— Real World. Marine Headquarters. Detention Block. —
The voice kept returning.
Coby had told himself it was the head-banging — the dull rhythm of skull against stone producing phantom sounds, dizziness translated into something his mind had chosen to give words to. He'd believed that, for a little while.
Then he asked it directly.
"Who are you? Did I imagine you?"
Silence stretched long enough that he thought he'd been right. Then the voice came again, lower and steadier than before, unhurried.
"I am from outside this world. Your hatred of the Marine satisfies me. Perhaps one day I will have use for it."
The sound faded. Something materialized beside his knee.
It was roughly egg-shaped, small enough to hold in both hands, and the texture against his palms was wrong — too close to skin. The surface was warped. Whatever face it might have once had had been deliberately disassembled: features broken apart and rearranged into something that couldn't be looked at directly without the eye wanting to slide away.
Once, Coby would not have known what he was holding.
"A Beherit." The word came out barely above a whisper. "This thing is real."
A flicker of something moved behind his eyes — not hope, exactly. Closer to the particular madness that sits just past the point where ordinary feeling runs out.
He understood the mechanism. The Sky Screen had covered it in enough detail. What the Beherit required, what it would do, what it would cost — none of that was unclear to him. A sacrifice. Chaos sufficient to serve as one. And then, in the aftermath, a door.
Out of this cell. Out of this institution that had looked at a future that hadn't happened and decided to bury him alive for it. Into whatever came after.
Coby turned the Beherit over in his hands. The distorted features caught the light from the corridor.
For the sake of leaving, he thought, I'll go against whatever I have to.
— Marine Headquarters. Elsewhere. —
Kujaku had pulled Helmeppo along quickly, as though she considered further delay a personal offense. Drake wanted the new recruit introduced to the rest of the unit, she'd said. If they were going to function as a team in the future — in the real future, not the broadcast version — they needed to know each other now. Helmeppo followed with his head slightly bowed, carrying the discomfort of a person being marched toward a room full of people who had already seen his whole life.
— Sky Screen. Infinity Castle. —
The Sky Screen's primary signal shifted.
In the Infinity Castle's depths, Kuzan and the one called the Blood Guanyin remained in a stillness that felt deliberate on both sides — each waiting, neither committing. The air between them had the quality of something about to break and both of them knew it. Somewhere in the surrounding dark, a third presence moved in patient, careful arcs. Keeping to the shadows, looking for the angle that wouldn't announce itself until it arrived.
Neither of the two at the center appeared to have missed him. Neither had acted on it.
The camera moved to elsewhere
The security team was being taken apart with a thoroughness that suggested no particular urgency on the attacker's part. The man moving through them — silver hair like hammered metal, amber eyes that hadn't changed expression since he'd come through the door — was not using anything complicated. Punches and kicks, applied with precise knowledge of where they'd do the most damage. Each guard that moved to intercept him found himself rearranged before he finished the motion.
Garou navigated the laboratory's interior with the unhurried attention of someone shopping. His eyes catalogued shelving units, equipment banks, sealed specimen cases. As a mercenary, he'd reasoned coming in, there's no reason not to benefit from the situation.
Caesar Clown had been trying to drag Vegapunk toward the emergency exit for the past two minutes, which was complicated by Vegapunk's legs giving up their cooperation approximately thirty seconds into the run. The old man's tongue was hanging out.
"You've been with the Marine for years," Caesar Clown wheezed, pulling. "Tell me you built something small. A weapon. Anything portable. Now would be ideal."
Vegapunk, still being dragged, caught his breath. As the Marine's leading weapons researcher, he had devoted his recent years entirely to the Giant God Soldier project. Compact, field-deployable weapons had not interested him. He had not built any. He said so.
Caesar Clown's face communicated several things at once, none of them generous.
He released Vegapunk's arm, converted himself to gas, and rose toward the ceiling with the practiced fluency of a man who had decided that legs were beneath him. A Gas-Gas Fruit user's relationship with footwork was optional at the best of times. This was not the best of times.
Garou noted the floating gas mass with the same neutral expression he'd used for everything else, dispatched the last two security guards with a pair of measured strikes, and blocked the emergency exit in approximately the time it took Caesar Clown to realize he'd been separated from his only means of departure.
"Garou—" Caesar Clown's voice adjusted immediately to its most cooperative register. "Whatever you want. Name it. Spare my life and I will satisfy every demand you have, up to and including things you haven't thought to ask for yet."
Vegapunk, crouched against a workbench, watched his former colleague's face perform this transformation and permitted himself a brief, private eye-roll.
Garou looked at Caesar Clown for exactly as long as it took to confirm he wasn't relevant to the commission.
"I'm not here for you."
The punch that followed was light by the standard of what he'd been doing all morning — the kind of strike that contained just enough force to deliver a message. It covered the distance between them before Caesar Clown had finished computing whether to dodge.
The Gas-Gas Fruit user's body reformed into flesh in time for the impact to register, traveled backward through the air in a smooth arc, and embedded itself into the far wall with a crack that branched through the plaster in three directions. The wall held. Caesar Clown did not. He slid from the gap he'd made in the plaster and crumpled, unconscious before he finished settling.
The laboratory was quiet now.
Garou turned to Vegapunk.
"You match the description I was given. Someone is looking for you."
He said it simply. He'd accepted two commissions on this operation, and a secondary contract that had come through different channels. The Illuminati: an association of non-natural life forms with a and persistent interest in Vegapunk's work. They paid well, and they'd set two prices — one for a live delivery, one for a dead one. He preferred the first.
Cold sweat had found its way down Vegapunk's face despite himself. He hadn't anticipated being the target of this particular visit.
"No," he said, keeping his voice as steady as he could manage. "I've only recently had contact with that group." He straightened, though his knees were not fully cooperating. "I won't surrender my research to anyone. That's not a negotiating position. It's a fact."
He meant the Anti-Life Equation ally, though he didn't say so aloud. What he'd built, and why, and what it would mean in the hands of someone who wanted power rather than an end to the entities who currently held it — that calculation had kept him awake across years of late nights and empty meals. It was not a weapon he intended to let travel without him.
Garou considered him without particular feeling.
The Illuminati had set the two prices for a reason. Live delivery paid more, which meant they wanted the man functional. That aligned with his preference for keeping things clean. But if cooperation wasn't available, the second option existed.
He cracked his knuckles once, unhurried.
"Then we do this differently."