O.C. Saar
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General Release | Chapter 2: The Rat
🕑 Added 2025-06-02 18:02:01 +0000 UTCThe hum of my motorcycle’s engine eased some of my nerves as I flew above the houses of Sector 16, heading towards the outskirts. From up here, I could see the edge of the ring and the void of space beyond in all its terrifying and beautiful glory. The second biggest moon of Jupiter, the scarred Europa, was starting to rise on the horizon too. Under me, the houses gave way to a sprawling industrial landscape. Pipes carrying who knows what to who knows where, house-sized machines constantly at work with a clamor of whirring, buzzing, and grinding, and people going in and out of factory buildings bigger than the entirety of Sector 16. The ever-present cloud of unprocessed smoke pooling against the surface of the forcefield that kept the air that we breathed contained forced me to fly lower, and much to my chagrin, I got to experience another thing the industrial sections were famous for, other than their mortality rate. The smell.
In the last three years of my self-imposed exile to the swill house, I guess I had forgotten it, but by lost terra, what a smell that was. The bouquet of tens of thousands of sweating bodies, mixing with metallic scents and the caustic aroma of chemicals, was enough to make my eyes water. A bright blue window opened in front of me, and I squinted at it.
[DEBUFF GAINED] - [Noxious Fume Inhalation]
Effects: Dizziness, slowed reaction speed, nausea, lower hand-to-eye coordination, headache. Effects increase per stack of [Noxious Fume Inhalation]. At ten stacks, [Noxious Fume Inhalation] starts causing damage to your health.
“Sometimes taking deep breaths is bad for you.”
I pulled up my neck gaiter, covering my nose and mouth, and felt instant relief as the fabric filtered the most harmful chemicals out of the air, the debuff disappearing after a moment. It still smelled horrible, but at least I wouldn’t contribute to the mortality rate of the industrial section because I fell out of the sky. What an ending to my tale that would be. Raziel Ibicas, surviving more gunfights than any man ought to, was finally done in by a smell so foul that he couldn’t fly straight anymore and crashed.
An hour of flying later, I was clear of the fragrant industrial section and was traveling at speed over the ruins of sector 11. It was a singularly rare occurrence to have an entire Sector be excommunicated, and the news of it shook everyone living on the outer ring to their core. Still, nobody was surprised that it had finally happened. It was common knowledge that Sector 11 housed the main force and operating center of the so-called “Godfall rebellion.” They thought to rid themselves of the Ecclesiarchy. That, with enough people and momentum, it would have been possible to repel the priests and set up their own independent government.
They failed. And now, because of their failure, every man, woman, and child of Sector 11 was dead. Dead and gone for eight years now. The only thing left of their dreams and hopes was a landscape of half-melted slag.
The column of smoke on the horizon caused my thoughts of the dead to disappear as I sped up toward it. I was close now. Looking down, I saw deep trenches dug through the partially melted slag, revealing the ring's gleaming, nigh indestructible metal underneath. It was as if a gigantic beast had crawled through the wreckage and eaten everything in its way: buildings, streets, and all.
Moments later, I could see the aforementioned beast. It was a scrap eater, a vehicle around 100 meters wide and 150 meters long, built specifically to crawl through all sorts of wreckage and remove, recycle, and process material from the surface of the ring. At the moment, it was standing still, no doubt processing whatever it gobbled up from this graveyard of a sector, with some buildings on its surface spewing thick black smoke.
I input the passcode Kornok gave me in his message into my wristwatch and sent it to the hulking monstrosity of metal. Within moments, a landing pad between some buildings lit up with faint green colors, and I landed on it. Getting off my bike, I stretched, feeling slightly stiff. I hadn’t ridden my bike this long for a long, long time, but it felt good. I should do that more often.
Then, I heard the metallic click of several guns being cocked, and I froze in place. My instincts kicked into gear, and I had to forcibly tamp down on my urge to reach for my own gun. I slowly raised my hands in the air. “Not quite the welcome I was expecting. Your boss asked for me.” I couldn’t quite keep my tone cordial, some sarcasm leaking through.
“Hrm. Turn around.” I heard a gruff voice say. I complied and found myself staring into the beady eyes of Jim Crolas. The man was so massive that the revolver he pointed at me looked comically small. “Face coverings off,” he ordered me.
I slowly moved my hands to remove my goggles and lower my gaiter. “Blimey, Jim. It’s me, Raziel. What in the rotations are they feeding you here? Feels like you’ve grown a couple dozen centimeters in height and several dozen centimeters in width since I last saw you.” I tried my best to crack a joke, but my current situation left little humor in my voice.
As soon as he saw my face, he rolled his eyes and grunted, “Clear.” I heard at least six fading voices grumbling in the windows of the buildings around us. Jim wordlessly beckoned for me to follow him and started walking away, not once glancing back to check if I was following. I suppose a man with arms as wide as your torso expected obedience. My pride chafed at his attitude, but I took a deep breath to center myself and started walking after his ridiculously broad back.
As we walked towards the large central building, I made a couple of attempts at small talk with Jim, only to face his stony silence, so I gave up on that endeavor. I glanced around, seeing grim-faced men and women all around me, staring at me sometimes with suspicion and sometimes with outright hostility. What a lovely crowd! Made me feel right at home. Then again, some of these people might’ve had a good reason to hate me, so who was I to judge?
Jim stopped outside the two-story building right at the center of the scrap eater, opened the door for me, and nodded at me to go in. “Elevator. Second floor down.”
I paused for a moment. “Second floor… down?” I asked Jim, who just rolled his eyes again and nodded at me with another grunt. I shrugged and walked in with a final “Good talk, Jim.”
The lobby of the building was surprising. Clean white walls with geometric synthwood decorations and a couple of actual, natural plants gave the place a polished, sophisticated air that I had only experienced in Middle Ring buildings before. A prim and proper secretary sat behind a wide desk, smiling at me politely. For a second, the juxtaposition of the grim, dirty faces outside and her well-put-together countenance caused my brain to short-circuit, and I glanced back to make sure I hadn’t been drugged and transported to a different place.
Sure enough, the industrial exterior of the scrap eater was still there, and so was Jim. Who was now staring at me with narrowed eyes and an impatient scowl on his face. He actually made a shooing motion at me as if trying to tell me to get on with it, and closed the doors. I turned around, schooling my face into a similarly placid, polite smile. “Hi, I’m here to see Kornok,” I said, walking up to the desk.
“Certainly, sir. As Security Officer Crolas has already told you, to see Mr. Kornok, you take the elevator to my right and go two floors down.” Her tone was so understanding and patient that, for a moment, I felt like she was a teacher explaining a very simple concept to a very dumb student.
I cleared my throat, trying to will my blush away. “Right. Off I go, then. Thank you.”
“You are most welcome, sir,” she said in the same patient tone. Something about her felt… off.
I walked towards the elevators, inwardly berating myself for my, frankly, embarrassing performance. As I stepped into the elevator and pressed the button to go to Kornok’s floor, I did my best to dismiss all extraneous thoughts and feelings. I had to keep my head in the game.
The doors opened to a room that was just as out of place with the reception area as the reception area was with the rest of the scrap eater. The walls were metal, partially rusted, and flaking rust onto the floor. The only two features of the room were a couch that at some point could have been described as “nice” but can only be described now as “rotting” and an ominous steel door.
I felt my anxiety spike at the sight of that door and had to forcibly unclench my jaw. The reality of my situation and the tight deadline I was operating under hit me like a truck, and I felt my hands start to sweat. I opened the door, finding it surprisingly thick and heavy, and stepped inside.
The room I found myself in was no larger than the previous one. It had another door to the left side and a desk with a chair in the far right corner, facing the door I just entered. There was a ratty-looking carpet in the middle of the room, and standing on said carpet was a ratty-looking man. Elias Kornok. The man looked like he would fit in with the vagrants of sector 16; his clothes and hair were disheveled, and dirt and grime covered most of the skin I could see. And he stunk so badly that I expected the Noxious Fume Inhalation debuff to appear.
A terse “Hello.” was all I could manage to get out, the images of all the people that suffered because of this filthy piece of shit flashing through my mind.
“Raziel! It’s so good to see you after so long. I always knew you would come back. They always come crawling back to me.” Kornok’s voice was as grating and slimy as ever, the weasel-faced man constantly glancing left and right as if expecting an attack at any moment.
I snapped. “You messaged me, Kornok. You marked it as urgent. Don’t treat me like I’m one of your goons; spit it out already.” I had been in his presence for only a minute, and my patience was already fraying at the edges.
“Oh? Did you come because of my message? I was sure you would come because Flon had convinced you. Interesting, most interesting. I assume then your more legit clientele has dried up? Three years of going dark will do that, you know.” He grinned at me, his crooked teeth doing his face no favors.
“Do you have a mission for me or not, you ring-damned vermin.” I spat back, my foot unconsciously tapping the floor.
“My, my, such impatience. Things must be truly dire.” I took a threatening step forward, and he stepped back, his back hitting the metal wall of his stuffy little bunker. He raised his arms as if to protect his face from a punch and let out a wheezing, half-mad giggle. “Easy, easy. I do have a job for you, a good one too. By the rings, you’re so on edge. We used to get along so well, too. Is it my business success? Does it make you feel inferior?”
I tried my best not to recoil as the putrid stench of the man’s breath hit me. “We never got along, Kornok. Now, what is the job, and how much are you paying for it? The danger level and influence level are of no concern to me. Just none of the vile shit. You know my limits. I’d die before going Blackjack or Cardinal.”
He licked his lips several times before lowering his arms and glancing around again. “Hm, hmmm… Ah, that job, the job, yes.” Another giggle escaped his lips. Rings, he was getting crazier by the day. “Simple smash and grab. Well, I’d rather you didn’t do any smashing, need to do it on the down-low, yeah? And it's not black, but it's not white either.”
“I don’t care about staying a Suit Kornok. Gray will suit me just fine. So you want me to steal something? If it's your best-paying job, like you mentioned, I doubt it's as simple as you try to make it out to be. Who am I stealing from, what am I stealing, where am I stealing it from, when do you want it done, and why?” Even when I fell on hard times in the past, there were some lines that I would never cross. Things had never gotten so dire before, but if he tried to trick me into doing something truly horrible, like stealing a child away from its family, he was liable to get the long-overdue bullet between his eyes.
“Think of it more as reclamation of goods. As for what and why, that is for me to know and for you not to ask about. It is a glass box with a small red stone floating in the center. That is all you need to know.” His eyes sharpened for a moment, and a sudden air of danger surrounded him before dissipating with another giggle of his. “As for the who and where… The gemling priests and a high-security warehouse. It needs to be done within the next two days. Elisa the Beautiful’s gang was contacted to steal it, too. We need to get there before them.”
I blinked at him for several moments, trying to determine if he was joking. “So you want me to steal a box I can’t know about, for unknown reasons, with basically no time to prepare. And I’m stealing from the Ecclisiarchy. And an Otherlord is involved. Fantastic. You realize that you’re giving me a suicide job, right?” I crossed my arms in front of my chest and glared at him, my voice as flat as my stare.
“I knew you’d say that. I knew it. It’s not a suicide job. I’ll be giving you my best man to help you do this job, an invaluable tool necessary for this job. Think of it as assistance and a guarantee. Make sure you return my tool unbroken, or it will affect your final reward,” he said with another giggle.
“You guarantee my safety by making me bring one of your goons. Color me impressed. I didn’t realize you could make it more obvious that you were planning to whack me.”
“Bah, such little faith,” he spat the last word out like uttering a curse, and snapped his fingers at the door to the left of him. “Aren, come in.”
I turned to the door, my hand ready to shoot up to the revolver I was hiding in my jacket. I carefully eyed the opening, rusting door, and watched as Aren’s small form walked into the room.
“Go fuck yourself, Kornok!” I whirled on the disgusting rodent of a person, pulling out my revolver and aiming it at his head in a blind rage. “You expect me to bring a kid to the job? A kid? Knowing what you know? After what happened?” I snarled each word out, my teeth clenched in a grimace of fury.
Kornok, to his credit, simply continued cowering and giggling the way he had been the entire conversation.
“I can take care of myself,” Aren said resolutely. I glanced at him, seeing his scowling face, and fought hard not to snap back at him. He couldn’t have been older than fourteen. “Now stop pointing your gun at my boss, or I’ll kill you.”
His terse, gruff tone, youthful voice, and violent words clashed so much that it snapped me out of my anger as I gaped at him, at a loss for words. “I…”
“Are you in or out?” He crossed his arms as I dumbly lowered my gun.
I took a deep breath, trying to regain some semblance of calmness. As I put my gun away, I steeled myself and took a long look at the kid. He was lean and wiry, well into his growth spurt, with messy, curly brown hair and piercing, deep green eyes. His clothes seemed sturdy, if dirty, and well-worn, and he looked ready to leap at me.
Cursing under my breath, I closed my eyes and took another deep breath. Hob needed me. If Kornok’s job paid enough to justify the absurd level of danger, it would be the only chance I’d have to save him and myself. I turned to Kornok, who was mumbling to himself. “This better be the best-paying mission this sun-blasted ring has ever seen.”
