by Ramy Vance
“We deserve it. No… No, that’s not right. Fuck that. I don’t want…”
“Keep it together, Beth.”
“You too.”
The Dark One’s voice tore through their minds again as he leaned closer to the screen. His veins were glowing a dull white. “Interesting. You are both very strong of will,” he thundered. “Acceptable. Prepare their minds and flesh for me to unveil my full glory to them.”
The viceroy stood, smiling, and turned to the screen behind her. She opened her arms as if ready for an embrace. Her back broke apart, three long, slender appendages slipping out from her shoulders, propping her up as electronic tendrils stretched from the computer screen, connecting her to the screen as the same tendrils extended from the Dark One to the screen. The tendrils burned bright blue, and the viceroy moaned loudly before settling back onto the ground, her back knitting itself back together, her organs visible for a brief second before her skin returned to its bio-mechanical nature. The screen above went black and the viceroy turned to face Suzuki and Beth, her face flushed, showing more color than it had seemed capable of.
Suzuki wanted the viceroy to scoop him up in her arms, to take him away to wherever she wanted. The techno-organic skin that had repulsed him looked so alluring now. He wondered how many different ways she could break his skin apart, what she could force out of him for the sake of beauty and creation.
As these thoughts crossed through Suzuki’s mind, he became very aware that they were not his own. Rather, they were not his thoughts as he had grown to understand them. They did not seem to spring from his own mind, but felt as if someone had inserted a seed of them in his mind and was quickly trying to get them to grow and mature. Suzuki instinctively looked away from the viceroy as he tried to shut the thoughts out. As he turned, he noticed that the monoliths seemed to be vibrating. The motion was subtle, and he wasn’t sure if he wasn’t just imagining it. Whatever was going on with the indoctrination that he already felt slipping into his brain, he knew that the monoliths were a piece of the puzzle.
The viceroy took a step toward the two Mundanes, her body moving as if it were made of pure liquid, her skin opening and closing, showing the beautiful, ordered interplay of gears and tubes working together, and she was standing before Suzuki before he realized it. She leaned down and took Suzuki’s head in her hand and pressed her lips to his. They were warm and firm, parted and inviting. Then she kissed Beth, letting her hand rest against Beth’s cheeks, her fingers splitting down the middle and a thin cable snaking out and caressing Beth’s head before she pulled away. “Take them to the reintegration chamber,” the viceroy said as she stood.
Suzuki felt a shock rock his body, and the world went black.
When Suzuki woke up, he was strapped to a cold, steel table. His hands, feet, and head were bound. He could barely move and it was difficult to breathe. Above him, there was a singular white light so bright that it was nearly blinding. “Beth!” he shouted.
Even though Suzuki could not see Beth, he could hear her voice. “I’m right here, Suzy,” she said.
“What the fuck is going on?”
“They’re reintegrating us.”
“Have they done anything to you yet?” he asked.
“No, not yet, Suzy. Just talk to me. The viceroy’s been in and out. But she’s hardly said anything. She’s just trying to be encouraging. I mean…fuck…I feel like there’s someone else in my fucking head.”
“It’s the monoliths. They’re pumping out some kind of brainwashing signal or something. We need to get out of here. Now.”
“You don’t think I’ve been trying?” Beth asked.
“How tight are you tied?”
“Too tight to move. You?”
“Just as bad.”
“I didn’t think this was how the first time you and me getting tied up was going to be.”
“Now is not the time, Beth.”
“If we can’t joke before we have our DNA rewritten so that we look like one of our parents fucked a microwave, then when can we joke?”
“Good point,” Suzuki said as he chuckled. “I’ve got a plan. It’s gonna go by pretty fast, so you gotta—”
“Are you going to shit yourself?”
“Why would I shit myself?”
Beth smirked. “I don’t know. Who would want to do any kind of operation if you were covered in shit?”
“Are you gonna shit yourself?”
“I don’t need to shit. But I would.”
Suzuki heard a door open, quickly followed by heavy, plodding footsteps.
An orc wearing a lab coat popped down into Suzuki’s field of vision. “You should count yourself very lucky,” the orc scientist said. “Many of us dream of being hand-picked by the viceroy to ascend to a more ordered existence. And here you are, granted that right out the gates. Very lucky, indeed.”
Suzuki struggled against his bindings. “Yeah, I feel like I won the fucking lottery,” Suzuki muttered as he tried to raise his hands. It didn’t matter. He was strapped in too tightly. There was only one option. He had to time this perfectly.
The orc leaning over Suzuki pulled out what looked like a long, hot glue gun, but instead of glue, there was a dripping, blue liquid. A drop of the liquid fell next to Suzuki’s head and he heard the steel of the table sizzling loudly. The orc held a large microchip in his other hand. “To think, this morning, you were only a human. Now you’re the secret to an entire race’s reintegration.”
Suzuki tried to relax. He started counting from a hundred slowly as he breathed. Now was the time.
The orc wrinkled its nose. He looked down at Suzuki’s legs. “What are you doing?” the orc asked.
“I have a weak bladder. Very weak. It’s probably going to just keep going.”
The orc pulled back in disgust, covering his nose with one hand. “Are you serious?”
“I think I’m going to need a change of pants, unless you want to continue the operation to the olfactory symphony that I’m creating.”
“Disgusting humans. I can’t believe the Dark Lord thought you, of all people, were worthy to elevate your race.”
The orc continued to mutter under his breath as he undid Suzuki’s leg shackles. Once Suzuki’s legs were free, he wrapped his legs around the orc’s neck, squeezing as hard as he could, the orc’s face shoved snuggly into his piss-stained crotch. The orc tried to scream, but Suzuki just squeezed harder. “You are going to unchain my hands now,” Suzuki commanded. “You got it?”
The orc nodded his head frantically as he thrashed, trying to hit Suzuki’s wrist shackles. He managed to get one of them undone and Suzuki raised his hand, concentrated, and waited.
Beth was laughing from her table. “What are you doing, Suzy? This isn’t a time to be striking a pose.”
“Hush, I’m concentrating.”
Suzuki kept the image of his ax firmly in his mind. He hoped this was going to work. He couldn’t remember the last time he had had his ax. Maybe in the bathroom? How far would the enchantment work?
The answer came soon enough. Suzuki’s ax came tearing through the operation room right into his palm. He didn’t waste any time and chopped off his last shackle, then brought the ax down on the orc’s head. He got up and unshackled Beth. “Grab your gear,” he muttered, pointing to the pile of Beth’s armor and swords before he took his pants off.
Beth threw on her armor. She turned around, and her jaw dropped when she saw Suzuki, naked from the waist down. “Oh, my God, Suzy, did you really piss yourself?” Beth asked, trying to hold back her laughter.
“Yeah, yeah, this is gonna make a great story and everything, but let’s concentrate on that later. We need to figure out what we’re doing.”
“How am I going to be able to concentrate with you butt-ass naked?”
“I’m going to do it. Fuck, it’s cold in here. All right, we’re in the research facility. This is where they—”
“You don’t have any other pants in your inventory?”
“No! I don’t usually pack an extra pair in case I piss myself. Now I know better.”
“All right, hold on.”
Beth scrolled through her inventory until she smiled. She selected an item and it materialized in her hand: a pair of bright pink booty shorts that read THICC on the butt cheeks. She tossed them to Suzuki. “This way, everyone doesn’t have to see your cock jiggling while you run.”
Suzuki put on the shorts and sighed. “I’m pretty sure everyone’s gonna see that regardless. You ready?”
“Ready.”
Beth kicked open the operation room door. She and Suzuki stepped out of the room and into what looked like a glass menagerie of races, creatures, and monsters. The walls were covered with individual, clear cells that stretched across the entire length of the wall and went up to the ceiling. It looked like an alien version of a zoo. “Are all of them being microchipped?” Beth wondered aloud.
Suzuki wandered to one of the closest cells and peered inside. A three-headed, golden lion paced. Suzuki noticed that the skin around the lion’s manes was starting to decay, similar to the techno-organic decay the viceroy had displayed. “No, I don’t think so,” Suzuki said. “I think what they do here is a little different. We weren’t just going to be reintegrated, we were going to be elevated. It’s something more extreme than just being chipped. I think that’s what the viceroy is.”
“I can’t believe I thought that psycho was hot.”
“Same here.”
“Is there anything we can do for them?”
“I don’t know. If they’re already microchipped and elevated, they might be beyond our help. But I don’t know how any of this shit works.”
Suzuki looked around the room. He noticed that there were three monoliths, smaller than the ones he’d seen previously. “Whatever is going on, though, I’m a hundred percent certain that those monoliths are making it worse,” Suzuki said as he cast a fire buff on his ax. He threw his ax as hard as he could at one of the monoliths, and it shattered into thousands of perfectly shaped black pieces. His ax came flying back to him and he threw it at another monolith as Beth charged the last one, knocking it to the ground and shattering it into fragments.
The occupants of the cells hardly seemed to notice. If the monoliths were doing anything to the prisoners, they probably weren’t even aware of it.
A voice thundered through the facility. It was the viceroy. “Bring the humans to me, either dead or alive. Their will to live will decide if they are elevated or buried. Release the dragon.”
Beth and Suzuki looked at each other. “The dragon?” Beth asked.
One of the cells opened with a deafening pop as the invisible barrier disappeared. The ground rumbled as something massive took its first step out of the cell. Slowly emerging was something red and long. Smoke billowed from its nose and mouth as it let out a roar that shook the entire facility.
Ashegoreth, the Red Death, stepped out of her cell, a microchip planted firmly in her forehead, the techno-organic decay already spreading from the microchip down the dragon’s spine and wings.
Suzuki and Beth were frozen with fear. They slowly backed away, each step feeling as if their feet weighed thousands of pounds. “Oh, no,” Suzuki muttered as he checked his HUD. It didn’t read anything. The orcs must have messed with it. That, or something here was fucking with its ability to calculate percentages. “This is bad… this is really bad… we need to get out of here.”
“Oh, my God…” Beth whispered. “That’s a...a…drag—”
Ashegoreth roared loudly again and then spewed a funnel of fire in Beth and Suzuki’s direction. The two Mundanes threw themselves to the side, only narrowly escaping being burned alive. Suzuki scrambled to his feet and grabbed Beth’s hand to help her up. “No more plans,” Suzuki shouted. “Just run! Just run!”
Beth and Suzuki took off, running the opposite direction as Ashegoreth, nearly avoiding another flaming vortex of death sent their way. As Suzuki ran, he tried to see if there was anything he could do to open the cells along the way, but he couldn’t see any discernable control near the cells. There were no buttons or pads. The walls were all seamless steel and there were hardly any tools or controls around the metal tables that Suzuki ran by. Suzuki wondered if the whole facility was operated by some Wi-Fi signal sent out by the viceroy, but the screech of the dragon pursuing him shattered his train of thought.
As Suzuki turned a corner, two armed orc guards stepped out of the corner on the opposite side. The guards gave each other a bewildered look briefly before unslinging their plasma rifles and opening fire. Beth jumped to the side, the bolt of crackling plasma passing by her and tearing a hole in the wall. Suzuki wasn’t so lucky. One of the blasts hit him square in the chest and sent him flying through the air and skidding across the ground.
Beth wasted no time moving.
She threw her sword like a spear into the guard on the left as she bolted, shield raised, deflecting another plasma shot, and jumped onto the other orc, lifting her shield and bringing it down on the orc’s skull. Then she grabbed both of their rifles and tossed one to Suzuki when he finally caught up. “I think our weapons might be a little outdated for this fight,” she said as she looked down the sights of the rifle. “You know how to use one of these?”
Suzuki looked at the gun with disdain and mild frustration. “I haven’t shot a gun since I was twelve at summer camp,” he admitted.
Three more guards popped out from a sliding door that seemed to have opened up from nowhere. Suzuki instinctively turned, aimed, and squeezed the trigger, sending a hot bolt of plasma at one of the orcs, tossing the orc through the air as it screamed. Suzuki and Beth took cover behind the corner they had just turned as plasma bolts went screeching past them. “Looks like you remembered the important stuff!” Beth shouted.
“The boom part makes things go dead, right?”
Beth laughed as she leaned around the corner and fired off two shots. One of them hit an orc in the chest, and he crumbled to the ground. “You think they would have invested in armor that would keep them alive,” Beth murmured.
“Who gives the grunts a good set of armor?” Suzuki shouted as he rolled out of cover and fired, nailing the final orc. He pumped his fist and turned around smiling before his face dropped at the sound of the roaring, pissed-off dragon on their tail. “Fuck, completely forgot about the winged death trying to burn us alive.”
“Okay, I know we gotta keep running, but where the fuck are we going? Out of this building, there’s a whole defense ring waiting to rip us to shreds. The viceroy is somewhere in there, and I don’t want to get in a fist fight with her. And outside of that, we got, four, five, fuck it, how many more defense rings to get through?”
“Maybe there’s a way that we could un-chip some of these guys. The same way that we did Ros’ten. Better actually, seeing how we missed one of the chips.”
Another roar from the red dragon interrupted their conversation. It sounded even closer this time around. “Run and think, run and think,” Beth shouted as she took off down the hallway.
Suzuki followed close on her heels as he reached out to Fred. “Hey, buddy,” Suzuki broached, “I think I got a special mission for you.”
Fred hissed in Suzuki’s head, voicing obvious irritation. “You do not need to pander to me, Suzuki. I assume whatever it is will be dangerous.”
“Sneak out of me with Ros’ten and go un-chip some of the big bads in their cells. Thank you can handle that?”
“And how is it you presume that I accomplish that?” Fred hissed.
“You’re the wise, eldritch creature. Figure something out. Our lives kinda depend on it.”
“Well, if your lives depend on it, I’ll see what I can do.”
Sandy, José, and Stew stood in their tunnel. GB had stopped digging and was looking up. The tunnel had gone from straight forward to arching upward and now they all stared at the bit of ground above them as if it were an attic door.
; Stew poked the thin layer of dirt. “So, this is where the nav point comes up to?”
GB nodded emphatically, his donkey tongue hanging out of his mouth almost like a dog’s. “Yep, yep!” GB exclaimed. “This is where we were supposed to dig.”
“It’s not too far from the first nav point that they sent us, is it Sandy?”
Sandy conjured her wand and poked at the dirt as well. “Yeah. Diana told me that the reinforcements are coming up at the last nav point. This one is all ours. We’re the cavalry.”
Stew drew his swords, as did José. “All right, well, let’s fucking do this then. For honor!”
“For glory!”
José looked at both of the Mundanes blankly. “Am I supposed to say something?” he asked.
Stew sighed, his enthusiasm deflated. “Dude, it’s not that hard. We say it all of the time. For XP.”
“Gotcha. For XP,” José muttered.
Fred and Ros’ten split away from Suzuki and Beth, barreling down the hall in the direction of Ashegoreth. They flew high up to the ceiling, barely slipping by the dragon, who was on a war path toward the two Mundanes, far too drunk on bloodlust to pay attention to the small familiars.
Ashegoreth exploded out of the hallway, skidding as she tried to grapple with the slippery floor. Her eyes were empty, not the eyes full of love and wisdom that Suzuki had seen before. These eyes were devoid of any intelligence. They were singular and dead, focused and driven on one thing and one thing alone: the Mundanes. She spewed another jet of fire down the hallway, roaring, which sounded more akin to screaming, a painfilled sound that was also mournful as if somewhere, deep in the recesses of her mind, she was aware of how lost she had become.
Farther down the halls of the research facility, Suzuki and Beth were still running for their lives. They had no idea exactly where they were, nor how long they were going to have to run for an opening. There was a surprising lack of guards for there having been an announcement to bring their dead bodies to the viceroy. Suzuki thought this was odd, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. With his current luck, the horse would have tried to bite his nose off.