Lost Rain
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Outrun - Chapter 320
🕑 Added 2025-10-22 22:04:02 +0000 UTCMira and I cut through a dim alley illuminated by the raging fire of a building far above. The drone that Luna captured floated just behind us, projecting a bright light for Mira to see by. I didn’t have any issue, of course, but the same couldn’t be said for my mikata. When we got back, I needed to make her a full set of gear.
We moved out of the alley and finally spotted the co-op. Or, at least, what was left of it. The building was now a carcass of steel, shattered glass, and charred concrete. The top half of the building leaned unsteadily across an alley onto another building at its side. Smoke and light flickered through the gaps inside the building, and a creaking noise seemed to constantly emanate from within.
”This is it.” I stared at the crumbling building. Answers were hopefully in there somewhere, as well as a place to start hunting the rest of Polar Moon.
”The place looks like it's about to fall apart.” Mira’s voice rang with hesitancy. I couldn’t blame her. The entire building might crash down on us if we hit the wrong pillar or opened the wrong door.
”Chek. It’ll only get worse the longer we stay out here.” No telling how long we had until it collapsed fully. I looked around, eventually finding three shadowy forms walking down the street. I almost called out contact on instinct, but managed to suppress myself.
The shadowy forms cast by Panther’s Sight’s tracking feature meandered around outside the building causally and then moved into the co-op. At the very least, they came through here. I lost sight of them once they entered the building. Not like I had x-ray vision, though that would be kinda cool.
We moved across the street, weapons up and ready to go. The bright light of the drone cut through the dust and shadow, peeling back the gloom ever so slightly. Mira kicked in a broken door, releasing a blast of air full of chemical tang and rancid meat. The air was choked with debris and chemical. If we didn’t have masks on, breathing would’ve been almost impossible.
”Ugh- gross.” Mira flinched backward and shook her head. “And I can smell that through the mask. That’s fucking awful.”
I patted her shoulder and moved up to the kicked in door. Their tracks moved deeper into the building. ”Is there anything moving in there anymore?”
”The last PMC group left about twenty minutes ago. They were barely in there for a minute.” Saint answered. “Something’s messing with the Dragonflies’ wings. Having a hard time getting close.”
”I’ll have to fix that on the next iteration.” And add guns or something. If we were going to have background support like this, it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Then again, this was probably a one off type of deal. Not like I wanted a Netrunner breathing down my neck.
Mira took the lead and stepped into the building. The drone stopped behind us, so she had to flick her flashlight back on. The bright beam flicked across the burned out husk of an office space. “What are we looking for?”
”We’ll know it when we see it?” I wasn’t a hundred percent sure either. A dead body, bullet marks—it could be anything. If we could find a clue, we could try to piece together the rest of the happenings. For now, though, I directed her toward the the Panther’s Sight shadow tracks.
A liquid dripped from above, noisily crashing into the ground. It wasn’t water. It sounded like way too thick of a substance. My grip tightened on the coil-pistol. There was just- just something off about this place. I’d been in plenty of broken buildings, but this one felt wrong, almost. I couldn’t blame the last group for leaving quickly.
I swept the place with Aetherial Perception, but there wasn’t a flicker of anything from the Aether. As far as I could tell, it was completely mundane. Something else must’ve been triggering Insight’s subtle warnings then.
We picked our way through the twisted rebar and fallen blocks of the building above. Mira’s boots crunched in broken glass and metal. She paused, light shining on a hazmat symbol scrawled over a wall. “Well… that’s comforting.”
”Stay sharp—“ A sound cut me off. It sounded like something wet moving around with uneven limbs. Every step splattered slightly. ”Mutants?”
”Maybe.” Mira flicked around to watch our six. “Wait them out? I doubt they’ll stick around here without some kind of respiratory mutation.”
”If we can. You guys see anything?” I called out to the other two of our merry little band.
“Blind as bats, Shiro. There's no cameras in there, and the drones can’t get in. There’s something sticky in the air blocking up their motors.” Saint’s voice held a trace of concern. “Watch yourselves.”
“That’s even more comforti—” Mira’s rifle flicked to the side. A shape shuffled just out of the light between the gaps of a broken wall leading further in.
More and more movement came from over there, and then figures poured through the dust and debris. They looked like they might’ve been human once, but they were wrong now. Shambling shapes of skinless, pulsating masses of flesh with milky eyes and misshapen bones moved toward us. Some crawled on all fours, bones sickeningly cracking with every step.
”Contact!” Mira shouted and opened fire on the nearest creature of flesh and gore. It jerked with the impacts, shrieked, and charged at us without a care for its own life.
I spun and fired into the group behind the initial one. My Blaze rounds had a much more significant effect, driving back the creatures and outright catching them on fire. Whatever these things were, they seemed weak to fire. The ones that ignited stumbled and collapsed with the flames rapidly engulfing their bodies.
Mira dumped a whole mag into the one charging, slowing it to a crawl. She then planted her boot into its half sloughed off face, sending it spiraling into the far wall. A quick reload and a dozen more shots destroyed its head. Only then did it stop moving. “Aim for the head!”
We fell back several steps, rounds echoing down the broken halls. There were seven or so more of the flesh creatures moving toward us with shambling gaits. One of the creatures dropped through a shadowy hole in the floor above.
”I got it!” I met it midair with a bolt of electricity. The crackling blue light illuminated our surroundings for a brief moment and then slammed into the creature. The entire thing twitched erratically and dropped to the ground. With the creature made of almost exclusively muscle, and gore, it seemed exceptionally weak to electricity. Three Blaze rounds to its head ensured it wouldn’t get up again.
Mira cleared out three more in that time. Although the first one got close, now she knew the head was their weakness, she no longer aimed for center mass. Precision bursts of her rifle took one head off after another.
I joined her once more in a firing line. My output limited with just a coil-pistol, but where I hit caused the shambling monstrosities to back away out of innate fear. It bought us time and kept the masses of rotting flesh away. Between the two of us, we quickly cleaned up the rest of the creatures.
Silence returned hard and heavy. Mira reloaded while she could and I recharge my pistol with careful manipulation of my Kinetic ability. “That all of them?”
”I think so.” Mira swept the place with her flashlight and then focused on one of the creatures. “What are these things? Mutants?”
I moved forward to the closest dead and poked at it with a knife. Without its life force binding the flesh, it turned into a toxic looking slime of rotting meat. “I don’t think so. Mutants usually have skin.”
Mira nodded her head. “These things were too stupid too. They didn’t even try to block the bullets, and just rushed in at us mindlessly.”
”Unless it’s some kind of new HMV strand?” The Savant lab around her was experimenting on mutants according to Saint.
Mira tapped one with her boot. The entire boot sunk into the flesh and clung to her shoe. She ripped it out, sending a spray of grotesque red across the walls. “Disgusting.”
”Careful there, killer.” I chuckled, trying to find some kind of humor in this. Honestly, not the worst things I’d seen. I think that altar of agony back in New Tress City took the cake. Or finding Mira huddled in a corner of a Savant Lab.
“Fuck!” Mira backed away and wiped her boot in mounds of ash to get the rotting flesh off. “I’m going to be sick. What the hell did we stumble across?”
”Your guess is as good as mine.” I looked toward where they came from, catching sight of a cobweb-like mass of flesh near an elevator shaft. The tracks led right to the elevator. “Hey, come help me out.”
Mira spotted it too and moved over. She easily managed to pry open the elevator doors, revealing a shaft that went deep into a sublevel. More growths of flesh spiderwebbed all the way up the shaft, becoming more dense the deeper down it went. They pulsated like the stuff was alive. “What the hell is this stuff?”
”Some kind of experiment?" I quickly filled the other two in on what was happening and strapped a Dragonfly to my shoulder so they could see.
Saint voiced his concerns first. “Be careful. No telling what’s down there. Might be better off going elsewhere.”
”T-the rest of my team could be down there, though.” Luna’s timid voice shook with anxiety. “W-we were hired to come to this place, after all.”
”I doubt Iris is.” She sounded like she was outside when she called me. Unless she doubled back here for some reason. And, weirdly enough, Panther’s Sight hadn’t activated shown any return tracks. “Would they have split up?”
“I-if they were forced too… there might be clues down there.” The Netrunner sighed. “I-I’ll keep looking, but I haven’t even found a trace yet.”
Mira shifted uncomfortably near the edge of the elevator shaft. “I don’t know about this, Shiro. I’m running a little low on ammo.”
“Rearming wouldn’t be a bad idea.” I was more than ready to swap off my pistol anyway. It was good, but I was weakening myself by not having a rifle.
“Eyes.” Mira muttered quietly, reminding me of our watchers. I nodded my head and casually turned off the Dragonfly. Just because they knew some of my secrets didn’t mean I wanted to share everything.
”We’re blind,” Saint called out.
”Uh—chek. Give me a few minutes and I’ll fix it.” I pulled out my Transporter and tossed it into the air. It immediately crashed. Right, there was some kind of sticky chemical in the air. Instead I had to prop it up on a table and activate it like some kind of old-fashioned projector.
About ten minutes later, the portal finally finished. In that time, Mira and I kept a watch on our surroundings in case more of those flesh creatures attacked. It was silent as a grave though. This entire place felt like it was haunted by ghosts or something.
”Keep watch.” I stepped through the portal and quickly moved around the place, swapping my loadout. I went ahead and grabbed a bunch of pyro-grenades and made a quick modification to the coil-pistol to turn it into a launcher platform. Basically, I just had to adjust the magnetic coils to be wider so they could fit the grenade. I originally built it with such a thing in mind, so it only took me a minute.
I also swapped over to a rifle and grabbed dozens of red-marked mags of Blaze rounds. These things were weak to fire. There was no point using normal bullets when we had a better alternative. Besides, I made them to be used, not to sit around in storage. It cut into my stock heavily, but I could always just make more.
I also swapped out some of my equipment and grabbed some other tools. A few explosives, repel lines—that kind of thing. Fully equipped, I stepped out of the portal and handed over half my ammo to Mira. “Swap to this.”
“Your Dragon’s breath?” Mira took the ammo and slotted it into her ballistic armor. She tossed the normal ammo back through the portal carelessly and fully swapped over. “These things were sick when I tested them.”
”Blaze rounds… though your name is much cooler.” Maybe for the more advanced rounds I could call it something like that. I needed to start setting up the complicated machinery and arrays for Aether Imbuement first though.
”Having a mobile armory sure is nice.” Mira took the repelling equipment and started setting everything up to go down into the depths while I packed up.
“Definitely.” I put the Transporter away and turned the Dragonfly back on. “You guys there?”
”Yeah, just watching the city burn. You know how it is.” Saint said it like a joke, but this part of the city really was burning.
I activated another Dragonfly and set it down behind me so it could have a good view. “Watch our backs. Let’s go, Mira.”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Mira took the lead, repelling down into the fleshy depths while I watched from above for an ambush. Her boots squelched every time she stepped on a patch of the pulsating gore spread up the walls. “I’m definitely not going to be able to clean this stuff out of my clothes.”
I dropped a Spectral Flock crow in a secluded corner of the hall just in case. Once she reached the bottom and posted up in a firing position, I jumped down after her. “I think we have bigger issues to worry about, mikata.”
Comments
kreiverin
Thanks)
Lost Rain
XD
Arkus86
That and the talk about how it all feels off and wrong lead me to think about aether shenanigans, rather than just some chemical in the air. They do wear masks, which might filter out whatever is in the air so they don't breathe it in, but I don't remember if they are full face masks covering their eyes as well, and they might still feel something on their skin eventually, if it is clogging up the motors. The aether might not have such issues, especially if it targets the mechanical parts... but then again, Mira has the exoskeleton now. I guess we will see.
Gardor
Ya guns seemed like a lot of hardware for minimal effectiveness. Like, would it be one high powered round that explodes the drone? Its not like you can strap a machine gun to the thing. Precision explosives seems like the way to make them combat capable, but there are problems with that as well. Or your idea of making them venomous, but that makes them more close range. Still a good idea, but probably wouldnt be very stealthy having them dive bomb enemies.
Gardor
The "the heads are their weakpoints!" bit reminded me of the meme/joke about vampires: "oh to kill a vampire you need to stick a wooden stake in their heart? So...same as everything else?"
Gardor
"There’s something sticky in the air blocking up their motors.” ->this seems more plot driven than realistic to me, theyre still walking through the same air without complaint.
Arkus86
This situation looks to me like it could potentially be aether related, and reminds me she did not much use her aether sight since the circle incident. If she adds guns to the dragonflies, they won't be exactly stealthy anymore. Adding enough firepower to be actually effective, especially if it were to include recoil control (we don't want them getting blown away by their own recoil) and spare ammunition, would add way too much bulk, making them unsuited for scouting through enemy territory without alerting anyone. I also imagine by that point Shiro would be inclined to add armour, ending up with a dedicated gun platform/general support drone instead of this "scouting drone with fire support" idea. A single-use stinger/injector/dart gun for pervider venom/other drugs she might get her hands on would be a more feasible option while keeping the size relatively small, but anyone paying attention would probably notice them getting close, or after getting stung. Also: "repelling down into the fleshy depths" -> "rappelling"
Scholar of Endless Knowledge
TFTC! Can’t wait to see what trouble she is jumping into now.
