BlueButcher

• The bioweapon spills out of the cab onto the asphalt of the opera house's reserved parking lot. Its jet black head towers over the cab, afternoon sunlight glinting off the knives embedded down its head and neck like extensions of an imaginary skeleton. Still nearly two thirds of its green-and-white striped body are coiled inside the cab, the hands on its forelegs curled on the blacktop and its giant blind eye like a knife wound almost two and a half meters above the ground.

S████ stares up at it. It's been over a year since she last saw 006, the monster that never meant to steal L███ from her but ultimately did. It stands half in, half out of its cab almost as if it's as anxious as L███ had been a moment before. It could swallow him in one go if it wanted, or tear him to shreds with its jagged maw. Instead he reaches up toward its huge mouth full of dagger-long teeth, curling one of his hands around a knife handle halfway down its jaw and pulling until it lowers its head to his level.

"Hey," he says to it again, voice gentle. "Hey, I know you're tired. I know. We just have to do one more thing and then you can rest, I promise."

It hisses a long tangled sentence of buzzing affricate words, none of its mysterious language coherent. L███ leans in and says something back, his mouth clumsy around its language but not mocking; confident, practiced. Then he lets go of his grip on the knife handle. He pulls his snapback off and hooks it over the handle of a different knife, groping for the elastic around his wrist to pull his hair back. He fits the cap back on, fingers touching the metal plate behind his right ear to check that it's clear before he steps down to fish up one of the long wired connector plugs implanted in its neck and plug it directly into his skull.

In an instant, almost between blinks, the green-and-white striped part of its body below the black head turns bright matte holographic blue.

L███ stands next to it like a bolt of lightning has gone through him. His eyes twitch, squinting and focused as he sees through the bioweapon's eyes instead of simply his own—the approximate position and vector of every single invasive within a four kilometer radius suddenly and overwhelmingly at his fingertips, and beyond that, the ability to focus on any of them and direct it to cut that target into 374 pieces. To kill in a truly gruesome fashion, for the company's financial gain.

S████ knows the invasives down in the access pipes to the opera house's reservoirs are tiny, most of them not even longer than her own arm. Dwarfed in comparison to the augmented monster standing next to L███ and willingly sharing its memory drives and global positioning data with him. A bioweapon trained to allow him to direct its ability to kill onto the tiny squirming invasives five hundred meters below the earth, rather than the Singers in the reservoirs themselves.

006 is a bioweapon, and L███ is the only one wired to wield it. He's been doing this for five years. And despite how long she's known, seeing him like this in person still manages to scare S████ to the bone.

(It's a carefully guarded secret that 006 can see and target people as well, one S████ only knows because L███ himself told her. Back when they were still talking, back when they were still friends. S████ and H██, standing here next to him, are targets in L███'s head too. And even if she knows he'd never focus on either of them, the fact that he could has always been chilling. Has always been something that kept him up at night. Has always been something that made him bend over backwards to make sure neither of them were ever in range when he joined his brain to 006's consciousness and drew on its terrible deadly abilities.)

H██ is still filming, but the cruel enjoyment has faded out of his posture now that he's finally face to face with his brother channeling his bioweapon's murderous reality. He looks between the video and this real life image of the two of them, 006's head twitching absently as L███ uses his brain as sieve to filter its deadly thoughts and redirect them. H██ glances up at S████, something spooked in his eyes that S████ knows is in her own as well. His hand closes around his phone as he kills the recording.