Cyberpunk: Whispers of the Blackwall

The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:

Novices David Sousa, Matthew Richards, Prothy, Arham Siddiqui, 9Tales, and Puddin341.

Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.

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AN: So, I recently created an Instagram page where I'll post some poetry, maybe some very short stories, or whatever. If ya wanna check it out, give ya boy a like and follow, it'd be much appreciated. Handle is: sorrow_written

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"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

- Proverb

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"Easy," Santi said as he deactivated his Kerenzikov. He bent his knees slowly and set the Burya down on the ground beside Padre's hand, then straightened and raised his hands to shoulder height, palms out and fingers spread.

"Good," Clarita said.

At that very moment, he turned left into the gun, and his right hand whipped back over his shoulder, clamping around the 3516's barrel and pushing the slide back, preventing Clarita from shooting, before he yanked it forward past the right side of his head and down. He felt her gold arm go rigid in his grip, the gorilla servos whining as they fought to bring the muzzle back to his skull.

The pistol went off beside his right ear, drowning him in a high-pitched whine.

The round punched into the ground just beside Padre's head and threw concrete chips against him. Santi's right ear stopped working completely, overloaded by the ringing sound. Out-muscling a gold gorilla arm was a fight he would lose every day of the week, so he used the arm against her. All those Krav Maga bds he had seen, though, he realized how bullshit they were compared to other forms of martial arts, actually came in clutch. They allowed him to realize that she had locked her arm rigid to hold the gun, and a rigid arm was a lever. So he kept both hands on the barrel and dropped his weight, driving his hip back into her and pivoting as he did so.

Throwing her off her feet wasn't easy, since she was six-two and packed with enough titanium in her skeleton to weigh nearly as much as he did. But the reinforced tendons in his legs, the angle, and the momentum he had allowed him to throw her over his hip and slam her shoulder-first into the concrete hard enough to crack it.

On the way down, he wrenched the barrel sideways against the joint of her thumb, and the 3516 tore loose from her gold fingers and went skidding across the floor into the far corner.

Santi went to grab it, but Clarita was already back on her feet, as if nothing had happened, planting herself between him and the gun while holding a black karambit hooked through her gold index finger by its steel ring.

He quickly assessed her. Her white dress shirt was now torn at the left shoulder where she had hit the floor, and her black tie was loosened. Her shoulder rig only had an empty holster on each side, her hair a shaggy mess of black that hung over one eye, and beneath the other eye, a pair of thin black tattoo lines ran down her cheekbone like a track of tears.

He had obviously gotten a good look at her from their previous interactions, but it was quite a sight to see her standing there, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, after she had been slammed into concrete.

Clarita took a slow drag, let the smoke curl out of her nose, and smiled at him.

She stared at him for a second as well, assessing him, before moving in faster than Santi expected. What really took him by surprise was how calm she seemed while doing it.

The Karambit hooked for his forearm, and he brought his left arm across to block, causing the blade to catch the RealSkinn over his chrome and peel it open in a long curling strip. Sparks spat from the gash as the Karambit bit into his chrome, but he didn't feel a thing.

He could have pulled out his monowire right then and sliced and diced her. He could have also sent a bunch of quickhacks her way and called it a day. But it had been a while since he had gotten to throw some punches.

He threw a right hook, and she caught it, her left hand closing around his fist in midair, gold fingers clamping down with a grip that made his own servos groan, and then she drove her right forearm, karambit and all, into his side, right into his cracked rib.

Pain shot through him and his knees tried to go out from under him, allowing Clarita to find his weakness early on. He tore his fist free and staggered back, but she was on top of him, the karambit in motion in a reverse arc across his thigh.

That cut he really felt as it opened his pants and the skin beneath them in a line of blood that started to run down into his boot immediately. She pressed in and slashed across his chest, the blade opening his shirt and the skin under it, and skated off the subdermal plate beneath. The plate stopped it from going deep, but there was still a trickle of blood making its way down to his stomach.

"Clarita!" Padre said, now on his feet as he braced himself against the wall with one hand. "Santiago! Ya basta! Both of you!"

"Tell your psycho to stop!" Santi snapped.

"She is not a psycho, she is like my daughter," Padre said.

"Same fucking thing!" Santi shouted. "The fruit don't fall far from the fucking tree."

Clarita slashed at Santi's stomach once again, and he dodged back. However, the tip still caught him, creating yet another shallow line across his abs that stung like hell. But the swing pulled her gold arm wide, and for half a second, her left side was open.

Santi was a young man who believed in equal opportunities when it came to ass whoopings, so he hit her with everything he had, sending a hook that landed square on the hinge of her jaw. Chrome knuckles against a titanium-laced skull caused her head to snap sideways and for something to fly out of her mouth and click across the concrete.

Clarita turned her head back to him slowly and spat a mouthful of blood onto the floor. Then she ran her tongue across the new gap in her teeth, and grinned.

A cold feeling crawled up the back of Santi's neck as he realized that something in her was eating every pain signal her body sent up before it ever reached her brain.

She reset her stance and lifted the karambit, waiting for him to try again. But now that Santi knew she had a pain editor, he switched strategies. He faked high, and when her gold arms came up to cover her head, he drove his right fist into her stomach, below the edge where her subdermal plating ended, up under her ribs and straight into her diaphragm.

Her brain may not have registered the punch, but her body couldn't just shrug off the hit as it drove every bit of air in her lungs out of her in a grunt. She doubled over and heaved for a second before throwing up between them.

He thought about finishing it right then and there. Lobbing her head off with his monowire or his Mantis Blades. But he didn't get the chance as she came up out of the crouch, swinging the karambit, catching the back of his left hand and then the underside of his forearm in two fast hooks, sending sparks flying from both.

Santi threw another punch, but she blocked it with her gold forearm, and the plating crumpled a bit. But she ignored the sound and slashed at his neck. Santi leaned back, and the blade missed his throat by less than half an inch and slashed his collarbone instead.

Santi took advantage of the strike, throwing her a bit off balance, and grabbed the arm with the karambit with his left hand, and her head with his right, and brought her head down while bringing his right knee up and slamming it into her nose.

Something definitely broke, but Santi didn't give her breathing room, quickly spinning on his left leg and sending a kick that caught her in the stomach and sent her flying back and skidding across the floor. She gasped for air as she attempted to get back up, blood quickly flowing down her nose, across her lips, and to her chin before dripping to the ground.

"Stop it!" Padre shouted. "Both of you! Stop it now!"

Clarita wiped her mouth with the back of her gold hand, smearing blood across her face. Santi was breathing hard. The injuries Clarita had inflicted on him, plus the injuries he had suffered a few hours ago on the gig and the moves he was pulling, were leaving him with an empty gas tank. Blood ran down his leg, chest, and stomach, and dripped off his fingertips.

But then Clarita's optics changed color, shifting from their usual cool gold to a deep, pulsing red. The veins in her neck stood out like cables under the Valentino script, her pupils blowing wide, and her breathing, which had been perfectly slow through the entire fight, dropped even slower.

Santi recognized that look. He had seen it before in an X-BD. It was her Berserk System. The more beat up she got, the faster she got. Every hit he'd landed fed something in her chrome that wanted more.

And as he realized this, he felt the same sensation that had overcome him in the warehouse creep in. The supervisory layer was straining against a flood of conflicting instructions it had never been built to hold, and what remained of the Higurashi's factory code pushed up from underneath like pressure behind a dam, through the part of his brain that decided what he wanted.

What he wanted, right now, was to take this bitch apart, and his chrome reacted to his desire as the Mantis Blades clinked out of their housings and locked into their combat angle, the sound echoing through the quiet room, and Santi smiled.

At the sight of Santi's crazed smile, something behind her optics flickered with recognition. It was a killer recognizing another killer. And then, instead of backing away, like any sane person would, she stepped in.

She closed the distance quickly, and Santi swung at her. But fighting another experienced solo while not having much experience with his Mantis Blades made him miss, letting her step right into his chest, inside the arc of both blades, and suddenly render them useless.

He tried to shove her off, but it was like trying to shove a wall. Her gold hand clamped around his right forearm, just above the blade housing, and squeezed, causing Santi's chrome to creak. She then hooked her foot behind his bleeding leg and pulled, forcing his injured leg to give out and throwing Santi down to the ground on one knee.

Clarita didn't waste a second and got behind Santi, wrapping her legs around his waist while pulling back both of his arms and bringing the karambit around toward the side of his throat.

The edge of the karambit kissed his skin, and the heat went out of him all at once, like a breaking fever, leaving just clarity. The Higurashi's firmware was still howling somewhere in the back of his skull, but it sounded far away now. His breathing slowed, and the pain in his leg, his rib, and his chest switched off one at a time.

Santi activated his Kerenzikov and the world dragged down to a crawl. He could feel Clarita's breath on the back of his neck, hot and slow, and the blade resting against the side of his throat, a hair away from his artery, waiting on one twitch of her wrist.

There was a mirror leaning against the wall that allowed him to scan her, and he realized that her Berserk was running hot and dirty. She had no cyberdeck, ICE, or any firewall standing between her chrome and the rest of the world but a factory handshake protocol that a first-year netrunner could have picked apart in his sleep.

She was wide open, and she had been wide open the whole fight. But for some reason he hadn't been thinking rationally throughout the fight. All he was thinking was killing, but not being efficient about it.

He queued up a Cyberware Malfunction and Overheat quickhack and deactivated his Kerenzikov.

As time snapped back into place, Clarita's gold arms seized. Every servo in them locked at once with a grinding shriek, and her fingers spasmed open so hard the karambit flew off its ring and rang across the concrete. Then the Overheat hit her and Heat poured out of her chrome in a wave Santi could feel through his shirt. Her sleeves started smoking where the gold met flesh, and the skin along the seams went red, then white, then blistered.

The pain editor ate every bit of it before it reached her brain, but her body didn't care. Her legs unlocked from his waist on their own in an attempt to buck away from the fire inside of her.

Santi stood and turned. He got a fistful of her collar and tie in his hand, and hauled her off the floor. She was six-two and heavy with titanium, but he lifted her anyway, her boots kicking a foot off the ground as he brought her eye level and slammed her to the ground before picking her back up and slamming her into the wall. Plaster cracked and rained down over both of them.

He drove his right Mantis Blade into her shoulder and pinned her against the wall as her gold arms hung at her sides, twitching and smoking. The red in her optics stuttered, glitching as the Berserk choked on corrupted data.

They looked at each other, and then Santi let go, letting her entire weight hang on the Mantis Blade that was piercing her shoulder before he pulled it out and let her slide down the wall until she was sitting on the floor.

Padre had gone completely still against the wall, one hand pressed flat to the plaster, and Santi didn't even spare him a glance as he walked to the far corner. He hooked the toe of his boot under the gold 3516 and kicked it across the floor, sliding to a stop against Clarita's thigh.

"Pick it up," Santi said as if it was the most normal thing. Like he was asking her to pass the salt. Padre heard it, and his face went gray. Clarita looked down at the gun, then up at Santi. The malfunction and the overheat were already starting to wear off. Her gold fingers flexed against the concrete, one at a time, slow and clumsily, and Santi waited in anticipation for her to grab the gun while his latest work of art sat ready in the corner of his vision. The Suicide hack.

As soon as she touched the gun, he would send the command, and her hand would close around the 3516's grip on its own. She would lift it slowly, fighting every inch of the way, and she would lose, because there was nothing inside her head to fight with. The muzzle would find the soft spot under her jaw, angled perfectly so that it would come out the crown of her skull, and she would pull the trigger herself, with her own fingers, with the same gun she had promised to use on his mother.

"PICK. IT. UP." Santi said again.

Clarita understood what he was about to do. He finally saw an expression on her eyes that was new. Fear. And it thrilled him to see it. But it was gone as fast as it came. She looked at the gun and then at him, deciding to keep her hands flat on the floor.

Santi brought the command to the very edge of his thoughts and waited for her to grab the gun.

"¡BASTA! GOD FUCKING DAMNIT!" Padre's voice filled the room as he shouted far louder than he should have been able to.

Santi stopped, but the upload hung in the corner of his vision, one thought away from being sent. Clarita's gold fingers twitched against the concrete an inch from the 3516's grip, but she didn't reach for it.

"Santiago," Padre said, quieter now, his hand held out toward him, palm open. "Mijo. Look at her. Look at what you are about to do."

Santi looked.

Clarita sat against the wall with her sleeves smoking and blood pooling out of her shoulder and flowing down her lips, staring up at him with her optics flickering between red and gold. She was breathing hard now, for the first time all night.

But he wasn't about to risk anything. He held the command until he watched the last of the red leave Clarita's optics and then closed her eyes while trying to control her breathing. Once he was sure she wasn't a threat, he let the command dissolve, and his legs went soft under him, and he dropped to one knee in the middle of the room, catching himself with the tips of his Mantis Blades.

Santi stayed on one knee, catching his breath as he fought an internal battle. He had to actually think, to find the command in his own head and push it through the red heat of the Higurashi's firmware. But his blades wouldn't go back in.

It took him almost a minute to retract them, and when he finally did, he tried to stand, but fell to his knees. He tried again, using his hands to support himself, and managed to stand up.

No one said anything for a while, and the rain kept falling against the high window as the light panel kept flickering. Padre was by the far wall with plaster and concrete dust in his gray hair, Clarita slumped against the opposite wall spitting blood onto the floor, and Santi in the middle, swaying slightly on his feet and dripping blood from half a dozen places.

Padre bent down, slowly, and picked the Burya up off the floor. He looked at it for a moment. Then he crossed the room and held it out to Clarita, grip first.

"Yours, mija," he said.

Clarita took it without a word and slid it into the empty holster under her left arm, then picked up the gold 3516 from the floor beside her, checked the chamber, and holstered it as well.

"I only wanted to talk," he said.

Santi laughed, even though it hurt so much he almost threw up. "If you just wanted to talk, you wouldn't have pulled the shit you pulled."

"You are right," Padre said.

"Yeah... No fucking shit, I'm right," Santi said as he spat blood on the ground.

"But it was the most logical way I could think of to get fully inside your head," Padre said, smoothing his coat. "People are very perceptive when their lives are on the line, Santiago. They listen with their whole body. You would not have heard me if I had said this over coffee. You would have nodded, and thanked me, and gone home, and forgotten every word by morning."

"Bullshit," Santi said, spitting out a bit more blood.

"Is it?" Padre asked, and Santi opened his mouth to answer, but closed it again.

"I wanted to warn you," Padre said. "That is all. I told you the story of that man because that man is a psycho, mijo. He has no chrome to blame. He was born with the wiring for it, and he spent his life feeding it, and he knows the look of it better than he knows his own face... I see it in you. I see a cyberpsycho being built, one piece at a time."

"And you give advice by shoving a revolver under people's chins?" Santi asked.

"Sí," Padre said, nodding. "When the situation calls for it."

"You're really fucking gonked in the head if you think that works, Sebastian," Santi said.

"I know," Padre said, flinching at the way Santi addressed him by name.

"Why, Padre?" Clarita asked, the first thing she had said in minutes, coming out of a mouth with a couple fewer teeth than it had at the start of the night. She was leaning against the wall with her right hand clamped over the hole in her shoulder, the blood seeping out between her gold fingers creating a stark contrast. Her sleeves had burned through at the seams, and the skin beneath them was red and blistered. It took her three tries to light the cigarette between her lips because her fingers still stuttered every time she tried to move them. She glared at Padre, fury and bafflement warring in her eyes. "Why him?"

Padre sighed, finally looking his age.

"Because I see myself in him," Padre said. "A boy with potential. More potential than he knows what to do with. Misguided by greed. Thirsty for power. Certain that he knows best, because nobody has ever been in a position to tell him otherwise... Boys like that end up in one of two places, Clarita. A grave, or a cell, staring at their hands. This one is headed for the grave."

"Death can have me when it earns me," Santi quipped.

"Don't be so cocky, mijo," Padre said.

"I'm fine," Santi replied.

"That is not what V told me," Padre said, shaking his head. "She called me before you arrived and told me about what went down at the warehouse. V is not easily frightened, mijo, but what she saw you do tonight was something that truly sent shivers down her spine."

Santi said nothing.

"That chrome you keep chipping in like a gonk is slowly driving you insane," Padre said. "Truly insane. And I say this as a man who knows what it means to be insane. You are on your way to being something worse than me, and I am the worst thing I have ever met."

"The hardest choices require the strongest wills," Santi said. "I'm doing what I have to do so my mother gets to live the best life I can give her... You don't know what it was like to have your life turned upside down. To grow up seeing your mother working herself into an early grave and all you could do was stare because you needed the eddies or you'd starve. You have no idea what this city has taken from her and what it has done to her."

"And so you're going to let this city take you from her as well?" Padre asked. "Have you ever even asked her?"

"Asked her what?" Santi questioned.

"What she wants," Padre said, stepping closer until he was standing just out of arm's reach. "Have you ever thought that maybe what your mother wants is not whatever you think you need to give her? Not a bank account full of eddies, or a son who comes home covered in other men's blood? Maybe what your mother wants is her son to be happy, to be safe. That she wants to see you alive? In this God-forsaken city, that is all most mothers want, Santiago. It was all mine ever wanted, and I gave her a psychotic cartel mass murderer instead."

Santi stood there in the flickering light, blood dripping off his fingertips and onto the floor because he didn't have an answer. He thought about his mother's silent disapproval of the life he was currently leading.

"You have potential," Padre said quietly. "Much more than I ever had. But the road you are walking only goes one place, and it is one I and every fixer in this city have seen. Good mercs are hard to come by. Runners of your skill are even harder. I did not want to bury you. I just wanted that message inside your head, where it could not fall out."

"With a gun to my fucking face," Santi said, and Padre chuckled.

"Sí. I know. Lo siento, mijo." He turned his head without taking his eyes off Santi. "Clarita."

Clarita stared at him.

"Clarita," Padre said again, in the same tone.

She spat a mouthful of blood onto the floor, took a drag of her cigarette, and looked at Santi for a long moment.

"Lo siento," she said before looking with mild interest at the blood that came away on her cigarette filter.

"Next time you pull that shit," Santi said, "I won't wait for you to pick it up and I'll blow your brains out myself."

"There will not be a next time," Padre said, and the sound of the rain filled the silence for a while.

"Would you have done it?" Santi asked while looking at Clarita. "My mom. Would you have really killed her?"

Clarita blew smoke at the ceiling and shook her head.

"No," she said, tipping the cigarette toward him. "The same way that the sins of a father aren't for a son to carry, the sins of a son aren't for his mother to carry. I just needed you to think I would and get you to stop."

"Well that was the worst fucking choice you could have made," Santi said as he made a gesture with his index finger and thumb. "Because I was this close to going all out and offing you, Sebastian, and any other fucker that got in the way."

Santi stared at her for a while longer before turning to Padre.

"I get your point, Sebastian," he said. "I do. I'll make sure I don't let myself go and lose myself in the chrome.... But this whole conversation could've been had without this whole fucking fiasco. You could have just said it. You could have sat me down and said, 'Santiago, you scared the shit out of V, please see your ripper.' That's it. That's all it had to be."

"But you would not have listened," Padre argued.

"Maybe. Maybe not," Santi said. "You didn't give me the chance to find out."

"That is fair," Padre said. "And I apologize for it. Truly."

Padre gestured toward Santi and the blood dripping from him. "Will you let us take care of you? A trusted doctor two blocks from here owes me a great many favors. He would stitch you up and ask no questions."

Santi looked at him, and then he looked at Clarita, who was spitting another mouthful of blood onto the floor.

"Fuck off, Sebastian," he said, and walked out.

He made it down the corridor on trembling legs, leaving behind a trail of blood the whole way. At the front door of the parish hall, he had to stop and press his forehead against the cool glass for a minute before he could find the handle.

Then he pushed out into the rain.

It was coming down hard over Vista del Rey, and thick droplets hit his face and ran down through his blood-crusted hair, allowing the dried blood to start streaming down his neck in pink rivers. Water pooled in the open cuts across his chest and stomach and stung like hell. But he didn't care. It felt good, as if he was taking a shower.

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Cyberpsychosis doesn't just affect your chrome, but as you have seen, rationality flies out the window as well. Send me stones, and I might just do something about it.

You can also go ahead and join the infamous P@treon if you seek the forbidden passages:

patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don't be a gonk, remove the space)

There you can find everything I've ever written, as I'm writing it.