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[hazediver]

I think any inanimate thing you regularly care for becomes a little alive.

[hazediver]

Interlude, and an update.

[Hello] [We hope that you find enjoyment reading our first report "LILAC". We are working on preparing the second.] [It will take us some time to prepare the next report, so this [[WEDNESDAY]] will have no update.] [The next report, "CHRYSANTHEMUM" will begin this [[SUNDAY]].] [We will be following a slightly different format as to make this next report easier to view. As a reminder, all reports will be mirrored to [WATTPAD] for easy reading. Thank you for your support.]

[hazediver]

[OPERATIONAL TIME LIMIT EXCEEDED]

She was out of time.

[WARNING: SEVERE NEURAL SHOCK RISK]

It was over.

[DISENGAGING DIVE SYSTEM]

A final lurch. Her body was back - she doubled over in pain - every nerve reconnecting, every sensation too loud and too quiet all at once. The interface ports force-ejected, the medical system pumping another dose of neural stabilizer into her - to bring her back. She was herself again, and she was still sick. ADDICT fell limp - falling to its knees in the sand, entire body cold and limp - a steel ragdoll. Short range comms were down - the surviving guardsuits would have to finish the mission without her.

Headache. Seizure?

No, just sleep.

Just sleep.

Then, sunlight.

The walls of a Kannazuki hospital - a window with the view of NEST-01. Her home - all urban sprawl and neon, stacked high to the sky - a pile of plates on the verge of collapse.

Her pilot suit had been removed, replaced with a drab hospital gown. A rat's nest of cables, IVs, and wires were connected to her - oxygen mask, intravenous nutrient fluid, neurological and biological monitoring equipment. Each piece looming over her like terrified family member, praying for a miracle. She must have been out for a while this time.

She blinked - difficult, but possible. She could even get her mouth and nose to twitch - maybe the recovery wouldn't be that annoying. She tried her fingertips, her toes. Little motions, faint twitches. Good, we were making progress.

Then came the big ones. Arms, legs. neck. Nothing. She'd be here for a while, probably a day or so before she could move on her own.

Her handler would be angry, again. Why wouldn't they? She was just a number - a tool to be applied when the company deemed it necessary. A last resort. Kannazuki had another HAZED, a better HAZED - the perfect HAZED, but ASTRAY was just one person. They couldn't be everywhere at once.

In another week they'd patch her up, adjust her meds, and then send her back out again, and the whole cycle would repeat.

She envied the OZM in a way, torn to shreds and discarded. At least when they broke, they were free. When she broke, they fixed her. She was too valueable, an investement. A bad investment, but the only one they were allowed to make.

She hated Kannazuki - she hated being sick, and she hated being a HAZED. She wanted to hurt them, the people and things that made her sick. But she couldn't escape it. Instead, she lived.

Every day she lived, every near-failure of a mission, every hospital visit, mile-long repair bill, and medication adjustment took resources the company couldn't afford to waste. Time, money, research - she would take it all, take everything she could.

Mutually assured torture - her final, defiant revenge.

Sephy forced a smile, closed her eyes, and returned to sleep.

[hazediver]

[SYNAPTIC OVERLOAD DETECTED: ENGAGING EMERGENCY NEURAL SHUNT]

Darkness. Dreamless void.

Then, a shock. Lightning down the back of her spine. Every muscle in her body tensing, guitar strings tuned to tight, about to snap. Vomit. Tingling all over. Headache, a spike driven into her neck.

[ADMINISTERING SYNAPTIC STABILIZER]

Pain. Injectors pumping her body full of drugs, the ones she took every morning. Triple the dose, this was combat after all. Metallic taste.

The pulse, gone. The sensation from her fingertips, gone. But she was awake.

[EMERGENCY BOOT UNDERWAY]

The buffer was shot - even through dull senses she could feel the burn on the back of her neck. Whatever, her human body was dead to the world now anyway.

[ENGAGING FORCED DIVE]

The combined ADDICT and Sephy rose - there was nothing between them now. One of the allied guardsuits was already downed, she could make out the OZM's manipulators gutting the mech's cockpit. They were trying to protect her. Idiots.

She gunned it. Full throttle, every ounce of weight ADDICT could manage slamming into the attacking OZM, bayonet piercing armor plating and steel, a terrible crumpling sound. She unloaded the plasma cannon - the entire capacitor dumped into center mass - the OZM's core liquifying into slag. She grabbed it with ADDICT's foot, tearing the dead thing off her arm and discarding it like a forgotten doll. One down.

This was power. This was strength. This is what she was supposed to be. But she didn't have long. A second OZM raised it's weapon, a repurposed cannon, firing wildly at her. It didn't matter. She launched herself into the air, bringing ADDICT's weight down on the conglomerate of OZM and Kannazuki GS, tearing its core from its chest. Two down.

She spun to the third, a slurry of hydraulic fluid and human blood still dripping from ADDICT's claw. She launched the core, the amalgamation of metal and neural tissue striking the OZM's optical cluster. She dove at it, a starving bird of prey. She tore into the thing, bayonets ripping and tearing it apart, and it responded in kind, tearing at her synthflesh in its death throes. Violence on violence on violence. She didn't feel a thing. Three down.

The final OZM didn't stand a chance. It was a single flash of carnage, plasma ripping a hole in the thing as it fell limp to the sand.

It was done.

[hazediver]

The disconnect bolts fired.

Then, freefall. Sephy ignited the boosters - not enough to keep aloft, but enough to slow her descent. She sent out a deep scan pulse - three, no four enemy contacts and two allied GS. She spooled up the cannons, both were green, but the reactor pulse was back.

No time for that now.

Impact - ADDICT's hydraulic dampers kicking into action as six tons of synth muscle and cybernetics slammed into the desert sand. She could feel every reverberation of the impact, shaking her to her core, but she was fine. She was holding it together.

ADDICT's optical cluster could make out the enemy - OZM-subverted guardsuits, their humanoid frames stretched, the OZM units breaking their way out of the joints of each GS's armor. They were a total loss. One of the allied guardsuits, a wide-shouldered Kannazuki model armed with a quartet of grenade cannons, had already engaged, peppering the infested GS with cannon fire. The second, armed with a single rifle, was missing an arm. She opened short ranged comms. “This is ADDICT. I'm engaging the enemy. Pull back - I'll give you an opening on the transport.” “Roger!” The voice was gruff, masculine.

Sephy and ADDICT dove to the side, boosters igniting, white hot exhaust cascading across the sand. She pulled wide and to the left, letting loose shots with ADDICT's plasma cannons, superheated hydrogen sprays impacting the OZM. Too far away for any real damage, but enough to pull their attention away from her allies. Good, now all she had to do was let them come to her and-

She felt something lurch, the pulse got louder, angrier. What had once been a dull arrhythmia became red-hot pain throughout ADDICT's core, bleeding into Sephy's own senses. Her mind screamed - the data buffer overflowing, every nerve in her body igniting with pain. ADDICT's boosters cut out, and the whole thing fell into the dunes, a puppet without strings.

[hazediver]

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[hazediver]

120 seconds until drop.

Her handler wouldn't shut up.

“The guardsuit team has already engaged the enemy. You will provide cover while they retrieve the sample. Any questions?”

Sephy was half listening. She would point her gun at the enemy and pull the trigger. That was easy. That's all she ever did. All they ever trusted her to do.

“Persephone - are you paying attention?”

“I am.” She finally snapped back.

“Speak up next time. Drop in 30 seconds.” If they were mad, their voice didn't betray it.

“Roger.”

They were far out into the quarantine zone now. A retrieval team would take hours. Backup wasn't coming.

25 Seconds. She could feel the strain of the transport Harness against ADDICT's body as it dangled from the bottom of the transport. It hurt, not bad enough to bother, but enough to be noticed. They were still one.

20 Seconds. There was an irregularity from the bio-reactor, a beat out of place - it would be fine. It was normal.

10 Seconds. It would be fine. The techs knew about it and said it wouldn't be an issue. It would be fine.

5 Seconds.

It would be fine. Right?

[hazediver]

The sun hung high above the NEST.

Sephy didn't hate the sun, she didn't even dislike it, but heat was dangerous. The pilot suit could cool her down, maybe, but it had failed before, so now she couldn't trust it. Frankly she couldn't trust anything they gave her to help with her sickness. The medicine, the neural dampener, the pilot suit, the remodeled interface, it all worked most of the time, not all the time.

It was the most frustrating part, because when these things failed, she had to account for them. She wasn't just responsible for herself, she was a HAZED. She had to protect people, protect the company's assets, to complete the mission. She wanted to do that, she wanted to be good at it, but it took so much just to fucking exist.

They had already loaded her Hazediver onto the helicopter. The humanoid mech, a fusion of top-of-the-line biotech and robotics, the absolute pinnacle of anything post collapse humanity could hope to build, was, in the company's eyes an absolute failure.

When they first built it, they had to pump it full of a double dose of stabilizer just to get the bones to form - after, it took sixteen doses of the same drug cocktail to keep the thing up and running, else the synthmuscle and nervous system started to break down. One of the techs joked that it must be addicted to the stabilizing solution, and the name stuck. ADDICT.

ADDICT's central macroorganism was lithe, wraith-like, almost emaciated in appearance. Nearly 80% of its genetic code had been deviant from the design pattern, and only the core of the organism, the torso and lower hip, had been deemed viable for use. Both legs had been replaced by sharp, almost skeletal prosthetics, and each arm had been replaced with a weapons cluster, a heavy plasma cannon and a bayonet.

Sephy sat herself in the cockpit, affixing the helmet over her head and connecting each of the neural plugs. One, two, three. ADDICT, to the dive system, to her. The “sensory haze” washed over her as she lost control of her limbs, the dive system redirecting her nerve impulses to ADDICT. She spun up the bio-reactor, feeling the pulse of energy from ADDICT's core reach out into ADDICT, into her.

She was inside the dive.

[hazediver]

Sephy was tired.

She had slept 16 hours, but she was tired. She was always tired, this wasn't new, and maybe, sometimes, it wasn't annoying, but today it was. Today she had to work, she had to get up and do what the company told her to do, be their good little HAZED and kill anything they threw her at.

She got out of bed, pushing her stuffed rabbit to the side. Her stomach turned - too fast, had to slow down. Gotta remember not to go that quickly, throwing up on her bedsheets wasn't a fun way to start her day, and besides, she didn't have the cash to buy new ones again - rent was due.

The notification light on her phone blinked, probably her handler, a medication reminder, and a debt collector, if she had to guess. At least one of those were useful.

She fumbled around, looking for her medbag. The dim light filtered through the blinds didn't help any, but “bright lights” and “I just woke up” didn't mix - best case scenario she get a migraine, worst case scenario, a seizure. She found the autoinjector, pulled up the side of her nightgown, grit her teeth, and jabbed the device into her thigh.

It hurt.

It hurt.

It hurt so much, she wanted to cry.

At least it was better than being sick.

She changed - from the nightgown into her pilot suit, plugging in the neural adapters into the ring of plugs around her neck. The third-generation dive system was supposed to be safer. It was supposed to be easier. But it made her sick - she was the only HAZED that got sick.

[hazediver]

Something in her stirred, she paid it no mind.

A cycle passed, and then another, this feeling, almost like buzzing refused to leave her.

She didn't know what she needed. She had everything but…

Movement. She needed to move.

She awoke, synthetic arm deftly pulling the data cables from the back of her neck, each producing an echo as they dropped against the datacenter floor.

How long had it been since she had to move? She didn't count the days anymore, the capacity of the proxy she was using to move her prime consciousness was limited, the processing systems had been prone to overheating. She didn't use the old thing often - it was from a different time, for a different "her" she thought. One that was content to interface and interact with some semblance of individuality.

An error, left leg, servo cluster two unresponsive. She let off a mental sigh, that was the knee - she could get away with one arm, but one leg? No, she had more self respect than to crawl on the datacenter floor.

She reached out, through the massive uplink cables she had retrofitted into her back, and the skittering of her smallest drones followed. Several meters away, in a long-forgotten storeroom, a pile of proxy bodies, her bodies, laid forgotten by their creator, just like everything else here.

Her drones wasted no time, they were her, after all, tearing one of the legs from the deactivated proxies and carrying it over to her. She gripped her thigh near the joint, and with unrestricted mechanical strength, she pulled her left leg off at the hip. Cables snapped, some at designated points and others not, synthetic tendon and nerve cable popping like a rubber band stretched too far. There was a way to do this, but her repair mites would quickly weld and solder and melt things back together.

She had been designed to be pretty, once - these proxies were intended to be appealing, but she had long abandoned the upkeep necessary to keep the facade. So many panels of the proxy were long gone, she had removed them to make repairs, and decided that the exposed cabling and circuity suited her more. She was not human, nor a facsimile of one. In this way, this body was hers. She had only really taken time to save the face panels, she was fond of the soft, kind looking face they had made for her. The contrast suited her nicely.

The mites finished their work, she tested the leg - moving it back and forth. It was fine. The range of motion was the same as the old one, no changes there.

She stood, freeing the rest of her body from the pile of network and data cables, rolling her shoulders and stretching - there was still some stiffness to work off.