Save Scumming

Chapter One Hundred and Seventy - Friends in the Business

Having a direction was nice, but that didn't mean I had even the faintest clue on how to actually start with that.

Fortunately, Jane came in clutch and was able to arrange something for me the very next day.

Which still meant waiting a full day to meet her 'friend in the business.'

So, I split my time for the rest of Saturday helping around the shop and staring at my laptop's screen. Seraph, being a big corp with a well-funded marketing division, made a pretty stupid and yet common mistake: they published videos of their troopers being cool.

That meant candid locker-room footage (all obviously staged) and some shaky-cam of their guys in some lower-level portals kicking goblin ass. All rather innocent, on the surface. The kind of stuff that made them look cool to a certain subset of the population (a subset that I was within) and which probably boosted shareholder confidence or whatever.

It was good for me, so I wasn't complaining.

Actually... could I short the company stock?

No, better not. That market was one I didn't want to mess with. If there were people that could predict people's locations out there like that one Claire woman I ran into, then there were certainly a few D and C-rankers working for the bigger corps and securing the stock market against some little twerp D-ranker that had lucked into some time-related powers.

The breadth of magic was wide. I had no idea how wide it might be, but I certainly wasn't going to bet against it.

Anyway, I had a few hours worth of footage of the Seraph guys, probably even including the assholes that had broken into my house. More importantly, I had images of their gear.

Jane whistled as she looked at the image on my laptop. I'd carried it over to the front counter once the shop was quiet. Not that it was a particularly busy place. Jane seemed to have a system in place to keep clients from running into each other. Most of them didn't just show up out of the blue.

"I'd say that it's nice stuff, but that's kind of a given. Seraph have the cash to throw at problems, and good gear is often a pretty decent investment. Those armours are... shit, I can't remember makes and models for armours off the top of my head."

"You can't?" I asked. "I thought that was kind of your whole thing?"

"I have gun-tism, not armour, it's a whole different thing," Jane said. "But I can look it up. What do you wanna know about it?"

"Weaknesses," I said. "I'm going to be fighting a group of ten guys, all wearing that exact set of armour. I need to know where it's weak. Beyond the obvious unarmoured bits."

"Damn," Jane said. "That's kinda metal. Alright. If that's what you're gonna be doing, I can pull that up too. The armour's like, at least five or six years old. There will be grunts bitching about it in the right forums, if you know where to look."

"There's forums for that?" I asked.

"Oh yeah." Jane left for a few, then came back with a laptop that could double as a ballistic shield. She thumped it down, and when she discovered that I was staring, she grinned. "It's a hacker's best friend. Bit heavy, but it has ports for days and hot-swappable everything. Plus the case is rated for small-arms fire and it's got good shielding. I mostly use it to troll through social media sites and shitpost, but you know, if you're gonna cruise around it's nicer to be in a limo than a beater."

"Sure, sure," I said.

I was having computer envy, and that was probably not healthy. Fortunately, I was distracted when Jane found pretty much exactly what I was looking for.

Someone had gone through the trouble of passing some of the armour that Seraph was using through an X-ray of some sort. There had been a lively discussion after that, but I mostly focused on the image.

The upper chest piece was rather solid under the shaped covering. It looked like the armour was mostly made of three materials. There were several smaller, shaped ceramic plates on the sides and under the arms, as well as around the bicep. The rest of the heavier armour was metal. The upper chest had a rectangular piece and the upper back as well. It was rated for higher calibers than some of the ceramics. Mostly it was just meant to take multiple blows without breaking apart.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

That left a lot of the armour... unarmoured. Only not quite. The actual, main body of the armour was made of these semi-flexible pieces of something the forum called Doron 2. Or Moron. It was some sort of semi-hard fiberglass laminate that apparently had a bit of flex to it.

It was also known for spalling really bad if hit too hard. Though it could bounce off a knife or a small-caliber shot from the right angle.

I took in the image of the armour again. There were a few spots on there that, by necessity, had less plating. The abs, the space next to the abs and the side, the area around the shoulder, the armpit.

Yeah, I could aim for those. I was pretty sure my revolver would punch through even the thicker chest armour, but I was increasingly tempted to send a message.

Sure, blowing chunks out of guys sent a pretty clear message, but it was loud, and brutish, and just said that they'd have to send more guys next time.

If I was clinical about it. Quick and nasty. Then the message would be different, right? I wasn't sure exactly how much it would be different, but I was pretty sure it would be different enough that they'd think twice.

Besides, there was something very satisfying about the idea of meeting their stupid, brutish push with a lot more flexibility.

I studied like I hadn't done in a long time until pretty late into the night, then I stumbled to bed. Surprisingly, my libido didn't feel like kicking into high gear, even though I was squeezing my way behind Jane, who seemed to not care one whit that she wasn't alone in her bed.

She didn't press, either, which I kind of appreciated. I owed her one, and... well, maybe I wasn't as good of a person as Jane, but in her position, I might maybe have tried to see if that meant something?

Urgh. Anyway, I laid down and slept like shit. Last night had been a long, stressful day and night, and that missed sleep had added up to me being knocked out the moment I was down. Tonight? Not so much. I was aware of Jane next to me, and eventually Mister Couchtop came out of hiding to settle on my side with his little dagger feet, but that was all.

I resisted the urge to squirm and basically just stared into the black for a few hours before sleep finally took me.

Which was why I felt like shit the next morning when Jane gave me an address on a slip of paper.

"Bring a thousand, in cash," she said.

"Huh?"

"His name's Edwin. He does training for a few different corps. Mostly handles D-rankers and up, with a focus on CQC and handling guns up close and personal. If you want to learn how those Seraph guys fight, then he's the guy you want because he probably taught them."

"Oh, thank you," I said.

She shrugged. "Best to eat something too. Knowing him, you'll be burning calories all day."

That was auspicious. I took a quick shower in Jane's tiny bathroom, which kind of sucked worse than the one in my apartment, then ran off to my bike after checking on Mister Couchtop. He was still waffling between hiding under the bed and seeking Jane for attention. At least he hadn't done anything too bad yet.

Anyway, I rode my bike a decent ways into the city and felt all sorts of ways when my GPS led me right past the Seraph building downtown. Fortunately, that wasn't my stop. That was several buildings down, in a rather nice highrise divided up between some hundred-odd smaller businesses.

One of those was Edwin's Dojo. Not the most creative name. The dojo was small. Just a humble little lobby before it spilled into a room with mats on the floor and what looked like a locker room off in the back.

Edwin was there already, idly doing sets on a speedbag.

"You the one Jane sent?" he asked without turning.

"Yup," I said. "I have a cool thousand here for you."

"And what do you want from that?" he asked.

"Training. Just a few hours' of your time, if you can spare it. I need to know how to take out someone you trained in CQC."

"Hmm," he said. "Doesn't seem fair. But life usually isn't, and money is money. Let's see where you're at first, yeah? You down for a spar?"

"Sure," I said. "I could use some loosening up."

***