WELP.

Needless to say, September is proving to be an outstanding month for me in terms of production. Here's hoping this chapter has more of a response than the previous one. Four reviews, guys? Ouch... Only need two more to pass 50, though, which will be a milestone. Who knows? Maybe it will even earn you all a little treat of some kind. Since the story arc is wrapping up, I might consider doing a Q and A in regards to what I was thinking and whatnot during the production of previous chapters. Just a possibility.

Enough of me, though. On with the story!

Dust in the Mass Effect

Chapter 10

"Make Some Important Life Decisions"

I'm not sure what I expected. I had left because we didn't have much time, after all.

As I approached the camp square, it became obvious what had happened. The smoky smell in the air became rife with other stenches, most notably that of blood. Bullet holes, grenade scars, destroyed shanties. There were Blue Suns and Blood Pack corpses thrown about like discarded dolls. The fighting must have pushed into the camp, with one side probably falling back from the main skirmish.

When I got to the square, I found what I was looking for. Nolan was next to his hut, which had been burned down. I waded through the bodies to reach him. He was prone, only distinguishable from the other corpses due to his lack of armor.

My chest began to ache as I fell to my knees next to him. It was another one of those situations where I didn't know how to feel, just like when I first met him next to that funeral pyre. All I could do was sit there and stare emptily at the dead body of the man that had been my mentor through all this. How could something so horrible happen so close to me? All I wanted was my normal life back, but then things like this or like Sen's treasure raid would happen.

"Dust!" I heard Etrius call from behind me. I didn't look away. All I could do was gawk at Nolan's dead body and wonder why this was happening.

Etrius said nothing as he arrived. He looked on as I counted the bullet holes in Nolan's torso. Four, five, six… Nine. Had it been a Blue Suns firing line, or maybe it was just Blood Pack brutality?

"I take it he was…" Etrius tried.

"He was a good man," I choked. "He helped me when I had nothing. Gave me almost everything I have now. Taught me lessons about how to survive in a place like this."

As I remembered the man, I checked the back of his hand. Through the tears welling up in my eyes, I saw that his omni-tool was gone.

"He probably had a plan," I surmised, standing back up. "Etrius, did you see any other bodies that weren't mercs?"

"Not that I can recall," the large turian remarked, scratching his plates.

"That's because they weren't here."

It was a new addition to the conversation, but not a new voice to my ears. We both turned around to find a thin batarian in civilian clothes skulking out from behind a shanty.

"Dev?" I was shocked to see my old card-playing buddy at first, but that feeling quickly gave way to something else. A thought inside me clicked, causing me to remember what had started this whole business with me leaving. The batarians had left us. I'd nothing alive to blame up until this point.

"You… You sold us out!"

Had I my good arm, I probably would have run over and given him two black eyes.

"No, I did not!" he quickly defended himself as Etrius tactfully placed himself almost in between us. "Going to the Suns was Grask and Brot's plan. I just went with them to buy a ticket out of here."

This news stilled me only slightly. Now I wanted to punch Grask and Brot instead.

"We went to their base, but they distrusted us. Grask used his weight as a former member to get us in and vouch for us, but their commander wasn't convinced. In the end, they took Brot and sent him up to be screened. Grask was rejected because of his prosthetic leg. He… didn't take it too well. He got hot, started yelling, pulled his gun, and…"

I flinched. Leave it to Grask's hot head to him killed.

"The fighting started up not much later. The Pack hit the Sun's camp, outnumbering them by quite a bit."

I looked at the ground, noticing that the majority of the bodies were indeed Pack vorcha.

"Didn't seem to help them that much."

"The Suns commander ordered a tactical retreat, from what I saw. They rigged their camp and blew it when it fell to the Pack. Their fallback line, however, was this clearing. Grask told them about it while he was trying to sell us to them. When I heard that they'd be moving in, I sent a message to Nolan."

I bit my lip, now feeling bad for having automatically accused Dev.

"When we arrived, all we found was him burning down his place. Not sure why."

We all turned to the destroyed hut. Why would he burn it down himself? Did he have sensitive records in there? Maybe he just didn't want someone else to be picking through his stuff after he was dead.

"What about everyone else?" I looked back to Dev.

"I can only assume that they cleared out before we arrived. Nolan probably stayed behind to play patsy while everyone else made a break for it."

My fist clenched. Dammit… Why couldn't he have escaped with the rest?

"Not to look inside the messenger's bag, but how do you know all this?" Etrius cut, bringing up a good point in the process.

Dev looked down, grimacing.

"You used 'we' in that story more than once," the turian made note.

"Dev…" I suddenly felt angry once again. "You were with the Suns, weren't you?"

"I-I didn't have a choice!" the batarian got more emotional than I'd ever seen him before. "They wouldn't let me leave. I'd been inside their camp, seen what they were planning. Their commander didn't want me getting caught by the Blood Pack. They made me move with them."

I was glaring at him, resisting the urge to get violent as he spoke.

"When we marched into the camp, their commander looked Nolan in the eye and told him to submit or die. Nolan… He just…"

I watched as Dev dropped to his hands and knees, unable to act.

"I'm sorry…"

I watched as he broke down and began to sob. I'd never before felt the way I did then. Staring down at somebody who was more or less responsible for the death of someone I cared about. The heartache I felt – the feeling that made my teeth clench, eyes throb, and body quiver with unchecked emotion. It was enough to send tears rolling down my face. I'd thought I was doing what I'd been doing to prevent something like this from happening, only to find that, with the way things were timed, there would have never been a way for me to prevent it.

So there I stood, a failure.

"He was a good man…" I repeated my earlier sentiments. "He deserved better than this."

Before I could decide what else to say, Etrius tapped me on the shoulder. He turned me, giving me view of a new intrusion. He was a tall man in Blue Suns armor. His hair was short and black, his eyes were dark, and his nose was long. Flanking him was a squad of four more Suns, all humans, all fully armored, and all toting assault rifles.

The way Dev furiously jerked himself back to his feet told me a lot about who the man was.

Etrius, being the heavily armed merc that he was, automatically reached for his Revenant. The squad didn't hesitate to level their weapons on him. The air thickened with tension, instilling in me a sense of screwed like I'd never felt before.

"Let's not be rash," the man spoke with a bored tone. "I'm sure we can be civil about this. Enough blood has been shed today. No need to add to it."

"Dust, that's him," Dev spoke, catching my attention. "That's their commander."

I faced the man, meeting his eye as he and his mooks held us at a disadvantage. I could feel hate churning in my stomach as I considered the transgressions he had unwittingly taken against me. He'd led the Suns down here, which had caused a number of things. It caused the batarians to abandon us, resulting in me and Dirk getting cast out and him shooting me. It had also caused the fighting with the Blood Pack, the direct result of which was Nolan's death.

It's his fault.

"Captain Yun, Blue Suns," he introduced himself.

I glared at him, my eyes so wide that they hurt. My jaw and fist were still clenched with tension, to the point where even my bad hand was clenched as well. It hurt, but I didn't care. I had to occupy my body to keep myself from trying to throttle this guy.

"What do you want?" Etrius spoke for us, seeing as I was too busy trying not to be rash. One wrong move was likely to earn someone a bullet or ten.

"Just sweeping the remains of the battlefield, actually," Yun claimed, grinning cordially before turning to Dev. "Devlen, I see you survived. Find a good hiding spot?"

"Y-Yeah," Dev flinched, seeming put off by the man's behavior.

"Good. Now that the battle has ended, I suppose you don't have to travel with us anymore."

"…" Dev didn't know what to make of the remark.

"And who are your friends?" Yun turned back to me and Etrius. "Armed, but not armored. Scavengers? I don't suppose this was your camp, was it?"

I started shaking. Every ounce of venom my body was capable of mustering had it out for this guy.

"Hm? What's with that look?" Yun noticed my searing. "Don't tell me you already hate my guts. We only met thirty seconds ago. Speaking of which, I don't even know your name yet. How about you tell me? Give me your name, and maybe I'll have an easier time apologizing for whatever it is I've done to hurt you."

I began to lose what little cool I had left.

"My name is Dust!" I snarled at him. "And I don't want your damn apology!"

"Oh?" Yun's eyebrow twitched, at which he suddenly began to snigger at me. "You wanna be mad at me, eh? What's a guy like you got against a hard-working guy like me, anyway? Huh? I'm just an adult doing his job. That's all it is. Suns Command wants the junkyard, I take the junkyard. They want me to neutralize the Blood Pack in this sector, I neutralize the Blood Pack in this sector. They want me to clear out some rats, I clear out some rats."

"Rats?!" I snapped. "Are you comparing the lives of people to rats?!"

"Why not? They're the same, you see," he grinned. "Rats live in the shadows, feeding on the scraps left behind by real people, just like you scavengers. My job here was to cut out the part of the rat, allowing the Suns to make use of those scraps themselves."

"He was not a rat!"

I shouted that. My throat hurt afterward.

At this, Yun cackled. This was where I could see it for sure. This man was unhinged.

"Well, you're certainly welcome to go on thinking that. In the meantime, I've got a new dilemma," All jovialness left his expression. "What do I do with the lot of you?"

Fear began to creep up through my anger. I couldn't move under penalty of death, and now my fate was to be decided by a madman. I needed a break and I needed it soon.

"W-Wait!" Dev interjected. "You said that…!"

"I said what? That you could go?" Yun overtook the batarian's words before reaching for his hip and pulling a sidearm. "You're actually wrong. I said that you didn't have to travel with us anymore."

He aimed and fired. Dev hit the ground with a hole in his head.

"Pathetic," Yun stated as he watched the blood spill onto the floor. "All he did was look out for himself, groveling as he tried to escape from the life of a rat. Didn't even try to help his friends while he had the opportunity. Just an urchin, not even worth stepping over."

"What happened to being civil and not shedding any more blood?" Etrius asked, braver than I.

"That was before this one started growling at me like an animal," the man stated, leveling on me. I just stood there, mortified. "Are you afraid now, Mr. Dust? How quickly your supposedly righteous fury has turned to horror now that I've demonstrated what happens to rats that don't know their place. What were you going to do anyway? Fight me with only one arm? Kill me with that popgun you're carrying? Somehow dodge the hail of bullets that'll befall you should you take one step out of line? Don't make me laugh again."

He was serious now, his tone grave. We both knew that there was nothing I could do and survive. Now all he had to do was make his decision.

"Captain."

The entire moment seemed to stop at the voice of the Sun at Yun's right.

He turned his head, obviously annoyed. "What?!"

"There's movement on the motion tracker."

Yun ditched his intimidation tactics, turning towards more important things. "Eyes up, then! It's probably just some leftover vorcha trying to-!"

He was cut off by a tech mine spinning in and zapping their shields. All of them flinched as blue bolts of electric energy coursed through their armor systems and weapons. Then a distant report sounded. One of the Sun squaddies hit the ground, blood leaking from his chest.

"Get down!"

The men stumbled about as I found myself being hauled aside by a turian claw. Etrius and I fell behind a shanty as an explosion tore into the Suns, killing two more. Yun jumped behind a hut across the street from us while the final squad member tossed his rifle as if having heard something. Whatever he heard didn't need to worry, though, as another loud rifle report promptly delivered death to him.

With that, my attention turned to where Yun had taken cover. I found him there, hiding from the sniper. His eyes were on me, however. His gun was drawn. I could see clearly down its barrel. I was on the floor, unable to move in time. There was nothing I could do. He was going to kill me.

He pulled the trigger…

…and his gun burst.

"Shit!" he swore as the pieces fell from his grasp, ejecting steam from the sabotaged heat sink. He gripped his hand, stunned and in pain.

"It's your chance! Get him!" it yelled inside of my head.

I listened. I grabbed the pistol that Nolan had given me and pointed it at Yun. He saw and bobbed away as I fired, my bullet harmlessly ricocheting off the wall next to where he had been. Unharmed, the man I blamed for my misfortune bounded out of sight. In response, I did something I never thought I'd do in my life.

I got up chased after him, gun forward, wanting nothing more than to see him die. I bounded across the corpse-laden lane and swung around the building he'd gone behind. I caught a glimpse of him and fired again. The shot hit a building, so sign of it meeting my target. Furious, I moved to continue the chase.

Instead of moving forward, I found that same turian claw wrapping around me and holding me in place.

"Let me go!" I shouted, struggling to escape Etrius's powerful grip. I held my pistol forward still, thinking to shoot anyway, but the professional in Etrius smoothly snatched it out of my hand without any trouble.

"That's enough!" Etrius argued, not conceding an inch as I writhed. "What good will going after him do? He'll just lead you into more Suns!"

"Let me go! Nooo!" I continued to rebel, reaching out to where I'd last seen the man's blue and white armor flash around a corner. Where had he gone? How could I have let him get away? After what he did to Nolan and Dev, I couldn't let him go.

But he was gone, and Etrius was right.

As I realized my failure, I couldn't contain my emotions anymore. I closed my tear-filled eyes and screamed.

T

I didn't say anything for the entire walk back to Sen's ship. It had been her and the rest that had saved us. Fleer with the Overload/Sabotage combo, Tealer with the frag, and Sen on sniper duty. According to the now ex-Talon merc, she'd intercepted a report from the rest of her team about the Suns and Pack having wiped out Nolan's camp. Etrius and I were just lucky things timed out the way that they did.

I found myself sitting in on the bed in the med-bay after we'd arrived. I had my omni-tool open, staring at Nolan's name as the sole occupant of my contact list. Funny thing about omni-tools was that you couldn't actually call someone unless they had an extranet service subscription. Nolan was the only in the camp who actually had one as far as I knew, and it would cost both of us extra to make the call happen. Our tools could still reach out and connect to make the call, but the fee made it so that calls were for emergencies only.

I pondered hitting the contact anyway, just to see what had become of the appliance. Had the Suns confiscated it? Had he given it to Cockney or Eco? Where had they gone? Dev said that they weren't in camp when he got there. Was there any way to track them?

Unable to figure it out on my own, I hit the button to place the call. The display signaled that it was loading, only to immediately switch to an error message detailing that the contact had been disconnected. I sighed. Pointless…

Closing my omni-tool, I placed my head in my hands and tried my hardest to figure out what had happened back at the camp. Once again, I'd been utterly useless. That much was clear to me. Even worse, Nolan and Dev were dead thanks to it. But what about after that? When Yun's gun exploded and I had the opportunity. Why had I…?

I looked to the pistol, which I'd placed on the floor next to my pack. I'd tried to kill another person with it, hadn't I? I'd listened to 'it', just like I'd feared I would. 'It', that thing that hid under my inner rationality, told me to go after him, so I did. 'It', the thing that made me shoot that poor turian.

You're probably wondering what the hell I'm talking about. What is 'it'? Well, think of things like this. You see some asshole picking on a defenseless kid. Rather than just telling the jerk to stop, 'it' would prefer you drag the guy into an alley after school and stomp his skull into the pavement. That way he never bullies anybody again, and the defenseless kid will get left alone. 'It' is my ability to make extreme decisions, and I've pondered its knack for affecting my problem solving in the past.

To keep things short, I listened to 'it' once when I was younger. Didn't kill the guy, though. Just broke his fingers. Since then, I've kept a lid on things. Learned to always control myself. It's why I hold a lot of stuff in. The last thing I've ever wanted was to hurt people when it could be avoided.

Self-control… All it would have taken was a little self-control to keep me from killing that turian kid. But my rationale had held the facts in front of me. He was a thief, he could join the Talons, etc. We would be safer with him dead. I could have just let Nolan kill him, though. Why did it have to me? The problem was that 'it' thought I was ready, and I'd been too confused at the time to argue.

The thing with Dirk had been different. 'It' had not been involved in that moment – or, at least, not in the part where I killed him. Maybe it had made me decide to try and kick that gun out of his hand instead of allowing him to drag me off and get us both killed somehow. The part where I shot him, however, could be chalked up to just survival instinct. Even children can kill if they have the will to survive. That's just the way things are. It's tragic, but then every life has its comedies and tragedies, doesn't it?

When Sen finally came to check up on me, I'd taken to nibbling on one of the ration bars that had been in my pack. She didn't say anything at first, just coming in and taking a seat in the same chair she'd sat in when I'd first woken up here. She'd been understanding, told everyone to give me some space right after things had calmed down. Just another tick on the list of things I owed her for.

"How do you feel?" she asked once I'd forced down a bite of the ration bar.

"It's a mixed bag," I threw out. "Primarily consisting of 'pissed off' and 'depressed'."

"Etrius filled me in. Any idea where your other friends might be?"

"No idea. Couldn't even afford to keep in touch."

"I see," she looked down.

"Thanks."

She came back up. "For what?"

"Saving me. Again, that is," I put on a weak smile, feeling better now that I was talking about it. "That's three times now, isn't it?"

"Nah, first time doesn't count," she smirked, waving it off. "And who said I was saving you? My new heavy was there too, y'know."

I could tell she was joking, and we smiled about it. It felt good. Not enough to fix me, but it was better than brooding.

"Everyone's worried about you, y'know," she continued, nodding back to where the others would be. "It's a shitty situation. They all get it. No one's gonna judge you for being like this."

I almost laughed.

"Shitty? I don't think I've ever felt this bad before," I claimed, not exaggerating. It meant a lot for me to say that, too. I'd lost relatives and friends before, fucked up important things, had bouts with pain that left me screaming, but all of it seemed miniscule compared to how I felt this day. Even when I was first waking up on top of that junk pile, at least I was too uncertain about everything to feel the kind of loss that I did now. Now I felt the weight of things I'd done wrong, like not accepting Cockney's friendship, and getting upset at Nolan after the execution.

"You're mad because of what's happened," she laid it out. "And because you let that bastard get away."

I grimaced. She was right.

Before I could dwell anymore, I suddenly found Sen getting up and walking over to me. She took a knee, coming face-to-face with my sitting position.

"I know that what I'm about to say probably isn't what you want to hear right now, but this is the best offer I have," she prefaced, looking me straight in the eye. "I'm leaving this scrapyard today. If you come with me, I'll help you. We'll get your arm fixed, and then you can become stronger. If you want revenge against that Yun guy, then the only way you'll get it is by becoming as good as he is."

I was surprised. Revenge… Was that what I wanted?

"If you're willing to learn, I can teach you."

My face fell as I ran the idea around in my head. Revenge wasn't something I was well-versed in. Even breaking that kid's fingers wasn't personal. That was logic to me. This, however, was about my feelings. There was no denying it – not after I had run after him like that. Some part of me wanted Yun dead for what he'd done. The only question was whether or not I was willing to go through with it.

"…" I opened my mouth to say something, but choked on it.

The thought of revenge sat clearly in my mind. I could see the word, its definition, what it had a tendency to bring. A wise man once stated that an eye for an eye makes both sides blind. Someone punches you in the face, so you punch them in the face back. Now you both have aching faces, and your hatred for each other has increased. By that logic, revenge seemed like little more than a way to get myself in even more shit.

But then…

What else do I have left?

"I'll do it."

And now Dust is turning Renegade. What am I going to do with him, the little trouble-magnet? X)

Thanks again to all readers, reviewers, favoriters, and followers! Also big thanks to Warhammer 2-4 and Spiritstrike for being pals! I couldn't have done it without all of you and your wonderful support! Seriously, thank you all!