Eye of the Monster

She followed after Candles, trudging up to the top of the footpath and getting her first solid look at the shoreline. A lone figure was down there, lit only by the comet's gaze, staring out to sea as if a statue. His left arm ended in a vicious saw blade that already was arcing electricity from its teeth.

Candles broke into a sprint, descending the path while igniting his pilot light and testing the weapon with a short burst of napalm onto the sand below. That served as the trigger for nearly three dozen creatures to burst out of the sand. Blank things of flesh and hunger. She knew them well. She had been one. And so she knew the threat they represented better than anyone else in this world.

"Candles!" Instinct's voice sounded normal to herself in the suit but it would sound to him distorted and masculine. He peered over his shoulder at her, the twin red lights of his helmet standing out against his silhouette.

"None of those creatures can escape! Not even one, Candles! Not even one!" Even one would be enough to end the world.

He turned his attention towards the nearest of them and let loose a torrent of flame that stuck to two of them. They collapsed in a writhing heap, but many more were ready to take their place.

Activating the compressed air jumpjets, Instinct pushed the suit off the top of the rise and sailed through the air, landing in the sand with a cloud rising around her that the growing wind stole away.

At last Ionfist turned to face her.

"It's the eye of the tiger, it's the thrill of the fight! Rising up to the challenge of our rival!"

He held his cybernetic weapon high above his head and with his other hand gestured for his foe to come close. No monologue, no threats, no diplomacy. This was all he had ever wanted in his barbaric life. Instinct deployed the riot shield and dialed the railgun to medium velocity: enough to maim and cripple, but not quite kill. He intended no such mercy.

"And the last known survivor stalks his prey in the night... And he's watching us all with the eye!... "

"Of the tiger!!"

= = =

The air raid siren was a minor distraction to Havelock. He supposed it might be a sign that someone was closing in on him, but when it cut out suddenly he wrote it off as someone fiddling with the tower up by the road. No concern for him.

The pressure in the air was changing which suggested a storm was coming. A derelict lighthouse by the shoreline was perhaps the last place anyone would want to be in the event of a big storm but Havelock didn't need to live much longer no matter what. Once he had this last collector wired up, he'd just have to hit the key and that would be it. He wouldn't die happy but he'd die knowing this carnival of hypocritical horrors was going to die with him.

He hooked the last bit of copper in place on the top collector and then shuffled his way down the spiral stairs to the ground floor. Taking off his coat, he laid it on the table over some of the calculations he'd been doing, adjusted his glasses and then made his way to the cobbled-together computer awaiting a single press of the Y key to set off armageddon. There was some kind of racket outside, sounds of fighting of some sort, but it didn't interest him.

As he stood before it, rubbing his right hand with his left, Elazar took a deep breath. This was it. The thing he'd worked for, the end he'd bent all of his knowledge and ingenuity towards. Was it revenge? No, in the end Ionfist was right. This wasn't murder... This was love. Love, and mercy. What more could he do for this world than to put it out of its misery?

I'll see you soon, Selena.

Your cinnamon hair.

Those warm baby blues.

Her choking. Her desperation.

The tears coursing down Havelock's cheeks dripped onto the grim line of his mouth and he reached out to press the key.

"Is that the button that ends the world?"

Havelock stopped, looking over his shoulder smoothly to see who had spoken. A woman stood in the doorway, dark of hair, broad of shoulder, dressed in a trench coat and a hat. He could see the comet's light gleaming on a railgun hanging on her hip, but it was in its holster. She could have shot him already but instead had asked a question.

He had to let out a tense sigh before he could speak, and he didn't turn to her as he did so. "The world ended a long time ago," he stated. "This is the button that skips us past the crying."

She didn't move into the lighthouse, instead keeping her distance. She asked, "Then why did you hesitate?"

She had meant, why are you crying? Elazar supposed that was a good question. "Never thought I would get this far," he admitted. "This scale. This much material. The first time was a pebble in the pond. This time it'll be a meteor."

"The person you're doing this for," the woman said, still not moving. "Is it what they would want?"

Despite his desire to remain calm, Havelock couldn't keep from speaking quickly. "It doesn't matter what she would want. She's dead. She'll never want anything else ever again."

"So then," she concluded, "This is just for you."

That made him sound quite selfish, and that was never how Havelock had thought of himself. "This is for everyone," he protested. "And anway, I thought you didn't care about my reasons?"

At that she looked visibly confused. She shook her head. "We've never met before."

"Really?" Elazar raised an eyebrow. "That wasn't you in the suit, in Seacliff? Neon Justice, they call you."

"If you were to look outside right now," she said evenly, "You'd see that same suit giving Ivan Ionfist a rematch."

He grunted in mild surprise. "And here I'd have thought technology that sophisticated, that expensive, might be gene-locked. Instead they'll let anyone pilot--"

The woman cut him off. "It is. The person inside of it... is me, genetically. But... not quite."

Finally Havelock turned to look at her. "What are you implying?"

"The person out there in the suit," she explained, "Is one of them."

"Them?" he questioned. He frowned. "One of the blanks?"

She took a few steps in and removed her hat, placing it on top of his coat on the desk. "Yeah," she confirmed. "Hard to believe, I know. We had an argument about it not too long ago. I wanted to try to save them. Teach them to be people. She said it was too dangerous."

Havelock raised a hand. "Hold on. Back up. One of those things... You talk to it? It... It reasons? It's supposed to be an infiltrator, a... a mouth with eyes, nothing more."

The woman sat on the stool Havelock had used when talking to It That Stares and let out a sigh.

"Reasons better than I do, sometimes. And wants to fuck, constantly. I'd never tell her this but she's driving me insane. I get so little done when we're together, it makes me feel irresponsible."

"You fuck it? It... It fucks?"

The woman looked at him sharply. "Stop calling her 'it,'" she growled. "She's a person. She's a wonderful person. The best person I've ever met." She placed her head in both hands and sighed heavily. "I don't deserve her. She's better than me in every way. She should have replaced me, but for some reason I'm the one she says she wants most."

Havelock walked away from the computer, forgetting all about it as he grabbed an empty box for a mana collector and sat on it a meter in front of the woman. She continued letting out something that had clearly been building for a while. Havelock didn't have a degree in psychiatric medicine but he had been a good listener, once.

"It keeps amazing me," she went on, "How such a wonderful person can be made out of me. Out of my mind. I'm so... so fucked up in so many ways, I feel like I'll never get better. But she gets all the good parts of me and none of the bad ones. She's not afraid of hurting anyone else, like I am. And she talks sometimes about wanting to... To change the world, and the people in it. Make them kinder, more connected. It sounds so weird on paper but when I look into her eyes, when I feel her heart beating in her hand or her throat... I believe it. I really believe it."

Havelock whispered, "Incredible. One of them has learned to be like you. A copy, but with ambition besides just consumption? And it wants to... to reproduce, biologically? I didn't know this was even possible."

Elazar reached out and took both of the woman's hands in his own. "This changes everything," he declared. "Don't you see? If even one of these creatures can take on the best traits of metahumanity, and they don't die or suffer memory death over time then... Then on a long enough timeline, they'll mix with the population to the point that everyone will share their biology to some extent or another."

The woman didn't interrupt this time, raising one of her brows as if unsure where he was going. "And that is a metahumanity," he predicted, "That will survive what is to come! The root fear of the scourge has always been that it would come before we're ready for it, that it would just wipe us all out like it did in the old days. This could be the secret to the sixth world's survival! Distilling ourselves, creating copies that remember our mistakes but aren't crippled by them..."

For the first time since Selena had died in his arms, Havelock smiled. A true genuine smile. "There's hope," he whispered. "Selena, there's still hope."

The woman sat up on the stool and surveyed him with bleary eyes. "You're awfully quick to go from engineering doomsday to seeing the light," she said suspiciously.

At this Havelock shrugged. "It's okay to change your position when new information comes to light," he said. "If I'm wrong about this then nothing changes. It all still ends in doom and gloom and nothing any of us does will matter so what's the point in worrying? But if this is what I think it is, then the sixth world one day will be a paradise!"

He met the woman's gray eyes and she smiled back, though sheepishly. Probably she felt self-conscious about being the model on which the future was built, but there was no room for modesty in a savior.

Elazar's smile became sad. "I wish I could meet her," he said. "Just once. I have so many questions I'd like to ask. About her biology and her senses. About... Well, you'd be bored by the technical aspects."

"You can meet her," the woman offered. "We just have to subdue Ionfist and those other creatures."

But Havelock shook his head. "You have to bring me back to prison," he reminded, "And Aztechnology will have me killed for making fools of them. That's if the state doesn't execute me when they figure out what I've been trying to do. Oh if only I'd known what the creatures were capable of sooner... I thought they were just monsters, stealing the worst of our traits and wearing them as masks... Never did it occur to me they could resemble the virtuous."

The woman stood up suddenly and placed a heavy hand on Havelock's shoulder.

"What you've done has resulted in lives being lost," she said sternly, "And... And because of the joy it's brought me I am not fit to be your judge. But if you're telling the truth about having hope now for the future... I can help you get away."

He looked up at the woman curiously. "And how were you thinking of doing that?"

She leaned close to him and whispered in his ear, at the same time pointing towards the doorway. There floated a small Sundowner model drone, no doubt recording them.

"Smile," she said, "We're going to fake your death."

= = =

Candles had sprinted away to chase down some uneaten that had gone for an old sewage pipe. No doubt the entity from which they were shed had sensed their imminent extermination and willed them to flee, consume and regroup, but the shadowrunner was ruthless in cutting them off. Last Instinct saw of him he was delving into the pipe after three of them with his Browning Ultra-Power in hand.

Ionfist kept her busy, trading blows as the storm rolled in. Rain began to pelt them, leaving droplets on the multitudes of lenses that made up the exterior of the suit, lashing in waves against Ivan's calloused body. He fought like the madman he was, never giving up ground, ignorant of the drone that watched them whenever it could get close. He longer required an audience; to him this was a matter of defining who he was... Violence for its own sake, nothing more, and nothing less.

When she delivered a bash with the shield to his midsection that lifted Ivan off the ground and dropped him to his knees, the ground erupted from beneath her. A collage of scything arms and mandibles bore down on her even before the suit had gone horizontal and out of reflex she dialed the railgun up to its maximum velocity. Three red-hot tungsten rods rocketed out of the suit's right gauntlet--flumph flumph flumph-- and flew through the head and body of the monster, flying off into the ocean. It went limp and collapsed onto the beach and it was all she could do to jump-jet up out of the sand as it rushed to fill in the pit where the monster had lain in hiding.

Almost.

The suit ended up buried up to its left shoulder in the sand of the beach. The air intake was clogged, preventing her from blasting up out of it. She'd have to have someone dig out around the jets for her to get out.

Ionfist knew right away she was trapped. He approached slowly, the hunter finally coming in for the kill, and when he was within five meters he charged with an overhead swing of his ionic saw. The teeth scraped against the titanium helmet, leaving a terrible surface scar that shorted out the lights where it touched. Neon Justice would forever look as if he had lost an eye fighting Ivan Ionfist.

He raised his arm again for another blow, this one intended to crack open the helmet and get to the pilot within. At the apex of his swing, a steel rod collided with his jaw and went flipping away into the sand.

Barely able to see past the sand she was buried in, Instinct caught Impulse's silhouette holding the Accelerator. Ivan grinned as if he had been waiting for this moment. With his left hand he beat his chest, daring Dawson to shoot him dead. That he wouldn't he would never know wasn't because of her longing for mercy, but because he had become a walking bomb.

Lightning flashed across the sky as Ivan charged, screaming, towards Dawson. She fired three more shots at medium velocity from the Accelerator, one of which stabbed into Ivan's right shoulder. But he refused to be stopped. Instinct screamed her human's name inside the suit, the sound lost in the thunder.

A face appeared in the sky. Instinct was captivated immediately at the way the clouds formed lips, the lightning flying back and forth between sockets resembling eyes. Like the limb of a watchful god, a hand formed from fog in the air and grasped Ivan's whole body, tearing him away from the swing that would have ended Impulse's life.

It pulled at him, lightning striking his arm and making the ork warboss shout into the storm. Slowly he left the ground and was drawn into the air.

Dawson dropped the Accelerator and ran... to him. She extended her right arm towards Ivan Ionfist and the motions of her mouth and head made it clear what she screamed to him. Take my hand!

The world seemed to slow to a stop as Ivan reached out with his left hand and clumsily grasped Dawon's extended right fist. For a moment he held, the storm pulling him no further. Then there was a brilliant flash that blinded Instinct, not just her eyes but her astral senses as well. Magic unlike any she had ever seen flooded through the world around them.

When her vision cleared, Ivan Ionfist was gone. The storm was retreating as quickly as it had come, back into the Pacific. Halley's Comet had vanished from the sky.

Impulse lay on her hands and knees on the beach, her coat in tatters, the Accelerator barrel-down in the sand several meters away.

Instinct whispered her name, begging for her to get up. Her heart leapt when she did, looking around at the night with some renewed sense of awareness.

Something's changed in her...

Turning on the helmet's speaker, Instinct called out. "Impulse! Impulse, come to me! Please!!"

Her human looked her way and, breathing heavily, stood up and started walking her way. She stooped to pick up the Accelerator as she did so, holstering it back on her hip.

Impulse's approach gave Instinct a strange feeling of... excitement, at once unfamiliar and yet deeply satiating, like it was something Instinct knew she needed and now it was more apparent than ever.

She saw the flare of Impulse's aura come to life just as the woman was rolling up the sleeves of her coat, and her arms were engulfed in brilliant brown-and-green radiance.

From the air raid siren above, music started to play. That meant Candles had come back around.

"You got the touch... You got the power! Yeaaaa!!"

Dawson made a shoving motion with her right hand and then her left. The sand around the suit erupted away as if someone had taken shovels to it the size of a car, lifting away in big sodden clumps to dig a steep pit around it.

"After all is said and done, you've never walked, you've never run... You're a winner!"

The suit could stand again but Instinct felt limp inside of it. Impulse looked like a firestorm as her hands moved in a palm-thrust motion, sculpting the wet sand in the front of the pit she had dug to allow the suit to simply walk up out of it.

"You've got the moves, you know the streets... Break the rules, take the heat! You're nobody's fool!"

Impulse lowered her sleeves and smiled at her, hair a mess but body seemingly no worse for the wear. "Come on," she shouted.

"You're at your best when the goin' gets rough... You've been put to the test, but it's never enough!"

Instinct wanted nothing more than to pry off the suit and climb into Impulse's clothing with her. With great effort she worked the legs of the powered armor to climb up back onto the beach proper.

Her human asked, "Are you hurt?"

"You got the touch! You got the power!"

The plates composing the helmet slid down into the neck of the suit and Instinct spoke breathlessly.

"Impulse... You... did you just use magic?"

"When all hell's breaking' loose, you'll be riding the eye of the storm!"

Turning her head slightly to one side, Impulse looked puzzled. She looked at her hands and smiled slightly. "Huh. Guess I did."

"You got the heart... You got the motion! You know that when things get to tough..."

"You got the touch!"

= = =

They found candles up on the rise by the car, helmet off and cigarette in his mouth. Dawson asked, "Did anything get away?"

"No," the ork said, flicking the nicotine stick away. "And not because of me."

He indicated a featureless and mottled body he'd dragged up onto the asphalt. Rather than being burned or shot, it had been disemboweled and decapitated in smooth cutting fashion.

The ork asked, "You ask anyone else out here?"

"I didn't," Dawson said, "But I have a feeling I know who did this." She thought, You're on the right track, Goro.

Instinct trudged up the incline in the suit and spoke through the distorter. "It's ready." Behind her, Havelock appeared with a harddrive under one arm.

"Whoa," Candles called out, setting a hand on his gun. "What's the play here, exactly?"

Before anyone could say anything, the lighthouse exploded into a column of ochre flame. That'll happen when mana collectors stuffed with unrefined orichalcum receive the wrong kind of electrical signals.

Dawson picked up the limp horror, hefted it into the air and then palm-thrusted it in the direction of the flame. A short burst of white light appeared between her hand and the carcass, propelling it away in a spinning motion where it vanished into the flame.

Again Candles said, "Whoaa, what the fuck was that? Was that magic? I didn't know you could do that!"