Equalize

by Ryan DeBruyn

  Two echoing explosions came a moment after the first, and Rocky just knew that the two other schools had also been attacked. This had the effect of pausing everyone in the fight, except Jax, who turned like a striking snake and batted Alex like a baseball. The child had been staring at the conflagration, which for him was directly in his field of vision. It was excruciating to watch. Alex had obviously assumed his first strike was debilitating. Typically, when you put two pieces of metal into a spinal column, it ends the life of what you are attacking.

  As the metal forearm connected with Alex’s head, Rocky watched in horror as the thief’s skull collapsed in on itself, and as the world seems to do during these moments, everything stopped. Or seemed to stop as Rocky’s brain went into overdrive, considering options, hopes, plans, denial, fear, death, and finally landing on anger as hot as the sun. Rocky’s anger encompassed everything; it wasn’t just directed at the enemy who stood before him but himself, Ether, the survivors behind him who hadn’t taken his initial offer, and even Alex for not getting to cover.

  In that eternity with perceived time stuttering at a crawl, Rocky was shocked beyond belief at how fast it had ended for the young man. Sadly, survival was now based on experience but those same experiences can be misleading. Even though Jason had numerous experiences killing wildlife, they had not prepared him for a foe that defied standard conventions.

  Rocky took note, vowing to teach others. Never assume something is dead because you struck perfect. Never assume something is incapacitated. Always assume that until you receive a notification of your victory, the enemy still fights.

  I just wish I could have taught Alex that…

  Then the moment ended, and the cassette reel of life kicked forward, lurching into action.

  His blood was frozen in his veins, and Rocky’s muscles percolated with inaction, simmering and ready to explode. Every thought bled from him, replaced only by his need to act, his baser instinct for revenge, and to damage those who had hurt him. The unbidden dark fog began to rise off of the grass for thirty feet in all directions.

  Pushing off the ground, Rocky moved towards the target in a straight line at full speed, no longer caring about surprise. Just as the shadow clone sunk daggers into flesh, that were then stopped short a moment later by the metal underneath, the mechanoid’s servo-motors whirred and spun him at the minion. The minion was only saved by releasing hold of his daggers, leaving them embedded in the hybrid robot. Once the clone released them, it ducked, seeming to meld into the inky fog that continued to rise from the long grass.

  Then Rocky arrived, swinging his sword two-handed at the creature, ignoring form and attempting to hit a home run. His blade struck and rebounded; the reverberation in his hand caused a teeth-jarring sensation and nearly forced him to drop the sword. Exiting Stealth as he hit, he was already turning the momentum of his swing into a roll as the mechanoid swung at him. Rocky disappeared into the smoke which continued to gain in height.

  Jax tracked a path using his new computing power and made a reasonable estimate as to where Rocky was in the fog below him. As he opened his hand, a red light began to glow from his palm. The clone suddenly popped up and, in a quick motion, snatched his daggers out of their temporary sheathes in human flesh before gouging up as he leaped into the air and away simultaneously.

  Confusion passed across Jax’s face, and he quickly diverted his charging beam to target the airborne minion, falsely assuming he was under attack by a single foe. As his hand swung up to track the flight path of the minion, Rocky had time to step and begin an upward slash, targeting a vertical plane in front of the enemy. This would be the most likely spot for the creature’s hand to finish when he was ready to fire.

  Rocky’s blade exited trailing fog, red eyes of the raven glinting with reflected scarlet light from the charging beam weapon. Jax, who had committed to the strike, only had time to register movement before his severed limb was turning a slow somersault in the air, followed by an emerging fog enshrouded humanoid form which quickly began to dissipate, leaving no shape behind.

  The minion sunk back into the fog also, and the eyes of Rocky’s opponent showed fear for the first time—perhaps even a little bit of pain, if robots could feel pain. Suddenly, the robot listed to one side as a leg was severed under him at the ankle. As Jax began his descent, the shadow clone rose from the fog to slash deep gouges towards the man's exposed face, which were stopped by his remaining arm. The Robocop wannabe’s descent was arrested as his foot and severed ankle ignited in propulsion.

  The propulsion shot the robot into the air but at an angle, leaking liquids and blood. However, his ascent wasn’t fast enough. Rocky leaped from the fog trailing the black substance, sword extended in a thrust. The black alloy pierced the silver metal in the creature’s midsection, and the alloy whined as it parted for the soul blade. The combined weight was too much for the propulsion engines which continued to give thrust but now in the horizontal direction as the strike spun the robot.

  Riding a shooting rocket Rocky drove him into the ground, his blade and friction slowing them to an eventual stop. Lying on his back, Jax coughed up a combination of blood and oil from his mouth. The fog slowly retreated back to Earth as Rocky’s Ether finally ran out.

  Once Jax regained sight, he was staring up at the eyes of death, slowly dissipating wisps of black clouds falling off of Rocky’s angry form. With his last breath, he whispered, “You think you’ve beaten us? Corsair will win in the–” Then his eternal heart mechanism failed under the applied strain and damage of keeping the cockroach running.

  Rocky, who was still not himself, scanned the area and saw his shadow clone dart off in the direction that Sela should have gone, so Rocky choose to help Azoth. “Report?” he projected to his large pet.

  No answer came, and he increased his speed, quite literally coasting over the ground until he arrived at where his soul link directed him. The Chimera was mid-dive at his hovering foe that was staying ten feet off the ground and strafing to Rocky’s left as Azoth dove. A moment later, after the attack missed, the Chimera was turning his decent speed into a climb as the robot lit up his retreating form with beam weaponry, burning fur, searing skin, and damaging his wings.

  Azoth was in bad shape; he was struggling to gain height, and it seemed like he could no longer steer appropriately as his tail, which generally trailed straight out behind him, hung limply near his rump. The strikes of the mechanoid were still connecting, and Rocky knew he didn’t have much time. Since he had entered Stealth on the run as soon as his Ether allowed and chugged an Ether Draught, he slowly began moving towards the enemy. A quick glance at his Ether bar showed Rocky he couldn’t cast Dark Mend if he wanted to use any other skills this battle.

  Hang on, Azoth. I will use Dark Mend when I can.

  Rocky timed his arrival with Azoth’s next dive but arrived slightly earlier because of the Chimera’s decreased speed and mobility. Regardless, Rocky left the ground as the hovering foe began his strafe, targeting an intersection point where their flight paths would cross. Rocky started his sword strike from the hips, aiming for the propulsion jets in the robot’s feet and adding a twisting vector to his sword’s force.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t sever the feet right through as he had misjudged the timing slightly, but he did cut both of the robot’s Achilles tendons or what used to be tendons and had since been replaced by metallic parts. The jets which had been exiting from the bottom of the robot's feet began firing out the back of the severed ankles, which widened the gap and made the man start to perform a backflip. As he rotated, their eyes met just before a black streak struck the tin can from the sky and landed atop him.

  It didn’t take long for Azoth’s claws and teeth to finish the work of ripping the half human to shreds, but he kept going for far longer than was probably necessary. It took Rocky casting Dark Mend before Azoth finally snapped out of his fury, and they both took off on the ground to find Sela. Unfortunately, that spell nearly bottomed
Rocky out again, and he prayed that the other fight wasn’t going poorly.

  Snapping Azoth out of his fury had the added effect of breaking Rocky out of his, which allowed him to think about a lot of things again. Most stuff he dismissed, currently not wanting to think about possible deaths and tragedy, knowing that what had happened was already done and couldn’t be undone. Instead, he focused on the words of the first enemy he had killed.

  Corsair, is dead… right?

  Rocky hoped that those words didn’t mean what they seemed, as he rushed towards the third and final site of destruction. When the two arrived, they found Sela in cat form, standing over the shrieking form of a handless, footless sack of bolts. Rocky’s shadow clone stood placidly off to the side. A brief moment of relief washed over Rocky before he interposed himself between Azoth and the downed man.

  They were going to have a brief chat before he sent the final mechanoid to the giant scrap yard in the sky.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Priorities brought Rocky back to Saint Monika. Tragedy kept him here. He had left right after stabilizing the mechanoid, whose name he didn’t even bother checking, and rushed back to discover a school building about to collapse.

  Not seeing anyone standing around, Rocky had rushed into the smoldering ruins and checked everyone with Analyze. No one from the survivor group was alive, which was painful. Then he found Oliver and Jason. Only one was still alive, barely, and he had carried him outside and begun casting spell after spell, holding the battered body tight with tears streaming unashamedly down his face.

  It was a mistake to bring the boys into the city. It was his mistake, and he should have left them in the cave. It didn’t matter what Rocky’s original intentions were when they left the safe area. It only mattered what had happened since. Three of his friends pre-apocalypse were dead and two of his newest family. Two people had died today because he had hoped to save a bunch of people he didn’t know.

  Rocking the badly burnt and densely Dark Mended body, Rocky wept tears of remorse, muscles clenched for what humanity had lost, sniveling for his part in it, and lamenting his weakness. The failures he had as a man were rearing up again, and this time, he couldn’t just pretend like it didn’t matter. He couldn’t just bluff and make excuses for himself.

  Despite trying his hardest, giving it his all, Rocky was cocking it up again. Despite what he told himself about how hard he had worked, he knew he had more to give. Deep down, he regretted his inability to be unfeeling, his unwillingness to uncage something he dreaded, something that society had requested chained. His inaction had made him weak.

  If he had never let it be pushed back, if he had never allowed the cage to slowly form, to be silenced, it would have never gone away. Rocky would have owned the basketball court in life, and he would have been able to have done what was needed from the start. Despite what others might say, he recognized the man who fought Azoth.

  He was the same man who had so callously bet on the death of a group of survivors that faced a creature hellbent on that goal. The same man he had released, hoping he didn’t have to kill. The same soldier who had turned around and become a greater monster.

  That was how Sela found Rocky, long hours after her transformation back to human. Well past midnight, Rocky still held the healed and unconscious form of Jason, crying with a smile so akin to a snarl it froze the druid in her tracks. Rocky kneeled beside a blackened and crumbled building, staring into the smoldering darkness, eyes bloodshot and teeth bared preternaturally.

  Behind him lay row upon neatly spaced row of burnt, destroyed corpses—some recognizable, others just humanoid in shapes. Sela went to each, crossed their arms, and placed a neatly stacked pile of soil on their forehead before speaking an adage from her time. With each pile, she chanted “Return to your mother, wholly, fully. Return to her your Essence and know she will treasure it and someday give it birth again.”

  As Sela walked amongst the corpses, chains of fog would sporadically form, sometimes linking to a corpse, sometimes linking to Rocky and then collapsing into the ground. What that meant, Sela didn’t know, and she honestly didn’t have it in her to question him. She walked over and placed a hand on his shoulder, telling him, “The final mechanoid hasn’t talked to me, and while I would like to draw out answers, you asked me to wait.”

  The scream that broke the silence was fierce in a way described in combat, strong in volume, but fathomless like it had been held unspent for too long. Each muscle flexed and bowed as it released, straining for action, straining for release from a moral bonding. Then just as quickly as it came, it cut off, and Rocky stood, holding a boy, the lone survivor of three such young men.

  Handing him silently to Sela, Rocky walked back the way he had come earlier that day, his Soul Blade strangely liquid, flowing over his shoulder and running into his armor and then back on to his shoulder, only to swirl, shift, stretch, and lengthen until he reached the pinned form of a machine. As Rocky approached, he motioned Azoth off the man, and as the propulsion tried to kick in, a blade tore through the fool’s leg and buried into the ground.

  The man was oddly put together, seeming to have no rhyme or rhythm for where the metal replaced skin and where the skin and perhaps muscles remained flesh. Each mechanoid he had killed had been slightly different, seeming to randomly have been assembled in some sort of Frankenstein laboratory. One of them even had a single eye replaced, Kano style, while the others all seemed to be utterly human at the head level.

  Rocky wouldn’t know this, but only the brain had remained as an internal organ; everything else had been replaced, but to oxygenate the brain, blood needed to be kept, which was the reason why some organics were left behind. The reason it was randomized was that the devices used by each of these abominations had been a different model of experiments from the sponsors who had never seen a human before.

  “Hmm, those motors have got to be, somewhere, don’t they? Let’s see if we can find them?” Rocky crooned, voice filled with dripping abhorrence at the downed figure. “Let’s see how you work! What you gave your soul to purchase? What you think could be worth the lives of those you pretended to protect?”

  It didn’t take Rocky long to find the first motor; it was in the approximate location of what used to be a thigh muscle but now was just a layer of skin that hid blood and then machinery. Casting Dark mend after removal, he went to work on the other side, removing any hope the man might have of escape.

  After the urge to escape, a beast inside Rocky whispered to him that the man would attempt to fight, and so Rocky queried, “What weapons did your organs buy? What foolish promises of power did your brethren die for? What is worth what you gave?”

  The man was crying at this point, and Sela, who knew when a man was broken, stepped in between Rocky and his victim, eventually forcing Azoth to stand vigil on the pacing figure of a wild animal that Rocky created. Crouching over the idiot mechanical human, who had thought he was dangerous earlier today, Sela simply stated, “You will tell me everything you know, or I will not intervene again.”

  One look from the man at Rocky, who was still attempting to circumvent another creature from a nightmare, was all it took for words to begin spewing out.

  “We got back from leveling to a destroyed base, and the other men, the ones who aren’t part of our group, told us that an explosion had gone off. That Corsair was dying. That everyone who was on the fifth floor was dead except him.” The man cut off as a terrible scream of frustration tore across the silent sky.

  Then he began speaking faster, “We got Corsair the newest version of the device and put it on him. It saved his life, and he woke up a mechanoid. Still human but so much more, so much stronger. He told us what to do, he told us what would come, and we did it.” Azoth's claws scraped on the ground as Rocky literally forced the behemoth back. The man paused at the sound before he sobbed desperately.

  “Please, I only know that he is going to build the beacon to his patrons, the material is c
oming through the shop tomorrow—or today, I guess. Then he is going to set off the rest of the bombs that we placed in every school.” The man paused, hoping he had told them enough to be saved, but if not that, at least enough to not have that thing take another go.

  The piece of golem metal that punctured his chest a moment later gave him his answer as Sela skewered the mechanical contraption that powered the construct and allowed oxygen to his brain. Rocky stopped fighting and just looked skyward at the moon which was already part way through its nightly voyage, and then he spoke, “Go tell everyone you can. I am going to go to the hospital to inform someone! Someone who isn’t on this list!” He brandished the book of names at her.

  “What if they are waiting?” was Sela’s immediate response, so quick and so desperate it could be felt in every breath after. They needed to stick together, and she wouldn’t allow him to run off and die in this state. Even though she approved of this side of her leader, she knew it would make him reckless. Sela continued as the silence stretched on, “What do you expect me to do anyway? Run from building to building? How many will that save?”

  Sela might have continued if not for Rocky shouting, “You can save groups! Start sending them away! You can get awa– You can be saf– You will do as I say!” Each time his brain broached the subject and tried to say the words ‘safety’ or ‘away’, his grief refused to allow it, like avoiding keeping people safe in the past somehow stopped him from telling someone he could keep them safe now.

  Sela’s voice raised in response, “I am not someone who needs coddling! Not a child who looks to you for protection! Not some spoiled lord who hasn’t faced combat! I fought in wars the likes of which you have never imagined, watched friends die, and killed enemies in numbers you would find unbelievable! I will not stay out of this fight!”

  “You will do as I say!” Rocky shouted, which had the effect of devolving the conversation into a fight of meaningless shouting, both only trying to get their way, both having a valid reason for what they wanted and arguing that same point in repetitive loops, sounding like a married couple.