Mercantile Violence 1.09

She wasn't stupid.

Sherrel Bailey was plenty of things—most of them terrible—but stupid wasn't one of them. The reason it never crossed her mind that I had zero intention of recruiting her was simple: that was just how her entire life had always worked. For a woman with her specific history, expecting the victor to claim her as a prize wasn't an arrogant assumption; it was just baseline reality.

The concept that someone might not want her—might not crave her power, or her body—was pure anathema to who she was. Being wanted, being actively lusted after... Sherrel lived for that shit. She needed it the way normal lungs needed oxygen, the way a fish needed water. She survived entirely on external validation.

Still, underneath the sultry act, even I could tell she was nervous. As she properly took in the butcher shop of shredded meat and shattered bone surrounding us, I could see a fine sheen of cold sweat breaking across her skin. It was enough to make a guy wonder why she hadn't just hit the gas and fled. I’d briefly wondered if she was the one who rigged up the kinetic missile car that had nearly taken my head off, but in hindsight, that didn't track. If Skidmark had coordinated the ambush with her, he wouldn't have had to jump through half those hoops just to herd me into position, and the vehicle itself would have been infinitely deadlier. He'd probably just hotwired a remote-control rig and called it a day.

Besides, you’d need an ungodly amount of nerve to actively try to turn someone into red paste and then stroll up five minutes later asking for a job. Even Sherrel wasn't that shameless.

...Surely.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Sherrel gasped, instantly throwing both hands into the air as she took in the barrel of the gun I'd leveled straight at her forehead. "Come on, Rexy. No need for that, yeah?"

I almost sneered in outright disgust at the sound of the old nickname sliding out of her filthy mouth.

"Why didn't you run?"

She might have deluded herself into thinking I still wanted her—I did not—but even then, that was hardly a sound reason to stick around. From an outsider's perspective, especially someone completely blind to how my powers functioned, my spree had to look stark raving mad at best, and violently psychopathic at worst.

She let out a soft snort, taking a slow, swaying step toward me. "Come on, T-Rex. You're not gonna hurt me."

She genuinely, completely believed it.

"You're lashing out. I get it, Rexy, I really do."

You don't get a single goddamn thing, bitch.

"But come on. Come on."

Her hand reached out toward the barrel, but she didn't try to grab it. Instead, her fingers brushed lightly along the cold slide, gliding back until her palm settled gently over the back of my hand.

"Being a girl in the Merchants... well, it requires—required—some sacrifices, yeah?" Her other hand drifted up toward my jaw, her nails scraping lightly against my rough stubble. "But that's fine! The Merchants are history now. It can just be you and me... Hell, if you want a little side action every now and then, I won't even complain, as long as you don't forget who your number-one girl is."

Part of me wanted it to work. A pathetic, buried part of me wanted it so damn badly. To just walk away with her, to laugh like we used to while lounging across her parents' expensive leather couch, trading lazy touches, getting high off the exact same blunt.

But it couldn't work. Surely it couldn't. I had some pride left in me, didn't I? I couldn't—wouldn't—allow myself to sink that low.

Whether that was genuine truth or just stubborn self-delusion, I suppose I’d never really know. Sherrel wasn't an idiot... but that didn't make her smart, either. She was a creature forged entirely by her toxic environment. Unlike Skidmark, who had always picked up on the fact that I never truly fit into their gutter world, Sherrel couldn't read a room to save her life, never needed to, when the room always played to her tune, which made her utterly incapable of adapting her pitch to her current audience.

"Besides," she cooed, leaning closer, "it's not like we were even together back then, right? I know it pissed you off, and I'm really, really sorry about that. After that, Skidmark... well, you seemingly left the group more or less, but he was insignificant, believe me. Couldn't satisfy a girl to save his life, unlike how I'm sure you will."

The deference, the cheap apology, the dick-riding—maybe some other desperate bastard would have found it pleasing, getting a cheap high from watching her scrape and squirm for approval.

To me, it brought only disgust.

"Plus, you have no idea the kinds of tricks I’ve learned since then," she purred, waggling her eyebrows in a sleazy, conspiratorial wink. "Trust me, once you get a real taste, you won't even—Rex? Is something wr—glrk!"

My hands clamped around her throat like twin bands of iron and began to squeeze.

"Y-you—!"

Her dirty nails clawed desperately at my wrists, leaving angry red gouges in my skin before raking upward, scrambling to gouge at my eyes.

The floodgates broke. Words that had been locked behind my teeth for what felt like centuries bubbled forth in a venomous, unspooling torrent.

Insults, screams, raw and ragged fury, punctuated by hauling her up by the throat and slamming her back down against the broken concrete. My physical boost had completely burned out by now, but Sherrel was just an unaugmented Tinker and a woman on top of that. She never stood a goddamn chance.

"You're a whore, Sherrel. A squealing, filthy pig whose entire worth on this earth is wholly dependent on a power you pure-dumb-lucked into."

She choked, her lips moving frantically around a gurgle of spit and bile. From the broken syllables sputtering out of her mouth, it was likely some desperate parting shot at my masculinity and lack of bitches. Which, frankly, said a hell of a lot more about her twisted worldview than it did about me.

"The world would be an infinitely more beautiful place without people like you walking—"

Her neck gave way. A sharp, muffled crunch echoed beneath my palms as her windpipe collapsed.

"On it!"

At the exact instant the system kill notification flashed in my vision, a sudden discharge of crackling static electricity enveloped her corpse. In a blinding, bluish flash, her body vanished into thin air.

"Teleportation?" I breathed, my hands closing around empty, peculiar-scented air.

Not that it mattered. The kill was registered; she was already dead. It was likely some automated, last-ditch tinkertech bullshit, kicking in far too late to actually save her miserable life. Ironic, I supposed.

I slumped down onto the ground, letting out a ragged breath. I lowered my face into my right hand, resting my elbow on a bruised knee.

"...What now?"

I sighed, tilting my head back toward the harsh, midday glare. A dull, throbbing migraine began to pound behind my temples as the unforgiving sun beat down on my scalp.

"How is it that with every attempt I make at Reaching Heaven... I just end up tumbling deeper into Hell?"

How do normal people do it?

How do they wake up, go to work, talk to one another, and just live?

How does anyone survive this crushing, hollow emptiness without losing their mind?

Am I... just completely broken?

Is there something fundamentally wrong with me? And if there is... how the fuck do I fix it?

"How am I supposed to reach Heaven like this?" I whispered to the empty, corpse-littered lot. "God... Devil... Scion... if any of you are listening... just tell me how. How?"

Nothing answered, of course.

If there ever was a God, He'd likely packed His bags and abandoned this miserable rock years ago, the Endbringers his ironic parting gift. If there ever was a Devil, humanity had long since outclassed anything he could dream up on a daily basis. Gray Boy even had the whole "suffering for infinity" down pat and everything.

And Scion... honestly, the golden man looked perpetually depressed twenty-four hours a day, so I seriously doubted he had any answers either. Was he searching for one, too? Or had the golden bastard simply given up?

"No... that doesn't make sense," I muttered into the silence. Why else would he still be drifting through the sky, then? Just to suffer?

Pointless. I shook my head, grinding my palms into my aching eyes. It's completely pointless trying to divine the motives of Pyrite Jesus.

The slight shift of my hips pressed the crumpled slip of paper against my rear, and I reached into my back pocket to fish it out.

'Call me if you need something.'

"Fuck it. Why not?"

I pulled out the smartphone I’d conjured earlier and punched in the digits. It rang once. Twice. Then a sharp click cut the third ring short.

"Who is this?"

Her voice was calm, measured. I still couldn't wrap my head around why this woman had taken such an interest in me. Was she just some bored upper-class samaritan who liked striking up conversations with dirty vagrants? For the life of me, I couldn't think of a single logical reason—unless she somehow, impossibly, knew who and what I was.

...Did she?

"Why did you give me this number?" I asked without preamble.

"Ah. Hello, Reggie," she replied smoothly, using the name I'd thrown at her after refusing to give her my last name and flat-out forbidding her from slapping a "Mister" in front of it.

"Brown," I replied in lieu of a proper greeting. She’d refused the "Miss" for her own part, claiming it made her feel her age catching up. Absurd, really—the woman didn't look a single day over twenty-two. "How are you doing?"

A soft sigh carried over the line, followed by the faint, muffled pop of shifting cartilage. Probably rolling her shoulders. "As well as can be expected, considering the circumstances."

Not well at all, then, I translated silently. Nobody on earth used that phrase when things were actually going fine and dandy.

"You're smart, right?"

She let out an amused chuckle. "A former colleague of mine used to say it was faster and more accurate to consult me than an entire library."

"Right." I chewed on my tongue for a beat, carefully weighing my next words. "You want something from me, don't you?"

She drew a breath, about to speak, but I cut her off before she could start.

"No, it's fine. Don't worry about it. That's..." I cast a sideways glance down at Skidmark's battered, cooling corpse, and then toward the empty patch of cracked dirt where Sherrel’s body had dissolved into static just minutes before. "That's just how things work in this world. It is what it is."

The words tasted like sour bile in my mouth. It was an outright admission of failure. But—I wasn't going to give up.

So what if I hadn't cracked the code myself? So fucking what? There had to be a way out there, a real Path to Reaching Heaven. And if my street-trash brain was too dumb to map out the route alone, then I’d just find someone with a bigger intellect to point me in the right direction.

"It is," she admitted quietly.

My respect for her shot up a dozen notches with that single sentence. Had she started spouting empty platitudes, or fed me some patronizing garbage about helping a poor soul out of the sheer goodness of her heart, I would’ve hung up the phone on the spot.

"Then I—"

"Why don't we discuss this face to face?" she interrupted gently. "I'll put the kettle on. Tea? Or would you prefer coffee?"

"...Tea is fine," I muttered, my brow furrowing in confusion. "Are you... anywhere near where I am?"

"Physically? No. But I don't need to be, either. You’ve already been granted access to the exact same means of travel as I have, even if you aren't entirely conscious of it yet. You only need to speak the command."

The command?

Before I could ask what kind of cryptic bullshit she was playing at, memory sparked. The slip of paper taped to the pavement.

"Door me," I said aloud into the empty lot. Nothing happened. I hesitated, then added, "...Brown's location?"

A vertical slit of pure light tore through the afternoon air directly in front of me, unfurling silently into a doorway—the exact same spatial rift that had dropped me into this Merchant meeting spot earlier.

On the other side stood a woman.

She was dressed down for the evening, wearing comfortable, civilian casuals—a simple, finely knit cream sweater paired with dark, perfectly tailored slacks. There wasn't an ounce of ostentation to the clothes, yet the fit was impeccable, effortlessly sharp. Her dark hair was neatly brushed, falling back from her face with deliberate precision. Every line of her posture spoke to absolute discipline, yet she stood with an easy, fluid grace that felt entirely relaxed.

More than that, though, was her skin. Up close, in the warm indoor lighting, it looked as though it had never been subjected to a single harsh element in its entire existence. It was completely unblemished, smooth, and untainted by dirt, scars, or age.

Intemerate.

Right. That was the word.

She looked entirely intemerate.

She almost certainly wasn't. Nobody who survived in this miserable world stayed clean on the inside. Yet simply presenting herself that way—maintaining an aura of untarnished perfection amidst the filth of reality—required an immense, deliberate act of will. That alone made me appreciate the sight. It meant the ideal of purity was something she actively valued.

"Looks like you've been busy," she noted, her lips curving into a mild, knowing smile as the shimmering rift snapped shut behind me, cleanly slicing away the view of the corpse-littered lot. "Do you take honey in your tea?"

I stared at her for a second, the absolute absurdity of the contrast washing over me.

I couldn't help it. I barked out a genuine laugh.

"Sure. Thank you, Brown."

She set two ceramic mugs on the low wooden table, her smile widening just a fraction.

"Please," she said softly. "Call me Becca."

Author's Note

Next chapter joke(ish) preview:

"Contessa…" Doctor Mother muttered, "was Alexandria mastered?"

"...it's complicated."

Anyways, next chapter should be the end of Arc 1.

One of my big problems in my previous writings was that I took too long to develop the plot. Perhaps did one too many Interludes/PoV changes. At the same time though, I just can't help but think that otherwise the characterization of certain cast members would suffer/not appear natural.

In this fic I'm attempting to go with a somewhat faster plot development while still trying to make everything make sense (like why is Alexandria acting in a way that could misconstrued as OOC).

Reason for this chapter having taken a while longer is that my pc monitor went to shit (every time I turned it on it flashbanged me and automatically turned itself off), so I had to buy and install a new one (and wait for it to arrive). Fortunately, largely in part thanks to the monetary support offered by all of you amazing people, I managed to afford a replacement without much stress.

The other reason is that monitors have actually become decently cheaper? Like, sure, I got my previous one like, 9-10 years ago but this new one was half the price and somewhat better than it. Now if only RAM could go back to its previous prices too that'd be just great.

I'm also hoping to add another advanced chapter to Patreon, for a total of 4. We'll see how that goes.

Godspeed.