Mardock Scramble - Volume 1 - Chapter 4

Chapter 4
SPARK
01
It was four in the afternoon.
Balot was stirring stew in a saucepan, but she suddenly stopped. Oeufcoque was standing on the
counter sniffing the air coming in through the ventilation system. Balot poked Oeufcoque with her free
hand.
“Agh, that tickles.” Oeufcoque covered his sides.
But his nose was still to the ventilator.
He spoke with just a trace of nerves. “There’s an unusual smell.”
Balot poked at the stew. She lifted up the wine, bringing the neck of the bottle toward her.
“I’mnot talking about the seasoning.”
Balot placed the bottle down and leaned her head toward him.
“There’s a smell of carnival. A group of people rejoicing, about to go to a party, or a festival…or
maybe to war.” Oeufcoque spoke and sniffed the air again. “There’s also the faint, bitter smell of fear. As
if someone has been killed.”
Oeufcoque looked at Balot, apprehensive. But Balot was no longer afraid of this sort of thing. She
turned the heat down and entwined Oeufcoque around her fingers.
–Enemies?
“Probably. Check communication lines with the outside world, will you?”
Balot put Oeufcoque on top of her right hand and touched the intercomon the wall with her left hand as
he’d requested.
She snarced the receiver without lifting it, putting a call out to the police escort that was staked out in
the neighborhood.
–The lines are all ringing, but nobody’s answering.
“What, all three of the bases? What about headquarters? And try the Doctor too.”
–I’m not getting anything.
Balot tapped the receiver with her fingers.
–Something doesn’t feel right. It’s coming up that the lines are engaged, but it’s weird. It feels
like I’m contacting somewhere entirely different.
A claustrophobic, urgent atmosphere pressed in on themfromall sides.
Balot took her hand off the intercom and turned the stove off completely, and then she took her apron
off and threw it over a chair. She headed toward her room, Oeufcoque still on her hand.
–They’re coming, aren’t they? The people who rubbed out our police guard. Coming here to
assassinate us too.
“Highly probable.”
–I want to get ready. Will you give me five minutes? “What are you planning to do?”
–Take a shower.
She spoke as if she were talking about tending to her firearms.
Oeufcoque nodded. “But be quick.”
Dish, wash, brush…she felt the ditty spinning around the back of her mind as she savored the hot
water. Dash, crush, rush, flush…
She knew that having dirt and grime on her skin weakened her natural abilities. So, whenever she was
due to wear Oeufcoque she needed to make doubly sure she was clean. To scrub herself up spick and
span, polish herself up like a stainless steel knife.
As she washed she started to feel that she might be able to grasp each individual droplet of hot water
as it fell from above, down to the finest of movements. She probably could have. Even the destination of
the water. She could almost imagine the whole world flowing through her skin.
Under her control.
My body is my own.
The seed of resolve was planted firmly in the back of her mind.
She wasn’t going to hand it over to anyone else ever again.
She would protect it—and fight.
Why me? The eternal question was about to deliver up an answer that she had never even dreamed of.
Or not an answer, to be precise, but a reversal, turning the question inside out, just like Oeufcoque.
Whoever it is who’s targeting me—I’ll make sure they get their just rewards.
That was the answer she had to the question of why everything had to happen to her; she would take
the question—Why me?—and shove it right back in her enemies’ faces.
Dish, wash, crush, mash…
She turned the shower off. She snarced the TowelJet without touching it, and strong warm gusts of air
blew fromall directions, drying her body.
She rubbed oil on herself, luxuriating under the warmbreeze.
She was now the perfect blade, or so she felt. A blade so sharp it would even cut through its own
sheath. She was a sharp sword who had the right to choose what she would have wrapped around her.
And, of course, she had already chosen. Her one and only scabbard—and weapon.
Goodish, fresh, wish…
Balot left the bathroom. She stood in front of the desk, not a stitch on her body.
She reached out her hand toward the mouse that was standing on the desk and sniffing his surroundings
with a pointy nose.
Oeufcoque jumped onto her hand. “Good to go?”
Balot nodded, wrapped Oeufcoque around her fingers.
–All set.
She imagined a dress, an impregnable iron fortress that would wrap her up completely.
Working with this vague image, she snarced Oeufcoque, running through his various programs and
adapting themone by one.
–Hug my body. Tight.
Oeufcoque turned with a squish.
Into the dress chosen—singled out—by his one and only.
The night melted like chocolate and seeped into the town.
The Bandersnatch Gang moved as one. Rapidly, silently, they closed in on the former morgue from
three different directions.
Welldone led the way, and Mediumfollowed swiftly behind.
Welldone checked the surroundings while Mediumstuck his Lockbuster Card into the rear door.
“It’s open. It was a triple lock—we only just made it.” Medium spoke and quickly slipped inside.
Welldone followed immediately after, almost back-to-back with Medium, and closed the door carefully
behind them.
The corridors were dark and narrow. Medium proceeded down them with caution, and Welldone
indicated to himto speak through their transplanted communication devices.
–We’ll leave the Lockbuster in and use it to carry our hack of the circuits. How long till we can
take over the building’s security systems, Fleshie?
–Two minutes should be plenty, Well.
–Rare, you enter from the south the moment we’ve overridden their security. Medium, you enter
from the main entrance, carrying the Boston bag full of firearms. No transmissions from more than
three meters away until we’re sure their security system is completely down.
–There are your orders, guys. I’ve pinned down the location of everything in the building. Heat
sources detected in the kitchen on the first floor and the north-facing bathroom.
–Go and investigate, Medi. See that the target doesn’t escape through a window. I’m heading to the
basement.
Without looking back Medium raised his right hand to acknowledge, then glided down the corridor,
footfall silent, disappearing around the right turn.
He removed his gun from its holster on his hip, and his eyes flashed red behind his sunglasses. His
computer-enhanced eyes picked up all the obstacles in the dark, clearly and accurately.
–Building secured. Sending through floor plans of the whole building now.
Flesh’s voice echoed deep in his ear.
Medium’s eye flashed. A semi-transparent diagramappeared directly over his retina. There were little
markers to show where he and the other members of his gang were, and the rooms where their target was
likely to be were highlighted in red.
–Move in, Rare. Mincemeat, standby on alert five meters from the entrance hall. Flesh was giving
the instructions now.
“Here we go!” Mediumused his real voice, not the wireless. A smirk formed on his face.
He pushed on, cross-checking the data on the map in his retina with what he could see, and decided on
his best route.
If he’d wanted to he could have brought up an image of the field of vision of the other gang members,
but Medium stayed fixed on the floor plans as he advanced down the corridor. It was a long corridor.
Some sort of special setup, thought Medium. This is massive. Why would you need a bathroom that’s
more than twenty square meters in size? Must be to clean all those dead bodies. There was almost no
light now, and he passed by a number of doors but barely paid them any notice. He’d already checked in
his retina that the target wasn’t behind them.
And this was why he completely failed to notice the white shadow that emerged from one of the rooms
and started to tail him, following in his footsteps almost casually.
Mediumturned a corner in the corridor and before he knew it he appeared to be inside a small closet.
Mediumfroze to the spot. Darkness enveloped himand seemed to stretch out forever.
–Fleshie? What the hell is going on? Where am I?
–Calm down. Calm down. There’s a door right in front of you.
–Door? I don’t see any…
But then Mediumrealized that he was indeed staring at a single door right in front of him.
–Found it. A door. What’s on the other side?
–Someone’s waiting for you.
–Waiting?
–Someone’s holding a gun and waiting for you.
Mediumsmirked.
–Okay, Fleshie. Let’s work out if it’s our target or the PI. Give me their exact location and
physical characteristics.
An image flashed up in Medium’s eyes—an orange silhouette of the figure beyond the door.
–Wow, a giant. At least two meters tall. Must be the PI, right?
–That’s right. And if you shoot, you’ll hit him for sure.
Mediumaimed his gun carefully at his enemy beyond the door.
–Let’s see who’s the faster shot, tough guy.
He fired.
All fourteen shots in three seconds flat. He swapped magazines immediately, then kicked down the
door that was now riddled with bullet holes.
Something came hurtling toward him, enveloping him.
–What the…
Cold water.
Mediumscrambled to ready his gun, no idea what was going on.
Something slammed into his shoulders and body, forcing himover in a backward somersault.
He thought for a moment that he had been hit by some explosives that the enemy had planted.
But, as it transpired, he was wrong.
His eyesight returned to him and cut through the haze, and he saw it was something entirely different
that floated to the surface. A large white mass.
Medium’s gun shot up, a reflex action.
It was a bundle of wet toilet paper.
Soaked through now, Mediumtook his sunglasses off and opened his eyes wide.
He was in a toilet stall.
This was the place that he had kicked the door down to and rushed in.
The toilet was in smithereens, obliterated by the electric charges fired at it, and it was vigorously
spewing out water.
“What…what the hell is all this?” He spoke out loud again, unthinking.
He left the cubicle. On the wall to the right of him he saw four urinals. On the opposite wall, mirrors
and sinks.
The giant expanse of space he’d been in had disappeared without a trace.
Mediumturned back to look at the stall again.
It was the only stall in the bathroom, and his eyes went to something on the wall above the destroyed
toilet.
Written on the tiles, in a bright poppy-red color:
I’M GONNA TO SNARC YOU UP!
–Fleshie, what the hell am I looking at…
–I’m coming…
–What?
–Let’s see who’s the faster shot, tough guy.
The bathroomdoor opened.
All Mediumcould do was stand and stare.
A girl stood before him, dressed in brilliant white.
Pure as snow, fromtip to toe.
Her clothes had a bondage-gear feel to them, as if she were wrapped up in white restraints. Or it could
have been an evening dress, or a wedding dress.
One thing he was sure about—the striking figure in front of him was unmistakably the Teen Harlot he
had seen in the video.
Rune-Balot.
An unusual name…
He wondered whether it was the PI in charge of her case that was responsible for her extraordinary
appearance.
“Drop your weapons.” A man’s voice, out of nowhere. Surprised, Medium raised his gun. Had the
voice emerged fromthis defenseless girl standing right in front of him?
Balot’s left hand rose, and the snow-white silken glove turned with a squish into something else.
A gun.
Light glinted off its silver barrel.
Mediumgulped. His finger pulled the trigger on his gun almost reflexively.
A tremendous spark flared between Balot and Medium, lighting up the room.
Medium’s eyes were now wide enough to split his eyelids apart. He realized with horror what was
happening:
The girl in front of him had actually shot at, and hit, his bullet.
Howling like a dog, he fired again.
Sparks. Explosion.
Steel shrapnel splattered against the walls, spilled to the floor.
But this time that wasn’t all. Medium felt a searing pain in his shooting hand. All four fingers, his
thumb, and the grip of the gun had all been pierced by shrapnel.
The very definition of perfect marksmanship.
“Uh…” Medium’s face went white.
His left hand disintegrated and fell to the floor along with his destroyed gun. The water continued to
gush out of the ground behind him, covering the tiles.
Medium tried to jump out of the way, but Balot shot at the gun on the floor. At the grip, the magazine
that he had crammed full of electronically charged bullets.
All the bullets exploded at once, and a blue-white flame enveloped Mediumfromthe feet upward.
He had no voice left in him, and instead of screaming he danced a bizarre dance in the flashing light.
His whole body stiffened and burst at the seams.
The air was pregnant with the stink of burnt flesh and hair.
The blue-white light traveled across the water-covered tiles and struck Balot’s body too, but was
repelled by the white raiment that bound her body tight, fizzling away harmlessly.
Thunk—Medium collapsed in a heap. Sparks continued to leap from the side of his head. The various
electronic devices implanted in his head had short-circuited, and now pitch-black blood was pouring
fromhis eyes and ears.
He wasn’t quite dead yet—but he’d seen better days.
Balot looked at the geyser of water that was jetting out from where the toilet had been. She intercepted
the building’s water supply system—and snarced it. The flow of water slowed, then stopped.
She approached Mediumand, with the lightest of touches, put her hand on Medium’s forehead.
She sensed a weak current and recognized it as a voice being transmitted directly into his head.
–What’s the matter, Medi? Are our transmissions not getting through? Was the target there? We’re
not getting any response from Medi, Well. Medi, If you can hear…
–I’m fine.
Balot answered, in Medium’s voice.
–There’s nothing here. No sign of our target. I’ll continue searching.
Then she stopped snarcing the transmission, left the men’s toilets, and closed the door behind her.
02
–No, it’s definitely weird. It doesn’t add up.
Mincemeat heard Flesh’s voice at the back of his mind.
“Wassup, Fleshie? Explain to me what’s so weird.” Mincemeat held his Boston bag under one arm,
waiting leisurely just outside the entrance hall.
–According to Medi’s audio records, he’s just heard a number of gunshots. One of them doesn’t
show up anywhere on my database—my database. So we must be talking about some pretty unusual
equipment.
“So there’s someone with different equipment fromus. One of the PIs?”
–Yes, but Medi seems to be saying he’s all right…
“Hmm…”
–You’re the closest one there to Medi, Mincemeat.
“Fine, I’ll check it out.” Mincemeat gripped his Boston bag and headed straight for the entrance. “If
the target runs from the building you’ll have to get Rare or Well to catch her, ’cause I’m heading in to see
if there are any enemies closing in on Medi. Open the door for me, will ya?”
–Sure.
Mincemeat gave the lobby door a gentle shove and it swung open without resistance.
He walked straight on into the hall.
Checking that there was no one behind the window at the reception area, he shoved his hand into the
Boston bag. He pulled out the reserve firearms—in the shape of an attaché case—and walked down the
corridor in large strides.
He shed his Boston bag and pushed on farther down the corridor, where he heard an elevator door
chime and open.
He slipped deftly behind a pillar and silently opened the lock on the case in his hands.
The box folded out in both directions, and a double-handed grip appeared in the middle, which he held
firmly. There were muzzles where the box folded out, pointing outward—this was a fearsome automatic
weapon.
After taking note of his surroundings, he opened transmission channels.
–Is this elevator your work, Fleshie?
–That’s right.
–You want me to get in it?
–That’s right.
–I thought Medi was on the first floor, though? Do you think he’s found the enemy?
–That’s right.
–Send me the floor plans, will ya? Right, so that’s where Medi is. I’m moving on out.
–That’s right.
–Huh?
The transmission ended abruptly. But the floor plan showed clearly the route he needed to take.
Mincemeat shrugged his shoulders. “Jeez, talk about impatient.”
Paying close attention to his surroundings, Mincemeat slipped into the elevator.
He looked at the operating panel inside. There were five buttons, one for each floor from the basement
to the roof. The button for the second floor was already flashing yellow.
The elevators closed, and Mincemeat braced his large body as best he could.
The pressure pulled him down. The lift was rising now with ferocious speed. Mincemeat just about
managed to stop himself frombuckling over.
The violent screeching of the wires could be heard overhead.
Then the elevator shuddered to a sudden halt, throwing Mincemeat’s huge frame into the air for a
second before he crashed back down onto the elevator floor, slamming his knee against the steel.
Mincemeat’s face was twisted in fury.
–Flesh, you little shit! This isn’t a fucking carnival ride!
–That’s right.
–Huh? That’s all you’ve been saying since…
A cold sweat broke out on Mincemeat’s brown skin and his lips trembled as he heard:
–THAT…IS…RIGHT.
An unfamiliar voice, straight in his ear—inside his own head.
“Who the hell are you?” Mincemeat couldn’t stop himself fromyelling out.
The elevator immediately resumed its ascent, throwing Mincemeat to the floor again. It stopped
suddenly on the third floor before plunging straight back down again.
“You shithead!” he roared. He pointed the firearms in his hands at the panel on the door and shot it to
pieces with both guns.
The elevator stopped.
A smile returned to Mincemeat’s perspiration-bathed face. “I used to be a pilot, you know. That was
nothing…”
The lights went out, but that didn’t worry him. A click at the back of his eyes and his pupils shone red.
Dark, light…it was all the same to him. He rechecked the floor plans showing in his retina.
The bottom third of the elevator door had gotten as far as the second floor. With his two-hundredthousand-dollar
butter knife in his left hand, he burnt off the rest of the panel and pulled out the wiring. He
pointed his other hand, firearmand all, at the door.
His eyes skipped over the wires until he found the one that opened the elevator door.
Just then, a fizz, and something sprang up under his feet. An unbearable heat ran through his body. He
jumped with a shriek.
Something else leapt up fromstraight below him, piercing straight through his firing arm.
He rolled up his sleeve to take a look.
There was clean, round hole right between a pair of eyes on his arm. The eyelids were open wide, as
if the transplanted eyes were surprised.
Mincemeat broke out in a cold sweat.
It was one damn thing after another.
The shot that came frombelow had hit the thumb on his shooting hand.
A series of screams emerged from Mincemeat’s mouth as he was shot again, in his hands, legs, and
buttocks.
Mincemeat danced his bizarre dance to an audience of no one, yelling inside the box, where no one
could see. When he dropped his knife, that too was shot to pieces. An intense surge of sparks erupted
forth, scorching his right leg.
He found a moment to squeeze the grip of the gun with his right hand. He pointed the gun straight
downward.
At the same time, a 10mm bullet came flying into his left eye. His mechanical eye was crushed right in
the socket. Sparks and blood spurted out, littering the floor.
“I’mgoing to rape the shit out of you for this, you fucking bitch!”
Mincemeat fired dozens of shots at the floor, turning it into mincemeat, living up to his nickname.
Plenty of steaming holes were open in the floor now, and he peered through them, but saw no one. He
turned to the elevator door, shooting it up just as he had the floor. When the bullets in the top half of his
gun case were spent, he flipped it up into the air and gripped it the other way around.
He pulverized the door, leaving it a bullet-riddled mess.
“I’mgoing to kill you!”
He charged the door with his shoulder, and it bent open. He pushed it open with his left hand—now
minus a thumb—and tumbled into the corridor, out of breath.
Blood and sweat trickled down himin equal measure—his whole body was drenched.
He crept down the corridor, crawling, and hid in the shadow of a pillar.
–Fleshie! Answer me, you bastard! Well! Flesh has been hacked! Well! Medi! Rare! Shit, answer
me, someone!
But the only answer he had was wild laughter froman unknown voice, echoing all around.
Confused, Mincemeat scanned the corridor to the left and to the right.
No one.
The laughter was happening inside Mincemeat’s head.
He tried to cut the circuits but found he couldn’t.
Tears welled up in his one remaining good eye.
Regression disorder, someone had called it.
The sounds of battle brought all the bad memories back to himin a haze of black smoke.
His helicopter had been shot down, and two days later he was taken captive. It was on the day of his
release, a year later, that he thought up his plan to transplant his wife’s eyes into his arm. His ex-wife,
actually—she had served him with divorce papers earlier in the year, when he was already at the limit of
human endurance, suffering all sorts of ill-treatment as a prisoner of war.
And his ex-wife had been giving him a look of the sincerest contrition every day—from his right
bicep.
Mincemeat tugged at his hair and ripped off his blood-soaked clothes, revealing all the eyes
transplanted onto his upper body.
He screamed a wordless screamas he forced himself up.
Brandishing his gun he pulled himself down the corridor, dragging his legs behind him.
The laughter in his head continued loud and shrill, driving himto distraction.
A pair of shutters slammed shut right in front of him—and behind him.
They were fireproof shutters—and odor-proof, made with the building’s particular requirements in
mind.
Mincemeat realized that he was once again trapped in a small space, cornered on all four sides.
“I’m gonna fuck you up good and proper, you little bitch! I’ll rip your eyeballs out and skull-fuck your
eye sockets!”
He was firing indiscriminately now, shooting everything he had in all four directions. Empty
cartridges flew in all directions, and the walls were remodeled under the barrage of bullets.
Just then he felt heat behind him. Mincemeat turned around.
The shutters were right in front of his eyes.
And frombeyond the shutters, more bullets came flying.
Both his knees were shot to pieces at almost exactly the same time, and he fell onto them, gritting his
teeth in agony.
As he collapsed both his elbows were blown off. His front arms drooped down, useless.
Every single blow was accurate to the extreme.
And in the twinkling of an eye—literally. For each of the eighteen pairs of eyes implanted into his
body were being targeted, methodically, ruthlessly. The liquid from the eyeballs was splashed around the
room, and the crystalline lenses of the eyes, intermingled with blood and tears, seeped across his body in
a thick soup.
Screams of despair filled the airtight chamber.
Still Mincemeat managed to stand, and even as blood and vitreous humor poured from his body, he
managed to find the strength to charge the shutters like a frenzied bull.
With a violent crash the shutters buckled under the impact of Mincemeat’s shoulders. Blood splattered
the duralumin surface, and as he peeled his hands off it a string of liquid lingered behind.
He charged the shutter again.
The gunfire had already stopped, but he was no longer interested in that.
Then, without warning, the shutters opened, retracting into the ceiling.
Mincemeat became vaguely aware of a small, shadowy figure.
Gathering the last of his strength he screamed and charged at the silhouette.
He became aware that the figure had multicolored hair dangling down over a pair of sunglasses.
By the time Mincemeat realized that he knew the face under the hair, the figure’s butter knife was
already embedded deep in his heart.
≡
Rare was overcome with shock, but he managed to wriggle himself out from under Mincemeat’s dead
body, which had collapsed on top of him.
He looked at his own knife, then screamed into the transmission device in the piercing voice of a little
girl.
–What’s going on? I thought you’d managed to trap the PI in there? Why is it little Minty? Do you
want me to come over there and kick the shit out of you? What were you thinking, Flesh, you stupid
fuckwit!
–Oh, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.
–What?
–That is the PI, right there.
Rare’s pale face darkened as the blood rose to his head.
–You fucking hacker! I’ll tie you down and have you gang-raped by pigs, you piece of shit!
Rare ranted on in this vein for a short while before bursting into tears of anguish and pulling the
Hutchinson Knife from Mincemeat’s chest.
“Oh, you poor, poor thing, little Minty, all because that fuckwit Flesh didn’t notice that we’d been
hacked…you poor, poor little darling.”
Suddenly there was a click in his ear, and a transmission began.
–Come in, Rare.
–Is that Well? The real one? Not the piece-of-shit hacker?
–Yeah, it’s me. Flesh is doing all he can to restore our secure line. What’s the situation over there?
–Little Minty…
–They got him?
Rare howled an unearthly wail as an answer.
–…I see. According to Medi, the target has run down to the basement along with the PI. They’re
protected by thick shutters—Flesh is trying to find a way to open them. You head downstairs and meet
us.
–Okay, Boss. Are we going to sell little Minty’s body of for parts too?
–No, we’re a band of brothers. We don’t sell our family members of . Those of us who want to use
Mincemeat’s parts have the right of first refusal. Right?
–Of course. That’s right, Boss.
Rare gripped his knife tightly and meandered down the corridor.
–I’ll see you downstairs in the basement, Boss. Could you beam me through the floor plans, please?
Rare’s eyes glinted red. Tears fell, blood-red under the reflection of the colored light.
He followed the route toward the basement, wobbling from side to side, all the strength drained from
his arms.
–Head into the room to your left, Rare. There’s a shortcut.
Rare did as Welldone said, opening the door on the left-hand side. He descended the stairs and
entered the room.
–Lock the door behind you.
Rare was about to do so, then came to with a jolt.
“What did you say?”
Rare looked around, grinding his teeth.
A large number of lockers lined the wall. Evidently some sort of storage room for corpses—and no
sign of anything that could resemble a shortcut.
Gripping the hilt of his knife even tighter, Rare glared at his new surroundings.
The electronic lock on the door behind himshut automatically.
Rare snapped back to look at what had happened, and he saw a ridiculously long release code flash up
on the display of the electronic lock.
He tried the numbers several times, but there was no trace of a response. He kicked the door with a
high-pitched whine.
“How dare you, you piece of shit! Where the hell am I? Flesh! Flesh!” He carried on kicking at the
door, apparently not even noticing that he was now yelling out loud.
–You’re in the Archaeozoic Era.
Well’s voice—no, a voice identical to Well’s—fromdeep inside his own ear.
–And now you’re in the Proterozoic Era. And now Paleozoic, Cambrian, Mesozoan, and finally the
Diluvial Epoch.
Rare spun around in surprise.
–You’re in a sea of fossils.
Countless numbers of spirals flashed before his eyes.
Ancient shells that had become one with stone were now appearing here and there and everywhere—
all around the mortuary, buried in the lockers—giving the distinct impression that they were in some sort
of prehistoric deep sea graveyard.
Rare jumped into action, bringing the knife in his right hand down on the nearest wall.
The metal melted where the blade touched it, and part of the locker slid to the floor with a thud.
The spiral shells kept on appearing and disappearing as before. Proof that there was a projector
somewhere, sending the images around the room.
“You and your fancy tricks! Come on out, you pig! I’m going to rip you to shreds and fuck the pieces!”
Screaming, Rare raised his right hand, now balled into a fist.
The unusually thick bracelet that he wore on his left wrist started jangling. Without warning it fired
strands of metal in every direction.
A crackling noise, and blue-white sparks followed.
Thin strands wound back into the bracelet, and the pieces of metal clinked and subsided.
In a few moments the lockers in Rare’s vicinity had been reduced to pieces, collapsing into heaps on
the floor.
“Wire whips.” A voice from the shadows of the lockers. “Wires that emit charged particles. What a
brutal weapon.”
Rare turned toward the voice and without any hesitation pointed the bracelet in its exact direction and
fired his weapon again.
A blue-white flash tore through the room, and with the sound of a dozen screaming whips, the fossils
were ripped to shreds over and over.
For a second he saw a white figure caught in the wires, but it disappeared back into the darkness.
A hit, a palpable hit…
But Rare’s facial expression tensed. The bracelet’s rewinding function failed.
The display on the bracelet was going haywire, flashing randomly, and it wouldn’t respond to Rare’s
instructions.
“Electromagnetic waves causing interference? Shit…” Rare tut-tutted, and was ready to throw the
bracelet away as useless when, without warning, it started moving of its own accord.
“Remote control?” Rare stood there, astonished, and could only watch as the wires snaked across his
left hand and wove an intricate path toward his body.
Rare shivered in terror, his face suddenly pale.
The very next moment the wires returned to the bracelet at breakneck speed, and Rare’s left arm—
from the elbow joint down—was diced like a steak, shredded into small pieces that dropped into a pile
on the floor.
A scream—neither quite froma man or a little girl—gushed forth fromRare’s mouth.
Rare tumbled into a heap, watching as the wires flew into the air once more before igniting in a mass
of sparks and disintegrating along with the bracelet.
Blood oozed slowly fromthe stump where Rare’s armused to be before its amputation.
“I’mgoing to kill you…” Rare’s voice was full of venombut was masked by the sound of gunfire.
A bullet pierced Rare’s shoulder with pinpoint accuracy.
Rare collapsed head over heels but used his remaining good hand to scramble for one of the pull-out
lockers, using it as a makeshift shield.
Even as he did so another bullet pierced his left leg.
Giving a half-crazed yell, Rare still managed to move quickly and precisely, using the pull-out locker
as a stepping-stone to get a better view of the figure hiding in the shadows, the figure that he had almost
hit earlier. He leapt at it.
Bullets flew through the air, scoring direct hits on his right elbow and knee.
But Rare didn’t stop. He descended on the figure, plunging his blade downward.
More sparks lit up the darkness.
The blade, blocked firmly by two guns being held in a crucifix shape.
Steel melted, and the sparks lit up the room, allowing Rare to finally see his tormentor’s face.
“Looks like he has an artificially reinforced bone structure. The odd gunshot here and there isn’t going
to be enough to bring himdown.”
A voice. Oeufcoque’s voice.
But the only person standing in front of Rare was that actress from the kiddie porn flick, all cherubic
and innocent.
Pressing the gun barrels away with his knife as hard as he could, Rare gritted his teeth and squeezed
out the name fromthe corner of his mouth. “Rune-Balot?”
At that very moment Balot relaxed and let go. She knew exactly what needed to be done to throw the
enemy off his footing.
She let the crossed guns slip downward to the right, and Rare stumbled.
She would have shot himin the back as he fell, but she couldn’t—the gun barrels were now half-fried.
Even as Rare collapsed to the ground he used his reinforced legs and loins to wrench his body around,
facing Balot.
The tip of his knife sped toward Balot’s flank.
More screeching and violent sparks.
Balot blocked the knife with her left-hand pistol. The incandescent blade ground into the body of the
gun.
Rare stared at the girl, a confused expression on his face, as if to ask What’s going on?
“Is she a PI who’s had her features surgically altered to make her look like her client?” Rare voiced
out loud, having decided that this was the only possible explanation.
Balot didn’t answer—she just thought back to Oeufcoque’s words, let go to get go.
She parried, sidestepping Rare like a toreador.
Rare’s feet tripped over themselves, and his blade made a red-hot arc that rent the air.
But he’d be back up, thrusting the knife right at her again, in just a moment.
Balot snarced the guns in both her hands.
The guns melted, fused together, and turned into a Hutchinson Knife, the exact same model that Rare
wielded.
Rare’s expression was a sight to behold—but he didn’t stop swinging his blade for a moment.
Balot switched the knife’s powers on and used her knife to block Rare’s blow.
The two highly magnetized blades collided, and an eruption of sparks burst in the space between Balot
and Rare. Two bodies went flying.
Rare braced himself for his landing, gripping his knife the other way round now, while Balot
consciously relaxed her muscles and flopped to the ground.
Rare brought his knife down on her, and Balot nimbly thrust her knife upward.
Incredibly, the two knifepoints met exactly, in an infinitesimally precise head-on collision.
The knife flew out of Rare’s hands.
It twisted violently in midair before plunging into Rare’s chest.
“Gah…” Rare moaned as he staggered backwards into the locker-lined wall.
The knife was buried deep in his chest.
Frantically he tried to gain purchase on the hilt to pull the blade out, but the impact of the
electromagnetic current caused his fingers to flail uselessly.
He slid down the wall into a heap.
The stench of burning flesh emanated fromhis every orifice.
Balot grimaced at the vile smell. She almost vomited.
Before long Rare’s mouth was gurgling, overflowing with blood. The fact that the blood wasn’t
evaporating was proof that his knife’s electromagnetismhad just about faded to nothing.
Rare was at death’s door but still conscious.
“Including you there are four intruders total, right?” Oeufcoque asked, and Rare looked at Balot with
an expression somewhere between rage and tears.
Then his jaw twisted in a strange way. He opened and closed his mouth, and a reedy voice just
managed to escape. “I’ll have you gang-raped by pigs…princess…”
A gruesome sneer descended over Rare’s pallid features and Oeufcoque cried out, urgently, “The
smell of death! Balot, retreat!”
Balot understood immediately. Telecommunication equipment and reinforced sinews weren’t the only
things implanted inside Rare’s body. She leapt away from him, snarcing Oeufcoque to cover her whole
body. Oeufcoque responded as rapidly as he could.
Light filled the room.
There was a thunderous roar and a blast of pressure.
For Balot this was the worst sort of scene imaginable—one that she had already experienced.
Rare’s body exploded. The lockers were crushed flat, the ceiling warped, and the images of the fossils
were wiped clean by the blazing inferno that swept the room and the corridor outside, blackening all the
walls.
A large elliptical object emerged from the rubble, bouncing with a plop, then rolling across the room.
It looked almost like a giant white rubber ball.
A crack opened from the top, and from it emerged the figure of Balot, hugging her knees tightly to her
chest. She jumped down to the ground.
The rubber ball-like object spat out a snow-white garment that started slithering back into place
around Balot’s body, hugging her tight, like leather bondage gear. Shock-absorbent material peeled off,
sprinkling the floor like a cracked eggshell.
“Balot, are you all right?”
Balot surveyed her surroundings, scowling, staring at the still-flickering flames.
–I’m never having my body go up in flames again. I hate it.
Then she kissed her silk gloves, showing her gratitude to a shell of her very own.
–So, where’s the last of our prey? The basement, theysaid?
“Don’t refer to themthat way—you’re not supposed to be enjoying yourself. Are you?”
Balot laughed.
–I don’t know if I am or if I’m not. All I know is that I’m doing just what you two taught me to
do.
“But I…”
–And I want to get better. Like that guyjust then. Close up.
“And the idea of hand-to-hand combat doesn’t scare you?”
–Whyshould it? It’s what I’ve got to do, right?
“Well, yes, but…”
–What a half-baked little thing you are, mysoft-boiled Oeufcoque.
Balot impishly called out his name, a play on words, playing with him, and kissed her other hand.
–Don’t you worry. Trust me. I’ll pull it off, she informed him, matter-of-fact, smiling.
03
Welldone reached the bottom of the stairs and arrived at the basement in front of the door to the
garage.
All of a sudden the whole building seemed to shake.
–What was that vibration?
Welldone raised his gun as he asked the question, but Flesh’s reply was bemused.
–It doesn’t make sense. The sensors just showed a heat reading large enough for an exploding
bomb, but it came from a room that had absolutely no heat readings up till now. No one could have
been in there. Maybe a trap that they set—something could have triggered it?
–But those vibrations tugged at my chest. Almost as if one of us had blown himself up.
Welldone was transmitting in a whisper now.
–Surely not, Well! After all, everyone’s heading right your way just this moment!
–Everyone…?
–Medi, Rare, Mincemeat…
Flesh hesitated.
–But according to Rare’s report, Mincemeat’s gone down, right, Flesh?
–That’s true…but all my circuits are secure now, so all our info should be completely safe from the
hacker.
–The enemy could have extracted Mincemeat’s transmitter from his head. The marker with
Mincemeat’s name—that’s him.
–I guess so…
–Or possibly—the same thing could have happened to the others too…
–Huh?
–Will this damn door still not open, Flesh?
–Wait a second longer—I’ve just got the lock of . Boy, this is some security system. I don’t get it; it
must be so inconvenient to go through all this on a daily basis…
Welldone ignored Flesh’s words and watched the barrier walls as they opened out to both sides.
As a wall, it really was quite something. According to their calculations it was up there with a full-on
nuclear shelter in terms of strength and impact resistance.
Welldone passed through the door and stood in the parking lot.
It looked like a perfectly run-of-the-mill lot, with spaces for about ten cars, delineated by thick pillars
and steel frames. There were two freight elevators lined up side by side, and one of these had its door left
open.
There was a set of shutters down at the car park entrance, but nothing compared to the incredible gate
he’d just come through.
The moment Welldone noticed the shutters at the end of the parking lot he stopped moving toward the
meeting point and swung around, looking back at the entrance he’d come in through.
It was a completely ordinary door.
Just a normal automatic door, and it even had a transom on top—the shutters on your average twentyfour-hour
convenience store were more solid.
–Our visual circuits have been hacked! Welldone yelled angrily at the back of his brain. He kicked
the door in frustration. One side of the door bent with a loud crack and its hinges flew off, clattering
down the corridor.
–It’s just an ordinary automatic door! I was standing there with my dick in my hands, waiting in
front of a door that I could have just pushed open! Flesh, give me a reading on the others’ positions!
A click, and Welldone saw an image of three blue flashing lights converging on him.
–Flesh?
No answer.
Welldone grabbed a gun in each hand and bent down, pressing his back to the wall.
The flashing dot representing Rare was coming down the stairs behind him. The flashing dot
representing Medium was in an elevator heading down to the lot. And the flashing dot representing
Mincemeat came toward him from the emergency stairs on the other side of the parking lot, swaying from
side to side as it descended.
“Specters, all of you…” Welldone muttered, a seething mass of indignation. “This is a disgrace! Rare!
Medi! Answer me if you’re there!”
Yelling now, he jumped up and ran toward the phantomfigure coming down the stairs.
He lifted his guns and fired.
The bullets sped into the darkness, embedding themselves into the walls and dislodging some plaster.
At the bottom of the staircase he spun around, firing simultaneously at the elevator and emergency
stairs.
The echo of the gunshots reverberated all around, and then the crisp sound of empty cartridges clinking
to the ground.
His bullets were soon spent. He slammed his back to the wall, creeping along bit by bit, expelling the
guns’ magazines. He opened up his coat and, in a well-rehearsed move, shoved the bases of his guns
toward the spare magazines that were clipped to his sides, pressing theminto his body.
He pulled, and the magazines clicked off, making a noise like the pin on a hand grenade.
Each hand pressed a switch on the grip, the breechblock slid into place automatically, and the bullets
were all ready to go.
“These babies have got your names on them! Show your asses!” he screamed, eyes scouring the
darkness.
He was answered by an earsplitting noise.
The sound of a radio.
The car stereo from one of the vehicles in the corner of the parking lot blared loudly, headlights
flashing. Its engine revved violently.
The blare fromthe radio turned into the furious drumbeat of electroclash.
The tires scorched the concrete, and the car charged toward Welldone.
Welldone jumped away fromthe wall.
The car plunged at him. The steering wheel spun around, cutting a tight turn, and the car bounded up
and down, chasing him, suspension grating, headlights flashing ominously.
“Fuck you!” Welldone fired shot after shot. He jumped onto the oncoming car, an abnormally powerful
jump, first onto the windshield and then onto the roof, shooting it to pieces before tumbling off.
The car smashed into the wall, its front half now totaled.
Welldone picked himself up and trained his guns on the driver’s seat.
But no one was inside.
Now a different car stereo came to life, headlights lighting up across the parking lot. Heavy metal this
time.
The engine rumbled, and the gas-powered car started closing in.
At ridiculous speed.
Welldone spun around and fired at the driver’s seat, but this car too had no driver.
He hid himself behind a pillar just in time. The car’s right headlight smashed straight into the pillar,
shattering—as if the car were trying to shave off a piece of the pillar as it pursued its prey.
Welldone took a running leap toward the next pillar, using it as a springboard to kick against and
change direction.
The car plowed on into the pillar.
Concrete flew everywhere. The steel rebar reinforcing the pillar were now wrapped around the front
of the car, merged into one mass.
The heavy metal stopped.
The drumand bass started.
Welldone landed on the ground and another car sped toward him.
Welldone screamed a wordless scream.
He jumped, firing at the driver’s seat again, but even as he did so the car caught his right leg, smacking
into himas it passed.
Welldone’s body pirouetted through the air and slammed into the ground.
The advancing car continued on its course, slamming into the back of the car embedded in the concrete
pillar.
Welldone pulled himself up and, with a dark expression, spat—saliva, blood, and smashed teeth.
He ejected his guns’ magazines and reequipped them with a fluid movement and stared out into the
darkness.
The second he clocked a white silhouette in the corner of his eye, he pointed the barrels of his guns
straight at it.
He pulled the triggers, and returning fire came straight back at him.
An impact in his right knee. The same leg that had been hit by the car. Welldone’s whole body jerked
to the right and collapsed.
He rolled with the blow, firing off as many shots as he could as he fell.
None reached their target.
Another bullet came at him, hitting the same knee again.
His bulletproof padding shattered, and a hole opened up in his reinforced body.
A pitiful moan crept out of Welldone’s mouth.
He reloaded his guns, bullets hurtling toward himas he did so, but none of the bullets hit him.
A suspicious expression appeared on Welldone’s face.
He wasn’t the target.
Welldone immediately realized what was going on. He gritted his teeth and sprang for cover on the
other side of the pillar.
That instant the bullets pierced the gas tank and the car went up in flames, causing a chain explosion
that brought the other car along for the ride.
A blast of flames engulfed Welldone, and his bulletproof coat was ripped to shreds as his body was
flung against the wall—like a doll that a spoiled child had long since tired of.
Even then, Welldone wouldn’t let go of the guns in his hands. He clambered to his feet, his whole
body pierced with fragments of unidentified shrapnel.
Breathing hard, he glared at the blazing fire and readied his guns again.
Without warning another volley roared forth from the flames. They were aimed for the gaps in his
now-ragged bulletproof coat.
His arms were hit, his shoulders were hit.
Desperately moving to change his position, he fired back, but the bullets just kept on coming.
A different type of bullet now, with an explosion of sparks on the surface of his bulletproof coat as it
slammed into his body. Charged particles flowed across his skin, frying all his exposed flesh.
Next it was a rifle shot. It sliced through his left shoulder blade and made a hole in the wall behind
him.
One by one, in quick succession, bullets of different calibers flew through his body.
Yelling what sounded like a war cry, Welldone peeled himself off the wall and charged at the
whirlpool of fire.
On the other side of the dark red smoke Balot’s face was a picture of delight as she fired her gun over
and over.
“That’s enough, Balot!”
An apparently inexhaustible supply of bullets emerged from a magical glove and disappeared again,
like a sigh in a thunderstorm.
She wore a satisfied expression, reacting to every roar and explosion as if to say That was me.
She was in control—overwhelmingly so.
The power to manipulate objects—and sentient beings—as she liked, bending themto her will.
This is it, she thought. This is the feeling that the men in my life have always been savoring.
Where previously she had been brutally oppressed, now she was experiencing the ultimate high.
Overwhelmed by a gust of pleasure so intense that it almost felt like pain, Balot grasped this all too
clearly.
“Stop it, Balot! That’s enough!” Her ears registered Oeufcoque’s shouts for the first time, even though
he’d been yelling at her all the while.
She hadn’t noticed because every time she had fired a shot, the shock wave of pleasure had numbed
her senses.
Now her aimfaltered. What’s the matter? she wondered.
Oeufcoque was trembling. He was shot through with an emotion that Balot, in her current state, simply
couldn’t comprehend.
“Balot, I’m begging you, you can’t misappropriate me so. It’s…abuse. Keep to our original tactics,
self-defense…”
–Don’t you worry.
Balot stopped firing one of her guns for a second to give it a fleeting kiss.
–I’ll be gentle with you. Leave it all to me.
Then she snarced her whole body with a sense of domination enough to make the blood turn sour.
“Stop i—”
This time she actually did block out Oeufcoque’s voice, forcefully silencing him.
She snarced both guns, turning theminto weapons she could use most easily.
Just then Welldone emerged fromthe smoke, both arms crossed in front of himto ward off the worst of
the flames as he leapt through them.
He rolled over the rubble, clocked Balot’s location, and stood up, his teeth bared. An expression
somewhere between fury and a smile.
For a moment they stared at each other in absolute silence.
Then they pointed their guns at each other.
Balot started laughing.
04
“It’s no good, I can’t get through!” Flesh wailed in despair. He was inside the shipping container on
the trailer.
“Well’s response—it’s as if he’s brain dead! And there are sound prints of over ten different weapons
recorded in his audio circuits…”
Boiled continued to stare at the monitor.
Flesh shouted. “How can there only be one of them? This is unbelievable? This PI Oeufcoque is a
freak! A sadist! He’s put Welldone in a coma and he’s shooting up the carcass with a pile of weapons!”
Boiled suddenly interrupted Flesh’s stream of words: “Fetishism is essentially compensation for a
sense of helplessness.”
Flesh stopped his wailing and stared at Boiled suspiciously.
Boiled spoke. “Those who fight in a way that’s subconsciously designed to compensate for their
feelings of inadequacy—Oeufcoque’s skillful enough to trap them into his way of fighting. It’s as I thought
—Oeufcoque is providing tactical guidance, and the client doesn’t really understand. This is a deviation
fromthe designated Life Preservation Program—it’s abuse.”
“What are you talking about? I thought there was only one enemy?”
“The enemy is abusing Oeufcoque. Before long Oeufcoque will be forced to retreat from the
battlefield in self-defense. The enemy will lose her ultimate weapon…”
Flesh’s wobbly figure recoiled at Boiled’s voice, sensing a dangerous undercurrent in his flat
monotone.
“It seems that the target has been somehow reinforced with the Doctor’s technological trickery. It
seems that Paradise technology—Scramble 09—has brought another monster into this world.”
“Paradise…what do you mean…”
But Boiled just took out a long gun fromhis breast pocket, and Flesh swallowed the rest of his words.
It was a giant silver revolver, and it looked strong enough to pierce the armor on a tank.
The sort of gun that only a being with extraordinary physical strength could wield properly.
Boiled opened the cylinder to confirmthat it was fully loaded before snapping it shut again.
“A…are you going to go yourself, sir…?”
Boiled turned to look at Flesh and nodded.
“Then please be as quick as you can—I think Well’s in serious trouble.”
Boiled stood up and took the spare key to the trailer fromoff the wall where it was hanging.
Flesh watched him, wary.
“What are you going to do with this trailer?”
“Your gang has expended its usefulness. I wanted to gauge how Oeufcoque’s new user would react
when faced with danger. Now, before long, Oeufcoque and his user will be separated forever. I got what I
came for.”
He cocked the trigger of the gun, and it thudded into place with a heavy click.
He pointed the muzzle of the gun at Flesh, casually, almost off-hand.
Flesh trembled.
Boiled pulled the trigger.
The gun roared, and a hollow space appeared between Flesh’s shoulders.
Behind him a gaping hole opened up in the wall of the container, exposing it to the elements. The
whole trailer rocked fromside to side, and the eye-watering smell of gunpowder filled the room.
Flesh’s body slumped to the ground. He had been destroyed utterly from his chest upward, taking the
machinery behind him along for the ride. His cloak had come open, and his fat wrists could just be seen
peeping through fromunderneath the mass of exposed breasts.
Boiled reloaded the single empty chamber with another bullet and exited the container.
He walked around the front of the container, climbed up into the driver’s seat, and inserted the key into
the ignition.
“I’mcoming. I’mgoing to acquire you, Oeufcoque. You’re a tool, after all.”
He twisted the key and the engine rumbled into action.
Boiled pressed down on the accelerator.
“Prepare to be fucked up, you bitch!” Welldone shouted. It sounded almost like an order.
Both of his hands pulled down on his triggers. Balot did the same, simultaneously. Shots flew in
unceasing rapid succession. The bullets smashed into each other in midair, sometimes vaporizing each
other, other times ricocheting all across the parking lot.
Teeth bared, Welldone moved in toward Balot as he fired. Balot stepped to her right. Welldone
moved with her, mirroring her movements. The hail of bullets continued incessantly until one side
stopped. Welldone’s guns were both empty.
They both jumped behind pillars, but Welldone was the only one to reload.
As for Balot, as soon as she was in the shadows she snarced the guns in both her hands and fused them
together.
The two guns melded together and turned into a single giant gun. Her gloves integrated perfectly into
the grip, which formed the ideal shape for her hands: right hand to support and left hand to fire.
She burst fromthe shadows of the pillar, flanking Welldone and pointing the gun right at him.
Welldone screamed an inhuman cry. He had been trying to lift his right armto fire, and now it was hit.
A shot to the back of his hand, a shot to the barrel, a shot to the firing hammer, and a shot to his elbow.
A streamof bullets.
The ammunition—the magazine that he had just used to reload the gun—exploded in his grip. The gun
was blown away, and with it all the fingers on his right hand.
Flying fragments splattered into the side of Welldone’s face, painting it in shades of black and red.
Still Welldone thrust his left gun out, unloading half the bullets in the gun in an instant.
Balot didn’t even try to dodge. She shot down only the bullets flying toward her face, trusting her
perfectly white garment to deflect the rest.
Two blows to her chest, one to her hips. But the impact was almost completely absorbed, and the
bullets didn’t even reach her flesh.
This is all you are. This is the best you can do. She felt like shouting at him at the top of her lungs.
She wanted to break himcompletely, thoroughly abuse and disparage him. It was what she needed to do—
and indeed she couldn’t think of anything else she should be doing.
Balot walked straight up to Welldone and fired at himwith all the rising passions in her body.
Not a single bullet missed.
She hit Welldone’s legs, his shoulders, his stomach.
–No, you prepare to be fucked up!
Balot screamed in a non-voice.
–I’m gonna fuck you up!
Her thoughts flowed through Oeufcoque and were spat out the other end as bullets.
–Fuck you!
Welldone lay there, back to the pillar, arms and legs splayed open passively.
And when, in a last-ditch effort, he tried one final time to lift the gun that was still gripped in his left
hand, Balot unloaded into his crotch, tearing it to shreds with another hail of bullets.
Frothing at the mouth, Welldone fired off a single shot in the wrong direction.
Gun smoke enshrouded the scene like tobacco smoke in a poolside bar that had no ventilator fan.
Empty cartridges from Balot’s gun bounced out onto the floor rhythmically, as if they were playing a
cheerful song.
Welldone slithered down the pillar, staining it red.
Balot continued to pump bullets into him even as he collapsed. With deadly accuracy she manipulated
the bullets, manipulated Welldone, and manipulated Oeufcoque.
Drenched in sweat, she stayed her hand for a moment. The muscles in her wrists were throbbing,
numb. The impact fromfiring the gun was now being absorbed by her, not her dress.
She realized that she could no longer hear Oeufcoque’s voice, and that it was she herself who was
suppressing it by force, as if she hadn’t known what she had been doing.
Balot let go and released all the power that had been building up in her body.
Her eyes prickled with smoke and she couldn’t see well.
She tried to snarc the lights and the air conditioning in the parking lot but realized that most of the
circuits had stopped working.
Fires blazed all around.
Balot took a step back to survey a vista of rubble. The parking lot had been reduced to ruins; the
ceiling had caved in where the pillars had been destroyed, and the contents of rooms on the first floor
were strewn around the place.
The Doctor’s research lab, too, thrown into the mix. All of a sudden Balot’s eyes fell on an aquarium
that she had seen before. At the back of her mind, Balot remembered the Doctor’s words—that he was
trying to find a way to regenerate her voice box.
The aquariumwas obliterated, its burnt-out fragments intermingled with jagged shards of concrete.
The smoke cleared abruptly.
For almost the first time, Balot properly registered the appearance of her assailant.
His bullet-riddled body stirred.
The body that she had thought of only as a target—she had completely forgotten that he was a living,
breathing thing.
The multitude of dark red wounds that punctured his body reminded her of this fact.
All of a sudden, an incredible, unbearable nothingness pressed in on her frombehind.
Dreadful footsteps.
Sensing the air, snarcing—no use.
–Oeufcoque! Balot cried out to the gun. A heartfelt cry, different fromany that had gone before.
–Oeufcoque, please answer me! Help me, Oeufcoque!
There was impatience in her plea now. Like she was trying to un-crush something that she had
unthinkingly squeezed to pieces.
Balot called out Oeufcoque’s name as if she were trying to piece back together a broken egg.
The gun in her hands warped into a crooked shape.
The gloves that had been melded together now split apart, and from that gap a bundle of fluffy honeycolored
fur emerged.
–Oeufcoque.
Gwah…a slight moan. Oeufcoque’s limbs twitched, convulsing, and he writhed in Balot’s palms in
agony.
Like the man he had just shot.
Without warning, Oeufcoque was violently sick.
A large volume of vomit spewed from his mouth, more than seemed possible from his tiny body, and
dripped through Balot’s gloved fingers.
–Oeufcoque? Oeufcoque? What’s the matter?
Balot’s eyes filled with tears.
Oeufcoque vomited again.
He spoke in a raspy voice, as if he were wringing something out of his body in between his heavy
breathing. “Let go of me.”
Balot didn’t understand what he meant by those words. Rather, she tried to hug him tighter to her than
ever.
As she did so, Oeufcoque twisted his head around to try and shake her off. “Please don’t touch me…
I’mbegging you. Let me down, please…”
Gwah…he was sick again.
Balot stood there like an idiot. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do—and Oeufcoque, the
very person who was supposed to tell her, was frantically trying to escape fromher hands.
Desperate now, she tried to pin Oeufcoque down, tried to stop his limbs fromwrithing around.
“Stop it! Leave me alone!”
Balot shook her head, determined. Her eyes were soon overflowing with tears.
She desperately searched for an escape route from the horrible feeling that overwhelmed her, the
feeling of being plunged into a pit of darkness, and Oeufcoque was the only person she could think of that
could save her.
Oeufcoque vomited still more copiously, then collapsed limp and senseless.
Balot stood there silently, waiting for Oeufcoque to speak.
She was more scared than she had ever been. She felt like she had been turned down, with stinging
words of rejection thrown into her face.
Tears flowed, but all she could do was wait.
But when he did finally speak, it was to tell her something completely different.
“He’s coming…” Oeufcoque spoke in the reediest of voices. “Go to the roof. The Doctor will…
quickly.”
Confused, Balot tried to work out what he meant. And also how she could best apologize to
Oeufcoque. Her thoughts flew fromone place to another.
Then she noticed the presence of something coming toward her—something large.
She raised her head. Her tears had stopped.
An incredible mass of something was charging toward the shutters at the other end of the car park.
A threat.
Balot snarced Oeufcoque as a reflex action.
Oeufcoque let out a cry of pure anguish.
A loud crunching noise silenced his cry.
The shutters exploded open, and a giant trailer rushed into the parking lot. It smashed through a number
of pillars, a wake of sparks behind it, zigzagging across the space and scraping up against the walls,
before finally running aground on the rubble.
The coupling connecting the vehicle to the container split, and the giant container was thrown toward
the pillar where Welldone lay prostrate.
Sandwiched between the concrete and the giant silver container, Welldone’s body burst like a
balloon.
Balot stared at the monstrosity that had just emerged from the blazing inferno, still holding Oeufcoque,
her back to the wall.
The air was fizzing with tension.
She could see a man getting up fromthe driver’s seat.
She heard the door swing open, and a man came toward her, walking over the flame-flickering rubble.
“Run away…” A cracked voice emerged fromOeufcoque’s lips.
But Balot stood still, staring at the overwhelming figure of the man. Not out of fear. Compared to what
had just happened to Oeufcoque, she wasn’t afraid in the slightest.
On the contrary, she felt excited—uplifted, even.
The flames fromthe fires lit up the man’s features.
The blank features of the giant man.
The man who had threatened Balot on the roadside, at the courtroom.
His name was Dimsdale-Boiled, and he was stepping over the body of the man he had just crushed and
coming right at her, an enemy and a true threat.
“She knows nothing about weapons, Oeufcoque. You shouldn’t allow yourself to be used by such a
person,” Boiled said.
Oeufcoque pulled himself up in Balot’s palm. “So, after sending your hit men you’re going to interfere
directly, are you? You’re no different from these assassins yourself, Boiled. Forever absorbed in your
own private vendetta.”
“Come back to me, Oeufcoque. You deserve to be utilized more effectively,” said Boiled.
Balot glared at Boiled.
Boiled wasn’t even looking at Balot.
“Ef ectively, you say! Have you forgotten what you did with me?” Oeufcoque was shouting now. A
voice steeped in anger, one that Balot had never heard before.
“It’s all the same, Oeufcoque. That little girl’s hand, my hand—we’re all looking for exactly the same
thing.” Boiled’s eyes were so dark he could have been asleep.
Oeufcoque shouted, “No! This girl’s different!”
Hearing his words Balot suddenly felt extremely sad.
Oeufcoque whispered to her. “You have to run away, Balot. In this sort of situation, discretion is the
better part of valor…”
Balot stared straight ahead at Boiled.
–No. I’m going to stay and fight. I don’t want to run away.
“It’s no use, this guy is…”
–This person is a threat to me. I need to fight him.
Boiled slipped his hand inside his jacket.
“Boiled, wait…”
Balot reflexively wrapped Oeufcoque around her fingers and snarced him.
“Balot!”
–Please. Try and understand myfeelings.
The man standing in front of Balot’s eyes had once terrified her so completely that she had lost all
hope of living.
Now, standing in front of this man—and despite Oeufcoque’s words—she simply couldn’t run away.
She knew that if she fled now, she’d never be able to stand up for herself again.
But that didn’t necessarily mean that she had made the right decision.
Pinned down by the sheer force of Balot’s will, Oeufcoque turned. At the same time Boiled pulled out
his gun. A six-round revolver—and a palm-sized artillery gun.
It fired, savagely.
Balot fired into the round’s trajectory.
There was a vibrant display in midair, and Balot’s bullet disintegrated as it hit her opponent’s, but her
bullet did succeed in deflecting the shell’s path.
An instant later the bullet slammed into the wall behind her, echoing oppressively through the parking
lot. The bullet seemed powerful enough to cut straight through the wall.
Boiled fired again.
Balot saw the angle of the muzzle the second before the shot went off and jumped sideways to dodge
the bullet.
A crevice opened in the wall behind her, and the air swirled around from the scorching trail of heat
that the bullet left in its wake.
Balot fired back at him, frantically, as she ran.
Boiled didn’t budge but fired again, unconcerned.
He was different from any opponent she’d faced before. Every single shot of his was careful,
potentially instantly fatal. The pressure was tsunami.
One false move and every molecule of her could be wiped off the face of this earth.
In order to try and escape the unbearable oppression bearing down on her, Balot ran in the direction
that made it hardest for her opponent to follow, and she fired back at him as she ran, desperately trying to
distract him, but there was no change in Boiled’s rhythm as he continued firing, apparently unconcerned
by anything.
Something was wrong.
Carefully watching her opponent, Balot slipped behind a pillar. Another bullet came at her, slamming
into the pillar with such impact that she had to suppress the reflex to jump and run screaming.
And that was when Boiled’s gun ran out of bullets.
Balot leapt out frombehind the pillar and fired as many shots as she could at him.
But Oeufcoque could no longer contain the shock from the recoil inside himself, and both Balot’s
hands throbbed in pain.
Boiled was coolly reloading his revolver, and he showed no inclination to move even as her volley
flew at him.
Rather, it was her bullets that moved.
Their trajectories strayed, and they hit the rubble behind Boiled in a trail of sparks.
Overcome with surprise, Balot stopped firing.
Boiled looked at Balot’s face. “So, no one told you anything about me?” He spoke, flicking his gun
sideways. With a vigorous click the chamber slotted back into place in his revolver. “I’m a product of the
forbidden arts, just like you—another monster.” Boiled’s expression was now twisted in a curious sneer.
Like a smile that peered out at the world fromthe bottomof the abyss.
Cold sweat drenched Balot’s body. Her knees trembled, and her gun shook.
Boiled’s armcame up. The giant gun barrel was, once again, trained casually on Balot.
Her stomach lurched.
Before she even had time to think Balot found herself flying for cover behind another pillar.
The pillar was hit by a blow that shook it to the core.
Balot engaged her abilities. Her last chance, her last resort.
A car engine revved up in the corner of the parking lot.
Snarced by Balot, the car sped toward Boiled, tires screeching.
Even then, Boiled made no move.
For the first time ever, the fear of battle weighed heavily on Balot’s shoulders. Still entrenched behind
the pillar, gasping for air, she plunged the car toward Boiled with all her might.
Without warning Boiled disappeared abruptly fromBalot’s spatial perception.
The car sped over the rubble, flew through the air, and smashed into the side of the container.
Reflexively Balot emerged frombehind the pillar to survey the results.
She felt Boiled’s presence with every nerve ending in her body. She understood immediately what had
happened. She just couldn’t believe it.
Boiled was on the ceiling.
Balot looked up in astonishment, and Boiled was standing there, looking down at her.
Even the hemof his coat was upside down, fluttering gently in the breeze.
Silently Boiled started walking across the ceiling. Avoiding the pipes and electric cables. And
pointing his gun at Balot.
“Run away…” Oeufcoque’s distressed voice.
Snapping out of it, Balot twisted her body out of the way.
Or so she thought, but all of a sudden she felt an impact frombehind. She was instantly winded.
Balot pitched forward, tumbling, and felt a bullet slam into her breastbone. The impact wasn’t fully
absorbed by her outfit, and she could feel and hear her bones creak under the pressure as her internal
organs were compacted.
Balot’s body was flung into the air and only stopped when she collided with the wall a few meters
away. A bucketful of saliva spilled fromher lips, coating her thighs.
She had just barely managed to avoid dropping her gun.
Out of breath, she stood up, leaned her shoulders against the wall, and saw the figure of Boiled in the
distance.
Boiled was stepping down from the ceiling and walking down a pillar. As if he were still walking on
the ground. Then, right leg still on the pillar, he extended his other leg to the floor of the garage. Then he
alighted onto the ground with both legs and stared at Balot in silence.
Fear drove Balot onward. She fired the gun in her hands over and over with reckless abandon.
Boiled didn’t budge.
None of the bullets completed their course; they just flew off into the ground or the walls.
And then the gun stopped firing completely.
It was as if something were entwined around the trigger.
A creaking sound echoed inside the gun—inside Oeufcoque.
The trigger stopped moving at all, and Oeufcoque’s groans could be heard fromthe gun in her hands.
“It seems the estrangement is now complete.” Boiled’s cold voice froze Balot to the spot. “A selfdefense
mechanismagainst those who abuse himas a tool. Oeufcoque has rejected you.”
His words struck Balot like lightning.
The words were more painful to hear than any of the filthy insults she’d had hurled at her.
This was even more terrible, even more humiliating, and—worst of all—even further beyond the
possibility of redemption.
Boiled raised his gun.
A voice came at her frombeyond the darkness of the muzzle, frombeyond the machinelike intent to kill
—a voice that said This is all your fault.
Bad girl.
You’re a bad girl.
Balot was overcome with despair and the fear of being sent back to that awful place.
You were trying too hard to climb the stairway to heaven, the Mardock, that you slipped and lost
your footing.
This was her despair.
–I don’t want to die.
She was crying.
She didn’t want to die, not with her heart feeling like this.
Boiled’s fingers moved mechanically, just about to pull back the trigger, when:
“You’re wrong, Boiled…” Oeufcoque spoke.
Boiled’s expression hardened.
At that very same moment, there was a series of clicks frominside Oeufcoque—inside the gun.
The sound of jammed cogs falling into place.
Boiled’s eyes opened wide, and he pulled his trigger.
But an instant before the roaring noise emerged, Balot had reflexively—and correctly—snarced
Oeufcoque.
The bullet that sped from Balot’s gun intercepted Boiled’s bullet perfectly, causing it to ricochet into
the ceiling. All the walls reverberated fromthe impact, and concrete fragments rained down.
Balot aimed at Boiled, ready to fire back, but—“Stop it. It’s useless, Balot.”
The gun fired of its own accord, unloading in a different direction, not giving Balot any say in the
matter. All the bullets passed by Boiled harmlessly.
And that was exactly what the gun was aiming for.
The bullets pierced the gas tank of the car that had just smashed into the wall behind Boiled.
A moment later the gas tank swelled up—and exploded.
A blast of flame and metal shrapnel swallowed him.
Or so it seemed, but a bubble of clean air had emerged frominside the smoke.
Boiled emerged from it, apparently unscathed, standing still amid the melee of the firestorm, waiting
silently.
Before long he noticed that no one was by the wall anymore.
While his attention was diverted by the blast, Balot had disappeared.
Boiled looked toward the elevators.
Seeing the display lights, he realized that one of the two elevators was heading upward.
“Why? Why do you allow your user to abuse you…” Boiled spoke in a low voice, directed at the
flashing light.
“Oeufcoque.”
As the elevator light stopped at the roof, Boiled headed straight for the emergency staircase.
His eyes glinted with an uncanny, otherworldly fury.
05
–I’m sorry, Oeufcoque, I’m sorry. Please don’t go anywhere. Stayin my hands.
Oeufcoque’s yelps of pain echoed around the cramped elevator box.
However much Oeufcoque might have been suffering previously, the pain was now even worse.
After saving Balot and showing her an escape route—this elevator—Oeufcoque had been overcome
by a new wave of convulsions. His limbs were quivering worse than ever, and he was in a state of
paroxysm, just as when he had tried to escape fromBalot earlier.
He threw up again.
–I’m sorry, Oeufcoque, I’m so sorry.
Inside the lift Balot was folded into a fetal position.
She held Oeufcoque up as if he were broken, her shoulders shaking with sobs.
–Don’t go anywhere, Oeufcoque. Don’t leave me behind. I’m begging you. Please.
Now, finally, Balot understood Oeufcoque’s feelings.
The dreadful thing that had happened.
She had promised to stop when he said no—and she had broken this promise in the worst way
imaginable.
She never thought that she’d be capable of such a thing. Why me?
Or so she wanted to think.
She was the one who had always been betrayed.
She was the one who had always had to wonder why and worry about what exactly it was that she’d
done wrong, turning it over in her mind in minute detail.
She had never imagined that the shoe could be on the other foot.
That she could be the one to break a promise, to make the other person suffer.
The very idea that she could hurt someone who trusted her—it had never even occurred to her.
“It’s a type of self-defense mechanism, a bit like hyperacute rejection of transplanted organs. An
automated response to when my user becomes my abuser…” Oeufcoque spoke between breaths as he lay
prostrate. “It’s due to my fear of being disposed of…but don’t worry…I’ll get over it soon.”
The elevator suddenly stopped.
The doors creaked open and revealed a vast expanse of darkness.
From within the small box bathed in orange light, they could see the windswept concrete rooftop and
the night vista of the city sprawling out below themin the distance.
Balot stared out at the view in silence, knees still to the ground.
She had no idea what she should do.
She had no idea what the right thing to do was.
She shouted in an empty whistle of a voice.
It sounded like a draft in a wind tunnel.
“…Sorry about all that. I’mbetter now,” Oeufcoque said. He raised himself up gently and looked up at
Balot.
Large tears still poured out of her eyes.
She wanted to say something.
She wanted to explain all her feelings to him.
But in her deep confusion she wasn’t able to say anything, and the best she could do was try and stop
her confusion frompouring out. She didn’t want to hurt Oeufcoque anymore.
“Try and stand up. It’s no use staying here. Let’s get out of this box.”
Balot took a deep breath. Nodding repeatedly, she stood up and stepped out of the elevator.
She wiped her tears away with one hand, carrying Oeufcoque along ever so carefully with her other.
There was nothing on the roof.
Nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide.
The cold night air only reinforced Balot’s sense of isolation and helplessness.
“…We need to buy ourselves a little more time. See if you can close all the shutters in the emergency
staircase and turn off the elevators.”
Balot manipulated the building’s security system, snarcing it as Oeufcoque had suggested.
But she was under no illusions that this would be enough to stop that man forever. No trap or obstacle
was ever going to be able to do that.
“If it comes down to it he’ll just walk up the building’s walls. Keep a lookout for him.”
–He was walking earlier. On the ceiling and the walls.
Just remembering that scene sent an involuntary shiver down her spine.
–What is he, exactly? My bullets had no effect on him either.
“PGF—PseudoGravitational Float, it’s called—developed to give soldiers the power of
independent movement in space,” Oeufcoque explained. “Powerful magnetic field generators are
implanted into your brain and limbs, allowing you to create an artificial gravitational pull in any direction
you want. This omnidirectional gravity field allows you to walk along any surface you want—or to
deflect the path of any bullets. The reason he can use that enormous revolver is also due to his PGF.
Boiled was the prototype—or, you could say, the first victim—of the technology, just before Scramble 09
was enacted.”
Oeufcoque’s eyes were downcast now, and he groaned. “I should have told you all of this before
today…I really messed this one up.”
–Why didn’t you? Because you used to be friends?
“Whenever he decides to act, he gives off a characteristic odor. The cold, harsh smell of a mercenary
going to war.”
He raised his head and returned Balot’s gaze.
“As long as I could avoid it, I didn’t want to have to speak about him—or how his body worked—
behind his back. In the same way that I wouldn’t want to talk about your past or your body in front of other
people.”
Balot’s eyes softened.
–You’re so thoughtful.
That was all she said. That was all she could think to say. And then she thought of herself, and how she
had forgotten about his thoughtfulness, and she was ready to start crying again.
But then she heard a gunshot down the stairs. The sound of shutters being ripped apart.
She hadn’t bought herself much time.
–Where should I go? There’s nowhere left!
Balot was at the edge of the roof now, hands on the iron railings that ran around the perimeter.
“The Doctor should be here. Close by. Can’t you sense him?” Balot looked up at the night sky. The
clouds drifted slowly, revealing the sharp crescent of the moon.
She sensed something froma distance that was gradually coming toward her.
“As soon as he received my emergency distress signal, the Doctor started heading back. He can’t be
more than a few minutes away.”
Balot stared at the sky. She thought of an angel descending from the heavens. Just as she had fantasized
whenever times were bad at the institute. The angelic visitor who would swoop down out of nowhere and
rescue her.
As these memories came flooding back, she felt even more keenly the terrible things that she had done
while using Oeufcoque.
Shameful, wretched things.
“Balot…” Oeufcoque called out nervously.
Balot spun around to face the emergency stairs.
The gunfire was getting closer now.
“Do it. Use me to protect yourself.” Oeufcoque’s little body trembled in Balot’s hand.
–I don’t want to hurt you anymore.
“I’ll be fine. I won’t get hurt.”
Balot’s expression tightened.
Right now, all she wanted to do was repent, confess to God, to anything.
All she wanted was to have someone say All is forgiven.
“He’s coming. He’s even faster than I thought.” Oeufcoque’s voice was harsh now.
She could sense the man’s footsteps approaching the door at the top of the stairwell.
Tears fell fromher face.
She reached out to Oeufcoque—and snarced him.
He turned with a squelch.
A reassuringly heavy object formed in her hands.
An object with a gun barrel bigger than any she had ever used before.
A gun that would stand up to Boiled’s weapon.
This was Oeufcoque’s will—and a physical response to the danger that was drawing near. And it was
customized perfectly for the situation. The grip of the gun turned, squishing into place as a belt that bound
the gun to Balot’s left hand. A belt that wrapped her tight. Then it moved on to cover her wrist, with metal
contraptions designed to deflect the force of the recoiling gun away fromher body.
Bullets slid into place inside the metal frame, and the firing hammer cocked automatically.
And then she knew that her opponent was standing on the other side of the door.
She also knew that he’d be expecting her to be standing there, gun trained on him. She sensed his
presence.
The air was pregnant with tension, and an unbearable heart-rending silence flowed all around.
Then the silence was abruptly shattered.
The first gunshots all sounded as one. An overwhelming number of bullets sprang into action. In that
one instant, Balot fired off everything that she could.
Gunfire echoed all around, along with the piercing metallic sound of bullets clashing in midair.
A number of Balot’s bullets had managed to pierce the cannonball-like round that emerged from
Boiled’s revolver, shooting it down.
The overpowering smell of charred metal spread, and a dense cloud of smoke filled the area.
When her opponent stopped firing, Balot too paused to eject her magazine, and with it the searing heat
that had been building up in her gun.
When she started firing again she could feel the shock from the blasts vibrating in her arms. Balot
realized what Oeufcoque had been doing—suppressing all his own instincts to reject her, pushing them
deep inside himself so that he could fill himself with bullets and be useful to her, protect her.
In turn, Balot carried on snarcing Oeufcoque, helping him to continue. Even as the trigger was pulled
and the electronic pulses caused the bullets to fly out the barrel.
She twisted Oeufcoque’s heart and pressed down, hard.
Balot’s eyes brimmed with tears, and her vision blurred; she fired by sensation alone.
In her sorrow she felt herself go weak in the legs, and her knees suddenly buckled. She crumpled into
a heap, her rump now on the rooftop.
A pathetic sight.
Still sitting, she carried on shooting, pushing the gun out in front of her.
From beyond the door, now torn to shreds, Boiled’s bullets came at her, relentless, oppressive,
crushing.
Balot squeezed Oeufcoque tight and raised the level on her snarc up another notch, firing again and
again with a face streaked with tears.
She knew that if she didn’t, she’d be dead.
How pitiful and pathetic she was, doing all this just to try and save her own life.
Suddenly there was an explosion right beside her, and part of the roof opened up. Balot realized that
her aimwas starting to falter. And there was nothing she could do about it.
The melee was disrupting her breathing, and her internal rhythmwas going haywire.
Unable to withstand the pressure, her emotions were in disarray. Her breast was choked with sorrow,
and she saw just how much stronger Boiled was.
Her aimwas all over the place now.
The figure of her opponent grew blurrier still.
No longer able to sense where her opponent was aiming, she was gripped by terror, and—without
thinking—scrambled for cover, awkwardly trying to get to her feet.
A life-threatening mistake.
Balot realized that she had been shot at.
The bullet flew straight for her face.
Then it happened, in an instant. The gun in her hand jumped up of its own accord.
The gun covered her face, turning with a squelch into a thick slab of shock-absorbent material.
Such was Oeufcoque’s will.
The bullet hit Oeufcoque. The belt fixed to her hand was blown away, and the gun flew from her
fingers and smashed into Balot’s face. Her skin tore, and blood poured out fromher wound.
Overcome by dizziness in her head, she collapsed, as if she’d just been flung backward.
The gun had—only just—saved Balot’s life, but in doing so it was blown to pieces itself.
One of the fragments squelched its way back into the form of Oeufcoque, who gave another cry of
anguish.
At the corner of her field of vision Balot saw the golden-haired mouse.
Desperately pulling herself up, she extended her hand toward him.
In turn Oeufcoque suppressed his suffering with all his might and tried to jump back into Balot’s hand.
A deadly bullet flew straight at them. Packed with cold, vicious intent.
Paralyzed by fear, Balot couldn’t even move—she was petrified on the spot.
But the bullet wasn’t aimed at her.
The bullet exploded right in front of her eyes.
The concrete rooftop flew up along with the target. The concrete fragmented and scattered, and a soft
bundle of something came flying toward her, bouncing off against her chest.
Oeufcoque’s flesh and red blood splattered across Balot’s white clothes.
“Balot…” Oeufcoque’s voice.
Mind blank, Balot tried to find the source of the voice. “Make me transform into something, quickly.”
The voice was frail, but full of urgency.
Finally Balot found Oeufcoque. He was the bundle that had just smashed into her chest and bounced
off.
The sight of himfelt like a hammer blow to the side of her head.
Oeufcoque’s lower body was shredded to pieces, and he was crawling along, armoutstretched toward
her.
Balot screamed.
But, of course, all that leaked out of her mouth was a dry whistling sound.
Crying, she hastily scooped Oeufcoque up.
That same instant a bullet came flying at her.
She felt a thud in her upper right arm. For a moment she thought her whole arm had been torn off, so
powerful was the impact.
Another blow followed to her flank. Her body flew through space. The air stuck in her throat and she
lost all sense of up and down.
Her consciousness receded into the distance, but her Made- by-Oeufcoque shell protected her to the
end.
She slammed into the iron perimeter fence, shoulder first. Thrown down onto the roof, she banged her
temple against the concrete, jolting her back into consciousness.
Blood poured from the wound on her forehead, seeping into her right eye so that everything she saw
appeared coated by a bright red film.
She was now a sitting duck. But no more bullets came at her.
Instead, the giant man emerged frombehind the bullet-riddled door.
Smoothly, as if he had all the time in the world, Boiled walked toward her.
“This gun is you.” Boiled stopped a little way away from her. “This gun is what you were, back then.
You were made to annihilate, to bring nothingness to this world. Just like me. That’s the ultimate answer
to all those debates about what we are.”
He was standing a good distance away. A good distance to fire words off from, and a good distance to
fire bullets off from.
Boiled opened the cylinder of his revolver. Smoking cartridges scattered across the roof. His trigger
fingers, and the fingers that he was using to load more cartridges into his revolver, were all covered with
burns and blisters.
The cylinder of his revolver clicked back into place.
Gripping his red-hot gun, he turned the muzzle toward Balot.
Balot’s left hand touched something soft. Without even looking at it, she knew exactly what it was.
Without even looking at it, she knew exactly what it was trying to do. She felt his blood, slippery in her
fingers. She closed her eyes, wanting to get a better feel of its warmth.
She heard the firing hammer of Boiled’s gun clicking back.
That very same moment, Balot brandished the gun in her hand—the turned Oeufcoque.
Two gunshots fired simultaneously, echoing in the night, sparks flying through the darkness.
The two bullets collided in midair, in the space between Balot and Boiled, smashing each other into
pieces.
Balot felt a warmsensation in her hands.
Blood flowed fromthe gun, covering her hands and dripping to the floor.
Crying, Balot squeezed the bleeding gun tight, pulling the trigger over and over.
In order not to die—in order to survive.

Chapter 4SPARK01It was four in the afternoon.Balot was stirring stew in a saucepan, but she suddenly stopped. Oeufcoque was standing on thecounter sniffing the air coming in through the ventilation system. Balot poked Oeufcoque with her freehand.Agh, that tickles. Oeufcoque covered his sides.But his nose was still to the ventilator.He spoke with just a trace of nerves. There's an unusual smell.Balot poked at the stew. She lifted up the wine, bringing the neck of the bottle toward her.I'mnot talking about the seasoning.Balot placed the bottle down and leaned her head toward him.There's a smell of carnival. A group of people rejoicing, about to go to a party, or a festivalormaybe to war. Oeufcoque spoke and sniffed the air again. There's also the faint, bitter smell of fear. Asif someone has been killed.Oeufcoque looked at Balot, apprehensive. But Balot was no longer afraid of this sort of thing. Sheturned the heat down and entwined Oeufcoque around her fingers.Enemies?Probably. Check communication lines with the outside world, will you?Balot put Oeufcoque on top of her right hand and touched the intercomon the wall with her left hand ashe'd requested.She snarced the receiver without lifting it, putting a call out to the police escort that was staked out inthe neighborhood.The lines are all ringing, but nobody's answering.What, all three of the bases? What about headquarters? And try the Doctor too.I'm not getting anything.Balot tapped the receiver with her fingers.Something doesn't feel right. It's coming up that the lines are engaged, but it's weird. It feelslike I'm contacting somewhere entirely different.A claustrophobic, urgent atmosphere pressed in on themfromall sides.Balot took her hand off the intercom and turned the stove off completely, and then she took her apronoff and threw it over a chair. She headed toward her room, Oeufcoque still on her hand.They're coming, aren't they? The people who rubbed out our police guard. Coming here toassassinate us too.Highly probable.I want to get ready. Will you give me five minutes? What are you planning to do?Take a shower.She spoke as if she were talking about tending to her firearms.Oeufcoque nodded. But be quick.Dish, wash, brushshe felt the ditty spinning around the back of her mind as she savored the hotwater. Dash, crush, rush, flushShe knew that having dirt and grime on her skin weakened her natural abilities. So, whenever she wasdue to wear Oeufcoque she needed to make doubly sure she was clean. To scrub herself up spick andspan, polish herself up like a stainless steel knife.As she washed she started to feel that she might be able to grasp each individual droplet of hot wateras it fell from above, down to the finest of movements. She probably could have. Even the destination ofthe water. She could almost imagine the whole world flowing through her skin.Under her control.My body is my own.The seed of resolve was planted firmly in the back of her mind.She wasn't going to hand it over to anyone else ever again.She would protect itand fight.Why me? The eternal question was about to deliver up an answer that she had never even dreamed of.Or not an answer, to be precise, but a reversal, turning the question inside out, just like Oeufcoque.Whoever it is who's targeting meI'll make sure they get their just rewards.That was the answer she had to the question of why everything had to happen to her; she would takethe questionWhy me?and shove it right back in her enemies' faces.Dish, wash, crush, mashShe turned the shower off. She snarced the TowelJet without touching it, and strong warm gusts of airblew fromall directions, drying her body.She rubbed oil on herself, luxuriating under the warmbreeze.She was now the perfect blade, or so she felt. A blade so sharp it would even cut through its ownsheath. She was a sharp sword who had the right to choose what she would have wrapped around her.And, of course, she had already chosen. Her one and only scabbardand weapon.Goodish, fresh, wishBalot left the bathroom. She stood in front of the desk, not a stitch on her body.She reached out her hand toward the mouse that was standing on the desk and sniffing his surroundingswith a pointy nose.Oeufcoque jumped onto her hand. Good to go?Balot nodded, wrapped Oeufcoque around her fingers.All set.She imagined a dress, an impregnable iron fortress that would wrap her up completely.Working with this vague image, she snarced Oeufcoque, running through his various programs andadapting themone by one.Hug my body. Tight.Oeufcoque turned with a squish.Into the dress chosensingled outby his one and only.The night melted like chocolate and seeped into the town.The Bandersnatch Gang moved as one. Rapidly, silently, they closed in on the former morgue fromthree different directions.Welldone led the way, and Mediumfollowed swiftly behind.Welldone checked the surroundings while Mediumstuck his Lockbuster Card into the rear door.It's open. It was a triple lockwe only just made it. Medium spoke and quickly slipped inside.Welldone followed immediately after, almost back-to-back with Medium, and closed the door carefullybehind them.The corridors were dark and narrow. Medium proceeded down them with caution, and Welldoneindicated to himto speak through their transplanted communication devices.We'll leave the Lockbuster in and use it to carry our hack of the circuits. How long till we cantake over the building's security systems, Fleshie?Two minutes should be plenty, Well.Rare, you enter from the south the moment we've overridden their security. Medium, you enterfrom the main entrance, carrying the Boston bag full of firearms. No transmissions from more thanthree meters away until we're sure their security system is completely down.There are your orders, guys. I've pinned down the location of everything in the building. Heatsources detected in the kitchen on the first floor and the north-facing bathroom.Go and investigate, Medi. See that the target doesn't escape through a window. I'm heading to thebasement.Without looking back Medium raised his right hand to acknowledge, then glided down the corridor,footfall silent, disappearing around the right turn.He removed his gun from its holster on his hip, and his eyes flashed red behind his sunglasses. Hiscomputer-enhanced eyes picked up all the obstacles in the dark, clearly and accurately.Building secured. Sending through floor plans of the whole building now.Flesh's voice echoed deep in his ear.Medium's eye flashed. A semi-transparent diagramappeared directly over his retina. There were littlemarkers to show where he and the other members of his gang were, and the rooms where their target waslikely to be were highlighted in red.Move in, Rare. Mincemeat, standby on alert five meters from the entrance hall. Flesh was givingthe instructions now.Here we go! Mediumused his real voice, not the wireless. A smirk formed on his face.He pushed on, cross-checking the data on the map in his retina with what he could see, and decided onhis best route.If he'd wanted to he could have brought up an image of the field of vision of the other gang members,but Medium stayed fixed on the floor plans as he advanced down the corridor. It was a long corridor.Some sort of special setup, thought Medium. This is massive. Why would you need a bathroom that'smore than twenty square meters in size? Must be to clean all those dead bodies. There was almost nolight now, and he passed by a number of doors but barely paid them any notice. He'd already checked inhis retina that the target wasn't behind them.And this was why he completely failed to notice the white shadow that emerged from one of the roomsand started to tail him, following in his footsteps almost casually.Mediumturned a corner in the corridor and before he knew it he appeared to be inside a small closet.Mediumfroze to the spot. Darkness enveloped himand seemed to stretch out forever.Fleshie? What the hell is going on? Where am I?Calm down. Calm down. There's a door right in front of you.Door? I don't see anyBut then Mediumrealized that he was indeed staring at a single door right in front of him.Found it. A door. What's on the other side?Someone's waiting for you.Waiting?Someone's holding a gun and waiting for you.Mediumsmirked.Okay, Fleshie. Let's work out if it's our target or the PI. Give me their exact location andphysical characteristics.An image flashed up in Medium's eyesan orange silhouette of the figure beyond the door.Wow, a giant. At least two meters tall. Must be the PI, right?That's right. And if you shoot, you'll hit him for sure.Mediumaimed his gun carefully at his enemy beyond the door.Let's see who's the faster shot, tough guy.He fired.All fourteen shots in three seconds flat. He swapped magazines immediately, then kicked down thedoor that was now riddled with bullet holes.Something came hurtling toward him, enveloping him.What theCold water.Mediumscrambled to ready his gun, no idea what was going on.Something slammed into his shoulders and body, forcing himover in a backward somersault.He thought for a moment that he had been hit by some explosives that the enemy had planted.But, as it transpired, he was wrong.His eyesight returned to him and cut through the haze, and he saw it was something entirely differentthat floated to the surface. A large white mass.Medium's gun shot up, a reflex action.It was a bundle of wet toilet paper.Soaked through now, Mediumtook his sunglasses off and opened his eyes wide.He was in a toilet stall.This was the place that he had kicked the door down to and rushed in.The toilet was in smithereens, obliterated by the electric charges fired at it, and it was vigorouslyspewing out water.Whatwhat the hell is all this? He spoke out loud again, unthinking.He left the cubicle. On the wall to the right of him he saw four urinals. On the opposite wall, mirrorsand sinks.The giant expanse of space he'd been in had disappeared without a trace.Mediumturned back to look at the stall again.It was the only stall in the bathroom, and his eyes went to something on the wall above the destroyedtoilet.Written on the tiles, in a bright poppy-red color:I'M GONNA TO SNARC YOU UP!Fleshie, what the hell am I looking atI'm comingWhat?Let's see who's the faster shot, tough guy.The bathroomdoor opened.All Mediumcould do was stand and stare.A girl stood before him, dressed in brilliant white.Pure as snow, fromtip to toe.Her clothes had a bondage-gear feel to them, as if she were wrapped up in white restraints. Or it couldhave been an evening dress, or a wedding dress.One thing he was sure aboutthe striking figure in front of him was unmistakably the Teen Harlot hehad seen in the video.Rune-Balot.An unusual nameHe wondered whether it was the PI in charge of her case that was responsible for her extraordinaryappearance.Drop your weapons. A man's voice, out of nowhere. Surprised, Medium raised his gun. Had thevoice emerged fromthis defenseless girl standing right in front of him?Balot's left hand rose, and the snow-white silken glove turned with a squish into something else.A gun.Light glinted off its silver barrel.Mediumgulped. His finger pulled the trigger on his gun almost reflexively.A tremendous spark flared between Balot and Medium, lighting up the room.Medium's eyes were now wide enough to split his eyelids apart. He realized with horror what washappening:The girl in front of him had actually shot at, and hit, his bullet.Howling like a dog, he fired again.Sparks. Explosion.Steel shrapnel splattered against the walls, spilled to the floor.But this time that wasn't all. Medium felt a searing pain in his shooting hand. All four fingers, histhumb, and the grip of the gun had all been pierced by shrapnel.The very definition of perfect marksmanship.Uh Medium's face went white.His left hand disintegrated and fell to the floor along with his destroyed gun. The water continued togush out of the ground behind him, covering the tiles.Medium tried to jump out of the way, but Balot shot at the gun on the floor. At the grip, the magazinethat he had crammed full of electronically charged bullets.All the bullets exploded at once, and a blue-white flame enveloped Mediumfromthe feet upward.He had no voice left in him, and instead of screaming he danced a bizarre dance in the flashing light.His whole body stiffened and burst at the seams.The air was pregnant with the stink of burnt flesh and hair.The blue-white light traveled across the water-covered tiles and struck Balot's body too, but wasrepelled by the white raiment that bound her body tight, fizzling away harmlessly.ThunkMedium collapsed in a heap. Sparks continued to leap from the side of his head. The variouselectronic devices implanted in his head had short-circuited, and now pitch-black blood was pouringfromhis eyes and ears.He wasn't quite dead yetbut he'd seen better days.Balot looked at the geyser of water that was jetting out from where the toilet had been. She interceptedthe building's water supply systemand snarced it. The flow of water slowed, then stopped.She approached Mediumand, with the lightest of touches, put her hand on Medium's forehead.She sensed a weak current and recognized it as a voice being transmitted directly into his head.What's the matter, Medi? Are our transmissions not getting through? Was the target there? We'renot getting any response from Medi, Well. Medi, If you can hearI'm fine.Balot answered, in Medium's voice.There's nothing here. No sign of our target. I'll continue searching.Then she stopped snarcing the transmission, left the men's toilets, and closed the door behind her.02No, it's definitely weird. It doesn't add up.Mincemeat heard Flesh's voice at the back of his mind.Wassup, Fleshie? Explain to me what's so weird. Mincemeat held his Boston bag under one arm,waiting leisurely just outside the entrance hall.According to Medi's audio records, he's just heard a number of gunshots. One of them doesn'tshow up anywhere on my databasemy database. So we must be talking about some pretty unusualequipment.So there's someone with different equipment fromus. One of the PIs?Yes, but Medi seems to be saying he's all rightHmmYou're the closest one there to Medi, Mincemeat.Fine, I'll check it out. Mincemeat gripped his Boston bag and headed straight for the entrance. Ifthe target runs from the building you'll have to get Rare or Well to catch her, 'cause I'm heading in to seeif there are any enemies closing in on Medi. Open the door for me, will ya?Sure.Mincemeat gave the lobby door a gentle shove and it swung open without resistance.He walked straight on into the hall.Checking that there was no one behind the window at the reception area, he shoved his hand into theBoston bag. He pulled out the reserve firearmsin the shape of an attach caseand walked down thecorridor in large strides.He shed his Boston bag and pushed on farther down the corridor, where he heard an elevator doorchime and open.He slipped deftly behind a pillar and silently opened the lock on the case in his hands.The box folded out in both directions, and a double-handed grip appeared in the middle, which he heldfirmly. There were muzzles where the box folded out, pointing outwardthis was a fearsome automaticweapon.After taking note of his surroundings, he opened transmission channels.Is this elevator your work, Fleshie?That's right.You want me to get in it?That's right.I thought Medi was on the first floor, though? Do you think he's found the enemy?That's right.Send me the floor plans, will ya? Right, so that's where Medi is. I'm moving on out.That's right.Huh?The transmission ended abruptly. But the floor plan showed clearly the route he needed to take.Mincemeat shrugged his shoulders. Jeez, talk about impatient.Paying close attention to his surroundings, Mincemeat slipped into the elevator.He looked at the operating panel inside. There were five buttons, one for each floor from the basementto the roof. The button for the second floor was already flashing yellow.The elevators closed, and Mincemeat braced his large body as best he could.The pressure pulled him down. The lift was rising now with ferocious speed. Mincemeat just aboutmanaged to stop himself frombuckling over.The violent screeching of the wires could be heard overhead.Then the elevator shuddered to a sudden halt, throwing Mincemeat's huge frame into the air for asecond before he crashed back down onto the elevator floor, slamming his knee against the steel.Mincemeat's face was twisted in fury.Flesh, you little shit! This isn't a fucking carnival ride!That's right.Huh? That's all you've been saying sinceA cold sweat broke out on Mincemeat's brown skin and his lips trembled as he heard:THATISRIGHT.An unfamiliar voice, straight in his earinside his own head.Who the hell are you? Mincemeat couldn't stop himself fromyelling out.The elevator immediately resumed its ascent, throwing Mincemeat to the floor again. It stoppedsuddenly on the third floor before plunging straight back down again.You shithead! he roared. He pointed the firearms in his hands at the panel on the door and shot it topieces with both guns.The elevator stopped.A smile returned to Mincemeat's perspiration-bathed face. I used to be a pilot, you know. That wasnothingThe lights went out, but that didn't worry him. A click at the back of his eyes and his pupils shone red.Dark, lightit was all the same to him. He rechecked the floor plans showing in his retina.The bottom third of the elevator door had gotten as far as the second floor. With his two-hundredthousand-dollarbutter knife in his left hand, he burnt off the rest of the panel and pulled out the wiring. Hepointed his other hand, firearmand all, at the door.His eyes skipped over the wires until he found the one that opened the elevator door.Just then, a fizz, and something sprang up under his feet. An unbearable heat ran through his body. Hejumped with a shriek.Something else leapt up fromstraight below him, piercing straight through his firing arm.He rolled up his sleeve to take a look.There was clean, round hole right between a pair of eyes on his arm. The eyelids were open wide, asif the transplanted eyes were surprised.Mincemeat broke out in a cold sweat.It was one damn thing after another.The shot that came frombelow had hit the thumb on his shooting hand.A series of screams emerged from Mincemeat's mouth as he was shot again, in his hands, legs, andbuttocks.Mincemeat danced his bizarre dance to an audience of no one, yelling inside the box, where no onecould see. When he dropped his knife, that too was shot to pieces. An intense surge of sparks eruptedforth, scorching his right leg.He found a moment to squeeze the grip of the gun with his right hand. He pointed the gun straightdownward.At the same time, a 10mm bullet came flying into his left eye. His mechanical eye was crushed right inthe socket. Sparks and blood spurted out, littering the floor.I'mgoing to rape the shit out of you for this, you fucking bitch!Mincemeat fired dozens of shots at the floor, turning it into mincemeat, living up to his nickname.Plenty of steaming holes were open in the floor now, and he peered through them, but saw no one. Heturned to the elevator door, shooting it up just as he had the floor. When the bullets in the top half of hisgun case were spent, he flipped it up into the air and gripped it the other way around.He pulverized the door, leaving it a bullet-riddled mess.I'mgoing to kill you!He charged the door with his shoulder, and it bent open. He pushed it open with his left handnowminus a thumband tumbled into the corridor, out of breath.Blood and sweat trickled down himin equal measurehis whole body was drenched.He crept down the corridor, crawling, and hid in the shadow of a pillar.Fleshie! Answer me, you bastard! Well! Flesh has been hacked! Well! Medi! Rare! Shit, answerme, someone!But the only answer he had was wild laughter froman unknown voice, echoing all around.Confused, Mincemeat scanned the corridor to the left and to the right.No one.The laughter was happening inside Mincemeat's head.He tried to cut the circuits but found he couldn't.Tears welled up in his one remaining good eye.Regression disorder, someone had called it.The sounds of battle brought all the bad memories back to himin a haze of black smoke.His helicopter had been shot down, and two days later he was taken captive. It was on the day of hisrelease, a year later, that he thought up his plan to transplant his wife's eyes into his arm. His ex-wife,actuallyshe had served him with divorce papers earlier in the year, when he was already at the limit ofhuman endurance, suffering all sorts of ill-treatment as a prisoner of war.And his ex-wife had been giving him a look of the sincerest contrition every dayfrom his rightbicep.Mincemeat tugged at his hair and ripped off his blood-soaked clothes, revealing all the eyestransplanted onto his upper body.He screamed a wordless screamas he forced himself up.Brandishing his gun he pulled himself down the corridor, dragging his legs behind him.The laughter in his head continued loud and shrill, driving himto distraction.A pair of shutters slammed shut right in front of himand behind him.They were fireproof shuttersand odor-proof, made with the building's particular requirements inmind.Mincemeat realized that he was once again trapped in a small space, cornered on all four sides.I'm gonna fuck you up good and proper, you little bitch! I'll rip your eyeballs out and skull-fuck youreye sockets!He was firing indiscriminately now, shooting everything he had in all four directions. Emptycartridges flew in all directions, and the walls were remodeled under the barrage of bullets.Just then he felt heat behind him. Mincemeat turned around.The shutters were right in front of his eyes.And frombeyond the shutters, more bullets came flying.Both his knees were shot to pieces at almost exactly the same time, and he fell onto them, gritting histeeth in agony.As he collapsed both his elbows were blown off. His front arms drooped down, useless.Every single blow was accurate to the extreme.And in the twinkling of an eyeliterally. For each of the eighteen pairs of eyes implanted into hisbody were being targeted, methodically, ruthlessly. The liquid from the eyeballs was splashed around theroom, and the crystalline lenses of the eyes, intermingled with blood and tears, seeped across his body ina thick soup.Screams of despair filled the airtight chamber.Still Mincemeat managed to stand, and even as blood and vitreous humor poured from his body, hemanaged to find the strength to charge the shutters like a frenzied bull.With a violent crash the shutters buckled under the impact of Mincemeat's shoulders. Blood splatteredthe duralumin surface, and as he peeled his hands off it a string of liquid lingered behind.He charged the shutter again.The gunfire had already stopped, but he was no longer interested in that.Then, without warning, the shutters opened, retracting into the ceiling.Mincemeat became vaguely aware of a small, shadowy figure.Gathering the last of his strength he screamed and charged at the silhouette.He became aware that the figure had multicolored hair dangling down over a pair of sunglasses.By the time Mincemeat realized that he knew the face under the hair, the figure's butter knife wasalready embedded deep in his heart.Rare was overcome with shock, but he managed to wriggle himself out from under Mincemeat's deadbody, which had collapsed on top of him.He looked at his own knife, then screamed into the transmission device in the piercing voice of a littlegirl.What's going on? I thought you'd managed to trap the PI in there? Why is it little Minty? Do youwant me to come over there and kick the shit out of you? What were you thinking, Flesh, you stupidfuckwit!Oh, don't you worry your pretty little head about it.What?That is the PI, right there.Rare's pale face darkened as the blood rose to his head.You fucking hacker! I'll tie you down and have you gang-raped by pigs, you piece of shit!Rare ranted on in this vein for a short while before bursting into tears of anguish and pulling theHutchinson Knife from Mincemeat's chest.Oh, you poor, poor thing, little Minty, all because that fuckwit Flesh didn't notice that we'd beenhackedyou poor, poor little darling.Suddenly there was a click in his ear, and a transmission began.Come in, Rare.Is that Well? The real one? Not the piece-of-shit hacker?Yeah, it's me. Flesh is doing all he can to restore our secure line. What's the situation over there?Little MintyThey got him?Rare howled an unearthly wail as an answer.I see. According to Medi, the target has run down to the basement along with the PI. They'reprotected by thick shuttersFlesh is trying to find a way to open them. You head downstairs and meetus.Okay, Boss. Are we going to sell little Minty's body of for parts too?No, we're a band of brothers. We don't sell our family members of . Those of us who want to useMincemeat's parts have the right of first refusal. Right?Of course. That's right, Boss.Rare gripped his knife tightly and meandered down the corridor.I'll see you downstairs in the basement, Boss. Could you beam me through the floor plans, please?Rare's eyes glinted red. Tears fell, blood-red under the reflection of the colored light.He followed the route toward the basement, wobbling from side to side, all the strength drained fromhis arms.Head into the room to your left, Rare. There's a shortcut.Rare did as Welldone said, opening the door on the left-hand side. He descended the stairs andentered the room.Lock the door behind you.Rare was about to do so, then came to with a jolt.What did you say?Rare looked around, grinding his teeth.A large number of lockers lined the wall. Evidently some sort of storage room for corpsesand nosign of anything that could resemble a shortcut.Gripping the hilt of his knife even tighter, Rare glared at his new surroundings.The electronic lock on the door behind himshut automatically.Rare snapped back to look at what had happened, and he saw a ridiculously long release code flash upon the display of the electronic lock.He tried the numbers several times, but there was no trace of a response. He kicked the door with ahigh-pitched whine.How dare you, you piece of shit! Where the hell am I? Flesh! Flesh! He carried on kicking at thedoor, apparently not even noticing that he was now yelling out loud.You're in the Archaeozoic Era.Well's voiceno, a voice identical to Well'sfromdeep inside his own ear.And now you're in the Proterozoic Era. And now Paleozoic, Cambrian, Mesozoan, and finally theDiluvial Epoch.Rare spun around in surprise.You're in a sea of fossils.Countless numbers of spirals flashed before his eyes.Ancient shells that had become one with stone were now appearing here and there and everywhereall around the mortuary, buried in the lockersgiving the distinct impression that they were in some sortof prehistoric deep sea graveyard.Rare jumped into action, bringing the knife in his right hand down on the nearest wall.The metal melted where the blade touched it, and part of the locker slid to the floor with a thud.The spiral shells kept on appearing and disappearing as before. Proof that there was a projectorsomewhere, sending the images around the room.You and your fancy tricks! Come on out, you pig! I'm going to rip you to shreds and fuck the pieces!Screaming, Rare raised his right hand, now balled into a fist.The unusually thick bracelet that he wore on his left wrist started jangling. Without warning it firedstrands of metal in every direction.A crackling noise, and blue-white sparks followed.Thin strands wound back into the bracelet, and the pieces of metal clinked and subsided.In a few moments the lockers in Rare's vicinity had been reduced to pieces, collapsing into heaps onthe floor.Wire whips. A voice from the shadows of the lockers. Wires that emit charged particles. What abrutal weapon.Rare turned toward the voice and without any hesitation pointed the bracelet in its exact direction andfired his weapon again.A blue-white flash tore through the room, and with the sound of a dozen screaming whips, the fossilswere ripped to shreds over and over.For a second he saw a white figure caught in the wires, but it disappeared back into the darkness.A hit, a palpable hitBut Rare's facial expression tensed. The bracelet's rewinding function failed.The display on the bracelet was going haywire, flashing randomly, and it wouldn't respond to Rare'sinstructions.Electromagnetic waves causing interference? Shit Rare tut-tutted, and was ready to throw thebracelet away as useless when, without warning, it started moving of its own accord.Remote control? Rare stood there, astonished, and could only watch as the wires snaked across hisleft hand and wove an intricate path toward his body.Rare shivered in terror, his face suddenly pale.The very next moment the wires returned to the bracelet at breakneck speed, and Rare's left armfrom the elbow joint downwas diced like a steak, shredded into small pieces that dropped into a pileon the floor.A screamneither quite froma man or a little girlgushed forth fromRare's mouth.Rare tumbled into a heap, watching as the wires flew into the air once more before igniting in a massof sparks and disintegrating along with the bracelet.Blood oozed slowly fromthe stump where Rare's armused to be before its amputation.I'mgoing to kill you Rare's voice was full of venombut was masked by the sound of gunfire.A bullet pierced Rare's shoulder with pinpoint accuracy.Rare collapsed head over heels but used his remaining good hand to scramble for one of the pull-outlockers, using it as a makeshift shield.Even as he did so another bullet pierced his left leg.Giving a half-crazed yell, Rare still managed to move quickly and precisely, using the pull-out lockeras a stepping-stone to get a better view of the figure hiding in the shadows, the figure that he had almosthit earlier. He leapt at it.Bullets flew through the air, scoring direct hits on his right elbow and knee.But Rare didn't stop. He descended on the figure, plunging his blade downward.More sparks lit up the darkness.The blade, blocked firmly by two guns being held in a crucifix shape.Steel melted, and the sparks lit up the room, allowing Rare to finally see his tormentor's face.Looks like he has an artificially reinforced bone structure. The odd gunshot here and there isn't goingto be enough to bring himdown.A voice. Oeufcoque's voice.But the only person standing in front of Rare was that actress from the kiddie porn flick, all cherubicand innocent.Pressing the gun barrels away with his knife as hard as he could, Rare gritted his teeth and squeezedout the name fromthe corner of his mouth. Rune-Balot?At that very moment Balot relaxed and let go. She knew exactly what needed to be done to throw theenemy off his footing.She let the crossed guns slip downward to the right, and Rare stumbled.She would have shot himin the back as he fell, but she couldn'tthe gun barrels were now half-fried.Even as Rare collapsed to the ground he used his reinforced legs and loins to wrench his body around,facing Balot.The tip of his knife sped toward Balot's flank.More screeching and violent sparks.Balot blocked the knife with her left-hand pistol. The incandescent blade ground into the body of thegun.Rare stared at the girl, a confused expression on his face, as if to ask What's going on?Is she a PI who's had her features surgically altered to make her look like her client? Rare voicedout loud, having decided that this was the only possible explanation.Balot didn't answershe just thought back to Oeufcoque's words, let go to get go.She parried, sidestepping Rare like a toreador.Rare's feet tripped over themselves, and his blade made a red-hot arc that rent the air.But he'd be back up, thrusting the knife right at her again, in just a moment.Balot snarced the guns in both her hands.The guns melted, fused together, and turned into a Hutchinson Knife, the exact same model that Rarewielded.Rare's expression was a sight to beholdbut he didn't stop swinging his blade for a moment.Balot switched the knife's powers on and used her knife to block Rare's blow.The two highly magnetized blades collided, and an eruption of sparks burst in the space between Balotand Rare. Two bodies went flying.Rare braced himself for his landing, gripping his knife the other way round now, while Balotconsciously relaxed her muscles and flopped to the ground.Rare brought his knife down on her, and Balot nimbly thrust her knife upward.Incredibly, the two knifepoints met exactly, in an infinitesimally precise head-on collision.The knife flew out of Rare's hands.It twisted violently in midair before plunging into Rare's chest.Gah Rare moaned as he staggered backwards into the locker-lined wall.The knife was buried deep in his chest.Frantically he tried to gain purchase on the hilt to pull the blade out, but the impact of theelectromagnetic current caused his fingers to flail uselessly.He slid down the wall into a heap.The stench of burning flesh emanated fromhis every orifice.Balot grimaced at the vile smell. She almost vomited.Before long Rare's mouth was gurgling, overflowing with blood. The fact that the blood wasn'tevaporating was proof that his knife's electromagnetismhad just about faded to nothing.Rare was at death's door but still conscious.Including you there are four intruders total, right? Oeufcoque asked, and Rare looked at Balot withan expression somewhere between rage and tears.Then his jaw twisted in a strange way. He opened and closed his mouth, and a reedy voice justmanaged to escape. I'll have you gang-raped by pigsprincessA gruesome sneer descended over Rare's pallid features and Oeufcoque cried out, urgently, Thesmell of death! Balot, retreat!Balot understood immediately. Telecommunication equipment and reinforced sinews weren't the onlythings implanted inside Rare's body. She leapt away from him, snarcing Oeufcoque to cover her wholebody. Oeufcoque responded as rapidly as he could.Light filled the room.There was a thunderous roar and a blast of pressure.For Balot this was the worst sort of scene imaginableone that she had already experienced.Rare's body exploded. The lockers were crushed flat, the ceiling warped, and the images of the fossilswere wiped clean by the blazing inferno that swept the room and the corridor outside, blackening all thewalls.A large elliptical object emerged from the rubble, bouncing with a plop, then rolling across the room.It looked almost like a giant white rubber ball.A crack opened from the top, and from it emerged the figure of Balot, hugging her knees tightly to herchest. She jumped down to the ground.The rubber ball-like object spat out a snow-white garment that started slithering back into placearound Balot's body, hugging her tight, like leather bondage gear. Shock-absorbent material peeled off,sprinkling the floor like a cracked eggshell.Balot, are you all right?Balot surveyed her surroundings, scowling, staring at the still-flickering flames.I'm never having my body go up in flames again. I hate it.Then she kissed her silk gloves, showing her gratitude to a shell of her very own.So, where's the last of our prey? The basement, theysaid?Don't refer to themthat wayyou're not supposed to be enjoying yourself. Are you?Balot laughed.I don't know if I am or if I'm not. All I know is that I'm doing just what you two taught me todo.But IAnd I want to get better. Like that guyjust then. Close up.And the idea of hand-to-hand combat doesn't scare you?Whyshould it? It's what I've got to do, right?Well, yes, butWhat a half-baked little thing you are, mysoft-boiled Oeufcoque.Balot impishly called out his name, a play on words, playing with him, and kissed her other hand.Don't you worry. Trust me. I'll pull it off, she informed him, matter-of-fact, smiling.03Welldone reached the bottom of the stairs and arrived at the basement in front of the door to thegarage.All of a sudden the whole building seemed to shake.What was that vibration?Welldone raised his gun as he asked the question, but Flesh's reply was bemused.It doesn't make sense. The sensors just showed a heat reading large enough for an explodingbomb, but it came from a room that had absolutely no heat readings up till now. No one could havebeen in there. Maybe a trap that they setsomething could have triggered it?But those vibrations tugged at my chest. Almost as if one of us had blown himself up.Welldone was transmitting in a whisper now.Surely not, Well! After all, everyone's heading right your way just this moment!Everyone?Medi, Rare, MincemeatFlesh hesitated.But according to Rare's report, Mincemeat's gone down, right, Flesh?That's truebut all my circuits are secure now, so all our info should be completely safe from thehacker.The enemy could have extracted Mincemeat's transmitter from his head. The marker withMincemeat's namethat's him.I guess soOr possiblythe same thing could have happened to the others tooHuh?Will this damn door still not open, Flesh?Wait a second longerI've just got the lock of . Boy, this is some security system. I don't get it; itmust be so inconvenient to go through all this on a daily basisWelldone ignored Flesh's words and watched the barrier walls as they opened out to both sides.As a wall, it really was quite something. According to their calculations it was up there with a full-onnuclear shelter in terms of strength and impact resistance.Welldone passed through the door and stood in the parking lot.It looked like a perfectly run-of-the-mill lot, with spaces for about ten cars, delineated by thick pillarsand steel frames. There were two freight elevators lined up side by side, and one of these had its door leftopen.There was a set of shutters down at the car park entrance, but nothing compared to the incredible gatehe'd just come through.The moment Welldone noticed the shutters at the end of the parking lot he stopped moving toward themeeting point and swung around, looking back at the entrance he'd come in through.It was a completely ordinary door.Just a normal automatic door, and it even had a transom on topthe shutters on your average twentyfour-hourconvenience store were more solid.Our visual circuits have been hacked! Welldone yelled angrily at the back of his brain. He kickedthe door in frustration. One side of the door bent with a loud crack and its hinges flew off, clatteringdown the corridor.It's just an ordinary automatic door! I was standing there with my dick in my hands, waiting infront of a door that I could have just pushed open! Flesh, give me a reading on the others' positions!A click, and Welldone saw an image of three blue flashing lights converging on him.Flesh?No answer.Welldone grabbed a gun in each hand and bent down, pressing his back to the wall.The flashing dot representing Rare was coming down the stairs behind him. The flashing dotrepresenting Medium was in an elevator heading down to the lot. And the flashing dot representingMincemeat came toward him from the emergency stairs on the other side of the parking lot, swaying fromside to side as it descended.Specters, all of you Welldone muttered, a seething mass of indignation. This is a disgrace! Rare!Medi! Answer me if you're there!Yelling now, he jumped up and ran toward the phantomfigure coming down the stairs.He lifted his guns and fired.The bullets sped into the darkness, embedding themselves into the walls and dislodging some plaster.At the bottom of the staircase he spun around, firing simultaneously at the elevator and emergencystairs.The echo of the gunshots reverberated all around, and then the crisp sound of empty cartridges clinkingto the ground.His bullets were soon spent. He slammed his back to the wall, creeping along bit by bit, expelling theguns' magazines. He opened up his coat and, in a well-rehearsed move, shoved the bases of his gunstoward the spare magazines that were clipped to his sides, pressing theminto his body.He pulled, and the magazines clicked off, making a noise like the pin on a hand grenade.Each hand pressed a switch on the grip, the breechblock slid into place automatically, and the bulletswere all ready to go.These babies have got your names on them! Show your asses! he screamed, eyes scouring thedarkness.He was answered by an earsplitting noise.The sound of a radio.The car stereo from one of the vehicles in the corner of the parking lot blared loudly, headlightsflashing. Its engine revved violently.The blare fromthe radio turned into the furious drumbeat of electroclash.The tires scorched the concrete, and the car charged toward Welldone.Welldone jumped away fromthe wall.The car plunged at him. The steering wheel spun around, cutting a tight turn, and the car bounded upand down, chasing him, suspension grating, headlights flashing ominously.Fuck you! Welldone fired shot after shot. He jumped onto the oncoming car, an abnormally powerfuljump, first onto the windshield and then onto the roof, shooting it to pieces before tumbling off.The car smashed into the wall, its front half now totaled.Welldone picked himself up and trained his guns on the driver's seat.But no one was inside.Now a different car stereo came to life, headlights lighting up across the parking lot. Heavy metal thistime.The engine rumbled, and the gas-powered car started closing in.At ridiculous speed.Welldone spun around and fired at the driver's seat, but this car too had no driver.He hid himself behind a pillar just in time. The car's right headlight smashed straight into the pillar,shatteringas if the car were trying to shave off a piece of the pillar as it pursued its prey.Welldone took a running leap toward the next pillar, using it as a springboard to kick against andchange direction.The car plowed on into the pillar.Concrete flew everywhere. The steel rebar reinforcing the pillar were now wrapped around the frontof the car, merged into one mass.The heavy metal stopped.The drumand bass started.Welldone landed on the ground and another car sped toward him.Welldone screamed a wordless scream.He jumped, firing at the driver's seat again, but even as he did so the car caught his right leg, smackinginto himas it passed.Welldone's body pirouetted through the air and slammed into the ground.The advancing car continued on its course, slamming into the back of the car embedded in the concretepillar.Welldone pulled himself up and, with a dark expression, spatsaliva, blood, and smashed teeth.He ejected his guns' magazines and reequipped them with a fluid movement and stared out into thedarkness.The second he clocked a white silhouette in the corner of his eye, he pointed the barrels of his gunsstraight at it.He pulled the triggers, and returning fire came straight back at him.An impact in his right knee. The same leg that had been hit by the car. Welldone's whole body jerkedto the right and collapsed.He rolled with the blow, firing off as many shots as he could as he fell.None reached their target.Another bullet came at him, hitting the same knee again.His bulletproof padding shattered, and a hole opened up in his reinforced body.A pitiful moan crept out of Welldone's mouth.He reloaded his guns, bullets hurtling toward himas he did so, but none of the bullets hit him.A suspicious expression appeared on Welldone's face.He wasn't the target.Welldone immediately realized what was going on. He gritted his teeth and sprang for cover on theother side of the pillar.That instant the bullets pierced the gas tank and the car went up in flames, causing a chain explosionthat brought the other car along for the ride.A blast of flames engulfed Welldone, and his bulletproof coat was ripped to shreds as his body wasflung against the walllike a doll that a spoiled child had long since tired of.Even then, Welldone wouldn't let go of the guns in his hands. He clambered to his feet, his wholebody pierced with fragments of unidentified shrapnel.Breathing hard, he glared at the blazing fire and readied his guns again.Without warning another volley roared forth from the flames. They were aimed for the gaps in hisnow-ragged bulletproof coat.His arms were hit, his shoulders were hit.Desperately moving to change his position, he fired back, but the bullets just kept on coming.A different type of bullet now, with an explosion of sparks on the surface of his bulletproof coat as itslammed into his body. Charged particles flowed across his skin, frying all his exposed flesh.Next it was a rifle shot. It sliced through his left shoulder blade and made a hole in the wall behindhim.One by one, in quick succession, bullets of different calibers flew through his body.Yelling what sounded like a war cry, Welldone peeled himself off the wall and charged at thewhirlpool of fire.On the other side of the dark red smoke Balot's face was a picture of delight as she fired her gun overand over.That's enough, Balot!An apparently inexhaustible supply of bullets emerged from a magical glove and disappeared again,like a sigh in a thunderstorm.She wore a satisfied expression, reacting to every roar and explosion as if to say That was me.She was in controloverwhelmingly so.The power to manipulate objectsand sentient beingsas she liked, bending themto her will.This is it, she thought. This is the feeling that the men in my life have always been savoring.Where previously she had been brutally oppressed, now she was experiencing the ultimate high.Overwhelmed by a gust of pleasure so intense that it almost felt like pain, Balot grasped this all tooclearly.Stop it, Balot! That's enough! Her ears registered Oeufcoque's shouts for the first time, even thoughhe'd been yelling at her all the while.She hadn't noticed because every time she had fired a shot, the shock wave of pleasure had numbedher senses.Now her aimfaltered. What's the matter? she wondered.Oeufcoque was trembling. He was shot through with an emotion that Balot, in her current state, simplycouldn't comprehend.Balot, I'm begging you, you can't misappropriate me so. It'sabuse. Keep to our original tactics,self-defenseDon't you worry.Balot stopped firing one of her guns for a second to give it a fleeting kiss.I'll be gentle with you. Leave it all to me.Then she snarced her whole body with a sense of domination enough to make the blood turn sour.Stop iThis time she actually did block out Oeufcoque's voice, forcefully silencing him.She snarced both guns, turning theminto weapons she could use most easily.Just then Welldone emerged fromthe smoke, both arms crossed in front of himto ward off the worst ofthe flames as he leapt through them.He rolled over the rubble, clocked Balot's location, and stood up, his teeth bared. An expressionsomewhere between fury and a smile.For a moment they stared at each other in absolute silence.Then they pointed their guns at each other.Balot started laughing.04It's no good, I can't get through! Flesh wailed in despair. He was inside the shipping container onthe trailer.Well's responseit's as if he's brain dead! And there are sound prints of over ten different weaponsrecorded in his audio circuitsBoiled continued to stare at the monitor.Flesh shouted. How can there only be one of them? This is unbelievable? This PI Oeufcoque is afreak! A sadist! He's put Welldone in a coma and he's shooting up the carcass with a pile of weapons!Boiled suddenly interrupted Flesh's stream of words: Fetishism is essentially compensation for asense of helplessness.Flesh stopped his wailing and stared at Boiled suspiciously.Boiled spoke. Those who fight in a way that's subconsciously designed to compensate for theirfeelings of inadequacyOeufcoque's skillful enough to trap them into his way of fighting. It's as I thoughtOeufcoque is providing tactical guidance, and the client doesn't really understand. This is a deviationfromthe designated Life Preservation Programit's abuse.What are you talking about? I thought there was only one enemy?The enemy is abusing Oeufcoque. Before long Oeufcoque will be forced to retreat from thebattlefield in self-defense. The enemy will lose her ultimate weaponFlesh's wobbly figure recoiled at Boiled's voice, sensing a dangerous undercurrent in his flatmonotone.It seems that the target has been somehow reinforced with the Doctor's technological trickery. Itseems that Paradise technologyScramble 09has brought another monster into this world.Paradisewhat do you meanBut Boiled just took out a long gun fromhis breast pocket, and Flesh swallowed the rest of his words.It was a giant silver revolver, and it looked strong enough to pierce the armor on a tank.The sort of gun that only a being with extraordinary physical strength could wield properly.Boiled opened the cylinder to confirmthat it was fully loaded before snapping it shut again.Aare you going to go yourself, sir?Boiled turned to look at Flesh and nodded.Then please be as quick as you canI think Well's in serious trouble.Boiled stood up and took the spare key to the trailer fromoff the wall where it was hanging.Flesh watched him, wary.What are you going to do with this trailer?Your gang has expended its usefulness. I wanted to gauge how Oeufcoque's new user would reactwhen faced with danger. Now, before long, Oeufcoque and his user will be separated forever. I got what Icame for.He cocked the trigger of the gun, and it thudded into place with a heavy click.He pointed the muzzle of the gun at Flesh, casually, almost off-hand.Flesh trembled.Boiled pulled the trigger.The gun roared, and a hollow space appeared between Flesh's shoulders.Behind him a gaping hole opened up in the wall of the container, exposing it to the elements. Thewhole trailer rocked fromside to side, and the eye-watering smell of gunpowder filled the room.Flesh's body slumped to the ground. He had been destroyed utterly from his chest upward, taking themachinery behind him along for the ride. His cloak had come open, and his fat wrists could just be seenpeeping through fromunderneath the mass of exposed breasts.Boiled reloaded the single empty chamber with another bullet and exited the container.He walked around the front of the container, climbed up into the driver's seat, and inserted the key intothe ignition.I'mcoming. I'mgoing to acquire you, Oeufcoque. You're a tool, after all.He twisted the key and the engine rumbled into action.Boiled pressed down on the accelerator.Prepare to be fucked up, you bitch! Welldone shouted. It sounded almost like an order.Both of his hands pulled down on his triggers. Balot did the same, simultaneously. Shots flew inunceasing rapid succession. The bullets smashed into each other in midair, sometimes vaporizing eachother, other times ricocheting all across the parking lot.Teeth bared, Welldone moved in toward Balot as he fired. Balot stepped to her right. Welldonemoved with her, mirroring her movements. The hail of bullets continued incessantly until one sidestopped. Welldone's guns were both empty.They both jumped behind pillars, but Welldone was the only one to reload.As for Balot, as soon as she was in the shadows she snarced the guns in both her hands and fused themtogether.The two guns melded together and turned into a single giant gun. Her gloves integrated perfectly intothe grip, which formed the ideal shape for her hands: right hand to support and left hand to fire.She burst fromthe shadows of the pillar, flanking Welldone and pointing the gun right at him.Welldone screamed an inhuman cry. He had been trying to lift his right armto fire, and now it was hit.A shot to the back of his hand, a shot to the barrel, a shot to the firing hammer, and a shot to his elbow.A streamof bullets.The ammunitionthe magazine that he had just used to reload the gunexploded in his grip. The gunwas blown away, and with it all the fingers on his right hand.Flying fragments splattered into the side of Welldone's face, painting it in shades of black and red.Still Welldone thrust his left gun out, unloading half the bullets in the gun in an instant.Balot didn't even try to dodge. She shot down only the bullets flying toward her face, trusting herperfectly white garment to deflect the rest.Two blows to her chest, one to her hips. But the impact was almost completely absorbed, and thebullets didn't even reach her flesh.This is all you are. This is the best you can do. She felt like shouting at him at the top of her lungs.She wanted to break himcompletely, thoroughly abuse and disparage him. It was what she needed to doand indeed she couldn't think of anything else she should be doing.Balot walked straight up to Welldone and fired at himwith all the rising passions in her body.Not a single bullet missed.She hit Welldone's legs, his shoulders, his stomach.No, you prepare to be fucked up!Balot screamed in a non-voice.I'm gonna fuck you up!Her thoughts flowed through Oeufcoque and were spat out the other end as bullets.Fuck you!Welldone lay there, back to the pillar, arms and legs splayed open passively.And when, in a last-ditch effort, he tried one final time to lift the gun that was still gripped in his lefthand, Balot unloaded into his crotch, tearing it to shreds with another hail of bullets.Frothing at the mouth, Welldone fired off a single shot in the wrong direction.Gun smoke enshrouded the scene like tobacco smoke in a poolside bar that had no ventilator fan.Empty cartridges from Balot's gun bounced out onto the floor rhythmically, as if they were playing acheerful song.Welldone slithered down the pillar, staining it red.Balot continued to pump bullets into him even as he collapsed. With deadly accuracy she manipulatedthe bullets, manipulated Welldone, and manipulated Oeufcoque.Drenched in sweat, she stayed her hand for a moment. The muscles in her wrists were throbbing,numb. The impact fromfiring the gun was now being absorbed by her, not her dress.She realized that she could no longer hear Oeufcoque's voice, and that it was she herself who wassuppressing it by force, as if she hadn't known what she had been doing.Balot let go and released all the power that had been building up in her body.Her eyes prickled with smoke and she couldn't see well.She tried to snarc the lights and the air conditioning in the parking lot but realized that most of thecircuits had stopped working.Fires blazed all around.Balot took a step back to survey a vista of rubble. The parking lot had been reduced to ruins; theceiling had caved in where the pillars had been destroyed, and the contents of rooms on the first floorwere strewn around the place.The Doctor's research lab, too, thrown into the mix. All of a sudden Balot's eyes fell on an aquariumthat she had seen before. At the back of her mind, Balot remembered the Doctor's wordsthat he wastrying to find a way to regenerate her voice box.The aquariumwas obliterated, its burnt-out fragments intermingled with jagged shards of concrete.The smoke cleared abruptly.For almost the first time, Balot properly registered the appearance of her assailant.His bullet-riddled body stirred.The body that she had thought of only as a targetshe had completely forgotten that he was a living,breathing thing.The multitude of dark red wounds that punctured his body reminded her of this fact.All of a sudden, an incredible, unbearable nothingness pressed in on her frombehind.Dreadful footsteps.Sensing the air, snarcingno use.Oeufcoque! Balot cried out to the gun. A heartfelt cry, different fromany that had gone before.Oeufcoque, please answer me! Help me, Oeufcoque!There was impatience in her plea now. Like she was trying to un-crush something that she hadunthinkingly squeezed to pieces.Balot called out Oeufcoque's name as if she were trying to piece back together a broken egg.The gun in her hands warped into a crooked shape.The gloves that had been melded together now split apart, and from that gap a bundle of fluffy honeycoloredfur emerged.Oeufcoque.Gwaha slight moan. Oeufcoque's limbs twitched, convulsing, and he writhed in Balot's palms inagony.Like the man he had just shot.Without warning, Oeufcoque was violently sick.A large volume of vomit spewed from his mouth, more than seemed possible from his tiny body, anddripped through Balot's gloved fingers.Oeufcoque? Oeufcoque? What's the matter?Balot's eyes filled with tears.Oeufcoque vomited again.He spoke in a raspy voice, as if he were wringing something out of his body in between his heavybreathing. Let go of me.Balot didn't understand what he meant by those words. Rather, she tried to hug him tighter to her thanever.As she did so, Oeufcoque twisted his head around to try and shake her off. Please don't touch meI'mbegging you. Let me down, pleaseGwahhe was sick again.Balot stood there like an idiot. She didn't know what she was supposed to doand Oeufcoque, thevery person who was supposed to tell her, was frantically trying to escape fromher hands.Desperate now, she tried to pin Oeufcoque down, tried to stop his limbs fromwrithing around.Stop it! Leave me alone!Balot shook her head, determined. Her eyes were soon overflowing with tears.She desperately searched for an escape route from the horrible feeling that overwhelmed her, thefeeling of being plunged into a pit of darkness, and Oeufcoque was the only person she could think of thatcould save her.Oeufcoque vomited still more copiously, then collapsed limp and senseless.Balot stood there silently, waiting for Oeufcoque to speak.She was more scared than she had ever been. She felt like she had been turned down, with stingingwords of rejection thrown into her face.Tears flowed, but all she could do was wait.But when he did finally speak, it was to tell her something completely different.He's coming Oeufcoque spoke in the reediest of voices. Go to the roof. The Doctor willquickly.Confused, Balot tried to work out what he meant. And also how she could best apologize toOeufcoque. Her thoughts flew fromone place to another.Then she noticed the presence of something coming toward hersomething large.She raised her head. Her tears had stopped.An incredible mass of something was charging toward the shutters at the other end of the car park.A threat.Balot snarced Oeufcoque as a reflex action.Oeufcoque let out a cry of pure anguish.A loud crunching noise silenced his cry.The shutters exploded open, and a giant trailer rushed into the parking lot. It smashed through a numberof pillars, a wake of sparks behind it, zigzagging across the space and scraping up against the walls,before finally running aground on the rubble.The coupling connecting the vehicle to the container split, and the giant container was thrown towardthe pillar where Welldone lay prostrate.Sandwiched between the concrete and the giant silver container, Welldone's body burst like aballoon.Balot stared at the monstrosity that had just emerged from the blazing inferno, still holding Oeufcoque,her back to the wall.The air was fizzing with tension.She could see a man getting up fromthe driver's seat.She heard the door swing open, and a man came toward her, walking over the flame-flickering rubble.Run away A cracked voice emerged fromOeufcoque's lips.But Balot stood still, staring at the overwhelming figure of the man. Not out of fear. Compared to whathad just happened to Oeufcoque, she wasn't afraid in the slightest.On the contrary, she felt exciteduplifted, even.The flames fromthe fires lit up the man's features.The blank features of the giant man.The man who had threatened Balot on the roadside, at the courtroom.His name was Dimsdale-Boiled, and he was stepping over the body of the man he had just crushed andcoming right at her, an enemy and a true threat.She knows nothing about weapons, Oeufcoque. You shouldn't allow yourself to be used by such aperson, Boiled said.Oeufcoque pulled himself up in Balot's palm. So, after sending your hit men you're going to interferedirectly, are you? You're no different from these assassins yourself, Boiled. Forever absorbed in yourown private vendetta.Come back to me, Oeufcoque. You deserve to be utilized more effectively, said Boiled.Balot glared at Boiled.Boiled wasn't even looking at Balot.Ef ectively, you say! Have you forgotten what you did with me? Oeufcoque was shouting now. Avoice steeped in anger, one that Balot had never heard before.It's all the same, Oeufcoque. That little girl's hand, my handwe're all looking for exactly the samething. Boiled's eyes were so dark he could have been asleep.Oeufcoque shouted, No! This girl's different!Hearing his words Balot suddenly felt extremely sad.Oeufcoque whispered to her. You have to run away, Balot. In this sort of situation, discretion is thebetter part of valorBalot stared straight ahead at Boiled.No. I'm going to stay and fight. I don't want to run away.It's no use, this guy isThis person is a threat to me. I need to fight him.Boiled slipped his hand inside his jacket.Boiled, waitBalot reflexively wrapped Oeufcoque around her fingers and snarced him.Balot!Please. Try and understand myfeelings.The man standing in front of Balot's eyes had once terrified her so completely that she had lost allhope of living.Now, standing in front of this manand despite Oeufcoque's wordsshe simply couldn't run away.She knew that if she fled now, she'd never be able to stand up for herself again.But that didn't necessarily mean that she had made the right decision.Pinned down by the sheer force of Balot's will, Oeufcoque turned. At the same time Boiled pulled outhis gun. A six-round revolverand a palm-sized artillery gun.It fired, savagely.Balot fired into the round's trajectory.There was a vibrant display in midair, and Balot's bullet disintegrated as it hit her opponent's, but herbullet did succeed in deflecting the shell's path.An instant later the bullet slammed into the wall behind her, echoing oppressively through the parkinglot. The bullet seemed powerful enough to cut straight through the wall.Boiled fired again.Balot saw the angle of the muzzle the second before the shot went off and jumped sideways to dodgethe bullet.A crevice opened in the wall behind her, and the air swirled around from the scorching trail of heatthat the bullet left in its wake.Balot fired back at him, frantically, as she ran.Boiled didn't budge but fired again, unconcerned.He was different from any opponent she'd faced before. Every single shot of his was careful,potentially instantly fatal. The pressure was tsunami.One false move and every molecule of her could be wiped off the face of this earth.In order to try and escape the unbearable oppression bearing down on her, Balot ran in the directionthat made it hardest for her opponent to follow, and she fired back at him as she ran, desperately trying todistract him, but there was no change in Boiled's rhythm as he continued firing, apparently unconcernedby anything.Something was wrong.Carefully watching her opponent, Balot slipped behind a pillar. Another bullet came at her, slamminginto the pillar with such impact that she had to suppress the reflex to jump and run screaming.And that was when Boiled's gun ran out of bullets.Balot leapt out frombehind the pillar and fired as many shots as she could at him.But Oeufcoque could no longer contain the shock from the recoil inside himself, and both Balot'shands throbbed in pain.Boiled was coolly reloading his revolver, and he showed no inclination to move even as her volleyflew at him.Rather, it was her bullets that moved.Their trajectories strayed, and they hit the rubble behind Boiled in a trail of sparks.Overcome with surprise, Balot stopped firing.Boiled looked at Balot's face. So, no one told you anything about me? He spoke, flicking his gunsideways. With a vigorous click the chamber slotted back into place in his revolver. I'm a product of theforbidden arts, just like youanother monster. Boiled's expression was now twisted in a curious sneer.Like a smile that peered out at the world fromthe bottomof the abyss.Cold sweat drenched Balot's body. Her knees trembled, and her gun shook.Boiled's armcame up. The giant gun barrel was, once again, trained casually on Balot.Her stomach lurched.Before she even had time to think Balot found herself flying for cover behind another pillar.The pillar was hit by a blow that shook it to the core.Balot engaged her abilities. Her last chance, her last resort.A car engine revved up in the corner of the parking lot.Snarced by Balot, the car sped toward Boiled, tires screeching.Even then, Boiled made no move.For the first time ever, the fear of battle weighed heavily on Balot's shoulders. Still entrenched behindthe pillar, gasping for air, she plunged the car toward Boiled with all her might.Without warning Boiled disappeared abruptly fromBalot's spatial perception.The car sped over the rubble, flew through the air, and smashed into the side of the container.Reflexively Balot emerged frombehind the pillar to survey the results.She felt Boiled's presence with every nerve ending in her body. She understood immediately what hadhappened. She just couldn't believe it.Boiled was on the ceiling.Balot looked up in astonishment, and Boiled was standing there, looking down at her.Even the hemof his coat was upside down, fluttering gently in the breeze.Silently Boiled started walking across the ceiling. Avoiding the pipes and electric cables. Andpointing his gun at Balot.Run away Oeufcoque's distressed voice.Snapping out of it, Balot twisted her body out of the way.Or so she thought, but all of a sudden she felt an impact frombehind. She was instantly winded.Balot pitched forward, tumbling, and felt a bullet slam into her breastbone. The impact wasn't fullyabsorbed by her outfit, and she could feel and hear her bones creak under the pressure as her internalorgans were compacted.Balot's body was flung into the air and only stopped when she collided with the wall a few metersaway. A bucketful of saliva spilled fromher lips, coating her thighs.She had just barely managed to avoid dropping her gun.Out of breath, she stood up, leaned her shoulders against the wall, and saw the figure of Boiled in thedistance.Boiled was stepping down from the ceiling and walking down a pillar. As if he were still walking onthe ground. Then, right leg still on the pillar, he extended his other leg to the floor of the garage. Then healighted onto the ground with both legs and stared at Balot in silence.Fear drove Balot onward. She fired the gun in her hands over and over with reckless abandon.Boiled didn't budge.None of the bullets completed their course; they just flew off into the ground or the walls.And then the gun stopped firing completely.It was as if something were entwined around the trigger.A creaking sound echoed inside the guninside Oeufcoque.The trigger stopped moving at all, and Oeufcoque's groans could be heard fromthe gun in her hands.It seems the estrangement is now complete. Boiled's cold voice froze Balot to the spot. A selfdefensemechanismagainst those who abuse himas a tool. Oeufcoque has rejected you.His words struck Balot like lightning.The words were more painful to hear than any of the filthy insults she'd had hurled at her.This was even more terrible, even more humiliating, andworst of alleven further beyond thepossibility of redemption.Boiled raised his gun.A voice came at her frombeyond the darkness of the muzzle, frombeyond the machinelike intent to killa voice that said This is all your fault.Bad girl.You're a bad girl.Balot was overcome with despair and the fear of being sent back to that awful place.You were trying too hard to climb the stairway to heaven, the Mardock, that you slipped and lostyour footing.This was her despair.I don't want to die.She was crying.She didn't want to die, not with her heart feeling like this.Boiled's fingers moved mechanically, just about to pull back the trigger, when:You're wrong, Boiled Oeufcoque spoke.Boiled's expression hardened.At that very same moment, there was a series of clicks frominside Oeufcoqueinside the gun.The sound of jammed cogs falling into place.Boiled's eyes opened wide, and he pulled his trigger.But an instant before the roaring noise emerged, Balot had reflexivelyand correctlysnarcedOeufcoque.The bullet that sped from Balot's gun intercepted Boiled's bullet perfectly, causing it to ricochet intothe ceiling. All the walls reverberated fromthe impact, and concrete fragments rained down.Balot aimed at Boiled, ready to fire back, butStop it. It's useless, Balot.The gun fired of its own accord, unloading in a different direction, not giving Balot any say in thematter. All the bullets passed by Boiled harmlessly.And that was exactly what the gun was aiming for.The bullets pierced the gas tank of the car that had just smashed into the wall behind Boiled.A moment later the gas tank swelled upand exploded.A blast of flame and metal shrapnel swallowed him.Or so it seemed, but a bubble of clean air had emerged frominside the smoke.Boiled emerged from it, apparently unscathed, standing still amid the melee of the firestorm, waitingsilently.Before long he noticed that no one was by the wall anymore.While his attention was diverted by the blast, Balot had disappeared.Boiled looked toward the elevators.Seeing the display lights, he realized that one of the two elevators was heading upward.Why? Why do you allow your user to abuse you Boiled spoke in a low voice, directed at theflashing light.Oeufcoque.As the elevator light stopped at the roof, Boiled headed straight for the emergency staircase.His eyes glinted with an uncanny, otherworldly fury.05I'm sorry, Oeufcoque, I'm sorry. Please don't go anywhere. Stayin my hands.Oeufcoque's yelps of pain echoed around the cramped elevator box.However much Oeufcoque might have been suffering previously, the pain was now even worse.After saving Balot and showing her an escape routethis elevatorOeufcoque had been overcomeby a new wave of convulsions. His limbs were quivering worse than ever, and he was in a state ofparoxysm, just as when he had tried to escape fromBalot earlier.He threw up again.I'm sorry, Oeufcoque, I'm so sorry.Inside the lift Balot was folded into a fetal position.She held Oeufcoque up as if he were broken, her shoulders shaking with sobs.Don't go anywhere, Oeufcoque. Don't leave me behind. I'm begging you. Please.Now, finally, Balot understood Oeufcoque's feelings.The dreadful thing that had happened.She had promised to stop when he said noand she had broken this promise in the worst wayimaginable.She never thought that she'd be capable of such a thing. Why me?Or so she wanted to think.She was the one who had always been betrayed.She was the one who had always had to wonder why and worry about what exactly it was that she'ddone wrong, turning it over in her mind in minute detail.She had never imagined that the shoe could be on the other foot.That she could be the one to break a promise, to make the other person suffer.The very idea that she could hurt someone who trusted herit had never even occurred to her.It's a type of self-defense mechanism, a bit like hyperacute rejection of transplanted organs. Anautomated response to when my user becomes my abuser Oeufcoque spoke between breaths as he layprostrate. It's due to my fear of being disposed ofbut don't worryI'll get over it soon.The elevator suddenly stopped.The doors creaked open and revealed a vast expanse of darkness.From within the small box bathed in orange light, they could see the windswept concrete rooftop andthe night vista of the city sprawling out below themin the distance.Balot stared out at the view in silence, knees still to the ground.She had no idea what she should do.She had no idea what the right thing to do was.She shouted in an empty whistle of a voice.It sounded like a draft in a wind tunnel.Sorry about all that. I'mbetter now, Oeufcoque said. He raised himself up gently and looked up atBalot.Large tears still poured out of her eyes.She wanted to say something.She wanted to explain all her feelings to him.But in her deep confusion she wasn't able to say anything, and the best she could do was try and stopher confusion frompouring out. She didn't want to hurt Oeufcoque anymore.Try and stand up. It's no use staying here. Let's get out of this box.Balot took a deep breath. Nodding repeatedly, she stood up and stepped out of the elevator.She wiped her tears away with one hand, carrying Oeufcoque along ever so carefully with her other.There was nothing on the roof.Nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide.The cold night air only reinforced Balot's sense of isolation and helplessness.We need to buy ourselves a little more time. See if you can close all the shutters in the emergencystaircase and turn off the elevators.Balot manipulated the building's security system, snarcing it as Oeufcoque had suggested.But she was under no illusions that this would be enough to stop that man forever. No trap or obstaclewas ever going to be able to do that.If it comes down to it he'll just walk up the building's walls. Keep a lookout for him.He was walking earlier. On the ceiling and the walls.Just remembering that scene sent an involuntary shiver down her spine.What is he, exactly? My bullets had no effect on him either.PGFPseudoGravitational Float, it's calleddeveloped to give soldiers the power ofindependent movement in space, Oeufcoque explained. Powerful magnetic field generators areimplanted into your brain and limbs, allowing you to create an artificial gravitational pull in any directionyou want. This omnidirectional gravity field allows you to walk along any surface you wantor todeflect the path of any bullets. The reason he can use that enormous revolver is also due to his PGF.Boiled was the prototypeor, you could say, the first victimof the technology, just before Scramble 09was enacted.Oeufcoque's eyes were downcast now, and he groaned. I should have told you all of this beforetodayI really messed this one up.Why didn't you? Because you used to be friends?Whenever he decides to act, he gives off a characteristic odor. The cold, harsh smell of a mercenarygoing to war.He raised his head and returned Balot's gaze.As long as I could avoid it, I didn't want to have to speak about himor how his body workedbehind his back. In the same way that I wouldn't want to talk about your past or your body in front of otherpeople.Balot's eyes softened.You're so thoughtful.That was all she said. That was all she could think to say. And then she thought of herself, and how shehad forgotten about his thoughtfulness, and she was ready to start crying again.But then she heard a gunshot down the stairs. The sound of shutters being ripped apart.She hadn't bought herself much time.Where should I go? There's nowhere left!Balot was at the edge of the roof now, hands on the iron railings that ran around the perimeter.The Doctor should be here. Close by. Can't you sense him? Balot looked up at the night sky. Theclouds drifted slowly, revealing the sharp crescent of the moon.She sensed something froma distance that was gradually coming toward her.As soon as he received my emergency distress signal, the Doctor started heading back. He can't bemore than a few minutes away.Balot stared at the sky. She thought of an angel descending from the heavens. Just as she had fantasizedwhenever times were bad at the institute. The angelic visitor who would swoop down out of nowhere andrescue her.As these memories came flooding back, she felt even more keenly the terrible things that she had donewhile using Oeufcoque.Shameful, wretched things.Balot Oeufcoque called out nervously.Balot spun around to face the emergency stairs.The gunfire was getting closer now.Do it. Use me to protect yourself. Oeufcoque's little body trembled in Balot's hand.I don't want to hurt you anymore.I'll be fine. I won't get hurt.Balot's expression tightened.Right now, all she wanted to do was repent, confess to God, to anything.All she wanted was to have someone say All is forgiven.He's coming. He's even faster than I thought. Oeufcoque's voice was harsh now.She could sense the man's footsteps approaching the door at the top of the stairwell.Tears fell fromher face.She reached out to Oeufcoqueand snarced him.He turned with a squelch.A reassuringly heavy object formed in her hands.An object with a gun barrel bigger than any she had ever used before.A gun that would stand up to Boiled's weapon.This was Oeufcoque's willand a physical response to the danger that was drawing near. And it wascustomized perfectly for the situation. The grip of the gun turned, squishing into place as a belt that boundthe gun to Balot's left hand. A belt that wrapped her tight. Then it moved on to cover her wrist, with metalcontraptions designed to deflect the force of the recoiling gun away fromher body.Bullets slid into place inside the metal frame, and the firing hammer cocked automatically.And then she knew that her opponent was standing on the other side of the door.She also knew that he'd be expecting her to be standing there, gun trained on him. She sensed hispresence.The air was pregnant with tension, and an unbearable heart-rending silence flowed all around.Then the silence was abruptly shattered.The first gunshots all sounded as one. An overwhelming number of bullets sprang into action. In thatone instant, Balot fired off everything that she could.Gunfire echoed all around, along with the piercing metallic sound of bullets clashing in midair.A number of Balot's bullets had managed to pierce the cannonball-like round that emerged fromBoiled's revolver, shooting it down.The overpowering smell of charred metal spread, and a dense cloud of smoke filled the area.When her opponent stopped firing, Balot too paused to eject her magazine, and with it the searing heatthat had been building up in her gun.When she started firing again she could feel the shock from the blasts vibrating in her arms. Balotrealized what Oeufcoque had been doingsuppressing all his own instincts to reject her, pushing themdeep inside himself so that he could fill himself with bullets and be useful to her, protect her.In turn, Balot carried on snarcing Oeufcoque, helping him to continue. Even as the trigger was pulledand the electronic pulses caused the bullets to fly out the barrel.She twisted Oeufcoque's heart and pressed down, hard.Balot's eyes brimmed with tears, and her vision blurred; she fired by sensation alone.In her sorrow she felt herself go weak in the legs, and her knees suddenly buckled. She crumpled intoa heap, her rump now on the rooftop.A pathetic sight.Still sitting, she carried on shooting, pushing the gun out in front of her.From beyond the door, now torn to shreds, Boiled's bullets came at her, relentless, oppressive,crushing.Balot squeezed Oeufcoque tight and raised the level on her snarc up another notch, firing again andagain with a face streaked with tears.She knew that if she didn't, she'd be dead.How pitiful and pathetic she was, doing all this just to try and save her own life.Suddenly there was an explosion right beside her, and part of the roof opened up. Balot realized thather aimwas starting to falter. And there was nothing she could do about it.The melee was disrupting her breathing, and her internal rhythmwas going haywire.Unable to withstand the pressure, her emotions were in disarray. Her breast was choked with sorrow,and she saw just how much stronger Boiled was.Her aimwas all over the place now.The figure of her opponent grew blurrier still.No longer able to sense where her opponent was aiming, she was gripped by terror, andwithoutthinkingscrambled for cover, awkwardly trying to get to her feet.A life-threatening mistake.Balot realized that she had been shot at.The bullet flew straight for her face.Then it happened, in an instant. The gun in her hand jumped up of its own accord.The gun covered her face, turning with a squelch into a thick slab of shock-absorbent material.Such was Oeufcoque's will.The bullet hit Oeufcoque. The belt fixed to her hand was blown away, and the gun flew from herfingers and smashed into Balot's face. Her skin tore, and blood poured out fromher wound.Overcome by dizziness in her head, she collapsed, as if she'd just been flung backward.The gun hadonly justsaved Balot's life, but in doing so it was blown to pieces itself.One of the fragments squelched its way back into the form of Oeufcoque, who gave another cry ofanguish.At the corner of her field of vision Balot saw the golden-haired mouse.Desperately pulling herself up, she extended her hand toward him.In turn Oeufcoque suppressed his suffering with all his might and tried to jump back into Balot's hand.A deadly bullet flew straight at them. Packed with cold, vicious intent.Paralyzed by fear, Balot couldn't even moveshe was petrified on the spot.But the bullet wasn't aimed at her.The bullet exploded right in front of her eyes.The concrete rooftop flew up along with the target. The concrete fragmented and scattered, and a softbundle of something came flying toward her, bouncing off against her chest.Oeufcoque's flesh and red blood splattered across Balot's white clothes.Balot Oeufcoque's voice.Mind blank, Balot tried to find the source of the voice. Make me transform into something, quickly.The voice was frail, but full of urgency.Finally Balot found Oeufcoque. He was the bundle that had just smashed into her chest and bouncedoff.The sight of himfelt like a hammer blow to the side of her head.Oeufcoque's lower body was shredded to pieces, and he was crawling along, armoutstretched towardher.Balot screamed.But, of course, all that leaked out of her mouth was a dry whistling sound.Crying, she hastily scooped Oeufcoque up.That same instant a bullet came flying at her.She felt a thud in her upper right arm. For a moment she thought her whole arm had been torn off, sopowerful was the impact.Another blow followed to her flank. Her body flew through space. The air stuck in her throat and shelost all sense of up and down.Her consciousness receded into the distance, but her Made- by-Oeufcoque shell protected her to theend.She slammed into the iron perimeter fence, shoulder first. Thrown down onto the roof, she banged hertemple against the concrete, jolting her back into consciousness.Blood poured from the wound on her forehead, seeping into her right eye so that everything she sawappeared coated by a bright red film.She was now a sitting duck. But no more bullets came at her.Instead, the giant man emerged frombehind the bullet-riddled door.Smoothly, as if he had all the time in the world, Boiled walked toward her.This gun is you. Boiled stopped a little way away from her. This gun is what you were, back then.You were made to annihilate, to bring nothingness to this world. Just like me. That's the ultimate answerto all those debates about what we are.He was standing a good distance away. A good distance to fire words off from, and a good distance tofire bullets off from.Boiled opened the cylinder of his revolver. Smoking cartridges scattered across the roof. His triggerfingers, and the fingers that he was using to load more cartridges into his revolver, were all covered withburns and blisters.The cylinder of his revolver clicked back into place.Gripping his red-hot gun, he turned the muzzle toward Balot.Balot's left hand touched something soft. Without even looking at it, she knew exactly what it was.Without even looking at it, she knew exactly what it was trying to do. She felt his blood, slippery in herfingers. She closed her eyes, wanting to get a better feel of its warmth.She heard the firing hammer of Boiled's gun clicking back.That very same moment, Balot brandished the gun in her handthe turned Oeufcoque.Two gunshots fired simultaneously, echoing in the night, sparks flying through the darkness.The two bullets collided in midair, in the space between Balot and Boiled, smashing each other intopieces.Balot felt a warmsensation in her hands.Blood flowed fromthe gun, covering her hands and dripping to the floor.Crying, Balot squeezed the bleeding gun tight, pulling the trigger over and over.In order not to diein order to survive.