Chapter 4: Loot First, Fight Later

Before she actually went looking for those radicals, she decided to loot as much as possible from the lab around her. Maybe it belonged to her company, technically. She could give it back later if she had to. But right now, everything was fair game. She had to survive, which meant she had to either defeat the other radicals or escape the lab. Either way, she was taking what she could find.

Searching all the bodies got her another of the assault rifles, four pistols, ninety-seven hard currency, three doses of medical nanos, two combat knives, and a bunch of junk that she knew she could sell later. The radicals didn’t have anything on them to identify them, and she didn’t look all that hard. She was far more interested in what the lab itself had.

It was, after all, a cybernetics lab.

There were some things that she knew just weren’t an option. There wasn’t time to do major surgery like a limb replacement. But there were some upgrades she could get to her own stuff.

She found what she was looking for in one of the cabinets on the wall. There were two lenses she could pick from, and three items called skill chips.

-Recording lens: records visual input up to 1 hour. Automatically overwrites, providing a constant recording of the past 59 minutes.

-Targeting lens: Scanning capabilities, level 3.

-Skill chip: Unarmed combat, level 5/10.

-Skill chip: Security, level 6/10.

-Skill chip: <redacted>, level ??.

She bit her lip and thought about it. The skill chips were a one-at-a-time thing, and so were the lenses. She couldn’t layer anything on top of one another, so she had to pick which was the best in each group. Sadly, skill chips provide temporary skills. So she might bring them with her, but she could only use one at a time.

“Who am I kidding?” she whispered to herself, slotting in the redacted skill chip, plugging it into a port she knew was right behind her ear.

-This item requires installation. Estimated install time: 5 minutes. Would you like to begin installing?

She considered putting it off, but her curiosity had already won out. She selected yes and went back to thinking about the lenses.

Recording would be useful later; that much was certain. If she could record everything she saw, no passwords would be safe, no information secure. And she could sell it. But scanning capabilities might help her right then and there.

She thought about it while a loading bar filled up most of her vision. She decided to stick with the assault rifle and stored the rest of the weapons and items in her storage pack, which thankfully defied the laws of physics, and everything fit inside it without it getting noticeably heavier.

By the time the loading bar was past fifty percent, she couldn’t see anything else in the room, so she closed her eyes and focused on her ears. She listened as hard as she could, imagining the sound traveling throughout the facility like she was casting a camera somewhere else. She tried to imagine the hallway.

It didn’t work. Not really. But it did give her an idea. She stayed silent until the loading was done, then began to move. As she crept forward, she checked her log to see what had actually happened. There weren’t any notifications she had missed, no messages unread. What did the chip do? She opened up her character sheet.

And gasped.

Megan Proxy, Level 5 researcher/Level 1 ????. Experience 800/2400. HP: 320/320. Stamina 100/100. Technology Points (TP): 100/100. Cybernetics: 0/5. Abilities: Strength 2, Agility 6, Toughness 6, Willpower 2, Wits 6, Intelligence 10, Charisma 6, Luck 10. Skills: Guns 2/5. Research 1/5. Jury-rig 2/20. Stealth 6/10. ??? 1/10. Talents: Quick memory 1/10. Collected 2/25. Subterfuge 1/10. ??? 1/25.

A second class? And if that wasn’t enough, most of her stats had DOUBLED. Even her Luck had gone up as if it doubled if the two-for-one cost was applied. And then there was the doubling of her Stealth skill, the new unnamed skill, and the unnamed talent. That was one hell of an item.

And it had downloaded, right? Did that mean she could remove it? Probably not. Better not to, anyway; no way another skill stick is going to be better than that.

She crouched down, testing her new abilities in sneaking. As soon as she did, the world around her got a little bit dimmer, like she was covered in shadows. Convenient way to tell if anyone had spotted her or not. She walked slowly up the hallway, looking for one of the other offices, so she could put her idea to the test.

In the first office she came to, she scanned her way into the computer and started trying to interface with the security cameras and with the recorder lens. This was the kind of thing that her Jury-rig skill was supposed to do. If she could get it to work right, she’d be able to look through the cameras with the lens in her eye, giving her a much better view of the enemy, and maybe even building a mini-map she could follow, or a radar of some kind.

Maybe it was luck, maybe it was the increased stats, maybe it was just a good guess, but a few minutes later she was walking down the hall with a pretty good idea of where the rest of the radicals were and what they were doing.

In fact, she was pretty sure she knew why they were there. The eight of them who were still moving around were converging on one of the prototype labs. They were here to steal – or destroy – a prototype of some kind. And they were moving into the section where the military prototypes were.

She constructed a route there for herself and started moving. She realized that she had to move slowly, or the world would brighten around her and she would come out of stealth. So she moved more cautiously, keeping the gun ready even though she knew there wasn’t going to be anyone waiting for her.

They were moving in teams of two, more sweeping through than anything else at this point. She saw that there were fourteen dead scientists, and she was the only – wait.

There was someone else hunting the radicals.

-Aijin Kuro, Level 2 security guard. HP: 140/140.

From the look of her clothing, she’d been in at least one fight so far. She was fully healed, but it looked like she’d been shot at least twice.

And if she kept moving the same direction she was going now, she was probably going to get shot again; one of the teams of violent radicals was about to turn the corner behind her and have a free shot at her.