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Gamma Protocol (097)
🕑 Added 2025-09-07 15:03:02 +0000 UTC[097]
“The ISPs have started throttling us.” Quinn’s message chirped in the common chat, clipped and angry. “Remote workers are getting shafted. Contracts will get pulled within the week, if not sooner.”
Isia watched the feed scroll past her neuralink, hands moving through the familiar ritual of cleaning her rifle. The Cobra R12 was beautiful in a blunt, utilitarian way. Its design served two purposes, and only two: fire big rounds, keep firing under abuse. If she had cared about firearm lore, she might have nodded at the old nickname people threw around, “the monster sniper of AK-47s,” the kind of rifle meant to take a beating, stand back up, and keep spitting .50 magnums like it was nothing. She had not cared. All that mattered was that the foreman had pressed it into her arms when she walked out of the factory for the last time. The gift had felt heavy then. It felt right now.
Normally she waited to clean herself up after a mission. Today she was doing it to keep her thoughts from circling the same drain. Spring out, bolt carrier checked, cloth over the feed ramps until they shone. Oil, just enough to glisten. Breathe in, taste metal and solvent, breathe out, steady.
“There goes our main support group’s income.” Vesper cut in on the chat. “Options? We can’t leave them out to dry.”
With a firm click, she seated the barrel and gave it the small twist that locked it tight. The motion soothed the pulse behind her eyes.
“We could push the intranet as a stopgap for the remote guys,” Quinn said. “Set up a relay port somewhere the ISPs are not watching. But they will spot the spike and kill it before the day’s over.”
“I meant viable options, Quinn.” Vesper snapped.
Three dots hung in the chat for a beat, then vanished. They hung in the chat again for a beat, then vanished again. It took their resident techie a full minute before they came up with an answer. “Maybe we spread the traffic wide. Blocking traffic to one relay is easy to excuse, but they can’t shut down hundreds without getting into hotter waters.”
“Start on that,” she instructed. “Doc, how’s our guest doing?”
“Healthy. But I insist that we don’t have much reason to keep him here,” their ripperdoc said.
“He stays locked up until he gives us some answers about what and who sent him to plant that suitcase Axel brought up,” Vesper answered.
“Speaking of Axel, how is he?” Isia sent the question that had been keeping her up at night. She then rolled her eyes when the answer started to arrive, it was the same excuse even if with different words. ‘Not available, not reachable’. Isia just ignored Vesper’s regurgitated answers and pushed another message to the public channel. “Do you even have proof he’s alive?”
Four DMs hit her feed at once. She ignored them.
Click
The bolt slid into place. The ejection port kissed shut. Chamber clean. Action smooth.
“Is he alive?” she asked again, out loud to the room and in the chat to the people who were pretending not to see it.
“He is with Moreau,” Vesper wrote.
That was new, that gave her pause. Isia’s hands paused as they moved to the grip. She opened a private line to Quinn. “Is he with the doc? Do you have confirmation?”
“Yes,” came the instant reply.
Isia hummed, low in her throat, and pulled the trigger with the chamber empty. Every part answered with the same clean sequence she wanted to hear. She stood, slung the rifle, and walked to the corridor. The server-room waited at the end like a sealed vault, her naked feet squeaked in the cold concrete, her hands moved to swing the weapon up and pressed the barrel to the metal door.
She took a neuralink snap and sent the image to their resident technophile.
“Do you have confirmation? Do you know anything?” she asked again.
This time Quinn took longer. Ten seconds. Twelve. Long enough for Isia to feel the weight of the rifle settle against her shoulder, long enough for the pings from the group chat to dull out.
“No.”
With a nod she lifted the barrel and walked back to her room. She set the rifle back on the desk and stared at it for a very long moment. Isia’s jaw clenched tight, the young woman moving to dress up, throwing a simple shirt, slipping into a pair of sneakers. Her gaze turned to her crash-backpack, it’d been lying next to her door, stuffed, and ready to accompany her on a ride at a moment’s notice.
The very first impulse running through her head was to take it and bolt straight to Vesper’s office. If things didn’t turn out, then she’d leave and look for Axel herself. “Don’t be a gonk,” she told herself, reigning in the explosion that had been building up for days. “You can’t fuck up again.”
Pulling the rifle again, she focused on its weight until she felt grounded.
The screenshot of her exchange with Quinn floated in her DM with Vesper, one blink away from sending. No good way to take it back once it flew. Isia looked at the button, then clicked. “Is he alive? Do you promise he is alive? That you know without a doubt that he is alive? Do you swear it on the Sewer Saints?”
It should’ve been a shorter message, but she was twitching. This was it, she knew Vesper, she knew her friend, her sister in name even if not in blood. Isia knew their leader would never lie on this, she clung to that.
The answer came after a minute. “Yes. I swear it. Isia, you need to calm down.”
Isia felt calm, that was the part that scared her, because there’d been one more voice in the back of her head, a possibility she’d been trying not to dwell on, but that now it was impossible to ignore.
She inhaled and set her jaw. “Is he the shush monster?”
The idea had first surfaced while watching the drone feed of the fight with the C-class. She’d seen the monster, more terrifying and deadly than ever, go out of its way to save a merc’s life. In the suffocating confines of the bunker, it had started as a joke. “Maybe Axel’s the shush monster,” she’d laughed, dismissing it as another of her wild theories.
It was silly.
But trapped in the bunker, counting the minutes, the silly idea took root. She saw the monster pulling the C-class high into the air, far from the district, and thought of Axel sparing the brats who tried to shoot him. Then the connections began to cascade. The food delivery with "SHUSH" scratched on it, and Axel's fixation on news about the creature. Vesper’s strange certainty about where the next drop would be. The timing of it all: the fight with Bear and other sightings happening the same week Axel appeared.
Then there was its behavior. It never attacked people. It kept their sewers clean of monsters while Bear’s sector flooded. It crudely reinforced buildings overnight. It rescued people from the rubble.
Her gut was yelling, and she was done pretending not to hear it.
Vesper’s message came after a minute. “In person. Lower bunker. The blank space. Now. Delete your question.” The text sat there for five long seconds, then it vanished, replaced by “Vesper deleted her message”.
There was a flutter, Isia nodded at the empty room, and cleared her own side of the thread. She stepped out. Hall light buzzed. Concrete breathed cold on her cheeks. Stairs took her down three flights, each making the air more stale than the last. Her footsteps were steady but only because she was holding back from making a run for it. Past the storage cages, past the pipe that always rattled, into the grey pocket where the signal dropped and died because Quinn was too cheap and lazy to install repeaters.
Click
The resolve in her gut cooled to stone, she didn’t freeze, she moved. Isia’s body lurched out of the line of fire, pulling out the knife from her sleeve, and stopping as she spotted Vesper staring at her from the far corner of the ruined room. She had a gun, but it wasn’t aimed.
“You look like shit,” Isia said, relaxing, lowering the blade. She tipped her chin at the gun. “What’s that for?”
Their gang leader had seen better days. The bags under her eyes had gone from a pale purple to bruised. Skin pale, cheeks a little hollow, hair pulled back into a ponytail like she had done it with one hand on the way here. Vesper looked like she had not slept or eaten in a year, and the year had gone out of its way to punch her a few times while at it.
“We have a turn-tail.” Vesper let the words hang for a moment. Then, with a sigh, she thumbed the safety and holstered the piece. “And I must be going insane if I thought for even a minute you had it in you to be the leak.”
Isia let the insult slide off. “How do you figure?”
“No one but us knew we were hanging by a thread, and that thread was the people working remotely through the net.” Vesper’s mouth pulled tight. “Someone’s trying to fuck us hard, and we did not bring the lube.”
“Speak for yourself.” Isia fished a small plastic bottle from her pocket and wagged it. The label was half peeled, the cap scuffed.
Vesper stared. If her face had not been a funeral, she might have gawked.
“You would not imagine how much a little water-soluble lube makes life easier.” She cocked her head. “What about your not-a-girlfriend-b-baka? Is that corpo ever going to be any help?”
“I am not going to deign that bait with an answer.”
“So no.”
Vesper pinched the bridge of her nose. “Could you put up a filter?”
“Can you tell me about the ‘shush monster’?” Isia asked, throwing air quotes hard enough her fingers crinkled.
“I am sticking to my promises.”
“You scared?”
Their leader, the woman she’d seen first hand stare down an E-class, shuddered. “Isia, I am terrified.” Vesper lifted her gaze, steady and flat, and the room seemed to quiet around her voice. “I have seen just enough to be sure that Moreau will not sit and watch if she finds out we know.”
“Ah. Shit.” The word came out small. Isia’s stomach tightened. She still remembered what had happened to the Iron Snakes, the way the story ended with empty chairs and scrubbed logs as if they’d just vanished into thin air. It was not a memory she wanted back. “What do we do about-”
“We do not talk about it. We do not tell a soul. Not even Quinn. Especially not Quinn.” Vesper’s reply landed clean. “Axel is the scariest thing in our sector. He survived that assassin bitch and a C-class. Trust me, if he needs help, we are not equipped to give it to him.”
Isia’s brows furrowed. “Not yet.”
---
Shadow marched into her treasury with determination.
The room lay deep beneath the Third Wall, a private space Elder Fulton had built for her. It filled a hangar’s worth of volume, drowned in rows of shelves that climbed from floor to ceiling. Half the aisles were already full. Every item sat in a fixed slot with a small booklet tucked beside it, neat handwriting listing what it was and where she had taken it from. It smelled faintly of cold stone and dust that never quite settled.
She usually came here only to deposit new memorabilia. Today was different. Today she needed tools, and not the kind that lived in an armory.
Her mission was simple to put into words and harder to execute. As Shadow, as the blade of the council, her duty was to make sure Axel did not cause the rift between the corporations and the elders to deepen. As the meguca, as the teacher, she had to find the catch in him, pry it loose, and bring him back to his human shape. She suspected the two goals were the same job, said two ways. If she could lift his fugue, she could steer him toward the elders, help him get his voice heard.
First she needed to unknot whatever held him tight.
So she set to work and scoured her hoard.
An original copy of “Oceans 1,233, collector’s edition,” taken from a small pawn shop wedged between her favorite udon place and a target whose name she had not bothered to remember. A state-of-the-art set of nano-carbon high-abrasion scrubbing tools, claimed after a mission that involved illegal attempts to clone meguca. Beeswax polish, snatched during her tour of the only apiary on the continent. Wolf-Clone fur space blankets that had actually been in orbit, their owner having met a quick end to a fork. An original 2091 yoga meditation book from an instructor that had sat in a slave smuggler’s private collection.
One by one she gathered the pieces and sent them to personal storage with a touch. Each vanished into that pocket of elsewhere, leaving only the brief ripple of air that followed her power.
Her gaze snagged on a yellow cover.
“How to Make Friends for Mega-Dummies, 2210 Premium Subscriber’s Edition.”
She hesitated, glanced around the empty room as if someone might be watching her through the concrete. Then she took that one too. No one needed to know.
Next on the list: food.
After that, she would need...
---
“I go. Now.” Axel growled down at her. His obsidian plates caught the light from the textile television and threw it back like dark mirrors. “Wasted tippppme.” Each time he tried to speak he recoiled, flinching at the tumble of his own voice. Every broken syllable tightened his stance, shoulders knotting inward.
He had sat through all of it while Shadow threw ideas at the wall to see what might stick: massages, light drills, movies, word games, puzzles, tasting trays, meditation. Nothing took. Not a single feature shifted. If anything, the strain deepened. Either her approach was wrong at the root, or his change refused to pass through middle states, making it impossible to measure progress.
Probably both.
“You are worsening,” she said, edging closer to the side wall, careful not to block him. Regret bit the back of her tongue as soon as she heard herself. Calling out anger to an angry person never helped. She should have turned his focus somewhere safer.
Her trained eye caught the small tells. Shoulders tensed. Claws flexed. His legs angled for a launch. His attention skated past her and pinned the exit. He read her as an obstacle. She slid farther aside until the tunnel behind her lay open, hands loose at her sides, chin lowered. No challenge, no threat.
She would not draw her blade against a meguca, no matter how his anger raised the hairs on her neck and sent her shadows whispering in quiet threats.
She could not make that mistake twice.
“I ssstayed, did notttthing!” He slashed at empty air and his claws found purchase anyway, ripping a furrow through the concrete in a dry burst of dust. “Need helppp.”
“This is help, Axel,” Shadow said, calm because she had trained the calm and because anything else would make him worse. “Your body is fighting itself. You need real rest. You need to stabilize. The longer this continues, the more you will lose control.”
He finally looked at her. Solid black eyes burned with a cold fire. The socially adept mind she knew lived behind them still, and it cut through her concern with a surgeon’s edge. “I ressssttted,” he said, the word shaped like a blade. “Ssstill deads, too mpmpany.”
The accusation landed and stuck. He was not arguing about pain or fear. He was arguing about duty. Shadow felt her own words falter. She knew the taste of failure in the task you are sworn to. She had tried everything she could name. None of it mattered. If nothing worked, the next step would only be escalation, and escalation would get people hurt.
The gentle teacher had failed. A cold knot tightened in her stomach. She had run out of safe options. Almost. One remained, and she hated that she knew it. It would risk the bond she’d been trying to nurture. Push too hard and he would refuse her as his teacher, and there were no more soft options.
She drew a breath, felt the room’s thin grit tickle her lungs, and measured the distance to the tunnel, to his hands, to his eyes. A part of her wanted to look for a way to soften the blow of what was about to come, but she knew the risk of a half-measure.
Sometimes the student needed the hard truth. She hoped Axel would see that.
Shadow’s shoulders straightened. The soft, conciliatory posture drew taut into something hard and sharp, something he recognized. The warmth in her voice cooled to absolute zero. “Hold this,” the meguca commanded.
The change in tone was so abrupt it startled him. She stepped forward, not with the hesitant motion from before, but with Elder Fulton’s crisp, economical stride, even if she carried only a fraction of that woman’s presence. A metal egg blinked into her palm, solid steel, palm-filling, its surface polished to a mirror shine. She set it in his hand. Weight dragged at his wrist.
He looked from the egg to her face in clear confusion.
“Just hold it,” she ordered, voice flat and without a hint of mercy. “And don’t break it.”
She planted her feet and stepped directly into his space. She drew a sharp breath.
“Eyes front!” she barked at full volume. “You black glass brute, shard snout, onyx fiend, quill back, spike stack, plate face, barb hide, basalt oaf, slag heap, soot snout, ash belch, fume slug, smoke sack, cinder lick,” she fired, each word landing harder than the last, shadows behind her rising like black flames. “Lava lout, scoria swine, wing wreck, storm chaff, claw klutz, hook paws, scythe ox, grip rot, split nail, fang drip, tooth pit, jaw grind.” It was forceful fury, her face drawn into a rictus scream, voice pulled from the gut exactly as Elder Fulton had drilled into her. She pressed closer, deeper into his space, until her spittle danced across his obsidian plates. “Maw slop, bile spew, gob stain, drool sow, spit hog, thud brain, dead weight, stomp brute, mud wit-”
CRUNCH
Axel twitched. They both looked down at the metal egg torn open in his grip. The solid steel had crumpled like tissue. Shards skittered across the floor. Thick, viscous coolant, startlingly like blood, ran between his fingers and dripped to the stone.
Without giving an inch, Shadow pointed at the mangled lump, face impassive despite the full-throated shout that had been inches from his sharp-fanged muzzle. “That was a human torso! You just killed a human because you could not even stay still for a few dozen words! Do you understand what that means!?”
He started to shove her back, then stopped himself, shock cutting through the impulse. He stepped away instead. She did not follow. She held her ground and kept the glare. She could not read his face and had to focus on his body instead, the almost-clutching of the dripping scrap, the way he stared down at her while his stance shifted toward something defensive.
Shadow let the silence sit for a heartbeat, then dropped the anger like a heavy weight, her voice coming softly. “You have saved lives, and there have not been accidents. But the worse you get the likelier that becomes. You will tell yourself you can handle it, that it is not that bad, that it is a tiny, involuntary gesture.”
She pointed at the totaled muck of metal in his hand.
“And that is what will happen. One day the twitch will line up with a skull, a throat, a lung, and you will not get to take it back.” Her voice wavered. “One life over an accident becomes three. Then you tell yourself it’s ok because they deserved it, and then…” Memories of the room, the darkness, the slow, choking guilt pressed in, the shadows in the tunnel wavered around her, darkening ever so slightly. Shadow pushed a slow breath out, gave a small shake of her head, and forced the next words out, heavier than before. “Then you wake up one morning not remembering what you did or didn’t do. There is only anger. There are only black fragments and a body count, and a certainty they could've all been innocent and it wouldn't have stopped you.”
Shadow closed her mouth and held it shut, jaw tight, hands whitening for half a heartbeat. She exhaled, steadying. The tunnel air felt stale and damp on her tongue. She stepped closer and offered her hand.
“Your health is deteriorating, you need help. Real help, more than what I can provide here.”
Axel looked at her hand, then at her. When he spoke, each sound dragged. “Orrr eldersss orderr ttto kkkill mpe?”
She flinched and looked away. The wall became safer than his eyes. “You’re a meguca,” she told the concrete.
“Onnly iiin papppper.” His inhuman mouth worried every syllable. “Nnot permitted to heeelp.”
“Every ounce of food you take is food that’d been meant for someone else. You can help without increasing friction between the corporations and risking a true schism.” She found the heat again and let it ride. “You can plead your case to the elders. If even one of them agrees, it would put things into motion. But you can’t do that while you’re so tangled by your own powers, your words would hold no weight.”
His claws curled. He stamped once, twice. The tunnel shuddered around them and dust sifted from the storm drain’s ceiling. He clutched his head and screamed. His maw snapped open and shut, a hard clack that echoed off wet concrete. Gunk smeared across his face from Shadow’s prop and she winced, feeling the shape of a frustration he could not shed.
“Two daysssss,” he said at last, the words leaking out with his breath. “Then I ssstart raaaidsss again.”
He turned away and lumbered to the little hollow he had claimed, a scratched-out alcove no wider than a large supply closet. He folded down into himself there, a ball of plates, spikes, and claws that looked more like a trap than a body at rest.
Shadow watched him settle. She felt dread tug at her spine and set her shoulders anyway. “Two days,” she promised, voice low. She let the darkness take her as she moved.
Two days was too soon, too fast. She didn’t want to sound the alarm, Axel did not need to be suppressed and forcefully drained back into his original form. But Shadow also lacked the tools to get him through whatever’s holding him back within that timeframe. She could only think of one option that teetered at the edge of “too extreme”, one that under any other circumstance she wouldn’t have even considered.
She needed Elder Fulton’s help.
Comments
Motanium
Im really liking this arc!
Dreamsteal
TFTC!
