Psycher Chronicles: Interlude V Stalker In The Weeds (Patreon)

Interlude V

Stalker In The Weeds

(Inquisition)

Huff, huff.

The suddenly vulnerable elemental users wheezed out in pain. Their lungs burning as they were not used to the intense pressure of needing to be physically capable of escaping.

Unfortunately, the elemental user, or the self-reported ruler class of the Bakshee was not used to such strenuous activity.

Misdirection.

Looking over their shoulder for the place where the pursuer was clearly following them, they failed to notice the way an electrical wire suddenly snapped off from the bracket that had held it for nearly half a decade.

Nor did they notice the way the electricity and lighting in the area before them suddenly flickered out, causing the area ahead to be pitch black for a moment.

They also missed the way, this sudden immersion into darkness caused their mind to pause, to hesitate for just a moment.

This was perfect for the pursuer, for they too were getting tired of chasing a monster.

A monster whose habits were well known to the stalker thanks to the accumulated data stored within the Surreal application. An application designed to track and monitor monsters in real life.

“No, noo…” the tired voice called out, turning away from the darkened alleyway that their mind inherently understood represented an unknown danger.

Splash.

Staggering backwards, the victim, a monster capable of calling forth flames at will missed the subtle signs of recent rain. Nor did they seem to notice the fact that while running downhill had been easier, it also caused an area for water to pool together and block even normal pathways. Thus the small puddle that the victim now found themselves immersed in.

Normally such an event would not be much of a concern.

Even the slight speckles of mud soaked water that splashed on their pant leg was inconsequential.

What did matter, was the way the target had been pushed into the trap perfectly. Following the same exact path that they always took for their morning exercise routine. Going the same path, away from danger that their muscles instinctively knew. Not realizing that someone had tracked them, well not this person, but others had tracked them down.

That others had noted their exact spot where they always paused and hesitated. The spot where their own body spoke of unsafe footing. A spot where they either ran forward when the water was low, or turned around when the water was high. On days like today, they would likely press through knowing that the splashing water would quickly wash off from sweat soaked legs.

This was why the stalker had been so meticulous with pushing their victim this way.

Why they had all but felt seemingly confident in their escape, despite the fact that no one seemed to hear them as they ran the few hundred meters from the spot of the first attack, until here.

“Sto, stoap…” the victim cried out, their words slurring as they realized they were being drugged with something.

Pausing, they realized that the initial attack, a crazed slash of a weapon had been a decoy. Or that somewhere along the way they had been poisoned, not much but once their blood started circulating, the effects of the toxins began interacting with their body a lot more.

Zzapp-crackle.

At that moment, that is when the downed powerline sparked back to life, momentarily releasing a block’s worth of electricity right into the liquid that the victim also found themselves standing in.

“Ahhh!” A moaning cry of pain escaped from the lips of the victim. Someone who had by all measures been completely innocent, for tonight.

Someone who had done nothing more than gone out as they always had for their evening run.

With a cold glare, the pursuer just watched as the body first collapsed to the ground, before a final shock was released into the collapsed victim, before releasing their control over the cord.

Once they had released their control over the cord, the emergency alerting systems sprang to life, indicating that there was now a detached cable and a momentary power outage.

By automated design, power from different part of the grid were then rerouted to give light to the area that had suddenly gone dark.

Once the lights had returned, only the body of a lone jogger could be found. One who apparently got electrocuted in a freak accident during their evening run.

***

Whatever her name was before didn’t matter. The name given to her mortal shell was immaterial to her current state of affairs, and her current goal in life.

Now as she had always been, she would be Inquisition.

Originally, her job for the fleet and the great mother had been to identify, eradicate, and prevent threats to the great fleet.

For countless millennia she had succeeded in just such a way.

Now though, now she found herself in a new world.

A world in which she had died, resurrected, and come back trying to prevent the further corruption of this planet.

For countless generations she had been reborn on this planet.

Her first death out at the edges of space made it so her ability to find one of her remaining natural vessels to be nearly impossible.

Then when she first arrived here over two centuries ago, she was noted as a monster. A serial killer.

Someone who was hunted down and ultimately killed by the very mobs of people she tried to protect.

In the beginning, she had been naïve with both her level of activity and her expected dwell time for reincarnation.

As life forms in this world were both slower to evolve to maturity than expected. Then once they were at the state of maturity, they often fell out of the ideal ability range within a matter of decades. Such inefficiencies in design, made it so that making any lasting change was almost impossible to perform.

This was why over the past few cycles, she had been building up technology. Starting with simple time saving tools and devices, that ultimately spawned multiple cycles of improvements.

All of this was done with the intention of making it so she could have more control over the evolutionary process of creation. By systematically adding more and more creativity to each iteration of designs, she made it so the world, despite being influenced by Bakshee hosts, relied entirely on Psycher mechanical designs.

From this, she had found that there was one other Psycher.

Though that Psycher had long since lost her trust. He was new, seemingly reckless with his willingness to strike fear into the world with monster sightings.

Even going so far as to stage an all out coup in Pittsburg.

A great showing and strike.

The event caused hundreds of infected Bakshee minions to be outed, but that was ultimately meaningless.

However the Inquisitor had used that moment to launch her Surreal application. A program that would instantly alert people to the status of monsters.

After generations of building wealth and hiding caches of money throughout the world, funding such a project, particularly one that offered cash rewards was easy to achieve.

Which was why she was able to track and document all of the infected Bakshee that attended Pittsburgh and other venues.

However, while searching her feeds, an anomaly appeared.

Three individuals seemed to have slipped through containment protocols.

Odder still, was the fact that these three individuals were seemingly of three different origins.

One was clearly a non-infected, while another was of the warrior or rager class. Then there was a third, someone who the Inquisitor took special measures to track and stop, but were able to easily slip through most alerts.

In fact, the fact that all three went to school was odd, particularly after what they had all gone through over the weekend.

The Inquisitor had even established an alert for anyone residing within a three hundred mile radius of the concert that did not go to school or work as usual on the following Monday would be marked on a CDC watchlist.

This meant that either all three individuals who had clearly been at the concert, and then subsequently had all of their data about being at the event deleted were either very good, very lucky, or had an insight into her multiple layers of data tracking.

At first, the Inquisitor thought of the experiment as a simple cat and mouse routine. Clearly a mouse was somehow able to access her networks, bypass her security measures, and then alter data.

Data that she had painstakingly gathered, aggregated, and then collated into a perfect layer of tracking.

In fact, this mouse was so perfect at not only moving in and altering her steps that the Inquisitor herself would have thought the information was a simple miscalculation on her part. Except for the fact that she herself was a living breathing computer, or the Psycher equivalent.

With her mind and Psycher training, she could go into enemy territory, mentally map out and record and store troves of data at will.

This was why she was able to notice the subtle signs of a master altering her data.

Then upon closer inspection, the master was intelligent, not just changing their own data, but changing the data of those around them.

This was how the Inquisitor had found data stores related not only to the prime suspect, but those she went to Pittsburgh with were also tampered with, in similar but subtle ways.

It was at this point that the Inquisitor was met with one of two options. First, she could try to oust the individual, develop ways of tracking them down and ultimately squashing them.

Though, they had already done enough of that by constantly changing and manipulating the data from one very rural area in the country.

The other thing she could do was something that she had thought about doing for a long time. Namely taking on an apprentice.