by Nick Ryder
“I don’t have eyes.”
“Don’t be pedantic.”
“I was just making sure there hadn’t been any kind of mix up,” he said. “Because I’m struggling to find anything different in the DNA.”
“You can’t see anything different from standard human DNA?”
“I can, but nothing that explains the changes we saw on the footage. I think the main changes must have occurred in the brain.”
“Dammit.” There was nothing I could do to bring back the man’s head, it had been evaporated in Cara’s attack. There was just an ugly stump now. “Do you think that’s just for this specific power, or for all of them?”
“It’s impossible for me to know that.”
“Dammit.”
“I will continue analyses.”
“Yeah, okay. Thanks, Ego.”
“You’re welcome.”
So I was going to have to make sure I got hold of complete people even if they were dead if I had any chance of finding out whether isolating the powers would ever be possible.
Yet another task to add to the mounting list of things we had to accomplish when the tribe invaded the facility. Our preparation was far from over.
Chapter Twenty-Three
We spent the next few days completing preparations for the attack. There was only so much we could do before we were just sat around waiting for something to happen, though.
Animals, with Lisa at their lead, were sent to retrieve Cara from the village at the time they’d arranged, and when they were back at the facility tensions rose even higher. Cara had done as she’d said and brought a dozen men and women with her. Surre I recognized from the first time she’d come to the facility: a waifish girl with an incredible power that allowed her manipulate plants from even the smallest shoot into dangerous thorny vines. The others were unknown to me, and it seemed like not all of them were convinced by Cara.
Following them and watching their body language became my favorite hobby during the two days they were there before the attack happened.
Whatever Cara had told them wasn’t much: they didn’t seem to realize that I could follow them wherever they went with the cameras and I did my best to keep that a secret.
Two of them felt comfortable enough that they outright discussed a plot they were considering to dethrone Cara. The audacity was astounding.
That was something I would miss when I had my body, I had to admit. The ability to see and hear everything all at once was invaluable. If only it hadn’t restricted me to the facility, it would have been perfect.
The girls were forced to split themselves up, too, spreading themselves between the groups to try and keep an eye on everyone. Elaine wasn’t thrilled about the supposed need for surveillance, but she did as she was told because I assigned her to keep an eye on Cara.
When the alarm sounded was a rare time that they’d gathered together. With traps as good as they were going to get, everyone had gathered into the lounge with the projector and was watching a movie together. The people from the village had brought dried meat with them to the facility and were sharing it among everyone while they watched.
Lisa chewed on it with relish, and I got the feeling that hunting expeditions for food would be a regular occurrence after this. A taste for flavor rather than the purely nutritional nutrigel had probably developed.
Maybe some of the rabbits would be killed and skinned and cooked rather than reclaimed in future. I doubted Marie would appreciate that even if she was gnawing on the meat contentedly now.
Ego shut off the projector the moment the alarm sounded, and everyone sat up straight. Everyone except Elaine, whose ears and tails just twitched like someone had opened the door to the room rather than being told that the biggest battle of their lives was about to take place.
“Positions,” I called, though everyone’s position was the same for now. We were waiting to see what the defenses could do before we started fighting people head-on. It seemed the most cost-efficient when it came to man power, and I didn’t want to separate the army we had up more than necessary.
The facility was huge, but it wasn’t so big that we could fit everything in one room. Animals had to wait in the wings for when there was room in the space that the main fight was likely to take place in – the same place that it had last time. Where the elevator opened up.
The elevator gave us an advantage, too: they had to filter down in as many people could fit into the elevator at one time. It was a large elevator, granted, but not enough to fit their entire army into.
I was feeling good about this, and now the alarm had sounded, so did everyone else. They had their fighting faces on. All shreds of doubt had vanished.
I loaded up the projectors again now they were in the room that would house the final fight. I wanted them all to be able to see every little thing that happened, for it to build momentum when they realized how thoroughly we were protected here.
Right now it showed the entrance to the facility, the solar panels standing gloomily in the semi-darkness of dawn.
One of Cara’s men let out a “whoop,” when the first face appeared in the camera.
It was one that they all recognized, apart from me, apparently. A thick-set man draped in multi-colored feathers and furs and armed to the teeth with every sort of blade I could think of – and a few more. He was pure muscle.
“That’s Mart,” Marie said softly, so only I could hear her where she stood directly beneath my camera. A cacophony of murmurs had started in the rest of the group. “He’s the leader of the tribe.”
And he looked like a leader. He had his lips pulled back over his teeth and seemed to have immediately identified the camera for what it was. He spat onto the lens.
“You’re going to die, motherfucker.”
“He seems friendly,” I said, starting to get excited about the upcoming fight.
Cara just curled her lip. She was sat cross-legged on the ground, her halberd resting over her knees, and watching the screen intently. She looked completely serene, except the small tinge of disgust on seeing the man who had humiliated her in front of her people.
I was surprised to see how ready the rest of her village was to agree with her, even the ones planning to overthrow her just days before. The animosity toward outsiders wanting to take over their village showed at least some bond between them, anyway.
Mart wasted no time in moving forward and into the facility. I hadn’t even bothered to bar the door this time, there was no point. They would only damage the door and I’d have to fix it. May as well just let them in, show them how ready I was for them.
Mart didn’t hesitate. He’d obviously been told exactly what the layout of the facility was from the man now being slowly reclaimed into nutrigel.
He went to avoid the first pressure sensor by stepping to the panel to the side of it. It immediately fell away revealing a shallower pit filled with thorny vines created by Surre.
The chief was pulled backward by his followers, and clenched and unclenched his fist. It had maybe been too soon to reveal that everything had been changed, maybe I should have lulled him into a false sense of security by making the first room exactly the same, but seeing the look on his face as he’d almost fallen into the pit of thorns had been worth it.
I chuckled as he tried to recover some confidence after having been saved by his tribe.
My girls all had smiles on their faces too. The tension in the room relaxed further.
Except for in Cara, who still sat tense as a board with her lips in a straight line. Her grip on her halberd was tight.
I’d never pegged her as a nervous character like that, but I supposed it was rare that she sat in wait for a fight to happen. Normally something jumped her and she immediately fought it off. Sitting here with her insane amount of power and just watching it happen must be stressful, I supposed.
But for me, it was thrilling. This was as close to really being in the fight as I could get. It was me having the most dir
ect impact on how things turned out.
What they hadn’t anticipated was how many of the panels in the first corridor would be pressure sensors. Compared to the first time I’d tripled it. Nearly all the floor panels fell away when triggered now, and it meant that there was no obvious path through.
There was a pause and Mart turned to the people behind him. There were over three dozen men and women crowding the facility, and the corridor wasn’t big enough to fit them all in straight away.
“Here.” One of the man behind Mart started unraveling the myriad of furs that he wore on his body. The more furs they had obviously corresponded to your place in the hierarchy. This guy must have been somewhere near the top.
The thick furs were laid down over the thorns and it was someone much further down the food chain that was made to take the first step onto them.
It was slow going, but eventually the leaders got across the vines. It wasn’t without injury: feet slipped off the edges of the furs because of the uneven surface and legs were cut up by the thorns, but nothing too serious happened.
But I wasn’t put off. That was only a taster of what was to come.
Chapter Twenty-Four
As expected, the chief still took the same route that the previous tribe had because they didn’t realize that I had the ability to change the layout of the facility. They might be expecting new traps, but they didn’t know they were walking the exact path that I wanted them to.
The next room had been completely overhauled. I’d liked the rats with the sticky feet, but they’d been good because they could launch a surprise attack and now that ability was lost. More importantly, they were better against smaller groups than against the large invasion force that was currently working its way through the facility. Half of them hadn’t even started the vine corridor yet, by the time they got to the rats they would have been dead and gone.
So I’d had to rethink the room completely. It had been Ego’s suggestion that had resulted in the room as it currently was. He’d reminded me that thinning out the invading force as much as possible would give whatever enemies we put in there the biggest chance they’d have, and the best way to keep them thinned out was to physically stop them grouping up.
Just making the corridor much narrower would have been a waste of valuable space, so I’d made the room into a maze instead. The idea was so appealing that I’d knocked through the wall to the room at the size of it so I had space to play with dead ends. With dead ends I could fuck with the order the tribe were walking in, too. Mart wouldn’t physically be able to stay at the head of the column like this unless he was insanely lucky.
And I had some more surprises. Some things I hadn’t even told Cara about.
Mart took the same precautionary measures as the previous group leader had when it came to tapping every floor panel with his sword to make sure there was no pressure sensor underneath it. He wouldn’t find any in this room. I was in complete control of everything that happened in the maze: it was important because it meant every trap wouldn’t be used on the person at the head of the column. I could wait until Mart had passed and unleash something on the people behind him instead, when they would think they’d already passed that area without danger.
There were plenty of things I wanted Mart to face too, though. As soon as he was in the maze I activated the first trap, letting a floor panel fall from the ceiling that had two rats on top of it. They jumped from the falling panel before it hit the ground and dove straight onto Mart’s face.
We had no idea what his superpower was, but Ego had confirmed that his stats were high. Whatever he was capable of, it would be a fine addition to my collection.
The collection that I intended to be stacked much higher by the end of this invasion.
Mart didn’t hesitate as he blocked, raising an arm wrapped with fur to shield his face from teeth and claws. I couldn’t tell from this angle whether they’d managed to pierce the fur or not, but it turned out to be irrelevant. Mart’s superpower quickly revealed itself. A small explosion rattled the steel walls of the maze and flung the rats backward. One’s face was so charred that it was dead immediately, and the other coughed pathetically on the ground as it realized one of its front legs had been blown clean off.
“Holy shit,” Lisa said, folding her arms uncomfortably.
Cara had sat up a little straighter in her seat, and I hadn’t thought that was possible with how ramrod straight her back already was.
Mart made quick work of the dying rat with a clean attack to the throat.
Marie flinched.
Mart’s arm was visibly charred, though. His skin was black to the point that it looked like pure coal.
“Do you think that’s permanent?” Cara asked.
“It can’t be. He must have used the power before, and I can’t see anything else that’s charred,” Lisa suggested.
“Maybe it’s like a cooldown,” I said. “He can’t use it again until the charred area disappears.”
There was a collection of nods. “Makes sense,” Elaine agreed softly. “So the more times we can make him use his power, the less powerful he’ll be. We can just throw rats at him in surprising ways and hope that his knee jerk reaction is to attack them with his power. He can’t have been in this kind of situation before.”
“It’s a solid plan,” I agreed, and tried to put it into action before he knew what had hit him.
I triggered a panel in the wall at the side of Mart that contained two small cat-wolf hybrids. Their powerful legs gave them the same ability to lunge straight at Mart’s face, and they did so with an added weapon. I’d created them solely to sit in that panel and so I wasn’t concerned at all about how the poison inside them would kill them–only that it would kill someone before they were put down.
This time everyone seemed more on edge though. Mart didn’t have to use his power at all, he dodged effortlessly out of the way and swung his blade in an arc, slicing through the stomach of the cat closest to him like it was butter.
The second realized the danger of the situation and switched target, going low and attacking the man second in the queue behind Mart. The cat had sunk its teeth into the man’s ankle before Mart brought his sword down again, chopping the beast’s head off.
Color drained from the man’s face alarmingly quickly, and his blood turned black as it flowed from the wound. He foamed at the mouth and fell to the ground. When he tried to speak it was a low groan. He was dead within seconds.
“Well there’s nothing weak about that poison,” I said. “That gives me a lot of hope about the spiders.”
There were a lot of scrunched up faces as they watched the death of the man. Most of the villagers probably hadn’t seen a human killed before, and probably not one they were actively opposing in a battle.
I watched each face carefully, and asked Ego to do the same thing. If there was anyone who was going to bail in the fight that would eventually come to them, then I needed to know so that I could factor it in.
“Okay, maybe not such a great plan,” Elaine said. “But worth a try.”
“Even if we didn’t make him use his power, we still got one with the trap,” Marie said, resting her head on Elaine’s shoulder as she spoke. “Still a success.”
And I’d gained some knowledge, which was important too.
I let Mart continue unharmed for a while, just to see how he would adapt now. He took to giving more surfaces a tap with his sword, but there was nothing he could do about potential threats from above without sacrificing one of his sword hands. He was willing to just risk it, to trust his reaction time and super powers to be superior to whatever fell out of the sky.
I’d been tame so far with the beasts he’d been exposed to, as well. He would have information from the previous invaders about what kind of creatures they’d faced, but I’d evolved even since then. There were plenty of surprises up my sleeve for Mart and his tribe.
The column was far enough along that I could start triggering t
raps further down without Mart being able to help. Ego was able to show me which people were likeliest to have superpowers depending on their readouts, and they were the ones I targeted. I could see their stats, but I couldn’t see what they could actually do and I only had so many ways of capturing people. I wanted to make them count.
The first trap was two sliding doors in the walls of the maze that revealed four rats. It was simple, but effective. The element of surprise was underrated, and it meant that the rats had mauled a person to death with two clean bites to the throat of a woman who wasn’t expecting them. She was without powers, but every life that we took was a person we didn’t have to fight when they made it through the first level.
The person I was hoping to target was a woman with stats that showed some short-range burst speed. She turned a violent shade of crimson and dodged the attack of the rats, killing one with a swift blow. The maze meant she didn’t have enough space to maneuver.
“We know her,” Lisa said. “She was part of the group that attacked Cara. She got away before we could stop her, for obvious reasons.”
“Her power is strong,” Elaine added, leaning back. “The maze is a good way to contain it.”
It was a sentiment I agreed with, and I followed her for another few steps until the perfect moment struck. The woman stepped onto just the right panel, and she was on it alone. I activated the trap and three things happened at once. At the same time that the floor gave out, metal dividers shot up out of the floor cutting the panel off from the people either side. Ceiling panels gave way and a single rat–basic build, without any modification except growth enlargement–dropped down to attack the people either side of the panel with the woman.
It was the perfect catch. The woman was trapped in a cage of solid steel below the maze and the people closest to her had been too distracted by the rats to do anything about it.
She was mine. Alive and well beneath floorboards, unable to use her power to escape. I couldn’t do anything with her just yet, but she would be going straight to Ego as soon as the fight was over, and I would figure out how to make that super speed work in my favor.