Chapter Fifty-One – Adamantium Toenails

Chapter Fifty-One – Adamantium Toenails

“Sassy? No, my AI is nice and polite? He’s like an old-timey butler.

What do you mean a butler and little sister? Mine gives me shit all the time!”

–Overheard conversation between three Samurai, 2025

***

I woke up to a kick.

It was weird, because I’d once been pretty used to waking up to kicks, but I hadn’t felt one in a while. Lucy’s deteriorating condition often led to weird twitches. She said they hurt when she was awake but she didn’t feel them while sleeping.

Instead, I was the one to feel them as she rammed her sharp little toe-nails into my shins and calves.

It had been a while, though. Maybe the kicking wasn’t medical at all and Lucy was just lying to cover up her habit of moving in her sleep? We used to sleep in the tiny, narrow beds at the orphanage. They were only barely large enough for one adult, so any movement was hard to miss.

I grumbled as I came awake and turned around. Blinking, I made out Lucy’s form in the dark with my cybernetic eye.

She was sleeping at a forty-five degree angle across the bed. Blankets thrown off her upper body and face drooling into a pillow she was hugging.

I grinned. She looked like absolute crap, which is why I took a picture and sent it to her. It would be a surprise when she woke up and checked her messages.

Reaching down, I rubbed at my calf where she’d dug her nails in. “Dammit, Lucy,” I muttered. She’d never drawn blood, but I swore it was a near thing. I checked the time and was horrified to discover that it was only eight in the morning.

Holy crap, I was waking up at a reasonable time? I wasn’t even tired enough to fall back asleep. I rubbed at my face, then popped open my media feeds for a quick scroll-through.

Lucy and I had been using the same old app for like, ten years now. It was a free version of an aggregator for various media accounts. It picked the juiciest gossip, news, propaganda, and advertising and shoved it all into one stream of easy-to-scroll slop. These kinds of aggregators usually had a monthly subscription fee, or you had to endure ads every so often, but this one was a beta version Lucy had found on some sketchy site that was a hundred generations behind.

As long as we didn’t update it, we were fine. It was a right pain in the ass to stop it from updating though, but I’d long ago gotten into the habit of opening it through my augs, closing the update prompt, then opening the downloader that downloaded the next update and shutting that down manually.

Still faster than looking at a single video ad.

The news this morning was the usual. Political scandals, corporate scandals, celebrity drama. I watched a video of a cat pushing a brick off the side of a building where it landed on some pedestrian’s head. I’d seen that same video ten years ago, but the damned thing was reposted like clockwork.

Some of the reposts were older than me, posted over and over again by attention-farming bots. I was ten minutes into the mindless scrolling when I passed some news about a few Brazilian samurai who’d blown up some statue or something that had been turned into a nest. They’d replaced it but the locals weren’t happy with the new one. My attention wandered to the corner of my vision.

I had the time displayed up there, and under that, Myalis was keeping my point tally up.

“Holy fuck!”

I bounced out of the bed, suddenly on my feet as a shock of adrenaline zipped through me.

I was expecting this reaction, and yet it’s still amusing to see.

“Myalis, what the fuck?” I asked.

I had forty thousand points banked. Forty-K and change, but at that number the chump change didn’t matter as much.

The earnings are from the Big Gun’s shots taken over night. In the last ten hours the gun has fired eleven times. I can get you a full breakdown of the points earned, but for the most part it comes from killing a small number of higher-tier antithesis. The value was, of course, split unevenly amongst the Vanguard participating in the project, with major deductions for the distance between said Vanguard and the actual successful eliminations.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it’s taken without the author’s consent. Report it.

“That’s a ridiculous number of points, still.” I said.

It’s what you earned.

I scratched my neck. “What I earned my ass,” I muttered. I’d sweat blood and tears to make a tenth as many points before. And now I’d earned this many while sleeping.

Is this how rich people felt?

Fuck, the game really was rigged.