BATTER 62

Isn’t it a strange thing that when you break it down, animals and machines smell the same? Baron Lin certainly thought so.

The moment he reflexively closed one eye, the remaining man lunged at him, knife in hand. The shelves they collided with collapsed one after another like dominoes. Leaning his back against a tilting shelf, Baron held his ground, gripping the opponent’s knife hand with raw strength. The blade, sharpened solely for killing, pressed closer as if it might pierce his throat at any second.

He tilted his head back as far as possible, the skin of his sweat-slicked neck pulling taut. He wasn’t dead yet, though only by a hair’s breadth. Baron let out a raspy, lingering laugh as he throttled the man’s neck with the wire. The wire tightened as if it were going to slice through the skin. The chilling metal cord dug into the man’s throat and the flesh of Baron’s own palm. Sweat poured. Blood began to seep. The man, choked by the wire, let out a bubbling, frothing shriek and managed to shake Baron off.

Pushed back onto the heap of wrecked shelves, Baron scrambled to his feet instantly. The fellow, having cast aside the wire wrapped around his neck, charged again. Baron rolled to the side to dodge and snatched the knife from the hand of the man who was still thrashing in the middle of a pool of blood. He caught the knife mid-air, spinning it once before it settled firmly in his palm.

Baron charged at the man without a sound. The back of the man’s blade, held at an angle, parried Baron’s strike. A gut-wrenching screech echoed as the blades scraped against each other. Baron had been the one to initiate the attack, but the man knocked his knife away with immense strength. Following the arc of the recoil, the man’s blade swung toward the underside of Baron’s raised arm. The swinging knife left a perilous slit across the chest of his jacket.

“Tsk.”

He’d paid a fair bit for these clothes; what a waste. Baron clicked his tongue and leaped backward. The man swung his knife again. Baron dodged by tilting his chin up slightly and then lunged forward, stabbing with all his might into the man’s abdomen. The blade should have sunk deep below the ribs. Instead, with a metallic clang that vibrated through the tip, the blade snapped.

In that same instant, a sharp, searing heat, like a burn, embedded itself near his collarbone. Thanks to the bone blocking the path, it didn’t go any deeper. Baron kicked the man below the knee and put some distance between them. Feeling droplets of blood trickling down his back, Baron glared at the opponent standing across from him.

He hadn’t realized it because of the clothes. A cyborg.

If part of the body is mechanical, from where to where? From parrying the knife to backing away and the man charging again, the total elapsed time was one second. In that split second, his eyes moved rapidly, searching for a spot that might still feel pain.

Since he’d been strangled, was the neck still original flesh? Regardless of what the shell looked like, the fact that he needed oxygen proved that, at the very least, the organs were human. This was doable. However, Baron’s knife was already broken. Only the handle remained in his grip.

Time for thinking was up. Baron had lost his weapon, and the man pinned him against the wall. Artificial muscles made of various twisted fibers exerted strength far beyond human limits. The dagger, fueled by momentum, sliced through the air. The man’s hand looked like a blurred smudge of paint. Baron parried the man’s hand with the hard bone of his lower palm. His heels, backing up inch by inch, caught on something. It was the leg of a fallen shelf.

“Ugh…!”

A wide swing of the blade grazed Baron’s cheekbone. Chilling flashes of silver flickered repeatedly before his eyes. Finally losing his balance, his body tumbled onto the pile of shelves. The man gave him no room to get back up. The knife, likely aimed for the center of his throat, slammed into the floor near his ear. Taking advantage of that gap to evade, a heavy knee drove into Baron’s solar plexus. A reflexive gag escaped him.

“Gah… huff…”

“Persistent little rat.”

The man pinned Baron down between his knees like a specimen being driven through with an insect pin. The man pulled out a dagger that had been stuck in a parts box. Goodbyes were skipped. He drove the knife down toward the helpless man writhing between his legs. The vivid sensation of piercing bone and meat followed. Blood dripped onto Baron’s Adam’s apple. However, the low, bubbling laughter heard now was also his.

The man’s blade had pierced Baron’s palm instead of his throat. Blood oozed steadily through the gaps of his splayed fingers. In the white of his right eye, red veins were etched deeply. Simultaneously, the adrenaline surging with his laughter erased the pain. Baron gripped the man’s knife with his impaled left hand. His right hand, which had been fumbling across the floor cluttered with various parts, was now holding a precision-grade metal pipe.

Anything in this world can kill a person. So long as you can swing it.

The pipe, as thin as a ballpoint pen refill, became a spear and pierced through the man’s ear canal. The sensation was like driving a hand through fruit, and the body pressing down on his chest went slack. The head, with the pipe sticking out of it, slumped onto Baron’s shoulder with a thud.

“Ouch, ouch, ouch.”

Emerging after shoving the limp body aside, Baron pulled the dagger out of his palm as if removing a thorn. Blood flowed freely from the deep puncture wound. It was far more bleeding than could be managed by just sucking on it, as one might do after an unlucky finger cut.

“I’ll have to say thanks to the doctor when I get back…”

He pulled out the hemostatic agent that Harrison had quietly packed for him and sprinkled it over the wound. The powder, upon contact with blood, quickly turned into a jelly-like form and filled the gap between the torn flesh. After finishing his rough first aid, Baron checked the wrist devices of the fallen attackers. Upon checking the map application, the recent travel history stood out.

In the search history and transit routes within the app, there was a record of where the two had been. Most were marked with exact building names or streets, but one record stood alone as nothing but coordinates.

Looking closer, it was a submerged coastal mountain range. They had traveled from there to Upper Hill. What reason would they have to stay in a desolate, flooded mountain range without a single building? Baron stripped the device off one of them and snapped it onto his own wrist.

A vehicle was picked up through the device’s link. Judging by the location, it seemed to be parked in the staff parking lot of the same platform.

He didn’t know what the relationship was between the hospital and these men, but they had already caused quite a stir. Having knocked over all the shelves and created a total mess, someone would surely come to check the situation soon. In any case, Baron Lin was a detective and had no intention of intimidating innocent citizens, so he had to leave the area quickly. Wiping the bloodstains from his face, Baron exited the hospital with a stride that was fast yet dignified enough not to seem suspicious.

Finding the vehicle they had arrived in wasn’t particularly difficult. Two hoverbikes, similar to the doctor’s description, stood side by side along with helmets. Baron started a bike and put on a helmet. Through the speaker by his ear, an AI’s greeting rang out cheerfully.

—Welcome aboard. Please set your destination.

At the same time, the linked device flickered. An input window for setting the destination was glowing blue. No long deliberation was needed. Baron entered the coordinates leading back to where they had come from.

✟

Who would have known that in just a few centuries, mountains would turn into islands? Well, aside from climatologists, biologists, environmental activists, various international organizations, plaintiffs suing corporations for environmental crimes, and those “difficult” citizens who lamented the need for veganism and recycling. At any rate, humanity’s selective intelligence had succeeded in causing a geological upheaval bordering on a catastrophe.

From the air, Baron looked down at the island that had once been a mountain peak. Most of the mountain range, which in the past consisted of high coastal cliffs, had sunk, becoming an archipelago where only the heads of the mountains poked out here and there. With all the vegetation withered away, the mountains—each exposing its blackened bones—were better described as reefs larger than islands.

The hoverbike sped over the small, desolate islands. Just as he was growing weary of the salty sea air, a singularly peculiar island finally came into view. Rising from between the dark, protruding rocks was a pyramid-shaped golden structure.