Ch.71Work Record 013 – To the Sky (8)

Could I shoot down a helicopter with a grenade rifle? Probably not. I’d been lost in thought for too long, watching the pool of blood burn and dry up. It was already too late.

I slowly raised my head to watch the helicopter land. Those who stepped out were the Shepherd with his distinctive blue fluorescent markings and… someone in an exosuit whose identity I couldn’t determine, yet somehow felt familiar.

My eyes were dry with fatigue. I rubbed my eyelids with my thumb and index finger, then looked up at the exosuit. I could see the neck. There was a helmet, but it was meant to conceal the face, not protect it.

So, not field personnel. And in this situation, there was only one office worker who would come here. After checking the Bellwether-issue tactical dagger I’d kept in my possession by running my palm over it, I stared at their silhouettes.

The office worker in the exosuit approached me. If I thrust upward just below the jawbone, I could pierce through to the life support system at the back of the head in one go. I needed to wait until they got close enough.

He looked down at me sitting on the low curb and spoke. The voice was, predictably, censored.

“Incredible. To think you could single-handedly dispose of a bioengineered monstrosity that tears through exosuits like paper, even with your enhanced body. Using potential energy, no less. A brilliant application of the basics. Efficient.”

The words of praise didn’t sound like praise. I stared back, keeping my gaze unfocused, pretending to still be in shock. Was I pretending? Only then did the branch director begin to lower himself.

But the Shepherd standing beside the branch director stopped him. I heard him say something brief. The sound seemed to reverberate from within, suggesting we were in a sound-dampening field.

“Please don’t get too close when you’re not wearing a sealed exosuit. Mercenary Personnel Company Nightwatch, Arthur Murphy, General Staff. Pull yourself together.”

The Shepherd bent down instead of the branch director and lightly tapped my chest with the back of his hand. So the Shepherd was on the branch director’s side after all? I knew he was someone who obsessed over order, but to this extent?

Despite his hand hitting my bulletproof vest, he didn’t report it. He should have reported my armed status. All I’d learned was Walter’s identity.

Did I have time? Could I survive long enough to stab Walter’s neck, deactivate his life support system, and crush his head with my fist? I couldn’t tell. But it seemed like my only chance.

I had no backup. Not even a sponsor, and my only lifeline was Bellwether’s LA branch, where Walter was the director. This might be my last chance.

If I escaped well, Nightwatch wouldn’t face repercussions. I should have left a resignation letter. I didn’t expect things to move this quickly.

I never thought everything would both begin and end so suddenly today. I had to make the best choice. Killing Walter was the best option.

It would mean killing the leader of the coup faction infiltrating Bellwether’s Los Angeles branch and settling the score for everything I’d experienced. Other options… I couldn’t see any. They simply didn’t exist.

If I somehow subdued the assault team, six men, and the Shepherd, then escaped to somewhere safe, Nightwatch would be held responsible—and that wasn’t even possible to begin with. He had essentially come to deliver an ultimatum.

Jaina was purged by Walter, by the security team led by the Shepherd. The monster did kill me, but… I couldn’t blame it. All my hatred belonged to Walter. All my murderous intent was for him.

“He seems fine, don’t worry…”

Despite the security team leader’s warning, the branch director leaned slightly toward me. The security team leader ejected a blade from his forearm that seemed to ripple from the vibration and looked down at me. He was on guard.

Fucking traitors. Fucking Bellwether. I missed the harpoon hanging on Gunter’s shop wall. But all I had in my hand now was the dagger.

The branch director started talking again. He seemed to believe he could persuade me. Apparently, he didn’t think the “bioengineered monstrosity” could speak either.

Perhaps… just perhaps, he didn’t need the regeneration experiments on the Post-Human Type IV. What he really needed might have been that monster. I suppressed the urge to grit my teeth.

“That’s good. Your recovery speed from psychological trauma is also remarkable. What did you see while fighting that monstrosity? I saw the limits of humanity.”

I saw your sister believing in you until her death. I saw myself selling out even your name to save what you call a monster. I swallowed my words. The branch director continued.

“I saw the inefficiency of Lone Star Rangers, keeping a monster that slaughtered countless researchers imprisoned simply because it was once human. But you were different. You were a machine made of flesh.”

Vola had said something similar, but when he said it, it didn’t feel offensive. Now, however, it made my skin crawl. The branch director lowered himself a bit more.

“Finding a place high enough to cause irreparable damage through a fall, successfully luring it there, dropping it, and finishing it with incendiary rounds. This could be a case study for the manual.”

He finally crouched lightly in front of me as I sat on the low curb of the sidewalk, and grabbed my right hand. He began speaking as if he could somehow reform me. His head was close enough now.

“You’re truly an indispensable talent. You refused once, but I’ll ask a second time, even a third if necessary. You were originally scheduled for termination, but I personally…”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I was tired of being Walter’s pawn. With the monster that could crush resistance forces gone, he was simply looking for a replacement. Nothing more, nothing less.

My hand moved so quickly it seemed to ripple. Gripping the half-drawn Bellwether-issue dagger, I firmly grabbed Walter’s hands holding my right hand and pulled. I extended the blade upward.

Did he think he could easily persuade a half-crazed general staff member? If so, he should have worn a sealed exosuit. The blade dug into the inside of his jawbone beneath his helmet.

It was penetrating upward without resistance. I briefly felt it catch on the cervical vertebrae, but it wasn’t a significant obstacle. The human skeleton wasn’t difficult to break with force.

I too was Bellwether’s biological weapon. Just a bit more intelligent than that monster, but otherwise no different. Especially to Walter. I should have felt the blade tip reach the life support system, but the blade stopped moving.

That traitor bastard was gripping my forearm. Though his face wasn’t clearly visible—he’d lowered an anti-mutant visor over his helmet visor, perhaps out of some sense of shame—the Shepherd had grabbed my forearm.

“You should have said things I could tolerate, Walter. You traitor bastard who can’t do anything without being protected like a child…”

From the moment the blade began pushing up from the tip of his chin, Walter’s life support system must have activated.

As he was about to go limp, he barely regained consciousness, drew a revolver from his waist, and pulled the trigger without properly aiming. But we were too close.

The bullet fired from the thick-barreled revolver designed for special ammunition easily pierced through the skin and bone of this enhanced body. The hole in my right thigh was large enough to see the ground through it.

The bleeding and pain were temporary. Pain is inefficient unless it’s used to assess injury status and take measures. I clung to consciousness with a deep, deep yearning for efficiency.

“Ah, hoo, fu… fuck… Shepherd, you son of a bitch! You were in on it from the beginning…”

I twisted and pulled out the dagger that had dug under Walter’s jawbone, hoping to cause excessive bleeding. It was useless if the life support system had activated. The assault team from the helicopter began rushing in from outside the sound-dampening field.

But the Shepherd showed them his fist as if telling them not to enter the sound-dampening field, only pushing the branch director toward them. A voice leaked from his exosuit. Incomprehensible words.

“Endure, Shepherd Six. It will be brief. It will be brief…”

Since he’d already checked my bulletproof vest, I couldn’t rely on luck. I raised my chin to face him as if daring him to shoot, but his gun barrel… was aimed at my chest.

A heavy gunshot rang out inside the sound-dampening field. The terrible impact and pain crushing my lungs and heart nearly made me lose consciousness. I struggled to hold onto my senses. I hadn’t died instantly.

First, I felt something hot and wet on my chest, followed by coldness. Did he deliberately shoot through the bulletproof vest to make me die slowly? My eyelids, which I tried to keep wide open, trembled. My vision blurred.

An assault team member who rushed into the sound-dampening field shouted at the Shepherd. He seemed to be the assault team leader who had followed the Shepherd… that’s… damn, my thoughts were slowing down too.

“We need to either send him to information processing or interrogate him, but you’ve gone and fired! Damn it, the rest of you evacuate the branch director! We need to call an ambulance right away to keep this bastard alive!”

I heard the tail end of those words, over and over. My vision showed the same scene as if in a photograph—just the face of the security team leader with his visor obscuring his expression, and the face of the assault team member.

Soon, darkness falls. Fuck… it’s my first time dying a second time in one lifetime. If nothing else, I could tell that by the time a person dies twice, they get better at cursing.

With that thought, my consciousness completely sank. Going down. Sinking like the soft beds I feared, not knowing where the bottom was.

And at some unknown time… I hit that bottom. My back was uncomfortable. Hard. I felt the floor with my hand. It was soft for something hard. What was this?

If it was the worst I could expect, I’d be watching my gray matter being dissected in the virtual reality of the information processing team. If not that, then… perhaps a hospital? I couldn’t tell.

Sensation returned to my eyelids too. Something was just covering my face. I brought my hand to my face. When I gently gripped it, the part my fingers touched began to crumble. It seemed to be an electronic device.

Where was I? I removed that mask-like object from my face and threw it at the wall. The object flew toward the curtained window and shattered. It was a facial protection device for post-facial reconstruction surgery recovery.

Preservation fluid flowed from the broken machine. What color was it? Orange. If it was orange… then this wasn’t Bellwether, nor Pasadena General Medical Center. I needed to figure out where I was.

The process is always simple. There’s a purpose. It must be carried out. Then a new purpose emerges. I touched my chest where I’d been shot. There was a similar protective device over my chest. My chest still throbbed.

My body’s condition was terrible. The wound in my thigh was closing, but the bone hadn’t healed. I hadn’t been lying here for months at least. So how many days? Probably just a few days.

I got up lightly, putting weight only on my left leg. I took a deep breath. The preservation fluid fixation device attached to my chest creaked loudly, knocking over the stand next to the hospital bed.

Someone opened the door to the room at the series of loud noises. I had no gun. I was on the verge of losing my mind from anxiety and dizziness, but the person who entered was… a nurse.

If Vola had a height of over 2 meters due to his full-body prosthesis, this nurse, despite being an ordinary modified human with only her eyes and hands replaced, was about my height.

She had dark brown hair tied in a bun. I tried to look at the UI in her pupils, but my vision was blurred from the pain in my chest and thigh, so I couldn’t read it.

She didn’t even flinch at the sight of me standing up. She boldly approached and pushed my chest to make me sit back on the hospital bed. When my unhealed right foot touched the ground, I felt a burning pain.

“Lie down, Mr. Peter. Your body isn’t in good shape yet, so you need to recover more.”

My name isn’t Peter. It was Arthur Murphy. As my confusion grew, she brought her head close to mine and spoke in an almost warning tone.

“Do you know what trouble Gerard went through to smuggle you here? Keep quiet, Peter Kruger. It’s true that your body is in terrible shape.”

My head was pounding too much to organize my thoughts. I needed to address the biggest question first. All I knew was… someone had dumped me here under the name Peter Kruger. As before, I had no patience for unknowns.

“Who’s Gerard?”

“Gerard McNamara. He said you’d know him as the Shepherd. Gerard brought you here by swapping you with a patient who was supposed to go to Pasadena. He said you were wearing a bulletproof vest, so he didn’t need to gamble…”

She pointed to the wounds on my chest through the transparent protective cover filled with orange preservation fluid. The bulletproof vest had provided some protection, but deep wounds and bruises remained.

“This was a gamble. Shooting you like this and then tossing you to us saying ‘he won’t die, so save him’—does that make sense?”

I half-lay back on the hospital bed. I first lifted my injured right thigh, which shouldn’t bear weight. Barely sitting up, I asked.

Was the Shepherd not a traitor? Did the Shepherd simply not know that the branch director was Walter, and so he just thought I was suddenly attacking a superior and tried to stop me? That couldn’t be.

The Shepherd had told me to endure. If he hadn’t known what I was trying to do or who I was trying to kill, he would have asked what I was doing first. My head was still throbbing.

“So, I’m Peter Kruger here, the Shepherd told you to save me… and where is this place?”

She picked up the facial protection device I’d thrown on the floor and clicked her tongue. That was my fault. Yes, I had carelessly thrown and broken hospital equipment.

“Just a private hospital on the outskirts of LA. This was to keep you hidden since Bellwether is probably desperately looking for you… and now it’s completely broken. Don’t worry. Gerard will compensate for it. Patients just need to rest.”

Even just placing my fingertips on my right leg caused a stinging pain. She approached me, sighed, and spoke. Was she just a good nurse?

If a patient with three gunshot wounds and a hole in their thigh could get up and potentially cause trouble, speaking as she just did would be appropriate. She sighed again.

“We can’t do anything about your leg. Our hospital doesn’t have a Post-Human Type IV cultivation chamber. We’ll monitor the progress to see if the bone can heal, but whether it will function at full capacity… honestly, I don’t know. Don’t touch it. It will hurt.”

“Who else knows I’m here? Actually, before that. How many days have I been lying here?”

“Exactly three days. The doctor said it would take at least a few weeks for you to wake up… but it’s been exactly three days. Gerard said to tell you he’s contacted Nightwatch. He said it was through the security team leader’s private channel, so there’s no risk of wiretapping.”

At least not everyone in the world would know I was here. I wouldn’t be forgotten. If I couldn’t even stand on both feet, it might be better to rest in obscurity.

I couldn’t tell what was right and what was wrong. Even though I knew who Walter was, my own side had become even more unclear. The Shepherd had hindered me, then helped me. There was no way to know what anyone was thinking.

I nodded slightly, experiencing a terrible lack of communication. The situation was still as answerless as before. The one chance to stab and kill the Bellwether branch director was already gone, and I had nowhere to turn.

Nightwatch was Bellwether’s official partner. They had no choice but to side with Bellwether. I had learned what kind of shit Walter was up to, but I couldn’t even tell who was trying to stand against him.

More precisely, I couldn’t even tell if anyone was trying to stand against him at all. Whether the Shepherd’s goal was to maintain the status quo or if he had some other plan. Everything was too blurry.

The nurse saw my increasingly contorted expression and took my hand. She patted the back of my hand gently and said:

“Focus on recovery first. Your leg might heal properly… and you have a visitor. Here.”

She pulled a drone from inside her nurse’s uniform. The drone soon took flight. The faint sound of the electric motor and the distinctive display color. It was Kay’s drone.