Outrun - Chapter 475 - Spiral (Patreon)

I kept my head down as the Waymaker rumbled through the sky, not daring to look at the Borgs all around me. It just took three of them to take down Lavender. Three. And now that Hope wasn’t with me since she left with the Medevac to keep an eye on Lavender, it was just me in the stifling atmosphere of the flyer.

My eyes darted up to check out the Captain, who sat back with a totally disinterested look in his eyes. Had I gotten cocky lately? No, maybe that wasn’t quite right. It was closer to being checked out than anything. I’d been going with the flow lately without much resistance. 

When did it start? It hadn’t always been this way, had it? No, no, back when I got the interface, it definitely wasn’t like this. Was it ever since I made it? Since I got Cold Moon Solutions back up and running, had enough rayn to not worry about things, and no longer had to struggle just to survive the day to day? It felt like I’d just relaxed lately like I was safe. 

No, not relaxed. Relaxing in of itself was a good thing according to my counselor. The real issue was that I got complacent. Luna hadn’t helped that, either. I used to be wary about even getting caught on camera, but having a Netrunner in my back pocket made me less worried about literally everything. She wasn’t to blame for this issue, though.  

Even with something as big as dealing with Sentinel, I was getting complacent. I should be ripping my hair out with stress over having to deal with one of the Big 7 as a small corporation with just two employees. I was a glorified R&D company at the moment. Dealing with them wasn’t a small matter.

And yet, I’d treated it like one. I wore grungy clothes to a corporate party, treated them like a flatbacker desperate for my attention, and hadn’t even thought of what product I should push forward next to ensure they still saw me as useful enough to keep around. It was so, so incredibly stupid.  

All it took was one exec deciding they no longer needed me for a Sentinel strike squad to hit me. They even knew most of my identities. If Sean or Brunhilde decided they were done with me, I’d be done. I was scared of the SCD Crusaders, and I had a sneaking suspicion they didn’t stand up to a fraction of Sentinel’s elite black ops teams.

I was so, so stupidly complacent. My heart pounded in my chest as I tried to keep my emotions off my face. When was the last time I even worked to make a better weapon? The plasma claws? The plasma claws that I ripped through my own hand the first time around, only to shrug it off since I could just heal it back? 

It wasn’t just my own self getting in my way, either. It was the same trap that I’d thought about several times since getting the interface, yet still found myself falling for—the interface itself was making me complacent. The quick growth brought about by it, healing of all my injuries, and everything else was just as much a boon as they were a curse. I couldn’t let myself forget how I got the interface in the first place from the previous scion’s still warm corpse.

What was I thinking? I wasn’t safe. Really, I highly doubted I’d ever be safe except maybe at Nine Peaks with an eidolon watching over me. This time around really hammered that home. Without even having to think about it that hard, I wouldn’t be making it out if the Crusade’s SCD came after me. Even just a couple Knights could put me down, even. 

Sure, I could pull my tricks and maybe finagle an escape. I still had that spider tank stored in the Aether, ready to come out any moment. Being able to just summon it anywhere was half the reason I hadn’t claimed the reward yet. That could buy me time, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t do all that much.

Only a fraction of the SCD squad even deployed. Most of them stayed in the Waymaker, with only three popping out to deal with Lavender. They didn’t even bother using the majority of their chrome. It was sheer brute force beating Lavender down with not much else. ‘Course, the guy also tanked two hits of the Waymaker’s airburst, but still.

Lavender… he wasn’t the best combatant ever. In the news clips I managed to find of the distraction attack on Mystech, it was Levi that did most of the work while he flew around like a gnat running interference. Unfortunately, that was also usually my role in combat. Granted, I didn’t have the massive weakness of a fuel can strapped to my back. 

The Waymaker rumbled underneath me roughly as thunder tore across the sky. I looked out the window and tried not to think about it too much. At the very least, these guys were on my side… for now. I couldn’t forget that Nightshade was also wanted by SCD Crusaders. A run-in with these guys would be disastrous if I didn’t already have an escape crow set up somewhere with Spectral Flock. Even then, they may be able to hunt me down.

If nothing else, this reaffirmed my resolve to stay out of sight, out of mind… only, that wouldn’t exactly be an option. When we went to Lathvin, what were the chances I got on the bad side of a paramilitary group like the Crusade while trying to save Kaynis? Better yet, what were the chances it was a paramilitary group itself that snagged the guy? 

Stealth was good, but stealth only went so far. As things stood at the moment, I didn’t even have much in my arsenal that could save me should a squad like the SCD come after us. My plasma claws could do some work, but that meant I’d have to get in close. If, say, three Borgs with a bad attitude closed the gap, I wouldn’t stand much of a chance.  

‘Course, weapons weren’t everything. More combat experience, teamwork, and all that good stuff could help shore up my issues. I had a month—no, less than a month to come up with a fix, though. 

I repeatedly tried to shift my thoughts to something else, but it was almost impossible once my brain latched onto it. Even when the SCD dropped me off before going onto their next thing, when I rode through the city on my Roughrider, and when I returned to my apartment building, my thoughts didn’t drift much. Before I knew it, I was headed for my workshop instead of trying to go to sleep. 

The doors to my Speakeasy swung open, and I slid into the place. Benny, behind the bar, waved at me with his glowing cigar in his mouth. “Sup, boss. Late night tonight, huh?”

”Hi.” I nodded to the bot as my eyes roved over his body. If he went against a high threat borg… he’d also be torn limb from limb, wouldn’t he? Would anything I’d made be capable of even putting up a fight? “Keep up the good work.”

”You got it… though we haven’t had any customers yet.” Benny wiped at the bar with a rag, though there was no point. Like he said, no customers. Should I just power him off? It was kind of a lonely existence to have his entire purpose be dedicated to running a bar without any customers.

I shuffled past him, and headed to the back lift. After thinking about it for a long time, I had a few ideas. Armor piercing rounds could only do so much against the heavy armor that most Borgs had built into their bodies, let alone any external padding. 

Maybe if I could drag a tank around to hit them with an AP shell, it’d work. Tanks weren’t the most mobile weapons, though. Even the FSA didn’t field many tank battalions anymore, especially with chromed infantry being able to get up on them so quickly these days. Strapping a cannon to a flyer could also work, but that had its own host of issues.

No, wait, even if I made some super weapon to peirce right through a borg, what about if I was swarmed by infantry. There were dozens of people that took Kaynis down, and we’d be going right to the heart of their operations. Being swarmed was a much more likely possibility, and I didn’t have very many solutions to that outside of not being caught.

I roughly scratched my head. This was the problem with all-inning on stealth tech. It was only helpful as long as I could avoid detection. Most of my gear was pretty useless once I got caught, though I’d be a bit harder to put down thanks to the resilience of my armor.

I grabbed a set of throwing knives salvaged from old chrome, and moved over to a wall. With a flick of my wrist, three knives thudded harshly into the surface while I continued to think. I would say I could make plasma knives or something. Carting around a hundred knives would weigh me down, though, and having to retrieve them would be a pain in the ass.

Maybe I could make a bunch of combat drones? That’d definitely neutralize being swarmed if I had a swarm of my own. My Fireflies were already a decent option. They just lacked any significant penetrative armor outside of their thermite payloads. I pulled the knives out of the wall, and chunked them at a target on the opposite side of my workshop.

I was planning to actually learn some magic, which would’ve definitely helped me. I couldn’t cast magic as a sprite though. I could still learn some runes from Owl’s Repository of Knowledge, but that felt like a waste of precious time if it didn’t end up going somewhere. Even if I knew runes, I wouldn’t be able to use them to fix this.

Ugh, I was stuck in a loop. I needed to just pick a problem and work on that before anything else. Okay, first things first—I needed some kind of weapon that’d allow me to deal with high threat Borgs in case we ran into them down in Lathvin. Something like the monomelecular blade from the DNBR would be a good fit, but I didn’t even know where to start with that. And, again, it was close range.

Maybe some kind of plasma cannon? I saw from how the SCD Crusaders took down Lavender how effective that could be. Hmm… or something with a bit higher penetrative power. I left my knives stuck in the wall, and shuffled over to grab one of my dozens of notebooks filled with ideas.

While casually flipping through the notebook, I stopped on a page for a rail cannon I drew up a while back. It’d require a vehicle to be mounted on, but my Roughrider could theoretically hold one instead of the HMG I had mounted to it. Or maybe I should just give in and make an aerial tank like the Waymaker.

Railcannons had a much stronger potential output than coil guns, though their requirements meant I’d have to mount it on a vehicle. Not to mention the heat buildup from a rail cannon would mean I’d have to constantly do field maintenance on it. 

That, and I’d only be able to use traditional projectiles. The heat made chemical and explosive rounds tricky to use. It’d work great against ‘borgs where a single penetrative shot to the head or heart could take them out. Not so much against vehicles.

Would I just have to make another coil gun of some kind? My coil pistol was good, but it was plagued with design issues. The biggest issue was that I made it a variable grenade launcher and projectile weapon back then. I gave up power, fire rate, and magazine size for more variability. 

I should remake it before we went to Lathvin. It currently was good as a silent weapon thanks to the Whisper mode. That was mostly what I used it for, anyway. There was no point having it trying to be everything all at once only to be mediocre. Or maybe I was just being too critical of the gun. 

Honestly, a few months down the line and I’d probably find issues even if I happened to make the most effective weapon ever. It was just the nature of creating stuff to solve issues, and then no longer having those issues. Like, I could throw a grenade much better now thanks to Throwing Weapon Master than I could ever shoot it, though I’d maybe run into some range issues.

I flipped through the pages idly. I really had some crazy ideas back then, didn’t I? After flipping through several journals, my attention snagged on something that I’d only recently put to paper. It was a mock up of the Graviton Bolt, which I’d hastily scribbled out a few ideas for after the DNBR.

The way they used gravity to shoot projectiles, and by extension how I did it in my mockup, was terrible. It did give me some ideas though. I pulled out my other notebook and flicked back to the rail cannon. Maybe… maybe that could work?

Yeah, yeah, if I… I scratched out a rough template next to the Graviton Bolt. The Graviton Bolt’s launch systems were incredibly crude since they used a fully crystalline chamber of gravitic, but I could fix that. 

Theoretically, a gravity based projectile system could be just as strong as a rail cannon without most of the heat issues. I just needed to create a gravitational field on par with a rail cannon’s projected magnetic field. In the past I would’ve said that was impossible even with Gravitic, but now I had Gravitite. 

Similar to how the projected barrier worked for my armor, I could project a field to catch a projectile and shoot it down a barrel lined using repellant gravitational forces. It could literally shoot anything without the constraints of being a magnetic material, too. ‘Course, that also meant I could get back into making some extremely lethal projectiles through Aether Imbuement, which I hadn’t touched much.

I pulled over a chair, and flicked to a new page to sketch out a heavily modified version of the Rustek Graviton Bolt. Their version wasn’t super practical, but with some adjustments it could make for a seriously deadly gun.