* * * * *
He had no idea whether it was seconds or hours before someone turned him over. He could make out voices, as from far away, as if he was underwater. Was he swimming?
Darla: Aes! Aes, can you hear me! Stay with me!
Sherman: What the hell? There's blood all over him! Are those fucking wounds? Are they beta-testing some new kind of avatar?
Darla: Shut up, Sherman! Aes, you're hurt. You have to heal yourself. We can't do it. Do you hear me? You have to heal yourself NOW!
Sherman: Looks pretty messy. No way they're gonna get the parents to sign off on this.
Darla: I said SHUT UP, dammit! Aes, you have to hear me. You're going into shock. If you don't heal yourself soon, you are going to DIE, do you understand?
She sounds worried, he thought. He wished he could hear her better. It was a pity. He felt himself sliding toward a brilliant light.
Darla: Aes, if you give up on me, Am-heh wins! Please, please hear me and heal yourself!
Weakly, Aes managed to open his eyes. What he saw surprised him. He looked down and saw...himself, lying on the green and purple carpet; Darla and Sherman the Tank were bent over him. I'm up here, he thought, but he could not make a sound.
Annoyed, he tried again to speak. No words came. I need my real mouth for that, he thought, and reached down to the fallen image of himself to heal it.
Vision chopped off. Light flared through his closed eyelids as his awareness returned to his body. Along with the reentry came the awareness of pain. He groaned and healed himself again.
After the third heal he was able to open his eyes and sit up. “Did we win?” he asked.
“That was way too close, Aes. You scared the shit out of me,” said Darla. “I should have warned you that sometimes healing can draw aggro.”
Aes healed himself again as he stood up. “I'm afraid I ruined this uniform,” he told them. “My healing only seems to affect bodies.” Sherman was looking at him strangely again.
“We got them,” said Arla. “I think all we have left is the boss room.”
“I dunno where you got it, but, man, Aes, that avatar is way too detailed,” Sherman said. “Is it an add-on or a beta?”
“I do not know what you mean,” Aes told him, puzzled. “It is me.”
“Maybe I'm wrong,” Sherman remarked. “But I think you're just a little too tight on your roleplay. Different strokes, I guess.”
“Do you want to debate play styles or finish this mish?” Darla called. She was already down to the next turn in the hallway. Coming up behind her, Aes saw her eyes widen. “Oh fokkit.”
Catching up, Aes and Sherman peered over her shoulder. Three of the Uzi-toting Jerx were wandering around a room. Near the center, the largest Jerx Aes had seen so far was dismantling a fourth Uzi.
“That's Snarky,” Sherman told Aes in a whisper. “He's taking that gun apart because he doesn't need it. In addition to his bodyguards, he has ice attacks and holds.”
Aes decided not to ask this time. He would find out what the words meant sooner or later.
“All right, now we need to pull,” said Darla. “His minions are patrolling the room; if we even set foot in there we'll have all four of them on us. And we already had trouble just with three Uzis.”
“So what do we do?” Aes wanted to know.
“We wait until one and only one of them is near the doorway, then I pull him. There's no time limit for missions like this, so all we have to do is wait.”
She was right. While the boss sat in a desk chair, absorbed in oiling gun parts, the three gun carriers paced. After watching them for a little while Aes could clearly see that their actions were independent of each other. One moment all three were walking toward the door. The next moment two turned in different directions, and the third kept coming straight at them.
Darla reached up and behind her and threw a knife that should have skewered him in the belly but her aim was slightly off this time and it struck his belt buckle, bouncing to the floor ineffectually. As that happened, she shoved Aes sideways away from the door and flattened herself against the wall by the doorway as Sherman did the same on the other side.
A bright flash of muzzle flame and a few dozen bullets shot through the doorway, followed by one of the gunmen. He looked down the hallway, puzzled.
“Konichiwa,” said Sherman affably from the corner. As the guy turned toward him, Sherman knocked his gun to the side with his left hand and followed through with a right uppercut. As the Jerx staggered, disoriented, Darla joined in with a series of stabs and slashes that finished him off.
“That took you a while,” Sherman commented. “Why didn't you use your Time Stretch?”
“It's a slow recharge. I'm saving it for Snarky if I can.”
“Right. One down, two and a boss to go.” They went back to watching and waiting. A couple of times Aes thought she would throw a knife, but the other sentry turned at the last second and was too close to the one she wanted.
Then, as the two gunmen approached the doorway, one turned on his foot and walked off at an angle back toward his boss. Immediately, Darla threw another knife at the other. This one stuck in his shoulder; he staggered, but straightened and rushed out the door after her.
Grinning, Sherman the Tank stuck out a size twenty boot. The careless gunman face-planted on the carpet. While he tried to regain his feet and Darla sliced him up, Sherman ambled up, drew back a foot and kicked him into the wall. Actually into the wall. In one of those freak moments that could only happen in a very strange dream, the ruffian's head passed ghostlike through – and became stuck in – the wall, leaving the rest of his body twitching, his arms and legs waving helplessly.
“Aw, let me help you with that,” Sherman the Tank offered, and brought his fists together on either side of the man's abdomen, crushing him between them as they impacted. The twitching stopped. “One and a boss to go.”
Alas, although they waited, the third gunman did not approach the door. Four times he seemed to be about to do so, only to change his mind and stalk back past the boss.
“We can't keep waiting,” Sherman observed. “It's only a matter of time before Snarky starts reassembling his gun. Then we'll be facing two machine guns, plus his other powers. I say we go for it. I'm almost leveled.”
“What do you think, Aes?” Darla asked him. She sounded worried.
“Go for it,” Aes agreed.
“Good man!” boomed Sherman, slapping him on the back. Aes managed not to fall down. “We'll make a Hero of you yet.” Sherman pushed into the room ahead of them.
Snarky the boss looked up and saw him. He pushed the chair back from the desk and stood up, looking unsurprised, relaxed and confident. “Hello Sherman,” he said in the tones of one speaking to a child. “I'm afraid it was so tedious waiting for you to work your way up here, that I took my toy apart. But no matter; disposing of you will be child's play. I'll take you apart too.”
“I wouldn't bet on it,” Darla told him, entering the room behind Sherman. Aes slipped in behind her, keeping his distance. Her body gave off that telltale glimmer and she became a deadly blur, whizzing across the room to hack and stab the lone gunman before he or Snarky could do anything about it. His bullets seemed almost to be avoiding her; she slipped between them like a wind through trees.
As the gunman folded up and began to crumple, Snarky laughed and stretched out his hand. Fog rolled down his arm from the shoulder and roared out at them, freezing all three of them. Sherman and Darla were encased in two blocks of ice. Aes found himself encased in it up to his knees. Intense cold gripped his legs, making him shiver uncontrollably for a moment. He gritted his teeth to keep them from chattering.
“Oh my, you seem to be in an awkward position,” chuckled Snarky, glancing at the two of them as he walked over to the gunman Darla had slain. He ignored Aes; for the moment, which was humiliating. Aes hated that Snarky considered him harmless, insignificant.
Snarky scooped up th
e fallen gunman's weapon and smiled at Sherman. “Still feeling tough? Let's see how tough you are.” He checked the weapon, then looked up, pleased and relaxed.
Behind him, Darla's ice block faded out. She sprang toward the boss, death in both of her hands. But Snarky whirled to face her, as if he had eyes in the back of his head, and loosed a stream of bullets into her from only a few feet away. There was no way he could miss, and he didn't. Her body jerked from the impacts and she staggered, her health dropping to one half. Aes reached out with his mind and sent her a flash of healing that glinted off the metal edges of the desk and the Uzi in the boss's hands. Her health went up to two thirds of normal.
“As for you...” Snarky began. He never finished the sentence. Behind him Sherman had unfrozen, ice cracking off him. Reaching down to scoop up a fist-sized chunk, he hurled it at the boss, bouncing it off Snarky's head to get his attention while he freed his legs.
Snarky spun to face him and took one hand off the Uzi to point at the tank; from his hand flew a spear of ice that pinned Sherman the Tank to the office wall behind him. His health began to drop. Darla straightened up behind the boss, raising her swords. Aes threw a heal at Sherman.
Something warned him, but not in time. As he jumped sideways, the boss fired at him. Aes felt a fresh burst of pain as a stream of bullets stitched him below his left knee. The leg collapsed and he went down, throwing out a hand to stop his fall.
The lethal volley was cut off short. Darla had engaged the boss with a double slash attack, blades cutting inwards toward him from both sides. He turned as if he had foreseen it, and countered one of the blades with his gun. Steel rang against steel and sparks flew.
The room wavered in front of Aes. He fought to stay conscious.
Snarky's gun was turning back toward Darla. Both her health and Sherman's were low. Time to choose again, Aes.
Gritting his teeth against the pain, he reached out with his mind and healed Sherman as Snarky fired at Darla, cutting her health down to less than a quarter. “Goodbye, Hero,” he laughed, pointing the gun at her head. “Looks like you're done.”
Behind him. Sherman seized the ice spear's shaft with one hand and wrenched it free. “Not this time,” he grunted, and shoved the jagged point of the spear through Snarky's back until it protruded from the boss's belly.
Snarky dropped the Uzi and tried to break the ice spear to remove it. His mouth worked but no words came out. Darla straightened up and thrust both blades into his belly. “Farewell, loser,” she said sweetly as the boss fell to the floor.
Her health was still dropping! She must be bleeding. Aes threw another heal onto her, pushing her vitality back to one third, before he collapsed. Gasping from the pain, he rolled and put both hands behind him, to push himself up to a sitting position with his legs in front of him. A piece of leg bone stuck out of his shin at an angle.
Dully, he saw Sherman the Tank lift off the floor and explode rainbow-colored light as he leveled. “Woot! Made it to level 12!” he exclaimed.
“Grats,” Aes muttered, managing to heal himself once before he passed out again.
Chapter 34: Am-heh: Am-heh goes on Walkabout
Gamers and Gods: AES Page 41
