Mistrunner - Chapter 26 - Sacrifice

Death is a natural part of survival. Resources are finite. Everyone can’t win. Sacrifices must be made at the altar of self-interest.

Jeremiah Braddock III

I didn’t sleep for long. Just a couple of hours before I jerked awake to a banging at the bunker’s front door. I rolled out of bed, ignoring the pain of my many wounds as I summoned my rifle. Opening the door to the room I’d taken as my own, I peeked around the corner. Outside, the hall was straight and narrow. A corridor perfect for killing. I knelt, leaning out to aim toward the door.

Another bang. I tightened my grip.

Again. The door trembled. Something big was out there. Something strong.

Once more, something thudded against the door, and this time, it let out a metallic screech of protest. I bit my lip. It wasn’t going to last much longer.

I flinched as something banged the door off the hinges. It flew down the hall, skidding to a stop only a few feet away from me. A cloud of dust hung suspended in the air, hiding my attacker. The lights flickered. I saw a shadow and squeezed the trigger.

One burst. Two bursts. Three.

The shadow was unaffected. It advanced. I fired again, but I got similar results. Either my attacker was invulnerable, or my aim was off. And after all the training I’d been through, I felt confident in my ability to shoot.

My mind whirled as I tried to think of what to do, of how to win the coming fight. I came up blank. It had taken everything I had to kill the mini-gun-wielding, miniature man. And I suspected that whatever stalked down the hall was far stronger than my previous adversary. I was going to die.

Or worse, I might be taken.

I fired again. And again. Over and over until my magazine ran empty. Still, it advanced.

I was just jamming the next magazine into the well when a familiar voice rang out, “Mirabelle? Is that you?”

I froze.

“Jeremiah?” I breathed.

Then, the light flickered again, and I saw the shadow for what it was. My uncle had finally arrived. I deflated, my muscles going slack and my shoulders slumping. It was over.

He rushed forward and knelt beside me. His hand found my shoulder, and he asked, “Are you okay?”

I looked up, and it felt like all the stress of the previous few days hit home at that very moment. Suddenly, I felt tears gathering in my eyes. I tried to hold them back. I wanted to be strong, like him. But I just couldn’t stop the tide of emotion from spilling over.

“I…I killed…I tried to save them…but…”

My uncle took me in his arms and patted my back. My wounds screamed at me to tell him to stop, but I refused to listen. Instead, I sank into his embrace, burying my head in his chest, and wept like I’d never wept before.

“It’s okay,” he said, his hand on my back. “It’s going to be okay.”

I wasn’t sure if I believed him.

I had killed before. I wasn’t proud of it, but I’d done it. But the events of the last few days – maybe even going back to my actions in the Tigers’ compound – had pushed me over the edge. Not only had I killed, but I had also been forced to watch a bunch of innocent formers being literally ripped apart before my very eyes. I’d run through their remains. I had seen what happened to the weak and defenseless of the world.

After a few minutes, I pulled away. As I wiped my eyes, he asked, “Are you hurt?”

I let out a bitter chuckle. “You could say that,” I muttered. Then, I detailed my injuries. The gunshots. The axe wound. My body had been put through the ringer, and I knew that, without proper treatment, things would get worse. I’d done what I could, but I wasn’t a real medic.

“Jesus,” he breathed. “I didn’t think I needed to tell you not to get shot.”

“Didn’t exactly mean to,” I muttered.

“Come on. We’ll get you to Kimiko. She’ll get you fixed up,” he said, standing. He extended a hand, and I took it, letting him drag me to my feet. I was unsteady. Probably the blood loss, if I had to guess. But I managed to follow him outside and into the bright sunlight.

There were more than a dozen people waiting on us. Some, I recognized. The amigos were there, but so was Milo. And a few others I’d seen guarding the walls of the town. Clearly, they had come expecting a fight. All they’d found were dead bodies.

“Any other survivors, hoss?” asked Milo, stepping forward.  He took off his ancient, blue cap and spat to the side. “Or she all that’s left?”

“She’s it,” my uncle answered. “I’m taking her back. Secure the area. Bury the dead. Salvage what you can. We can’t afford for this farm to be out of commission for long.”

“Ain’t that the goddamn truth,” the man said, squinting up at the sun. “We’ll get on it.”

After that, my uncle led me to a jeep that hadn’t been there during my battle and directed me to sit in the passenger’s seat. I did so in a daze that continued as we took off back in the direction of Mobile. I was barely conscious, and the trip went by in a haze. Before I knew it, Jeremiah was half-carrying me into Kimiko’s office, where he planted me on an examination table.

The doctor herself took one look at me, then shooed my uncle outside before getting to work. I managed to retain my consciousness as she undressed me, but after she jabbed me with a med-hypo, I surrendered to the unconsciousness that had been threatening to overtake me for some time.

When I awoke, it was to a strange chant.

“Mangos, mangos, mangos! I love mangos!” came an extremely high-pitched voice that could only have belonged to a little girl. I opened my eyes to see a tiny figure jumping around, waving a wooden sword in one hand and a reddish-orange fruit in another. She had a bucket on her head, and, if her facial features were an indicator, was clearly related to Kimiko.

“Um…hey?” I said, my throat raw and my voice scratchy. I sat up, but moving even that little bit was incredibly difficult. “Who are you?”

“I’m Elie!” she announced proudly. “And you can’t have my mango.”

“Oh…okay…”

“Well, maybe a little,” she said. “But I get most of it!”

“That’s…um…”

“Okay – half!” she said, her face scrunching up. “You can have half. But you can’t tell Grandma about it.”

“Why is that?” I asked, a smile finding its way onto my face.

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because I wasn’t s’posed to take it,” she said guiltily. Her eyes flicked back and forth conspiratorially before she added, “But it was right there. I had to take it.”

That certainly seemed like a good enough reason for me, and I let out a little giggle at the young girl’s antics. She was an adorable, little thing. Maybe eight or nine, at most, with jet-black hair and a complexion to match Kimiko’s. In fact, she looked like an adorable, less severe, far younger, and much tinier version of the doctor I knew.

Almost as if she was summoned by my thoughts, the door to the room slid open, revealing the doctor. She wore a white coat and a cold expression. To Elie, she said, “Young lady, what are you doing in here?”

“Nothing, grandma,” she said, hiding the pilfered fruit behind her back. “I was just checking on what’s-her-name over there.”

“Is that so?” asked Kimiko, raising an eyebrow. “And your assessment?”

“She’s really nice!”

“Is that your medical opinion?” was the doctor’s next question. Her lips twitched as she held back a smile. Perhaps she wasn’t as stern as I’d first judged.

Elie’s face scrunched up in intense concentration before she announced, “Yes!”

Kimiko laughed, and I chuckled a bit as well, which brought a round of coughing that in turn came with a good deal of pain. Kimiko was by my side in a moment, her hand on my forehead. She said, “Elie, dear – run along. Grandma’s got to work.”

“I can help!” declared the little girl.

“Not now,” Kimiko said. “Now, go.”

Elie looked like she was going to argue, but with a dramatic sigh, she stomped out of the room. When the door closed, the doctor said, “I apologize for her. She is very independent. I don’t know where she gets it.”

I nodded, finally recovering from my coughing fit. “It’s a mystery,” I muttered.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Like I was just run over by a hover car,” I said. “Or maybe trampled by an alligator.”

“That’s expected,” she said. “You pushed yourself well past your limits. With the amount of blood loss you experienced, it’s a minor miracle you were still standing.”

I nodded, but I didn’t consider it a miracle. It was because of my [Combat Utility]skill. The abilities that came with it, chiefly Combat Focus and Regeneration, coupled with my training, had given me the ability to push through pain and fatigue. There was nothing miraculous about it.

“How long will it take me to heal?” I asked.

“I want to keep you in here for another day or two,” she said. “But judging by how quickly you heal, it’s probably going to be no more than a week before you’re back to normal.”

“That quickly?”

It certainly wasn’t long, considering how many times I had been shot, which wasn’t even mentioning the axe wound I’d received from the miniature man. But I definitely wasn’t going to complain.

“The miracles of modern medicine,” she said. “I remember life before the Initialization. Back then, the wounds you suffered would have been fatal. On the off chance that you did survive, you would have had months of recovery ahead of you. Now, it is a matter of days.” She shook her head. After a few more minutes, during which she asked me various health questions and inspected my injuries, she left me alone to rest. The next two days followed a similar pattern, but I didn’t see Jeremiah again until I was released from Kimiko’s care.

He was waiting for me outside of the building that served as a medical center.

“You okay, then?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. “You could’ve come inside.”

“I got updates from Kimiko,” he stated, already walking down the sidewalk. I hustled to catch up, my wounds barely bothering me anymore. When I did, he said, “I need to apologize to you. I’m sorry. You should have never gotten caught up in that situation at the farm. But I have to ask – why didn’t you contact me?”

That took me by surprise. I’d been laboring under the assumption that the entire thing had been a test, and so, I hadn’t bothered sending a message to my uncle. I was beginning to suspect that I was mistaken. I said, “I thought the whole thing was part of my test.”

He cut his eyes at me, saying, “I would never have sent you into that kind of a fight. You weren’t ready for it.”

“But you did send me.”

“I made a mistake,” he said. It sounded like it took every ounce of his willpower to get those words out. My uncle was good at a lot of things, but admitting that he was wrong certainly wasn’t one of them.

“Nobody’s perfect, I guess,” was my response.

Silence stretched between us as we made our way back to the Dewdrop Inn. When we got there, I had to endure Jo’s concerned questions before my uncle escorted me up to my room. Once we were there, he sat on the bed next to me and told me what they’d found.

Apparently, a group of bandits named the Bayou Boys, had been growing progressively more powerful over the previous couple of years. Most of the time, they were little more than a nuisance, ambushing the odd caravan and stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down. However, of late, they’d undergone a marked increase in power and displayed a far greater degree of organization.

“They don’t normally come north,” he said. “Usually, they stay down by the coast in Bayou La Batre. They might head a little west, but they don’t mess with us.”

“Yeah, clearly,” I said sarcastically. “Who was the little guy?”

“Horace Lafontaine,” Jeremiah said. “His mother’s in charge down there. He has – or had, I suppose – a gaggle of brothers and sisters.”

“He was packing some serious firepower,” I said, thinking back to the mini-gun that had torn down a concrete wall. “Not to mention subdermal armor.”

“That wasn’t the half of it,” my uncle stated. “That little man was filled with more cybernetics than most Operators in Nova. He was a hair’s breadth from hitting the Singularity.”

The Singularity. Jeremiah had explained that to me before. It was when someone’s body crossed a threshold where they had so many cybernetic implants that they couldn’t maintain their humanity anymore. It wasn’t common – most people couldn’t afford that kind of hardware – but when it happened, strange things came with it. Most people just went insane and started killing anything they saw, but others reacted in different ways. I’d heard about one woman who, after hitting the Singularity, had retreated into seclusion. The next time anyone saw her, she had become a wealthy merchant. She had been so successful that, if someone from King’s Row hadn’t had her killed, she might have destabilized the entire economy.

“How did he get that kind of gear?” I asked. People outside of the cities usually didn’t have access to the same kind of equipment or cybernetics available to people in the cities.

“That’s the million-credit question, isn’t it?” he said. “That mini-gun of his came from off-world, just like your weapons. Usually, that’s not the case out here. Unless someone like me is supplying them, they should be using pre-Initialization weapons.”

“The others with him were.”

“But he wasn’t,” my uncle stated. “Neither was that big idiot that attacked us on the way here, either.”

I thought back to the giant man with the arm-cannon. He’d been just as invulnerable as Lafontaine, and his arm-cannon had been even more devastating than the mini-gun. If I hadn’t gotten a lucky Misthack and fried his system, things would have turned out very differently.

I glanced at my uncle. Or maybe not. Back then, I’d gotten the feeling that he wasn’t in any real danger, and I’d long thought of that attack as another test. And given that I’d emptied an entire magazine at my uncle in an enclosed hallway, and he hadn’t even seemed affected, I was confident that my theory held water.

“So. What now?” I asked. “Do we go after them?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But for now, you need to rest. Then, you need to train. You were lucky to make it out of that alive. I’m proud of you for how well you did, but you have a long, long way to go.”

I nodded, feeling a sense of pride at his approval. We made a little more small talk before he finally left me to my thoughts. The moment the door slid shut, I opened up my status to investigate my gains:

Name: Mirabelle Lisa Braddock

Class: N/A (Requirements Not Met)

Level: 4 (15%)

Constitution: 14/38

Mind: 17/38

Mist: 9/38

Skills: 7/7

· Cybernetic Interface (Tier 2) – 14%

o Bonuses Applied: None

o Slots Unlocked: 3

· Firearms (Tier 2) – 2%

o Bonuses Applied:

§ 10% Firearm Damage

§ 4% Reload Speed

§ 6% Accuracy

· Close-Quarters Combat (Tier 2) – 11%

o Bonuses Applied:

§ 15% Melee Damage

§ 7% Melee Speed

§ 5% Melee Accuracy

· Stealth Operations (Tier 0) – 17%

o Abilities:

§ Camouflage (F)

· Combat Utility (Tier 2) – 51%

o Abilities:

§ Triage (F)

§ Basic Explosives Handling (F)

§ Combat Focus (E)

§ Pain Tolerance (E)

§ Resistance (F)

§ Foraging (F)

§ Improvisation (F)

§ Regeneration (E)

· Mistwalking (Tier 0) – 37%

o Bonuses Applied:

§ 5% Misthack Speed

§ 5% Mistwalk Speed

o Abilities:

§ Mistwalk (F)

§ Misthack (F)

§ Mistwall (F)

· Spycraft (Tier 0) – 41%

o Abilities

§ Disguise

§ Deception

I was very happy with my progress, considering that I’d made gains across the board. I drilled down into my sub-menus to check on my skill trees. What I found was that I’d made significant progress there as well. The first one I inspected was my [Firearms] tree:

I had made significant improvements there, which explained why my shots had begun to deal far more damage than before. I had a suspicion that, as I grew more powerful, my enemies would as well. So, if I wanted to keep up, I had to continue to progress. Next, I looked at my [Close-Quarters Combat] tree.

My gains weren’t as broad in that skill tree, but I figured it was due to my preference for using firearms in actual battle. The fact that my bladed weapons were further along than the other weapon categories seemed to support that. After all, I’d never even killed anyone with my bare hands or with blunt weapons before. The movement category had progressed better than any of the rest, probably due to how much I’d been forced to run, climb, and jump. I was eager to see the ability at Tier 3, though.

Finally, I turned to the [Mistwalker] tree:

Admittedly, I was more than a little disappointed in my progress in my Mist manipulation. I’d used it quite a bit, but I’d only really made any progress in Misthacking. It was a little annoying, but then again, I’d received no real training in the skill. Compared to how much time I’d spent shooting or learning to fight, I’d barely even scratched the surface of that particular skill. I had high hopes that the lack would soon be remedied.

With a sigh, I lay back on my bed and went through a few logic puzzles before my injuries caught up to me. I still hadn’t finished recovering, so fatigue kept creeping up on me. After getting undressed, I climbed back into bed and went to sleep.