O.C. Saar
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Omega Release | Chapter 18: To Kill a Boogeyman
🕑 Added 2025-06-06 18:00:08 +0000 UTCMy entire body seized up as waves of pain emanating from my stump assaulted me. I could barely breathe. I clutched at the ruins of my arm. The metal fused to my flesh started to bubble like it was boiling. An innumerable number of warning notifications started flashing before me, disappearing before I had a chance to read them. I felt heat surround me and looked down with horror, watching my armor melt.
“Hob… What’s happening?” I said through gritted teeth, tasting blood.
Before he could answer, my ears were filled with a ringing sound, the world around me sounding muffled. I could hear Hob reply, but his voice sounded so distorted that I couldn’t tell what he was saying. My sight was filled with bright flashes of light and spots of complete darkness. I tried standing up and getting help, but the world around me stretched and shrank uncontrollably, and I lost my balance.
My head hit the floor with a loud thump.
…
“I still don’t understand why we didn’t bring Silvie along.” Muttered Yorathan as I parked the bike in a dark alley.
I ruffled his short-cropped, black hair with a smile. “I hope that I’ll be able to explain it to you someday. For now, remember, we take this to our graves.”
He scoffed good-naturedly. “This isn’t the first mission you have brought me to. I know how to shut my damn mouth and get the job done.”
“Alright, alright, I’m just covering all of my bases.” I chuckled. My brother was barely fifteen and already trying to talk like a badass. Well, I couldn’t blame him. I acted the same at his age. The following nine years of experiencing reality on the Rings disabused me of any illusions that I was hot shit, but Yora still had a ways to go.
We started skulking through the alleyways towards our target. I tried to keep my thoughts in check, but they kept returning to the intel package that had brought us this far. About everything else it contained. The implications of its contents. No, I couldn’t afford to get bogged down with emotion.
We had a boogeyman to kill.
Varhas had earned his nickname of “The Searing Butcher” five times over before I was ten years old. Half the Otherlords wanted him dead, and the other half gave him work. Often, who belonged in which camp would switch around, but it seemed like someone had finally had enough. Apparently, he got hired by a gang of Tech-heads that recently put up a bid to become a clan. They called themselves “The Progress Spiral.” He went and killed a bunch of rival gang leaders, destroyed a ton of their research, and, as was his calling card, he never left a single trace he was there except the cauterized holes in his victims’ bodies. He was to be rewarded for a job well done with an experimental force relic with a ceremony and everything.
Well, turns out that one of the Techies up near the top thought that Varhas was an abomination and wanted him dead. Rightly so. Varhas didn’t limit his killing to mission targets but actively sought to cause collateral deaths. When he wasn’t working, he would occasionally murder random people in their homes. I’d been privately investigating him for years, trying to figure out his pattern and figure out a way to prevent any more deaths, but I never had an opportunity to actively hunt him down. Until now, that is. I opened my mission log and nodded.
[MISSION LOG]
[Hunt the Hunter]
Objective: Kill Varhas during a brief window of vulnerability.
Details: During the award ceremony, Varhas will recite the twenty-word sequence required for the activation of his defense-magnifying force shield. Between words five and fifteen, all of his defenses can be deactivated by a Codebreaker hacking a console next to the hidden entrance mentioned in the information package, leaving him vulnerable to attack.
Success: You will be awarded 430,000 credits and a black chip.
Failure: Varhas escapes or survives.
It was the perfect opportunity. We couldn’t afford to screw this up. We followed the map included in the information package and made our way to a back entrance of the Progress Spiral’s compound. The five-meter-tall wall of pure metal in front of us looked quite imposing. As promised, the door hidden in the recess was entirely unguarded. I peeked out, glancing up and down the eerily deserted street, seeing no one and no cameras. I signaled to Yora to follow me, and we rushed to the door, crouching in the shadows of the recess.
I pointed at an electronic panel next to the heavy-looking door and wiggled my fingers at Yorathan. He rolled his golden eyes at me and smiled, reaching up and gingerly touching the panel. I saw the briefest spark of electricity right before his finger touched the panel. He closed his eyes, inhaled slowly, and as he exhaled, the door silently swung open.
I took my new epic-ranked, silenced pistol out, kissed it, and peeked through the doorway, prepared to shoot at anything that moved. Yet, nothing did. The beautiful, surprisingly verdant compound of the Spiral was seemingly abandoned. I slowly made my way in and hid behind the nearest thick bush. I took a deep breath, reveling in the rare scent of vegetation. We could hear the sound of a small waterfall nearby. I forgot we were in the Otherside for a moment, remembering a fun vacation Silvie and I took to the Middle Ring. Well, we did have to clear out a den, a massive pack of Ferronir had made out of an underground nutrition lab, but we took care of that fast enough and made the most of the rest of those weeks. The fact that Silvie used the loot we gained to make me my new armor and her first masterwork weapon, her [Righteous Fury], was the cherry on top.
Yora followed me and let out a soft “Woah,” as he looked around at the trees and the grass. That snapped me out of my thoughts.
[Message]
[Raziel]: No noises!
[Yorathan]: Oh, stop worrying. Surely, the sound of the waterfall is enough to cover a measly whisper.
[Raziel]: Under most circumstances, yes. But we don’t know what kind of defenses these Tech-Heads have. For all we know, they might give their guards neural implants to filter and detect human speech. You’re lucky this entrance was left purposefully unguarded.
[Yorathan]: Ah, I didn’t think of that. Sorry. I’ll hush.
I nodded at him and looked around, pulling up the map of the compound. We were close to the building where the ceremony was taking place. Yora and I carefully made our way through the underbrush toward the gang’s meeting hall, taking great care to be as silent as possible. After a couple of minutes, we came across our first guard patrol, but Yorathan and I activated the [Chameleon] subroutine on the pair of matching badges we had. The disguise wasn’t even close to perfect, but in the darkness, just taking the vague color of our surroundings was enough for the muttering, twitching guard to walk past us.
We kept crawling through the dense forest while I occasionally checked my map. We had to crawl through some pretty dense brush, but after a couple more minutes, we reached a secluded spot marked on the map with a large X. At first, it seemed like an absolutely normal, leaf-covered patch of grass, but I used my foot to clear some of the leaves out, and the handle of a secret hatch appeared.
I grabbed the handle and twisted it counterclockwise, letting go once I heard a click. The handle silently retreated into the grass, and a nearby boulder hissed, a perfectly shaped doorway appearing on its surface as that side of the rock silently slid down into the ground, revealing a dark passage going into the ground at a gentle decline. We’d found the secret ramp.
Yorathan’s eyebrows shot up as he looked at the contraption wide-eyed. He glanced at me with a look that said, “Did not expect that!”. I grinned at him and beckoned him to follow. We left the door open; it was far enough out of the way of any patrols that it wouldn’t get spotted, and we would need to book it once Varhas was dead. I had a safehouse prepared, too.
At the end of the long, dark corridor was a door. We could hear the muffled sounds of someone giving a speech, getting louder as we got closer. The door looked even more heavy-duty than the one in the perimeter. The panel next to it looked much more advanced, too, glowing with soft blue light, symbols dancing on its surface.
We set up our positions, Yorathan on the right side of the door, under the control panel, and I on the left, ready to swing the door open and ensure the coast was clear. I looked at him and gave him a nod. He reached out and touched the panel, closing his eyes. I held my breath, ready to move at a moment’s notice.
His face was scrunched up in concentration, and I started getting nervous. This was taking longer than I expected. “What’s going on?” I breathed out, trying to be just loud enough to be heard above the muffled din of the cheering crowd beyond the door.
His frown deepened. “This is harder than I expected. Hold on. I almost have it,” he started tracing a line from the control panel to the door. I was about to tell him to get away from in front of the door when I heard the door softly click. He turned to me with a wide, victorious grin.
Then, I heard a gunshot. Laughter. Blood. Fire. Running. Pain.
A promise.
…
I woke up on my side with a start. I scrambled up on all fours, retching. My stomach had been empty for a day, so nothing came out, but that somehow made it worse. There was no release from the feeling.
Then I noticed I was on all fours, and everything seemed to stutter momentarily. I looked at my right hand, for there was a hand there.
In fact, there was a whole new forearm too. Both were made of a peculiar black metal with bright silver swirls. This wasn’t like any other augmentation I’d ever seen. It didn’t appear to be slotted into a socket. It was… Fused with my arm. The transition between flesh and metal was seamless. If not for the interlocking metallic panels and the small components and wires between those panels, I would have thought that someone had regrown my arm and painted it to fuck with me. It didn’t feel any different than my regular arm, that’s for sure.
“What?” I asked, feeling dazed. I examined the arm.
[Apostate’s Arm]
Rank: Divine (Unique) | Level: ???
Description: ???
Subroutines: ???
Damage: ???
Durability: ???
“Heresy, given form.”
“What?” I asked again, and Hob’s voice came crashing right back.
“Sir? Sir, please say something other than ‘What’. Are you well?”
“I… Uh… What?” That information window didn’t make any sense.
“Oh dear, do you have brain damage? That shouldn’t be possible!” Hob sounded panicked.
I sat back on my haunches, rubbing my temples, feeling a migraine coming on. “Why does everyone keep thinking I have brain damage? How long have I been out?”
“Oh! You’re okay!” Hob said, relief clear in his voice. “It has only been thirty minutes, sir.”
Okay was a bit of an overstatement. I felt like I had been run over by a car. “Hob, what the hell just happened?”
“Ah, yes, about that,” he said, sounding nervous. “Again, my deepest apologies. The gem requires a way for me to interact with the physical world. It was trying to manifest as the priests' grizzly augmentations, but I managed to wrangle it and focused on just reforming your arm.”
“Wrangle it? So you don’t have control of it?” I asked, alarmed.
“Well, yes and no. I can guide it like I did with your arm, but some things were beyond my control. For example, material acquisition.” He said with trepidation.
“What do you mean by material acquisition?”
“Well, it required a lot of technologically advanced materials and components. And none were nearby. I managed to salvage the most precious materials in my previous housing, but I’m afraid it also drew from other sources.” He said in a rush.
I gritted my teeth, trying not to make my annoyance evident. “Out with it, Hob.”
“Ah, well. Yes. Well. If you would look down at yourself…”
I did as he told me. I was wearing my underwear and nothing else. “Hob. Where is my armor?” I said as calmly as possible.
“Well… You see, your armor was only of rare quality, but it was unique ranked, and the epic rank set bonus was quite powerful, so…” I bet if Hob were a person, he’d be fidgeting right now.
“So…” I prompted, looking around for the first time, noticing fabric scraps and slag scattered around me.
“I may have been forced to… disassemble your armor and use its most useful component parts in creating your arm.” He said, sounding embarrassed.
“You… Ate my armor to make me an arm?” I asked, incredulous, looking down at my new arm and flexing the hand.
“I… Well. I suppose one could see it that way. My deepest apologies.”
I stared at my arm for a moment longer. “From armor to arm.” The absurdity made me burst out laughing, the stress of the past few days bleeding out of me with every gale of laughter.
I was still in deep shit. Priests would no doubt try to hunt me down, my famous armor was gone, and everything in my accounts, including my home, would be taken from me in a little under two hours, but at least I was alive, and so was Hob. I would probably have to go into hiding, live in the Otherside for a bit, and maybe start all over again in a different sector, but I had enough coins saved up to help me to begin anew, so that hopefully wouldn’t be much of an issue.
I took a deep breath, getting my mirth under control, and let it out slowly as a long, contented sigh. “Well, it couldn’t be helped.” I slapped my knees and jumped up, feeling surprisingly spry for someone writhing in pain and dry-heaving a few minutes ago. Thinking of my stomach made it clench painfully. Before I could start figuring anything out, I had to eat something. I went to my fridge and grabbed the last [NutriBloc] I had available, examining it. I wasn’t sure if it had expired or not.
[NutriBloc]
Rank: Official Product
Level: N/A
Description: Nutrient paste pressed into the shape of a bar. Tasty and filling.
Effect: Provides enough nutrition for a person for an entire day. Effect decreases as level increases. Insert into a fabricator and use the optimize function to increase the effect up to 2 times.
Expires in: 8 days.
"An entire meal in the palm of your hand"
I looked down at it in confusion. “Uh, Hob?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Why is my nutrient bar talking about levels? In fact, why are all my information windows so weird now?”
“Ah, right,” he said, sounding excited. “Let’s talk about levels and stats.”
