"Scrape material. What was left?"
Reports from the cleaning crews are scattered across his desk.
"Thunder air." huffs the Zaibatsu head, looking out of the opaque window at a distant sunset, safely tucked away in his skyrise east of the Colonial City. Clouds of smoke billow from his cigar and mask his words in cold gray tones.
Cubed: Back in dayside. Chotz Lilith. The 15 names. 3 Birds. The way out through the ICEwall. Rough hacks, they take a toll.
All the heads of Target 184 have withered away - their substance transmuted into new forms. All save for the one Brantley shot...Ahh, Brantley...He did good work, it was never a question of that...it was just maybe too good. Old Recluse in the North...Now what the fuck has Lenisker become? Advanced technomantic thugs with invisible equipment? Zero-interface? No telling. Signals down across the board. Things are a fucking wreck.
Sancte Spiritus snapped through green disease.
Quick steps in the dust, silent echoes trill down the empty alley. Swift shadows. Diamond's ghost-form synchronizes and attunes to the Ikipr's technomantic, divine armor grafts. The moment, shifts, quick-blade, cut light into darkness.
"What was that rule you could never seem to follow Cubed? It went something like 'Thou shalt not kill' - right? Pity, you had such promise but...ultimately you succumbed to the inertia...degraded in Φ-time. Red."
Speak in secret language. Let snake loose, plant worm. Simple instructions. Easy enough for any street thug to follow if you manage to lay low...off radar, level-0.
It was the sword of their sacred school and clan. Ain-carved eyes with golden letters of light etched along the blade. Cubed bleeds a black liquid-light across the ground, viscous and full-spectrum absorbing. Negative particles' stain, scatter and disperse. Radiant flames crawl along Ikipr's spine, enveloping, shrouding. Infinite white hue glistening in tantric swirls radiate outwardly along unseen fractal telluric courses. Ikipr had come down from the Silver Twilight lodge and OSK to stalk the scrapyards and rectify a few loose cannons. See you either work for Control...or well...you do not work at all. He had acoustically tagged every microquanta of Ujuor's nano-assembled body during their encounter should this agent work against them in the blue-machine projections. The device Ujuor had barely managed to attach to Ikipr's exoskeletal angelic nanosilver coated flux-alloy suit had fallen off in an alley almost immediately though...EMF discharged and it's shell carelessly discarded somewhere in the vast rubble.
Sentient, hollow cling, followed by the eventual silence that beacons the crunching sound, like snapping bones.
Lost in thought for a moment - Ikipr comes to; gathers some of the black liquid mixed with Cubed's blood off the cement and into small vial he pockets before swiftly dispersing in the Eastern most direction down another dusty alleyway.
"If you want to see Giant-Spiderwomen of the Tarantula variety, you'll have to go to Old Mexico...I don't think they race them though, kinda unruly."
Diamond's sitting back in his office, peels his head off the desk. Drowsy as fuck - an understatement. Immediately realizes he has no recollection of how he got back - was he a ghost at one point? Cruel dreams taunting him mayhaps...he could very well be a mere spectre of the dreamscape for all he knew...and even more odd, but less troubling, it seems his usual paperwork has been replaced by some curious devices: little living and shimmering statuettes that appear to act as interfaces to some remote post-Athielic & Ain datapools. A few "Easter Eggs" lay neglected on one of his bookshelfs as he becomes enthralled with the toys and their shifting, non-biological sentience over the growing hours, days, weeks. Beacons to far away B-Cluster with co-ordinates in dimension unknown. Icing on the cake was the maps were the gates for access in this case. Selling that Blue chip to an intermediate buyer for Control seems to have paid off rather nicely. In his hands, he holds these codified ladders with steps into strangelands outside our time, outside our space.
The only enemy is yourself - from the future. He has a different set of plans than you.