Ch.305043rd Work Record – Savior (2)

As if following the prediction of someone who shouldn’t be in El Sueño, La Roca had been waiting for salvation for days. However, she wasn’t waiting for rescue forces. She was waiting for a savior.

The ongoing torture in a room without lights or windows couldn’t steal even a bit of her religious fervor. Rather, it only made it burn brighter. La Roca didn’t need eyes because she saw with faith.

When El Sueño was called an invisible god, they tore out La Roca’s glass eyes, but it didn’t matter. Even with her eyes removed, La Roca could see the vision El Sueño had given her more clearly than ever.

Because it wasn’t some revelation, but an image etched directly into her optic nerve. With her glass eyes removed and no visual stimuli, only the image directly imprinted on her optic nerve remained vivid.

The Las Vegas Strip interrogators were bewildered by this sight. La Roca was rising up, despite having all her modified parts removed, with only her arms remaining up to the forearms.

The flayed skin, a result of torture that should have been gradually increased but was instead poured out to the limit in just a few days to extract information quickly, seemed to have no effect on her.

She spread her arms as if trying to embrace the torturers. Only her yearning for El Sueño, which had helped her endure the pain, filled her completely. She spoke with broken teeth and a slightly cut tongue.

“You don’t enjoy making people suffer. You don’t enjoy extracting information to offer to your superiors. You don’t enjoy living in this Las Vegas Strip. Not at all. Not even a little.”

Even without listing each torture they had inflicted, the impossibility of her condition remained unchanged. She approached them, limping on one leg due to tendon damage, staring at them with empty eye sockets.

“Rather, you hate such things so much. You must despise the fact that you have to live in the Las Vegas Strip, that you have to do these things, that you cannot determine your own fate.”

She began speaking like a blind prophet. To her now, pain was sweetness. All this violence they poured out was, according to doctrine, the expressive act of people who couldn’t possess pleasure and enjoyment.

“So, by breaking people, by dominating… you’re intoxicated with the sensation of controlling the situation. You’re trying to believe you can do something, struggling to escape from an unpleasant situation.”

One interrogator pressed a shock baton against La Roca’s burn-blistered side, and she felt the current shaking her collapsing body again. The current reminded her of El Sueño’s lightning.

The sensation of burning skin was buried beneath the thrill of that moment she recalled. Buried beneath the image of El Sueño delivering revelations, proclaiming that all this wasteland would be theirs.

It was true that La Roca was experiencing terrible pain, but for her, this pain was… deserved. It was punishment for her repeatedly disobeying El Sueño’s words.

He had clearly told her not to finish off the mercenaries, but she had tried to. She had tried to kill those El Sueño said not to kill. She had done so again this time, and now she was being punished.

Believing this made the pain bearable. Because there is love in the heart of a god who punishes. Punishment is given to those who can be changed by it. If she changed, El Sueño would come.

La Roca, who had collapsed on the floor reeking of iron and ammonia due to the electric current, rose again. The rock established by El Sueño had not broken. The torturers now began to fear this blind saint.

Pain is equal for everyone. Pain changes people. A million propositions beginning with ‘Pain is’ were true in every moment, but not now, because they weren’t true for her.

Compassion entered La Roca’s voice. She was enduring pain with promised salvation, but the interrogators here were suffering pain with no salvation awaiting them.

“So, I can’t bear how pitiful you all are. You have no salvation, and you’ll live your whole lives believing these one-time intoxications are true pleasure and enjoyment… I pity you.”

Angered by those words, one interrogator kicked La Roca with all his might, trying to deny her words and show who held dominance. La Roca began alternating between crying and laughing.

“Ah, El Sueño. These sinners have finally realized the thorn stuck under their nails. Now that they know the source of pain, they cannot look away, and the wound will begin to fester…”

With those words, La Roca looked up at the vision visible beyond her empty eyes. The image injected into her mind blazed clearly in her head again. She looked toward where the wind was coming from.

Seeing the cold, refined air coming in meant one of the torturers had opened the door. They had made a mistake. She had sought El Sueño, and they had opened the door. The outline of an invisible door began to appear.

And before La Roca’s eyes, the figure of El Sueño began to appear. It must be a hallucination. Her pain-ridden brain had painted the savior she dreamed of with the last drops of hope’s pigment.

But El Sueño was precisely that dream. He was born in dreams and descended to dreamers, lamenting a reality where people do not dream and enjoy.

La Roca knelt on the floor saturated with the smell of iron and ammonia. She waited for the god clearly visible before her eyes, and heard the sound of an interrogator’s foot striking the floor.

He rose into the air, and as he tried to shout something, his head was crushed and he flew into the interrogation room wall. Another interrogator quickly tried to draw his shock baton, but it floated up into the air.

La Roca could smell burning flesh and hear the interrogator’s screams through her muffled ears. El Sueño was silent, but La Roca didn’t mind at all. She was still being tested.

She began following the silhouette of El Sueño drawn in her mind. Sometimes screams rang out before her, or warm, sticky liquid touched the floor, but it wasn’t a problem.

When La Roca arrived at the doors of two elevators side by side, the elevator door she wasn’t standing in front of opened. The sound of hurried footsteps rang out, and La Roca turned her head.

Though she couldn’t tell exactly, about eight to ten people were coming out of the elevator. With someone’s panicked “Uh, uh? Wait, no!” gunshots and the sound of high-frequency knives rang out.

Flesh splattered onto her shoulder, and she shook it off. The sound of something scraping the floor approached her, but couldn’t grab her ankles that had lost their nails or had been touched by saws. Only death rattles echoed.

Only after all that ended did the elevator La Roca had been waiting for arrive, and its doors opened. She got in, and though there was no one around, she could feel El Sueño.

La Roca couldn’t contain her excitement and leaned her body, which remained supported in midair without falling. La Roca began to whisper with slurred pronunciation. A loving whisper.

“Show mercy to them too, El Sueño. Seeing their sins, or souls dying without ever experiencing pleasure and enjoyment in their lifetime, must be sad for you too, my El Sueño…”

Despite her coquettish tone, El Sueño remained silent. The surveillance cameras only captured a woman standing askew, spouting deranged babble. The elevator stopped at the 5th floor of the building.

La Roca moved forward, following the vision of El Sueño before her eyes. When she reached a security staff passage that wouldn’t open, the door shattered, and she walked through the air ten centimeters above the glass shards.

Where she arrived following El Sueño’s hallucination, there was a chair. La Roca didn’t doubt, and restraints began to bind her body. Her wrists couldn’t be restrained. Because she had no wrists.

The sound of a bone saw approached, and all her senses momentarily faded, leaving only El Sueño’s vision. It showed the god extending his hand as lightning struck the wasteland. She saw the splendor of celebration and the moment of conquest.

Though her sense of time wasn’t functioning properly, making her unable to distinguish between an instant and eternity, loneliness wasn’t a problem. Because El Sueño’s revelation was guiding her. And soon, her senses returned.

The HUD appearing in her vision flickered, and soon the world seen through digitized eyes began to appear again. There was no feeling, but tactile feedback was working. She rose from the full-body cyberization surgery table.

Far away, she could see a broken body. Her former body, with its head opened but still smiling despite being wracked with pain. La Roca raised her awkward metal body and approached the mechanical arms moving that body.

And she embraced the body. Following what the mechanical arms should do, La Roca herself carried her old body to the organic waste processor and put the brainless body into the shredder. Farewell.

As La Roca watched the tortured piece of flesh disappear forever, the internal security team of the Human Resources Department arrived behind her, armed with silenced submachine guns. They couldn’t understand the situation.

What kind of intervention had occurred? The fact that a prisoner being tortured on the third basement floor had accurately undergone brain transplantation into a full-body cyborg here was incomprehensible to them.

And one security officer standing at the edge pointed his gun at his colleagues standing beside him and pulled the trigger while screaming.

The security team, minimally deployed to avoid attracting attention from other teams who were both symbiotic and competitive, fell. The security officer who had massacred them whispered to La Roca, trembling with fear.

“There’s no mutant who can use abilities while wearing a full-body cyborg, right? Huh? No, r-really… witches can only use that ability with bodies made of flesh…”

At that moment, he drew a knife from his waist, deeply cut his own nape, and collapsed. La Roca stepped through the pool of blood with her titanium steel foot and left the repair department.

Though she needed to go down for escape, an elevator heading up arrived. This was a revelation. El Sueño wanted her to go up. So La Roca gladly obeyed.

She boarded the elevator, and it headed to the 23rd floor, the top floor of the building. There… only the Human Resources Team leader’s office, a boss’s room, and their conference room modestly filled the top floor.

She walked without hesitation toward the conference room at the front, and the Las Vegas Strip’s security chief, wearing reinforced armor, burst through the glass door of the conference room. He aimed his gun.

The aimed gun barrel fell to the floor. More precisely, the wrist of the security chief holding the vertical grip in his reinforced armor was cut off, causing the gun to point at the floor.

Surprised, he pulled the trigger with his intact hand, filling the entire corridor with gunshots, gunpowder smoke, and bullet marks, but La Roca continued walking.

When she raised her face to look at the security chief, his neck was severed. Or so it appeared. La Roca headed into the conference room, following the revelation, or hallucination. The conference room was pre-war style.

Beside a long conference table that seemed able to accommodate all executives hung a restored, massive pre-war artwork. The executives weren’t there. They were all in the panic room.

They didn’t know why La Roca had come here. They couldn’t even understand how she had come. El Sueño wasn’t a god. He should have been just an agent in optically camouflaged reinforced armor. That’s what he should have been.

El Sueño shouldn’t have known the internal structure of this building. Or perhaps gang hunters recruited by El Sueño had gradually revealed the internal structure they remembered.

La Roca shouldn’t have been able to come this far. She should have died when they dispatched the emergency strike team to the basement, when they sent security to the 5th floor.

Or El Sueño drew attention in La Roca’s form and then eliminated them all. Not using his usual high-frequency blade, but grabbing one security guard with brute force and massacring them with their own weapons.

La Roca slowly approached and lightly touched the painting hanging on the conference room wall. It depicted paradise. On the edge of the painting was written “Elysion,” a Greek word popular just before the war.

To her, the pastoral plains in the painting, the fruit trees bearing delicious fruit, and the clean spring weren’t paradise. Paradise was a land existing in reality, created by people under divine guidance. This was unrealistic.

While El Sueño’s rock was looking at the painting depicting paradise, the security chief with his severed neck and wrist floated into the conference room. With his severed wrist held high, he began writing in blood on the painting.

‘Today I came only to reclaim something more precious than the throne.’

If someone with a keen eye were to review the CCTV footage, they might notice marks on the security chief’s forearm just above his severed wrist and on his waist, as if gripped by something.

But not many would rewind that moment. Because the moment La Roca knelt and clasped her hands before the words surely written by the god she served, her figure also disappeared from that place.

La Roca denied the existence of the metamaterial waterproof cloak covering her body. What concealed her body was El Sueño’s power, not some mere cloak! Or at least that’s what she believed.

Soon, the 23rd-floor window shattered. Only now could the Human Resources Team executives think like humans again. They ordered all remaining plainclothes agents to go outside the building to find El Sueño.

But no one noticed the footprints appearing on the carpeted floor of the staircase connecting the 23rd and 22nd floors. Even the thudding sounds in the stairwell were absorbed by the carpet on the floor.

The Human Resources Team feared the discovery of El Sueño’s intrusion into their building by other teams more than the intrusion itself. If this incident came to light, they would be torn apart and devoured like the Accounting Team.

The executives still in the panic room didn’t hear the thumping footsteps of the full-body cyborg, the invisible footsteps leaving the building like a free person, as they began discussing how to cover up this incident.

It was a meaningless meeting. No matter what good excuse they made, no matter what perfect reason they gave… the El Sueño cult would use this intrusion for propaganda.

They needed a desperate decision. It was even ambiguous to call it a desperate decision. Their goal was for the Human Resources Team to survive, not for the Las Vegas Strip to survive.