Hitori Nojima - Death Stranding - The Official Novelization, Volume One

Below the eaves that barely jutted out at the South Knot City distribution center entrance, the ritual had begun. The priest was Higgs and the sacrifice was Fragile. Those witnessing the ceremony were their subordinates. With the exception of Fragile, all their faces were hidden.

“Listen up, Fragile! I got a proposition for ya!” Higgs declared. The witnesses raised their guns. They were all aimed at Fragile. Higgs looked up at the sky and the clouds converged, shrouding the area in dusky darkness. Fragile had barely begun to notice the drops of water begin to fall when the timefall suddenly poured down.

“Do you want to live out your days as damaged goods? Or would you rather take damage for the goods?”

The case that contained the nuke was placed in front of Fragile. It was a case that she had transported.

“Alright. If all you want is to save yourself, you just have to jump. However, if you want to see this altruistic streak of yours through, then you’ll have to carry my nuke to the bottomless pit and toss it in. Then you’ll be the city’s savior. Simple enough, right?” Higgs said before looking up at the sky again. The timefall was crashing down like a waterfall.

“I don’t want to go too easy on you, though. You will have to walk naked through timefall to do it. Trade a lot of your time for a little bit of the city’s. Hell, seems like a fair exchange to me.”

Higgs removed his mask, and then the gas mask underneath, to reveal his true face.

“You see, the truth is, I don’t much care for my face. That’s why I hide it. Oh but you… ooh, you just love yours, don’t ya? I bet daddy was real proud.”

He grabbed Fragile’s hair and pulled her closer. A cruel smile broke across his face as Fragile tried to turn her face away from him. He stuck out his tongue and licked her eyeball.

“Oh! No, no, no. Now, don’t worry. I won’t mess it up. See, I want your face to be a kind of testament.”

Higgs went on, placing his mask over Fragile’s face. They had switched places. Now Higgs was showing his bare face, while Fragile’s was concealed.

“Why did you do it? Why did you betray me?”

Higgs threw Fragile and her muffled voice a look of pity.

“Because I found someone who completes me. Someone who doesn’t need me to wear a mask.” He gave orders to his subordinates and forced Fragile onto her feet.

“Word to the wise. Even if you do save South Knot, you’ll always be the nutjob who blew up Middle Knot. That pretty face of yours will always be remembered as the face of a terrorist. They’ll never stop hunting you. Believe me, I know. Well, they can slap a sticker on you, but you’re still gonna break in transit.”

The rain kept falling as hard as ever. Fragile could hear the sound of a building collapsing among the ruins somewhere.

“So. What’s it gonna be?” Higgs leaned in and whispered in her ear. This time his tongue flicked against her earlobe. Fragile looked up at him and spoke as if to reject the lukewarm sticky feeling on her ear and the curse Higgs had whispered inside it.

“I’ll take the damage. And the goods. I don’t break that easy.” Fragile recited the same words inside her head to purify the curse and keep her spirits up.

I’ll take the damage and the goods. I don’t break that easy. I’ll take the damage and the goods. I don’t break that easy.

Fragile picked up the bomb that lay at her feet and ran.

The timefall pounded relentlessly against her shoulders, back, chest, and limbs, stealing away her time without mercy. Her attunement to her own body, that should have been deteriorating at its own rate, was thrown into disarray. It started to age. The woman who took the damage and the goods was beginning to break.

Protected by Higgs’s mask, her face didn’t age a day, but her body from neck to toe was now covered by the wrinkled skin of an old woman. The only thing grounding the sensation of her torn and broken body in reality was the weight of the bomb. It kept the woman named Fragile running through the rain.

All life in Knot City was resting on her delicate shoulders.

“Well, there it is. You are a goddamn hero. You did the right thing,” Sam muttered as Fragile finished recounting her story. “It was all true.”

As he looked into the crater that had swallowed up the bomb, Sam praised Fragile, but she just shook her head feebly.

“I’m no hero, Sam. That choice I made? I’ve regretted it ever since. All I had to do was jump, and I could have saved myself.”

“But instead you saved a city.”

Fragile shook her head once more.

“Well, now there’s only one person left for me to ‘save.’ I’m going to make Higgs regret he ever crossed me.”

“By killing him?” Sam asked.

“Can’t. He’s way more powerful now than he was before. But you could take him. You could. But promise me… Promise me you’ll leave him alive. There’s something I wanna ask him to his face. I want to know why he betrayed me.”

When Sam saw Fragile’s face, he thought that she looked hollow, as if she had lost someone very dear to her. A cryptobiote drifted in the space between them. Fragile plucked it out of the air skillfully.

“Do you want it?”

Sam grimaced for a moment, before taking it and popping it into his mouth. It tasted terrible.

He couldn’t hide his disgust, and when Fragile saw his face she burst out laughing. Sam laughed, too.

“Promise me, Sam,” Fragile said, and vanished.

SOUTH KNOT CITY

After disposing of the nuke in the crater lake and parting with Fragile, Sam picked up the rest of his cargo and eventually arrived at South Knot City.

A man from Bridges named Owen Southwick greeted him excitedly. Even though it was protocol to interact with porters in hologram form from the control room, Owen had made an exception and gone up to the surface especially. This man was their savior!

And he had just received word that Sam and Fragile had disposed of a nuke that the Demens had tried to sneak into the city.

“You gotta give me the whole story later,” Owen remarked as he went to lower the cargo that Sam had brought into the basement for inspection. “By the way, Sam, you know Mama, right?”

Sam nodded as he lowered his backpack. He had only ever spoken to her over codec, but she was an important member of Bridges. She was the developer behind the anti-BT weapons and the Q-pid. Once he had rested in South Knot, Sam had been instructed to drop by the satellite lab on the outskirts where she had taken up residence.

“There’s been word from her saying that the fluctuations in chiral density in this region have become unstable. We’re not sure why that is, but she told us to be careful,” Owen reported on his way down to the basement.

Left on his own, Sam finished his delivery and used the Q-pid to activate the Chiral Network. He was assailed by the usual dizziness, but this time it was worse than usual. He felt like his stomach had been turned inside-out. He felt like he was going to puke, like when he repatriated back from the Seam. Maybe it was because he was so worn out.

Sam had walked all the way from Lake Knot with a lot of cargo and hadn’t taken a decent break in days. He was acutely aware of all the aches and pains he had forgotten about, like the toe with the nail that had been torn off and the soreness that coursed through his shoulders and back from the weight of the pack. He needed to rest. So he got on the elevator and took it down to his private room.