Just Over Half of Us Were Hurt

"You told them to kill themselves?" The woman said, glaring daggers at Grey from the other side of the interrogation table.

"Well not exactly." He replied nonchalantly.

"Then what did you say?" She asked, developing a bewitching smile that would strike fear into the hearts of most mortals.

"Hurry up and kill yourselves already." He clarified.

The woman took a deep breath. 'After all of the time I've spent praising your intelligence, you prove me wrong time and time again.'

[ "That's… it?" Elise asked with a frown. She only had a voice, but Grey could always visualize her body because of her extremely expressive personality.

"Yes, Elise. Can you help?" He asked tiredly.

"Of course! Who do you think I am? This plan is child's play. When are you going to meet someone deadly enough to entertain me?" She asked bitterly.

"We're on our way to a place called the 'The Death Qube' in a server where normal people are sporting felony grade modifications like they're a style trend." He pointed out, rather sarcastically, at that.

"Really!? I can't wait!" She announced excitedly. She even added the sound of hands clapping together as she said it. Elise was always this extra.

"Elise, you have a listener that's always recording what everyone's saying. You already knew this…

…also, does your excitement increase as my chances of survival get closer to zero?" He asked in a state of bitter perplexion.

"Don't make it sound like that, murder bear! Without your skills and programs, your chances for survival as a free man would always be less than 10 percent.

Even with your skills, your tsundere attitude toward your enemies doesn't increase it by much. So how're a few more percentages going to make a difference?" She giggled.

Grey sighed. "Elise… if my chance of survival is 20% and you knock off 5 points, that's a 25% reduction in my chances to live…" He pointed out, losing a small bit of faith in his trusty confidant.

"That's just statistics, Alyx. Statistics are meant to be misinterpreted. I'm disappointed you didn't know this already." She retorted.

"That's why I can never understand what you're saying." He quipped, reminding her that she was created from statistical analysis.

"... Anyway, is getting water particles into the attack area the only way to increase the speed of the cloning process?" He asked in a serious voice.

"Yes, that's right. Unless you have diamond dust or floating glass particles…

I suppose you wouldn't even need to fight if you had floating glass particles in the air, would you? Can we try that out sometime?" She asked quizzically, expressing her intrigue with a hint of exhilaration in her voice.

"Sure, whatever. Are you ready?" He asked hastily.

"Anything for you, Alyx! Let's goooooo!" She exclaimed.

"Hawhawhawhawha! You mean a twinklin's junk gets the 'herring treatment' and then people pay to watch cats treat it like Fancy Feast!?" Dikines roared.

"Eloguent, even by Dark Paradise standard, you make me sick." Saison avowed with venom-laced hatred in his voice.

"That's… that's not it! I was taken there by a friend! That w-was all!" Eloguent stated in his defense.

"Why you stutterin' there, you naughty cat cucker?" Dikines asked, trying his best to keep his sides from splitting.

"Dikines, I don't think that it matters anyways. If he was taken there by a 'friend' it means that he spends his time with some twisted people when he's not on patrol." Saison replied with a chastising demeanor.

"Saison, who gives a shit? After we sell these little twats, let's see if we can even [afford] to watch the show!" He retorted while cackling.

At this point, Dikines resembled a deep voice hyena going through puberty.

Michael started walking away from them as though he didn't have a care in the world. One could easily imagine him humming happily as he did so.

"Sebastian, when we stop, keep your head forward and don't move unless I tell you." Michael whispered to Sebastian.

"O-Okay." Sebastian replied with a dazed nervousness in his voice.

To the right of him was Sebastian, who was valiantly trying his best to care, and standing right behind Sebastian was a fully synced clone.

He had already made the clone with his wrist band before leaving the entry point.

"Hey! Where the hell do you think you're goin', you brazen little tinies!?" Dikines roared. "Saison, brand hurry and the brats so people don't fuck wit' them if they sneak away. Try not to mangle the merchandise."

"I'm on it." He said, bending his legs into a sprinting position.

But to everyone's surprise, both of them stopped walking completely, and Michael put his hands in the air to raise the white flag of surrender.

Michael was holding nothing in his hands and looked just as threatening as before. So Saison, while suspicious of the surrender, decided to walk over peacefully.

"Oui! Why did you walk away if you were just planning to surrender?" He asked hastily as he walked over to Michael.

"I figured that if I didn't, I'd have to stand around listening to you guys forever.

Either do your job or hurry up and kill yourselves already." Michael said in the most monotone voice imaginable.]

"Don't you know when it's best to walk away?" She asked, saltiness dripping from her pores.

"I did try to walk away. I said that after they prevented me from doing so." He explained with the casualness of an innocent child.

This type of reply annoyed her beyond reason.

At first, she thought these curt responses were a way of guiding her to a misleading conclusion for his amusement.

She learned the hard way—and kept learning the hard way—that these types of responses were modest, literal answers to her questions. In fact, they bordered on the realm of politeness.

When she asked clarification questions, he didn't hold back on the explanation. But unfortunately, those types of answers bordered the realm of mildly traumatizing.

The problem was that the answers themselves held no indication of the event's extent or significance.

He had described his welcome orientation in the same exact way.

He said something like, "I learned I was there for a death match, they asked me to kill a teenager, and when I refused they planned to use software to make me kill the teen and then myself."

His reply made her believe he killed the teen in 15 minutes.

Five hours later, she learned that the events in that room were a first-class national security threat, the "teen" was a 35-year-old man, and that Grey cooked 1st class felony drugs in the room.

Not only that, In her eight years as a high-profile cybercriminal investigator, she had never seen a person that ended up in a predicament more brutal than what his emissary faced.

While she saw the crime scene, she only saw the bodies. What happened there was so unexplainable that it remained a mystery for half a decade.

What actually happened was exponentially worse than she could have ever imagined. It permanently traumatized her sense of ethics and morality. That was not an exaggeration.

That was the issue she faced. Should she ask for the details and then suffer the psychological consequences of the answers? Or should she pass them by and permanently lose key details?

His stories were like a minefield; at any moment, the information he told her could blow up in her face again.

The woman took a deep breath to compose herself.

"Alyx, I was using a figure of speech. What I meant to say is that you should at least try using your acting skills to get out of situations instead of bringing them upon yourself." She explained.

Grey sighed in a rare show of emotion. "That was acting to get myself out of it." He explained.

"I'm sure that's true. I guess what I'm ultimately saying is… Do you need to make things sound that way?

You always make it sound like you were always antagonizing the dangerous people you encountered." She said, trying to explain her concern.

"... Do you want me to bend the truth when I give you answers?" He asked.

"... No, I guess you're just giving me the literal truth. Nevermind." She replied in a defeated tone.

She put her hands on her temples and leaned her elbows on the table. 'I can't really complain when he's being 100% honest with me. I hate this.'

The woman sighed with her eyes still facing the table.

"So three dangerous people tried to kidnap you, you told people to 'hurry up and kill yourselves,' and then as expected they violently attacked you. Is that right?" She filled in the blanks with the final part.

"Correct."

"So… how did you get out of it? No, don't answer that question. Give me a moment to try to figure out how I'm going to ask you that question." She replied.

After spending a full minute running simulations on what type of question would minimize unnecessary details, she had a questioning strategy ready to try out.

"Did you end up killing anyone?" She asked.

"No, I didn't kill anyone.." He replied.

'Hoh? That's… surprising. No, technically Alyx hasn't killed anyone to my knowledge. Well, he's helped people die... maybe. I think that counts? Either way, I shouldn't be surprised.'

"In a few words, how did you get out of the situation alive?" She asked.

"I immobilized them so they couldn't chase after us." He explained succinctly.

"That's good to hear. So no one was hurt?" She asked, relieved.

"That… no, more than half the people there were hurt when we left." He replied.

"More than half? You mean two of them?" She asked, puzzled by his word choice.

"No, there were five of us, and two of us remained unharmed." He clarified.

"And by 'two of us,' do you mean you and Sebastian?" She asked with deadly piercing eyes.

"Correct."