-Richard’s P.O.V.-

I’m not usually one for being cynical, and I try not to complain before a job is done. See, when you complain during the job, you’re whining, and nobody - especially not me - likes to listen to someone whine about the job their doing. Most of the time, they’re probably doing the same job you are, or are relying on you to do your job right. Are they going to be happy hearing that you’d just as well be doing something else?

Hell no. Nobody wants to hear that.

Especially if it’s a crap job, of course nobody likes it! If you did, you’d be weird. The only complaint I have is when someone asks ‘how is your day?’ when I’m doing one of said shit jobs. It just makes me want to slap them. What do you want me to say? “Gee, I’m doing greaaat. I’m just going to go look for mountain of moving flesh that looks really fucked up.” I realized I was speaking out loud at that point, but the tirade didn’t stop, “What the actual fuck do you want me to say?”

I restrained myself after that outburst. That wouldn’t do. Not at all. Already I’d had to check in with Doug, apparently that Reaper guy was helping to straighten everything out with the other two organizations. Groups? Guilds? Hell if I know. I’m staying out of the political sphere, nothing ever good comes of politics. I’d rather have my freedom, stay in a position of security in an organization with minimal oversight.

You could say I got my cake and eat it, as much as that phrase makes no goddamn sense to me.

Alright, this wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. I owed Doug… err… well, no, I guess I didn’t really owe him too much anymore these days. Wait, doesn’t he owe me? I stopped immediately where I’d been slinking through the trees, coming to rest against the side of a tree. Even as I was resting on its side, my mesh suit’s spikes dug into the bark to keep me secure.

Come to think of it, I’d saved Doug anyways, and helped to take care of his daughter. Sure, he pulled strings to make sure the rest of my family was cared for - but I didn’t really concern myself with their day to day activities. But, I guess that counted then. I did help with his peg leg. Shame that had to happen in the first place, but I guess a wolf getting his leg wasn’t hardly the worst thing that could happen.

Man, that sucked. I don’t have much in the way of med school, but I at least know how to take care of someone who lost a limb. Only upside is how clean the cut was. The good and bad part of the biotics is that they were fairly clean too, not really much in the way of bacterial infestations in their mouths. Probably a feature of them being partially inorganic.

On another note, that entire fiasco ended up better than I could have known. Being a good samaritan has its upsides sometimes, even if I’m not a people person per se. I had no idea who Doug was when we were all evacuated from the areas immediately outside of the city, the sparse houses that couldn’t even be called the suburbs of Gilramore. What I found out, though, was the fact that Doug didn’t let go of a debt that needed repaying.

So, I found my family well cared for all things considered; my mom and dad, and two of the four siblings I’d had. The other two were outside of the city, and I tried not to think about what might have happened to them.

From a distance, I confirmed that they were doing alright, and am happy to report that the four of them seem as happy as anyone could expect to be here. I don't involve myself further, I’d burned bridges with them long ago, not that I don’t think we could come to a compromise now. It seemed so silly now, but I still had no real desire to get myself reacquainted on any personal level.

It might seem petty and shallow, and it probably was, but unless I felt like I was missing something, I wouldn’t reconnect. They’d already spent the first 19 years of my life trying to mold me into the perfect little puppet. A proxy for them to live through, always compared to my siblings. I was the middle child of five, and being that, I found myself harassed on all sides.

I’d say I was overreacting to that, but in this case I don’t think so. I’m sure any ‘oppressed youth’ would say the same thing, and that it’s a teenager phase. But I’m also pretty sure that normal parents didn’t literally try to dictate every step of your life. In the most literal of senses, they tried to see what my life was like when they weren’t around; who I should make friends with, what I should do at ‘x’ time or what to say in ‘y’ scenario. It took my a long while to realize that I wasn’t being pampered or babied, not like my younger siblings, but instead I was the one that was being programmed.

No matter what, I would never bring this up to someone else. I’m positive someone would say I was just being melodramatic, that ‘it’s just a phase’ would be thrown around. I used to try that, used to try to speak to councillors or adults. They always accused me of making it up, even when I had a literal notebook with my schedule of what was expected of me and when detailed in my notebook.

To make a long story slightly less long, I’d left them as soon as I could, at 18, but couldn’t quite shake them the rest of the way until I was 19. I did what any sane fresh-out-of-highschool student would do to obtain moral high ground and get the hell away from potentially mentally unstable parents.

I went to college. For a bit anyways. Med school, to be precise. I didn’t take my parents money, I went in with my own money, predominantly loans.

There’re a lot of details I’m missing here, my reptile farm being one of them, but I realize this is one massive tangent when I’m really just trying to figure out why I’m even out here.

Ah, right, Doug has me running as his personal agent. Cloak and dagger stuff, I’d assumed, when he first asked me. I’m not particularly against helping him, after all he makes a convenient way to make sure my two little sisters are cared for without me doing a damn thing.

What surprised me was how he knew I was hunting biotics pretty much minutes after the Obelisk touched down. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I stocked up on what I figured would be the best possible thing, which apparently was a good thing.

I purchased something that wouldn’t do much early, but was crazily advanced tech. The reason why I was able to purchase it? The Obelisk system was still booting, and I managed to find an exploit.

Apparently, the guy at the head of the Legion did something similar, Matthew I think was his name. He had the right idea, though I think mines still better for the long run. Maybe. Not sure yet.

I’m positive he and Daniel have classes, making us among the few in the city with them. It’s hard to tell who has them sometimes, you have to see the back of their hand. Simple diamond? Vanilla, non-classer. Symbol of anything else? Class. That said, it’s not always easy to be looking without seeming conspicuous, and even seeing the symbol tells you nothing about what the actual class does. Some people, for instance, seem to have some kind of halfway point, like the ex-pre-Bulwark officer Fran.

What that ultimately meant for me is that I had unique options, one of which being the nanite slurry in my body that was slowly but surely managing to self-replicate and interact with my body. It was weak at first, but it would learn over time how best to help me. The downside was that I had to eat some kind of metallic smoothie to keep them functioning. Early on, they barely did anything, now though? Quite a difference.

I pushed onwards, Doug’s eyes-and-ears out here. Not that I would engage Wolven if I could help it, that thing was above my pay grade. As much as I figured I could probably do some damage to a lot of things, given all of my practice and tests, I had absolutely no desire to interact with that thing.

The back of my hand buzzed, notifying me of more information across the ReaperNet. The biggest bits of information pertained to the other scouts nearby. We formed a loose net, trying to make sure nothing could get buy us. It was going well for a few hours, but now we ran into an issue.

It didn’t take much deliberation before collectively we came to the conclusion that we’d have to get rid of them.

Them, being the horde of a few hundred biotic wolves. A few weeks ago it would have been laughable for so few people to try to actually fight against that many. But now? We had a number of fancy toys. We didn’t lack for M.E. after the mines, although I actually hadn’t participated in the event.

Why? I was busy looking around for the other team and checking out our flanks as per Doug’s request. Which, apparently, was a good thing because the delve team had to deal with advanced biotics on their home turf.

I’d seen the pictures of those beetle things, and I gotta say, not sad at all that I missed that particular mission.

It did, however, enlighten me to some adjustments I had to make to my kit. Or build, if you went off of the lingo that was getting thrown around in the Legion now. Almost made it sound like a game, which was a risky notion to put in your subconscious.

Still, I could see some resemblances. In a game you’d kit yourself or adjust your skills, abilities, and the like with specific things in order to make yourself specialized (or generalized, really) to deal with particular threats, or focus on a few things instead.

Mine would definitely be an assassin type, at this point. Which was exactly why I wasn’t going to go after the wolf horde. I lacked aoe, or area of effect, out in the open and therefore would be better suited to using my enhanced searching capabilities.

That was about an hour ago that we’d made that division. The others were cautiously drawing them into easier kill zones, away from wide open areas and into a gulley. Regrettably, that would actually have made my particular skill set useful, but alas, hindsight is 20/20. Instead, I ranged a bit farther out to detect if Wolven would be raining on our parade, or see if there wasn’t any sign of straggler wolves for this horde.

The flying death bot was helping immensely now with culling the horde, since they’d managed to get it into a ravine. It was surprisingly deep, the slanted walls unreasonable to traverse in any meaningfully short amount of time. The openings ran from east to west. Relatively short, all told, not even a kilometer in length before it elevated somewhat on the west end and spewed out into what I figured to be a flood zone.

There was little water at the bottom of the ravine, which would only help. Wolves didn’t really pay attention to their environments as much as they should. That would slow them down as they traversed the muck, and then Matthew’s death machine, Shade, would swoop in and get anyone that was trapped there away from the horde.

I sat on a tree branch, low enough to minimize interference with my line of sight. A metallic tail, thick at the base and attached to my suit at where my tail-bone would be, curled around the limb. Small spikes extended, allowing me to effortlessly stay in my position as I examined the area.

It was a cloudier day than most, the sounds of gunfire in the distance muffled somewhat by the trees. Those sounds wouldn’t carry much farther, but it still concerned me. If I could hear it here, who knew what else could?

Reflexively, I checked the barb-thrower on my right and left arms. A stronger version was built into my tale, each and every one poisoned with a particularly nasty acidic variant that worked quite well on both organic and inorganic objects. Helpful, given the nature of a biotic, but it had limits. A small biotic like a wolf would just get the basic barbs from my arms. Anything bigger would get the harder hit, bigger dose. I hadn’t run into anything that warranted that yet, but seeing pictures of the beetle-type biotics, I knew it was a matter of time. My gas grenades were… a work in progress. Open air didn’t do me much good with them, but enclosed spaces or ravines? I could work with that.

Sound brought my attention up, distant and towards the north. It wasn’t quiet, not at all, but it was fast judging by how much louder the noise was becoming by the second. It was the sound of trees being toppled over, snapped, and a resounding and constant cacophony of snarling and whimpering.

“Already?” I swallowed hard, “That’s really bad timing.” I quickly sent a Legion-wide message, it was a simple one.

My attention was entirely on Wolven then. At first, I thought it was only occupying a smaller space, maybe five meters wide. But it quickly surged outward, poised in front of me before hundreds of eyes turned their way to me, focused intently.

I felt a shiver run down my spine at that.

And then dropped off the tree as parts of the wall of wolves seemed to contract. A moment later it sprang forward, projecting almost a to a dead spring as flailing limbs dragged it further forward, faster. It reminded me vaguely of an amoeba, reaching out with arms to trap and envelop a target.

I dodged left hard, my senses augmented slightly and my organs just barely toughened up by the nanites in my body. What should have been a disorienting spin instead was a controlled pirouette, barbs of poison launching out at high speed into the limb that missed me.

The length of wolves snarled and began to circle on me, but then staggered. Four barbs bit deep into the mass farther down, eating through crucial parts and being circulated rapidly by the certainly bizarre vein system. Already, ghastly green smoke pumped from the wounds as the chemical reaction tore into the thing, my glass barbs working magic. It was incredible what crazy chemicals could be made with some basic components.

A second lance of wolves rushed at me then, and my dodge this time was far less graceful. I flopped to the side, slamming my mechanical tail into a tree to gain distance. I fired two more such bolts before running flat out. The main mass shifted forward towards me for a few seconds, snarling and quivering with renewed ferocity. I felt my teeth clench hard at that, the sound that came from the thing hitting me in the chest like a punch.

Both tendrils where set upon at their bases, sheared through by the main mass. It obviously could tell that what I’d hit it with was spreading. Luckily, it didn’t seem to realize that it could go only so far.

The arm ceased moving instantly, falling to the ground with an eerie suddenness.

If it wanted to chase me, that’d be fine. I could outrun it.

Instead, I watched as all of its many eyes turned to the sound of gunfire. They cast one more glance at me, and I swear they smiled.

Then they turned towards the sound and lurched forward, deceptively fast for something with so much rolling mass.

Just as I worked to send the next message, The Reaper beat me to it.

Even as he spoke, though, I watched the blob that was Wolven keep going.

And going…

And going…

“Holy shit, it’s like a meat train.” I cringed, getting within range and, against my better judgement, began to unload dart after dart into it.

It shuddered, screeching at the parts where I’d done damage. I had just enough time to grin before each location I’d hit contracted and launched at me, disconnecting from the mass.

It didn’t matter if they weren’t alive, they were cannonballs of acidic mass with teeth and talons protruding.

I jumped desperately as the meter diameter cannon balls shot at me, and almost cleared it.

Except for a glancing shot that spun me and flung me off just as fast. I crashed into the ground hard hearing a crack and feeling immediately pain flare in my left arm.

My consciousness flickered, ‘If you drop here, you die.’ I reminded myself, fighting to keep the murmur of conscious thought alive. I ran off, trusting my enhanced body to realize where it was going, which really only needed to be away from the monstrous meat train behind me.

I’m not usually one for being cynical, and I try not to complain before a job is done.

But this job really blows right now.