by Logan Jacobs
“Hee hee,” I couldn’t help myself from giggling. “Rear naked choke.”
“Oh, sugar,” Aurora gasped as I tightened the hold to restrict both her air and blood flow, “you know any other time I’d be all for it, but I’m not going to lose. I have all sorts of fun things planned for you when you are my cute little slave-boy.”
She pushed back on me as hard as she could until I had to bend slightly backward. I tried to tighten the hold in the hopes that she would pass out, but before I could she threw all her weight forward and I went flying over the top of her three feet in the air.
My body twisted with the force of the flip so that I landed in a crouch instead of flat on my back. Before I could turn around I felt the warm skin of Aurora’s sexy leg around my own and then I was rolled over and found myself in a rather effective triangle choke hold. Aurora’s back was flat on the ground but her legs were wrapped around my neck and torso and her ankles locked behind my neck. She squeezed, and I could feel the pressure on my carotid artery increase. If I didn’t do something quick I was going to be out cold in about five seconds.
Our eyes locked and she flashed a wicked, sultry grin.
“I do love seeing your eyes stare up from between my legs, sugar,” she whispered as she breathed heavily from the exertion.
“You know,” I gasped, “any other time I’d be all for it, but not right now.”
I gathered my legs up under me and with all the effort I could muster as dark spots danced across my vision, I pushed up and lifted Aurora off the ground until I stood almost to my full height.
“Sorry babe,” I uttered with the last of my breath and then let my legs buckle as I pitched forward. Aurora’s eyes went wide with realization but it was too late. All two hundred pounds of Crucible of Carnage forged muscle came crashing down on top of her.
Aurora's back slammed into the ground, and her breath exploded out of her in a great “oof”. Then the back of her head smacked the floor.
The pressure around my neck went limp and fresh blood flooded to my brain. It was the biggest head rush I’d ever had, and I almost fell over. After my vision cleared I saw that Aurora had been knocked out cold.
I bent over and felt the back of her head to make sure there wasn’t a crack in her skull. Before one of our previous matches, all my alliance mates, and I had picked a combat medic upgrade, and I was able to discern that while she would have a decent sized goose egg, Aurora would otherwise be fine.
“Sweet dreams, sugar,” I whispered to her as I bunched her cloak under her head and then ran toward the other side of the landing.
There was a metal ladder bolted into the side of the building that looked to be the only way off the landing. It went straight up for as far as I could see.
I didn’t see another option so I put one hand over the other and began to climb.
I’d gotten about a hundred feet into the air and had an impressive view of the war-ravaged city. From this high up the damage from the long-ago nuclear blast didn’t seem as bad. I didn’t have much time to ponder it though because I heard the wail of a jet engine scream above me just before I was tackled and knocked off the ladder.
My assailant and I rolled in the air like a barnstorming acrobatic plane before we leveled out, and I found myself hanging by the back of my battle harness thirty stories high.
“Hey, PoLarr,” I said matter-of-factly and I looked up at the fearsome Val’Keerye warrior.
PoLarr Inarra was another one of my alliance mates. The lithe, over six feet tall, blonde spikey haired beauty was a member of an elite interstellar Special Forces unit nicknamed “The Death Angels”. The compact jetpack on her back kept us aloft on high-thrust multi-directional exhausts that looked like bright blue angel wings.
“Get to da choppa!” She yelled down at me in her best over the top Austrian bodybuilder accent. When we first met PoLarr had Soul Gazed me which was like an alien mind-file transfer that allowed us to share memories. PoLarr got a virtual treasure trove of inane movie and pop culture references, and I got two-and-a-half decades worth of badass training in a firearm based martial arts known as Ar’Gwyn.
She probably got the worse deal.
“Come on, Cohaagen, you got what you want.” I retorted in my own exaggerated Schwarzenegger. While I’d been distracting the gorgeous Val’Keeyre with my witty impression I sneakily hooked a locking carabiner on the end of a ten-foot length of cable that was spooled into a nifty winch device on my belt onto her jetpack harness. “Give these people air.”
“Ha, nice,” PoLarr smiled and then dropped me.
“Gah-ah-agh!” I screamed still in my Arnold accent as I plummeted. The half-broken windows on the side of the sky needle flashed by in a blur.
“Sorry, Marc!” She smiled despite herself, but then I hit the bottom of the cable that spooled out of my combat belt and yanked her unexpectedly down out of the sky.
The force of gravity on my not inconsiderable mass as it hit the bottom of the cable was more than the jetpack could handle at the moment, and we both tumbled through the sky. I gave the cable a hard yank and either pulled myself to PoLarr or pulled PoLarr to me. Physics and I had a tenuous relationship at best. All that mattered was that I grabbed her in a massive hug just as she hit the throttle, and we smashed through one of the windows and landed in a rolling heap on the floor.
Thankfully, this one held as our speed carried us into the building. Both of us hit the opposite wall with a whoosh as the air was knocked from our lungs. At this rate, I was going to be picking broken glass out of hard to reach places for a week.
We both got to our feet as soon as our diaphragms had stopped spasming long enough to catch a breath. PoLarr’s hands flashed down to where her holsters usually held her custom made Equalizer pistols. But they weren’t there. For whatever reason, we were all weaponless for this exercise in combat.
“You, madam, are no daisy,” I drawled in a damn good Doc Holiday if I did say so myself.
“Does this mean we aren’t friends anymore,” PoLarr responded in kind. Her accent was good. Not as good as mine, obviously, but pretty good. “If I thought you weren’t my friend, I just don’t think I could bear it.”
“Ha,” I started to laugh, but the giggle died in my throat because PoLarr unleashed a barrage of powerful kicks at my midsection. The angel of death had really long and perfectly shaped legs, so she had the advantage of reach. Her body was lean like a marathon runner or ballet dancer but that didn’t mean her kicks didn’t carry Muay Thai like power, because they sure as fuck did.
I had to use both arms to block them, and they still sent me smashing into the wall. I crashed through the dusty sheetrock into the next office and stumbled back as fast as I could. I needed some distance. Soon my back hit another wall. I was in a tiny storage room. So much for maneuverability.
PoLarr sailed through the Marc-shaped-hole in the wall with her fists up and ready for action. She almost banged her head on the ceiling, that's how cramped it was in the room, and in that instant I knew how to take her long-legged advantage away.
The Val’Keeyre warrior set her front foot, and I could almost sense as her taunt gluteus maximus coiled for a wicked roundhouse kick. As she let go with the blow, I skipped forward so that I was inside the effective range of her strike radius. Then I caught her leg at the knee in the crook of my elbow, placed my right foot behind her left and then shoved. She landed amid a bunch of old cleaning supplies that flew everywhere and clattered all around her. A stack of paper towels, yellow with age, spilled from a shelf and covered her face.
PoLarr scrambled to get the towels out of her face but it was too late. I yanked on the grapple cable which had rewound on its self-winding spool that was attached to my belt once we’d crashed into the building and tossed it over an exposed steel beam in the ceiling. I caught the carabiner in my other hand and with a rodeo like whip of my wrist I wrapped it around PoLarr’s ankles, pulled it tight and then backed up until she hung upside down from the
roof.
Once she was off the floor, I undid my belt and buckled it around the base of a large metal shelf that was bolted to the wall. PoLarr’s face turned red both from embarrassment and all the blood that rushed to her head.
“Stick around,” I tossed over my shoulder as Arnold before I ran out of the room. “Oh, and sexy school girl.”
“Nice one, Marc,” I heard PoLarr say from behind me. “Wait? What? No way, Havak! Damnit! I’m not dressing up as a sexy school girl!”
“A deal’s a deal!” I shouted as I ran into a long hallway away from her.
Just one more sexy warrior babe left, and I’d be the winner.
To my right were the shells of offices and on my left were the remnants of the building's windows. Maybe a third of them were still intact. Dust stirred in motes as the last of the sunshine filtered through the windows. I went through the doorless doorway at the end of the hall and found myself on a terrace that surrounded the hollow interior of the building. Thankfully there was a railing for once in this megaverse, and I bellied up to it and peered over the edge. I could see all the way down to the lobby twenty stories below. I activated the zoom function on my Occuhancers, small contact lens like devices that were surgically melded to my eyeballs, and my view got three times closer to the ground.
Forty of the muties milled about the street level. They pushed and shoved each other while others outright fought. They must not have been able to find the stairwell. That, or they couldn’t figure out how to use stairs. Either way, I was glad I was up here and they were down there.
Above me, the sky needle reached up toward the heavens for at least eighty more stories. I felt a flash of vertigo and pulled myself away from the railing. I had to get up there somehow and I sure as shit didn’t want it to be by leg power.
I began to jog around the perimeter of the terrace as I looked for some other way than the stairs to get up to the roof of the building. As I rounded the corner I came upon a large, clear glass cylinder that was at least ten feet in diameter and ran from the floor all the way up to the top. On the wall next to the cylinder was a panel with a series of buttons on it.
“Worth a shot,” I said to myself and pressed what should have been the up button. To my utter shock the button lit up and from somewhere deep in the belly of the building an old machine cranked to life and the elevator car slowly began to move down the shaft from several floors above. After thirty seconds there was a muted ding and the doors opened to reveal a dust covered interior. In the middle of the elevator car stood a statuesque orange skinned female alien with dark auburn hair and bright green eyes. Like Starfire from Teen Titans but built like an elite Crossfit athlete. She wore white armor with bright blue accents over black leggings and a top that left her muscled stomach exposed. I smiled at my last alliance mate, the knight errant from Paladin Prime, Nova Qwark.
She smiled back at me and threw a punch at my face. Thankfully, she telegraphed the punch with a twist of her shapely hip, and I’d been able to lean away so that it grazed my cheek instead of knocking my nose through the back of my head. Seeing that her punch missed its mark, she yanked me into the elevator just as the doors closed and the elevator continued its way up.
“Ow!” I yelled as my back smashed against the plexiglass of the cylindrical elevator car. “Nova, that hurt.”
“That was the intended result,” Nova shot back and brought her hands up in a loose boxer stance. Paladinian gravity was unusually high and as a result, they had molecules that were about four times as dense as humans. She looked like she was a hundred and thirty pounds of female badass, but she actually weighed close to three hundred pounds and could bench press a car. All things that made hand to hand combat with Nova just about impossible. On the plus side, Nova moved a bit slower than my other two partners.
She came at me with a jab that I easily dodged, and I skirted the edge of the car to try to get behind her. I knew better than to try to take her on head-to-head in a straight up brawl. One, she could knock me out with one punch if it connected and two, I would probably break my hand if I tried to hit her anywhere but the face. And she was stupid hot, so I really didn’t want to hit her in the face. Chauvinistic? Probably, but I would stand by it.
Nova guessed what I was trying to do and shifted her weight as she threw a half-hearted blow into my chest. My armor absorbed most of the blow but it still threw me back into the plexiglass in front of Nova like a boxer going to the ropes.
“Nice try, Marc,” Nova said in her slightly accented husky voice. “You shall not pass.”
“Hey!” I blurted out. “Movie quips are my thing.”
She bounced her eyebrows at me and then let go with a monster haymaker. A fresh dump of adrenaline made her fist seem to move in slow motion. My brain spun in that long, drawn out millisecond, and I knew there was no way to block a blow that she threw with all her weight, and she had wound up good for this one.
As her orange fist got closer to my face, I had a crazy idea and just dropped like a sack of potatoes. Her fist flew over my head and smashed through the plexiglass as if it were made from spun sugar.
Her forward momentum was too much to stop and her legs crashed into me. She stumbled and then fell through the big hole in the elevator.
Even though she literally had just tried to knock my head off, I sprang to my feet and tried to catch the back of her armor, but I was a fraction of a second too slow, and I watched as Nova tumbled out into the big empty space and began to plummet twenty stories to certain doom.
“Nova!” I cried after her. A few seconds before she hit the ground Nova curled into a tight ball and unleashed a concussive force wave that shattered all the remaining windows in the building. Muties flew out in all directions like bowling pins hit by a rocket-powered bowling ball, and when the dust cleared Nova stood in the center of a large crater where the floor had been. She was a bit battered from the fall but the blast had cushioned her enough to survive.
I marveled at this totally freaking sweet power she had due to a freak accident aboard a spaceship. Nova’s cells absorbed ambient radiation and stored it until she decided to let it rip as kinetic force blasts. They were crazy destructive and, depending on the intensity of the blast, depleted her energy. Nova looked up at me, shook her fist, and then passed out.
I watched for a second then pumped my fist in the air as if I’d just scored the winning goal in the World Cup.
The surrounding buildings shimmered and then began to dematerialize like digital legos winking out of existence to reveal the interior of our training gym in the Hall of Champions.
“There can be only one!”
Chapter Two
“You survived, human,” Grizz boomed as he materialized two feet away from where I stood in the middle of our now very empty training gym. The anti-matter constructs that made up everything from the buildings to the Morlock muties had faded and it was just Team Havak and our holographic trainer, Grizz. The former champion had had his entire consciousness downloaded into the giant mainframe that controlled most of the aspects of the Crucible of Carnage the day before he ultimately met his doom. Now, he was a six foot six-inch tall holographic space barbarian that looked eerily similar to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. And by eerily similar, I mean almost exactly even down to the actors signature one eyebrow raise, which Grizz had fixed me with. “Barely.”
“Hey, it wasn’t my idea to have to fight everyone in my alliance,” I said as I moved over to where Nova was getting to her feet. “You okay, Nova?”
“No,” she grunted.
“Oh my god! Are you really hurt?” Artemis said as her head popped over the bank of computers and displays off to the side of the gym that served as our “Command Center”. She bolted from her chair and was over to where the two of us stood in a flash with a small medical scanner in her hand. “I knew this was a bad idea. Grizz, if any of them are seriously hurt from having to fight each other I will be so mad I’ll drool screws!”
“Spit na
ils,” I corrected quietly with a small smile.
She passed a scanner that emitted a cone of green laser light over Nova’s entire body and studied the readout intently as she absently bit her pink bottom lip. Her chestnut hair was pulled into a loose ponytail at the back of her head which accentuated her high cheekbones and full lips. She nodded her head a few times as if in agreement with what the readout told her, and a smile eventually spread across her face. To say Artie wore her emotions on her sleeve would be like saying Jim Carrey was a subtle performer.
“Okay, you’re a little drained from that blast, but otherwise okay,” Artemis said as if reading the result of a test.
“Artemis,” Nova said as she stretched and took a deep breath, “the only thing that took any real damage is my pride. Physically, I am fine.”
“Yeah, you are,” I joked and put my arm around her shoulders. Nova turned her head slowly toward me, her eyes little more than emerald green slits. I slowly removed my arm. “Sorry.”
“I shall need a bit of time, Havak,” she said through gritted teeth. “Right now I am very angry at myself, and unfortunately, I will gladly misplace that anger on your face.”
“Point taken,” I said apologetically. “Although you shouldn’t be too mad at yourself. You nearly punched me right in the money maker here.”
I did a quick little “Vogue” pose which made Nova giggle despite herself.
“Curse your persistent charm, Havak,” she said and shook her head as we walked over to the side of the gym. “One of these days it will not get you out of trouble.”
“True,” I grinned, “but that day is not today.”
“Don’t feel bad, sugar,” Aurora drawled from where she had lounged in a recliner near the Command Center. “At least he didn’t knock you out.”
“Or hang you upside down by your feet,” PoLarr added while she threw the coiled cable I’d used onto the long conference table that extended from the Command Center.
