by Logan Jacobs
The blast of plasma flew and hit the Opposer dead center and washed over him like spray from a water gun. He stood there, smiling at me, completely fine.
“Oh, they just used a Null Blast,” Grizz noted, somewhat impressed.
“What the hell is that?” I asked as I whacked the gun on the side.
“It absorbed you blast, analyzed the light frequency required to heat the plasma and send out a light frequency to neutralize it,” Grizz explained somewhat pedantically given the situation we were in. “Your gun is basically a glorified flashlight now.”
“Perfect,” I sighed and holstered it as the Opposers began to advance. “Keep an eye on my back will ya buddy, since you don’t have anyone to fight… again.”
“I would not be so sure about that, Havak,” Grizz said warily. “Look.”
I followed where he pointed and sure enough about ten more SFHs had appeared behind us as if they had followed us into the store. Almost as if it were a plan.
“Yup, sounds about right,” I shrugged. “You wanna go pick a fight?”
“Yes,” Grizz replied with savage relish. “Yes, I do.”
We moved around so that we stood nearly back to back as our respective enemies advanced on us. A chill ran up my spine as I realized I was about to get to fight alongside my trainer. Something I never thought would happen. Even though neither one of us might make it out of this, it was pretty fucking cool.
I didn’t get to bask in the glory long because they attacked.
The first few Opposers came for me all at once. Which is exactly what I figured they’d do. I didn’t bother trying to engage them, even with my skills and mods it would have been a massive beat down, so I cut diagonally down one of the wide isles and made a beeline for the home improvement section.
On first glance I had no clue what most of the strange alien tools were, but I figured there had to be some kind of make-shift weapon there. I passed an aisle of space toilets, one with appliances, and then found a tool section. Most of them were small hand tools like spanners and saws, and I was starting to think maybe I’d made a grave error when my hand reached out and grabbed the nearest thing as my chasing Opposers found me and slowly began to walk down the aisle toward me.
When I pulled my hand back I found that it was filled with an eighteen-inch long handled framing hammer looking thing. Except this hammer had what appeared to be a small rocket engine where the claw part of the top would have been. It was made from a very lightweight metal that was surprisingly well balanced. On the end of the handle there was a small button close to where my thumb was.
I didn’t have time to pickle anything else, so I went with what I had and as the first Opposer reached me and took a swing with his bat as I brought the hammer up to block and pressed the button. Sure enough, it was a tiny rocket engine and it propelled the business end of the hammer at a wicked speed to slam into the bat. It knocked the thing out of the Opposer’s hands, and the propulsion swung me around in a circle a full three hundred and sixty degrees just in time to whack into the shoulder of the now weaponless baddie. I heard his bones crack under the force of the blow, and the dude was out of commission, writhing on the ground.
That caused his compatriots a moment of pause.
Which I proceeded to exploit to my advantage.
I clicked off the rocket to get it back under control, and then it was my turn to go after the Opposers.
The next one in line took a swing which I stepped inside of easily and let pass harmlessly over my shoulder and back before I turned at the waist and swung the hammer at the Opposer’s elbow. Just before it struck, I hit the rocket again and there was another crunch of bone and a yowl of pain. Two down.
The rest gathered their courage and came at me as a group. That’s when it got really ugly.
I caught a blow from a bat on my left arm and spun away from it and then sank to my haunches while bringing the hammer down on the Opposer’s foot like driving a nail home. It squished a neat round dent in the flesh of his foot all the way to the floor.
Immediately, I twisted and let the hammer lash out at the next nearest target. All I saw around me were legs and knees, so, that’s where I went to work. I stayed low to the ground and just kept moving forward, not really paying attention to anything above waist level, and swung the hammer from knee to hip and back to knee again at anything that came my way.
Soon the floor was slick with alien blood and the air was filled with cries of pure agony. I took a couple of hits along the way, one that opened up a small gash in my scalp that bled down the whole left side of my face, but I didn’t let it bother me.
After a few moments there weren’t any more joints to pound, so I stood and turned around to survey the damage and see if there were any more baseball bat toting bad guys for me to fight. Even though I was a bit shocked by the carnage that I had dealt out.
Twenty or so Opposers lay sprawled down the aisle covered in blood with bits of exposed broken bone sprinkling the devastation like confetti. A few of them were either unconscious or dead and the rest writhed in agony or tried to crawl away.
I looked down at the hammer which had just run out of fuel and tossed it in the air where if flipped end over end and caught it by the handle again. With a final look at my grim handiwork, I turned and sprinted back to where I had last left Grizz.
He was in the center of ten Skalle Furia Holos, all of which had swords. It looked like he was bleeding holographic blood from a cut on his arm but he held his mighty sword in his right hand and began to twirl it in front of him tauntingly.
With a pitched battle cry the SFHs rushed him all at once, and I finally understood what it must be like for him to have to watch others fight and not be able to join in.
Grizz launched into the battle as if born with a blade in his hands. For his size he moved like a dancer, as if his feet barely touched the ground, and his sword never stopped flashing and spinning. It made any of the battles in Lord of the Rings look like a high school play. He blocked several blows and then, with a swing of his arm, decapitated two of the SFHs before he reversed direction and stabbed one through the chest, lifting the hologram clear off its feet with one arm. With his free hand he clobbered another SFH by the skull and broke its neck. He then threw the still writing hologram from his sword like a Benihana chef.
And then there were none.
I walked over to him as he wiped holographic blood off his blade on his pant leg before sheathing the sword on his back.
“Seems like you haven’t lost a beat, old man,” I joked.
“That was glorious, Havak,” he grinned down at me with deadly delight. “I see you dispatched your opponents well.”
“Hammer will fall,” I shot back with a Queen reference that I knew there was no way he would get, but I didn’t care.
A few moments later when CDPD finally arrived in force and surrounded us we were still standing there, grinning at each other like idiots.
“It was a pleasure to fight by your side, Marc,” Grizz grinned as we were ordered to drop our weapons and get on our knees.
“No nearly as much as it was to fight by yours, Grizz,” I said back as I dropped the hammer and got down on the ground. “Not by a long shot.”
Chapter Eleven
“Was there something about ‘keep a low profile’ that you two did not understand?” Captain Har’Gitay said with barely contained fury. She was seething, but doing a pretty darn good job of keeping it under wraps.
“Uh, yeah, so things might have gotten a little out of hand there,” I offered up. It was all I could come up with at the moment.
After the CDPD had shown up at the mall it took about half an hour for everything to get sorted out. Eye witnesses exonerated Grizz and I pretty much immediately, but we were still brought to the station house and were now enclosed in Har’Gitay’s personal office, which on any other circumstance would have nice because it was a cool as shit office. She had all kinds of plaques and commendations and nick-knac
ks from her sixty plus years as a cop. Even though she appeared to be in her early thirties by human standards, she was actually closer to ninety.
“Captain,” Grizz said, his voice particularly calm and collected after the day we’d had so far, “we are incredibly sorry. We certainly did not intend to get into a glorious and epic battle in the middle of one of the busiest shopping centers in the city. Others had different plans however and Havak and I simply reacted as anyone would. By laying utter waste to all those who dared to challenge us.”
“What about Darry’s workshop, huh?” She shot back, not to be deterred. “That was still an open crime scene, and the next thing I know, not an hour after sending you out of here to quietly and on the side lines investigate Darry’s death, his place of business explodes!”
“Captain,” I started, “look, we are clearly on to something much bigger than just a simple murder.”
“I know,” she sighed and some of her anger left with it. “Whatever is going on, it goes very far up. I am getting pressure to wrap up Darry’s death as a suicide to squelch all this other nonsense as quietly as possible. And it comes from higher than my pay grade even allows me to know exists. What have you two berserkers been able to find out so far?”
“Darry was working for Trillium Vou,” I said plainly as I took the cold compress away from the gash in my scalp. Har’Gitay had been kind enough to make sure that I got some medical attention on my way to the precinct. My regen mod was taking care of the rest. “She has some kind of super stalker, and he was developing a special subdermal stealth armor for her.”
“Is that what the frackas was about over at her production studio today?” Har’Gitay asked. “She claimed it was an angry employee making a scene after getting fired, but I didn’t buy it. Vou is very good at keeping CDPD out of her affairs. Bitch is well connected.”
“Yeah, while we were talking she was attacked by someone who she identified as Toe-Massi,” I told her. “I almost caught the bastard, but he got lucky.”
“Then we were contacted by the TechnoWitch we had hired to try to crack a micro-drive we found at Darry’s,” Grizz took over the explanation.
“There was something my crime scene guys missed?” The Captain asked with a raised eyebrow. “Oh, heads are going to roll for this one.”
“To be fair it was wedged in a crack between the wall and floor,” I offered up, trying to save some poor CSI dude his job. “I only found it because I fell.”
“Tempest brought us to Neophor,” Grizz said.
“That would be the TechnoWith with her brains and circuitry strewn about the cafe?” Har’Gitay asked, although it really wasn’t a question. “I was familiar with who she was. We’d been trying to get her for information jacking for a few years but she was very very good. Apparently not good enough though.”
“Neophor was terrified of the information she had found on the drive,” Grizz continued. “Unfortunately, she was killed before she could share it, and the drive was destroyed while she was extracting the information.”
“Hmm, there might be something we can do here,” Har’Gitay said and rubbed her chin in thought. “I have a good friend down in the coroner's office. She’s a bit of a savant when it comes to reconstructing techno damage. Maybe a few of her memory cells survived, and we can scrub them for what may be there.”
“That’s kind of creepy,” I grimaced.
“You have a better idea, champion?” Har’Gitay asked, daring me to say something.
“Nope,” I said, deciding that discretion was the better part of valor. “I sure as shit don’t.”
“So,” Har’Gitay said and began to pace the small space behind her desk. “We’ve got Darry, Trillium Vou, some stalker named Toe-Massi, and an assassinated TechnoWitch? How does this all tie together?”
“That, we do not know, Captain,” Grizz replied and shook his head slowly. “Do not forget the Skalle Furia.”
“And the Opposers,” I added. “I doubt they were there shopping for their fall wardrobes.”
“Yeah, believe me I haven’t,” she said and began to rub her temples. The Captain looked very very tired, and I wondered when the last time she had sleep had been. “That tech they had that allowed them to attack you Grizz is cutting edge and only available on the black market on a planet two hundred light years away. And you are correct, Marc, the gangs very rarely venture outside of their own turf, and especially not into the heart of the Champion’s District.”
“So, there are two more pieces of a puzzle that not only do we not know what the fuck the picture is supposed to be, but we have no clue how they all fit together,” I said and wiped a hand over my face. I had to admit I was pretty fucking tired as well, and I had a match coming up very soon.
“You should go and get some rest, Havak,” Har’Gitay said as if she’d read my mind. I guess she didn’t get to be the youngest Captain the CDPD has ever appointed by not being an observant cop. “You have a big match coming up. And a strange one at that.”
“Very strange,” Grizz agreed. “That is something else that has been pulling at the edges of my mind as we have been descending into the abyss of this mystery. Never in my time as a champion or as a trainer have there been so many changes to the nature of the games.”
“It has been, odd, Grizz, I’ll give you that,” Har’Gitay nodded. “But it’s not without precedent. Alliances used to be forbidden until five hundred years ago. I’m sure a few of your older trainer hologram friends can attest to how much that upset the status quo.”
“Captain, are you a fan?” I asked with a wicked little smirk. The convo had been so heavy until now, and my inner jokester was dying to lighten the mood a bit. “Are you are Crucible Cutie?”
“If you ever call me that again, Havak, I will plant evidence on you and arrest you,” Har’Gitay said deadpan. Then her expression softened a bit. “If you must know, as a younger woman, in my adolescence, I may have been obsessed with the games. When I became a cop, I started to study the history of the Crucible as a way to know more about the district I was duty sworn to protect.”
“You’re a fan,” I chided, not letting up. “It’s okay. I can get you some autographs if you want.”
“Get out of my office,” Har’Gitay said and pointed.
“Yes, Captain,” I said and couldn’t help the smile that spread across my face. The “Buddy Cop Movie” fan inside of me loved getting thrown out of an angry superior officers presence.
A short cab ride later and we were back in the gym at the Hall of Champion’s with another angry beauty standing in front of us.
“One day,” Artemis said with her hands on her hips. “I leave you two alone for one day, and all Tartarus jogs free.”
“Hey, they got one of my pals killed,” Tempest added as she lounged in a chair with her feet on the conference table, one of her little, sweet smelling cigars cocked in the corner of her mouth. “Eh, pal is a strong word, I guess, I owed her money, so I should be thanking you.”
“Very sentimental of you, Tempest,” I pointed out.
“Better her than me,” Tempest said and shrugged.
“Okay, you know what?” Artemis said and threw up her hands. “I’ve had it with this little murder mystery you two would-be sluices have been on.”
“Sleuth,” I corrected her gently. “With a T H.”
“Mister man, you are two seconds away from my boot being planted firmly in your behind,” she growled. “Did I get that one right?”
“Sure did,” I acquiesced.
“You have a match coming up in the morning, sir,” Artemis continued, now in business mode. “I want you in the med bay pronto where you are going to get an IV drip of Blue Betty for the next two hours. Then we are all going home and stay in for the night so that I can keep an eye on you until the match starts tomorrow morning.”
Just as I was about to get up to follow her instructions dutifully our gym was bathed in flashing red lights.
“Champions, to your matter
transmit tubes,” a calm female voice said over the loudspeaker. “The next match will start in five minutes.”
“What?” Artie practically screamed as she ran over to her computer console. “This has to be some kind of mistake. This wasn’t a flash match.”
“Oh, balls,” I sighed, got up, and started to walk toward my matter transmit tube. For some reason this didn’t surprise me at all. In fact, it almost made perfect sense. Something very funny was going on in the Crucible of Carnage, and Grizz and I were getting close to figuring out what it was. Hence, the sudden change in time for the beginning of the match.
Someone was trying to catch me off guard. Throw me into a match where I would be all alone and was exhausted from a full day of fighting for my life.
“I don’t see how this could be,” Artemis complained in a panic.
“Marc,” PoLarr said and came up and gave me a big hug as I stood outside the plastic mat-trans tube. “Be careful. You’ve seen enough thriller movies to know that this ain’t right.”
“Yes, Havak,” Nova said as soon as PoLarr moved away and gave me a surprise hug. She wasn’t much on displays of affection. “I have grown to like your face, and the rest of your body parts and stupid jokes, so please keep your wits about you.”
“Sugar,” Aurora drawled and took Nova’s place. Her hug included a nice little ass grab. “Get out of there as soon as you can so you can come back to where you belong. Between my legs.”
“Don’t die,” Tempest said and actually smacked me on the ass. “Be a shame to lose out on this.”
Artie walked over and I could tell she was on the verge of tears that were part fear, anger, and part sadness.
“Hey, kiddo,” I said quietly and took her in my arms. “Don’t fret.”
“How can I not, Marc,” she whispered into my neck. “This is not right or fair. I’m so worried.”
“Come on,” I said with as much confidence and swagger as I could manage. “It’s me.”
“I know,” she nodded and then kissed me gently on the mouth. It was soft and sweet and made my heart hurt. “Come back to me, Marc Havak.”
