Chapter Five – Dying is For Other People

Chapter Five – Dying is For Other People

“Point. Buy.

“Rince, repeat, climb so high!”

— Lyrical extract from ‘Point. Buy.’ Gun and Done’s best selling rap single of 2043

***

At some point, I started to hyperventilate. It wasn’t exactly pleasant to be breathing so hard while bleeding out, but I managed it anyway.

Now now, no need to panic. You’re dying already. Hyperventilating will only worsen your situation.

“What, where are you?” I asked.

My head came up and I looked around. I still had a pole sticking out of my chest, the grotesque sight too much for me at that moment, so I stared around the open museum and tried to make sense of things.

Come now, blood loss is no excuse not to put two and two together.

I let my head fall back. “I’m a samurai?” I asked.

It was silly, dumb. The kind of thing that kids everywhere dreamed of. The sort of thing that didn’t happen to someone like me.

Yes. You are, at least for now. In twenty minutes you will not be one.

“Why?” I asked.

Was the voice actually speaking out loud? I couldn’t tell where it came from. Maybe that was the pain talking, of the rushing noise of blood in my ears.

In approximately six minutes blood loss and trauma will lead you to losing consciousness. The pole cut into your liver and gallbladder and is bleeding quite profusely.

A glance at the blood pooling around the pole said as much. “Yeah?” I asked.

Assuming that no action is taken, two minutes after that you will begin to experience cardiac arrest, then total body failure and eventually death. Well, I say experience, but you won’t be able to feel any of that.

I swallowed. “I’m dying,” I said past the haze of pain.

You are. Now let’s fix that, shall we?

I could worry about hearing voices later. “What do I do?” I asked.

Turn to your side, throw off the weight pinning you down.

I cursed, tears welling up in my eye as I shifted to the side, legs kicking out to try and get some sort of leverage. The alien above me fell to the side, dragging the pole with it.

A scream was torn out of me as the pole, still stuck in my chest, shifted with the motion.

Well done! Though you did make a mess of your internals there. No worries.

I sniffled, feeling like one of the kids that I was meant to be caring for instead of the woman I was. “N-now what?”

You currently have twenty points available to you from killing those two Model Threes, as well as the initial one hundred points freely granted to new Vanguards. Let me suggest a purchase!

My vision swam for a moment before resolving into an image of a sort of thick syringe hovering before me.

This is a WoundStop. A device available to anyone with Class I Medical Utilities unlocked. Unlocking the Class would cost you fifty points. The Woundstopper would cost you five points.

“It hurts,” I whispered.