Thunder and Webs C136 [Gold]

Ripley visits the Snake Fangs to finish the job.

Chapter 136: Finishing The Job

February 28th

11:21 PM

The Snake Fangs

“Yo.”

Hoaqin knew he should have run, he should have shouted, he should have immediately contacted his uncle. But he recognized that look, that smile on Ripley’s face.

It was the same smile he had when he’d say: one step at a time, and continue operating like nothing bad had happened. Not even after his arm blew up. Not even after his mother grew ill. And not even when Selene was forced to work in degrading conditions. Or when she died. That smile worn to mask one’s inner dread and despair, and it, for a moment, drew pity that disarmed Hoaqin.

“Hey…” Hoaqin’s voice drew slowly, eyes wandering the man who was not wearing his Dreadwire suit, but instead robed in a towel. The right arm of his friend was different, not his mother’s Op’ Claw, but something… different. What peeked out of the sleeve of Ripley’s robe was black-steel that didn’t adhere to the traditional rules of Shardware operating.

The entire thing consisted of curved black ropes, shiny with a faint golden undertone, creating a seamless structure where muscle and plating were indistinguishable. Yet, it was intricate. Hoaqin’s months of Shardware Operating lent him the knowledge that he’d never make something like that even with decades under his belt.

“Rip,” he swallowed. “I didn’t come over to your place, man, ever since you… threatened me. I kept my promise, so why are you here?”

“Why?” Ripley tapped his foot on the ground. “Because… a lot happened. My mom died, for one.”

“Huh?” Hoaqin’s stomach dropped.

“I thought you should know. You two always liked picking on me together.” A soft smile lifted on Ripley’s face, almost nostalgic. “And… well, you were the one part of The Snake Fangs she could stand.”

“Rip, I’m sorry.” He hurried, “I… shit, man. My condolences.”

“Thanks.” The word came quickly from Ripley. “How’s your family doing? Nice place, this, by the way.”

“Fine, hombre,” Hoaqin said naturally, “I mean, uh, my mom’s doing fine. Always stressed, the restaurant’s been hit by all the new food guidelines, but I support her. And, uh, my sister’s about to graduate.”

“Oh, any idea where’s she going?”

“Central Academy.” Hoaqin couldn’t hide the smile on his face. “Uh, the uh, Swarm Defense.”

“Military?” Ripley never saw Anya doing that.

“Yeah, the uh, Silvereye ads got to her.” Hoaqin bit his nerves down. “Tried to tell her to be smart, to be… sensible. But you know how she is.”

“I do.” Ripley said fondly. “Glad to see she’s doing well…”

Then his smile dropped. “But I’m not here to ask for your pity, or to know how your family’s doing. I’m here because Skeleton killed my mother. Attacked me and my… what I thought was my family. And because you guys are still spreading around that Personality Matrix I jailbroke for you all.”

“Shit,” Hoaqin took a step back, but the door closed to a wave of Ripley’s fingers. “Look, it wasn’t my idea.”

“Oh, I know whose idea it was. It was Skeleton’s.” Ripley’s face was serious, a thin line on his lips. “And your uncle’s, who’s desperate to eat that pile of bones’ shit. Though, looks like you all had it good. Been loyal little servants, haven’t you?”

“Rip… he’s just an employer.” Hoaqin tried to say. “Are you and him like… beefing or something?”

“Yeah, well,” Ripley carelessly shrugged. “We got beef between us, you could say.”

“I don’t want any part of it, man.”

“Neither did I.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Exactly what you think I’m going to do.”

…

“I’m your…”

…

“You can’t even say it and you know it. You know why.” Ripley’s orange eyes burned through the faint steam of the room to penetrate Hoaqin’s consciousness. “You have two minutes to organize your affairs.”

“Rip, you’re unarmed. Skeleton’s prepared this place for this kind of thing.”

“Unarmed?” Ripley chuckled. He then stood up, and loosened his robe. Metal rivets in his skin gushed forth black liquid that crystalized and hardened over skin and muscles, steel plating forming over his body seamlessly — and it layered with cloth that flowed before holographic light submerged him, giving him an almost ethereal quality.

“Do I look unarmed?” Ripley said, before four curved tendrils of shiny black spilled from his back and crowded the sauna room around them. Heat from the steam drew into the Dianium meshed with his Neolymph that formed the Ruinsteel, producing a rich current that made the circuitry of Livewire beneath glow like veins.

Hoaqin shivered, and tried to contact his uncle, but his communication systems were down.

“I got into your system via Nanites. They blend right into the mist.” Ripley lifted his hand, which seemed to spew miasmic fog, like smoke was burning off his hand. “And you have one minute and thirty seconds left.”

“Dude, please.” Hoaqin pleaded.

“I’d suggest you organize a transfer of all your funds to your sister, and write a heartfelt message to your mother.” Ripley said.

“My guy, we didn’t know Skeleton would-”

“It’s not fair that you guys get to live in wonderland, while I’ve lost everything. My mother suffered to your criminal enterprise — its not right that you guys get to live while she’s dead. You’ve all deserved this for a long time. One minute. Ten Seconds.”

Hoaqin’s teeth chattered as his hands swiped across screens, doing exactly what Ripley told him to.

Ripley’s voice made him lift his eyes. “If it makes you feel better, I do actually need the Personality Matrix to do this to you.”

“Then, dude, don’t do it.”

“You reap what you sow, dude. Fifty seconds.” No anger inflected in Ripley’s voice, and no sympathy. Hoaqin was typing to his mother, every flick of his eye adding another letter, but he couldn’t keep his gaze off Ripley, off Dreadwire.

“Twenty-five seconds.”

“Wait-!”

“Twenty.”

“Please-!”

“Fiftee-” Knocking on the door interrupted his words, as a female voice spoke from outside the door.

“Hoaqin, I brought those drinks!” Mary said.

“Do you want to open the door? You’re free to.” Ripley said, his Arachnodyne and armor slipping back into his body as he tightened the robe over him once more.

Feeling relief at Mary’s arrival, Hoaqin didn’t hesitate. He turned around, finding the sliding door to be unlocked as he saw the pretty girl.

She held up a tray with two bottles, but noticed the tense look on Hoaqin’s face. “Is everything alr-”

“Zero seconds.” Came unforgiving voice.

Blood flashed over Mary’s face as a sharp tendril speared through the back of Hoaqin’s mouth, before pulling off his lifeless body to extract the Bronze BUG. She fell back, heart pounding and eyes wide in mortified shock, but another tendril dragged her down the wet floor and into the room as Ripley raised a finger to his lips and shushed her.

He inspected the Bronze BUG, Codex divulging its inner secrets with ease as he turned a cold glare to the terrified worker. “Mary.”

“How do you know my name?”

“Not important.” He said, crushing the Implant between his fingertips. “You know who I am. These limbs make it easy to know, but I can’t let the world figure I’m active right now. Silvereye will annoy me, otherwise. I’m going to inject you with something. You’ll go unconscious, but you should be fine.”

“I’ll be quiet!” She whispered, shaking on her knees. “I swear.”

Ripley gave her no time to react before the Arachnodyne exposed a fine needle-tip and stabbed into abdomen. She gasped from the sharp pain, but it quickly faded as the needle retracted and left only a growing nausea that spread from her stomach and all through her body.

Error: Foreign Shardware Identified

“What did you do to…” Her words failed as sleep got to her, and while she’d be unconscious, Ripley would receive her Warp Energy as tax.

“I hope you don’t die, but I can’t promise that anymore.” Ripley said as he walked out, dragging Hoaqin’s corpse by an Arachnodyne tendril wrapped around his ankle. The mist made it difficult for the others to realize what has happening initially, but Ripley made sure they would all know.

One of his tendril’s ends sharpened. Not quite like a blade, but with a sharp tip that fanned out with a pulsing sac underneath it — like a scorpion’s stinger. It impaled through Hoaqin’s chest before tossing his corpse through the air and into one pool of water. It splashed up with a wave of red, panic instantly spilling with the blood of his former friend.

“What the fuck!”

Innocent civilians, at least according to Hoaqin’s memory, tossed themselves out of the pool as chaos began to swim through this sauna club. Snake Fangs and other affiliate gang members tensed, as the corpse floated up with a barely recognizable face through the torn skull. “Fuck. Hoaqin! Who-“

Tyson didn’t get to ask his question before a sickle of black swiped his neck and a head plopped down into the water, joining Hoaqin in staining it.

“You know who.” Ripley said, orange eyes peering through the mist like scalding embers as he stabbed one pipe to spew the hot fog and drench the room in white.

“That…” A shaking voice, Adam, grew with false bravado. “That you little Donovick?”

Ripley responded, inches behind him. “Who else?”

A head tore off and was tossed into another pool as confused and terrified civilians quickly sprinted for the exit. The Arachnodyne made precise jabs across the distance into any exposed flesh of the workers or clients of this place — he didn’t have any guarantee that some of them were completely innocent.

Guilty until proven otherwise was his method today.

Currents of Energy from their Implants began to swim to him, their memories piecing apart for his choosing to make sense of this place. Shaun was underneath him in a VIP lounge, hosting a private feast by a large pool of debauchery and sin.

Gunfire opened through the mist, but Ripley didn’t move to dodge. Two tendrils flattened, their black-steel musculature thinning and stretching into an umbrella-like sheet that absorbed the bullet fire and left imprints of gold on the surface of the Ruinsteel. Charged kinetic energy from the hail of bullets sparked rivers of Gold into the surface of the make-shift shield.

That gold flowed down to the other two free tendrils like a pulsing worm’s ringlets. Their ends shifted into barrels that drew Neolymph inwards and hardened them into bullets. Two Dreadcannons shot out, piercing stomachs and lungs from the reckless grunts.

They fell back behind cover, wincing from the sharp pain that flowed in them as they put pressure on the wounds. “Fuck, is that really him? Why’s he attacking!”

“Who cares!” One of the men released the pressure, his Mutations clogging the wound as he dragged his rifle back up to continue shooting against that black mass visible in the thick mist. Only those orange eyes could be seen through the misty distance. “He’s standing still! Everyone fill him with holes until we can stuff our dicks in and-!”

He gagged as he fell over, he’d felt like a blade was stuck in his heart but no visible wound appeared, until he looked at his skin. Black miasmic veins grew over it, infecting it until it was hard and shadowy and began to flake off his body. “The hel-hell…”

He tried to speak more, but then his throat began dissolving as he spat out spittle of black that… shifted on the ground. Desperately, he glanced over at Samuel, who stopped putting pressure on the wound on his thigh but was instead choking and wheezing as he reached for his chest.

Samuel didn’t have a thigh anymore. Instead, there was an inky mass clawing up and ripping through him — but he didn’t bleed. Instead, all wounds only seemed to create more of the miasma, until the pale bone of his ribs were visible and Louis finally got to understand what was happening to his heart.

Lungs were rapidly shrinking and caridac tissue was melting.

A voice spoke above him, a voice that he’d once heard complaining and grunting about a lack of parts in an old dingy cupboard. “Mutants, you’re a little tougher to chew through. Want me to put you out of your misery, Louis?”

“Fuck you, Donovick!” Louis yanked his rifle up to the man who he’d laughed at the idea of being Dreadwire’s true identity. But as he looked at his fingers, he understood.

As he looked at nothing but cracking steel revealing bone underneath, he understood it.

Dread.

A foot stomped on his skull, exploding brain goo and skull fragments around, while Ripley turned to the other dissolving corpses. They were quickly becoming skeletons.

How fitting.

“How many left, Mid?” Ripley didn’t bother speaking in secrecy. Everyone in this part of the club was dead.

“You took out twelve of them…” Midnight glanced around. “Sixty-four left. Looking through the cameras, most of them are trying to get their weapons. Hidden places in locker rooms, the boiler room, exclusive sections. They have no clue what’s happening.”

She grew excited. “Oh, this is gonna be satisfying!”

Daylight, meanwhile, brought exciting news. “Found Shaun! And guess what? He’s got Cadavers with him!”

“Anyone we know?” Ripley turned impassively to them.

“Uh, your old boss Lucille is one of them!” Daylight nodded. “Actually, they’re wearing Snake Fang colors!”

So Skeleton was offering a service to convert your dead employees into forever mindless slaves.

He scrolled through the various cameras, feeling the Neolymph around him pulsing and squelching to enter the shallow pools. There, they drained away and into the pipes.

Of cours,e Shaun was repurposing dirty water for the steam here, and it would be his undoing as black fog began to filter into the crowded rooms. Not everyone would die, however, Ripley didn’t possess the Energy required to kill en-masse with Goliath — not yet. He also had to be careful when it came to those unconscious civilians he infected.

If he exhausted his own stores, he’d be draining them dry as well — and he wouldn’t stop until their Implants were shriveled and they were corpses. It wasn’t his choice, Preservation Matrix made that the only choice the moment he infected them. So, he turned to Midnight.

“Get me complete access.” He ordered, to which she gave feigned annoyance before disappearing, then he turned to Daylight. “Use Goliath to figure out which of these innocents are genuinely unknowing of this place’s true colors.”

“Oh, and if they aren’t?” Daylight tapped her chin.

“Then we leave Skeletons.” Ripley said, before light shimmered across his body and he faded into the mist.

———

“WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING?!” Shaun screamed over comms, and Artie, one of the newly promoted lieutenants of the Snake Fangs did their best to answer as they stripped from towels to hastily scavenged weapons and clothing. The boiler room was dense with panicking grunts, and where they stashed their criminal ware.

“I don’t know!” Artie tried to get any information, but all he could see were disconnected frames across his vision. “All we know is that… Hoaqin was the first to be attacked by them.”

“Hoaqin? Is he dead?!” Shaun yelled.

“We don’t know, we haven’t checked!” Artie picked up a rifle, shuffling from out of the stuffy boiler room and into a dance floor where alarmed guests were trying to leave. The sight of multiple armed gangsters only further added chaos to the scene after all the gunfire they’d heard.

“A-are we hostages?” One woman asked, tightening her towel.

“You will be if you don’t listen.” Artie left his voice stern as he audibly clicked a magazine into his gun, he didn’t want to have deal with any of them during what was clearly an attack. He reached into his communication channels, looking around the steamy room where lights blared and left a mirage of colors drifting across the fog.

“José! Turn off the steam!” He screamed.

He got no response, and the steam only seemed to deepen till he needed to rely on his ocular implants to make sense of the scene. It didn’t help that heavy bass drowned out all sound. “And someone shut off that music!”

One of his men left, but he still waited on José. “Dammit! Where are-”

{Arthur Thimble.} A familiar voice pierced his head. {José’s been disposed off. But tell me, are you enjoying the party?}

“Bastard.” Artie’s voice tensed with recognition. “You can’t take us all out, Donovick!”

“Sure about that?” A physical voice spoke from behind him. Artie turned around and fired, but no one was there except a wall and another Snake Fang.

“What the fuck man!” Kyle yelled.

“He was right here!” Paranoia festered in Artie’s voice.

“The fuck? I didn’t hear anything!” Kyle yelled and looked at Thea beside him, who shook her head.

“Boss!” Another voice spoke into Artie’s ear through the comms, a Moses. “He’s here!”

“Where?!”

“The showers!” Moses said before static engulfed the sound of crunch and a painful wheeze. He flicked across more channels, trying to determine the location of Ripley Donovick. Sound and steam swallowed him as he switched from eyes to a set of drones he controlled, they curved and bent around the halls of the sauna club, searching.

All he saw were skeletons. “What the fuck…”

And then he saw gunfire. Except, it was one of the Snake Fangs shooting another one of them, and her — Sarah’s — voice rose in triumph. “Take that you phony spider! Not so big now, are y-”

A black spear tore her head off. Seconds later, another three grunts all collapsed as chunks of their bodies were thrown against walls.

Then his drone stopped moving as it was pulled aside to give him sight into cold orange eyes faintly visible in the steam — now a dark gray color that faintly misted red.

“Artie.” Ripley’s voice came out somber. “Do you remember that night?”

“I…” Artie choked, fleeing from his drone’s eyes and blinking back to the dancefloor. But it wasn’t the sauna club’s.

He was back in the Toxin Club. The dozens of grunts around him all seemed equally confused. “The hell?”

Amidst the bass of the music, one sound overwhelmed all others. Glass from Shaun’s office shattered and out flew a body of something. At first glance, Artie knew it wasn’t a human body, but something… unnatural.

Black wires swept around and a petal-like face erupted to reveal rows of teeths and eyes. Before even a single movement could be made amidst the stupor, a sharp tentacle impaled and curved through several of the men with pure predation.

“Do you remember now?”

“I do.” Artie choked, diving behind cover as he avoided the jostling bodies of countless panicking clubgoers and policemen.

“Are you running?”

A head smashed into the wall ahead of him, bits of jaw and an eye splatted on the ground.

“This isn’t fucking real.” Artie cradled his head in his hands. “This is just a fucking hologram. I don’t know what tech you’re using, but…”

“This is the Meta-Mind. These are your memories.”

An inhuman snarl saw multiple sources of gunfire cutting off, splatters of blood painted the wall around him as the neon light did its best to illuminate some semblance of color back into the pale corpses around them.

Except, they did change in color. Skin, muscle and blood deepened into a black sludge that surged onto Artie. He screamed and tried to swipe it off, but it coccooned around him.

He swore he was being torn apart, but when he blinked again, he was back in the club — only now it was a small, dank room and his flesh arm was being sawed through. He felt the buzz fraying each nerve and exposing them to the stale and dirty air of the club. He screamed.

“Look, I know it hurts but you can blame Shaun for not being on time with his Stesia’ shipment.” Isabel Donovick stuffed a rag into his mouth, her voice both urgent and holding some measure of sympathy. “Have to do this now, or the limb will necrotize.”

Her right hand, later Ripley’s right hand, quickly pulled the dismembered forearm away and got to cauterizing the arteries and nerves. Tears and choked cries were muffled by the cloth in his mouth, his eyes growing sleepy as the pain wrapped a blanket around his consciousness.

But he wasn’t the only one suffering.

Isabel Donovick, who had seen the most grotesque sights imaginable, always stood standing ready to offer her best even to the worst.

Today, her foot stumbled as something spread from her right arm and pierced the bubble of her mind and sent her crashing to the ground.

And Artie, pain prickling his exposed nerves, helped her back up despite missing an arm. He even alerted Shaun and Ripley to call for help.

“You were good to her, to do that in the state you were in.” A man crouching on the ground spoke, looking as a younger version of him bolted into the room and offered water to his mother. She sat on the floor, weak and clearly in pain, but kept on promising only good things. It just took one step at a time.

“I… I knew you guys were…” Artie choked, even now it felt like he was missing an arm. Sustain was the only thing that kept his eyes open. “Fuck, man! I was nice to you! To your mother! Just let me go and kill Shaun, I don’t care anymore!”

“Maybe,” Ripley stood up, and supported Artie’s pained form. His voice brushed Artie’s ear. “I’m sorry for putting you in pain, I just needed to… see her again.”

“Shaun’s downstairs, just… leave me-”

A claw that was neither blood nor steel swept into his hair, and the five digits cracked through his skull and squished the softness of his brain.

Exiting the Meta-Mind, Ripley looked into the carnage around him on the dance floor. All those he’d deemed innocent were unconscious, feeding him energy, while those who weren’t lay in pieces that were quickly dissolving away.

“24 left.” He mouthed, looking through cameras as he saw countless remaining Snake Fangs twisting and contorting as Midnight turned their Shardware against them. Some of them were trapped in memories under his Codex Module and killing each other off in the hallucinations, while the remaining were slowly being eaten away by the steam which was now much darker in color.

With every step he took at it’s own time, a distant body collapsed without him laying a finger on them. By the time he reached the boiler room, only 8 Snake Fangs remained.

They all stood waiting beyond that door. New recruits, or old ones pumped with Shardware and Mutagen until they were considered the ‘elite’ Serpents of The Snake Fangs.

Bullets exploded through the door but Ripley didn’t stop walking. His Arachnodyne tendrils expanded into sheets to absorb the onslaught, and soon he kicked the door off its hinges as a thickly armored man was sent stumbling onto his back.

Two tendrils stabbed his abdomen, each pulling a different direction to tear him into two and each half was lazily thrown away.

Seven.

Most of the Serpents were startled by the ease in which he’d taken one of them out, but a white-haired man, an Esper, hastily controlled the steam and flattened it onto the walls to expose Ripley. The Glitch Cloak shimmered and in a blink he was by the Esper’s throat. An easophagus and pair of lungs ripped out with the slightest tug, and his glitching form twitched through the air like a phantom, in-and-out of sight, as intense bulletflashes nearly missed him and struck the boilers to only further crowd steam into the room.

Six.

Ripley used the heat to his advantage as the mutated lungs shrank into a pale white clay of sorts under Neolymph’s transmutation. It was reacting to the steam, emitting a crackling sound.

A man with four bestial limbs pounced from behind and wrestled each Arachnodyne tendril down. “Got you now, boy! Get him while he’s-”

The tendrils merely pushed and the Mutant was lifted off the ground and smashed into the ceiling where more pipes shattered and released hot steam that singed his back. The Serpent roared as skin and fur peeled off, while Ripley let his right claw-tips aim through the foggy distance against the other elites who were charging at him. Serpents? He laughed.

They were no Black Dragons.

They were no Crimson Fingers.

They were no Devils.

They were no Priests.

Stored kinetic energy pulsed into each sharp tip and the infected bodies perfectly relayed their positions despite the distance.

He locked on — and fired.

Five golden-and-black spears launched from his hand. And five heads were impaled before limp bodies collapsed.

One.

The Mutant, still pinned to the ceiling gulped as he realized he was the only one left alive. “Hol’ up! Let’s talk about this!”

“No.” Ripley yanked the mutant down to the floor and with precise flicks of black tentacles severed the muscles of his jaw. It opened wide and Ripley thrust the sizzling clay into Desmond’s mouth. “Don’t think I forgot about that time you joked about raping my mother.”

Neolymph surged in ropes to seal Desmond’s jaw shut, and with a vicious grip on the beastly man’s head, he thrust it through a boiler and exposed it to the scalding water within. Four arms flailed as Ripley kept him there, a satisfied smile growing as the movements grew more panicked. He wondered what the process of having your face boiled off was like?

Did the eyes melt? Or perhaps the skin and muscle went first?

No. It was the eyes. And soon, a loud pop signaled that they clay blew up and the body went limp. Faint red began to pour through the broken pipes.

Zero.

Except… one remained. And the Cadavers with him.

Tendrils lifted Ripley into the air as he stared at the concrete below. Underneath should be the VIP lounge where Shaun was hiding out in.

With a deadly pull from each of his limbs, Ripley’s foot cracked the concrete and burst through as chunks of rock and the corpses of Shaun’s eight elite members each rained down into a pool of water.

The water was already stained red. Corpses littered the place, mostly half-naked women as Shaun hungrily chewed on an arm and veins of red crept through his neck. An eye that was completely white registered the collapsed ceiling and the culprit behind it. “You!”

Three motionless bodies, each wearing similar armaments of green and purple shifted into position. Shaun’s jaw unhinged as he swallowed the arm — bone and all — and his form began to grow. “I should have fucking known!”

“Not running today?” Ripley remained in the air with his tendrils hoisting him, above this filthy bastard. “At least now you know you’re dying with the club.”

“HAHA!” Red streaks grew until Shaun’s skin molted. “Clever one, ain’t ya!”

“You lost Shaun.” Ripley said with a hint of glee. “The Snake Fangs are dead. Every. Single. One of them.”

“You didn’t.” Defiance grew in Shaun along with bulk as his muscles contorted with oozing red.

“Hoaqin was the first. You’re the last.”

“You… fuck…” A maniacal laugh erupted. “I’ll fucking tear your dick out and choke you with it!”

“And I’ll do the same with all three of yours!” A similar maniacal laugh blew out from Ripley’s mouth, but it was hollow.

No. He wanted to feel every bit of satisfaction and joy when he took this bastard’s life.

So with no hesitation at all, Ripley deactivated his Personality Matrix. It was like his recent update had said: negative motions would fuel his motivation.

And he felt nothing but utter hatred for Shaun.