Log inAn Outsider's Perspective Ch 2
And chapter 2.
Hope y'all enjoy.
=][=
Not all healing magic was gentle.
Some healing magic glowed like cotton candy and imparted a cessation of pain, giving distilled relief as a soothing ambrosia that left one wondering if they’d truly been hurt in the first place.
The healing I was given felt like someone took a welding rod to my bones.
I worked my arm, feeling my previously hurt and swelling elbow work flawlessly.
No matter how hard I had to grit my teeth not to scream, it was undeniably effective.
“Alright you’re good now.” Said the bored part-goblin who had healed me. My best guess is that she was at least part elf, as she was far too pretty to have much goblin in her. “Move along.”
“Right.” I said, wiping away the still fresh blood on my now undamaged cheek and forehead.
Looking around the big portal room, it seemed that a solid half of everyone who went into the exam came out of it alive.
I sighed and walked into the crowd. Now I just needed to wait until I was called off individually, I’d get my Stamp, choose my build, and start my adventure.
Give me a few…dozen years, and I’d pay off my Contract and be a free man traveling the multiverse and could say goodbye to the fucking Company.
Sure, there were those who wanted to use the Company’s power to fight evil and all that nonsense. But I wasn’t nearly so idealistic. Enlightened self-interest, that’s the way these things went.
Maybe I’d go into Halo, pimp out a Destroyer, genocide the Covenant, and be crowned king of meat mountain, with a harem of sexy ladies and lady AIs in meat bodies.
Yeah, that sounded pretty nice.
Hell, with how popular the Covenant were for use in the mines, maybe I could sell enough Covenant species to pay off my contract. I’d have to set up some kind of farm though, at Severity Ten, I would require industrial quantities of aliens.
I saw a few faces I recognized from my time in the Seminars and Basic, but as I debated on whether or not to have a dramatic and possibly tearful goodbye (the chances that I’d see any of my fellow clones of a Prime ever again after I was called away were astronomically small, after all), local reality stuttered and I fell a foot to the floor’s new location.
“The fuck was that?” I asked as I pushed myself painfully to my feet, more quietly than most, some of whom had twisted their ankles when they landed badly thanks to the surprise relocation of the floor.
There was a flash of kaleidoscopic light, and six and a half feet of hulking and sleek matte-gray power armor stood next to me.
“Oh shit!” The part-goblin said, her eyes shining golden as her implants gave her information. “It’s the cucks!”
That’s as far as she got before the armored form’s left arm whipped toward her and her head instantly transmuted into red vapor, her headless corpse fell to the ground, not even bleeding as the neck stump was cauterized.
Weirdly enough, as the cyclopean visor of the armored form turned to me, that did not cause the reaction it should have. I wasn’t terrified as I should be, or reacting at all. I just felt…disinterested?
Huh, a mental effect, and judging by how calm everyone around me was, it was area of effect. Still, while I understood this, I couldn’t summon up the desire to do anything about it.
Besides, all I had to my name were my pants, boots, and a revolver with hollow point bullets in my pocket, I’d do nothing against armor that advanced.
+Well butter my butt and call me a biscuit.+ The armored form said, his voice distorted by an electronic growl. +This is really awkward.+
“I wouldn’t know.” I said with a shrug. Then as the helmet folded away into the suit, I felt a twinge of surprise past the dampening of my emotions.
That was my face staring back at me.
“They told me that the Company had a clone-line of me.” ‘I’ murmured to ‘myself.’ “But knowing it and seeing it are entirely different things, huh?”
“It is what it is.” I said with another shrug. “I didn’t exactly ask to exist. What’s your deal, you a clone too?”
Other me shook his head. “Nah, got recruited by the Bad End Foundation after…uhhh…” He waved his hand vaguely at me. “Other ‘yous’ across the multiverse sent around by the Company collectively made the multiverse a less shitty place.”
I blinked, twinges of happiness and envy skittering feebly along my cognition. “Neat. I always wanted to be a hero. The healer said the Cucks were here…did a Contractor…”
Other me shook his head again. “Nah. I’m all but married to my job, honestly. I’m paying back a favor by aiding in the assault of this facility.”
“Ooooh.” I said. “Well, I’m glad you weren’t cucked by the Company, that would suck.”
Other me nodded. “Okay so, I’ll keep this short before it gets any more awkward. What were your plans for after you got your Stamp?”
I blinked. “I wanted to have an adventure, be a hero, make a world or series of worlds a better place. Find a nice girl and romance her all proper-like, wine and dine her, you know, the works. Rock her world, ruin her for other men, give her love and emotional support. Maybe have a few brats.” I tilted my head. “Maybe two girls? Threesomes sound hot and having a second wife sounds like it might help with child rearing, especially if I’m busy making worlds a better place and shit.”
Other me sighed in relief, his helmet unfolding from his suit and covering his head again. +I see. Catch.+
He threw something that I caught. Looking down at it, it was a gun, 12-gauge magazine-fed bullpup shotgun that would work wonders in an office building’s tight confines.
+Well shit, he’s got a gun.+ Other me said, dropping a duffel bag halfway between us and tossed something underhand in my general direction.
The direct attack made my adrenaline spike, vanishing the vice grip whatever effect he’d implemented had on my cognition. Happiness and envy and betrayed rage all roared, my body had already reflexively raised the shotgun, my thumb flicking off the safety as I got a good cheek weld. For the slightest instant I considered attempting to take him down with me, but I would not give another possibility hostile me a weapon that could go through my defenses, so I didn’t bother.
I lined up the iron sights with the sphere he’d thrown, it looked like a fancy grenade. As I squeezed the trigger, I saw the door to the portal room shatter as an enraged Omni-Man flew through it, and absently backhanded Miles as he floated in, Miles’ head and upper body turned into a liquid as I squeezed the trigger an instant after the grenade flashed.
The shotgun punched my shoulder, the recoil making me wince as whatever was loaded in the shotgun slammed the high-tech grenade out of the air and sent it skittering. I pivoted to bring Other Me into my sights, dead set on at the very least trying to take him down with me, but paused.
The portal room was in shambles, other than an eight-foot circle centered somewhat close to where I stood, the floor was a shattered and cratered ruin. The room smelled like blood mixed with a meat shop, and I could detect a faint hint of garlic in the air.
Looking around…Miles hadn’t been the only one to die. Guardian, weird guy, he’d signed up for a work-contract that turned him into a fairly advanced cyborg. That hadn’t been enough, as he’d been torn apart, his metal spine had been used as a garrote to very messily nearly decapitate Ethan.
I shook my head and studied the shotgun in greater detail. It was a little bit of a franken-build, it had a fire selector, I’d flicked it to single fire, but it was capable of full auto, the magazine release resembled the same type of mechanism used by the Kalashnikov, it had an ambidextrous charging handle along the top, a bolt release much like a standard AR, too many rails, a laser, a light, and an angled grip that terminated uncomfortably close to the end of the barrel. The magazine was fairly long. Removing it, I could see that it had a plastic window and numbers etched into it, showing that the magazine held nine more rounds.
Slapping the magazine back into place, I pulled back the charging handle and checked to see that there was indeed one in the pipe. Which meant other me carried one in the pipe and a full magazine.
More alike than different, we all seem to be.
I went to the duffel bag, and saw that Other Me had left me some equipment. Light armor, scanning it with my implants showed that it was a jacket with durasteel plates coated in ablative plasteel, a helmet of the same type of composite materials, ammo pouches, and five more magazines for the shotgun.
Furthermore, the bag’s outside dimensions did not match the volume of the armor and other gear that I pulled out of it, so it was either seriously advanced tech, or it was enchanted.
Don’t mind if I do.
Once I had everything on me, I even had a handy duffel bag to store anything useful I came across.
Thank you, Other Me, I judged you far too harshly.
Looking at the corpses, not all of them had died to blunt force trauma, there were definitely several more that died to lasers. So, the time-dilation bubble had been an excuse, plausible deniability. A way to ‘kill me’ by locking me in time forevermore, except he’d set the grenade to deactivate after a few hours.
And of course, the only reason he didn’t give me a warning, was in all likelihood that he wanted to get a laugh out of the look on my face.
Asshole.
Stepping carefully out through the shattered portal room door, I saw that there were a number of people that had managed to escape the initial slaughter. A largeish group that had managed to get somewhat far, mostly by leaving whoever was the slowest behind, or whoever chose to turn around and fight to buy the others time.
Kukulkan, the one that never shut up about becoming an Aztec God in truth not just in name; butchered, but blood coated her knife.
Fiona, she’d gotten her hands on a gun somehow. She died with an empty gun, her face stretched into a rictus of laughter.
Yite, Matt, Murafa and Lee, the four of them were compressed into an amalgamated pile of variously macerated organic matter. Out of the four, the only one I was passingly familiar was Lee, the B-itch had tried to convince me to join his ‘team’ for the Final. Something about strength in numbers. I figured he’d merely been trying to use the low-performers as ablative armor, but considering his expression looking angry and disappointed, looks like he’d been entirely genuine when he’d said he was in it to protect ‘good’ people.
The rest of the initial ‘survivors’ hadn’t made it more than thirty feet beyond where their rearguard had fallen. Out of the butchered remains, the only one that still had recognizable human features was Alan Marris, the guy that was absolutely certain he wasn’t a clone like the rest of us.
Weird guy.
Still…not all of them had been bad people, but whoever had attacked the Company hadn’t cared to differentiate.
I shook my head, and walked past them. I’d been called to do maintenance to this outpost several times, it was the biggest Company processing center in this branch of the multiverse. Checking to see if the building’s Network was still running got me a cascade of error messages and repair tickets.
Well shit.
It wouldn’t do to walk through the open hallways, I might draw the wrong kind of attention, so looking around, I found the metal plaque that indicated the location of the maintenance tunnels and slipped into them.
Time to head to the armory and see if there was anything there that was still worth taking.
