I do not own Final Fantasy VII or any of the characters.
Experiments
Cody knelt beside Wedge, feeling his neck for a pulse. "He's alive. He'll be okay."
"You sure?" Barret asked.
"Yeah," Cody nodded. "A few scrapes and burns from the fight, but he'll be just fine."
Barret sighed, nodding, and stood. "Makin' me worry like that. I'd kick your ass if you didn't look like shit. Thank God."
"I can't believe he's alright," Jessie smiled, kneeling on Wedge's other side before frowning and looking toward the exit. "But, I still don't understand how he got this far in, and around a corner, if he was unconscious. Or else, why he's unconscious now after walking over here."
"Yeah, about that," Cody said, looking into the massive, open room they were in. "I'm suspecting foul play. Barret, put him out in the hallway."
"What?" Barret asked.
"Now," Cody said, picking up his gunblade and preparing himself, holding it in front of himself with two hands.
Barret quickly lifted Wedge and moved to leave the room, only for shutters to begin sliding down the openings into the room. He gently set Wedge outside the room and Jessie slipped out under the shutters.
"Be careful," Jessie said.
"You too," Cody said before the doors closed.
Cody turned back to the room. The room's only decorations were shipping containers near the far wall, and a catwalk on the left side over the containers. Just as the shutter closed, monsters began to appear from behind the containers. They were humanoids with dark purple bodies, some places glowing orange in thin lines, four flat-tipped spikes extending from their shoulders, their entire body covered in some kind of chitin-like exoskeleton, and they each had a single long, segmented tentacle, or maybe tail, off the back of their left shoulder. The first to appear leapt onto a shipping container and roared, more and more flooding into the room.
"We're in trouble," Cody said.
"We can take 'em," Barret said, Gatling gun beginning to spin.
"Are these Shinra experiments?" Tifa asked.
"Most likely," Cody said. "Looks like something Hojo would cook up."
The creatures swarmed toward them and Barret opened fire. His bullets ripped through them quickly, but they didn't seem to feel it. A couple lost an arm or leg, but they continued, any that couldn't run scrambling on their remaining leg and their hands. After a moment, the creatures reached them and Tifa and Cody stepped forward to meet them. Cody launched himself forward with his gunblade, then used a second blast to spin, shredding his way through eight that were clumped together, then began to skid, slashing two more as he passed. He stopped himself just in time for his sword to deflect a slash from one of the creature's claws, the force sending him staggering backward. The creature instantly roared, leaping at him, only for six of Barret's bullets to slam into it at the same time, Barret's gun hissing and steaming for a moment as the creature sailed across the room with a hole through its torso. Three creatures charged at Barret from behind and Cody squeezed his trigger, gripping his sword with both hands as he shot toward Barret.
"Down!" he shouted.
Barret dropped instantly and Cody squeezed his trigger again as he landed in front of Barret, slashing over him and splitting all three across the chest, the momentum of his swing spinning him and allowing him to also slash the two creatures he'd heard chasing him. He stopped his slash in time to see Tifa drill a punch into a creature and send it exploding backward into several more, its chest collapsed. He slashed the tip off one of the dead creatures' tails and held his gunblade out with the blade flat, laying the spike on it before aiming at a group of creatures off to one side, pulling the trigger and sending the tail piece speeding through the air to a creature, which it impaled through the head mid-roar. He sprinted forward as Barret opened fire on the group from off to Cody's left, killing three and distracting the other two that were alive, allowing Cody to kill them both easily just after Barret had stopped firing. Suddenly, a grate on the wall all but exploded out of the wall and more of the creatures began to swarm through it.
"Ah, of course there's more!" Barret shouted opening fire again.
Cody turned toward them, watching as Barret dropped them quickly, though not nearly fast enough to deal with all of them. Suddenly, two on the catwalk began to fire spikes out of the end of their tails, aiming at Barret. He swore as one scratched his arm, turning to deal with them, and Cody and Tifa moved to deal with the ones still charging at them. Cody looked up at the vent where the creatures were still coming from.
"Tifa, see if you can seal the vent somehow!" Cody shouted, slashing a pair of creatures before launching himself forward into the next group and meeting them by slashing a wide arc through the air, killing most of them.
"On it!" Tifa shouted sprinting for a set of stairs leading up to the catwalk.
Just as she reached the catwalk, however, a massive hand and forearm, together about three quarters the size of the rest of the monsters, exploded up from the ground under the shipping containers, a giant version of the same monster rapidly breaking through the floor, roaring as it pulled itself into the room. It smashed a fist down on the catwalk, hurling Tifa backward, only for Barret to catch her and throw her at the same time as she jumped off his hand, launching her up to an undamaged part of the catwalk. Cody stared at the monster. Aside from the obvious size difference, this one had four tails, rather than one. He shook his head, laughing humorlessly.
"Fuck you Shinra," he sighed. "Making me fight giant monsters and shit."
He moved to charge, only for a dozen of the smaller ones to swarm him. He held his gunblade in front of him with the blade to his left, and as soon as the monsters were in range, he squeezed his trigger, spinning in a circle and slashing them all, the metal soles of his shoes sparking on the metal floor as he did. Finally, he used a second blast to stop himself, taking a second to steady himself, then looked around. Barret was spraying the massive creature with bullets, seemingly harmlessly, and Tifa was fighting the smaller versions on the catwalk. Cody sprinted for the massive thing, just as it drove a tail into one of the smaller creatures, then whipped the tail forward, sending the creature streaking at Cody, who only evaded it because he used his gunblade to launch himself out of the way.
"Barret!" he shouted. "I'll keep its attention!" Do something about those tails!"
Barret nodded, beginning to circle the creature as Cody launched himself at it. He used a blast to slash the thing, but his blade barley made it through its exoskeleton. He swore as a tail flipped around, launching himself to the side out of the way. The tail bounced off its chest where he had been, and he flipped, skidding backward on his feet and left hand as he landed. A small creature leapt off the catwalk at him, but he flipped his gunblade around to reverse grip and held it behind him before pulling the trigger and jumping into a backflip, turning into a vertical saw blade and splitting the creature in half before his momentum died and he landed on his feet again, flipping his sword back around. The giant creature roared in pain suddenly as Barret began to spray the tails with bullets. It staggered toward Cody and he pulled his sword back, squeezing the trigger and launching himself forward before spinning himself like a saw blade, slashing both of the giant creature's legs and taking them out from under it, sending it crashing to the ground. Barret stepped up onto it instantly, reloading his Gatling gun with a mag containing a materia. A moment later, the center barrel of his Gatling gun, which could fire a ball of fire if he used the right mag, fired a massive blast of blue energy, which exploded against the base of the tails, though it didn't leave his entire gun glowing, only the very end of it, and the orange glow began to fade quickly.
The creature stood, roaring, and Cody sprinted forward, blasting himself into the air, then flipping and using another blast to turn himself into a saw blade, slicing off all four tails at once before landing hard. He grunted as the creature fell to its knees, tilting back slightly but staying upright.
"Barret!" Tifa called out as she took down the last of the smaller creatures. "There's something exposed in its chest!"
Barret sprinted around in front of it and grinned, reloading his gun before shouting and unloading a massive flood of bullets into the creature's chest, the creature roaring in agony. Cody ran around beside Barret and saw a glowing blue heart exposed through an opening in the creature's chest. Just as Barret's bullets finally ended, Cody launched himself forward, driving his gunblade into the thing's heart. It roared, reaching for him, only for him to squeeze his gunblade's trigger, launching himself backward at the same time as blowing the creature's heart into paste. He flipped backward, skidding to a stop beside Barret again and sighed. The creature staggered backward before collapsing, crashing into the wall hard and cratering it before beginning to fade into mako energy, as all the smaller ones had been doing. Just as it finished disappearing and Barret raised a hand to shoot their way through the wall, since the way they came in was still sealed as well, three smaller ones suddenly roared above them, falling toward them, only for Cloud to leap off of the catwalk and slash all three, killing them before landing beside them.
"Look at you, showing up after the fight's finished," Cody said. "Where were we?"
Barret opened fire on the crater, blasting it into a hole after a few moments. They all walked over, looking through the hole, only to stop, staring at the tanks lining the walls of the room on the far side. There were dozens of tanks, and inside of each sat what was once a human, not half-way mutated into a monster, their skin all an ashen grey, devoid of hair, and all seeming lifeless.
"Oh my God!" Tifa gasped. "Were those..."
"People?" Barret finished.
"Not anymore," Cody said.
"Yeah," Cloud agreed. "That's the Shinra I know."
"This has Hojo's stench all over it," Cody said, climbing through the wall just as Cloud groaned, holding a hand to his head.
"Cloud?" Tifa asked worriedly, only for him to shake his head.
"I'm fine," Cloud said.
Cody walked over to one of the machines and pressed his watch's crown, the screen appearing over it. He set it to scan, and the window faded before he held his arm out, bending his hand down out of the way before the crown projected a light the same color as the screen. The light swept down over the person in the tank, then back up before the screen reappeared. He stared at it before sighing, pressing the crown again.
"We should put them out of their misery," Cody said. "They can't be helped, and we shouldn't let Shinra use them."
"Agreed," Cloud said.
"We can't just kill them!" Tifa argued. "We need to help these people!"
"Tifa, these aren't people anymore," Cloud said. "Hojo's turned them into monsters. It would be a mercy to just kill them now."
"If you don't want to be a part of it, you can leave," Cody said, bringing up his watch's screen again and wirelessly linking it to the facility's internal network, raising the doors that had sealed them in before. "We'll be up once we've dealt with this. And take Jessie with you. She shouldn't see this."
Tifa hesitated before nodding and turning, walking away with Barret. Cody turned to the tank in front of him and pressed a red button on the control panel beside it, venting poisonous gas into the tank.
"Thank...you," the person inside rasped after a moment before fading away in seconds.
Cody moved along one wall, Cloud following the other. Finally, they reached the far end of the room and stopped, finding a computer. Cody turned it on, hooking his watch to it wirelessly and quickly scanned the computer for data that he found interesting. What he found was disgusting but unsurprising. The facility, under Hojo's orders, used people abducted from the slums as experiments. They'd all been classified as failures, however, and the facility was abandoned. The facility did however, have a couple of other functions. One was a weapons' development area somewhere near the bottom, then a storage room for a monster Cody definitely did not think should be allowed to live. A Behemoth that was listed as "Type Zero," which meant that it was considered a very dangerous, and very successful, Shinra weapon that likely was captured, or created, specifically to be released behind enemy lines in the event of a war. Cody was about to close out of the system when he found one last thing to help. A permissions system. It was a system that was supposed to be accessible only to the highest levels of Shinra, because it gave someone access to whatever the person using the system wanted. Cody grinned widely, reactivating his Turk access codes, then created several new ones to go with it, in case his got deactivated again. He stored the codes in his watch's memory chip, then wiped his history from the computer and shut it down.
"You ready?" Cloud asked.
"Yeah," Cody nodded. "Let's get the fuck out of here."
They left the room through the hole, then made their way back to the surface, Jessie meeting Cody with a hug.
"You took forever!" Jessie said. "What were you doing down there?"
"Giving myself access codes to Shinra facilities and computers," Cody smirked. "I got one access code for each reactor, one for Shinra HQ, and one for a spare."
"You can do that!?" Tifa gaped.
"Only if you know what you're doing and are lucky enough to find a computer that some dumbass forgot to erase the permissions system from, which we did," Cody said. "So, now what?"
"Let's head back to Aerith's house," Cloud said. "Wedge needs somewhere safe to rest, and we could probably all use a rest too."
"Before we go save Aerith," Cody said. "Do we have time for that? you know what Hojo's like, right?"
Cloud was silent for a moment. "We're not going after her yet. We'll ask her mother's permission once we get back."
Cody sighed. "Alright. If you're sure."
Cloud nodded and Barret lifted Wedge, Jessie and Tifa picking up the two cats that had led them to him. Then, they all turned and made their way back through the debris that used to be Sector Seven.
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