Outrun - Chapter 226

I rubbed at my new eye, looking around my speakeasy as I moved to the back workshop. Everything was as I left it. No sign of any intruder. One less worry on my shoulders if this place was still safe.

The eye would take some getting used to. It was slightly worse off than my normal eye, but still far better than my vision had been back before the system. After the surgery, the interface had mutated the cloned flesh, applying all my Perks to it. It likewise had an amber core in the pink iris and changed to a vertical pupil. It'd been unbearably uncomfortable, though I managed to not react and keep it relatively well hidden.

The eye itself felt a little weird like it was heavier or something. Maybe since I just got it? I could feel that the clone flesh eye wasn't natural just the same as when I had chrome. It would take some getting used to.

I also stopped by Nael's on the way here and got a checkup. He fixed up my chrome, including the datajacks at my wrists. That'd been a process and half, and I was glad I had him around to help out.

Before doing anything, I dumped kerosene onto the silver Crystallization Array and started the tedious process of making Crystalized Fire. It could run in the background while I did some other stuff. I had a feeling I’d need a lot of it, especially with some ideas I had. It was time to put the molotovs to rest and make some proper fire grenades.

First things first though, I needed to repair all my gear. I started with my backpack. The ash and soot weren’t hard to wash out, and the glass shards I shook out easily enough. I covered a few holes with patches, making the whole thing look more rustic. I could probably sell it as a designer item if I had to. Just getting a new backpack wouldn’t be a bad idea, but I really didn’t want to reintegrate the Drop Chutes and Blackout into a new one.

The Drop Chutes themselves were still in good enough condition, though I went around and fixed a few minor dinks and some messed-up wiring. Blackout’s focusing lens was broken, so it also needed a replacement. Simple enough to do. I also threw the battery on the charger.

I hammered my shock gauntlet back into shape and repaired the wiring. Then I rooted through my scrap chrome for more pieces to make another one. I’d have to print some parts to make it capable of shocking again, so I just made the basic shape, set up the SITCH to make the microelectronics, and then moved on while I waited for the printer to finish.

My poncho was gone, unfortunately. I spent a while on the company’s website messing around with designs and different options before I finally ordered a new one. Of course I went with the climate control, which had been particularly nice. With fall coming up, and later winter, climate control would be extremely important for staying warm. Winters in Aythryn City were brutal.

This time I opted for a five-preset chroma. I went with the same basic urban camo, desert camo, bright white, and the two new options were a forest camo and a Blue Crusade pattern with the shield and laurel emblem on the back. The forest probably wouldn’t get much use, but I was finding myself in more and more situations where I was surrounded by greenery these days. The Crusade one was so I could wear it over my Crusade gear more comfortably.

They had so many cool options I wanted to get too, but they jumped up the price significantly. For instance, electrokinetic tassels that shocked anyone who touched me, psychedelic graffiti mode which could daze and confuse opponents, reactive ballistic weave that could stiffen to resist small arms and knives, and dozens of other options. They even had a whole line of magical effects I briefly glanced through. Most of them required being an Adept or Magus to get any use out of though. The more advanced options started at twenty-thousand Rayn. 

Seriously impressive how far Poncho Unlimited was pushing poncho technologies, though the only other feature I settled on was simple EMP shielding. It was a kind of tech that could minorly help resist a Netrunner and fully protect against EMP and microwave-type attacks. All in all, the price was way higher at four thousand Rayn compared to the fifteen hundred last time. 

I checked my First International Boswan Bank account: eighty-three thousand, three hundred and four Rayn left. I’d already used about a fifth of what I earned from the job with the Crimson Company. Granted, most of that was spent buying explosives, chemicals, and gear. And I wouldn’t have to worry about rent anymore. My poor apartment.

The first batch of Crystalized Fire was just finishing up, so I pulled out the red glowing crystal and started the next one. For now, I just left it off to the side while I continued work on other things.

Next up on the list… gear upgrades? I guess? Or the wrist guns… let's go with upgrades first. I started with the Scouters. I fully stripped the design to its basic parts and reworked the entire blueprint. I got rid of the Hibisen slot since I hardly used it, slimming the profile down even more. It was now about the size of an eye.

The camera also got a massive rework. It went from a frankly low-quality cam to a high-quality one with a night vision toggle incorporated into it. I even threw in some micro mics upgraded and adapted from my Listeners. I wanted to add some thermal imaging into it too, but the battery wouldn’t be able to hold up with all the features. I set the printer to start working on Scouter 3.0’s electronics once it finished the gauntlet parts.

My turrets also got an upgrade, though it was just the targeting software. On top of that, I added manual kill switches to every single piece of my tech just in case. I’d hate for a Netrunner to hijack something and use it against me. Especially one of my turrets.

With the upgrades done, I moved on to the wrist guns. The parts were already all printed and ready for me to work on, so I started putting it all together. The targeting arrays that were supposed to be built into them were useless at the moment since I had gone with a flesh eye this time, so I skipped them for the time being.

I ran into a few issues with my new toys, though they were relatively minor ones. Half the design was modified from Sentinel’s stuff, so it was really just my adjustments and modifications that caused hitches. There was a reason they made theirs the way it was. The biggest issue was in making the thing so slim that some of the parts came out extremely weak. 

Once I finished the first one, I loaded it up with point twenty-twos. It was a hefty piece of tech even without the sixteen shots. Just holding it while fully loaded weighed my arm down. My next variant would need some serious adjustments to the weight, but for now I could just- just get used to it, I guess. 

I went down to the Underground, back to where I set up a temporary firing range. I wasn’t gonk enough to test it out while wearing the gauntlet. I just regrew my hand and I’d rather not have it blown off again. Instead, I set up a string to fire it from safety.

I ran several tests, most of them missing the target horribly as I worked out a few kinks in the mechanisms. The biggest issue was the drum mag design. It just- it wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be. It was a cool aesthetic, but, like… aesthetic wasn’t worth my life?

It was bulky, heavy, and had serious jamming issues. I could hardly get two or three shots off before I needed to manually adjust something. And it was noisy. The components inside jiggled around quite a bit, which could complicate things considering my usual MO. I could try to fix it, but I wasn’t even sure if it was worth the effort. 

Back up in my temporary workshop, I reworked the schematic slightly after prepping another batch of Crystalized Fire. Chopping the heavy drum mag entirely, I went with a belt feed instead. It would be far lighter, easier to store, and less restrictive on my wrist.

I set the new parts to print, this time using my old printer since the SITCH was busy. While all that was going on, I sat back and started working on something entirely new on my sketchpad.

AOE and power were my biggest issues by far. No matter what situation I found myself in, I never had a good solution for taking out multiple enemies quickly. Frag grenades were simple and easy, but they were lacking in their own ways. And, on the same note, I still didn’t have anything to take out large opponents. 

The Blaze rounds were cool, but Aether Imbued bullets needed more investment before they could pull off the large, serious damage I wanted. The only reason my current set of Blaze rounds worked was thanks to their good effect on the human body. Getting hit with what was essentially thermite was a terrifying prospect.

A simple solution came to mind, one that I’d been putting off for several reasons. Cost, experimentation, weight, bulk, and in-combat deployment time were a few of the problems why I’d been shoving it off. 

Weight and bulk could be fixed with a few methods, and the in-combat deployment time wouldn’t be as big of a problem as I originally thought it would be. Recent ventures had proven that my typical style was good for buying time and repositioning. I just needed a heavy hitter to help me get by.

The simple solution was a big gun. Simple, like I said. Some kind of grenade launcher or heavy-caliber rifle would do the trick. Even both depending on how I set it.

Of course, making a system that could fire both heavy calibers and toggle for a grenade launcher would be very complicated. And honesty, probably not worth it. Carrying both would also not be great considering all the added weight. An under-barrel grenade launcher would work, but I had a different idea.

If I shifted focus onto a non-conventional weapon platform, my main issues were solved. For instance a coil gun. They were rarer than conventional firearms in the modern age, mainly thanks to being harder to produce, maintain, far worse durability in rugged locations, harder logistically, and way more expensive. Oh, and most coil guns weren’t automatic thanks to the limitations of the tech.

That isn’t to say they weren’t around though. I did some research on coilguns as I thought about the design. Most of the time they’re favored for specialty options. Snipers in particular liked them, as did corporate operators. 

As for me, a coil gun would make a good secondary weapon to have, though I’d save it only for situations where I needed AOE or my main rifle lacked damage. It’d give me that umph that my current kit lacked.

All that being said, they were complicated and the battery would be a slight issue. The design itself wouldn’t be too bad to set up though. Electromagnetic weapons were one of the main research branches of Sentinel, so I had a dozen different designs stored away in my memory. 

Sentinel worked on everything from rotary-type miniguns to assist rapid fire to micro pistol-style coil-guns. There were options for everything from non-lethal shotgun pellet designs to high-powered flechette snipers that could auto-adjust for wind and other factors that would affect the shot.

Then there were the highly experimental specialty-type electromagnetic guns. Things like the ‘Hurricane’, which absorbed incoming shots using a projected magnetic field, then shot them back in a maelstrom of pure destruction. The Hurricane required a mounted exoskeleton or to be anchored on a vehicle though. Or the ‘Singularity’ which supposedly used overcharged Gravitic rounds to create temporary localized gravity wells. Each round would be insanely expensive if it used Gravitic, though a localized gravity well would be highly destructive.

Sentinel was cooking up some terrifying weapons, and that was just on the coil gun side of things. Their rail cannons were even more horrifying. There's a reason most of the stuff was experimental though. The Hurricane had severe friendly fire issues and the Singularity exploded frequently according to the research notes.

A favorite feature of their blueprints was togglable Whisper mode, which fired at the perfect velocity to be entirely silent. Perfect for me. And they had a bunch of different variants of non-lethal modes for riot control purposes. They also had some micro-battery designs, but they needed stuff I wouldn’t be able to get my hands on. I could copy their lightweight micro-capacitors though.

I thought through the stored blueprints one more time, pulling out any key features as I started designing something to fit my purposes. It’d be a rifle, one lightweight with the capability of firing a bunch of different calibers without issue. Built-in toggles to adjust projectile velocity too. I pulled out dozens of design elements, throwing them together and working on a beast of a rifle. It’d take time to get everything set up though. It looked to be the most delicate and complex build I’d ever taken on.

Unfortunately, I didn't feel like I’d have time with the way things were going. For the time being, while I worked on the coil gun’s design, I started printing a fairly simple grenade launcher. It’d give me some better firepower for now while I worked on other things. I copied one of the blueprints I stole from the Night Market down exactly then queued it to print. 

I also set the printer to start working on grenades to be fired from it. They were based on things I saw in the Night Market. The first was a basic frag. The second was essentially a molotov. I could print the shells and stuff for now, though I’d have to prime them manually later.

With all my machines running and printing parts for the future, I left the speakeasy and called a taxi. My next location was the Crusade apartment I'd been given. It was incredibly late and I was more than ready to sleep the night away.