The room is utterly destroyed by water damage.
Beyond the door is a dangerously cramped rectangular space. Half shin deep water has flooded the place, and more of it is still rushing in from a burst pipe overhead. Broken machinery lines the space, with human shaped silhouettes out of them, like they're built to assemble Frames. Not one of them looks operational.
The Frame isn't a Nep.
The Nep is dead at his leg points.
The feral Frame stares dead ahead from across the room, unarmed, but unnerving. His eyes are gone, half his face has been eaten away by something, and his body is bent and broken but still standing.
Rotten, decayed, corroded. Corrupted.
I don't take much more of a look than that. Dashing to the right, I sprint to meet the nearest armripper. The visual overly highlights its right leg so I slash west with Logos and sever it at the knee. Something bangs in its torso and I follow up with a stab from Pathos. The white hot metal punches through its rusted steel chassis with ease.
The second one steals the chance. It slips behind me and lunges. The feeling of losing my arm flashes through my motherboard, and I twist my torso out of instinct. Instead of severing my shoulder for the second time, the Armipper's claws rake across my middle.
The slashes steal my breath but the overshield Zen gave me takes the brunt of the hit. The blue aura flickers red and breaks like glass, leaving me with only a minor scratch.
And the fear of death. But I'm fine otherwise.
Tune appears from nowhere and shoulder bashes the machine, knocking it away from me. The ripper I hit with my blades throws itself at me, sweeping its claws. The rusty steel clangs against my armor plating and bounces off. A quick laugh leaps out of me and gunfire deafens my audioboard an instant later. The ripper that just swung on me is racked with shots and then an Air Burst blasts right in my face.
The armrippers both take some damage and the water on the floor shoots up like a geyser. The force of it only knocks me on my metal ass without harming me, though I'm met with the freezing temperatures of the water.
"Watch it, Zenith!"
"I don't know what happened!"
"We were already even, asshole!"
Henna and the Frame are locked in melee combat but I can't pay attention to them. Taser whips through the chaos and targets the ripper Tune has hold of, piercing its eye glass with all three pins and giving it a brutal shock.
ACE> Hell yeah Taser!!!
I lurch forward, shove an acid canister into the gap I made in the first armripper's chassis with Pathos, then slam the thing with a kick that makes it take a step back. In the moment while it's recoiling, I draw and fire my pistol left handed.
The canister bursts.
The armripper shrieks and writhes as it dissolves from the inside. The knees crumple and it splashes dead in the water.
That's one down.
ACE> Nice move.
I catch sight of Henna tragically whiffing two electrized hammer swings–the enemy Frame is too dextrous in its ability to dodge out of harm's way. The remaining armripper's self repair module activates, rancid green transmitter fluid coursing through its venous tubing.
Tune still has a hold on it. "Alert: you are injured, Nep. Would you like me to begin repairs?"
"It's barely a scratch, Tune," I huff, readying my sword. "Kill that thing!"
"Affirmative." A blue smiley face.
She punches it in the face and knocks it against the wall. Another Air Burst rips past, nearly knocking me over again as it delivers a hefty dent to the armripper. I decline to comment, thankfully still on my feet this time, then get out of the way for the next one. When it hits, the concussive force leaves the machine on its last fuse.
Henna is having a rough time of it.
We need to hurry. I need this kill now.
Dashing around Tune I grip Logos with both hands and deliver a perfectly level horizontal eastbound slash, the plasma arc buzzing in the air and catching fire as the armripper splits in half. Justice again for Nep-67. With that I turn my back.
It's time to see what this feral Frame is all about.
To my horror, Henna is sparking from head to toe. She's completely seized up from some kind of electrical short. Zen sprints toward her, sending another Air Burst at the Frame as he goes. The force ruptures and knocks it back, and Zen uses some CyanTech to bring Henna's shortage back under control.
"Thanks!" she yelps, taking up her hammer again.
She's badly hurt.
I'm going to fucking kill this thing for that.
Tune runs straight to her, starting repairs while I square off with the Frame, twirling my blade in one hand while I scan my first good look at it.
The face's synth-skin has been chewed away by biters, it looks like, exposing the glowing neon green synth-bone underneath the flesh to rust and decay. The same is true for various parts of his chassis, and I find that one of his legs is shorter than the other, broken off at the point. Without a weapon, his hands are clenched into fists, capacitors sparking.
So that's how he stunned her.
He'd do the same to me if I get hit.
So I'd better not get hit.
He gets the jump on me, literally. Diving into a tackle he throws himself at my middle. I manage to sidestep but he somersaults through the landing, splashing in the water as he leaps back up. Pivoting off the broken leg he jumps again, swinging fists for my center mass.
Again I dodge, but only barely.
Taser makes a try but it's like a mosquito trying to bite a tank. He swats the pins and wires away, so I steal that lapse in his guard. Driving all my focus with the single swing I slice at him with Logos in a two handed southwest arc. He can't adjust in time to do anything, taking the full brunt of my attack.
The edge bites deep through his chest.
The plasma bites even worse.
The severity of the damage makes him stagger back a step. With sick pleasure I sheath Logos and watch Henna bring the hammer down. The impact thuds throughout the room and puts him on his knees. Tune delivers a kick to his diaphragm, rupturing his chest cavity. Zenith finishes him off execution style with a bullet to the back of the head.
The spent casing hits the water and the body slumps forward.
The only sound is the rushing water from the broken pipes.
He holsters the handgun. "That was surgical, you two."
"I'm a bit rusty," Henna sighs, starting her self repairs. Her venous tubing glows cyan and she turns to look at me. "You're hurt."
I poke at the measly scratch on my abdomen, glowing the same color but not leaking. "Please. Badeep didn't even bother to patch this. That's how minor it is."
"Doesn't matter. Let me help."
"Stop it, Henna. Look at yourself. You faced that thing alone and you're the most hurt one here. Quit fussing over me while you're half dead."
She scoffs, crossing her arms. "I'm not half dead. I'm seventy five point eight four percent dead. I'm gonna have nanomachines to spare, so let me at least close that up for you."
Shifting my weight, glancing at the Nep corpse off to my left, I mutter, "Okay, fine. But I want you to think I'm tough. I'm trying to impress you,."
"You're tough as nails, Razor." She leans her weight on her hammer, giving me a beaming smile. "And I'm very impressed."
ACE> Hennaaaaa <3
Suddenly sheepish, I peep, "Thanks."
"Mhm! Now let me fix your injury!"
"Okay. Go ahead."
She places a large, warm hand over the cut on my middle. She's touching me. She's touching my abdomen. A buzzing feeling emanates from the surface and when she pulls it away the wound is no longer open. There's a pale cyan scar, but my internals are once again sealed from the elements.
Imprinting the feeling of her hand on my stomach deep into my memory core, I cough up thanks again but she doesn't hear me, moving on to Zen.
ACE> Lucky.
RAZOR> Don't be too jealous. I like you more.
ACE> Oh, me too.
ACE> I mean, I like you more, not me.
ACE> Well, I do like me [arrogance = 221] but I also like you…
RAZOR> We can share a mutual love for Henna.
ACE> Yesss!!!
With a sigh, I shake off the rush of combat and ease myself down. The dead Nep in the water calls for me with her glitched and broken voice, begging to be saved. Only once I reclaim her will she be able to rest.
She's face down in the water. I roll her over and turn off my olfactory cortex. Smells terrible. Seeing myself dead for the second time is no less harrowing. Her synthetic flesh is swollen, face and cheeks puffy, blue, green, bloated with the cold black water. In her mouth is another SmartChip, and when I remove it from her blue tongue, the painfully glitched thirteen gigahertz signal falls quiet.
The Failsafe Chip is in horrendous condition. It's been damaged by exposure to the water and most of the terminals are horribly corroded.
"Shit…"
ACE> Maybe don't put that one in you…
RAZOR> I'm not exactly thrilled about it.
ACE> It might gunk up your pretty ports.
RAZOR> Then I'll clean out my pretty ports.
It goes into the back of my hand with some resistance, but then it clicks. nEPI-0092's memories are disjointed and corrupted. Most of the video footage is incomprehensible and irreparable. The few clips that survived show her running away from something on the surface. A warehouse, stacked with crates. A dozen armripper claws, reaching through the gaps of a makeshift barricade. A ventilation shaft. A locker room. A dark hallway.
The images and places flash by me, impossible to make much more sense of than that. I can't even begin to put her story together from the few broken pieces I have. Her log data states that she had a runtime of four days. That should be ninety six hours of footage, and I only have about fifteen seconds of fragments.
With what little remains of her memory core copied to my harddrive, I eject her SmartChip and cube it to bring safely back home, rinsing my hands off in the cold water and shaking them out. Sorry, Nep-92. Your body is a little gross.
"Is that…" Henna trails off as she looks over my shoulder at the corpse. "Oh no. What happened?"
I check the half corrupted error logs. "Looks like she drowned."
"In a half meter of water?"
Zen nods toward the pipe. "Could have been catastrophic when it burst."
"It's just senseless, isn't it?" Henna observes, watching me for my reaction. I don't have one to show her, only standing up straight. "Ace's death was so… heroic. But this one seems so brutal and callous, with no real reason. I guess that's how it goes, isn't it? Death is senseless."
"Always is," Zen responds, gazing emptily at my corpse. "Even Ace's."
"But she saved us. I'd say that's a sensible reason."
"It was a choice she made to sacrifice herself, but it's not the reason she died. She died because the spider killed her. There's no climactic, heroic, or grandiose answer to the question of why it did. The spider killed her because it's a killer. Though her sacrifice did prove to be distracting enough for us to escape, the ultimate answer as to why she died is that there is none. She just… died."
ACE> Shit. He's right.
"That's really what it debugs down to, huh?" Henna murmurs. "I'd like to think my death might have meaning someday. When it comes. Decades and centuries from now, I hope. Guess that's a bit different, isn't it? Meaning versus reason?"
"I'd agree there. Her death did have meaning."
"Yours will not," a voice whispers behind me. A cold blade to my neck. "None of them ever will, Alice."
My throat is sliced open.
I drop to my knees in the water.
Glowing transmitter fluid pours and expands on the surface.
It's all draining out of me. I'm dying. I'm dying.
It hurts. It hurts. It… hurts…
>ERROR: EXTREME INTERNAL TEMPERATURE [NATURE: ASPHYXIATION / DROWNING] nEPI-0107.bin, LINE 19837123
>ACCESS: A:\SCORPIO\OS\FAILSAFE#0107
>NOTICE: COMPILING FAILSAFE SMARTCHIP…
>NOTICE: REROUTING BATTERY CORE PSU…
>INITIALIZE: 13GHZ FAILSAFE BROADCAST…
>TERMINATE: ALL OTHER SYSTEMS…
>NOTICE: AWAITING RECLAIMER…