Knights Apocalyptica

Chapter 173: Workplace Safety Hazard

In three minutes, after killing the robots, they were left with a dead Pendragon and two of the Pack convulsing on the ground and foaming at the mouth. Not to mention the other injuries inflicted by those things in the brief scuffle. Olivia went into triage mode, abandoning the two injected with the mysterious concoction, and focused on those who would live if the bleeding stopped.

Erec panted above the second one he’d helped kill—the one Enide and Rochester laid into. It didn’t have syringes but rather a prod, which ran with a high-voltage current. It’d hit his Armor with it, and it’d fucking hurt, but he managed. It was deadly old-world tech, mostly in how quickly it moved and the tools at its disposal, but the Armor and training made it manageable. Were they not caught by surprise, he doubted they would have had any causalities.

“NOW TEST SUBJECTS. LOOK AT WHAT YOU’VE MADE ME DO. CONDUCTING TESTING IN A TRANSPORTATION ZONE? THAT’S HOW WORKPLACE SAFETY HAZARDS ARE SPAWNED! LOOK AT THE BLOOD IN MY HALLWAYS. I’LL HAVE TO ASSIGN RESOURCES TO CLEAN THAT MESS. OH WELL. SUFFERING IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE IS A LONG TRADITION, HAVE YOU HEARD OF MARIE CURIE? ME AND HER ARE SOMEWHAT ALIKE, DON’T YOU THINK? WHAT WITH HER INJECTING RADIATION AND ME HAVING TO CONDUCT SUCH UNSANITARY TESTS FOR THE BETTERMENT OF MANKIND. REMARKABLE.”

Erec pulled a hatchet off his side and threw it into the nearest speaker the voice came from. There was a static screech as the equipment broke apart, along with what he assumed was a threat from the AI.

Instantly after the destruction of more Vortex Industries property, another speaker further down the hall sparked to life, admonishing him for vandalism before diving back into its comparison between itself and the old-world’s finest scientists. The deranged AI continued on. At least now, the insistent self-congratulatory voice was far enough away to manage to ignore it.

“Oh dear,” Dame Morgana tittered as she hovered over one of the convulsing bodies on the ground. “Something is truly wrong with this woman.”

“Poison,” Rochester spat, then got to the ground, crouching next to the woman Dame Morgana was concerned over. “Such a cowardly and disgusting method of attack; how dare it so disgrace our people.”

“No, I don’t mean the poison, but rather what the poison is doing.”

“It’s killing her.”

“I don’t think that’s what’s happening.” Dame Morgana trailed off.

Erec looked at the convulsing body of the corpse; VAL highlighted several parts of the body. Her arm elongated. The veins that the chemical concoction the rogue AI shoved down it was expanding, dilating, and then bursting. But the woman wasn’t dying. Her skin turned a dark red as the blood vessels burst and then congealed within her, forming a secondary epidermis as her eyes rolled back. The moment those eyes did, her breathing increased, and she stumbled to her feet.

Rochester swore, and Dame Morgana and he backed away from the woman. Her skin reddened even further, her posture bent as if her muscles argued whether they could hold her mass. She might be alive, but was she really a person anymore?

The woman threw herself at Rochester, her jaw unhinging as the muscles holding the mandible together stretched, then tore. Her jaw expanded as the teeth went right for Rochester’s throat.

With a twitch of his finger, Rochester emptied a bullet from his revolver right into the woman’s skull. It stopped at the skin, cratering the skull and tearing apart the outside, leaving a patch of congealed blood. Despite her neck jerking backward, her momentum still went forward, and her widely splayed hands clutched Rochester. Her head whipped forward, teeth sinking into his neck as the torn jaw by some magic pulled itself closed, intending to tear out his windpipe.

At the point of contact, a swirl of ink condensed from the tattoo’s lining Rochester’s neck. Jet-black liquid spiked outward from the swirl, flicking right through the woman's open mouth as her teeth started to close. The spike shot right through the back of her throat, bursting out of the back of her skull and leaving her limp and dead a second away from killing the Pendragon’s leader.

Rochester shoved her body away, hand going to the blood on his neck as her body flopped.

The other man injected by syringes got up in the chaos. But he met his end far swifter at the end of Dame Robin’s sword, who decapitated the former Pendragon and ended that horror before it could begin.

For a moment, there was chaos. People didn’t react well to loved ones and friends turning on them and attacking, which the Knights had more than their fair share of with the White Stag. That didn’t make this easy to witness again, but it led to them understanding how to temper the Pendragons and get them back on the focus. With Erec's worked-up state, he knew he wouldn’t be much help. His hands twitched in his gauntlet, and he burned more Fury to ease it.

[Check that body.] VAL advised as Boldwick and Dame Robin did their best to settle the Pendragons.

Erec decided to comply. He went over to the body with a hole through its head, rather than the one without a head, and knelt. It was gristly. He could see where the crater in its head was; it’d torn apart the skin like cracked mud, and beneath, he saw the congealed blood from burst vessels. He pressed his hand against that wound and found why it had stopped a bullet. Calling it harder than bone would be a bit of a misnomer. It wasn’t harder, but how it distributed force like a gel combined with the bone beneath made it an effective tool.

“Horrible,” Erec said. With the Stag, when it took over their allies, they hadn’t changed. More importantly, they were no more effective in combat since the Stag had to puppet them and couldn’t tap into their talents. But this woman was different on a fundamental level; she’d been made into a monster. So quickly, too.

[Sample collected, running analysis.]

Good. Maybe you’ll finally have some answers. This place was supposed to be about sub-space research, but what he was looking at here didn’t track with that.

Erec ran a hand down the woman’s forearm and felt a prick at the wrist. A spike came out of the femur, the tip poking out of the skin, made of bone and sharpened. A strong enough jab would essentially be a concealed weapon and kill. That poison, solution, whatever the fuck it was, the A.I. made, turned her into a living weapon.

[Ah. Well. I have some conclusions here. None of them good. Not that I’ve had cause to mention it, but you’ve splattered yourself with quite a bunch of viscera and blood during your fights. Of course, with those opportunities, what kind of scientist would I be without collecting samples, cataloging them, and devoting some processing power towards research? Anyway, all that number crunching and biological research is a new field for me. As you can imagine, given the resources, I’ve had for the last couple hundred years. Buuuut, I’ve come to some conclusions. The variety of monsters encountered has such a wide range of biological markers and foundations of life; this is true. But would it surprise you to know that at least a couple of them have a chromosome structure and a similar foundational makeup to humans?]

“Point, please,” Erec whispered under his helmet, looking around to make sure no one was noticing. Enide was staring directly at him. Though she’d had his backs in the fights, she knew more was happening. If only he could explain it to her. To Boldwick. Even now, she sensed him talking to VAL, and Goddess knew what she suspected.

That would have to be a later problem to solve, unfortunately.

[What we’re looking at here is likely the result of research into mixing and matching chromosomes and DNA from your ‘monsters’ with the human genome through a forceful localized virus.]

Shivers went through Erec, though he only half understood the implications.

[I’ve reached a couple of hypotheses on what has occurred here. A couple of more data points would be helpful to confirm one way or another how correct or incorrect those assumptions are. What you’re seeing here is likely the product and refinement of testing on the previous Pendragons locked in this facility. This kind of outcome is not one that is reached by predictive modeling alone, as a lot of biological processes, especially with such cutting-edge science, would require studies to perfect. Instead of dying, the organism successfully reformed and lived, albeit with heightened aggression and severely reduced mental capacity.]

Well, that answered one question. Erec was now sure that Enide’s uncle and the rest of her family were no longer alive. Not that it was likely, to begin with, but it did mean that they might encounter more of these things when they searched for them. Was this what the testing was?

“I thought it should be focused on subspace research.”

[As did I. Those ‘Rifts’ were intentional and practiced tears in subspace, which extended to different points in this world…. We need more data before reaching any further conclusions. Terminate the rogue AI, and then we can take a peek under the hood, so to speak.]

“Easier said than done, VAL. We don’t even know where it is.” Erec stood up and frowned as he looked at the dead Pendragon below. What if that syringe had found its way into Enide or Yniol? The fact Enide had been in here before, too, was terrifying, since just as with these people, it very well could have been her used as a human test subject, corrupted by the artificial intelligence and turned into a monster.

What if it had sent more of those things equipped with syringes? Or guns? Or some kind of tech it squirreled away and developed that would catch them flatfooted and bring causalities? VAL said it’d tied her hands, but if this was working on limited capacity, he didn’t want to see what it might bring to bear once it sorted out his block. The Knights were safe compared to their allies, but those allies mattered. Watching any of them die felt like losing one of their own. And Enide…

The thought of her getting hurt made him want to start destroying.

[About that. I may have been launching a covert operation through a shell processing program in case it detected interference to monitor its activities. Luckily, its been busy puzzling out how to enable its access over all its systems to notice. I believe I may have honed in on where it's hidden away.]

Erec looked toward where Rochester and the rest of the Pendragons were arguing and trying to calm one another down. Boldwick was seemingly at a loss, scanning the perimeter for nearby attacks. Though they weren’t in the testing chamber this thing so desperately wanted to shove them into, no one could escape the feeling that it was already busy, already testing them. Trying to puzzle out their weaknesses and exploit them.

“We need to move,” Erec declared, his voice burning with barely concealed rage. The longer they waited, the more data this thing had on them. The more things that it could hone in on and exploit. Kill it quick. Be done with it. And VAL knew where it was; they could do it efficiently and beat it at its own game before it could take more lives.

Within VAL, they’d found an answer to solve this problem. A problem spawned from a world long before theirs.

“Move where, tin can?” Rochester pointed towards the spiraling hall, a network of intersections that led through the lab. “Are we to start busting down doors on the off chance of finding the source of this corruption? What an excellent plan. Let it spawn more Rifts and throw enemies at us.”

“Better still than sitting here arguing amongst ourselves over the dead. On the battlefield, action is what is needed to survive. Sitting and waiting for the enemy to come to you is a one-track course to certain demise. And I will not roll over and die here under the ground. If I am to die, I will do so under the sun, on my terms.”

Rochester scoffed, but Erec saw it there, the look of uncertainty on his face. That seed of fear planted before surfaced. He wasn’t sure what Erec was capable of; he’d heard him called a hero, though he knew not what such a thing meant.

“Lead the way then, pup, if you’re so sure,” he said, putting venom into his words. But that was all the permission Erec needed—he confidently turned, collected his hatchet, and then walked down the route they’d already come, not waiting for the people behind him to follow.

Truthfully, he didn’t need them to. Not anymore. VAL knew where this thing was, so the next step was easy: get to it. Whether or not he had the support of the Pendragons or Knights wouldn’t stop him, not if he was willing to burn everything away to take care of this problem. And he was. This was a monster created by Vortex Industries, meaning solving this issue was his responsibility.