"Decontamination sequence complete, thank you for your patience." The friendly computer voice opened the far door with a ding and Phanya stepped through, squinting her eyes against the laboratory's harsh lighting.

"Tapper? Salazar? You guys here?" she asked. The automated systems had kept the clean room properly sterile while on emergency power, and the wide rows of lab equipment looked completely undisturbed. Not one sign of looting, or of a struggle. Phanya entered through the same decontamination chamber that had locked in the other two, so where could they have gone?

Buying radios for everyone moved further up her responsibility list. The only reason Phanya eventually left Ricky by himself in the basement was because she knew he wasn't going anywhere while he focused on repairing his gear. Plus, they both felt strangely confident that clearing the floor of monsters meant that the floor would stay cleared for a while, though neither could guess for how long. Phanya shook her head and marched forward, at some point they all needed to sit down and talk about how the system was influencing them. Once everything calmed down.

Once she got a break.

"Hey computer, can you hear me?" Phanya asked into the empty room.

"Query detected. Answer: Yes," the computer answered from a nearby speaker set into the wall, and Phanya huffed a quiet chuckle.

"Okay then, can you tell me where the refill tanks of medgel are stored?"

"Security level: numan. Access granted. The nearest unused tank of medical nanobot gel is in Storage Room 2, on your left."

Phanya followed the instructions and found several reinforced metal tanks the size of her thigh, lined up neatly against the wall just inside the storage room, and Phanya grumbled. She didn't believe for a second that Salazar's paranoia would have missed this easy loot, so where the hell did they go? Phanya's palms itched as her lifelong babysitter training kicked in, and Phanya fought the urge to go chase them down.

She needed to trust that Tapper could fight if they needed to fight, especially if another crazy "adventure" caused the fight. In fact, that's probably what happened — Ricky had his hyperfixation and Tapper went gallivanting off, leaving Phanya the only person actually concerned with doing the job. She took her frustration out on the tanks, jerking them into her shoulder bag one by one until she looked up for more loot.

"Uh… computer, why is this storage room mostly filled with eyeballs?" Rows and rows of labeled glass jars filled the storage room, each holding a single eyeball suspended in clear fluid. The eyes ran in all colors and sizes, most of them so bizarre that Phanya couldn't tell what mutation or creature they came from.

"Internal records indicate that anomalous ocular organs are the most profitable product from this branch of Fusion Pharmaceuticals®, along with standing orders to maintain a continuous supply."

"But where do they come from?"

"I am sorry, answering that question is outside of my capabilities. Playing relevant shareholder advertisement:" The computer voice changed to a man, hyped up on so many stimulants that his calmest moments still reverberated off the walls.

"Ladies and gentlemen, Fusion Pharma® has done it again! Did you know the organ that's the most difficult to replace and most prone to mutations are our eyes? Using our new proprietary processes, Fusion Pharma® has rediscovered how to guarantee that new eyes grow when recycling Phasic flesh, eliminating the need to sift through useless hands and feet! Usually. It's so precise that we can now automate the process, further reducing costs by eliminating interns! Still need to keep the mouth, though. And specifying what kind of eye it grows is still a crapshoot. But now we have the quantity to guarantee quality! Just you wait until next quarter, you'll see what the boys in the Theoretical Physics Department have been cooking up for that so-called 'spiritual energy' byproduct of the harvesting process. Buy more shares now before news hits the public, and the profits will be something to behold!"

Phanya's mouth suddenly went very dry. "Tapper? Salazar? I'm starting to get a bad feeling about this!" She hurried through the laboratory, checking every side room without stopping to loot until she reached the exit on the other side. The door through that decontamination chamber just contained another bare concrete stairwell, identical to the one she used to reach the basement. But once Phanya stepped out of the high-tech laboratory and its background noise of whirring machines, she could hear faint crashing sounds coming from the floor just beneath her. Phanya groaned, because of course those two wound up finding trouble, and rushed through the security door marked 'Harvesting.'

Everything was on fire.

Commander class instincts took over and Phanya gulped down her panic, giving the situation a proper tactical breakdown. Not everything was on fire but several machines in the wide room blazed away, along with streaks of ice and bubbling melted plastic cutting across at random intervals. The room wasn't supernaturally dark like the basement, but enough lights had blown out on the ceiling to cast strange shadows on the monster floating in the middle space. Phanya couldn't make out fine details, but what she saw made her stomach churn: a sphere the size of a large volleyball floated without any visible source of lift, made of nothing but formless flesh, and covered in scar tissue and writhing tentacles.

The security door slammed shut behind Phanya and one of the tendrils snapped in her direction. A naked eyeball with a shocking blue iris grew from the tip, contempt radiating in its unblinking glare as it spun to face Phanya. The only other features on the floating meatball were a massive mouth filled with rows of razor teeth, and a massive gemstone embedded into the flesh above the mouth like a red cycloptic eye. It glowed with dazzling power and Phanya froze in place, overcome by primal fear as the monster focused its full attention on her. Every tentacle grew either a single sensory organ on the tip, mostly different eyeballs with a few hands and feet, or a shining gemstone the size of an eyeball. And they all bore down on Phanya with predatory intent.

"Phanya! Cut quick and dodge!" Tapper shouted.

Phanya couldn't see him, she couldn't look away from the gemstone's red hatred, but she did see the tiny sphere that arced through the air directly between them. The flashbang exploded at its zenith, and her painful wince from the light and sound forced Phanya to break eye contact with the monster. She rolled with the recoil and blindly dodged to the side, right as she heard the monster roar in pain and something audibly smacked into the wall where Phanya once stood. She landed painfully on her shoulder and scrambled behind a long cabinet for cover, trying to rub the focus back into her eyes.

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Familiar metal feet clanked around the corner, accompanied by an unfamiliar squeaky wheel. "Thank goodness you're okay! Don't look directly into the gemstone, lest it beguile you. It beguiled us quite effectively!"

"Yes Tapper, that much was — why is Salazar relaxing on a cot?" Phanya squinted up at the mercenary, who answered her bleary look with his own scowl.

"Your bot fucked me up and I still can't walk straight. Now be quiet!" Salazar spat as he adjusted his seat. Most of the feeling had returned to his arms by now but his legs still felt like jelly, so they had angled the medical bed to let Salazar see. Now he sat propped upright with a very small pile of canisters in his lap, every remaining smoke bomb and flashbang accounted for and desperately hoarded.

"I'm still not convinced that the monster can hear us at all, what with the lack of ears," Tapper whispered. "It may even have grown the overabundance of eyes to compensate!"

"Shut up shut up!" Salazar twisted in his seat to swat at Tapper, and everyone froze when the monster roared again.

"Okay, stowing the questions for later," Phanya quickly whispered. "I got the medgel, do we really need to fight this freak? Let's just leave!"

"We were trying to do that before you showed up!" Salazar hissed back, and urged that everyone else start crawling away. Phanya finally looked past her two companions and saw the security door she had entered through, now covered by a thick layer of ice. Whatever the monster did would have caught her dead to rights if Phanya hadn't jumped at the last second. She shuddered, and not just from the implied cold.

"And the only other exit is through another decontamination chamber, which Salazar understandably refuses to use," Tapper said, answering Phanya's question before she could ask it.

The monster tumbled through the air and slammed into a nearby wall, still shaking out its own disorientation. The trio panic-crawled down the aisle of harvesting equipment and took the first available turn, cowering in place once they felt sufficiently hidden.

"Alright yeah, we need Ricky's help," Phanya panted. "Hey computer, can you connect directly to other intercoms?"

"Query detected. Answer: Yes." Salazar gaped at the nearby speaker that answered her, then glared accusations at Phanya.

"What? It's been open," Phanya hissed back. "Must be from your, uh, hacks or something. Computer, please connect to the basement intercom!"

"I am sorry, but there is no Intercommunication Systems Terminal available with that designation."

"Come on, it's the one I talked to in the basement!"

Salazar shushed her and said, "Computer, query list of intercom names." Nothing happened until Phanya repeated the question, and when the computer chimed to acknowledge her Salazar grumbled, "Racist-ass pharma systems…"

The computer continued to ignore Salazar as it said, "Please choose from one of the following: IST-001, IST-002…" The monster's roar drowned out the computer as it soared overhead, banking hard when several eyes locked onto the trio.

"Make haste!" Tapper shouted.

Phanya grabbed the medical bed as the two ran off together, forming a chain that snaked down the aisle. She heard an odd straining sound and spared a glance back as they rounded a corner, just in time to see a cone of green light shoot out of a tentacle gemstone. The light beam arced along the wall as the gemstone chased them, and everything that light touched instantly started to melt. Salazar threw another canister that split into a hundred tiny explosions in the monster's face and the monster reared back, ending its attack and giving the trio precious seconds of lead.

"IST-007, IST-008…"

"Oh screw this. Computer, open up all intercoms right now!"

"Security lev—"

"YES GREAT THANK YOU!" Phanya shouted over the computer, hoping that Salazar was panicking too much to notice. "Alright Ricky, can you hear me? Ricky!"

Ricky answered with a yelp and a crash. "...Oh hey you got the intercom working, nice!"

"Nevermind! Get your ass up one floor to Harvesting, we have a monster problem! Like a giant flying gremlin!"

Ricky's tone instantly dropped any frivolity. "Shit, okay. What do we know?"

"We know that they perish if they bleed a great deal!"

"That isn't helping, Tapper!" Phanya snapped.

"No, I mean they need to bleed a great deal. The last gremlin we defeated contained more blood than its physical form should hold, and that beast is of a magnitude larger!"

"Actually, I think I can work with that!" Ricky whooped. "I'll just need a minute, anything else?"

"Yeah, it's shooting fucking lasers from Phase gems!" Salazar wailed.

"What's that about gems?" a gruff and unfamiliar voice asked.

Both Tapper and Phanya almost tripped over themselves. "Hello, who is this?"

"Who is this?"

"My name is Tapper, and we are currently busy with combat against a large Phase monster — "

"Tapper shut up!" both Phanya and Salazar snapped, too little too late. Multiple voices were starting to chatter with excitement and Phanya's stomach sank; she hadn't considered that some of the intercoms in the looted front half of the building would still work, but the raiders had heard them.

Save the guilt trip for later. Phanya snarled, "Ricky, new plan! Barricade the door we came through, and exit out the back! This door is frozen shut, you'll need to break it down!" She's pretty sure she heard Ricky's acknowledgment, but now the raiders were starting to overwhelm the speakers. "Computer, shut off all intercoms!"

The trio slid into cover behind a large tank, catching a lucky break after losing the monster. Salazar snatched his gasmask back from Tapper and slid it on, quickly verifying that his wearable technology had all finished rebooting from the debuff.

"What are you planning to do, Salazar?" Tapper asked.

"Well, since someone fucked our stealth," Salazar started, pausing to watch Phanya wince. "Time to show you how a professional works. Soni, remove the alarm jammers for this building."

Instantly a red light started to blare overhead, with an alarm to match. "Warning: Intruder alert. Warning: Intruder alert."

Shortly afterwards gunfire erupted from the floor above, and Salazar huffed in self-satisfaction. "Told you I handled the security bypass."

Two drones entered the room on ceiling rails, beefier versions of the widowmaker robot with fewer limbs. They instantly zoned in on the monster and responded by instantly blasting one of them with a green laser, melting it until the drone sloughed off its mount in a manner of seconds. The other managed to jab the monster with a stun rod and it roared with pain, before it spun around and tore every arm off the drone with its teeth.

"Well… shit."

"Not to worry!" Tapper cheered on his compatriot. "Next plan is to try some mag— I mean, some special hacking!"

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