Interlude 9: Enforcers 2

  “Come on! We need to get the boss!” Katy shouted while unloading both of her SMGs. Thanks to both the weapons’ recoil control systems and the super arms her boss bought, she could hold them down plenty well enough.

  She’d never seen Rosalie work the bolt-action on that rifle of hers so fast. The helmet’s visor confirmed for her that Katy wasn’t the only one extremely fucking worried. “Altany, donne-nous la vidéo de son drone! / Altany, give us the video from his drone!”

  The sniper’s shots were just a bit more frantic and less accurate than usual, but still one hundred percent deadly. Heads exploded around Katy’s invisible form, both of them barely keeping back the tide. Every round over-penetrated and injured a second or even third model. Her… friend had taken cover next to her behind a pile of bodies.

  The both of ‘em got along great. Rosalie helped train her at sneaky shit a lot. She was the reason the both of ‘em kept moving from spot to spot before shooting since the boss didn’t grab the attention away from them. That girl never treated her like an underling or some nuisance, which did more for her than she’d like to admit.

  The boss too, the way he handled her it… felt weird. She’d been a slave for a long ass time, never good at anything but fucking, and even then not much better. Her real talent? Surviving. No idea why, but she just couldn’t stop fighting to stay alive. Tons of whores let go, just waited for the end, but her? Something inside just… couldn’t stop, wouldn’t let go.

  When those cock suckers went for the kids and Rosalie opened that big mouth of hers, using her French accent to the fullest to sound as condescending and insulting as possible… That instinct, that little voice in the back of her head that wouldn’t let go, it changed or evolved or something…

  It didn’t tell her to hide anymore, to make herself unnoticed, no, instead it… It did what she wanted, pushed her to what she felt like she should do. That instinct or whatever followed Rosalie’s lead! That voice didn’t just force her to survive through everything anymore, even when she very much would’ve liked to die.

  The left SMG went down as a model three jumped over and met a wrist vibro-blade accompanied by high-powered helical-coilgun shots from her arm-cannon. Fuck she loved those arms! “We need backup! Bad!” Katy had to help the boss! Panda he… saw that voice! Forced her to see that she had something to contribute! That a useless whore like her… well, wasn’t just a useless whore. That those words weren’t from her. So, Katy followed the voice.

  And here she was, standing between monsters and tons of innocent people that just wanted to live free. Also, protecting people that treated her right! The other enforcers, they thought someone like her was… good, strong even! For the first time, she wanted to live, had people to live for…

  A video feed appeared in the corner of her HUD and whatever relief she might have had about her boss still being alive evaporated quickly. Panda moved fast! There were seven tentacle nightmares around him, all trying to pin him down! No one could avoid all of their crazy powerful hits. He couldn’t resist their strength or dodge a dozen strikes at once!

  Add the god damn model fives into the mix and… Well, if someone could make it out alive, it was Panda!

  The level of injury must have been insane but that crazy man just kept moving! However, she could see him favor a certain arm or leg. Even hurt, the guy kept fighting. That was her boss! Panda was… well, like her.

  Katy’d listened to lots of stories about him. Rosalie shared a bunch, apparently being there for the big ones too. She looked at her… friend? Yeah… Yeah, she had a friend. Rosalie was good people, and those were rare. Panda wanted to be her friend too. Felt weird, a guy like that, so powerful and in command, wanting to be friends. A bad voice told her he didn’t care, just saw her as a pet or something. Maybe he did, but even then, it’d be…

  “Je suis désolée, Katy… / I’m sorry, Katy….” The words snapped her out of the battle trance and musings.

  “The fuck ‘you sorry for?”

  “Regarde ?a… / Look at that…” A part of the feed got highlighted. One of the tentacled fucks was heading their way. The place was big and he didn’t move at top speed through the sea of lower models. They had a few moments. “On t’a poussée à devenir une enforcer et là… Alors je suis désolée. / We pushed you to become an enforcer and now… So, I’m sorry.” There was a note of finality in that apology.

  A laugh burst out of Katy while shooting a couple model threes at the same time. “You fucking serious?” With all stealth systems active, Rosalie would only see a distorted image of her, but voice and shit would carry her smile probably. “Couple of weeks’ of this ‘worth more than my whole life before. Thanks, I get to die good.”

  They nodded at each other without really seeing with Rosalie’s camouflaged form, a sort of understanding passing between them. There’d be no retreating. Their guns wouldn’t do shit to that squid, so blades it was! They might buy enough time for reinforcements.

  Then, a sound louder than any gunshot could be boomed out!

  “Limp squid!”

  ***

  Rosalie was about to die. It would be a good death. Exactly the type of demise she always dreamed of. Unlike a lot of her compatriots, Rosalie was educated. She even went to college! Drugs were her vice of choice, and the one that created her downfall. The family name only helped so much. Even then, she did not want to use it.

  Her home found in the bowels of depravity fit her well. Fencing lessons combined with a baseball bat kept the Cobra Kais from abducting her, but she was aware of their crimes. The cold hand of faith brought Louis Larose to her.

  Rosalie never wanted to live much. Eventually, the diagnosis came in. Severe depression and body dysmorphia. She was born in the wrong damn body. College, away from the family she hated and who refused the diagnosis up and down, felt liberating. Finally, a chance to transform, on the outside at least.

  However, even with medication, the effects of her depression were still there, in some ways. She did not want to live, in truth. It became an embarrassing poetic phase in her late-teenage years. She studied to be a commander, to take to the field and die bravely, for the good of mankind!

  If someone had to die, better her than someone who would feel sad about it, right? However, her demons complicated the plan, and she ended up downstairs, with the people. That was where she met her own commander, someone who offered her to live and die truthfully, the way she wanted. No one treated her as anything but a woman, and eventually, that wonderful man gave her a vagina! Not just that, but a fully functional, exactly the same as a biological woman’s, vagina! It was technically a prosthesis but she didn’t care!

  It felt real anyway. She’d tested it quite thoroughly with… volunteers.

  Rosalie would have been happy to die in the shelter, horribly but beautifully! On the other hand, getting to truly become a woman in her own eyes, that made life worth enduring for a bit longer. She had enjoyed life a lot more in the past years. Fighting for people without dying felt good too, of course.

  However, now she would die with Katy. The girl was worth protecting, of that she had no doubt. Brave, strong, resilient beyond belief, still kind after all life threw at her. Rosalie wanted to tell her to run, but knew it would be pointless.

  The enforcers were all like her, in their own ways. Having like minded people around also made life feel a lot better. With the end of her transition, meeting even more like minded and good people, Rosalie found, oddly, that she did not want to die.

  Horrible timing.

  “On va pas durer longtemps! Faites attenti… / We’re not going to last long! Be caref…” An incredibly loud voice interrupted her, louder than anything in this battle!

  “Limp squid!”

  The shout from Panda made her pay more attention to the feed in the corner of her HUD. It automatically took more screen space and she saw him completely stationary! Even fortified by all those plates, he could not last long! “Non…”

  “No one…!”

  A deafening ‘BOOM’ resounded through the tunnel they were in! In front of her, the massive tentacle beast moved like a car hit it! A fraction of a second later, she saw tiny pockets of bulging flesh, like… small explosion! Right after, a much bigger explosion happened closer to the entry point, pushing flesh aside. “Qu’est ce que…/ What is…”

  Rods-of-god Mark 21*2. Half a kilogram…

  “...Hurts…!”

  Another shot, hitting just as hard, rocked the plant squid. In the corner of Rosalie’s vision, Panda kept taking more and more damage. His shield lost metal, ablative layers were destroyed on plates, those small armor ‘cards’ shattered and others fell off…

  … At .50 BMG velocity.

  “...My frrucking…!”

  “Bouge putain d’connard, bouge… / Move you fucking moron, move…” She said, seeing Louis get more and more injured. That fucking idiot was going to get killed. Katy tackled her to the ground to avoid a horizontal sweep from the somehow still alive vegetation octopus! How!?

  Another shot pushed the massive beast to the side! The impact point caved-in and thirteen explosions wrecked its body from the inside! How in damnation could something survive that multiple times!!!

  “...Frruieends…!”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  An incoherent scream of rage and pain escaped her boss as one last shot finished it off. Rosalie heard so much suffering in that voice, mixed with quite a dose of insanity! “Merde! Louis a besoin d’aide! Vite! / Shit! Louis needs help! Fast!” She screamed in enforcer comms, hoping someone, anyone could come and save him!

  “I fucking got this.” Came back from someone. Well, now they just had to make it worth it. The little ones started heading their way. The rest of the enforcers were behind them, each of them pretty damn occupied with another tunnel! That thing would’ve cut through them like a knife through butter.

  Since you asked, 30mm Rods of God slugs, mark 21*2, twelve explosive fragmentation rods surrounding an unfolding wide area kinetic striker with an acceleration detonated high-explosive which explodes when it finishes imparting energy. It weighs in excess of 500 grams and my vanguard injured himself pushing it to mach 3.23.

  Katy, still on top of her, spoke so low to herself that only their proximity allowed Rosalie to hear. “Friends?” She sounded… surprised?

  “Bien s?r, idiote. / Of course, idiot.” She pushed both of them up as they prepared for quite a fucking fight.

  With friends like these, Rosalie would rather live, for once.

  ***

  Lila looked at the feed with growing horror. She’d seen Louis injured, plenty of times! He rarely took injuries unnecessarily, but this… Necessary or not, it fucking terrified her! Even knowing about all the nanites, mods and shit in his body…

  Not just that, but his voice… The wounds piled up more and more, every bit of damage making way for more hits. Blood and viscera kept spilling from his stomach, covering the ground and his armor…

  “Jackal! Please…” Rosalie called for help at the same time she did. Thankfully, Jackal answered them both.

  “I fucking got this.” A moment later, four turrets landed, two for each tunnel they were defending. “‘Imagine you wanna come?”

  The two turrets’d be plenty, sure! Both tunnels were almost dead, the hive apparently focusing on their invaders. While they slid down one of them, the feed filled with flames! “Oh no…”

  “Don’t fucking worry, Mad’s probably got heat linin’ or somethin’. His AI can even modulate the fire so it’s not too hot maybe. Armor that good? He can take it. Mine can and it’s not even half as crazy as his.”

  Indeed. Do not worry, the napalm is providing cover and hiding his position. The heat lining in his armor is made to handle far higher temperatures. Not indefinitely, of course, but still far more than necessary for regular petroleum fire.

  “Oh, prepared for big fancy fire, impressive!” Jackal’s tone only sounded half-joking. Louis’ armor was pretty crazy according to what she read about samurais. Most didn’t spend that much of their points on it, but still some.

  “His armor’s better than yours? Thought you were melee focused?” She needed something else to focus on, bad.

  “Well, yeah, I’m melee but I use deflection auto-shielding, dispersion, speed, point-defense, that kind of stuff. I’d rather not get fucking hit, you know? Mad Panda’s focused on tanking hits. You have any idea how stupid fucking dangerous model thirteens are? I can’t believe he’s still alive after tanking something like, what, a hundred hits full force from those things with his mother fucking back to a fucking wall!” The samurai said with a hint of awe in her voice.

  She remembered that battle footage from the model that injured Louis back in Peach-Trees. That kind of metal, with that much weight moving at close to super-sonic speed? The forces involved were ridiculous, on many levels. A single hit to the chest would instantly kill a normal human. It’d cave in their ribcage like it was nothing and pulp all their organs.

  “Crazy fucker, but I understand. That model would’ve killed every enforcer in the way. Takes a samurai to put down, and even then, tons might die, especially in a hive’s tunnels where you don’t have room. Fighting seven close-up… He’s a tough cunt, gotta give him that.”

  Jackal stopped talking as they approached the bottom. They could both see light ahead, as well as hear explosions. “Altany, can my armor handle that?”

  Unless you bath in napalm, there shouldn’t be any issues.

  “Stay behind me, let me get in melee and you cover our backs, deal ho–?” Jackal obviously tensed after almost saying something.

  More important things to focus on, but the sharp tongued girl’s slip didn’t escape her notice. Well, she appreciated the compliment! “Deal.”

  They sprinted forward, towards the fire, and immediately encountered resistance. Before Lila could raise her weapon, Jackal turned into a blender! The thousand degree machete was accompanied by a flurry of thrown knives, seemingly appearing from nowhere. Her main blade glowed white hot yet appeared completely solid, almost unyielding. It clearly still had an extremely sharp edge.

  Every thrown knife somehow came back, only to be thrown again! Every swing made way for another in an artistic dance of death. Nothing slowed her down. That blade must’ve been ridiculously hot, given the heat she felt under her armour… “How’s Louis?”

  Repairing. He suffered substantial injuries on most of his body. His heart and head thankfully did not take damage and he was able to self-administer model four anti-venom. I’ve convinced him not to attack the model thirteens.

  Jackal laughed. “Yeah, in the same spot, I’d be hard to convince. They staying there for now?”

  Yes, they seem to consider him the larger threat and are trying to put out some of the fires. Their efforts are quite futile, especially with my vanguard firing more shells every five seconds.

  The samurai’s laugh intensified. “Nice! We’re coming up on the spot, I’ll take care of the thirteens, make sure we’re not interrupted. Going to take ‘em on one at a time if I can.”

  “I got you.” Lila said as they entered hell.

  The hive’s main chamber was covered in napalm, no corner left unburnt. Flames and smoke obscured her vision, but Altany created outlines based on Louis’s drone data to help out. Jackal darted for the first model thirteen, opening up with some kind of thin bare blade, which confused her for a moment. Then, it moved.

  It stopped moving forward, as if attached to a wire. She understood quickly when the crispy squid’s skin broke on its side and a few tentacles heading for the warrior were severed in flight. “Monowire…” It was a good first strike!

  A bladed tentacle heading for her met some kind of angled panel, appearing out of nowhere. It broke immediately but deflected the hit to the side. A moment later, Jackal planted her bat on one of things' faces! Every tentacle twitched and shuddered, the massive electrical discharge frying the thing’s nerves.

  Another outline turned towards them and Lila took aim. Thankfully, the hentai nightmares weren’t at their best, what with all the cooking. However, that didn’t mean they were dead, and this one tanked her bullets like it was nothing! She’d been using anti-material rounds, but that wouldn’t do the job right. “Altany, need a mixed mag of good shit!”

  Of course, when you’re ready.

  She ejected a half-full clip and tried to ignore the wasted points. Not the time for point-pinching! These things were serious business! The new helical magazine weighed more as she slammed it in place.

  “Whatcha got for me?” She asked with a growing smile. Even with all her worries for Louis, Lila loved to fight. She loved to fight with very destructive shit even more!

  12.7mm all, of course. First, shredder hollow-points that spread into six 5mm long Mole-Bear alloy sharp wedges.

  Second, claymore rounds, each with an explosive cup at the bottom to send shrapnel flying inside your target.

  Then, for your main course, high-velocity heavy kinetic strikers, which flatten wide to send massive hydrostatic shock into your target after the first two tenderizes them. You should be able to put a finger through the wound channels.

  As dessert, I offer you armor-piercing white phosphorus incendiaries to leave a lasting impression.

  “Oh, Altany…” Lila purred with a massive, maybe a bit manic smile.

  I aim to please.

  “Then you’re damn accurate, you sexy bodyless girl you." Thanks to her hyper-burst mode, Lila sent all four types in a single press of the trigger. The effect on target pleased her on a deep, fundamental level.

  Not a girl.

  However, it took half a fucking clip, sixty god damn rounds, to put down one of them! It was even injured! Jesus.

  She took on another one. Thankfully, Rosalie and Katy were done with small fries and already started taking shots at it. Between all three of them, it died fairly quickly. Jackal was on her third already!

  The last one died fast with all four of them focusing on it! “Alright, everything else is burning, where’s Louis?”

  Here.

  A big pile of burning napalm became highlighted and Jackal headed over with Lila in toe. Katy and Rosalie covered their backs using Altany as a detection system to shoot through the flames.

  As they arrived, an arm raised and the other samurai took it, pulling Panda up and out. He rose like a phoenix, burning from head to toe! “Fucking hell…” Jackal exclaimed.

  “Panda! Panda, come on, talk to me! Are you alright?” Lila asked while wiping off the burning material. It stuck to her gloves and burned some but she didn’t give a shit.

  My vanguard cannot speak at the moment. He requires fresh air, preferably quickly.

  After some hand gestures, Lila and Jackal understood that he needed one of them to be a crutch. With his knee bent inward, they could understand.

  When they’d exited the inferno behind the other enforcers, the air turned bizarrely fresh. Apparently, those tunnels going up acted as a chimney with air being pulled inward from the Badger base.

  Louis let go of them, got on all three and the moment his helmet retracted, coughed his damn lungs out. Lila wished it was a metaphor! Copious amounts of blood splattered the ground, every wheezing breath bringing more and more blood out!

  As Lila held his shoulders, when he started breathing in maybe half-lungfulls, Panda started to vomit blood. The cycle continued like that for a few minutes, coughing followed by vomiting before coughing started up again, all of it spreading a massive puddle of blood on the ground.

  Lila had no clue when she started crying. Jackal stood crouched, both feet in the puddle, waiting for him to get better. His first words? “Gimme a sec…”

  The insane man took a few deep breaths, then clearly got his armor reshaping to snap his knee back in place! Thankfully, he must’ve been on painkillers given how little he screamed through clenched teeth…

  “Fuck…” Lila rubbed circles on his back. Even metal-to-metal, the tactile might help a bit? His tail was wrapped around her midriff, something she’d learned to associate with affection, like a hug.

  “Fucking hell, you gonna be alright?” Jackal asked, which was a damn good question!

  “Yep…” Another bout of coughing later, he continued. “Nano repaired… most of the damage, lots of it. Couldn’t remove blood from my lungs or stomach… Need to upgrade those. Still damaged, but I spent a lot on this shit for a reason. Bones almost done. I’ll be alright, just couldn’t talk with my lungs full of blood like that. Had to take an Oxygen-Replenisher. Katy? Rosalie? Are they…?”

  “Right here boss, you saved our asses, we’re alright.” A small smile spread on his face at Katy’s confirmation. Tension bled from him in an instant.

  “Thank fuck… How’s the… everything?”

  The hive is mostly handled. More extermination will be needed, but most of the danger has passed.

  “Good, good…” Louis braced himself visibly for his next question. “How many?”

  “Huh?”

  “How many did I lose?”

  “No fatalities.”

  “What!?” Panda’s head snapped to her, eyes wide.

  “Hum… No fatalities. Lots of injuries, but that’s why Carol’s here. Sure, it got close, but your idea for a medical enforcer saved anyone that might have died.” Lila informed him simply.

  After a second or two, his head went back to the floor, but she saw the dampness. Soon, his shoulders started shaking and she heard him mutter. “I… I didn’t fuck up this time… I did it…”

  “Oh, Panda…” Lila pulled him up into a hug, her knees in a puddle of gore, alloy armors scraping against each other. His helmet snapped back into place, but she still heard him crying softly. “Shhhhh, you did good. It wasn’t your fault…”

  She muttered reassurances as he wept in silence. Katy and Rosalie each put a hand on his back.

  Jackal just watched on, a sad, knowing smile on her face.