Amelia was not amused.

She let loose an impressive tirade about taking risks, all while trying to glare a hole right through my 'thick skull.' Which is what she repeatedly accused me of having.

I just kept my mouth shut and took it. This had less to do with my desire to get berated and more to do with the fact that she currently had a hand inside of me. Literally. She was rooting around in my leg enthusiastically, entirely ignoring the twitches of pain that escaped my ability to control.

By the time she dug the bullet out and coaxed my flesh to close, I had a thin sheet of sweat covering my forehead.

"There. The next time you rush in and get shot, I'm going to pull the bullet out so I can stick it up your stupid ass!"

"Urm, well… I'm not really into that, dear."

She looked ready to brain me. She might well have if I hadn't held back my grin until she turned around and stomped up the stairs.

That's when I remembered our current situation and went chasing after her.

In the end, only two of the mercs emerged from the clash alive. The guy whose arms I shot, and the one who got a bullet to his gut. The former was an easy fix for Amelia, while the latter was very close to dying of blood loss and, ironically, blood poisoning. Gut wounds were tricky at the best of time, even when they didn't cause all sorts of nasty shit to spill out and fill your insides.

Amelia cursed up a storm. Still, she was reasonably sure she could keep them both alive and convert them to our side.

That having been sorted out, I ventured upstairs, fearing traps and who knew what else. Instead, I was greeted to the sight of six passed-out mercs and two more drunk idiots. They were all restrained by proper handcuffs, lying on the floor of a massive room that seemed to be set up for entertainment.

The bottles and scattered bits of food told me our drones had completed their 'get the other mercs drunk' job to perfection.

Said drones turned around at the sound of my ascent up the stairs, but they immediately dropped their weapons and greeted me with blank looks, awaiting orders.

"Good work. Two of you, stay here and keep a lookout on these idiots until Amelia shows up. The other two, guide me to your netrunner."

There was no response. I felt a brief flicker of unease at the idea that they might turn on us. Then I realized the issue.

"You and you, stay. You and you, lead," I ground out, wanting to facepalm.

This was the problem with having a bunch of almost-zombies as our underlings. Give vague orders, and they'll just stand there and drool!

Thankfully for my sanity, they rushed to obey me once my orders were clear enough. The two mercs I had chosen immediately led me up the stairs, past two sets of doors that required passwords, and then to the heavy duty door of a room that had far too many cables stretching out of small, expertly sealed holes in its walls.

"Can you open this?" I received two disappointing head-shakes and just waved dismissively. "In that case, shoo. Actually, go tell Amelia I need her. Oh! And that I'm not hurt," I hurried to add, before they could leave and cause a potentially disastrous misunderstanding.

With them gone, I turned my attention back to the door. The lock seemed to be both electronic and physical, in a double-layered setup.

I sighed and got to work.

Thankfully, the electronic lock wasn't of particularly high quality. It seemed to be made more for slowing people down than really denying entry. There was also a function which, as best as I could figure, was meant to alert the runner inside the room the second someone tried to gain unauthorized access. I didn't need even my shoddy quickhacks lock to break through.

I fiddled with the physical lock for a bit before I lost my patience and decided to try something new.

Amelia's arms got a major boost to their effectiveness when she channeled Essence into them, so I couldn't help but wonder if perhaps mine would get the same. Channeling Essence into my hands, and my claws in particular, I stuck one inside the lock and jiggled it around experimentally.

My eyes widened and I cursed when my claws ripped through the metal like a knife through butter. A moment later, the door swung open of its own accord.

Instantly, the smell of blood, sweat, and slightly melted electronics assaulted me.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I rushed inside, cursing again at the sight of the apprentice ripper in the netrunning chair. The guy was still breathing, if barely, but his eyes were wide open and entirely blank. Plus, the ample amount of blood that had leaked out of his nose, eyes, ears, and mouth did not fill me with hope for a good prognosis.

I heard Amelia rush through the door behind me. "You sent them to — Fuck, what did you do to that poor kid?"

I took a second look at the runner and cringed. Her calling him 'kid' wasn't really off the mark. He was a few years younger than us, fourteen or fifteen if I were to guess, with close-cropped hair devoid of all personality and a relatively shabby outfit.

I vaguely remembered what he'd looked like in the netspace. His avatar was dressed like a fresh corpo overcompensating for something, all purple clothes and golden chains. He was nowhere close to securing that kind of a lifestyle in the real, obviously.

"Uhhh…. I ate bits of him? Look, it was an accident! I didn't really mean to! Think there's anything of him left?"

"I'll check, but don't hold your breath. I stabilized your other two victims, by the way. Gave them the brainwashing treatment, too."

"You're a lifesaver, you know? Literally."

"Yeah, yeah, save me the nonsense and move over."

"You still smiled."

"And you're still a jerk."

I chuckled, but I did put a healthy bit of distance between us so she could work. She immediately went about removing the runner's connections to the chair, which looked like it had demanded custom port installs at the base of his skull and partway down his spine. I winced when I realized that was where the smell of melted electronics was coming from.

The runner hadn't caught fire or anything, but if those ports weren't fried, then we had a minor miracle on our hands.

Amelia immediately engaged her Essence and shoved her hands into his skull. Her frown deepened until she finally drew back with a wordless growl. The runner jerked and sat up, eyes looking even more blank than our drones' typical expressions.

"That's the best I could do. He can follow basic orders, and I do mean basic, but it's like entire segments of his brain have just… shut down. I'd say they look like someone chewed on them, but that's exactly what happened, isn't it?"

She glared at me until I flushed and looked away.

"Sorry?"

"Ugh. You know, you're the one who said we should ideally get the runner alive. What if they try to check in with him on their way back to HQ?"

"Then we'll figure something out. Or… can we feed him lines?"

"I don't know." Amelia turned towards our newly acquired drone. "Guess we can test it out."

—

It was truly remarkable, what you could do with a couple hours of access to your enemy's HQ. It was also remarkable how much money the mercs had put into keeping people out of their turf. For a company of barely three hundred people, they had enough defenses installed to chase off four times their number.

Most of them were focused on the outside of the building, with far too many automatic defense torrents located in the entrance rooms as well. If we had tried to storm the place, we'd have gotten torn apart into little bits of meat confetti within seconds. Literally.

So, it was a good thing we were safely on the inside, waiting in their netrunner room, with their own defenses primed and a little surprise added to their sprinkler system. Which was surprisingly well-maintained, but then again, even scummy mercs feared fires.

"Oi, you there, kid?" A voice crackled from the scroll we'd set up to mirror any calls our unfortunate runner victim received. "Kid?"

"Yes, I'm here," the 'kid' finally replied, tone entirely dead as he repeated the words Amelia was struggling not to screech at him.

"What the fuck's wrong with you? Why do you sound like that? Wait, did you let those fucks talk you into drinking again? You better not have, you fucking ingrate! Did ya?"

A beat. "No."

"Fucking shitty little —! I'm going to wring your neck, okay?! I can't believe that fucker Patch talked me into training your sorry ass. Just… sit your ass down somewhere and try not to puke all over the equipment. Again! We'll have a talk about this if I don't just zero your stupid ass. And tell those idiots to greet us out front! We've got a guest. You know, the guy the boss wants to win over."

With that, the call cut out, leaving us to let out sighs of relief.

Amelia and I exchanged a look.

"I'll do it. You keep watch on what's happening," Amelia mumbled, eyes going distant as she immediately opened a call to the scrolls of our drones downstairs.

We had ordered them to clean up the mess made by our brief fight. Thankfully, most of the mercs the main group had left behind were alive and under our thrall. I could only hope the returning mercs wouldn't comment on the missing ones.

Or how drunk some of the drones currently were.

It had been almost hilarious to watch Amelia struggle to convert them, grumbling all the way about how much the alcohol messed with their nervous system. Even when she'd succeeded, the mercs weren't miraculously restored to sobriety.

They did, however, totter about rather amusingly as their overwritten minds forced them to obey all our orders with urgency.

"Done," Amelia whispered before joining me on the camera feed. Together, we watched our drunk soldiers stumble to the front entrance of the HQ.

Cars dramatically screeched to a halt in front of the building, despite the fact that I knew they had a proper garage area and everything. Doors opened, spitting out a whole lot of mostly drunk and disorderly mercenaries.

Seeing them like that, all outfitted in some flavor of 'military' gear with more than a few guns on display, I actually thought they looked relatively impressive. 'Relatively' being a key word, since a ton of them kept swaying about like the inebriated idiots they were.

Patch Six stepped out of the fanciest and cringiest car of the lot: some kind of red muscle car monstrosity with far too many gold accents for anyone to consider even remotely tasteful. He spent several moments shouting at the group of mercs that greeted him, all wearing suitably sheepish expressions as he chewed them out for 'dereliction of duty' and 'risking the safety of them all.'

Like the group of twenty idiots he'd left behind were perfect little soldiers, or anything other than thugs and rapists!

My amusement died a very quick death when he dipped his head back into a car and then stepped back to make way for a man almost a head taller than him. A man whose face sent a wave of familiarity washing over me so powerfully that I almost drowned.

I froze, a word slipping out of my mouth before I could hold it back.

"Mela?"

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