Never Have One Last Score
"You want us to steal what?"
Kōkishin Yuuki's eye bugged out. Her mouth was pulled into a frown, and hers wasn't the only one. Susumu leaning against the wall was sneering at the thought and the other member of the crew for this one, the fox-eyed Karen, was hiding her disgust behind a manicured hand. The old man only known as Ichiro-ki, however, was unmoved by their reactions. You don't last this long as a fence and a mastermind unless you know every angle of your business.
"Each one sells for more than one-point-five million yen. Four liters of the premium stuff can clear more than two-and-a-quarter billion."
Now a different kind of silence filled the living room. It soaked into the antique furniture and weighed heavily on the sunset sneaking sideways through the wooden blinds. Ichiro-ki waited patiently, his eyes closed, his hands folded across each other on the simple brass ball that topped the cane resting between his legs. He could sit there in his well-worn leather armchair with his eyes closed for as long as it took the young thieves to marvel over the numbers and shore up their courage with greed.
Without even thinking about it, Yuuki plucked up a mug from the coffee table in front of her and turned it upside down before placing it back. Billions of yen. Even putting aside what the target is, the amount of trouble it would bring had to be weighed against the prize. She stood up and crossed the room to collect the dried up blossoms from one of the old man's huge green plants.
Susumu ran his index finger and his thumb along the thin line of his mustache and squinted at Karen through round yellow shades. He shifted his weight a bit. The number in his head was making his feet feel restless.
"That can't be real, can it?" He was asking nobody in particular, but he said it loud enough for everyone to hear.
Karen's golden eyes flicked between everyone in the room. Her hand had already lowered and she was affecting a demure kind of grace that contrasted sharply with her real personality. "It makes sense. It's big business, with rich players."
"Rich players who know how to punish on both sides of the law," Susumu quickly replied. Everyone could tell he wasn't trying to convince anybody. It was a formality to say, like when people announce themselves upon coming home. Ichiro-ki opened his eyes. He knew he had them.
Susumu glanced at Yuuki, who was stuffing the crumpled flowers into a pocket and looking out the window. Then he looked back to the stringy-haired old-timer and pushed himself off the wall, standing to his full height. "What's the plan?"
Finally, Ichiro-ki smiled.
"There's another appointment in ten minutes, and he's new, so I want at least five people in there with him. Not too many or he'll get skittish. Only enough to keep things from getting too far out of control."
"Right, manager."
The middle-aged shift manager briefly removed his white hardhat to comb back his sweaty hair with one hand. The young employee walking with him was a good kid, but still had a little too much naivete for the work. It wasn't just that collecting the product was dangerous, but their real bosses - the clients of this facility - were even more dangerous themselves. When they bought a new account, it was even worse. Come to think of it, it's been the first new one in a while.
While his thoughts were wandering like this, the pair of workers accidentally walked right into someone striding with purpose and going the other way. "Sorry," "My apologies," they blurted out. The individual gave a quick hum of acknowledgement and a thumbs up over the shoulder, a clip board tucked under one arm. It was impossible to say who it was when they were in the full PPE like that - hardhat, safety goggles, standard company coveralls, and even a respirator for some reason - but they clearly knew what they were doing so the manager let it go. It was probably a paperwork issue or some weird demand the client made and now had to be rushed.
He hated the stress of new-account days.
"Sukuzi-san, collect the team. I need a smoke."
The younger man grunted politely and nodded once, then the two broke off from each other at the next hallway intersection.
And at the other end of the hallway, freshman highschooler Nyoro Hoge slipped into the main office, with its bookcases full of binders.
Denomi Susumu, codename Powerdown, dropped the bolt cutters right by the busted gate. With a raise of his hand, one of the glowing bulbs attached to his blue-and-black spandex swiftly dimmed, and a trail of crackling blue lightning swirled and raced up the man's arm, to his gloved fingertip, and made the leap into the shielded dome protecting the ceiling-mounted security camera. The dome cracked instantly with a loud pop. Acrid black smoke snaked out from the gap and the smell of burnt wiring made Powerdown grin behind his opaque yellow face shield.
"In position. Start your countdown."
His baritone came across the open comms that both of the women on his team were also wearing. No point in being too specific: in this world, there were plenty of ways to listen in on even encrypted signals, and anyway the three of them had been drilled in the procedures. As Powerdown approached the massive transformer for this part of the city, he confidently rolled his shoulders. Then he raised his hands like a conductor alerting his orchestra.
The subtle hum of the big machine before him unwillingly tuned to his thrall. He finished his countdown. His fingers flexed out.
A surge of light erupted in the concrete room and then flickered out, burst fluorescents raining down a shower of hot orange and yellow sparks. The transformer screamed and Powerdown dragged its murderous amount of electric power through the tortured metal of its body. White lightning thrashed, igniting ozone in the air, wreathing Powerdown in an aura of rebellious light, and filling every bulb across his arms, back, chest, and thighs with compressed, cloudless, raging storms.
Powerdown couldn't help it. The thrum of it all around him, coursing across his body and locked into place by his will, thrilled him to the core. He began laughing, and filled the channel with a throaty, gleeful, "Aw yeah, baby! That's the real deal!" He alone cut through the dark of this maintenance area. He dragged his palm towards the ruined security camera again and a bulb went out completely as an eruption of true lightning lanced out of him and smote the electronic device. Concrete lines cracked open with an exhale of dust as the previously charred wiring completely exploded away, sending a deadly overcharge to whatever storage medium was jacked onto the other end of the line.
The unlit bulb began to fill and glow again as every other one in the network slightly dimmed, evening out the charge. Outside this area, the surrounding blocks were all completely out. Every building was dark, every plugged in device was starved, and everybody around knew something was going down but with no clue what. Except for three.
As the streets started to fill with confused workers and residents, jabbering and already spreading rumors, a pretty patrol officer in sharp, clean uniform waved her white-gloved hands and drew attention with a little silver whistle. She spoke with authority, and broad chopping gestures, calming civilians up and down the street and insisting that everyone go back to what they were doing as best as they could. When a small circle of irate people approached her and began badgering her with complaints, each one found themselves disarmed by the gleam of her golden fox-like eyes.
Ochiba Karen, codename Kori, arrested them one by one with a glance. When she spoke, the words wove illusions in their imaginations, and each person began to deceive themselves on her behalf. They muddled their own emotions, second-guessed their doubts, and gave her their trust. One of the wrinkly uncles even forced upon her a genuinely abashed handshake and mentioned how good of a job she was doing. Kori had to smile. As long as none of these people were given a new reason to doubt themselves, they would as good as eat from the palm of her hand.
That thought, given the nature of today's job, almost made her giggle at the appropriateness. But unlike some people on the line, she was a professional, and kept the sound shut up silently within.
"It's kind of you to say. When I have information that I can share, rest assured that I will personally visit with every building on this block and let all of you know it as well." She gave a polite, humble half-bow, and - mollified - the group cleared away and made friendly small-talk with each other. They hadn't been in such good moods in who even knows how long.
Kori's polished customer service smile took on a predatory edge when everyone's backs were turned away. If she had a tail, it might have been swishing in satisfaction. They were all like rabbits in her teeth. Too easy.
Inside the building that Kori stood guard in front of, the last member of the team was already on the move. Kōkishin Yuuki, codename Shoggoth, slinked with surprisingly quiet footsteps through the labyrinthine halls of the facility. Absolute focus pulled her along from moment to moment. Everyone had studied the building's floor plan, but she alone had memorized it in all three dimensions, even down to the spaces in the walls that a person couldn't fit. Or, at least, most people.
Shoggoth approached a corner and grabbed it in her left hand so only her fingertips were visible to the other side. The flesh foamed and inflated out, first making four lolling eyes, then they began to collapse like soap bubbles into two bigger ones, which spawned an entourage of eyespots and eyelets around themselves. After taking in all directions, they snapped with complete synchronicity in a fraction of a second to where a fire extinguisher sat in a cubby on the wall. Shoggoth darted around the corner, towards a secure glass door complete with unpowered keypad that separated her from the laboratory section.
She did it with half her left hand, as she left the melange of eyes smeared across the wall. The mass reshaped itself again, dragging itself towards the extinguisher with protoplasmic growths, transforming mass swiftly from one tissue to another. The dark snotling brought itself to the handle of the extinguisher and began to grow minuscule tentacles to sabotage the pin, valve, and gauge, with the sole intent to turn the safety tool into a device of mischief. Then the wayward flesh firmed itself up into a muscled ball and dropped off the wall, bouncing and flinging itself back to Shoggoth's main body, rejoining just in time.
Shoggoth braced herself against the ground. Her right arm split apart bloodlessly into blindly thrashing tendrils of undifferentiated tissue, then rapidly wrestled each other into new forms, wastefully sprouting expanding pores, bubbling eyes, and temporary mouths of fish-needle teeth as it did so. Parts of her torso and even neck pinched and contorted themselves to lend more mass to the burgeoning growth, until it reached a critical point, and almost instantly solidified into a tightly compacted cone of muscle, sinew, valves, and coiling potential energy. The tip of the cone was a messy assemblage of yellowish fangs, curving out in many directions at many lengths, and suddenly the whole wad of them shot forward as the flesh cone cannoned out with a rapid accordion unfolding. The fangs smashed through the safety glass of the door all the way to the hilt of meat that held them, spider-webbing and tearing the glass out, but the force of the cnidocytian punch also rended the very frame of the door free of the wall and sent it clattering to the tiles beyond.
"New clock, short time!" Shoggoth's excited, youthful voice went out over the comms, which had also transmitted the noise of her wrecking through the barrier. The biological weapon she made of herself jellified and slopped to the floor, except for what was close enough that the young woman could use it to reform enough of her typical human anatomy to balance herself in a run. The rest of her caught up, latching on to her legs and crawling up her body under her skin to become an arm again, all done as she stomped over the folded remains of door. She couldn't hear footsteps yet, but it was inevitable that someone would come check on what she'd done. If they were smart, they'd take the damage for the hint that it was, and pretend not to have seen a thing. And if they were as dumb as she believed....
At that thought, her shoulders blossomed with boils of eyes, some of them inflating and breaking free to drift lazily in the still air of the hallway. The rest moved jerkily with a kind of dumb animal paranoia. Shoggoth grinned so hard it moved her eyepatch up a little. This was what life was all about, testing yourself against the whole wide world. And she hadn't lost yet.
Hoge in her scavenged worker disguise was speeding through her third binder when all the power went out. In the next instant, she could hear the sound of automatic gates falling into place echoing up the hallways. The messy clang of them made it obvious they were heavy enough to slow down an intruder's exit and advantage any pursuers. Behind the respirator, her breath caught.
Her nerves began to rise. She carefully closed the binder back up and slid it into the proper gap on the shelf. In the dim light filtering in, her quirk Wasuremono shook apart her edges, causing her to sink further into the gloom. She shifted her stance from a neutral, if stiff, posture into a slight crouch and further spread her feet apart. The power going out definitely wasn't in the plan. 'Is this a trap?'
The girl shifted backward so she could keep her goggled eyes on the office doorway she had left closed - but unlocked. Blindly, her hands reached back towards the desk and felt around until her fingers found the handles of typical office scissors. She began to calm down somewhat with steel at hand. It took less than a minute to unscrew the blades and put each half alone in a different hip pocket of her red coveralls.
'Step one: surveil the area to determine if mission should be aborted. Step two-A: if able, continue searching the records for yakuza leads. Step two-B: if unable, seek alternate escape from the building. Roof access, perhaps? Step three: disappear into crowds at earliest opportunity.' With a new plan to follow, Hoge's mood shifted from fear into a hard-edged excitement. Seconds later, she was looking up and down the hallway.
To one side, Hoge could hear someone muttering to themselves and forcefully flicking a wall switch up and down, as if it would pump out a jam in the lighting. They were in one of the other side rooms in this management and storage section of the building. The girl judged that they were uninvolved, going by their decidedly pointless actions. Down the other side of the hall, it was easier now to overhear a small crowd of agitated people shut behind closed doors in some cavernous space. They were beginning to yell at each other, edging towards a group panic, while an angrier voice of authority struggled to take the situation under control.
When Hoge stepped out to head that direction, she heard a horse snort and nicker. To hear such a noise in the city caused her to misstep and accidentally kick the ground, meaning her jog down the hall began with a couple one-footed hops to avoid falling over. She took a couple swift turns to get closer to all the strange sounds and found a pair of heavy steel doors holding reinforced view windows.
Hoge pressed her back up against the wall directly next to the doors. The facility's hardhat made it more difficult to angle her head properly, but she managed to get a good enough bad angle that it was possible to spy on the workers in the big concrete space on the other side.
On the opposite side of the room, those security gates had slammed down directly in front of the raised loading bay shutters that had let in the animal. Beyond the gate, a disheveled truck driver was holding a baseball cap in one hand and scratching his scalp with that hand's pinky. He had a long-suffering grimace that said he wished all the best for the people stuck inside but he was going to be observing from out here. Inside, a lean black stallion with white markings was rolling his eyes and flicking his head around, flashing his yellow teeth, and popping himself up into short hops that threatened to turn into aggressive kicks. A woman in hardhat and goggles was standing directly in front of the horse, hands out to either side of its face, and whispering something to it with a placid expression that didn't reach her fearful gaze. All around the horse were workmen in the same uniform and gear as the woman, hands out defensively, someone trying to work a length of dark rope, and the whole group of them skittering about like monkeys when the horse lifted its legs. Of course, an older and heavier man was off to one side, nearest person to the exit doors. He was speaking the loudest and the deepest, making demands and doing nothing to help the rising unease in any party.
Hoge slipped down lower and silently sidestepped along the doorway so that she couldn't be seen through the windows. The last thing she needed right then was for her improvised disguise to work. As she checked other passageways and found each exit sealed off, she could feel her own unease rising as well. She knew that a shroud of muted gray was creeping over her now. Her self-imposed infiltration mission had gone bad and it was at least ninety-three percent certain that it wasn't her fault. In some ways that was more irritating than if it had been her mistake. You can't improve on luck.
It was when Hoge had decided to turn back towards the record books that everyone heard a crash like a car plowing through a wall. Unfortunately for her, practice took over, and she was sprinting with hands knifed out in front of her before she fully registered the sound. She was joined by other clattering bootsteps clumsily moving in the lowering light - the further into the building that anyone got, the darker it grew, as light from exterior windows failed to breach the secure interior. Hoge cursed herself foully once she was the first to arrive at the wreckage of the security door with its strewn glass and stripped wires hanging like a gutted body from the wall. Facility workers, some in lab coats and some in business-wear, stumbled to a stop nearby.
"Wh-what the hell happened?," someone managed to get out.
"Was it an explosion? Is anyone hurt?"
"It wouldn't be an... attack? Would it?"
"Attack? Why would you say an attack? Who would attack us? Do they think they can steal drugs here?"
"How am I supposed to know! It just looks like an attack!"
They began fearfully bickering with each other, neither willing to lose face by immediately retreating with their coworkers watching, nor willing to take even one step further into obvious danger.
"H-hey! You! Come away from there!"
Hoge turned when she was addressed, glowering through the plastic PPE hiding her face. An office lady flinched and took a half step back away from the look.
"Did you-..." a man started in an accusing tone, then swallowed hard, and changed his sentence. "...see what happened?"
Marumaru flicked a hand with a dismissive air. "No. But I'm about to. Go call the chief and tell him someone broke in." Her voice came out strange, distorted by both her quirk and the respirator in front of her mouth. She pointed at several spots in turn, though none of them meant anything much to the people rubbernecking.
"This was no accident." She crossed with purpose towards the wall and plucked a fire extinguisher from its home. She tested its weight and shifted her two-handed grip on the heavy thing. Noticing no one moving, she dug deep and barked out, "Now!"
Herd mentality took hold and all the workers moved at once, urging each other back through the darkened hallway and disappearing from sight.
Maru shook her head and checked the inspection date on the extinguisher's tag. 'Step 2-C. Get yourself into someone else's mess and be made to clean it up. You've got bad habits now, Coru-chan.' The last inspection was within legal limits but not exactly recent. No comfort to be found here. The young ninja hero, now legally playing vigilante instead of trespasser, stepped lightly through the destroyed doorway.
'Sorry, Stranger-kun. I think I'm getting broken glass in your tread.' She failed to notice withering eyes bobbing in the dark corners of the hallway ceiling, watching her from above like baleful balloons.
"Taro playing Hero here," Shoggoth burbled into her feed. The other two immediately understood the jargon: one of the interchangeable nobodies on the scene were acting brave and things might make a hard shift soon. Each thief made a different choice.
Powerdown moved from his place in the back of a local lunch spot. Even though he was being covered by a damaged, oversized, full-length hobo coat and a rain-stained wide-brimmed hat, it was his habit to act like a lookout in jobs like this and was loitering in an alleyway to do it. He was going to have to give that up now, he decided. He'd have to take on his other role as a heavy. But there was no sense in giving up an ambush if he could still secure it.
The villain's gadget suit made the coat look lumpy and his body misshapen as he stepped out into the street. Keeping his head down and stumbling a bit as he walked caused passers-by to assume he was some homeless drunk mutant and they gave him space, as well as derision. With his mask hidden by raised collar, tilted brim, and play-acting, he was able to scope out the entire street in front of the target building.
Kori was still out front in her fake policewoman uniform. As Powerdown watched, she cutely bopped herself on the head with her knuckles and stuck out her tongue, playing up a ditzy bit for the benefit of real police that had approached her. She had to keep stalling, and as long as they could hear her, they were under her spell. This was the second time they had come by: the last time, she had 'mistakenly' redirected them to the wrong address, and only after getting one of them monologuing about something so boring Powerdown almost broke and zapped the comm in his ear.
He made sure to walk directly into the background of her sightline, then whipped his head around to address a nearby pedestrian and slur something about spare change. They predictably shuffled further away and tried to pretend he didn't exist, and it lent enough time for him to be sure that the next signal - Kori flicking the brim of her police cap and giving a shoulder-level thumbs up - was meant for him. She was confident that things didn't need to go loud. Not yet.
Powerdown kept circling the block with one eye on the place Shoggoth was running amok. If Kori didn't need help, did Shoggoth? Some middle manager or horse whisperer surely couldn't pose a threat to someone of her caliber, but then again, the girl was known to be ... variable. And there was every chance that she'd go overboard instead. Not that Powerdown's hands were bloodless, but you didn't go that direction unless you were willing to clear the board.
He reached with his mind and ran a mental finger against the humming glass up and down his body. He could do it, today. He was holding enough juice that he almost wanted everything to go wrong. If a real Hero showed up, Powerdown would have a chance to put his name up in lights.
Shoggoth jammed her feet forcefully against a ventilation grate, and instead of the metal breaking, her flesh came apart. She strained herself through the gaps in the metal with a mucosal tearing sound, spreading and reshaping on the other side to get better leverage and prevent the passage from collapsing. Her dress began to peel away, stuck in the vent, but her body was so far from normal human anatomy at this point that it didn't matter. She stretched and shifted her organs - tube of a heart, straw of intestine, coil of liver, whip of brain - so they could thread the needle and relax a bit on the opposite side. The last thing to change entirely, her face, left the eye-patch behind, revealing that underneath its black cloth was not a scar or a hole but a smooth plane of skin. A defect from birth, and one which had no correction until her powers started coming under her control late in elementary school.
A sticky tendril snaked back out of the vent and drew in the rumples of her minimal clothing. They were surprisingly durable as clothing went, and withstood the strength of her tugging them jerkily into the jammed up vent with her. Cold air blew into the plug of her roiling pudding-like body, and Shoggoth gave herself jawless fanged clenches of mouth at both ends with rings of eyes to direct them. Like an earthworm, tiny tentacle-like cilia sprouted from the trunk of her limbless body, helping her slither her way through the vent and spreading the weight as much as she could. Even still, it rumpled, popped, and echoed in her travail. She carried her clothing tucked into a pocket of skin.
Elsewhere, floating eyes squirted out their stores of hydrogen to jettison into each other, splattering into larger and larger masses, which shot out sticky strands of flesh to grip the ceiling in a dozen places. They wrapped themselves into one complete lump, which used insectile compound eyes to find a ceiling vent and slither into the ducts. The two masses, one a great worm, the other an alien beast of tendrils, drew towards the same junction to become one and redirect to the lab storage.
Marumaru heard the sound in the walls and clutched the extinguisher to herself like it was the scared child... and not her. Strangely, the clammering through vents reminded her of a much better day which now felt much longer ago than it was in reality. She thought of the haunted house attraction at the amusement park, and how skittish the students from their rival class had been. At the time she hadn't been able to really put herself into the situation and give the attraction the benefit of imagination. Now, however, her imagination was spinning out, liable to throw a cog. She knew she was in real danger. What she didn't know could actually kill her and what she didn't know she was now feeling compelled to fill in. Wasuremono twitched and buzzed, which - unbeknownst to either party - let Marumaru pass unknown by Shoggoth and into the long way deeper into the labs.
Maru crept through more glass-walled laboratories with spotless white cabinets and speckled black stone counters. She could name every device on display, and at another time might even be rambling enviously about the equipment here - sequencers, spectrometers, radiation sanitation boxes - which even the advanced facilities at Shiketsu couldn't budget for. On either side of the hall, undamaged glass doors with unlit keypads gave circumstantial evidence that whatever had knocked down the way into this wing hadn't busted into any of these rooms yet. If she found nothing in a sweep, she could check more thoroughly when forced to double back.
She resolved herself with a shaky exhale of breath and felt conviction, if not courage, rise over her and crash through her. She shifted the extinguisher in her grip from being held as protection to being held ready for use. It was jammed between her ribs and her arm, tucked under the right armpit, braced against the back of her hip. The nozzle was out and pointed ahead, and she was sweeping it along as she turned and silently weasel-stepped up the hallway. If any fires burst up, or villains burst out, they'd be facing her foam.
'Hopefully it at least blinds them before you get yourself shot, dumbass.' Maru hated to admit it, but Hoge had a point. She was ungeared for this, without costume or armor. Maybe the people she knew were way better shots than average and the typical Japanese criminal wouldn't have enough gun experience to end her immediately. But on the other hand, you didn't need a lot of skill to put down an unarmed teenager when you catch them by surprise, and this might be the organized criminals she and the rest of the mystery team had been tracking for a while. They had confirmed triggermen among them. 'It all comes down to who is sneakier than who.'
Pride lifted the tide of her resolve. That's a battle she wouldn't lose. Wasuremono rose too, and the lightless hallway cloaked Marumaru. Even her ferocity couldn't shine through this dark.
Shoggoth pressed her mouth against the exit vent and turned her teeth into thousands of pseudopods. They went into a flurry of squamous motion, loosening slats and unscrewing bolts. The fully disassembled pieces were discarded whimsically in all directions, one washer even being passed through her body and spat noisily into the duct by the still-fanged mouth on the other end. A slit formed beneath one of her eyes and a dry cyst inverted, shoving the wad of her costume back onto the ground in this new room. She shoved herself through and relaxed into her default human shape inside the clothes themselves so as to skip the tiresome procedure of getting dressed.
She rubbed her cropped platinum blonde hair to dry and fluff it as she looked all around the room.
"Yep. This is it alright." Shoggoth plucked an expensive-looking doodad off the shelf as she went by. She had to put it down again when she got to the huge sealed cylinder that the team had come so far to find.
The device was a container firmly attached to the floor and secured further by its significant weight. Tubes went into chrome pressure tanks or into the wall, along with a heavy power wire that wasn't just plugged in, it had a retainer plate screwed into the outlet. Shoggoth laughed at the sight. They might have stopped anyone from unplugging the cord, but they didn't stop anyone from unplugging the building. Two soft rubber rings sealed either side of a snapped-shut hinge lid for the container, and the thumb reader was as dead as every other security device so far. In theory, that meant the thing was stuck locked. In practice, Shoggoth forced her hands into the seals and flooded them with mass until she could undo the thing from the inside.
She opened the cold storage box and it exhaled a cloud of frozen air. It would have taken days for it to lose its cool while it was still shut. Now, it would probably only take an hour or two. It didn't matter. Shoggoth reached in, daintily lifting one foot up as she bent forward, and began plucking straw after steel straw from their little holes. Each one was carefully labelled with time of collection, time of most recent chill, the name of the sample, and the name of the lab technician that verified it. Everything was neat and tidy with plenty of record of who to blame if things should go awry. This was a business that ran entirely on reputation, as much as they liked to pretend it depended on science or on pedigree.
Shoggoth shook her head and chuckled. "Wild how much people will pay for race-horse semen."
"For what?"
Shoggoth turned the whole back half of her skull into a giant eye fed directly into her brain. Marumaru was already boggling from what she had overheard, but now she was craning her neck away and shuddering. A lot of people had that reaction to Shoggoth, the woman thought sadly. They never understood the freedom. The massive red-irised eye looked down at the equally red fire extinguisher that Marumaru was wielding.
"Watcha gonna do with that?," asked a mouth on the back of Shoggoth's shoulder that blossomed out like a tropical flower.
Maru twitched and snagged out the safety pin. In the next moment she had the lever triggered down with her thumb, but nothing came out of the hose.
Mouth after mouth opened across Shoggoth's body, some with their own sets of eyes, others with fish teeth or squiddy beaks or gnashing bug pincers. They all laughed in a rising mocking cacophony at the joke they made of the extinguisher finally coming to pass, and at the joke they were now making of Marumaru. Without actually turning or changing position at all, Shoggoth folded through herself and her front emerged where her back had been. The mouths stopped laughing when the vigilante honor student javelinned the extinguisher into Shoggoth's smug face.
Shoggoth dimpled around the thing like a fist being punched into bread dough. She kept her balance by allowing her spine to morph, which caused her neck to unnaturally fold a full 180 degrees and drip down between her shoulder blades. Marumaru lifted a foot, thinking at first of kicking the body horror show in front of her in her thin chest, but had a second thought about calfs caught in teeth and did her own 180 degree turn and transformed the movement into a run out of the room.
That's when the extinguisher ruptured.
Seventy-five thousand kilopascals of pressure exploded in the storage room. Pressurized CO₂ ripped apart the sabotaged extinguisher, launched the dinner plate sized shears of metal in different ways, and instantly evaporated into frostbite-cold gas. A sharp red piece of metal cleaved into the storage container and it began spraying liquid nitrous and chilling nox steam. Pieces of Shoggoth went flying, too, spattering across the tiles, the ceiling, the walls, and out into the hallway. Glass shattered. Cabinets dented. A very expensive gallon of premier stallion ball juice glugged worthlessly into an irretrievable pool.
Marumaru was thrown from her feet not by the pressure wave, which practically didn't exist, but by the horrible thundering noise that pounded her eardrums so mercilessly that she lost all sense of balance and, weirdly, her sense of taste. She rolled and skittered on the ground as the world doubled, spun, waltzed, and threatened to make her puke into her mask. As her eyes began to find unison again and her ears screamed in a nearly inaudible high tone, Maru wished desperately they had not.
The jawless head of Shoggoth glared daggers at her, still dimpled inward and marked by frost burns and flecked ice. Thirteen crab legs crunched their way out of the gap while she watched. The angry head ran sideways towards Marumaru, and the teenager tore the hardhat from her head and whipped it at the nightmare, sending it tumbling away again. Maru still struggled with standing and so compromised with her fear by shoving away from the wreckage with body hands and feet, slipping and fumbling the whole time.
Chunks of Shoggoth were shaping themselves into clumps of pseudopod, glistening pliable flesh, and oozing hollows of false mouth. They erupted with temporary bubbles of eyes the way lava pools let off gas, complete with splattering pop. Slicks of fluid congealed together and pierced their way back into the nearest convenient cluster, and each cluster rolled frozen chemical burns into warm interiors out of sight. As a terrified Marumaru watched, Shoggoth put herself back together again.
Her dress, of course, was ruined.
Maru used a wall to climb to her feet. Shoggoth used an eye looking through the dress tear over her boob to retrieve her own head. It lowered onto her neck with a slurp. Maru tried to talk, and it came out as a whisper even she couldn't hear. Shoggoth raised a finger and pointed it accusingly at Marumaru.
"Not cool, moptop."
Maru put up her hands in the international soccer signal for time out. Her heart leaped as Shoggoth, blinking rapidly and slack-jawed, let her finger and her shoulders both drop. Marumaru pressed her luck and pointed at her throat and closed that hand into a squeezing fist. Shoggoth cringed and sneered.
"Is this charades now?"
Maru held up two fingers. She shook her head as Shoggoth made her guesses.
"Peace. Victory. Cool. Selfie. Kawaii. Two. Ah! Two? Two words?" Maru touched the tip of her nose, or where it would be under the respirator, causing Shoggoth to giggle and clap her hands like a kid.
Maru pointed with both hands at her head from below and shook her head side to side again.
"No..." This prompted another tap of the nose from Maru, and she switched to tracing down the line of her throat with her chin raised.
"Swallow. Spit. Air? Larynx. Blood. Water, food, friends." Maru tapped urgently on the skin over her voice box. "Voice?"
Maru touched her nose and golf clapped. Shoggoth hopped on her toes in excitement. "Two words! No voice! Wait, what? Are you sick now? No? Stress? What do you mean so-so? Is it a quirk thing?" Maru confirmed it and wondered why it wasn't always this easy.
Shoggoth scoffed in her torn clothing and Maru noticed for the first time that the eye patch was now staying on because a bridge of skin was holding it in place. "Listen, after the stunt you just pulled, I don't know why I should feel bad about that. It was your quirk that set off the extinguisher right?" Shoggoth's face eye opened in surprise for a moment and she put her hand to her chin and looked back at the wreckage.
"Actually, I think I might have done that," she muttered. "Whoops."
Shoggoth lifted her nose snootily when she turned back to Maru and waved her hands like she was dismissing a small dog. "Okay, go away now. I have to see what I can manage to save and you had your little moment so tell your bosses what a good boy you are and be on your way."
Maru squinted and looked into the middle distance as she considered her options and worked through the consequences. Shoggoth misinterpreted the expression and stamped her foot. Then she grew a second foot from the same ankle and stamped them both for emphasis. "I don't have time for this!"
She lifted her arms again above her head and flung them down. As they swung floorward, they softened, deboned, and lashed out into gummy whips of muscle and wrinkled skin. Marumaru had stalled long enough to get her head on right and dodged between them by turning sideways, which had to become a cartwheel as the long lumps of flesh crashed into the ground and began sealing themselves together like breaker waves. Shoggoth turned her shoulders and upper back into an array of pseudopods to grab at Maru, but Maru sprung up and vaulted one-handed by making a perch of Shoggoth's head.
Of course, now she was trapped at a dead end with a toxic... gas....
'I was right. I'm being such a dumbass today.' Maru silently sighed and ducked a slamming tentacle. Out came the paired scissor blades, wielded like kunai and diverting more strikes with slashes and jabs. She swiveled her footing as she battled and allowed Shoggoth to snatch the improvised weapons away before retreating into the cloud lingering in the lab and becoming one with the haze.
Shoggoth swiftly followed in. The thief heard wrenched metal and a fresh hissing leak. The fog thickened. She sprouted new eyes, each one independently moving, some rising on stalks and slithering through the air or along countertops. She even grew a couple ears, but they were mostly cosmetic, since she didn't have the practice with all the tiny bones. She grew and shrank as needed to divert mass into probing pseudopods that deepened into oil-slick black.
"I'm not going to kill you," Shoggoth snarled, "So cut it out! Don't you get it? I'm giving you the chance to leave!"
A hand emerged from the snail-like trunk she was now resting on, everything below her chin having been reformed. It felt around the ground for unbroken semen straws, but felt only disgusting tacky stains, broken glass, and a piece of twisted metal debris.
"You're not just a worker, right? You know how much these are worth? I'll, uh, split you in. Turn on a fan so I can see and I'll cut you some of my share."
She created a web of herself by coiling off minuscule sections again and launching them about, then having even smaller portions of each strand do the same between each other. She kept her vitals in a hairy lump of skin that drooped on the floor. Her one-eyed face still bent over the top as if painted there. Air vibrations tingled through Shoggoth and flooded her mind with difficult-to-parse information.
'Right. Taro here can't talk for some reason.' She tried to clear the short, dry tube of her throat and realized her salivary glands were repurposed somewhere under the undusted crack of a cabinet near the floor. All of this morphing was really taking it out of her. You know what could be better than several million yen sometimes? A nap. When she got out of this she'd rent a penthouse suite with some random office worker's credit card and shack up for a week. She'd even pay off all his debt because she was feeling so generous. Sleep. That was the real prize after a botched job. Slee...
Marumaru waited for a while longer after all the tendon-snapping sounds died off. Then she pushed open a cabinet door and mentally apologized to the glassware that was sacrificed for her hiding spot. At least it wasn't old enough to have a soul yet, so she hadn't sent any of the instruments of science to hell. A taut tendril sprung when the door snapped it and Marumaru guiltily winced. But Shoggoth was still out of course.
Maru praised her respirator. She praised her safety goggles, too. It made things a little harder to see but it was a lot better than getting stung and maybe blinded by all the crap in the air. She took shallow, chilled breaths through the clogging filters and braced herself for something unthinkably disgusting. If only she could have justified getting gloves too. But it never would have worked with the look. Maru bent down to pick up the horrible lump shadow in the fog and had to waddle to carry it into the fresher air in the hall, with far less carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide polluting it. The flesh webbing twanged and broke and dragged along too like the bloodless tendrils of a human-colored jellyfish. She had to keep caring long enough to ensure the flattened face was pointed upward instead of suffocating against the tile.
"Lady," Maru muttered, "You are gross."
The news cycle didn't know what to make of it in the end. They settled on doing their best not to draw attention to the gaps in the story and focus on the sensationalism of it. A failed burglary of an thoroughbred equine reproductive center, with losses and damage adding up to billions of yen. Police on the scene experienced a communication breakdown that was sure to see effects in the municipal budget. Or was this intentional vandalism spurred on by the extreme competition in the horse racing industry? Suspects remain at large.
They couldn't talk about the police transport van disabled by a lightning strike from a cloudless sky; that would only frighten the public unproductively. They couldn't talk about why some stallion semen samples were never accounted for, and probably couldn't say the word 'semen' on air at all. And why would anyone ever talk about the neatly folded uniform stacked in front of the doors to the loading bay with the breeding dummy. Sure, it was odd, but it didn't mean anything. And according to their best cryptography consultants, neither did the message found on the appended sticky note.
"o72"
So what could they do? They threw it into the lineup and washed their hands of the whole thing. And so too did Nyoro Hoge. Again, and again, and again, until her knuckles were raw.