— Broadcast—
Ada had assessed the situation and reached a conclusion: she was not mentally prepared to deal with Garou, and the old man hiding behind her was not worth the trouble of protecting.
She stepped sideways.
"The man behind me has nothing to do with me," she said pleasantly. "Feel free to take your time with him."
She moved her body to put Vegapunk directly in Garou's line of sight and stepped clear.
Vegapunk found himself looking at the hungry wolf's face again, unobstructed, with fresh sweat forming immediately. He still had no clear understanding of how the Illuminati had found someone willing to break into Marine Headquarters for a commission. The economics of that decision escaped him entirely.
Garou looked at Ada for a moment. He ran through his memory of active bounty warrants and found nothing that matched her face or her hospital gown. He waved a hand — a gesture of unambiguous disinterest. She was welcome to leave. If she remained in the vicinity and took incidental damage during the rest of this, that was her problem and not something he would modify his approach to prevent.
Ada blinked at Vegapunk with a smile that didn't reach anywhere near her eyes.
"Good luck, old man. I hope we never see each other again."
She pressed herself against the wall and began moving along it, navigating past Garou's position by the most compact route available to her. Whatever came next, she intended to be elsewhere for it. She had been an experimental subject in this facility for years, repaid every debt the World Government had ever claimed she owed them, and had no further obligations to anyone in this building. The scenery outside the Holy Land had been waiting long enough.
Vegapunk watched her go. There was a small, tired flicker of something in his expression — not betrayal exactly, since he hadn't expected otherwise. He had, he realized, already made peace with this situation before Garou had arrived. The Anti-Life Equation would die with him. The knowledge would encrypt. Whatever came after was someone else's problem.
He straightened up as well as his remaining energy permitted and turned to face what was in front of him.
Garou was already moving. A live Vegapunk was a better asset than a dead one — the secondary commission had made that clear — and the fastest resolution was to knock the old man unconscious and remove him from the building. One strike to the right point would do it cleanly. He closed the distance.
Then stopped.
The sound reached him before anything else did.
A noise like a very large thing failing to survive — a wet, ragged exhalation from somewhere in the dark section of the corridor beyond the laboratory proper. Then silence. Then the sound of movement: multiple sources, distributed, low to the ground.
They emerged from the dark sections simultaneously, flowing out along the walls and ceiling with the fluid competence of things that had been designed to move in exactly that way. Hundreds of them, in a glance. Their skin was gone — the musculature beneath was red and precisely defined, as if someone had produced an anatomical diagram and then added movement. The skulls were wrong: brains visible, faces absent where faces should have been, replaced by a cavity from which a tongue extended and moved constantly across whatever surface was nearest. No eyes. Nothing that functioned as eyes.
But they heard everything.
The moment Vegapunk's breath audibly caught, the wave turned toward him.
Vegapunk did not manage a full sentence before several hundred Lickers converted his location into a destination.
Garou arrived in front of him in approximately no time at all, planted one hand on the old man's chest, and drove him flat to the floor before the first one reached them. The bite closed on empty air.
Then Garou straightened up and looked at the wave.
"You disgusting things," he said, with the particular tone of someone who has found an insult in the attempt itself. "Stealing prey from me."
What followed lasted roughly two minutes.
The Lickers were fast, mobile, and designed for enclosed spaces — qualities that translated into nothing useful against someone who hit harder than the walls and moved through them like he had already decided where the whole fight would end. Garou's fists worked systematically: not wild, not showing off, just locating the load-bearing points in each creature and removing them. Lickers that closed range found the impact waiting for them. Lickers that tried to approach from above found he had already looked up. The enhanced hearing that made them such effective hunters in the dark gave them no particular advantage when the thing they were listening for could hit them from outside the range they were adjusted to understand.
The blood accumulated. Garou did not.
By the end of the two minutes he was soaked in it, standing in the center of what had been an organized assault and was now a floor-level dispersal of biological material. He reached down, extracted the last surviving Licker by what remained of its head, and crushed the exposed brain with his free hand with the deliberate satisfaction of closing a problem.
He let the thing drop.
"That was good," he said, to no one in particular. His voice had the quality of someone who has eaten something they didn't expect to enjoy.
Vegapunk had watched the entire thing from the floor, from the angle of someone who had been knocked flat and had not subsequently found a strong reason to get up. His understanding of what Garou actually was — not just a mercenary with unusual physical capability, but something closer to a weapon that had been given independent operation — was considerably more complete than it had been twenty minutes ago.
At the far end of the corridor, Ada's head appeared around the corner.
She had not, it turned out, gone far. She looked at the state of the laboratory, at Garou, at Vegapunk still on the floor.
"Fortunate that I didn't try to fight him," she said, as observation rather than relief. "He's genuinely impressive." A pause. "There are more of those things, though. Deeper in."
She was correct.
The footsteps arrived before she finished speaking.
Heavy ones — the kind produced by something over three meters tall moving at a considered, unhurried pace. Not the skittering distribution of weight that the Lickers used. This was the footfall of something that knew it didn't need to move quietly, because nothing in any room it had entered had ever successfully argued the point.
They came into view slowly: bald, massive, bound from shoulders to thighs in black straitjackets that had been constructed for containment rather than comfort and were not entirely succeeding. The muscle structure beneath had found the seams and was pressing against them. Their faces held nothing — no expression, no apparent interiority, no recognition of anything in the room as worth an individual response.
They moved, and then they stopped, and then they stood at the edge of the laboratory's wreckage and waited for whoever was in charge of them to issue the next command.
Caesar Clown, who prided himself on the variety of his work, called them Tyrants. Three meters of biological engineering, capable of dismantling a concrete wall with their hands, possessed of regeneration sufficient to discourage conventional engagement, and responsive to simple commands. Mass production had been achieved. This was not a prototype line.
This was the inventory.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Writing takes time, coffee, and a lot of love.If you'd like to support my work, join me at [email protected]/GoldenGaruda
You'll get early access to over 50 chapters, selection on new series, and the satisfaction of knowing your support directly fuels more stories.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~