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The fall of a Wing is always a momentous occasion. To be the corporation that ascends to replace it requires a special talent; singularities, employees, and resources galore. Competition is fierce, and every action must in some way damage a competitor's own chances. Legions of fixers, corporate sabotage, false flags, any and all such means are simply the basic moves of the game.
To win the war with merely two employees under its aegis, with one occupied with the corporation itself? Now that takes a special kind of ruthless cunning.
Benjamin walks past the imposing front gates of the manner. Wrought iron pickets that twist and turn upon themselves like so many writhing snakes, thin engravings and embellishes all over the surface, with a filigree of fine gold seeping through them all.
He, of course, barely pays attention to the ostentatious wealth displayed in even the entrance. He knows that the owner of this mansion sees it as a glorified apartment; a minor safehouse in case she needs to discuss something with a peon in the area.
The Smoke War is one of those rare events that shape generations to come. The City is no stranger to fighting; the backstreets of District 23 are always filled with some manner of ambush or kidnapping, syndicates frequently tussle over territory, and even Wings may participate in the occasional skirmishes with a Finger, or more rarely, another Wing. The Head oversees the entire process and keeps an iron grip on it via its Arbiters.
It's commonly believed the reason for the City's patent and gun laws is stability between the Wings. Artillery pieces, gunships, and all manners of ranged bombardment are nearly eliminated from the equation due to just how restrictive the Head's laws are on acceptable armaments, along with the sheer rarity of workshops allowed to manufacture them. Even R-Corp's rifles, some of the only mass produced guns in the city, are barely capable of dealing with a concrete blockade by themselves. The patent laws further prevent Wings from getting into scuffles about stolen technology; while the singularities are still heavily guarded, the patent system ensures that the Wings always have a monopoly on whatever service they provide as long as they live. It keeps conflict down; fights between the Wings are usually restricted to blackmail and throwing around their soft power. Very rarely does any Wing attempt to fight another. The sheer cost of such an action can easily backfire upon the aggressor and leave them vulnerable to being torn apart by the others.
Of course, this does not mean it cannot happen. For when two Wings find the impetus to go to war, the results are horrific. Singularity enhanced war machines are thrown around like confetti, great swathes of a District can be sterilised at once, and the leftover horrors from such a war can pollute the Backstreets for years onward.
A war involving multiple Wings would be catastrophic; each alliance giving birth to abominations far greater than the sum of their violated parts.
A war involving most of the fundamental Wings of the City?
It would be past catastrophic; it would be an event that permanently scars the whole City for decades, maybe even centuries, to come.
Benjamin shakes hands with Dias over a smooth basalt table. An agreement has been reached. Dias wishes to overthrow the Head. She cannot be seen doing such a thing. Benjamin and Ayin wish to overthrow L Corp. They do not have the resources for such a thing.
Luckily for Benjamin, Dias has fortunes, assets, and connections beyond the wildest dreams of even a Wing CEO. The Udjat are essentially an entire private army at her beck and call; the slaughter of a District or two are in no way unpalatable to them. Dias herself sits on enough money to feed the entire City for years; it will be more than enough to strike a blow at an already unstable and unpopular Wing.
Luckily for Dias, there is a taxidermied Arbiter stored in the bowels of Lobotomy Corporation. Her mind is permanently ravaged; whatever affectations she puts on, she must contend with the fact that Ayin has permanently warped her mind away from the edge of insanity. She has no value now that Ayin has torn her memories away; she is now a mere overseer for the Cogito experiments. Her only purpose is to suffer with no end in sight.
Neither Benjamin nor Dias particularly care about the Arbiter. They do care, however, that her memories have revealed a gateway to evade the Head's Beholders. Their sight over the present, past, and future may be absolute, but even they do not have the bandwidth to monitor every event in the city at once. Benjamin hands Dias a single blueprint containing the schema to divert the Beholders' attention away from a building permanently. It is incredibly expensive; the cost would be prohibitive for any normal person in the city. Even a Finger or Wing CEO would be destitute trying to run it. But Dias and Benjamin do not care for this; Dias has hoards that can easily weather the expense, and Lobotomy Corp needs to be built around the system. After all, money is merely a means to an end for them; running dangerously close to no net profit each year is perfectly acceptable for the Seed of Light.
Dias adds one last clause to their deal. Benjamin is to lend them his experience and prodigious talent for the Smoke War. He accepts.
One of the most pronounced effects of the Smoke War was the lasting scar it left on the psyche of the City. Anyone and everyone within the affected Districts had to contend with the fighting and all the participants within, from groups of Fixers to veritable swarms of bug like abominations, with the speech pattern of humans and the ferocity of Sweepers.
In fact, it is said that you can still see a few remnants skulking around L Corp's backstreets; swarms of smoke that strip the flesh off whoever is unlucky enough to be caught within their grasp. These myths have never been confirmed; certainly, they've never affected anybody except minor Rats. Due to this, the reports of these monsters will have to be left as tall tales, up until a reliable source or evidence is found for their existence.
The smoke that wafts out of L Corp chokes the backstreets of District 12. It spreads through every inch of the air, flowing like a musty grey river. Benjamin can hardly stand it, but his role in the war is simple. Dias informed him that the fixers within District 12 were able to resist the advances of other wings far too well; their familiarity with the smoke serving to shield and obscure them while bogging down anybody who tries to invade them. Even the smoke itself seems to have been harnessed as an offensive tool by some veterans.
So thus, he walks through the smoke trying to find some stratagem or weakness that could be used to turn the tide. He does not cut a particularly imposing figure in the mist; in fact, some rats have tried taking the opportunity for an easy mark. The Udjat following him has put a permanent end to all those who try.
Absently, Benjamin looks at a nearby wall. It is a dilapidated, filthy thing, with graffiti plastered all over it, along with water damage marks and cracks. Looking a little closer, he notices small bugs who writhe inside the cracks; their bodies blend in perfectly, giving them both shelter and hiding them from both predator and prey.
As he watches on, a small aphid skitters next to one of the cracks. It barely gets past the edge before a larger insect catches it and drags it in, presumably towards its nest. He looks up once again at the pervasive smoke surrounding the area, far too thick for anyone to see through normally. Even the people used to it have simply accepted the visibility loss as a part of life and adapted rather than learn how to penetrate it. It dulls sound that passes through it to a supernatural extent; screams in one area of the smoke quickly dissipate through it and can no longer be pinpointed from a mere few meters away.
Satisfied, Benjamin walks back to the nearest Udjat laboratory; he has more than enough smoke samples, and there is certainly merit to turning the smoke upon those who would usually curl into its embrace.
Veterans of the Smoke War frequently report that combatants on the side of old L Corp had an odd propensity to disappear while in the smoke. Most reports agree that the cause was likely ambushes and the effect on perception caused by the smoke; at worst, it was some or the other fixer that was particularly adept at hiding within it. Some superstitious folk attribute it to the above smoke swarms; this is patently nonsense. If they were really so common as to be a frequent sight, somebody would have described them past "noises in the smog".
Benjamin's smoke apparitions are released into the Backstreets after a week of painful testing to ensure that they would not target anybody on the same side as them. Dias was reticent to approve of such a thing, but Benjamin still pushed for it to minimise unnecessary casualties. There was no reason to kill innocent members of their own forces for simply being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The apparitions have multiple issues with them; they are far weaker against armoured opponents, and they are still semisolid masses for a great majority of the time. A solid blow to any part of them would leave them as barely mobile husks, and a second would return them to the smoke. Any competent fixer could hold them off without much issue.
But they're not meant to fight the fixers now, are they? L Corp would pick up on any such blatant attempts to truly weaponise the smoke and replicate them a thousandfold, a scenario which all but guarantees the war will be drawn out to a slow, lingering end. It's not a scenario anyone except perhaps the flagging L Corp would want.
And thus, the monsters are meant to prey upon the unwary and frightened. Let the organised groups of fixers pass through the smog as if it was so much mist; let them spend days in it without ever encountering them. It'll only make it so much worse when one of them pops out to get something from a nearby depot and doesn't make it three steps out of camp. Nobody would ever suspect the smoke itself for that; it would be passed off as mere bad luck, a friend drawing the attention of the wrong sniper, perhaps.
But to eliminate vital targets, even slowly, is still to cripple the backbone of the defenders. The next time a group of W Corp Cleaners try pushing into the smoke, they walk through it with their heads held high. After all, the snipers who had been picking them off just a few days earlier were conspicuously missing, the only remnants being a few scraps of ripped cloth. Signs of a scuffle could be seen; for the last one, it seems like they tried to hide themselves within a small camouflaged tent to buy themselves time. The tent is pristine, the zipper still firmly locked from within. The inside is not.
Of course, we should not allow this particular instance of myth and legend to distract from the very real instances of Smoke War weaponry running rampant. District 7's sticky streets are one of the most famous examples of this; an entire section of the Backstreets where the streets squelch under your feet. The sound they make is quite distinct; in fact, the source of the sounds is closely to linked to Gene Corp, the former G-Wing.
During the Smoke war, G-Corp was one of the most active contributors on the side of old L-Corp, being responsible for over 80% of the ground infantry present. Veterans recount tales of swarms of human-insect hybrids filling entire streets like a tide of flesh and chitin, the clicking of their claws against the concrete a maddening metronome. They were G-Corp's answer to K Corp's Class-5 Extirpation Personnel and W Corp's Conductors; instead of making a few nigh-immortal super soldiers, they sent out hordes upon hordes of ever more deformed foot soldiers to soak up hits and adapt to enemy weaponry.
It is these very soldiers that make up District 7's streets. Every footstep and slimy crunch is the result of years of congealed hemolymph, kept in a perpetually semi-liquid state by the aftereffects of the workshop weaponry used. While the precise details are unknown (the original creators of the weapon likely lost to the war themselves), it can be inferred that it was suitably devastating. After all, the roads show signs of sudden compaction, implying that whatever was used to clean the roads crushed entire swarms at once.
The Backstreets of G Corp have long been cleaned out of any of their previous dwellers. Anyone caught in the purge was turned into another soldier, and anyone who was unfit for the treatments was turned into rations for those who were. G Corp has historically been particularly lax with the lives of its residents; to them, the backstreet dwellers are particularly troublesome genetic samples who fuss a little more on the way to the lab. The only ones spared from the forcible conversion are the Fixers, who are instead grabbed and experimented upon until every drop of combat knowledge in them is wrung into some form of genetic memory. The more skilled and paranoid have long since vacated the area, successfully fending off the scouting forces looking for them, meaning G Corp works even harder to distill any data they can from survivors and those who were unable to escape in time.
Benjamin walks through them, confident and head held high, the sort of self assurance that only comes when one believes that they are in complete control of a situation. And he is, make no mistake of it. For today is the day the streets and walls of G-Corp turn into fields of flypaper, kill zones that stretch for miles and miles.
It is no easy task to build such a thing, either physically or mentally. Most people in the City do not even approach the technological proficiency needed for such a task, and even fewer have the mind for it. Hundreds, if not thousands of G Corp soldiers harvested, each contributing just a little more and pushing the project to fruition. Genomes sequenced to find their most stable points to target, tests on chitin to see what substrates bind to it the best, meticulous testing of sharpened tendrils to maximise their penetration efficiency, the list goes on. It has taken 3 grueling months of work, even after the research assistants and resources provided by the Udjat. But Benjamin does not wish for the war to continue a second longer than it absolutely must; he knows every second is one where Ayin slips further into his mania, one where another caravan of innocents die, another where the relations between Wings destabilise to the point where even the replacement of Nest L will not guarantee their safety.
And thus, Benjamin stands proud in the middle of a crossroads. On time, just as intelligence reports indicated, swarms of genetically augmented drones pour out of ever single alleyway and rush towards the clear intruder in their territory. They are overwhelming, a mass of stingers, claws, webs, elytra, and flesh barrelling towards him from every direction. They reach ever closer until suddenly-
With an almighty lurch, the streets crack and melt to form vast reservoirs of corrosive glue, hissing and burbling as the stench of melted rubber wafts upwards. The hapless soldiers fall into it, unable to even stop as their own momentum forces them down deeper into the muck. Their mouths and noses are clogged instantly, leaving them to helplessly choke and futilely struggle, even as the weight of their comrades entombs them further. G Corp's augmentations are unable to fight against the substance, gossamer thin tendrils snaking through it that slice through protective chitin and leave even more vectors of infection. Within less than 20 seconds, the entire street is eerily silent, with the only sounds left being the stretching of the annealing asphalt. One of the last ones to be immured manages to raise his hand above the street just as the final bits of asphalt lock into place, burying entire contingents, perhaps even armies of soldiers.
Benjamin looks around once to confirm that the coast is clear. Then the mask of pride slips off his face as he falls to his knees, retching uncontrollably. He still sees the faces of the unluckiest ones at the top; those who had enough time to be cognisant of what was happening and who could wail the longest. His hands shake and he curls into a ball; driven by disgust towards both himself and his creations.
Unsteadily, he gets back up and wipes some of the vomit off his sleeves and pants. He staggers forward before regaining some minor semblance of balance and slowly walking towards the rendezvous point. He discards his overcoat and walks towards the car waiting for him. If the Udjat sent to pick him up notice the faint traces still on his shirt, they mercifully do not comment on it.
One of the most interesting combatants in the Smoke War are the Chimeras. Massive conglomerations of hundreds of different organisms, prosthetics, and general debris, they have been frequently cited as one of the most effective units in clashes and were instrumental towards turning stalemates and preventing opposing forces from being able to regain ground.
However, none of these are their true defining characteristic; indeed, ask any Fixer who survived an encounter with them and they'll all have the same answer. The true power of the Chimeras were their mere presence, or more specifically the overpowering fear that would press down upon all who dared lay their gaze upon it. Several references are made to their grotesque appearance above all, with descriptions of human bodies woven into a 'skin', mouths filled with fixer weapons in approximations of teeth, and limbs grafted on in seemingly random locations. In fact, one of the main consistencies between reports are the arbitrary nature of where or what the limbs are. Some Chimeras have been seen with sweeper tanks and prosthetic arms functioning as crude legs and joints, while others had rows upon rows of hair like growths to slowly push themselves along. Still others have been described as, to quote, "rows upon rows of skin folded into itself", "a human inverted, and then stitched to others", "a wall of speakers, microphones, and transmitters held together by odd sinews."
Another extremely effective tactic of the Chimeras was their ability to consume anything in their path and integrate them into the main mass. Combined with the surprisingly high intelligence of these constructs (theorised to be a byproduct of the previously mentioned behaviour and the sheer number of people certainly consumed), they were frighteningly quick to adapt to changing battlefields and strategise around their opponents. In fact, they would frequently use the same knowledge or abilities gathered from fallen enemies to use against their cohort, giving them a tactical edge that human opponents did not possess.
The air is thick with the stench of dried blood and viscera. Red streaks can be seen all over the streets, with a particularly thick streak being seen on the walls, while the street lamps are bent over double like mockeries of a royal court. He knows exactly where their target is. The Liu have been dispatched to stop a Chimera that has been harassing F-Corp's retaliatory forces for far too long and ignoring most of their attempts to kill it. It turns out that being able to conceptually open anything in your reach is surprisingly useless against a monster who isn't particularly fazed by the idea of "being dead" or "your organs are outside your body you can't still be alive". Can't unlock what was never really closed to begin with.
Snorting at the thought, he moves to the side, allowing one of his squadmates to take point and survey the area. It's strange; the blood covers his face in just such a way that it can't be recognised. Nevertheless, Lowell instinctively trusts the man with his life, memories of discovered ambushes and surprising saves being quite the convincing argument. The Chimera they're looking for is particularly sneaky, and likes to hide behind unassuming objects or pieces of debris. It is further abetted by its own physique; rather than being an inherently unsubtle colossus like its brethren, it more closely resembles an ambulatory mass of tendrils. It's much harder to find something when it's spread over half the block, after all.
There's a rustle in the bushes behind them, and Lowell along with his cohort immediately turn around to see a tendril snaking towards their vanguard. A few quick strikes immediately drive it off, but their momentary distraction leaves them vulnerable; a mass of tentacles scream out of a nearby manhole and grab the surveyor. The Liu immediately regroup and rush to break their friend out, but their efforts are futile. The tendrils have long since managed to worm their way under his clothes and into a proper grasp; it would take them minutes to untangle him even if he was cut free. Unfortunately, the chimera is quite unwilling to give them the time they need. Dodging three blows, it uses its prey to absorb a few blasts of fire before pulling his mangled corpse into the ground.
The fixers stand there in silence, mourning their comrade for a few precious seconds before moving on. It is inadvisable to spend more than a minute in any place that you don't strictly need to be, and doubly so when you start losing people. They press on, warier of every exposed hole and piece of debris.
The sixth day of the expedition quietly rolls around. The good news is that the horrific abominations infesting this particular region of the backstreets has effectively eliminated the Sweeper issue, so the Liu can freely camp out on the streets instead of having to pick through buildings filled with both structural and tactical vulnerabilities. They can easily fend off any number of tendrils as long as they're prepared, and they've managed to pick up enough about the creature to determine where it can realistically strike from. One particularly noteworthy attempt had them manage to cauterise nearly a hundred different appendages at once.
The minus side is that the chimera seems to have picked up on their attempts, and has decided to simply try to win a battle of attrition. While his team can deal with most attacks when they're prepared, their opponent has simply changed tack and started to clear out nearby buildings of any supplies while constantly sending in minor tendrils into the Liu camp. Individually, none of them are even a minor threat; one was even killed when Lowell stepped on it while trying to move some debris out of the way. Unfortunately, that only makes the problem worse, since the loss of even a thousand of the micro-tendrils is barely an inconvenience to the Chimera. They still haven't seen hide or hair of the main body even after searching through every area they've passed through. While F Corp's intel says that it exists, the group has begun to suspect that the intel was flawed, or worse, actively misleading.
As Lowell searches for any possible vectors of attack, he keeps a close eye on his companion. She's been chosen as the target of harassment; he doubts that she's gotten more than 15 minutes of uninterrupted sleep over the last 3 days and it's started to affect her performance in the field to a frankly lethal degree. He's has to pull her back from absently stumbling into pits several times and she's become increasingly drowsy even in combat situation. Lowell worries for her; if she doesn't manage to lose the focus of the Chimera, it's unlikely she'll make it to the end of the week.
Suddenly, a whole mass of cable-like tentacles rips through the foundations of the building in a whirling maelstrom of flesh and concrete. Both of them hurry to escape the debris footprint of the collapsing building before they're buried alive. Three tendrils whip out to try and catch Lowell; he drives them off with three pinpoint strikes and continues sprinting. His companion is not so lucky, and Lowell hears her scream out in pain and disbelief. Looking back, he sees her caught in a tangle of flesh and limbs, and he can see her terrified eyes for a split second before the building crashes down upon her.
In the remnants of the debris, he can only find a few tattered clothes and accessories. Any trace of the body proper is completely gone.
The third week of the expedition rolls around. Morale is low, and there are talks of abandoning the contract and returning home. At least they'll simply be castigated for their failure if they return, rather than the increasingly likely scenario of being devoured in the streets. Unfortunately, even if they were allowed to, they can't. They're too far in now to retreat, and it would place them under more danger to try and evacuate with the chimera still watching them.
Interestingly enough, they're seeing a lot more intact corpses now. At the beginning, it was rare to even find a single organ not thoroughly ravaged or drained. Now, there are nearly perfectly preserved bodies just lying around. He can even see one sitting upright on a chair. It's both vaguely morbid and incredibly worrying, since that means that they've either managed to find themselves in a worse situation (more sanctity-violating threats to deal with) or that they've managed to completely miss their target and ended up somewhere else altogether. The latter is bad since they both have no results and no intel on their current location; the former is significantly worse since they have no results, no intel, and also a fair chance of being massacred by a monster significantly less averse to direct confrontation.
Either way, they press on, tired and completely unwilling. At the very beginning of the expedition, they assumed that supplies would be a minor problem at best; either they fail to find the monster and they pull out, or they find it, fight until (hopefully) the problem loses, and then trek back. Even if they failed, the assumption was that they would fail fast and hard. At the 7-8 day point of the search, they were confronted by a significant chance of simply starving to death, with them having a fair few mouths to feed while under constant attrition.
That problem has long been solved, now. They don't have more food, but they've lost most of their members. The rations were insufficient for 20. They are more than enough for 3.
Lowell walks forlornly down the street, fending off several minor whip-like tendrils as they try to trip him up. He looks up at the sky; it is still just as choked with smog as it ever was. Someone asks him to scout out the nearby store; Lowell nearly complies before realising who the voice belongs to. The first man who died to the chimera asks again, sounding more confused. Lowell discreetly looks at the reflection of the street in a nearby puddle, and there is something decayed hanging off puppet strings behind him, moving its mouth in a gross facsimile of the original.
He notices those same strings weaved all throughout the cafe, interwoven through the corpses of each former patron. In fact, on closer inspection, he can see an area of the floor that sags a little too evenly to be a mere case of damping or collapse.
He swallows and moves onward, yelling back that the leader has called him, and that he'll come back soon. After all, it seems to be content with staying with the tricks as long as Lowell pretends that it's fooled him.
It is three months into the expedition. All the other members are gone. The director lasted the longest; she made it to two months before being ambushed by something speaking with Lowell's voice. He's long since decided that there's no point to continuing the mission and started his efforts to leave. Unfortunately, the backstreets of District 6 are a veritable labyrinth for those unaccustomed to them. The mission path had evacuation routes, but he's long since had to abandon them; if the monster was smart enough to mimic voices and set up ambushes along key points of their original route, it's doubtlessly smart enough to cover every inch of the given routes with sensors and ambushes waiting to strike. Even now, away from the beaten path, the roads are positively choked with cilia and hairs waiting for him to slip up and step on even one of them to give away his location.
He wonders where all of this material even came from. Initially, it was barely able to fend off the group even with a full stack of tentacles striking wildly, even with the advantage of surprise. Now, each tentacle is a gargantuan mass honed to a razor sharp point, and instead of swaying erratically looking for targets, it stays perfectly still, poised to strike at whatever trips the tangled nets over the streets.
He steps over another precarious crack in the streets and walks past a long since closed cafe. Suddenly, he hears a snap and creak in front of him; darting behind a nearby pile of debris, he cautiously looks around to see what exactly he has to escape from.
A perfectly ordinary looking man steps out of the smoke, looking for all the world as if he was simply going on an evening stroll. Their grey hair and black overcoat are pristine, with nary a single strand or trace of golden filigree out of place. A black mask sits on their face, obscuring his every facial feature, leaving nothing but a golden eye in its place. Lowell hears a masculine voice trail away as the figure presumably finishes whatever conversation he was having before stopping at the intersection.
Calmly, the figure walks through the street and stops near a boarded up cafe. He must've tripped every single warning alarm the creature has (Lowell can even glimpse a stray tendril retreating from under his foot), and yet the street is still as calm as ever. The sentinels of flesh and sinew at each corner even acknowledge him, bowing over double like advisors in a twisted court. Out of morbid curiosity, Lowell decides to peek his head just a little further out, to see what exactly the mysterious figure is doing. He shifts his leg a little to the side to better balance himself, and-
A loud squelch can be heard throughout the street as a mass of flesh under his foot wriggles.
The man looks back. With an almighty crunch, the dumpster is crushed into a flat surface as one of the nearby tentacle pillars slams down on it. Panicked, Lowell tries to flee, before he is unceremoniously hoisted into the air by another pillar. He decides not to struggle; after all, there is no conceivable way for him to actually escape this situation with his soul still tethered to his body. Better to save his energy and at least die a dignified death.
The pillar brings him closer to the masked man. He looks over Lowell once, presumably deciding on a course of action to deal with him. In the meantime, Lowell observes the man from a much closer distance, and notices a few interesting things. For one, his stance does not befit that of a combatant with any measure of skill. He stands loosely with both his legs slightly bowed and his feet shifting on the ground, with his arms and body similarly hanging akin to a shirt on a clothes hanger. The man is either a fixer who is so supremely confident in their skill that they forego any sense of posture, or a regular City resident with some particular talent in dealing with Chimeras. Lowell suspects the latter; he only knows of one fixer with grey hair who he believes could survive the chimera, and she neither fit the image of the man in front of him nor would she have risked being part of a warzone while raising her son. No, the person Lowell sees is his own brand of anomaly.
The man gestures to one of the tentacles, and Lowell feels himself being transported away as they loosen around him, an act of mercy as-
Lowell realises something is wrong; they should've deposited him next to the gaping maw he sees. It's filled with corpses in various stages of decay, and he can't explain why, but he knows that that is not where he was supposed to go. The tentacles release him, and he is falling down down down and he falls into the writhing sea and the hands grab him from every which way and he can hear the accusing voices of the dead and they are seeing seeing crying consuming as his leg snaps and is drawn closer in and he looks to the hole from which he fell through but it is now unimaginably far away and it shouldn't be he should be on the edge and he hears the jeers and accusatory remarks of people he knew and people he didn't, asking why he didn't save them and-
Lowell jerks upward in his bed with a shuddering gasp. Next to him, the Maiden of Iron sleepily stirs and and asks him why he's awake. With a reply of "Nightmare", he slowly sinks back down under the covers, turning and holding onto Xiao as he does so. The Smoke War haunts all who participated in it; the only thing your prowess gave you was changing the reason for your moments of helplessness.
One of the main events that marked the end of the Smoke War was the deployment of a singularity enhanced superweapon in Nest G, following a counteroffensive by G Corp that managed to successfully retake swathes of land and threaten the established positions of the W-K-R teams. This incident has become one of the most hotly debated topics amongst scholars, and it is not hard to see why; despite essentially destroying most of the Nest by its lonesome and leaving any survivors long mired in fits of mania, there is curious little actual information on the actual method of operation of the weapon. The only concrete fact known about it is the involvement of Lobotomy Corporation for the containment and subsequent destruction thereof. Due to this, it is theorised that the weapon was in large part built by L Corp itself. Of course, L Corp itself publicly disavows any direct connection to the Smoke War, with Benjamin, one of the founders, having stated on record that the only service Lobotomy Corporation provided during the war was power and enkephalin to interested corps.
The war has been going on for three years now, and Benjamin is well and truly sick of it. He's long since discarded any feelings of guilt or remorse he may have had over his actions. After all, an atrocity is disgusting to commit the first time. So too the second, third, tenth, and maybe even twentieth time. After the hundredth time, and the perhaps millionth wail of despair and agony, the human mind is surprisingly adept at adapting to its new situation. He choked himself with tears the first time he took a life and saw the longing for life in the other person's eyes. It was self defence all the same, but it was still enough to have him unable to look himself in the mirror for a day. Today, Benjamin sees a frightened child, maybe 15 at best, attempt to flee after her unit is ambushed by the Udjat cell following him. She makes it a meter. Benjamin speaks once. She falls, a knife flung clean into her neck and severing her spinal cord. He doesn't dignify her with even a second look; after all, she was killed because it would be a hassle if the Udjat's movements were reported. She's barely even worth the weapon in her hand.
He walks forward until he can hear a faint noise. Looking back, he sees the child still weakly burbling in pain, trying to crawl away from the Udjat. Her face is mask of terror and desperation, the will to reach tomorrow manifested. Benjamin is immediately intrigued; most people would've long since given up or simply died on the spot. Even if she was augmented, each rattling gasp makes it abundantly clear that each centimetre she gets is straining her will to the absolute maximum. Absently, Benjamin reflects on each and every time he's given up a little more of his humanity in service to the war. W Corp used to only leave the passengers in the trains for as long as it took for them to dispatch cleaners and have them gotten rid of. A few months ago, Benjamin attended a meeting between him and the CEOs of W and T Corp. Now, the Warp Trains are left in their dimension for millenia at a time, with T Corp's TT1 protocols draining the passengers of every second they spend in there. After all, the Seed Of Light could take hundreds of years worth of time to complete; it is paramount that T Corp have enough stored time to route into TT2 to make it worthwhile. If it needs that the passengers of the trains pay the cost, then he is perfectly fine with it.
The chimeras, the smoke creatures, T Corp's time removal mechanisms, the G Corp soldiers, every modified weapon the Udjat carry, every single one of them is a burden Benjamin carries. And every last one of them were also effective through the terror they spread rather than their direct combat ability. In fact, the fear and disgust surrounding them were far more potent than anything he devised...
Benjamin calls for the girl to be stabilised and brought back. She weakly struggles, but there is nothing she can do. Either way, he doesn't need her physical body intact; merely her mind.
The laboratory is prepared and every system carefully calibrated thrice over. Qliphoth deterrence protocols are running far past their intended maxima; at this level, even he has a fair chance of winning a direct confrontation with most abnormalities.
He is not intending to dredge up anything that could be categorised as most abnormalities.
The subject's physical body has long since failed, with their mind only kept alive via a slew of bio-techology systems. The real goal here is to perfectly balance their mind; fill it to the brim with just the correct combination of memories and feelings to draw upon something truly malignant from the River. For additional safety, she has been interred in what is essentially a near-unbreakable soundproof coffin. It probably won't stop anything truly dangerous, but it will at least dampen the sounds made by the subject as the process continues.
In the back, several high ranking Udjat watch, with Dias herself attendant via a broadcast screen. Benjamin has already communicated his intent of building a proper superweapon to her; she is eager to watch, despite his own repeated warnings that the effects may be capable of persisting through audiovisual feeds. He can't tell if it's because she's being uncharacteristically careless or simply incredibly confident in her own ability to ignore any issues caused. The Udjat fixers are mostly just there to transport the creature once the process is complete, or in the case of it escaping, buy enough time for Benjamin to leave. He has absolutely no faith in their ability to survive a fight, should one break out.
Benjamin starts the process, and a vial of Cogito presses down into the sternum of the restrained victim. Within seconds, all sensors from within the chamber break down from excessive volume, and the sound dampeners installed into the metal shudder and can only mute most of the sounds; faint screaming can be heard from inside. Considering the dampeners are rated to completely block out sound of up to 120 decibels from close range, it is mildly concerning. Nevertheless, Benjamin has heard the results of Cogito experiments with far less protection, and this barely affects him. Faintly, he can hear the sounds of something dripping.
The screams subside, but the dripping continues. Disappointed at the apparent failed extraction, Benjamin moves to lower the Qliphoth deterrences around the lab. The second he does, the dripping amplifies greatly in fact it nearly deafens him and he cant think or see straight and oh god it sounds horrific and the udjat agents have doubled over vomiting or clutching their ears and even dias looks visibly ill as-
Suitably warned, Benjamin turns the deterrence back up to its maximum value, and the roaring torrent subsides back into a slow dripping. Dias looks serene as ever, but Benjamin can see the newly formed ruffles in her shirt; whatever she heard was enough to unsettle her too.
Swallowing, he calibrates the enkephalin output and deterrence sensors. They tell him that the procedure went perfectly; the abnormality contained within is indeed an ALEPH.
He gestures for the transport box with explicit instructions on how to maintain the Qliphoth conditions up until they reach the release point. Shaken, the Udjat agents agree and gingerly move it out; whatever's inside the box is still thrashing violently enough to shake it even in such a weakened state.
It is deployed in G Corp. The Nest falls less than 50 hours later. Benjamin can hear the dripping and screams all the way from Nest K.
It is recontained via the liberal usage of maximum power Qliphoth deterrence protocols over the area. The existence of child entities was not accounted for, and led to several additional casualties. They appear to have a significantly weaker effect compared to the main one.
The Seed of Light protocol starts in earnest. Benjamin is immured and becomes Hokma. Angela begins to maintain each loop. Ayin sheds himself and becomes X. The Sephirot act out their eternal play.
Hokma shuffles through another pile of employee records, adjusting various facets of the TT2 protocol. The loops have continued for over 8700 years, by his estimation, and the sheer volume of information that must be processed and retrieved each loop only magnifies. This loop, X is far more competent than his previous iterations; he has managed to successfully navigate both Hod and Netzach's core meltdowns. Granted, he lost more than 70% of the agents both times, but that hardly matters to the Sephirot of Records. Death has no meaning in this place, and it never will.
A request comes through from Extraction. It asks for the designations and descriptive blurbs for the three most recently dredged up abnormalities. The first one is O-04-72. Luckily, the Manager already has extensive experience with this one, so every facet is already logged.
The Burrowing Heaven
Don't look away, just keep your eyes on it. Contain it in your sight.
An annoying one, to be sure. Hokma hopes that the manager will remember to keep it in sight this time.
The next one to come through is T-01-75. This one is a relative newcomer; only Managerial Tips 1-3 have been unlocked along with basic information. Nevertheless, it is more than enough for Extraction's needs.
The Mountain of Smiling Bodies
The smiling faces are unfamiliar yet sorrowful.
For an ALEPH, this one is surprisingly weak. Even during its short time in the facility, it was only really a threat if it was left unattended with plenty of corpses. Whenever it did manage to survive and find enough, the facility was usually about to be reset due to the myriad other abnormalities who had produced the corpses in question.
The final one is interesting. Hokma looks at the abnormality code, and checks the facility records again. There are no previous instances of this abnormality being chosen. Distantly, he can almost recall encountering it before; unfortunately, the specifics elude him. Sighing, he requests an image from Extraction, and then nearly drops the sheaf of papers he was balancing when he receives it.
He knows what this abnormality is.
After all, he made it.
O-03-89
If a flaw in the system disables the censors covering the Abnormality, we will once again have to sincerely consider how to dispose of the manager.
Distantly, he can hear something dripping. He can now finally pinpoint what it reminds him of; the contents of a bathtub slowly leaking blood.