Chapter Thirty-One – The Skinny Lowdown

Chapter Thirty-One – The Skinny Lowdown

“Oh, Stray Cat!

Bang bang bang, bang bang bang!”

NPC Streamer #31,501, Tik Tok Two, 2057

***

I landed my bike in the same parking garage as last time, then got off and started for the elevator. Halfway there I tested my suit’s invisibility. The surface of my coat wavered for a fraction of a second, then there was nothing. I could see straight through my arm and to the floor below.

Waving my arm around revealed only a very slight blurriness. It refreshed so quickly that it was almost impossible to tell that anything was wrong. If I wasn’t looking for it, I would have dismissed it outright. It looked too much like a heathaze. Or… no, a heathaze was more visible. Maybe like those little floater things that moved around in my eye when I was looking at something really dark? They were easy to dismiss when I wasn’t looking for them.

“This stealth shit’s a bit better than what I’m used to,” I said.

It’s a slight improvement over your last set of similar equipment. Don’t worry, you paid for the difference in quality.

“Yeah, I bet,” I said. My chat with Audrey-slash-Emoscythe the other day had me thinking a little about fighting styles. Well, mostly she’d put a lot of ideas about style in my head, but that kind of led from one thing to another.

I had to work a little on my fighting style as well as my image. They kind of went hand-in-hand. So far I’d been a bit wishy-washy about what I used. Bombs, sure, and some more silent weapons. But then I’d pick up an SMG, or a crossbow, and I still carried my Trench Maker around.

I wasn’t focused on a single weapon type or platform, which was… probably okay? It gave me a bit of flexibility, at least, but there was a lot of value in hyperfocusing. Gomorrah’s fire shit was probably leagues ahead of what I could manage by now.

The only advantage I had was the versatility of bombs as a weapon. They let me punch up enough to keep things interesting.

Eventually I’d fall behind someone like Gomorrah who speciaised, though.

I was still in the honeymoon phase of being a samurai however. I still had time to experiment and try shit, and it wasn’t as if there was a lack of things to experiment on at the moment.

“I’m gonna need something to knock people out, I think,” I said.

I’m sure I can find something that can do that. Flashbangs? Gas-based grenades?

“How about, uh…” I ran my hand against my front, looking for the currently empty pouches on my suit. “Two of each?”

Myalis summoned the grenades for me, and I stuffed them away by feel alone. It was nice to have a small contingency for when shit inevitably went south.

By the time I’d tucked everything away, I was back on the same floor as the clinic. It was a little strange being indoors so late at night, mostly because there was no way to tell. The LED lighting was the same off-white as during the day, and there were plenty of people wandering around, doing their own things.

Stores that were automated didn’t have much of a reason to close at night either, so while a few places were shut down, plenty were still operating. I walked into the open space where the clinic was located and glanced around. There were more gangsters than I had noticed last time. The bakery was closed at the moment, which made sense, it was operated by actual people.

See-Three was pacing in front of the clinic, arms crossed while two more cyborged-up people lingered in the clinic. I moved over to her, then past, carefully avoiding a few heaps of broken glass on the floor, just in case.

The clinic had been spruced up a little since I’d last been here. We had chairs now, and a dividing wall between the front and rear. The back had two operating rooms set up. They weren’t exactly super clean, more like dentist offices than a real operating room, but that would do for replacing prosthetics.

The rest of the space in the back seemed to be a small workshop of sorts, combined with a small office space and break room, all squeezed into a tight little place that probably wouldn’t be all that comfortable.

“So, what kind of theft are we dealing with here?” I muttered.

One of the cyborgs turned my way, but dismissed the noise after a moment.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

She didn’t lie about the lack of cameras within. I noticed some linked to other stores in this area. Their footage is recorded off-site, however. It’ll require some finesse to grab it from their servers. Or permission. Do you want me to contact the owners?

I nodded. Getting a recording of whichever dumbass robbed the place would help. Not that I thought we’d really need it.

There was a massive painting of a rat sticking out of a green pipe painted across one of the walls of the clinic, right over our new waiting room chairs. It was actually pretty well done for some quick graffiti.