Chapter 10: Depths of Depravity
Why did they ever think it was a good idea to go uphill?
The tunnels’ uncomfortableness was amplified tenfold climbing through them, especially with their new clothes and lamplight. The new threads magnified the heat, and the sweat pouring from their skin was making crawling upward even harder work. The tunnels were busier too. High-density squid traffic seemed to travel the tunnels, spraying the claustrophobic spaces with strange smelling oils and other such ointments, so now the humidity was also getting to them.
The squids were content with treating them as obstacles rather than escapees, though, and were more concerned with their ‘jobs’, sliding around the humans as they blindly made their way up the hellscape. It was such monotonous work Beau had switched his brain off after about the first hour, so he almost smashed into a wall before he realised the tunnel didn’t continue on.
“Oh damn,” he exclaimed. So far their travels had been a steadily inclining slope. Neither man was expecting a sudden sharp increase in verticality. It was a dead-end, and their only course of action was straight up.
“Bo?” Ryo questioned him from behind, unable to see past his broad-shouldered companion.
“We gotta go up…” Beau pointed.
“How far?” the youth asked. Beau peered up and didn’t like what he saw.
“Uhhh… I can’t see too far without the light, but several storeys at least.”
Ryo’s ever glowering face grimaced even more.
“Does it go anywhere?” came the groaning reply.
“Up!” Beau sighed passive-aggressively. As if he knew any more than Ryo did. A tense moment passed between the pair as they realised their limited choices. This wasn’t the time nor the place for an argument. Beau looked around. At least the number of squids was dwindling. They could turn down one of the more crowded tunnels, but his gut told him to keep going.
“Do you want to risk it?” he asked.
Ryo nodded.
“Let’s go.”
“That’s the spirit!” Beau encouraged.
Going straight up wasn’t as bad as Ryo expected. He could stretch his legs, and it felt like they were making much better progress. Within the leathrey walls were small indents, likely made for the squids to traverse the vertical shaft. hey were just big enough for their hands and feet to grip onto, like indoor mountain climbing. They passed a few more tunnels deviating off the tall shaft, more squids and more tubes of different colours. It must have been an artery, in more ways than one.
Beau occasionally lifted the light higher, wishing he had something decent like a flashlight with a focused beam.
“I’m thinking,” Beau said out loud, wiping sweat from his brow. “We start looking to where the cameras are looking, see if we can find a way to get out of this stank-ass vent.”
Ryo nodded his head enthusiastically. He was pouring sweat down his face and neck. The clothes the squids brought them didn’t breathe much, like wearing a wetsuit in a sauna. Poor kid was probably drowning in his own sweat.
“...But we’ll take it easy for a moment, don’t want you dropping dead on me, eh?” Beau sympathised. Ryo didn’t reply, but had stopped climbing up, composing himself.
Beau climbed up a little further , searching for a camera. At the first one he came across, he grimaced before plunging both hands into the goop and pulling it from its cavity. It landed with a squelch, and a light from below blazed through the opening.
This one was as good as any.
Beau looked down into the room. There was a large ledge close by that they could use to get down. Lucky them. He tried to find a seal to pull up the plastic casting, so as not to draw too much attention. He couldn’t see anyone down below, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone there. There wasn’t a gap or seal for him to pull on, so he grabbed the alien taser and extended it out, stabbing it into the wall around the cavity.
The soldier flinched as dark blue liquid spat and bubbled out of the wound.
“Aw hell no.”
Staying quiet wasn’t worth staying inside this nightmare anymore.
“You ready Ryo?!” he called, “‘cause we gettin’ the hell outta here.” And after a confused “Huh?” from the kid still behind him, Beau used all his strength to kick down an opening.
The plastic case popped off with no trouble and clattered its way down.
It was a drop of a few feet, but with the ledge close by them it wouldn’t be too far from there to the floor.
Beau’s feet hit metal, then quietly slipped down, landing on top of one of many, many containment vats.
“Your turn.” He gestured to the kid, helping him out of the hole and onto the tube before lowering him down to the floor.
It was eerily silent. The gentle bubbles of a filter gurgled in the background, accompanied by the slight sloshing of unidentified fluid. The air was chilled, and Beau breathed deep and wiped the rest of the sweat off his face before it became frosted. Ryo started to shiver almost immediately and began muttering curses in his native tongue. Beau even recognised a few of them. It’s always the swear words you learn first.
The soldier looked around, wondering what was in the glass containment vats that needed to be kept as such a low temperature.
Curiosity got the better of him.
Beau wiped the condensation off the glass and came eye to eye with a deformed face.
He saw a creature with eyes large and misshapen, nose and ears non-existent on its head, and a jaw stretched with teeth moulded into one continuous plate. Elongated limbs were missing fingers and toes and while the pieces and features he recognised as human, this creature never was. It was a mockery of what a human was supposed to be…
Beau stepped back from the glass, processing the shock.
“What?” Ryo asked and looked inside.
Beau’s chest tightened with a primal revulsion, anger, disgust and the urge to destroy confronted his senses all at once.
The kid jerked back and turned to Beau with harrowed eyes. “What?...” he repeated, fear in his voice.
“Not human,” Beau replied sharply, his thoughts running ahead of his mouth. “Monsters.”
Row after row of vats filled with monsters.
The sharp crack of an alien taser snapped in the air as Beau pulled out his weapon and held it ready for combat. Whatever acts brought them here were never anything other than malicious.
As they walked further down the hall of horrors, the bodies in the vats began to take different shapes: large muscular builds, stretched lanky skeletons, large heads, black eyes, some even had tentacles protruding from chests and backs. Skewed visions of living things, as if they were determined to find every terrifying combination they could.
Then they came across the degrading specimens.
Slowly rotting flesh, cancerous bone growths and cavities riddled with tumours, dozens became hundreds as they carefully crossed the laboratory of malformed horrors.
Beau looked back over the entire facility. It was a storage block. They were all failed experiments, every one of them.
Beau asked himself, glaring into the eyes of the dead creature from behind the glass. What was the point of it all?
As his shadow fell over the monster’s face, the body jerked, reacting to the stimulus.
They were alive.
Beau raised his weapon and a burst of cold anger forced his hand.
The taser sword punctured the tank and a sour stench permeated the air as pink fluid gushed from the opening.
Beau heard Sugawara shout in his foreign tongue, and back away from the encroaching goo.
Beau did not look away even as he felt the fluid run over his feet. He was watching the creature twitch and thrash inside its prison. Dead eyes stared straight ahead, void of understanding, it couldn’t even stand under its own weight. Guttural cries forced their way out of the monster’s lungs, its head smashing against the glass before it sank, lifeless, to the bottom of the tank.
Beau stared it down, watching its final, wretched moments.
Sugawara shouted at him again, desperate, afraid, but Beau only moved onto the next tank and repeated the process.
There was a darkness in his eyes, a deep moral fury burning inside him. He had been through hell, watched the best and brightest suffer pointless torture, but this… This was truly a fate worse than death.
One by one he granted them mercy, aiming for their hearts so the end was swift.
“Beau, stop!” Sugawara shouted. Helpless from the side lines as he watched his companion descend into a destructive madness. The floor was swimming in amniotic fluid, the disturbing cries of the experiments ringing in Sugawara’s ears, the cold of the room freezing his lungs. “Beau stop!” he tried again, but was afraid to properly intervene.
‘That’s right, you can’t stop it…’ his father’s voice laughed at Ryo. ‘You’re too weak to do anything, even try and I’ll throw you right back down.’
Sugawara grabbed Beau’s left arm.
“Beau, stop!” he shouted as hard as he could into Beau’s ear.
It seemed to briefly snap him out of his angry daze, but the soldier’s attention was drawn to the sound of incoming footsteps. Beau shoved him off with ease, running off to engage the oncoming threat. The shove startled Sugawara, his feet slipping on the fluid covered floor and smashed his arm on the tiled floor.
He cried out in frustration.
‘You’ll stay there if you know what’s good for you.’ The haunting, cruel voice mocked him.
‘Fuck you old man,’ Sugawara spat and chased after Beau.
Beau charged after the sound, picking up speed as he rounded the corner and came face to face with a goddamn raptor. The lizard squawked and scrambled away as it saw Beau running towards it. It never stood a chance. Beau grabbed the creature by the leg and forced his foot through its knee at top speed. It snapped instantly, the lizard dropped to the floor, scratching and shrieking while it struggled to escape, but Beau wasn’t done yet.
He grabbed the lizard by the neck and slammed its face into a full vat, screaming with the full force and fury of his being,
“Are you responsible for this?!” His voice shook with outrage as he crushed the lizard’s windpipe with the might of his bare hand. The raptor could only whimper in reply.
“Beau! Stop!” Sugawara cried out, this time raising his alien sword to his companion’s face. “You will kill us!”
Beau’s fury turned on Sugawara for the briefest moment.
“Kill us?! Motherfucker you seeing this shit?! We’re already dead!” he screamed.
He felt the alien’s bones snap. Its head went limp in his grip.
He let the body fall to the ground, and his wrath faltered.
Ryo held a lance to his face, the kid’s eyes were watering with pain, but focused with courage.
Beau stood there in the aftermath of his impulses, destruction and death all around.
Behind enemy lines, trapped in a physical nightmare, with only the thinnest of hopes to get out alive, he’d lost his shit while Ryo held it together.
Pathetic. He was supposed to be the adult here, supposed to get them both out alive.
He put his lance down and looked over the alien’s body.
A light on its collar was flashing blue. Whatever backup it called for was going to be arriving soon.
“Sorry,” he muttered to Ryo. “It won’t happen again.”
He picked up his taser and dialed the thing up so lightning crackled off its surface.
Their captors wouldn’t get away with the horrors they created.
Chapter 11: Exercising Extremes
Jasmine swiped through one video after another, funny accidents, pranks gone wrong, hardcore parkour, and the aliens were mesmerised. She’d never heard either of them laugh so hard before. Rynard sounded like a lion with a bad cough and Xant’s was closer to a crocodile’s snicker, so it wasn’t something she would have instantly recognised as laughter in the first place.
“This! Now this is entertainment!” Rynard exclaimed, thumping his tail on the deck repeatedly.
“Oh I concur!” Xant agreed, closing his mouth to nod. “This is truly a masterwork of comedy!”
“You know it’s funny, back on earth slapstick is usually seen as ‘low-brow’. I didn’t think it would be your taste, Xant,” Jasmine mentioned, scrolling through her gallery looking for more videos for them to watch. Xant stood back and smiled.
“Ah, on the contrary, Jasmine. While words and cultural tics may be more the intellectual’s field, as a Zenthi, physical comedy gets the bigger laugh.”
Jasmine nodded her head as it dawned on her. Xant’s race was psychic, and while she had seen a few bits of writing here and there, most of the GC tech seemed to work on voice commands or Freq Pulses. The written word was nowhere near as prevalent as it was back on Earth. It made sense. The translator worked on thoughts, not ‘words’. Even some of the concepts she had learned about were probably only translated to the closest ‘human equivalent’.
But you didn’t really need to translate a precisely timed shot to the nuts.
She selected another video and popped it on the screen, and the two aliens did not laugh. Jasmine tilted the screen to see what was up, the video was of a man not using the leg press for its intended purpose.
“He’s doing it wrong,” Jasmine explained while chuckling. “The way he’s doing it, he’ll over-extend his legs and they may snap, he’s not working the muscles at all!”
“‘Working’ the legs?” Rynard asked, which really threw Jasmine off.
“Yeah? So the muscles don’t atrophy?” she continued, but she was met with blank stares. “Don’t you train to keep in peak physical condition?”
“No, we train to keep our instincts and skills up.” Rynard crunched his fists, flexing his chest. “Our bodies don’t degrade like our brains do.”
“We are in peak physical condition, always,” Xant noted, before adding, “...for what we were designed to do.”
“You have no idea how much I wish that applied to human bodies,” Jasmine half laughed. “We gain and lose muscle in the blink of an eye, only takes a couple of meals and doing nothing to balloon…” She looked down at her own body and tugged at the waistline of her jeans. “I mean, I’ve lost a bit of weight since being here, whether it’s due to stress, diet or a combination of both…” It was probably both. “I enjoyed working out in the Esaander training room, I should start that up here as well.”
“That sounds like a good idea,” Rynard concurred, relaxing back against a wall. “Too bad that wouldn’t work for the doc! He needs muscles he ain’t got for his suit to work.”
Xant nodded sadly in concurrence.
Galactic Council Citizenry and Military were designed for peak efficiency. Their bodies worked without stress or failure and could calculate their dietary intake down to the kilojoule. They would never experience the kind of fluctuation Jasmine was describing.
“Really? You guys can’t just use stimulants?” she suggested.
Xant and Rynard shared an uneasy look before Xant spoke up.
“It is unorthodox, but not out of the realm of possibility…”
Rynard raised an eyebrow, and Xant folded his hands behind his back in thought. Unorthodox, yes. Muscle stimulants were just for repairing damage done to bodies, not so much to transform a perfectly functioning body. Not in the GC, anyway. Outside the areas of reclamation, where pirate bands profited off the citizenry’s hard work and benefited from the military’s border security, they did all sorts of things to themselves outside the descriptions of unorthodox. Things that could be described as barbaric and deforming. “I may be able to make an exception to their use, considering the circumstances,” Xant replied, more to himself than the others.
“You know, I’m just saying since you guys can regrow bones in hours, muscles would be easy right?” Jasmine defended, feeling the tension now like second nature. “Or I could give you some really easy exercises? There isn’t a proper limiter on your body growth is there?”
Xant once again pondered.
“Technically no, there is no limiter, I could theoretically grow the muscle as you do.” Perhaps a slow growth was what he needed. He was still learning how to use his new neural tissue to its fullest after all, having to learn how to control new physical muscles as well could be a sensory overload. His brain twinged with another tangent. It was interesting what humans chose to advance with their technology and what they didn’t. The medical and biological tech they seemed to be very wary of, while throwing their full might into, as far as he could tell, creature comforts and the arts. Strange combination indeed.
“Well, I’ll go check downstairs.” Jasmine stretched and stood up from the couch. “They have a Michelin star kitchen on board, it would be weird not to have a gym squeezed in there somewhere.”
The human pocketed her phone and went below deck, peering through more of the undiscovered rooms, but her gut told her that she needed to go right to the bottom.
She was right of course, there was indeed a whole mass of equipment to be found in the ship’s storage, mostly all toppled over and covered in jet skis and quad bikes. She was going to need some help.
She dashed back up on deck.
“I’ve got good news and some bad news,” she stated, hands on her hips. “Good news is that we have the equipment! Bad news is that I’m going to need some help getting it above deck.”
Rynard chuckled and looked knowingly towards Xant. While the captain was indeed the stronger of the two, there was no way he was going to fit downstairs. Xant was going to have to re-don his suit to get the equipment up, a prospect he wasn’t entirely thrilled about.
Since gaining his new nerves, putting on the suit was becoming more and more of a chore. The wound pain lingered for what seemed like an hour when it should have been seconds at best.
“Give me a moment to prepare and I shall follow you down,” he told Jasmine, walking through to the ‘cocktail room’ where his power armour currently resided.
“Just meet me right at the very bottom! I’ll clear what I can for you!”
Xant stomped very carefully down the stairs.
There was little room for error and the last thing he wanted to do was fall a large distance down a narrow stairway. Being inside the suit was tense enough, the added stress of the claustrophobic hallway did not help in the slightest.
Jasmine waved upon his arrival.
“Here we are!” she proclaimed, standing amongst the mess of wires and mechanical pulleys.
“I can bring the weights up, but you’re going to have to handle this.” She pointed to a tracked incline plane. Xant walked over to inspect the equipment while Jasmine hefted the training weights upstairs.
The machine wasn’t heavy in his suit, but it was still awkward to carry. He opted to stick his head through the hole and have the large track run down his back, his tail ensuring there was no movement.
Jasmine squeezed past him once or twice, ducking into adjacent rooms and offering words of encouragement. Xant was taking it slow, there was no rush.
As he reached the top the doctor felt a rush of accomplishment. He’d never done any physical labour and to be able to achieve such a task had him pretty pleased with himself, until Rynard plucked the machine effortlessly off his shoulders.
“Let me help ya with that,” the captain said, holding the equipment and flipping it around with ease. “Now which way is it supposed to sit?” he asked, studying the angles.
“Flat on the ground!” Jasmine laughed, appearing with the last load of weights. She placed them neatly in a line to the side while she directed Rynard. Jasmine patted the device and explained.
“This is a treadmill, a really fancy one! It’s kinda like during the physical where the floor moved as I ran, only this one you stay in one place.” She jumped onto the treadmill and began searching for the on switch. “Hopefully its batteries aren’t dead...”
She ran her fingers over the console and Xant heard an audible ‘click’, then watched as the black glass lit up.
“Huzzah!” Jasmine exclaimed, then followed it up with a disappointed, “Hrrrrnnn...”
“Is there a problem?” Xant asked.
“Not a huge one,” she replied, finger hovering over the light display, “but the language settings are in Portuguese, so it’s going to take me a minute.”
To Xant, the human alphabet looked exactly the same as what she would normally be able to ‘read’. He even recognised several of the more common symbols.
“Is this the same as the ‘Latin’ or ‘French’?”
“French. Portuguese is even more removed from English, but similar to Spanish, which are both European, so…I can kinda muddle my way through.” She began tapping menus and opening and closing screens, blindly, yet making some progress.
Xant watched her problem-solving skills at work. While she couldn’t ‘read’ the menus, there were still intuitive and universal ‘accept’ and ‘decline’ symbols that were mostly getting her through.
“We need to find the settings, then system, then find where they’re hiding the language options-- ah ha! Inglês indeed!” As Jasmine activated the setting, Xant watched as the characters rearranged themselves and the little dots and dashes disappeared. She turned to Xant, proud of herself.
“Now then, do you want a demonstration, or just to jump right into it?” She was clearly excited to show them more human tech. Getting a small bit of her world back had breathed new life into her.
“After your display of ingenuity, I trust you can configure the machine for me,” he mused.
“...Was that sarcasm?” she narrowed her eyes, smirking.
“I don’t know, was it?” Xant sassed back, pulling himself out of his armour and moving to take up Jasmine’s former position. The human jumped on the outside and began setting the menu.
“The treadmill’s going to start moving slowly, so just one foot in front of the other, and then we can increase the speed when you’re ready.”
“And this will expand my muscles?”
“Well, it’ll strengthen your cardiovascular system, which will help build muscles in the long run.”
“Like the captain’s?” Xant looked over to the hulking Sulin, who was happily watching from his makeshift lean-to.
Jasmine shook her head. “Nah, if you want to bulk up like the captain, you’ll need to do weights.” She picked up a small barbell and began showing Xant how it contracted and expanded her bicep. “Do this enough times and eat more protein and you might be as big as the captain’s thigh!”
Rynard chuckled and picked his teeth.
“And all humans do this? What for?” he wondered.
“Well, to stay fit, to be healthy, for recreation or sport,” Jasmine listed, “there’s loads of different ways and reasons.”
Rynard snorted. “You do this for fun?”
Jasmine continued her reps. “Some do. Why, what do you do for fun?”
“Me? I like my down time, laying down and listening to the battle reports and hunt results,” Rynard answered wistfully. He missed his quiet rest quarters.
“Huh, really? That’s strangely relatable.”
“Not all concepts are completely alien,” Xant interjected. “Communication is one of the oldest forms of entertainment. If it weren’t the case, I doubt we’d be so interested in talking to each other about increased hauling capabilities.”
Jasmine rolled her eyes.
“Careful there, smart-ass, I control the speed at which you run.”
“Ah, but you are also honour bound to care for my well-being, Namegiver. Your threats are naught but jest!” Xant shot back, gaining more confidence in his ‘casual’ speech.
Jasmine smirked and slid her finger across the treadmill. The speed increased, but not so much Xant couldn’t keep up with it.
“You’re lucky you’re funny!” Jasmine put down the weight and sat on a chair by the precariously leaning Rynard. “So, hunts? What are those?”
Rynard’s smile grew wider, happy to be the expert in a topic for once.
“They’re activities that require keen senses of speed and skill. The objective is to chase down your opponent and decommission them before they’re able to do the same to you.” He slammed a fist into an open palm, laughing to himself. “Retired rangers who still need the thrill of the kill join leagues and the victories are recorded. Commentary is great when they get into the gory details, like who made it out with their tails still attached and their jaws intact.”
Jasmine gulped at the description. It sounded like a gladiatorial match.
“Do, do competitors die in these ‘Hunts’?”
“Nah, bad for business if they did,” Rynard chuckled. “Couple of hours in a medipod and they’re back on the field.”
“Phew…”Jasmine sighed. It sounded like their version of extreme sports, MMA mixed with hide and seek. “Is that all you listen to?”
“Well, there’s a lot of leagues, inner planets, corp networks, championships... Throw battle reports into the mix and I ain’t got the time to listen to much else.”
“Battle reports, like war correspondence?”
“Eh, not quite.” Rynard picked his teeth some more, and his tail joined his hands in explaining. “Mostly the ‘war’ is over, we’re not under constant threat like the Painful Dynasty anymore. There’s pockets of Rajava cells here and there, but mostly the battle reports are about pirate captures and Imperial duels.”
“Wait, Imperial duels?” the human queried. “Like, for honour?”
“Yeah, princes like the Lieutenant like to fight to ‘prove their worth’. They throw themselves into fighter ships to see who can come out on top.” Rynard shrugged. “It pays to find out who’s got the biggest boasting chops. Imperial space is a lot more chaotic than Council space, territory lines are forever shiftin’. Some battle reports get really boring if one prince takes out too many others in quick succession, the commentators get really foot-kissy, they love them some over-achievers. But then those princes get bonded, become Primarchs and taken out of the fight so the smaller skirmishes can start up again.”
“Huh, that’s pretty cool.” Jasmine nodded along. It was interesting listening to Rynard talk about something he was passionate about. He was normally happy to stand back and let Xant do all the talking, but even this small example helped her to understand more and more about the world outside the carefully curated rooms she’d been exposed to. “Xant, what do you listen to in your downtime?”
“Well, much like the captain, my interests revolve around my field of study. I prefer to listen to the reclamation reports of new/old tech, and occasionally listen to an Arvas amphitheatre performance.” Xant replied, his voice smooth and tempered through her translator while his large mouth remained open and panting, the juxtaposition was hilarious.
Rynard snorted. “Of course you’d be into that.”
“Why wouldn’t I be? Do you not listen to Chik and Tah? Or have you not watched ‘What Can Go Wrong Now?” Xant scoffed back.
“Now you see that’s different,” Rynard replied, unusually animated. “I’ve seen every ‘What Can Go Wrong Now?’ episode, especially the ones they don’t air on the civnet!” he boasted. “Had an old buddy smuggle the Vidfiles for me when I retired.”
“Really? How did you keep them from administrat-- oh, of course, you were head of security…” Xant shook his head at his own answer.
“And boy, if you haven’t seen them, they’re impactful!”
“More impactful than the elbow poppers?”
“Try eye poppers and thorax splatters! In zero gravity!” Rynard described with glee while Jasmine squirmed at the thought.
“What are you guys talking about?” she interrupted, unsure if she wanted to know the answer.
“‘What Could Go Wrong?’ It’s Arvas theater performance, much like the vids you showed us.” Xant answered.
“Yeah but, my vids were accidents, what you’re describing sounds like getting hurt on purpose…but like, waaay more gruesome.” She pulled out her phone, holding it absently for comfort.
“Is that not entertainment on Earth?” Xant asked, ears wobbling in his suit.
“Well it is, and it isn’t?” She ran her hand behind her ear, trying to find the right words “Like, guys will purposely drive a hammer into their junk but, eye popping sounds a little extreme. And permanent.”
“Why would it be extreme?” Xant’s curious voice hit Jasmine hard, the alienness creeping back in.
“...Wouldn’t it hurt?” Concern waved in her voice. The hunts, the duels, the violent entertainment, it was all starting to scare her.
Rynard shrugged. “Nah, not really,”
“Seriously? Popping out someone's eye or ripping off their jaw doesn’t hurt?!” Jasmine snapped incredulously. Rynard pulled himself off the wall and crouched down to face her.
“Doesn’t hurt at all!” he stated and without any sort of warning, Rynard grabbed a finger and ripped it off his hand. “See?”
Jasmine screamed as blue blood splattered from the wound and hit her in the face.
Xant jumped off the treadmill to run to her side as confusion and fear gripped the human.
Rynard was stunned into silence and Xant comforted Jasmine out of her shock.
“What the fuck, Rynard!” she shouted, colour drained from her complexion, desperately wiping off the blood when she pulled herself together.
“It’s alright, Jasmine…” Xant quickly put himself between her and Rynard, blocking her view of the detached limb. “The captain doesn’t have pain nerves like you, he can genuinely not feel a thing.” Xant watched as Jasmine held her hand, imagining the pain. “We can reattach the finger, it happens all the time to Rangers. I’m sure he has survived much more debilitating wounds,” he comforted her.
“Yeah,” Rynard agreed, suddenly feeling very guilty. “I’ve had almost every limb replaced at least once, my right arm more than a dozen times.” He tried putting the finger back on the hand, but knew it was pointless. “Aren’t your military units built the same?”
Jasmine shook her head.
“No, definitely not.”
She squeezed her own hand even tighter, imagining the pain of her own finger being ripped off, and looked up at Rynard’s. The bleeding had stopped, the break was clean, and Xant’s words echoed in her memory.
Created in a vat, designed for a purpose, Rynard’s body was engineered to be torn apart with minimal damage to the rest. Designed to be broken and used up. Humans were not the same, they could not treat their bodies as interchangeable parts in a machine, they did not rip each other apart for the purpose of entertainment, to be put back together over and over again.
They were not created to be expendable.
Nobody should be.