39. PROTOCOL FAILURE (RAGE)
They moved unlike ordinary humans. And unlike animals. They moved absolutely silently. No growling, no roaring, clicking sounds like the altered Erkki or that arachnid creature on the stairs made. There was neither inertia nor assessment of distance. There was only a blind, gravitational pull toward the carrier of the Executor. Perhaps they wanted to consume my new, «successful» biology to rewrite, to fix their own corrupted, broken code.
I didn’t wait. My body, guided by the absolute logic of the +Angi, reacted a second before contact. The calculation was instantaneous. The concept of a «brawl» was absent in my consciousness. There was only an unconditional directive — «Sanitization«. These incorrect Objects were subject to immediate defragmentation.
The first one — tall, with twisted elbow joints — jumped. The attack vector was primitive. I simply shifted my center of gravity, ducking under its trajectory. Using the creature’s inertia, I delivered a short, dry kick to the supporting knee of the landing monster.
CRACK.
The sound of a bursting kneecap rang out like a gunshot in the cottony silence of the forest. The creature collapsed. Its inertia, stopped by the broken support, forced the body to fold in half like a cheap deckchair. I sharply delivered a few more powerful blows. The creature’s spine cracked in three places. But it didn’t even scream. It only let out a hoarse, whistling exhale, as if air had escaped from a punctured tire.
Minus one. Energy expenditure: 3%.
The second and third attacked synchronously. From the flanks.
My left hand darted forward on its own. A grapple. My fingers, hard as hydraulic pincers, closed around the second one’s throat. The monster’s tissues, soft and spongy, yielded almost effortlessly. I felt the trachea burst under my fingers and the cervical vertebrae crumble.
A snap.
Another.
The corpse went limp even before it hit the ground.
Perfect. Sterile. Correct.
My mind remained a crystal-clear lake, upon the surface of which there was not a trace of a ripple. Only absolute efficiency.
But the third…
The third one surprised me.
The third one turned out to be an Error in my flawless calculation. It was faster. Or its mutation had preserved more animal reflexes. Instead of a direct attack, it pushed off a tree trunk, altering its trajectory, and crashed onto my back. Heaviness. The smell of rot hit my nostrils. Razor-sharp, yellow claws, looking like bone hooks, dug into my shoulders, piercing my armor.
— «Shell damage. External impact,» — the Module stated documentary-style.
Its voice was even, but somewhere on the periphery of my consciousness, a note of… bewilderment flickered?
The creature on my back arched, threw open its maw, and with a wet crunch tore a chunk of flesh from my trapezius muscle.
PAIN.
It didn’t just arrive. It exploded like a supernova. This is not an informational report about damage. This is — hot, living, blinding human pain.
Not modest.
It poured over me like a tub of scalding boiling water.
It shouldn’t be there. The «Anesthesia» protocol is active. I shouldn’t feel myself being eaten. But I felt it.
— «Critical failure!» — the Module shrieked, losing its robotic intonation. — «Neuroreceptor block breached!»
Along with the pain, the dam burst. A dirty, murky wave of human emotions flooded into the sterile hall of the Executor.
Fear. Panic. Mind-clouding Adrenaline.
And… RAGE.
«Motherfucker! That hurts! Throw him off! Kill him, you bitch!..» — my own voice screamed in my head. Not the voice of a soulless +Ang. But the voice of a guy from Lappeenranta whose daughter was stolen and who was currently being eaten alive in the forest.
— «Internal Dissonance! Carrier is seizing control!» — real panic sounded in the voice of the +Ang Module.
I (now my own Self, the former, trembling, sweaty, living one) felt a wild disgust. I was being eaten alive, and this calculator in my head was counting fucking percentages!
— «Fuck you!..» — I growled aloud.
My body, torn apart by two opposing wills, jerked in a convulsion. I dropped onto my back. Intentionally. With all my might. With all my mass, I pinned the creature to the stony, root-filled ground. The wet crunch of the monster’s ribs resounded.
Music to my ears.
Its grip weakened.
I rolled over, throwing the stinking body off me, and leaped to my feet.
My eyes — the crossed-out pupils of Saturn — met its eyes.
With the empty, black holes of the eye sockets.
In them, like two rotten olives in a jar, floated hatred.
In that moment, the «Executor» with his karate moves and grappling schemas evaporated, vanished. Only a lonely caveman remained.
I didn’t use any martial arts. I grabbed a cobblestone from the shoulder of the road. Heavy, dirty, plastered with wet earth. And with a howl that had nothing mechanical or artificial in it, I brought it down on the creature’s head.
CRUNCH.
The asshole’s skull burst like a rotten watermelon. But I didn’t stop.
— «Take that! Take that, you freak!»
A blow. Another blow. And another. And another…
With relish, I turned its head into minced meat. Splatters of dark blood flew into my face, flooded my eyes, got into my mouth. I tasted iron and rot. No logic. No efficiency. Only dirty, primal, saving rage. I pounded the stone against the already dead body, taking everything out on it: the fear of the Fog, the pain of losing my daughter, the hatred for the fucking +Angi, the humiliation in that apartment with the sludge.
Finally, the stone slipped from my blood-slicked fingers. I stood over the corpse, breathing heavily. My chest heaved. The wound on my shoulder throbbed.
Thump-thump-thump.
This was my pain. My blood. Hot, red, mixed with black, rotten filth, but mine.
— «Executor…» — the Module’s voice sounded in a quiet, seemingly ashamed tone. — «Dissonance resolved. Threat eliminated. Method… inefficient. Excessive expenditure of energy, calories…»
— «Shut up, freak,» — I wheezed.
I spat thick saliva right onto the corpse, aiming for the bloody mess that remained in place of its face-muzzle.
— «Take control of functions and resume the march,» — the Voice continued dryly, trying to regain authority. — «Target — Border.»
I wiped my face with my sleeve, smearing dirt and alien blood. I felt vile. Rotten to the core.
But I was still alive and I was still breathing.
A clack.
Again this fucking bolt…
The Executor inside me took the captain’s bridge once more, but now it knew: in the hold sits a mad passenger who can break down the door and take the helm at any moment.
— «I am an instrument…» — I whispered, tasting the words. They were bitter. — «I am the Executor of the Fucking Sentence.»
I turned toward the east. Ahead stood an impenetrable leaden wall of Fog. I stepped into it, limping on my left leg. My back burned like fire.
Fifty kilometers more to the border.
But now I was not walking alone. There were two of us, barely fitting in one very, very tight head. And we both hated this journey.
> ⚠️ ENTITY STATUS: CRITICAL DRIVER ERROR. ORGANIC VIRUS AWAKENING.
>
> 🧠 Applause for the protein shell! The Higher Logic of the +Angi made a major miscalculation. They thought they could simply format the brain of a depressed layman and pour a perfect, sterile combat script into it. Charming algorithm hubris.
>
> 💀 They forgot that the human psyche is not a hard drive. It is a viscous swamp. And as soon as the perfect alien armor cracked from a mutant’s claws, a real, dirty, caveman terror rose from that swamp. The Executor breaks kneecaps with the grace of a surgeon, but the Executioner survives only because he picks up an ordinary cobblestone and turns the enemy into bloody minced meat.
>
> 🪓 Did you hear how the Module panicked? The algorithm simply doesn’t know what to do with pure, uncontrolled hatred. The System has locked the human back in the hold of the subconscious, but the lock is already broken. Keep reading. Let’s see how this biomechanical schizophrenia in one head makes it to the Eastern Border.
