Chapter 96: You Can Come In and Collect the Bodies Now
In the dark, Hunk's figure was gone before the last word had left him.
When he appeared again, he was directly in front of Heisenberg.
Heisenberg scrambled backward in a frenzy. The metal debris drifting around him surged with magnetic force, accelerating instantly into a spinning wall of industrial shrapnel, a massive improvised meat grinder filling the space between them.
For the first time in the operation, the attack actually caught Hunk off guard. He was drawn partially into it.
But his body held. He pulled himself out in a second.
Through his gas mask, Hunk looked at the spinning metal wall, which was picking up speed. He was quiet for a moment.
Then he shifted the Stanavistin to third gear.
Third gear was the maximum setting on this customized unit. Tony had specifically told Matthew when handing it over: the first two gears were technically mature, but third was still experimental. Brief use was fine. Extended use would over-stimulate the body, placing enormous strain on the muscles and the hardware alike. Long enough, and it could dissolve the cardiac muscle and destroy the equipment entirely.
To Hunk, these facts registered roughly at the level of a weather report about a day he wasn't planning to go outside.
The one thing worth noting was that the equipment might break. And a broken Stanavistin meant going to Mr. Lawrence for a replacement. He would prefer not to create that inconvenience for his boss any more than necessary. So he wouldn't run it continuously. Just when the situation genuinely called for it.
Third gear engaged. Everything around him decelerated.
The metal storm became individually readable. Every fragment of it, every spinning edge, was now clearly visible and moving at a pace he could work with. Even Heisenberg's expression of fury was playing out several times slower than normal.
He had no interest in wasting activations. He moved with precise timing, directly into the spinning wall.
From Heisenberg's perspective, Hunk had just gotten faster again. Which should not have been possible.
When he appeared on the other side, he had passed through the entire metal storm without a mark on him.
Heisenberg, watching this, had the look of someone getting their first real encounter in Night City with a Stanavistin-running enforcement squad charging through a hail of bullets straight toward them. Cold sweat broke out across his forehead.
"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"
"How is he this fast?!" He kept hurling scrap metal and kept retreating.
And then he hit the wall.
Was this the moment for that technique?
His temple vein stood out visibly. He clenched his teeth and pushed the metal fragments faster. The technique he was thinking of was his true form: abandoning the human body entirely, drawing in vast quantities of metal via magnetism and becoming something that was no longer classifiable as a person. Flesh and metal fused into a creature.
He had some concern for his appearance. He disliked that form.
But Hunk was already in front of him.
Heisenberg made one last attempt. He wrenched a steel plate from beside him and threw it between them.
A sharp metallic tear rang out.
Hunk's fist went straight through the plate and closed around Heisenberg's throat.
He could have removed the head from the body at this exact moment if he wanted to.
Heisenberg looked at the hand locked around his neck. One drop of sweat traced a line down his forehead.
In that moment, feeling death genuinely arrive, things clarified quickly.
Appearance? Forget appearance.
Staying alive came first.
Blue-white electrical current erupted across every surface of his body. The magnetic field surrounding him became wildly chaotic, an invisible force of enormous size drawing every piece of metal in the factory toward him, all of it surging inward from every direction.
Waves of E-Type Mold appeared, mixed with bleeding crimson flesh.
Within a few breaths, Heisenberg had expanded to fill half the factory.
Hunk looked at this development for two seconds. Then he opened the Las Plagas link.
"Commander. My apologies."
"The experimental subject designated Heisenberg has gone into a berserk state. Capture and containment are no longer feasible."
Matthew's response came without any hesitation. "Then don't bother with alive. Kill him. Bring the body back."
"Understood."
The killing intent that came out of Hunk after that word was something different from what had been there before.
With a single mental command, the symbiote covered his entire body.
Iron-grey, tank-armor thickness. And at each arm, from the elbow down to floor length, two massive war blades condensed into place.
Before Heisenberg could complete his transformation, symbiote-Hunk was already airborne and closing, moving like something that had been in a cage for too long and no longer was.
Blade strike after blade strike, each one faster than the last, each one landing on Heisenberg's body. Every hit tore through the outer metal armor and bit into the flesh underneath.
Screams filled the factory interior.
Heisenberg felt his armoring being peeled away piece by piece, his flesh exposed and then cut. He let out a sound that didn't belong to anything human.
A massive deformed arm swept across at Hunk in a furious horizontal strike.
Hunk didn't step back.
He dropped low, slid inside the sweep along the underside of the arm, flipped his blade upward.
A flash of light.
The massive arm fell.
While Heisenberg was still screaming from it, Hunk drove upward and reached his neck. Both war blades crossed over each other and locked into the gap in the neck armor. He pulled.
Something tore.
Mechanical parts and flesh separated at once. A skull encrusted with metal crashed to the floor with a sound that shook the whole building.
Heisenberg's body lurched. The metal gathered across him began to detach, control gone. The skull rolled. Crimson blood hit the iron-grey symbiote plating and spread across it.
The clatter of falling metal continued without stopping for several minutes.
When Heisenberg had been still long enough to be certain, Hunk deactivated the symbiote and powered down the Stanavistin. He straightened his blood-covered combat suit and pressed the radio.
"Hunk Squad, come in."
About one second. Then: "Hunk Squad copies, go ahead. Hunk Squad copies, go ahead, over."
Very official.
"All units attention, this is Hunk."
"You can come in and collect the bodies now."
At least five seconds of silence from the other end before the response came.
"Copy copy..."
"Do you... need a truck?"
Umbrella Corporation. Level minus twenty.
In the open space, Matthew stood still and watched Miranda's back.
Neither of them spoke. The atmosphere had the quality of air that was in the process of freezing.
Seeing that she had been fully exposed, Miranda stopped maintaining the pretense.
She raised one hand.
Hundreds of crows burst from inside her body in an instant and filled the air above them. When they scattered, black feathers drifting down from the dark above, a slim six-winged figure in black robes stepped out calmly from the swirl of feathers and stood with the composure of someone who had done this before.
"When did you figure it out?"
***
30+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces