A dozen human lives, an armed AV, and who knew how much in munitions, weapons, and stocked up combat supplies. Gone in an instant, vaporized in a flash of heat and light so intense it warped every rooftop within forty meters of the blast. The secondary explosion had also damaged the buildings nearby, chewing out massive chunks of their foundation and leaving the structures teetering at the edge of collapse.

And it had taken out my shield.

All of it, right when monsters were about to turn the district into a slaughterhouse.

I glared down at the sole survivor, the soldier I'd earmarked as the leader of the squad, now naked and hogtied with metal wire. The guy quietly glared back as we both remained seated atop the water tower.

He'd insisted he hadn't even known the AV had been rigged to blow, let alone commanded it. I was inclined to believe it. Why would he blow up his only reliable transport out of the district?

But I couldn't lean into common sense.

Common sense dictated that even special operations wouldn't carry around a suicide bomb since it'd be a massive liability against a netrunner. Common sense dictated that you wouldn't destroy your resources out of some phantom concern they might get caught. That was what opsec was meant to cover for! Common sense dictated the best possible outcome was to send resources to the district to help fight the monsters, not set up… whatever this had been for.

I was grinding my teeth so hard my temples were ringing from the pressure. "What was the EGG?" I growled, eyes fixed on the cratered concrete and half-melted asphalt where the device had self-immolated.

"You think they'd tell us?"

"Is your neuralink recording? Do you have an AI observer?" I accused, glancing at the middle-aged man. Standard protocol was to plant an observation AI into anyone being sent to the field, but maybe that could risk someone doing some software forensics? This was way too far up anything they taught at the academy.

"It doesn't matter," he replied. "I'm not going to live to see the sunset."

It mattered because it could potentially establish communications the instant the jamming dropped.

I spared the guy a glance. He didn't look much older than me, maybe mid-twenties? The beard stubble added another year or so, but the scar on his chin caught my eye, a twisted jagged cut that went down his neck. "You don't look like you want to die."

"Only an idiot would throw their life away." He laughed.

A horrid metal screech rang out from my hand. The piece of rebar I'd been holding onto had been squished into an abstract representation of itself. "That include your men?" I inhaled sharply, letting out slowly in an attempt to calm my nerves. "You were the squad leader, you must have had mission parameters and relevant details. The AI overseer in your neuralink surely has mission success and failure parameters to check for."

He didn't answer.

I kept talking, if only because I didn't want to think of how easily I could shove him off the water tower. "They didn't use just any bombs to destroy the evidence. Those were plasma erasers." I distinctly remember reading about them in the Anti-Monster- weekly-digest magazine. It was a type of explosive that deployed a partially-contained blast of plasma ten times hotter than the surface of the sun. "Something hot enough to vaporize tungsten… or turn an AV into a cloud of scattered atoms." It was considered one of the few combat-usable answers against a regenerating D-class monster, and only so long as the creature got completely caught within the field. It also just so happened that the only way to acquire one was through auction since it was so insanely expensive. "There are a million cheaper ways of killing a platoon's worth of soldiers."

But none that could be that thorough, that quickly.

"I'm probably going to be dead by the end of the day," the guy said. "But if you don't let me make a run for it, so will you."

I dropped the piece of deformed rebar, watching it clang and tumble over the edge of the water tower and onto the half-wrecked buildings below. My gaze lingered on the metal suitcases the soldiers had been guarding, their metal glinting under the morning light.

The 'EGG' had been important enough to obliterate, but not the cases?

Or… maybe the cases already had the means of destroying themselves.

As if reading my mind, four of the suitcases exploded, releasing a burst of blue steam. The air became violently appetizing, the umami taste cloying at my mouth and throat.

"Get us out of here!" The mercenary cried out, reduced to a coughing fit

Not certain whether the substance could prove toxic to my prisoner, I resigned myself to saving his life, slinging him over my shoulder and jumping off to the nearby rooftops. By the time I'd stopped to check on his condition, his eyes had swollen shut, tears running down equally swollen cheeks, lips, and tongue.

It looked more like an allergic reaction than poisoning.

If his condition deteriorated any further, he'd end up suffocating. "Hold on tight."

Stolen novel; please report.

I paused a moment, noticing something amiss in the blue-coated rooftops: one of the suitcases had not exploded. Either it'd been damaged in some way, or its timer had yet to go off, whatever the case, it just remained there… Prisoner 01's feeble wheezing broke me out of the train of thought. I made a mental note to come back for it when I had the chance, and began making my way back towards the gang's base.

"No," Vesper said as soon as I finished explaining the situation. She pointed a finger at the mercenary that was more inflammation than person. It was frankly a miracle he was still breathing to begin with. "I'm not wasting good medicine on a gonk."

"He'll die." The words felt hollow in a sense. Maybe I should've put more emphasis into the statement, but I was still pissed.

"Shouldn't have come to our district," she replied, crossing her arms. "Our hands are full already. We've got a few confirmed monster sightings already."

I tried to reign in my surprise. "That's… too soon. Wait, did the jamming stop?"

"Quinn set up the drones to patrol fixed routes and data-dump the footage at the base on each circuit." She explained. "As of the last check, we have some flyers at the edge of the district that got well ahead of the pack." The young leader of the Sewer Saints kicked the bloated sweaty naked hogtied prisoner. "Why do you want to keep him alive?"

"Because we don't know what affected him and that blue stuff could end up blowing over our way," I replied. "Also, whoever detonated the bomb wants him dead." That sort of zealous paranoia meant Prisoner 01 was valuable. Valuable means useful. I wasn't sure how he could prove useful, exactly.

Not yet.

Vesper nudged Prisoner 01 with her boot, watching him gurgle and wheeze. "Fine," she said, voice flat. "I will drag the doc up, but I need you to close the main gate. The motor jammed and we don't have the time for a proper repair job."

I slung the prisoner over my shoulder, Bulstra in my free hand, and followed her across the cracked asphalt that ringed the bunker entrance. We quickly reached a crowd that had gathered on the street in front of the tunnel that led down to the bunker's main entrance. Refugees pressed against a ragged line of Saints who were doing their best to hold everyone back with nothing more than raised hands and more than a few shotguns.

Parents trying to shove babies through the gaps, old women waving bags of supplies or pieces of paper, everyone shouting out and trying to get through. The sight of it churned my stomach.

"We don't have the space," Vesper whispered, shoulders tense as my presence parted the crowd for us. As soon as she'd reached the gates, she turned to the crowd, hopping onto a broken concrete planter and shouted for calm. The order was echoed by the others, pushing the crowd two steps away from the door's grinding track.

That only riled them further.

That is, until Vesper pulled out her gun and shot twice into the air. "We don't have the space!" Vesper shouted. "You were given orders on where and how to bunker down. The Saints will be doing our best to fight what's coming, but we do not have space. Either do as you were told or join the fight."

The crowd didn't leave, but they didn't push either. The sour taste in my mouth only worsened, fully aware that if I said or did anything that might undermine Vesper's authority, we could very well end up with a schism.

Something screeched in the clouds. I glanced up in time to see a manta-shaped thing dive from the gloom. "Monster!" I roared, dropping the prisoner and pulling out my Bulstra to take aim.

The creature was as big as a motorcycle, a matte brown splotch that was accelerating down towards us, its crescent shape becoming more apparent the closer it got. The crowd of refugees was already scattering in a panic, but we didn't move, waiting until it was close enough we could stand a chance of landing a hit.

Some opened fire early. I couldn't be sure if they hit and did nothing or if they just missed, I kept waiting, watching as it kept crashing faster down at us. I squeezed the trigger once. My revolver coughed once. The slug punched a smoking crater through the wing, but the thing's momentum drove it on. The others had already joined in, dumping several more rounds before it crashed into the asphalt a few dozen meters away.

No one moved closer, keeping their guns trained on it, waiting.

We all let out a collective sigh of relief once its corpse began to fizzle and steam, burning away and reducing itself to nothing. With how easily it'd died, it couldn't be higher than an F class, yet I felt a trickle of concern at not having managed to recognize the species. The fact that there'd been no notification was also concerning. But at this point, I felt like a frayed cable ready to snap at anything.

People stared. Nobody cheered. They were too tired for celebration.

"We can't wait any longer, Axel," Vesper reminded me, instructing some of the guards to take the prisoner.

I faced the blast door. One guide rail was bent inward, locking the slab in place. I holstered the Bulstra, braced both hands against the steel, and pushed. Muscles burned, concrete cracked under my boots, and the rail groaned. The door slid a handspan and jammed again.

"Once more," Vesper shouted.

I inhaled and shoved harder. Something snapped in the hinge. The slab slammed shut with a boom that drowned every other sound. Dust puffed from the seams. For a moment the only noise was the ragged breathing of thousands of people who had just lost their last view of the sky.

A Saint opened a personnel hatch beside the door. Vesper waved me through and we ducked into the passage. The tunnel sloped down into a descending spiral, each rotation marking a floor before leading into the next. I could hear as much as I could smell the gathered crowds that were overloading the garage at every level. Sweat and fear were the two strongest scents, with a constant murmuring that quickly became background noise.

Thousands of people, crammed into as tight a space as they could be.

My stomach tightened at the math. Our slum district held millions.

We passed a tired runner carrying a stack of data-drives, probably because radios were still dead in the jammer haze. Only when we reached the third sublevel did Vesper's throat mic crackle to life.

"Quinn," she said, "gate sealed. A monster got all the way here already, any updates?"

The reply was tinny and faint. "Copy. Fans red-lined, triage overrun, south stairwell blocked. Ops board updated."

My mind kept spinning. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, or maybe it was just the exhaustion setting in, but I just couldn't let it go. A rational part of me kept insisting this was not a fight I could tackle. No matter how hard we tried, there was no solution that could let us save the district in a more meaningful way than we were already doing.

Every shred of training I'd gotten had covered this.

I should not allow the circumstances to distract me from the fight to come.

And yet…

I looked at the crowd of gathered people, tense, afraid, desperate.

My gaze stopped at one particular man, one guy whose face was familiar, but I did not fully understand why until I noticed his shirt.

"I want to believe in The Shush-Monster." It read.

I froze, eyes going wide.

"Axel?"

"I have an idea." I hesitated as I chewed through the implications of what I was about to suggest, clamping my mouth shut, then frowning.

Vesper frowned, waving in front of my face until I flinched back. "You with us?"

No, I couldn't do this alone.

"Yes, let's talk."

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