DiSCLAIMER: I don't own Mass Effect, Bioware, or any canon characters contained therein. I do, however, own my self-insert and the idea for Project Ares.

REVIEW RESPONSES:

JustAFerret - That won't happen. Garrus isn't Space Batman yet, so no rescues for me. :( However, that won't be necessary. *Smirks*

Sleepy-G - Reviews taste like chicken because I say so, and since I am the writer of this fanfic . . . *waves writing utensil in a vaguely threatening way* Also, I would say Cerberus is more like the Taliban than the Al-Qaeda (don't ask why, I don't really know, I just felt like being contrary). And how did you guess what I was going to do? OMG, psychic!

TemptingEternity13 – Why, thank you.

Reema – Oh we will.

ArchShadow24 – The name-dropping will happen, but not for a while. And yes, he will.

A/N: Okay, y'all, here's chapter 3. As an important note, there is a HUGE timeskip between last chapter and this one, for reasons of my own.

CHAPTER 3

I don't even know how fucking long I've been here; wherever the hell this is. I've been poked, prodded, injected with chemicals, operated on with only enough anesthesia to keep me unable to move, subjected to psychological and mental torture in an attempt to break me down, and a load of other shit I don't even care to think about.

Every time I woke up, it was the same goddamn thing. I would get hit with some sort of gas that would make it really fucking hard for me to think straight, at which point I would get pulled out of my boring-ass cell, dragged to a lab with bright lights that hurt my eyes, strapped to an operating table, and then . . . well, I had no fucking idea what happened then, because I would get knocked out and wake up some time later back in my cell, where I would then twiddle my thumbs for hours on end while plotting the deaths of every single member of Cerberus I saw that time.

There were a few silver linings; I didn't need my glasses anymore, I was in insanely good shape, and I grew something like a foot in height. As well, my memory had gotten amazingly good, and almost photographic; one of the things Cerberus did to me was make me learn, by force, how to use, take apart and clean various types of weapons, the best ways to kill every single major race including other humans, and other, more unpleasant things, and I could remember every single detail perfectly. Regardless, I was still stuck as a lab rat for a fucking terrorist organization.

Every now and then, usually after being operated on, I would get forced through obstacle courses and other shit, probably to test whatever the hell they were putting in me. They had a metal collar around my neck that would shock me if I didn't do what they wanted me to do. Or if I went too slow, or if I talked back to them or even talked at all. They shocked me if I even stuck my tongue out in their direction. They underestimated me; something that happened because of the hell they put me through was that my pain tolerance went through the roof. The last time they tried putting me through the tests, I was able to resist and fight through the pain long enough to actually rip the collar off. Though after that, I got gassed and tortured for an extra-long period for my efforts.

They tried to get me to join Cerberus willingly. Morons left me unrestrained while the guy giving the spiel about "loyalty to my race" was there. I nearly strangled him to death before they managed to sedate me again. They tried other methods; none of them worked. After that, they tried to break me, then plant suggestions in my head to make me blindly loyal to them; that didn't work either, but I will never forget what they did to me, and I will never forget the ones responsible.

They better pray to whatever gods they believe in that I don't break out of this place; if I do, they will be the ones to die first, and it will not be pleasant for them.

...

After waking up after yet another invasive-yet-unremembered surgery, I saw that I was still in the lab. Oh joy, now I can get put through exhausting physical testing or be tortured for the umpteenth time.

Accompanying my return to consciousness was a feeling of nausea and a splitting headache. What the fuck? I never felt sick before when I woke up. I brought an arm up over my face to block out the light, and- wait, what the hell? Why wasn't I restrained? All the other times, Cerberus always had me tied down securely.

The second thing I noticed was that my arm was covered in armour of some sort. My forearm was encased in two smooth, curved metal plates that wrapped all around my forearm and fitted together with barely a gap between them. A single plate covered the back of my wrist and hand. Segmented metal pieces were protecting each finger, the pieces on the last joints of each tapering to dull points reminiscent of claws, but not large or long enough to obstruct my ability to grip or to use as weapons. Dull grey material that on close inspection looked like tiny interlocking scales covered my palms, the inside of my wrists, and any places not protected by armour plating, as well as covering my entire neck and coming up over my head in a sort of close-fitting hood. The armour extended up my arm and covered pretty much my entire body, as far as I could tell, and was coloured a dull silver-grey, with an orange stripe bracketed by black running along the length of my arm and down the centre of my chestplate. Cerberus colours.

Okay, I am kinda freaking out now. What. The fuck. Is going on.

I sat up, and as I did so, noticed Captain Bastard himself leaning against the wall on the opposite side of the room, reading off a datapad. He looked up. "Ah," he said. "You're awake."

"Oh, fuck you." I growled, feeling another wave of nausea. "Urgh..." I groaned. "If I didn't feel like shit, I would come over there and kill you."

"Oh really?" He smirked and held up what looked like a handle with a button on one end. He pressed the button, and suddenly a sharp wave of pain ripped through me.

It felt like my nerves were on fire. It went on for only a few seconds, but it was enough to make me collapse off the table and onto the floor from how much I was writhing.

Once the pain shut off, I glared shakily at the man. "What . . . the fuck." I groaned, muscles still spasming.

"That was the control chip we put in your head just a little while ago," he said, smirking. "I'm very pleased to see that it works. Of course, we'll have to perform more tests to be sure of the effectiveness, just to be sure." Oh, you smug bastard. You have no idea how cathartic it is going to be for me to kill you.

I rose shakily, grabbing the edge of the operating table to pull my self up. I noticed dully that my grip was actually crushing and deforming the edge of the table. Once back on my feet, I glared at the man with death in my eyes.

"You son of a bitch," I snarled. "I'm going to murder you, and dance on your grave."

Another wave of pain, not as bad as the last time, as I knew what to expect, but still enough to drive me to my knees. As the pain receded, the man, smirk turning malicious, said, "Now, if you're quite finished, there are tests to run. Or would you prefer I just use the chip on you until it fries half of your brain? I assure you, we have no real need for your higher mental functions; in fact, that would do wonders for making you more obedient."

I gritted my teeth. "Fine," I forced out, before adding one last insult under my breath, "Fucker."

The man seemed to smile even wider, if that was even possible. He poked his thumb in the direction of another table, where a there lay a helmet, coloured grey, black, and orange like the armour I was wearing. "Go put that on, and then we can go to the testing area."

I growled slightly, but managed to walk, albeit a little unsteadily, over to the helmet. Picking it up, I noticed that the opening at the bottom was too small to fit my head into. A plate was covering what I guessed to be the area where I guessed the underside of a person's jaw would be.

"Hey," I demanded, "How the hell do I put this thing on?"

"There's a button on the left side of the jaw area." the man said. "Push it."

I flipped the helmet so I could see where the button was, located it, and pushed it. The entire chin and jaw area of the helmet slid forward, uncovering the rest of the opening and allowing me to fit my head inside. It was a snug fit, but not at all uncomfortable. Right after I got the helmet on, the chin piece locked back in place. I started freaking out a little, as the helmet was stuffy inside and I couldn't get any air, before a sort of hissing click sounded, and the interior of the helmet immediately cooled down and I could breath again. I noticed some text pop up in the upper-right-hand corner of my vision. Vision being a relative term, as all I could see was black.

Vacuum seal enabled, it read. Seal strength: 100%. Full environmental hard-seal.

Then more text came up, turning into a short list of what seemed to be diagnostics or something. The first line read:

Interfacing with combat hard-suit . . . Interfacing successful. HUD online.

Suddenly, my vision field flared to life. The interior of the helmet had been black before, but now it had changed to a view of the room that was so clear that if there weren't readouts and other stuff along the edges of my vision, I wouldn't have known I was wearing a helmet at all. There was what seemed to be a radar scanner in the lower left-hand corner of my vision field and a blue bar along the top, along with the text in the top right corner. As I looked at the man, a very small, almost unnoticeable reticule popped up and centered itself on his face. Then it disappeared, and text popped up in the bottom right of my vision field, reading:

Species: Human

Gender: Male

Condition: Uninjured

Status: Calm, unarmed

Threat Level: Minimal

. . . Okay, that is REALLY cool. A little bit distracting, but cool. The text disappeared after a second.

"Is everything working?" the man asked.

I shrugged. "I gue- Wait, what the shit?" My voice through the helmet was distorted into a menacing, digitized, raspy tone. "What is up with my voice in this thing?"

"Voice scrambler," he answered. "So you can't be identified. Not that it would matter; according to records, you don't exist anyway.

"Now, does your radar work?" I looked at it. It looked almost exactly like the radar from Halo, and there was a white dot being shown on it that looked like it represented him, based on its position.

"I think so," I answered uncertainly. "There's a white dot on it."

"That would be me," he said curtly. "White is neutral or unknown, green is friendly, red is known hostiles. The blue dot in the centre is you."

Well, that's handy.

"There's a blue bar at the top of my HUD," I commented. "What is it?"

"Shield indicator. How full it is shows how much damage your shields can take." He turned and gestured for me to follow him. "Follow me."

"Like I have a choice," I muttered, shooting him a death glare, but I followed him.

We soon reached another room. It was large, way too-brightly lit, and completely empty except for a large number of closed hatches of varying sizes on the walls or in the floor. Oh joy, it's the examination room. Well, this is just bloody fantastic; what the hell am I going to have to do now?

I looked at Captain Bastard, wondering what the hell he was up to, but he just smirked from where he stood, behind a transparent window of some kind, next to another man sitting at a computer console.

"Begin the test." he said to the other man, who nodded and tapped something on the console. One of the hatches opened up, and from the shadowed corridor behind it, there were the sounds of whirring and heavy footsteps.

I gulped. I had a really bad feeling about this.

...

I groaned, picking myself up off the floor. That bastard decided to test my armour's capabilities, namely the shields, by setting a bloody fucking YMIR mech on me. Of course, it wasn't with live ammo; no, instead they loaded it with rubber rounds which, by the way, hurt like a motherfucker, especially when you get hit with one half the size of your head that's being used as a dummy missile. And I thought YMIRs were a pain in the ass in the game.

What's worse, Captain Bastard and his minion let the mech shoot me even after it took out my shields. I wasn't exactly certain how long it was before they called it off; things got kind of fuzzy after I got whaled by the second dummy missile.

What did surprise me was how little injury I received and how fast I recovered. I would've expected to at least have broken ribs from the pounding I received, but no; I was likely bruised from head to toe from all the hits, but within a minute the pain faded from excruciating to almost nothing and I was able to get up.

The first thing I noticed was that there was someone new in the room. Captain Bastard's minion had left, but there was an asari wearing handcuffs and some kind of collar slumped on the floor with him standing over her holding a collapsed pistol. He threw it in my direction. It landed on the floor a foot in front of me and slid the rest of the way to hit my boot.

"The hell is this for?" I asked, kneeling to pick it up. I hit the deploy button, looked at the gun, and then at the asari on the floor. She looked young by human standards, even though she was probably old enough to be my grandmother in human years, and there were tear tracks running down her face, which had several large, deep purple bruises. Sobs racked her body, and her back hitched irregularly from her ragged breathing.

"That is for another test." Captain Bastard said.

My eyes narrowed. There was something bad going on here.

"And that would be?" I growled. This fucker was pissing me off.

"We're seeing just how effectively a control chip can be used to, shall we say, overcome a person's reluctance towards certain actions they normally would not do, as well as testing out the punishment and reward system we have laid out."

I looked at the pistol again, and I got a chill as I realized what he meant. I remembered something Jack said in ME2: "I got shocked if I hesitated. Narcotics flooded my veins when I attacked."

Dear God. They want me kill this asari, and they're going to use the control chip to start conditioning me to kill aliens.

"Burn in hell." I spat, then put the pistol barrel up under my chin, ready to shoot myself. "I'll blow my own brains out before I kill her, so FUCK YOU!"

"Wrong answer." He pulled out the control chip's trigger and hit the button.

The pain drove me to my knees, but I was able to keep a grip on the pistol. The only thing going through my mind was making the pain stop. I opened my eyes, forcing through the involuntary blurring and tunneling of my sight to look up at him, the source of my agony. Muscles spasming wildly, I raised the pistol in my clenched fist. My finger found the trigger and pulled, repeatedly, until it overheated and clicked.

The pain suddenly gone, I dropped the overheated pistol and collapsed to the floor, sucking in deep breaths as I recovered. Once I had managed to get my breathing under control, I looked up. The asari was lying on the ground in the fetal position, arms covering her head. I hoped she was alright.

Captain Bastard, however, was lying on the floor, unmoving and leaking blood. He was still alive though; I could hear him making a wheezy gurgling noise.

I pushed myself up off the floor, picked up the pistol, and walked over to where he lay. There were two shot wounds in his lower chest that were leaking small streams of blood, but the one that took the cake was up higher; I had managed to shoot him directly in the throat, and he was choking on his own blood as he tried to breathe through what was left of his windpipe.

Leaning over him, I looked him in the eye and whispered, "Say hello to the devil for me." I pointed the pistol in his face and pulled the trigger. The bullet left a neat red hole right between his eyes, but the floor was splattered with gore, which sprayed for a foot along the floor in all directions from the exit wound.

I looked numbly down at the corpse. I had just killed a man. The man who had been in charge of experimenting on me, of torturing me, was dead. My shoulders started shaking in a combination of self-hate, disgust, and hysterical laughter.

A whimper from the asari snapped me out of it. I turned to look at her. She was looking up at me with fear in her eyes, and she was trying to scoot backward, away from me. I must've terrified her with my laughing; it probably made me sound rather unhinged.

I crouched down to her eye level. "It's alright," I said softly, or tried to. The scrambler in my helmet didn't let it sound the way I intended. I fumbled for the release button on my helmet, and pulled the helmet off.

I tried again. "I'm not going to hurt you," I said, doing my best to smile reassuringly. The asari just stared at me, but at least she wasn't trying to get away from me any more. I moved so she was in arms' reach, and reached for her wrists so I could try to get the cuffs off. She flinched, but let me work on them.

The cuffs were a pain in the ass to get off. They were too snug for me to get more than two fingers underneath each, so it took several minutes before I was able to pry them off.

"What are you doing?" the asari asked, voice hoarse.

"What does it look like?" I asked sarcastically. "I'm getting you out of here. I'm not leaving you here with these sons-of-bitches."

"Bu- but you're human, too." she said, confused.

"Just because I'm human doesn't mean I feel any sort of loyalty to these people. You have no idea of the shit they've put me through," I explained. "Put your chin up please."

She lifted her chin, giving me better access to the collar around her neck. It didn't look like the collar Cerberus used to keep me in check; it had a weird glowing blue stripe in the middle, running the circumference of the metal ring.

I rotated the collar until I could see the seam where it snapped together. Getting as good of a grip on it as I could on either side, I pulled it apart. The metal gave with a weird twanging noise. I held it up to the light. "Want a souvenir?" I asked, trying to make light of the situation.

The asari shook her head. "No thanks."

I stood up and offered a hand, which she took, and pulled her to her feet. Feeling curious, I asked, "Are you a biotic?"

She looked at me funny. "Yes. Why?"

I shrugged, picking up my helmet and pistol. "It will just make escaping here easier." I collapsed the pistol and put it on my hip, where it stuck, then put the helmet on and sealed it. I started walking toward the door, then realized I had no idea where to go.

"When they brought you here," I asked, "Did you see anything that looked like a hangar?"

She nodded. "They actually brought me through a hangar bay on my way. I can show you the way."

"Alright," I agreed. "But you should stay behind me. You don't have shields and you're the only one who knows where we're going." I pointed to the corpse. "Also, could you help me get his omnitool? I have no idea what it looks like."

We went through the hallways, me in front, pistol raised, the asari behind me occasionally giving directions. Getting her to remember the exact route to the hangar turned out to be irrelevant, as Captain Bastard's omnitool, which I gave to the asari since I had no idea how to work it.

We had also pilfered a small chip that the asari said was a credit chit. The amount on it was staggering. I'd never seen that many zeros in a money denomination before.

It was kind of eerie, how empty the corridors were. You would've expected there to at least be some people around. I was also surprised that the alarm hadn't been sounded, or something. Captain Bastard must've thought he didn't need anyone monitoring the testing room when he tried to get me to kill the asari.

Altogether, this was kind of suspicious. Either I was getting insanely lucky, or this was some kind of setup. I had a horrible, suspicious mind, so I went with the latter. This made me kind of twitchy.

"Ah!" the asari exclaimed, dodging my pistol as I swung it around to point in the direction of something I thought I heard. In a low, furious voice, she hissed, "What was that about?"

"Sorry," I apologized, "This all just seems suspicious, so I'm kinda jumpy." At that point, Cerberus had apparently found Captain Bastard's body and realized we had escaped, because the air was suddenly filled with the obnoxious caterwauling of a Klaxon.

Okay, so it's not a setup. That's comforting.

"Never mind what I said about it being suspicious," I amended, picking up the pace. "We gotta move."

Rounding the next corner, we came face-to-face with three Cerberus soldiers. One of them shouted, "It's Zero and the asari! Get them!"

"Oh shit!" I exclaimed, taking cover back around the corner and pulling the asari with me. I popped around the corner long enough to squeeze off three shots, one of which hit a soldier in the shoulder, before taking cover again as assault rifle fire smashed into the wall. I swallowed hard; I really hoped my shields were good.

"I can help," the asari said. Oh right, biotic.

"What can you do?" I asked, a feral grin spreading on my face.

"Not a whole lot," she said. I popped around the corner again and loosed off a few more shots, this time taking the time to aim and managing to nail the already-wounded soldier twice before bullets started impacting against my shields. I ducked back into cover, and she continued, "I never had commando training, so I'm not as strong a biotic as some other asari, but I could throw someone a fair distance if I needed."

I had an idea. "What about-" I started, then shot twice more around the corner. One of the bullets hit a soldier right in the neck, and he dropped like a rock. Bullseye! I cheered silently, and ducked around the corner again, where I continued what I had been saying. "What about throwing someone up, like to smash them into the ceiling or something?" I asked.

After a moment, she nodded. "I think so." she answered.

"Alright," I said. "On three, use your biotics on one of them. One . . . two . . . three!" We both popped around the corner. I squeezed the trigger as fast as I could, not even bothering to aim, just trying to keep to soldiers off-balance, while the asari glowed blue, reached out with one hand and made a motion like she was tossing a ball up. The blue aura appeared around the remaining uninjured soldier, and he suddenly rocketed upwards to collide with a sickening crunch against the ceiling. He then fell back to the ground limply, and it didn't look like he was getting up any time soon.

The other soldier, the one who I had already wounded, just stared down at the guy who had been smashed into the ceiling, and I took the opportunity to drop him with two shots to the chest. I was getting better at aiming; I wouldn't be consistently dropping people with headshots any time soon, but it was improvement.

I walked quickly over to the bodies, trying to ignore the churning in my stomach at the sight of the men I'd killed. I picked up their dropped assault rifles and offered one to the asari. She took it hesitantly, but quickly got ahold of herself and held it with much more confidence. I took the remaining two, collapsed one and put it on my back, and held the other in lieu of my pistol, which I also collapsed and put away.

We continued along the route to the hangar, only encountering one other group of soldiers, which was easy enough to kill, before reaching the door to the hangar. I ducked behind the edge of the doorway, as I saw five red dots on my radar -the armour was apparently smart enough to mark everything as hostile except for the asari- and peeked around the edge to look and see what exactly they were. I groaned inside. Apart from an assortment of crates scattered around the room -why the hell were there always convenient chest high walls all over the place? - there were also three regular soldiers, plus two who had the weird-looking holograms surrounding them that meant they had tech armor, that were all standing in front of a shuttle. Fuck.

"Three regular ones, plus two with shields." I told the asari.

She nodded, then said, "I'll get the regulars,"

"And I'll get the ones with shields." I agreed. She nodded, and we both readied our rifles.

I was first through the door, and I used the age-old strategy of wildly spraying bullets in the direction of the soldiers and screaming obscenities at them at the top of my lungs as I sprinted for the nearest cover. Most of them ducked for cover, but I killed one who was a little slower than the rest before my rifle overheated. Ducking behind the crate I had reached, I quickly swapped the overheated rifle for the collapsed one on my back.

Popping up again, I noticed the one of the two regulars picked up and bodily hurled into the other. I grinned. Biotics were awesome; I wished I could do that.

I was interrupted in my musing by an electrical crackle and my HUD flashing red. I ducked into cover and glanced at my shield indicator, which had dropped to a little over half. I raised an eyebrow; in the game, Shepard would always completely lose shields when hit with tech attacks. Those were powerful shields I had.

I came back out of cover, just as one of the tech-armoured soldiers came up to shoot at the asari, and opened fire on him with my assault rifle. This time however, I just fired in short bursts; if there was one thing I had learned from playing shooter games, it was that shooting in bursts worked a lot better than spraying and praying. The soldier's tech armour collapsed after four quick pulses of the trigger, and I held the trigger down after that to kill him as fast as possible.

The second guy came up right after the first dropped dead, and I decided to try something kind of risky. Trusting my shields to hold, I vaulted over my cover and bull-rushed the guy. The soldier seemed too shocked to do anything, right up until I bashed him in the face with my rifle. He fell to the ground clutching at his nose, and I was about to shoot him when a stream of bullets came from the side and did the job for me. I turned to see the asari pointing her assault rifle at the dead soldier.

She shrugged. "What?" she asked. She rested the rifle over her shoulder, turned, and walked toward the shuttle. She turned, adding, "You coming? I, for one want to get out of here."

Now there was something I could agree with. I followed and got in the shuttle with her. The door closed, the asari walked into the cockpit, then I felt the shudder as it lifted off. I sighed and sank onto one of the seats. I was free.

A/N: I'm really sorry about how slow this update was. I really have no excuse beyond my own laziness. I was enjoying the fact that I was out of school and could just lie around doing nothing. I also couldn't find a good place to cut it off, so the whole thing kinda dragged on.

Also, sorry if the fight scene seemed sucky; I'm really much better at writing hand-to-hand combat.

Next chapter will probably be a while, because I promised myself I would at least try to write another chapter of Lone Wolf after this.

Read and review! And no flames, dammit! I haven't gotten any yet, and I plan to keep it that way.