Ch.291Work Record No. 041 – What I Don’t Want to Refuse (4)

“Ah, yes. This is Pavilidie Leon from Farmers Co. Wasteland Restoration Research Institute. Who is… Oh! Of course I remember you. It was the most spectacular experience a wasteland restoration researcher could have!”

Farmers Co. researcher PD Leon received a communication request from someone. Remembering the fear he had briefly felt, and the time he couldn’t give up despite that fear, he answered cheerfully.

He requested something again. His voice was gentle, more like a favor than a demand, but PD felt it somehow like a company directive. He could choose not to follow it, but it made him want to comply.

“Of course I can share wasteland restoration samples with you. Actually, if an individual buys and spreads them, it’s not even the company’s responsibility, so there are fewer people who would object. Oh, and since then, we’ve made improvement after improvement…”

Improvement after improvement had made it possible to effectively convert surrounding organic matter into nutrients. Even if most of the seeds spread in large quantities died, the rest could survive by using them as nutrients.

Of course… the fact that it could break down any organic matter meant that even if a person died among those flowers, they would bloom luxuriantly on the corpse. That’s why the project name was Blood Sucker.

Originally, it was designed to directly use the enormous amount of organic waste produced by MediTechs as fertilizer, but that enormous amount of organic waste was essentially corpses, so it couldn’t be helped.

Still, the person who contacted PD really liked that characteristic. His voice was friendly. The communication ends with a suggestion to have a meal together at the Farmers Co. cafeteria sometime. The goods will be delivered.

Chance could hear someone with whom he was sharing consciousness asking something. His role was to answer. Chance’s partner wanted something unbecoming of someone entrusted with a great mission.

“Confirmed. I will prepare weather observation drones. I recommend you also contact Miss Mila Joyce. Her weather forecasts during the war were never wrong.”

Someone teased Chance for no longer calling her Prometheus, and Chance replied that there was simply an agreement. The person could sense a slight curtness in Chance’s manner.

And after exchanging some more trivial conversation, that person began to spend the remaining month planning how to spend time with his Eve, and then spent that time according to plan.

But all of this story was unnecessary. Human hearts and human-like stories were unnecessary to a god. What defines a god is what problems they solve, not what they have done.

From that perspective, the Los Soñadores gang needed a new god. Santa Muerte was a silent deity who solved no problems, a god as indifferent to them as the Mojave Desert.

When heavy rain falls, small lakes form in the Mojave Desert, and due to soil that cannot retain water, these lakes soon dry up and disappear. It’s not just the lakes.

Gangs also emerge and die, and scavengers pick at their corpses until they become another gang. In that sense, Los Soñadores looked like a small puddle that would soon disappear.

At least they had a few working cultivators so they didn’t need to cannibalize people, but two of their three cultivators were broken. It wasn’t a problem since they could get parts.

But the problem came after that. The gang members who went to Las Vegas to get parts were followed by Strip thugs.

They barely managed to fend off the subsequent attack, but in the process, more than twenty people died from a gang of just about eighty members.

El Pastor, who served as the gang’s spiritual pillar, felt despair. Now there were barely ten people who knew how to properly shoot a gun on the front lines, including La Roca, who was in charge of force.

And all of them had been suffering from terrible headaches that had started about a month ago. They said a burning pain that felt like something trying to engrave itself into their brains visited them every night.

In that pain, they saw a person. El Pastor said it looked like a god he believed in. He said they saw the image of a deity with a halo around its head, performing miracles by striking lightning.

That wasn’t all. They also said it showed them a hopeful future. They claimed to have seen Los Soñadores gang, the dreamers, proudly entering Las Vegas as if in a victory parade.

Ironically, El Pastor, the most devout among the gang members, had never seen these visions. He only pretended to understand when others spoke of them; they were scenes he had never actually witnessed.

Anyway, if it was a prophecy, it was one far removed from reality. What Los Soñadores needed to worry about wasn’t gods or salvation, but simply not being annihilated on this terribly rainy day.

They had managed to repel them once, but the Las Vegas Strip would try to annihilate Los Soñadores as a routine, ordinary task. They would surely come tonight or this evening.

Therefore, El Pastor couldn’t just sit clutching his head in fear. The responsibility to overcome the situation was in his hands. He connects communication to La Roca.

“What’s our readiness status?”

From across the communication channel came La Roca’s gruff voice. She was like her nickname—a boulder of a person.

It wasn’t about her size, muscles, or modifications. It was closer to meaning she was dry and bland. She didn’t enjoy shooting, nor was she debauched like most gang members.

She was simply cynical about everything. It was common for her to mock El Pastor when he prayed to Santa Muerte, and she was the type to say things like the world is cruel, and the only thing you can trust is the gun in your hand.

“Terrible. But I’ve done what I can. I’ve given guns to the errand boys too, so they might be able to manage suppressive fire somehow. I don’t suppose we’ll get any support?”

“I doubt it. No one’s going to care if we die.”

“What did I tell you, Reverend? The world is cruel. Whoever’s shoving these images into our heads is probably just conducting cheap human experiments. No one cares about wasteland people, right?”

El Pastor wasn’t in the mood to answer right now. He had many rebuttals but… he wasn’t saintly enough to prepare statements for a world that wouldn’t take his side.

Or perhaps he inwardly knew how ridiculous it was for a gang member to voice such complaints. El Pastor was an undertaker. Not professionally, but in terms of his beliefs.

That’s why he had attacked brain prison transport vehicles before, and ended up fleeing to this wasteland after attacking a megacorporation security team with a flimsy plan to steal brains.

Taking in La Roca was similar. Bringing a badly injured mercenary into the gang was… purely out of the thought that they might be able to stand above other organizations.

But the situation wasn’t easy. The losses caused by people coming to kill La Roca outweighed what she brought to the gang. Nevertheless, El Pastor maintained a forced smile.

It was because… he was a good person. No. It was because he believed he was a good person. Devout, and someone who knew how to work for where he belonged. That was the assessment he gave himself.

La Roca was the opposite. She was fully aware that she was society’s trash, having failed at her job and fled until she ended up in a gang. Her job wasn’t mercenary work but murder.

So she expected nothing and was thus detached. ‘And a mind that expects nothing is easily numbed by unexpected fortune,’ someone had said at an operation briefing somewhere.

This has nothing to do with these people. It has everything to do with them, down to their marrow. The truth was only hazy. None of them could have predicted how many eyes were converging on this situation now.

By evening the rain had stopped, but the sky was still cloudy, and lightning still struck occasionally. For the most part, it was just thin, thread-like lightning that flashed briefly. No one was frightened.

On days when rain poured so heavily you couldn’t see ahead, such lightning struck many times. It was due to the instability of the atmosphere itself. Living in the wasteland makes you physically feel the terribleness of the environment.

El Pastor hoped the lightning would serve as a lantern. He believed that when lightning struck and brightened the surroundings, he might by chance spot the Strip forces, but that belief was betrayed.

La Roca’s urgent communication arrives at El Pastor’s computational assist device. It awakened El Pastor’s mind as he was quietly praying on the rooftop of the old laboratory building occupied by the gang.

“El Pastor! El Pastor! Get ready to fight! They’ve been spotted 600 meters east. When they get closer, I’ll start with concentrated fire. We should be able to hold them off somehow… They’re coming!”

With those words, a commonplace gunfight in the wasteland began. The state of the defensive forces was terrible, just as La Roca had said. Most of Los Soñadores’ forces now were ordinary errand boys.

Trash who sold drugs made by Los Soñadores’ cultivators, hoping to straighten out their hopeless lives a little in the wasteland. El Pastor ground his teeth in disgust.

But unlike the absurd spiritualism of the former undertaker, they were at least creating a decent field of fire. El Pastor, with neon skeleton tattoos all over his body, quietly picked up his gun.

It wasn’t anything special. Just an ordinary megacorporation rifle modified in the style of Santa Muerte followers, but it was as good as any weapon available in the wasteland.

El Pastor hurriedly ran and leaned against the low wall on the rooftop. He rested his gun on the low wall and aimed at the power armor walking steadily forward, returning fire emotionlessly even amid the barrage.

Screams erupted around him. It was the sound of several errand boys dying, unable to even properly take cover from the return fire. El Pastor remained calm. No matter how many of them died, he had to wait a bit longer.

Power armor was the armor of an era where small arms didn’t work even without being sealed, but it wasn’t invincible armor. Concentrated fire on one spot could sometimes penetrate it, and El Pastor had some armor-piercing rounds too.

El Pastor waited for the Strip’s gang hunters to become a little more intoxicated with their power. It would feel good to look down on humans struggling, firing ineffective bullets, as if they were superior beings.

And when that good feeling fills to the top of their heads, people become careless. La Roca’s words—’You have armor-piercing rounds! Are you going to wait until all these kids die?!’—just drifted past him.

She must be afraid of failure. She had experienced it before. El Pastor rationalized. It was because gang members who had worked well with El Pastor had died defending against the last attack.

If they had understood him well like those others, they would have understood his grand intentions too. Thinking this, he waited for them to come a little closer. Only when they were close enough did El Pastor open fully automatic fire.

The chest area of the power armor, already heavily pounded by the errand boys and La Roca, especially the neck armor, was beautifully penetrated, and the arrogant attitude disappeared as the figure toppled backward.

El Pastor absolutely did not enjoy the downfall of people living better lives than himself. Or so he believed. He was a devout and hardworking person, after all.

But even El Pastor couldn’t possibly have predicted that more Strip gang hunters would emerge from behind.

Now he too fired his gun in panic, but penetrating power armor required skill. It couldn’t be done with the gang-style shooting method of pulling the trigger randomly in panic.

That’s why El Pastor was a skilled marksman. Gang members would go to Santa Muerte’s side when they died anyway, so he was good at sacrificing them to create gaps and time to concentrate.

But in this situation, he was just an ordinary gang member not worth knowing by name. Perhaps he had always been just an ordinary gang member not worth knowing by name. He was just denying it himself.

El Pastor now began to accurately sense the surrounding situation. Not the calm and quiet gained by sacrificing innocent people, but the fact that chaos was unfolding around him.

Nevertheless, El Pastor believed he could do something. Taking a short breath, he loaded another magazine of armor-piercing rounds and aimed at the enemy beyond the wall. A gun barrel was looking at him.

He had no ability to dodge, but the bullets meant for the rifleman shooting from the rooftop missed him and cut through empty air. The reason was… absurd. Because that gang hunter had been sent flying.

Not into the sky. He rolled across the wasteland as if hit by something. Something was definitely there, but invisible. The desperate voice of that gang hunter rang out sharply.

“Help! Something’s here. Something, fuck, hit me! It approached from the right…”

At that moment, that gang hunter’s helmet was pierced through the nape. It wasn’t a fully sealed power armor so there were small gaps, but those narrow gaps were forcibly widened and penetrated.

And… a knife from that gang hunter floated up into the air. At a speed El Pastor couldn’t follow with his eyes, it lodged into the gap in another gang hunter’s power armor as he looked around.

That gang hunter, clutching his side in pain, tried to return fire into the empty air, but it was useless. What followed made it clear. That gang hunter was slowly lifted into the air.

Words like “What are you doing? Put me down.” continued without promise, then he was slowly stretched in both directions with brute force, until he was completely torn apart, with each half thrown in different directions.

A bloodstained mark appeared in the empty air. Something with a human form but too large to be human was there. It was revealing itself, if only through stains.

After showing only that someone was there, it shook itself off and waited for the gang hunters positioned behind. In truth, it was impossible to know. One cannot track with eyes what cannot be seen.

“What the fuck did these worthless Los Soñadores bastards hire?! Shoot at even the slightest breeze! Whether it’s optical camouflage or whatever, bullets will penetrate it!”

Saying this while aiming his gun, ignoring the already neutralized Los Soñadores and pursuing the suddenly appeared third party, one gang hunter’s gun bent. It aimed at his comrade and fired.

The comrade gang hunter returned fire, but he too ended up shooting his own comrade. Two power armors collapsed one after another, and the head of the gang hunter who fell first turned abnormally.

It looked like someone had stepped on it and twisted it. El Pastor was watching this scene. He watched as a gang hunter with a gunshot wound to his abdomen trembled and fired wildly around him, until his stomach was pierced from behind.

It looked just like a bloody hand protruding from his stomach. Soon the gang hunter was thrown aside. A human silhouette began to appear as if flickering. It was a silhouette too massive to be an ordinary human.

It had a human silhouette but… it couldn’t be human. El Pastor didn’t know anyone who could single-handedly kill five gang hunters in power armor, even if they weren’t fully sealed.

He tried to look to at least confirm the face, but El Pastor had to cover his eyes and retreat. A flash of light too intense to meet eyes with emanated from his face.

The fact that it didn’t say anything made El Pastor more… expectant. Finally Santa Muerte… No. El Pastor didn’t care at all whether this was Santa Muerte’s messenger or whatever.

If it was a new god, he could change his faith. Gods were always beings that solved problems, so abandoning an old god who couldn’t solve problems wasn’t even that strange, he believed.