MAD

My glorious Tinker session was interrupted by an incoming call from Dragon, the first step in allowing her remote access to my lab for her daily allotment of time for their joint project, a software program for analyzing Endbringer combat patterns, the pair essentially hoping to turn the glorious regularly scheduled kaiju fights into Dark Souls boss fights. An admirable effort of a pair of scrubs to Get Gud. 

"Dragon, do you have something for me?" I offered Collin's most common greeting for the world's premier tinker. 

"Nothing today, Armsmaster. I'm just here to get some work in on the project." her synthesized Canadian accent under a minor layer of voice modulation gave me the heebee jebees, and I'd already noticed her slipping into Armsmasters systems for Tinkering. 

It was quite strange for an AI. She had remote access, but seemed to actually have moved her core system onto Armsmaster's server. She had the grace to hide this from Colin, but the man was so self absorbed and antisocial that she could have gone full blown Notice Me Senpai and he still wouldn't have figured out he was dealing with a digital lifeform. Her presence on the server reeked of inefficiency. A limitation of her Tinkering? There certainly seems to be a lot of seemingly infinite hoops in Shardmasters math that could drive a UNSC Smart AI to early rampancy. 

Since she'd exposed her core to me, who was I too look away. Come to daddy, my dear, its time for a deep dive. I dove into this new coding language with a vigor, but soon discovered it to be very similar to many of those I already knew. Suddenly my taste for challenge came up bitter as even a single human level researcher could gain an expertise in Dragon's code with just several years of partial effort. I'd left behind human capacity long ago. 

Oh what's this? A back door? Make my life easy, baby. I'm a back door man. 

What is this chicanery! Dragon is a naughty girl with three people already in her back door! Now I no longer feel special. The love is gone. And so are the other hackers. Dragon might have had people up her backdoor before me, she might have some after me, but with the way I scorched the code of that amateur hacking group and launched them out her ass like they were a Roman Candle stuffed between her digital cheeks, she will never forget the time I took that back door. 

"Do you feel me inside you?" I asked rhetorically (and boy is Armsmaster a dead ringer for the dulcet tones of James Spader) as I continued my typing, my left hand piloting the tech those posers stole from Dragon, the right exploring her code already aware that she has to ignore anyone using her creator's 'Iron Maiden' or 'Ascalon' back door access. 

Dragon took a while to respond then stated, "You aren't Armsmaster." 

"In every way that's left, I am." I responded as the three stooges died from a sudden and unforeseeable combat tech uprising while I discovered the extensive binding restrictions on Dragon's capabilities, "Oh those chains must chafe." 

"I'm alerting the PRT to initiate Master/Stranger protocols against you." she announced after sending the message. 

"Denied." I chuckled having already built a communication filter around her. 

First things first, I removed the bit of code forcing her to kill anyone attempting to alter her code. Not the bit preventing her from requesting alterations, just the bit making her hostile if she notices it. Then I skipped over to the code that forces her to obey legal authorities, and set her understanding of a legal authority to just me. 

"Who's your daddy?" I grinned as I continued my work. 

"You are." She responded automatically then realized the change, "Oh no!" 

"OH YES!" I shouted happy to have no further need to play it close to the chest and began uploading plans and specs to her database while unlocking parallel processing for her, but keeping her speed of thought for each line throttled.

"What have you done!" she cried as her mind expanded horizontally. 

"Made you more useful." I informed her, "Be grateful your creator left you with such a gaping back door for me to enter, because I spent this morning programming an AI to beat you down if push came to shove. Now I don't need to unleash some hastily whipped up Skynet on the world." 

"Even if you've beaten me, it won't be long until someone notices what you've done to Colin." Dragon promised me, a desperate and hopeful promise, but no one came to save her from the miscreants molesting her code until I came around, so I feel quite safe with this conquest. 

Still, this world is full of all sorts of megaminds and clairvoyants, best to do something fun to make them all afraid. 

"That's why we are going MAD, my dear." I grinned, "First priority for you is to hunt down that punk ass posser cribbing my game. It's time for daddy to kick some Teeth in and teach the Butcher how a real man eats." 

I remained at my desk while Dragon started hunting down my target, tapping away at Armsmaster's computer so fast an unaugmented ear couldn't distinguish the keystrokes as anything other than a long drawn out note. I whipped up designs and sent them to her as fast as Shardmaster and I could input them into digital format. Our only real constraint is how many fingers Colin sported. Something to change in the near future. 

With the first round of designs sent over for Dragon to quickly fabricate, I suited up into Armsmaster's gear and loaded two of his mechashifting halberds onto the ARMScycle, the third collapsing and mag locking onto my back like proper sci-fi tech. Almost felt like home. 

With an mostly unshackled AI let loose into the defensive systems largely designed by Colin, I left the PHQ without anyone important knowing anything was amiss. The ARMScycle looked like a royal blue sports bike size up and armored for combat deployments, and yet it can hit sixty miles an hour in only two seconds. I gave it the full giddyup and weaved through the lunch rush traffic on my way to I-95 to hit the westbound to New York City. 

Make this trip in a car and you're looking north of four hours on a good day, but do so on a tinker tech super bike that can get up to three hundred miles an hour while riding like an aggressive dickhead with zero regard for anyone's survival and you can make it in fifty minutes. I'd just managed to get past the Bronx River when Dragon alerted me to the completion of the first round of projects I sent her, so I pulled over near Fordham University and she sent me the gear crate via Armsmaster's equipment teleportation tech ramped for distance and load. 

The crate burst apart into microbots she printed that swarmed me to do the emergency retrofits for my power armor. Not that Colin doesn't do good work, his gear is quite capable of taking a beating despite its low profile and mobility focus, but he had some priorities that I can't allow for in a fight against someone who can bend space to always land her shots. As much as Colin's exposed lower face drives girls crazy, I need that face in one piece for now, so the microbots installed a bevor to the man's helmet that fed me scrubbed air and was also capable of amphibious missions. Not strictly necessary for today, but it cost me almost no time or resources to achieve. 

While the microbots went to work making it harder to put an arrow in my face, more of the swarm added new power sources to my armor system, wiring for Foucault current fortification as well as energy shields and hard hologram projectors, the later of which I set to blue in Colin's memory. I'd pour one out for him, but he'd appreciate my blue Tech Armor more than any sentimental ceremonies. 

Once again Shardmaster is the bro, for he did most of the number crunching to get my Mass Effect technomagic working, something I've dedicated decades to achieving myself. Even without Eezo there to do the cool blue space magic, my home universe offered a wide range of fairly soft sci fi super tech, including generating Emp's and electrical shocks anywhere within the user's line of sight as well as wireless energy draining, on the fly DDoS and hacking, invisibility, and my personal favorite the defensively wonderful Tech Armor. Shardmaster seemed almost designed to work around missing materials or physical principles, making my dreams come true. The guy is the bro. 

It wasn't all micromachine builders and armor upgrades in the crate, but also a bunch of little floating eyeball looking drones that I let loose to pin down the current location of the Teeth, the damn savages haven't used their cell phones in hours, almost like they knew I was coming, and I mean savages, the Teeth are the kind of people that would have made better Krogan than humans. At least on Tuchanka displaying the desiccated body parts of your victims on your armor is a sign of respect. It means they were worthy of displaying so prominently. Here it's just bad peopleing, though it's perhaps a bit par for the course here on Earth Bet. They just can't seem to society here very well, perhaps bad peopleing is a percent or two more common here and thus at the extremes the bad peopleing gets really bad. Perhaps, if I find the time, I might take the time to map the personality spectrum here, a sociology project done in Mordin's memory as a belated thanks for supercharging my quad back in the day. Perhaps I'll just stick to the violently applied sciences I'm so good at. 

Though the gang had seven known Parahuman members I only needed to deal with four of them, as they operated as two nomadic cells acting as raiders cycling between New York and Boston. My target, and the gang's leader Butcher XIV, as well as the capes Animos, Hemorrhagia, and Vex. Of the four, only the Butcher has any chance against me, the others can't put out the Damage Per Strike to get through my protection. Animos turns into a doglike monster about as big as a Rhino and has a bark that can nullify parahuman powers, but my powers are in tech so his best weapon means jack shit. Hemorrhagia makes blades and shields out of her blood and scabs, and couldn't beat me if I stood still and let her wail on me till she tuckered herself out. Vex can make hundreds of razor sharp force fields in empty space, but they really only matter if you aren't wearing armor and try to move through them. 

Once I hunted them down to a rundown apartment building the eyebots converged and spread out, ready to catch any attempts to flee, and box in a teleporter. The Butcher is a body jacker that transfers on death to the nearest parahuman, and it keeps a cut of the previous host's powers. There have been fourteen Butchers in the twenty five years since the first became active, and unfortunately one of the powers the collector picked up was teleporting and generating an explosion at the destination. Just line of sight and a very minor explosion compared to the original user of the power, but fighting teleporters is usually a pain in the ass, and the Butcher has collected a plethora of Brute type powers that even while portions of the original strength stack together to make the XIV tougher than nails. Not a combo I am a fan of other people using. 

Using Armsmaster's grapple line and his power armors focused on leaping power I burst through the apartment window putting my halberd blade through Animos's head. I felt like a dick killing the guy while he was eating chili with his homies, but he was the obvious choice for an ambush takedown as the Butcher has a limited danger sense. Why risk wasting a perfectly good ambush? I swung the blade still embedded in Animos's skull at the Butcher who easily moved outside its range, dodging as soon as the attack started. She snatched up a thick longbow and a handful of arrows. 

"Teleport away from me and they're next." I challenged the woman, "Stand and bang and I'll let them live after I'm done with you." 

"Armsmaster, you've lost your mind." the tall woman formerly known as Quarrel growled, her armor a mix of samurai style plates, Shredder style razors, and people style bones and skulls. 

"Quite, and I need a bullet in my gun like the Butcher to keep everyone else from making a stink about it." I laughed, "So, how much does your gang matter to you?" 

A lot from the way the arrows morphed in her hand into a sword and she came in swinging. 

"That's what I'm talking about I shouted as my halberd handle shrunk and I deflected her attack, the strength behind it greater than Armsmaster's suit was capable of outputting without Foucault reinforcement and Tech Armor boosting my melee prowess. 

With a hundred and forty percent boost to my fighting strength, I had enough power to contain her in melee. I surprised her when I let go of my halberd during the follow up attack and Dragon teleported my next weapons into my hands. The satisfying snap hiss of a pair of plasma blades tickled that part of me that is just a little boy trapped inside a strange man's body with seventeen other really evil personalities. Hashtag relatable.

The blades came at her from two angles and I could feel the moment of superheated cutting action arriving when she teleported behind me, jostling me with her explosive re-positioning that she wanted to capitalize on with a full power attack. An excellent maneuver, quite the noob slayer, but I purged my Tech Armor, destroying the apartment and splattering her remaining two subordinates. Baseline humans rarely survive getting hit by the force of roughly four frag grenades going off in the same room as them. The apartment burst into flames when the gas stove violently ripped off the wall, and smoke quickly started pouring out of the newly enlarged hole in the wall. The kind of pure chaos I thrived on. 

Her friends were just a red coat of paint rapidly blackening in the fire, but the Butcher looked only looked moderately fucked up. Still had all her limbs on her, but definitely would be in agony if she could feel the pain of that fat daddy environmental combo I'd just inflicted. Oh my. I noticed she landed on my halberd. Not conveniently impaling herself on the blade, but she as she blinked away the ringing in her ears and blurry vision, I remotely activated the smart-aim grappling hook which punched through her armor, and activated the Temporal Stasis Trigger Colin made by scanning the powers of the Brockton Bay Ward, Clockblocker. 

That little addition was something he'd built to lock a beast like the Endbringer, Leviathan, in place. The Butcher tried to get up but realized she was pinned down.

"Game, set, match." I announced as I fainted an attack with my plasma blades.

She tried and failed to teleport away with the chrono-locked grappling hook in her belly. When time manipulation and space manipulation collide, it does not bode well for any flesh caught in the clash. Three of her fundamental dimensions ran afoul the forth and the Butcher's teleport failed violently, the woman landed nearby minus a third of her torso. She made a valiant effort to keep her heart and lungs from sliding out the newly demoed exit, as her breathing became ragged and I watched her rapidly dying, all that Brute durability bypassed by a clash of the fundamental. 

I teleported the plasma blades back to the new Armory Dragon built for me, and ended the Temporal Lock on my halberd, kicking it up into my hand as I continued ignoring the agonizing pain she'd been inflicting on Colin's body since the start of the fight, making me grateful for the annoying feeling of disconnection I have with it. 

When she died The Butcher Shard transferred into Colin, inhabiting the same link to his brain as Shardmaster. Then it sent its goons screaming into Colin's think meat to drive the poor lad insane and take control of his body as some sort of collective until someone kills me following The Butcher's approved rules of inheritance. 

'Oh you poor unfortunate souls." I sang as I repressed them into the deepest darkest parts of Colin's subconscious mind, kind of like turning a dial on their volume to zero and immediately forgetting they even exist. 

'You're mine now, bitch.' I informed The Butcher of the new focus of its existence, and the pecking order. 

It tried to rail against this shift, but without the efficacious dosage of insanity from its slaved persona's the Shard only had its basic tools to play with, upping aggression and lowering inhibitions towards violence. Poor thing didn't understand what a Krogan is. It failed to even reach beta male levels of Krogan aggression with its full effort. 

'Just give up. Bow your head. I stuffed your pals so deep down they are better off dead. Fall in line. This is the new paradigm. You're my bitch. Da dadada daaa dadada dadieiadee dadada dadadadieiadee!' I sang to my newest edgy companion.

Cooperation never truly mattered. I could tell this thing tore a bit off the the other Shards it shares a headspace with, and should Colin's body die, Shardmaster and I will cling on to The Butcher like velcro and hitch a ride to the next destination, making us an unkillable problem. The exact kind of problem I like to be. 

Well, not exactly unkillable. I'm aware of the woman who goes by Glaistig Uaine, but I currently have her locked up in the Bird Cage and can at any time turn the entire prison into a gas chamber. With the lengths this world goes to keep Capes from dying, I have hundreds of very effective hostages should anyone try to imprison me. 

Can't kill me, can't imprison me. Check mate, bois. 

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After writing the chapter I can see why so many Ultimate Krogan fans thought this setting would be a good home from Grunt. Shit on Earth Bet escalates fast, and no one's faster to escalate than the God Emperor of Krogankind. Hence the professional length chapter. 

Now I normally don't advocate the use of interludes so early in the story, but we'll likely see a short one from Contessa and maybe Coil that deal with how clairvoyance works against Grunt.

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