“Get the fuck … Mai?” stammered the other culler. “What the hell? You’re in the Culling?” Johnny stood before her utterly helpless. Arms down by his side, mouth hanging open in surprise, the sight of her robbing him of any self-preservation instinct.

“Yeah,” Mai smiled. “I got indentured into the sewers. Lost a friend. Ran away. Signed up at the last moment. You?”

“Got into debt with the Nights Below. Did some stupid stuff. Was facing a Code Ten. Joined the Culling.”

A Code 10 was serious. It was instant imprisonment with the very high probability of either a lobotomy, or execution. The knowledge that he was capable of such a thing baffled her. Johnny had been a good friend from school when they were kids. When life was so much simpler. When her parents were still alive.

But the Nights Below were seriously bad news. She’d spotted a couple of their markings on fellow Culling inductees, but considering the company they were in she hadn’t given it a second thought.

Nights Below were a One-Miler gang which had managed to literally and metaphorically claw its way up from the depths of the Hells until they had members on nearly every level of the city. They were one of the biggest gangs in the world.

Like any gang, they ran every racket under the sun, and one of their ‘best’ rackets was loan-sharking. Desperate people would go to them, borrow money they could never hope to pay back, and would be in the gang’s pockets for ever more.

And if you were deep enough in, you’d do whatever you had to.

“So I guess we’re both stuck here now then,” she sighed. It felt good to find someone she had known, even though the old Johnny would never have been capable of committing a Code 10! He’d always been a tad edgy, but beneath it she knew there had been a shy kid putting on a front.

It was why she had liked him so much from the first day they’d met in Nursery Four Hundred and Fifty Thousand. He’d offered her a sweet lichen bun which had helped.

“Damn,” he said, shrugging.

“Yeah,” she shrugged back. There wasn’t much more that could be said.

“Wanna just turn around and forget that we ever met? I’ll go back the way I came. You do the same?” He pointed over his thumb towards the kill marker, eyebrow raised, a slight smile on his face. It made her heart skip a beat. He’d always smiled to cover up his nervousness.

“Or,” Mai’s mouth dried up at what she was about to suggest, “We team up. Seems there’s a lot of that going on.”

Johnny’s face lit up with a smile and he placed both hands on hips, another gesture she knew well from their past together.

“Hell yeah! Wait a sec.” His eyes glazed and she knew that he was looking at her stats. “Buddha’s nut sack, you’re way up the league! How did you get so many culls?”

“I keep running across people who want to kill me. And who were clever enough to team up. Or thought they were. I’m getting fed-up with being outnumbered. What you say. Teammates?” She held out her hand to him to seal the deal after having reabsorbed her knife.

“Hells yes!” He took her offered hand and shook it enthusiastically. “We should have a name!”

She laughed at his enthusiasm. It felt good to have met up with him after all these years. He’d always been a happy-go-lucky lad and they’d had good times. Even after her parents had passed, he’d been able to put a smile onto her face. Am I being too trusting too fast? She reluctantly pushed the thought away as she wanted to have someone help watch her back.

“How about Battleforce One?” It was an old game they’d wasted far too many hours playing as kids. Neither had been that good at it, but it had kept them out of trouble.

“Excellent choice!”

CULLERS NUMBER – 299332 & 192038 ARE NOW BATTLEFORCE 1

DO YOU ACCEPT APPLICANTS YES/NO?

Johnny made to stab at one of the choices.

“Wait,” Mai held a hand up in warning. “Don’t select NO. We need to leave our options open. If we say no then we won’t be able to pool resources with anyone else we meet,.”

“God, any other friends I should know about?” His head tilted quizzically, eyes going blank before the sparkle returned just as suddenly.

“Only the one that I know of. Dakota. She’s a ganger. But not like the rest that were in my hangar. She actually saved my life in training. We can trust her if we come across her that is.”

“Huh. Well, colour me surprised. Okay. We’ll leave it open. Who knows, we might become the biggest team in the game.”

They both laughed at that. The idea that they might actually make it to the point where they had a proper group was a joke.

Damn it feels good to have a friend with me.

“Which way then?” Johnny asked.

“Let’s go back your way. Mine is just never-ending shit.”

“Well, so’s mine, but I only just got down here. There’s a ladder just a few metres back.”

They started walking the way he’d come and as they rounded the bend she saw his kill.

“Who were they?” she asked.

“Mother of three. Not a ganger or anything like that. She was hiding in an alcove just to the side of the ladder. Sprung at me when I dropped down next to her. Only had her knife. Wasn’t really a fight.”

Mai knelt by the pitiful figure and gently arranged her limbs so that it looked like she was sleeping. Multiple stab wounds covered her, and it looked as though her death hadn’t been quick.

“She must have been desperate. Probably too low on BIO-MASS to form a weapon worth using.”

“Yeah,” Johnny laid a hand on her shoulder. “I felt really shitty for killing her.”

“Best job I ever had,” she quoted from one of their favourite films.

“Best job I ever had,” he replied with a slight smile. “Still, it’s for the greater good,” he quoted back.

“For the greater good,” she repeated the mantra sadly.

“You know, we really shouldn’t hang around a kill zone like this,” he waved a hand around to indicate ‘this’.

“I know,” she sighed. “But I thought I’d leave this little present for anyone that wants to check her out.” She placed a mine by the body.

“Oh, you’re sneaky, going to have to keep my eye on you. How’d you figure out to do that?” his hand rested on her shoulder, squeezing ever so too tightly.

“I’m not sneaky. Not really, I just know that someone or something,” she shuddered at the memory of jiangshi, “will be along to check the body. And a kill’s a kill.” She didn’t bother explaining how she’d learned to set mines.

“Shame there’s not a way we can’t draw more people here. Ambush them. We can submerge ourselves in the river. Pop up when they come,” Mai gestured around them. It was wide-open with little cover. Perfect for catching people unawares.

“We can. I’ve got the DIVERSION skill. Had it since before, when I was running with the gang.”

“How’s that work then?” She hadn’t heard of that skill, but then again nor had she worked as closely with the gangs as he apparently had. She blinked open his SASS.

Hells, he didn’t run with the gang, he bloody well ran the gang.

She said nothing, hiding what she was doing by wiping at her helmet. She thought she might have caught the slightest tensing of his eyes right when she had opened his SASS. He might have been a friend, but it was still considered very bad form to read someone’s SASS without asking. And she got the feeling that if she asked, he wouldn’t let her.

Hopefully he didn’t catch what I did. What else hasn’t he been straight with me about? And why the hells doesn’t he have more ganger markings? She closed the SASS before he worked out what she was doing. At least she hoped she had.

“It’s quite a simple skill. I can create diversions, just like it says. Got it when it was running with the gangs. It’s a ganger sub-skill. Not something you’d have found unless you were really looking for it. Anyway, one of the diversions I can create is a fake kill marker within one hundred paces. One kill marker each time I activate it. It’s got a really slow recharge time though. Like every five minutes.”

Mai formed another mine and stuck it to the wall where the ladder came out of the ceiling above.

“Do it. Two kill markers are sure to draw sharks.” She shuddered at the thought of having to face Sharktooth but was fairly certain she’d managed to lose him. And if she hadn’t, Johnny was with her.

“Done.” Her map chimed at the same time as he spoke, and a kill marker appeared next to the first one.

“Okay,” she created a couple more mines, smaller ones this time that look as though they were loose pieces of concrete. She even went so far as to break a dried crust from the edge of the river to hide one.

“That’s mank, Mai. Clever. But mank,” chuckled Johnny as he changed his suit’s helmet so that it had a small snorkel. Not only did it have a breathing filter, she also saw a camera lens.

Why on earth didn’t I think of something like that! She’d been concentrating on the main menu items, not looking deeper into the configurations she could make. She was also surprised that Andries hadn’t passed on that knowledge. Johnny’s probably had more experience due to his gang membership.

Wading out into the muck, he lowered himself carefully into the sludge river until only a couple of finger’s worth of the snorkel could be seen.

Flipping through her own menu she found the customisation choices for her helmet. She smiled at the apt title of BOG SNORKEL. It was ten per cent BIO-MASS, but she was happy to pay the cost for such an ingenious mask.

She also liked the description.

Bog Snorkel

A helmet customisation which allows the wearer of said helmet to be completely immersed in the foul filth flooding the sewers and not only be able to breathe, but to also avoid catching any one of a million fatal diseases with each breath. It even comes with a color camera for your viewing pleasure.

Wading out into the river, she moved to Johnny’s right, a few paces upstream. Despite having the snorkel, she still had to force herself below the surface, memories of her last battle in the sewers still uncomfortably fresh in her mind.

“Can you hear me?” Johnny’s voice was tinny, but the reception was good.

“Loud and clear.”

“Think this is going to work?”

“No idea. Either it will and we’ll get through this together. Or it won’t, no one will come, and we’ll have had a shit bath for no reason.”

“Best quality shit there is Mai, this is an offshoot of an eight-miler pipe.”

Mai laughed at that. The idea that someone’s shit was of better quality just because of where they lived was – at that moment – hilarious

Damn it feels good to have someone with me, it’s like being back at home, the thought of home brought back memories of her sister, and she gritted her teeth, promising to herself once more that she’d get back to her sister.

***

“Mai, for hell’s sake. Mai!” Johnny’s voice blasted into her ears. Jolting, Mai cursed. She’d fallen asleep. Luckily, she hadn’t drifted with the flow due to the fact she was kneeling on the sewer floor.

“I’m here, stop your flapping,” she kept her tone light. Falling asleep was such a stupid thing to do. “Sorry. I’m exhausted.”

He sighed over the comm.

“No harm done. I’ve used my DIVERSION a couple of times. Had to change the location slightly. But it should look like a lot of people are being killed here.”

“Reckon people will wonder why there are so many dead in one area?”

“Don’t think so, due to the spacing of the deaths.”

“Fair point. Why did you wake me?”

“Because if you slowly move your camera to the right, you’ll see a couple of lights headed our way.”

All of the sewers in this area were dimly lit, it was far darker here than in the sewers she had been used to. It wasn’t exactly dark, but it wasn’t daylight either.

Whoever was coming either didn’t have enough nanites to use a low-light device, or preferred the light created by torches. Either way, their choice was a stupid one.

“I count at least two different beams. One considerably further in front than the other.”

“Agreed,” Johnny added a marker onto their team’s minimap. “I have the lead torch here. And the rear torch here. Reckon there’s anyone between them?” She was still amazed that they could share their minimap now. This was so much easier than if they couldn’t.

“I bloody well hope not. They’re at least twenty paces apart. That’s a lot of people.”

“I’m switching to twin SMGs. You?” he hissed as he finished speaking, clearly creating the weapons.

“Ditto. Spray and pray. Cut them down as soon as the mines go off.”

“I hope you chose the ability to remotely detonate.”

Mai closed her eyes in frustration. She hadn’t. She was so used to setting the mines for proximity detonation that she hadn’t even given remote detonation a thought.

“Don’t sweat it,” she reassured him. “They’ll want to move the body. And if they don’t do that they’ll break a beam on one of the other mines.”

“I’ll take that as a no then,” he chuckled.

Mai didn’t reply, concentrating on forming the SMG of her choice. She added a suppressor and laser sight. The suppressor would make her shots relatively quiet, making it just that little bit harder for her targets to locate her.

Most would be DISORIENTATED at the very least from the detonation of a mine. Having a suppressed weapon would add to that.

“Shit. Is that a kid?”

Mai’s stomach flipped as a child carrying a torch came around the corner. Behind her was a group of three adults, followed by a ganger at the rear.

“What the hells?” gasped Mai.

“There’s no age limit on cullers. Well, no one below the age of twelve at least.”

“How did they survive the training?”

“They had it easier?” asked Johnny not sounding very sure of himself. “What do we do?”

“Kill the adults. Leave the kid. No-way do I want to kill a kid.”

“Confirmed. Heads up.”

His warning came just in time. The child had made it through the beams of at least two mines due to Mai’s positioning of them. She’d aimed the mines at an angle so that an adult’s head would break the beam. Her reasoning was that this would guarantee a quick kill, and that any other cullers in the blast radius would suffer head wounds so severe they’d be easy pickings.

“Brace!” she warned as the first adult stepped into the kill zone. There was a flash and a roar of sound as the mine went off.

KILL!

CONTESTANT 293755 ELIMINATED

KILL!

CONTESTANT 003384 ELIMINATED

CRITICAL HIT! 65% DAMAGE

BLEED @5% PER SECOND

BLINDED!

Deciding at the last second that concealment wasn’t that important anymore, she surged to her feet to clear her weapon’s barrel from the sludge., Mai laid her laser sights onto the last adult, the closed eye glyph hanging above like the death sentence it was. As soon as they were on the stunned-looking woman’s chest she mentally squeezed the trigger. Blood and flesh puffed into the air as the bullets slammed into her.

Johnny was also firing. His bullets blasted into the woman’s neck and face. She was dead before she even had a chance to realise she was being shot.

KILL ASSIST!

CONTESTANT 100688 ELIMINATED

Mai loosed another, shorter burst at the last remaining member of the other team.

KILL!

CONTESTANT 099227 ELIMINATED

CULLER LEVEL 6!

“Mummy!” the child yelled turning to see the woman being blown apart. Mai and Johnny stopped firing as the remains of the woman tumbled into the sludge. Spinning from the sight of her dead mother falling into a river of shit, the child pointed at the two of them.

“You killed my mum!” Twin blades appeared on the girl’s arms and she shrieked in rage and charged.

“Fuck!” Mai re-absorbed her SMGs, using a quick-select to form a staff instead. If she could, she wanted to try to subdue the child. What she was going to do with her after the fight she had no idea, but the thought of killing her made her stomach roil.

She was just in time. Face screwed up in grief and rage the girl launched herself into the air.

Oh shit, Praying Mantis, Mai just had enough time to block the first attack. Praying Mantis was a vicious martial art. Every technique was geared towards killing the opponent. No step was ever taken backward, and attack was deemed to be the best defence, with their defensive tactics always being used to damage an attacker and return back to the offensive.

Praying Mantis practitioners were feared the world over. They’d dominated the Combat Shows she’d watched back in the old days.

Nanite staff met nanite blade. Mai activated her DIRTY BOXING and SEWER COMBAT.

Johnny was shouting something, but she was too busy trying to avoid the child’s attacks to pay any real attention. Her entire focus was on the child before her.

A blade thrust to her face. Deflecting it with her staff she tried to counter-attack, but another blade flicking at her forced her to change the attack to a defence.

DAMAGE! 5%

BLEED @2% PER SECOND

HEALTH 93%

The cut hurt. A minor vein must have been nicked. Attack followed attack, the onslaught non-stop.

DAMAGE! 10%

BLEED @3% PER SECOND

HEALTH 78%

Heart hammering, mouth dry, chest heaving, palms sweaty, Mai continued to try to subdue the girl. Every attack she made was pulled in order to avoid killing her. As a result every attack was too slow to penetrate the girl’s determined defence.

“Fucking hurt her! Get out of the way!” She didn’t know how long Johnny had been shouting at her.

“Die!” The girl screamed, face contorted so that she barely appeared to be human. She pressed home her attack, slipping through Mai’s defence.

DAMAGE! 25%

BLEED @10% PER SECOND

HEALTH 38%

She was down to less than thirty per cent health. Both of the girl’s blades flashed down at the same time. Mai parried, her staff momentarily stopping them.

Flicking the bottom of her staff up as she stepped to the left she dealt a blow to the child’s inside thigh. As the girl folded over, Mai followed with a strike to her back.

HIT! 7% DAMAGE

It wasn’t enough. Tears streamed down the girl’s face as she recovered from the blow far faster than Mai thought possible.

With a shriek the girl resumed the attack. Her blades sank deep.

DAMAGE! 15%

HEALTH 8%

Vision dimming Mai pulled the girl towards her, preventing her from withdrawing the blades from her body.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped as her opponent tried to break free, “but I need to get home to my sister.” Her own tears flowed as she spoke, a lump making the words hard to form.

The girl gasped as Mai drove the blade she had just formed up into the child’s chest. Wrapped in Mai’s arms, the girl looked up at her and gave a small smile. Mai sobbed, she’d killed a child, stopping her life before it even had a chance to start.

KILL!

CONTESTANT 000972 ELIMINATED

Mai let go of the girl, blood loss causing her to lose consciousness. As she fell into the noxious river, she heard Johnny calling out her name.

“Mai! Don’t you fucking die now!”