192 - Sewer Wars Pt. 1 [Cherno] (Patreon)

With her exhalation, Viridaimon’s crow-like gas mask released long threads of smoke. Krahe raised her left arm, holding it straight to get a feel for the suit’s stabilization. Then, she dived, just to dial-in any impact Viridaimon might have had upon the Liminal Coil’s functions. The relative time distortion felt a bit weaker, but the dive worked fine otherwise. She began forming a burster in her right hand as she continued further, sending Barzai up ahead.

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Achmed smoked a cigarette, lazily ambling out of the subterranean loading bay and into the flooded tunnel that led into it. He balanced atop one of the cart rails to avoid wading through water. His tendrils writhed inside his lungs as the smoke spread through them. But then, something felt off; one of his tendrils was caught, and he stopped dead, leaning a bit as he mentally commanded the tendril, dragging up a clump of tarry mucus before he spat it out and put the tendril back in place.

Meanwhile, the two hideous things assigned to him waded along through the water, oily patches spreading out around their legs.

They were insectile, evoy-like things, but wrong in countless ways.

To start with, their morphs were malformed, with emaciated, human-like torsos and lanky limbs, almost looking like a dried out corpse with chitin plates haphazardly stuck to it willy-nilly. Black tubes and cables snaked in and out of them, and fully artificial organ enclosures bulged their stomachs or protruded out of them in various ways. Heavy-duty, helmet-like sensor array grafts covered their heads. The one to his right had several large, circular graft-eyes set into its head graft in a scattershot pattern, and as a result it had a habit of constantly looking around. A decal was sloppily airbrushed onto the side of its head. It read: “SB-55C-143”. The other one had no visible eyes, but it constantly emitted a low buzzing and it seemed to “see” just fine. This one’s decal read “SB-55C-82”.

Both of them had one functional arm, with clawed, knobby, dysgenic fingers, and one weaponized arm. One-four-three’s leftie was a muscular limb with a bulbous, mace-like head, sectioned off into five petal-like parts that could open to reveal an array of six silver membranes, one at the center and five around it. As for 82, its left arm retained a hand, but it was distorted and partially split down the middle to fit a weapon graft onto the underside of its forearm. It looked like one of the Blasting Arrays that had been mounted on the Foreman’s Hounds, but smaller, clearly accommodating for the unit’s more limited power output and weaker build. A primitive, cheap, but effective “shotgun”.

“Lotta good the operation at Slaughterhouse 9 did to those rich fucks if you lot’re all that came out of it…” he muttered derisively, taking another toke. Less human than even stitched-together hobo corpses, these things were supposedly failed evoy molts that had been “recycled”. Little more than corpses reanimated with heavy grafting; never even alive to begin with, in the same realm as the artificial bodies offered by the church. Suitable vessels only for the Gor’ah in their heads that gave them motion; they certainly took to these shells better than natural humanoid meatsuits. It was obvious something about these “Stillborns” were explicitly designed to accommodate Gor’ah and thus compensate for their sorely lacking intellect. The nature of that compensation was far beyond Achmed’s station, but he was sure it was something extremely fucking heretical given the Benefactors’ involvement.

Slowly, lazily, taking his sweet time, he continued his patrol. Being only one of many guarding the mansion, he didn’t actually have a great deal of responsibility. His purpose here was threefold. The first task was to act as a minder for the Stillborns, and the second was to receive a delivery that was to come through here. Some kid. He didn’t think twice about the purpose or origin of that delivery, having long numbed himself to far worse cruelties than human trafficking. If it wasn’t happening in front of his face, he could easily act as if it didn’t exist at all. The third and perhaps most crucial task was to keep an eye on blasting charges planted along a section of the tunnel, and to set them off if any intruder came through and managed to reach the area where they were planted. The Stillborns were there to keep the trafficker honest and to act as a barrier between any would-be intruders and Achmed for long enough to set off the charges.

He soon got to the section with the charges. They were nothing like any explosives he had seen. Occult-looking tetrahedrons made of brass, with long, three-sided black rods emerging from their apexes, ominous symbols glowing orange down the rods’ sides. He couldn’t read it, but it didn’t look like any human alphabet, and Achmed was abnormally well-read for his current career path. Tetrahedral spikes emerged from the tunnel wall around each charge, seemingly “growing” out of the bricks. Achmed guessed at some sort of geomancy. Feeling no need to hurry, Achmed took his time checking them over, eventually stepping onto the tunnel wall and walking up it. A petty trick learned from a saurian he had inhabited in the past, but terribly useful. Sure, he had a fancy detonator obviously built specifically for these things, but it was never bad to be double, triple certain that explosives wouldn’t misfire.

Footsteps approached from afar, sloshing in the grimy water. Achmed perked up, anticipating the trafficker. He finished his checks and retreated a short distance, outside the remote charges’ blast zone. It was at a turn in the tunnel, this spot chosen specifically to allow him to look down the other side or to take cover.

It wasn’t the trafficker. He knew that the moment 82 became agitated, both in body language and sound. Its quiet buzzing took on a deeper tone and became far louder, its inaudible frequencies sending ripples through the water underfoot and within Achmed’s body alike.