Fanfic #105 Unwanted Obligations by ReincarnatedSalad(Worm)

This fanfic is a semi si oc into Worm. I really like this fanfic because it has an interesting storyline that I've never really seen before, with a focus on characters that aren't really seen much in Worm fics. I also like that this fic has one of the most realistic SIs I've seen, like the way that the mc isn't going out of his way to fix everything because he's a little bit selfish. Just check out the first chapter, it's awesome.

Synopsis: After a year and a half of living with strange and unwanted visions of an alternate life and possible future on Earth Bet, Jackson was starting to believe that he might have just hallucinated after falling off a roof and losing his original memories. Then the Slaughterhouse Nine visited.

Rated: M

words: 41k

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/unwanted-obligations-si.958715/

Here's the first chapter:

I leaned against the tree, hoping for a brief respite from the pouring rain. Kyle had decided today would be a "Father, Son" bonding day, as if that would change the fact we were complete strangers. I hadn't lied when I told them I didn't remember the past 16 years of my life on Earth Bet, because I didn't. Hell, I barely even remembered my previous life well enough to know that I was fucked. I couldn't even tell how I knew so much about this universe cause it certainly wasn't where I was from. I'd grown up with some most likely loving family and reached somewhere around 30 years old before anything even remotely clear was gone. At first I thought that I had gained a future sight power, but upon remembering the fact that powers give you brain growths which my MRI's clearly didn't show and the fact that I had no desire to punch criminals or do anything but act normal, I surmised that I wasn't a parahuman.

That didn't stop me from nearly having a heart attack when I saw someone wearing a fedora on my first day back to high school. Yeah, my body was 17 years old again. Well, not my old body, this one was new, to me at least. It turned out that it was just a kid that thought they looked cool, but all of the information in my head was majorly stressing me out. I'd cracked after about two weeks and loudly yelled, "Door me," in my bathroom. I wasn't sure if it was good or bad that nothing had happened. Did Contessa know that I knew and was just waiting for me or was I a blindspot? I tried writing anonymous tips about powers on PHO, but in the three threads I'd started I found out that I wasn't the only one who believed powers were parasitic aliens, or that the Endbringers were being controlled by Eidolon. I did get banned though.

"Jackson, I'm talking to you! Get over here." My head finally turned to Kyle and noticed him beckoning me over.

"What is it?"

"You see these tracks?" He was hunched over a pile of dirt. We'd been trekking through the forest for hours without finding anything. We lived in Mass, near enough to Brockton Bay that I wanted to be sick, but still in the smallest, most out of the way piece of nowhere you could find in Mass. There were only 39 residents. I finally hunched over in the rain to look at what Kyle was pointing to.

"Deer?" I asked.

"Yeah they look fresh." I squatted awkwardly next to him, he'd spent the last year trying to build a relationship with me, but between my depression and dissociation, I couldn't handle his attention. By all rights his son had accidentally killed himself by drunkenly slipping off a roof while drinking with his friends, so I was hesitant to say that I was guilty for stealing his life, but the truth was that I wished I had just remained dead. What if I died again here and wound up in an even worse universe? Was there any real ending to my consciousness? Kyle stood up and looked around for a bit.

"Today's probably a bust, let's head back." I nodded and adjusted the shotgun on my shoulder. It was a Remington shotgun with deer slugs. Kyle had the scoped rifle, but he was hoping I would remember something if I used the gun Jackson was fond of. I kind of hated the thing, it kicked too hard. Kyle turned and gave me a look. He was probably hoping I would say something, but I didn't and we started walking back.

I usually wasn't this bad at talking to people, but Kyle and Mary, his wife, were a special case. I just couldn't bear to lie to them. They were good people and I tried to be as nice as possible, but it made me feel sick when they tried to be my parents. I'd long thought about how I could run away and really attempt to get Cauldron's attention or find Lisa somehow and give her what she would know in order to save more people, maybe even Taylor.

After about a year and a half in this God forsaken universe, my only real answer as to how I knew these things was that I was a glitch in the simulation, but that was stupid. Solipsism was a philosophy for nihilists and famous tech geniuses. If we were in a simulation, then chances were that the reality one level above us was also a simulation. If you had just proved that the simulation hypothesis was true, then that made it even more likely you were still in a simulation. It would keep on going for an infinite number of higher level realities cause each time you got up a level, it was even more absurd to think you were finally at the top level of reality. Then of course, you were basically implying that the real universe has infinite information and it was like the multiverse theory all over again. Except, according to most quantum physicists, the multiverse interpretation was the correct one, or at least it was in my old universe.

I suddenly heard a sharp crack and a yell of pain. Kyle fell to his knees in front of me. Where were we? I quickly scanned my surroundings and realized that we were already almost back to town. We lived walking distance from hunting grounds. I ran over to Kyle, only to see him clutching at his throat where blood was seeping out between his fingers. There were bloody marks all under his chin, like some shrapnel grenade had exploded dangling from his neck. He always wore a crystal necklace that I thought was tacky, but I never told him. He was choking and spluttering on the ground, but rather than move to help him, I just stared.

I used to be a man of action. That sounds heroic, but it wasn't, all that meant was that I usually would react to intense situations by taking calm actions instead of freaking out. I used to be the type of person to just act when I knew what I could do, but here, in Bet I felt like I was watching a movie. I'd even met a real superhero. I'd shaken Missy Biron's hand, otherwise known as Vista. Mary had taken me to see one of the Ward's public events on the Brockton Boardwalk last summer. I felt like I was watching the whole event take place from above and as much as I wished this was different, it wasn't. While Kyle stood there bleeding out I watched him try to say something to me, but I couldn't read lips and I felt like I barely even knew who this man was. You'd have thought that seeing death for the first time would be shocking, but I remembered playing virtual reality games and this just felt like some hyper-realistic full dive game.

This was totally cliche, there was no way this was real. Moreover, there was no way that Shatterbird was here in little Woodrock, not even an hour away from Brockton Bay. The Simurgh hadn't even attacked Canberra. You'd have thought that people would be too afraid to predict the Endbringers, but you'd have been wrong. It was banned on PHO, but there were at least 3 prediction websites that I'd seen, all claiming around 70% accuracy to one poster or another. Kyle was lying still now and I still hadn't moved. I heard some distant sounds in town, but it…

No, nothing was wrong. This was probably a dream. I looked at my watch, "12:39." Maybe it wasn't a dream, but this couldn't be real. What was I supposed to do? I had left my phone at home by accident, but it wouldn't have even worked if Shatterbird had sung. I swallowed thickly and started walking back to town. I heard a few loud sounds and gunshots on the way. It only took me about 10 minutes to break the treeline that led to the so-called center of town. There was a post office and a cafe that awful garage bands would occasionally play at, but aside from that, this was just a street with two local businesses.

It was in absolute chaos. I didn't know how they didn't see me, but there were three obvious capes standing in the middle of the road surrounded by a pile of bodies. This was clearly fake right? I looked to the other side of the street to see a school bus, one of the little ones that would come to pick up students. Thankfully it wasn't a school day, it was just the driver who lived about a mile away from us. He was quartered, but I could see his lifeless eyes pointed in my direction. That was him, this wasn't fake. The actual S9 had visited my tiny town right under the ENE PRT's nose. I didn't remember this, why didn't I remember this? The capes still weren't looking at me, one was clearly Crawler, and the other two I didn't recognize, seemingly because they didn't really wear easily identifiable clothes and were facing away from me. I looked down at my shotgun.

I didn't want to experience what was going to happen in the next few minutes. I shrugged it off my shoulder and held it in my hands. I was never suicidal, but this would just be common sense right? I looked up at the capes again and noticed the one that I couldn't identify had turned to look at a building behind Crawler, who was lazily pulling apart some of the bodies in the road for fun. That was Jack Slash wasn't it? Supposedly, he could only be killed by a normal person. I internally shrugged and shouldered the shotgun just as he was turning my way.

Now, I considered myself a relatively decent shot, but taking a potshot with a shotgun slug at a few hundred feet away wasn't something that I could normally do. In fact, skill had nothing to do with it, it was pure luck.

In the next few seconds a few things happened, the first was that Jack Slash's head blew back with a spurt of blood from his eye and the rest of him collapsed like a puppet without strings, the second was the obvious shock that it actually worked, and the third was 5 villains suddenly turning their entire attention towards me. I slowly lowered the shotgun down as everyone took a few seconds to process what had just happened. Oh yeah, there were 3 other villains that had been behind that bus, The Siberian, Mannequin, and Bonesaw. That was going to be a problem.

At first no one moved, still in complete shock that Jack was down, and probably expecting him to get up with a laugh or something, but as the seconds dragged on, it was becoming more clear that that wouldn't happen. The first to move was little Bonesaw who rushed over to the downed Jack as fast as she could, which was quite fast. The rest seemed to study the scene, looking between me standing there awkwardly and Bonesaw.

It started quiet, but quickly escalated to a wailing scream, then Bonesaw turned her head. I could barely see her turn her head, but this time, I desperately wished my legs would move. It wasn't to be, as less than a second later I found myself on the ground with no memory of how I had gotten there aside from the fact that I was looking up at The Siberian and I was screaming. Because she had torn my hand off. The pain was like a lightning rod, drawing me back down to reality. This wasn't fake, this wasn't a simulation, or if it was, it was a cruel one. I wasn't just going to die, Bonesaw was going to do something to me and she was going to make Harlan Ellison look like a preschooler. I should have killed myself, this wasn't worth it.

I black out again due to the pain, I couldn't think. I was begging God, Scion, Contessa, Thinker, Warrior, anyone or anything to just kill me. I didn't know how long it had been, 5 seconds, 5 minutes, 5 hours? It didn't matter, Bonesaw wanted me to hurt and I did. So much that I literally couldn't remember it, but I'd guess that it didn't last long, because at some point I knew what to do.

First thing that popped into my head really helped me out. I still had control of my hand because the little shit had probably wanted to see me squirm, so I naturally subverted one of her spider helpers. Well, that's what I'm guessing I did since I was still in too much pain to remember any of it. I remembered the pain suddenly relenting, not just relenting, but completely stopping since I had just severed a good chunk of my spinal cord. The next bit that slotted into place told me that I needed to start using the spiderbot to synthesize some antiviral agent since my blood was now coursing with no less than 15 tinker viruses. The third and final bit that popped into place told me that I had about 23 seconds before all of my organs failed, particularly my brain, so my hands found the surgical tool that Bonesaw had dropped and promptly ripped out her femoral artery and connected it to mine. At some point I had also reattached my hand, which was useful.

Now that I had that set up it was time to start cutting again, only when my hand dove at her stomach, the scalpel skidded off. I looked up to see The Siberian and she was fucking pissed, however when she swiped her claw at me it just smacked my face. We both looked down at the artery connecting us and I coughed up blood. Thankfully, my spider bot had already injected its syringe into my neck so I could begin pumping the needed drugs to keep me alive. The Siberian had a rictus of hate on her face, but I was distracted when I saw the explosion of fire behind her. I should have felt a wave of heat, but with The Siberian unintentionally giving me invulnerability as well, I felt nothing. Of course these fucking animals were tearing each other up. I made a halfway bloody smile at the monster in front of me.

"Now that Jack's gone, you're suddenly wondering why you did all of this, you-" That was as much as I could say before The Siberian let go and Bonesaw sliced the front of my neck open with a long knife. Luckily, the spider bot was able to keep my head from falling backwards and I used the opportunity to slice her stomach open along the seam between subdermal plates. I was rewarded with her trying to stab me in the eye, but this time I had the spider bot catch it since I was able to use the twitching of muscles in my shoulder to control it somehow. After about 10 seconds of wildly swinging and crying it looked like her tinker power took over and redirected her focus to what I was doing which was mostly just stealing her organs. This thankfully gave my spiderbot the time to redirect the flow of blood to my brain, however, there was no way her little bot could produce enough antiviral for all of what she had pumped in me.

The viruses started dismantling everything they could. My organs were liquifying by the second and it was only due to the fact that her heart was still pumping blood into my veins that my muscles were working at all. I had to concentrate all of my antivirals to my blood brain barrier to keep going, but it wasn't going to work for long. Especially now that she was turning her blood into acid. Not good. I couldn't battle her viral agents and acid at the same time. I knew something needed to change. The drugs weren't doing me any good anymore so I just let them go. The next second I had my answer. I stopped stealing her third liver and instead used my hands to subvert the spider bot that was halfway through sawing my right arm off. When I was done with that, it was putting my shoulder back together while I used my hands to try and interfere with whatever she was doing with my liquifying heart.

That pissed her off enough to attempt to jab me in the eye again, but this time I just used the spiderbot to jerk my head to the side enough so that the scalpel just tore a chunk of skull out. Meanwhile, I used my newly acquired spiderbot's extra legs to start cutting a hole in the back of my skull. Riley finally went back to working on my heart and I finally understood what she was doing. She wanted to pump it full of pressure until the vessel burst and launched shards of dense bone into my skull. I could barely follow what she was doing, but each time my hands got in her way, I felt like I understood what she was doing more and more.

We were both midway through completing our projects when we both turned to look up at almost the exact same time to see the one guy I hadn't recognized earlier. He was walking towards us, holding a car door and blocking whatever the Siberian was throwing at him. Now that I thought about it, it was probably Hatchet Face, which meant power nullification. I looked down at Riley and something unspoken passed between us. I stopped hindering her in making the heart bomb, but at the rate he was going it wouldn't be enough, so I let go again. Instead of seeing how to aid Riley, I guided her hand. We were wrong about the whole thing. We didn't need the heart to be tough enough to last with the pressure, just hold it long enough to pressurize. There were a thousand and one ways to get pressure to build up and stay for a few seconds. I looked up and Hatchet Face was only about 30 feet away from us, so I finally fed the acidic goop that had once made up my organs into Riley's converter and 3 seconds later we pulled the vibrating heart out and aimed it at Hatchet Face.

I had to make a last second adjustment with my first spiderbot, but just as Hatchet Face was turning to block another thing thrown by the Siberian, our heart bomb went off like a grenade. Mostly because we hadn't worried much about the collateral damage, but I was thankfully still attached to Riley enough that we would both survive since I now had her livers and kidneys and she was the only one here with a working heart. I spared a brief glance behind our tangled limbs to see the headless corpse where Hatchet Face was standing moments ago. I wasn't surprised since Riley had loaded a sharpened chunk of her reinforced femur into the bomb.

Now that that was over, I was in a bit of a bind. Apparently, I couldn't switch out my three specialties that quickly, so I was stuck with a pressure specialty until I could make the switch back to surgery. Any hope of a change of heart was dashed when Riley dug her hands into her own ribcage and started fiddling where I couldn't see. I realized after about two minutes of our renewed tinker fight that she was playing hardball now. She was working on detaching her heart and moving it to where I couldn't reach. I had our lower halves secured and she couldn't sever the artery going between us without me and my bots stopping her, but with her hands in her chest, I couldn't stop her from ripping out her heart before I finished my oxygen breathing system that I was installing in the back of my head.

It was time for a different tactic now that she was in the tinker zone. I could feel that my powers were broader than hers, I could do a million things she couldn't, but she had used her powers to the extreme every single day for years. She and her power were acting like one and it knew exactly what she needed. I diverted my focus partially from the breather system and started sewing my throat back together. It was difficult without the surgery specialty, but the spider bots were very helpful and intuitive, besides, the hack job would hold for a few sentences. I was able to repurpose a partial lung I sewed onto my back made of Riley's belly skin into feeding air to my trachea rather than the breather which was still taking too long. I carefully took in a breath.

"Jack didn't love you." Immediately, Riley's look of concentration turned into rage, but it was my turn to stab one of her misplaced knives through the underside of her chin and into her mouth, silencing her. "You've always been a bad girl Riley." It was strange to say that I felt more uncomfortable about the words I was saying to her than the fact that I had been carving her open like a christmas turkey for the last however long this was taking. Riley went back to trying to detach her heart, but she lacked the smooth skill she had shown earlier. "His power told him what to say to you-" Damn, she managed to blitz my spiderbot defence with her own bot which once again severed my throat and poked out an eye, but now I had three spiderbots and she only had two.

Our tinker fight continued in silence while we worked. It had become clear that due to our lack of physical might or explosive power we couldn't finish each other off without using tinker tech and thus the battle dragged on. First she built a heat generating organ to start boiling our blood, but I was barely able to use the pressure specialty I still had as well as respiration to vent off the excess heat at which point Riley switched tactics. I had also finally finished my breathing system after almost losing it to the excess heating when she suddenly pulled out a cancerous bone growth that shoved jagged bone spikes in all directions that started growing its way towards my spine which forced me to switch out respiration. I didn't get another surgical specialty like I was hoping for, but instead I got fungal colonies. Not exactly ideal, but I was surrounded by dirt so I could tap into the underground mycorrhizal which connected me to an underground network of fungus.

As useful as it was to draw nutrients up from the ground, I was still falling behind Riley when it came to building and designing. I would barely solve one issue she had created, only for her to create two completely different medical disasters for me to fix. With each exchange we got faster and deeper, systems within systems constantly in battle for supremacy with her always staying on top. This couldn't last, at this point she was winning, though it would take a long time for me to fully expire in my current state, she had the upper hand from the beginning with her experience and as much as I felt I'd grown with my power, she had grown just as fast, if not faster. She was a monster in every sense of the word.

I looked up from the tangle of pulsing veins and fungal roots we were laying in, almost like a cocoon of body horror, but I don't think my brain had the ability to process anything besides tinkering and strategy due to all of the chemicals that were coursing through it. I needed an advantage and I finally figured out what I could do when I remembered where we were. I looked away from the tangle of limbs and tentacles working in concert before me to see that while it was still light out, the sun had set. The street was deserted aside from the cooling bodies, but there was no sign of heroes or villains, well, besides the monster I was connected to.

I let go of my distillation specialty and felt a new one slot into place. It didn't so much feel like I was gaining or losing knowledge, but more like I had three extra brain interfaces and each one would plug into my head when I swapped. This one felt like it was for biological mobility and a thousand ideas sprang to mind. I was getting better at sifting through my choices. At first it felt like one specialty could switch and just hand me the idea I needed, but the more and more I battled with Riley, the more I could put my own needs forth for the specialites to narrow down the designs. Riley still wasn't letting me rebuild my throat or communicate with her in any way. She eventually turned off her ability to process speech or use words. She was literally just a puppet for her power now and it showed.

I quickly got started on the underlying fungus and within a few minutes, we were slowly gliding across the street like a snail, leaving a dark orange slime trail behind. Riley put up a decent fight against my relocation, but her only real avenue of attack was through our connected mass. I had decided to detach our body from the mobility system so she couldn't do much. Soon enough, we arrived at the back of the cafe. There were several bodies laying in the back room, the band that was due to play this evening. I swore I'd never curse a crappy garage band again if this worked out.

I had to wait until my mobility specialty lock decayed and I could switch it out again since my other two specialties were still barely holding Riley back, but I finally let it fade and mentally crossed my fingers.

When the switch finally happened, I was thrilled. Sputtering didn't exactly seem like a powerful specialty at first, but I trusted my power and I was rewarded when I realized what I could do with all of these vintage amps. I quickly got to work by pulling away my two heavily modified spiderbots and sent them to start gathering what I needed, especially the generator in the back. Sure, Riley was quickly eating through the heavy defences I had spent the last few hours throwing up, but I wasn't sure her head was really in the game anymore. She was just overpowering me with her relentless assault, but she wasn't acting as tricky as she had been before she turned her natural language processing off.

I had almost been reduced to a puddle of jelly by the time my sputtering gun was finished, but as soon as I turned it on her, I could feel the shift. We had spent the last few hours operating in her domain and it was all I could do to just hold on, but as I started coating her acquired mass with my fractalizing sputtering gun we could both tell that this fight wasn't over by any means. Every square inch of material that my sputtering gun coated in the special alloy I made would carve up the organic matter into hermetically sealed, nearly impenetrable blobs of alloy, allowing me to freely take mass from her.

I made serious inroads, finally carving away the majority of mass that I added by connecting us to the fungal growths when my inner prayers were answered. As our tangle of limbs and spiderbots spilled out of the back door to the cafe I was greeted with a high explosive anti-personnel round right to the center of mass from what looked like a Carl Gustaf wielded by none other than Miss Militia. I was obviously happy that the cavalry had arrived, but now I was having to keep Riley from spewing one of the many instantly lethal and highly resilient viruses she'd developed in our tinker war. She hadn't been releasing them at anything besides me, but now she seemed like she was going full nuclear. Another high explosive round tore through us, this time it seemed to be an anti armor one, which only gave me more holes to patch up before Riley could get her plagues out.

"I need help!" I yelled as loudly as I could through my makeshift throat. Of course, I just got another high explosive round in response. Quickly followed up by a tinker tech dart which pumped us with anti brute sedative that did about as much as a champagne bottle to the side of an aircraft carrier.

"I'm currently trying to restrain Riley… I mean, Bonesaw!" Another few seconds and another two shots from different, highly destructive weapons. The first one didn't do anything, but in my distraction, the second one carried a piece of Riley's worst virus along with it and into a nearby body which started bloating. I had seconds to contain it and no time to hesitate. I pulled a few wires out of place and threw my sputtering gun at the body which promptly exploded and covered that whole side of the street with sputter. Now I was starting to lose again.

"Armsmaster, I'm containing Bonesaws plagues, but if you keep shooting, the entire east coast is done for!" Now that I was hopeless at stopping Riley by myself, I turned to the heroes to see if I could get assistance. When I looked, it wasn't only Armsmaster and Miss Militia. Behind them were half a dozen other capes, only a few of which I recognized. I saw Assault, Battery, and a cape with a giant sword who must have been Chevalier all standing behind a large array of shields along with more indistinguishable capes.

"What is the situation?" Armsmaster's words were short and precise.

"S9 attacked, I triggered, I've been fighting Bonesaw for hours now. Also, Jack's dead." I had to look like some kind of horror show, because they stood there for another couple of seconds, clearly debating what to do while I was once again losing ground. I hoped they would decide what to do soon.

"What is your current status?"

"I'm physically connected to Bonesaw and she is trying to release as many plagues as she can. I can keep her contained for another 5 minutes at minimum."

"Are you a tinker?"

"Yes, I can change my specialties to adapt, but she's had the upper hand for hours." I tried to find Armsmaster behind the multiple layers of shields again, but I couldn't make him out anymore. "Listen, you can interrogate me for weeks after this, but if I lose, millions will die." That seemed to galvanize them enough to move. About a minute later, Armsmaster walked past the shields that had now turned from a barricade to an airtight bubble. Behind him was another person wearing a hazmat suit as if that would protect him from a tinker virus. Hopefully he was another tinker and not an idiot.

"Is it safe to approach?" Armsmaster said when he was roughly 20 feet away.

"No, but she's not building anything to physically hurt you, she's just trying to release plagues. Who's that?"

"PRT agent carrying some of my equipment."

"Have him drop your stuff and leave, the hazmat suit won't help." The agent quickly placed the equipment next to Armsmaster and ran back to another group of agents wearing hazmat. "I need you to start precisely cutting sections away. Do you have any way to annihilate matter?" His armor had a mouth cover so I couldn't see his expression, but after a second or so of thinking, he picked up the case the agent had been carrying and awkwardly lugged it over. As soon as he got within 6 feet I felt Riley shift. "Don't-" Was all I got out before a large amount of liquid was expelled at him, coating him from head to toe in dark orange puss.

"Don't panic, that wasn't contaminated." He nodded and picked his equipment up again.

"Show me where to cut." I nodded and switched to a new specialty. Containment systems, how convenient.