I was crying again as I closed the cockpit. The upper left glassteel was beyond repair, and I grabbed some duct tape and attached the drawing Mother had regifted me across the shattered pane.
Chapter 39
I didn’t hear it. I didn’t see it. I don’t think any of us did, since it happened out of our sight and sound, but each of us felt it in our own way.
A difference in the air. A taste in the back of our throats. A hint of impending doom and unwritten prophecy fulfilled.
I marched the Mechanical out through the doors just as the sky went lavender and swallowed the sun.
I keyed the speakers and addressed the dregs, aiming my voice only through the ones facing backward. A few of them were still functioning, but not many.
“Here’s the plan. We’re the Raid Boss, and I’m the Mountain King. They can’t have the base until they brawl with me. If we die, that should end the raid. It might mean that you’ll be able to close the doors before they get in. If we don’t die though, I’d appreciate you not shutting them, because I have no fucking idea how we’ll get this thing back in here if you do.”
I’d been trying to lighten the mood, but I didn’t know if it was working. Patch was smiling up at me, and she gave me a thumbs up. It was all the encouragement I needed, even if she was the easiest audience in the world.
“Whatever happens, I’m proud of you.” I chuckled. “Hell, I’m proud of me. Oh, and the Wi-Fi password is ItBurnsWhenIP.”
“That was beautiful,” Patch told me, once I shut the speakers down.
I didn’t answer. All of the bravado had left me, and the sky got darker as we crossed the churned up ground in front of the doors and began to work our way up the center hill.
Even inside of the metal, fortified Mechanical I could feel a chill grow in the air. The soil was sloppy with gore, and every step was hazardous.
Off to one side, the Rift dumped even more off world stuff on to ‘Neath as lightning torched its way across the sky.
“Dat can’t be good,” Bingo said. “Ya know, we ‘ad a pretty good run. What say we just turn tail an’ make a break fer it?”
“No way,” Patch called, expertly tossing a screwdriver up through her hatch’s opening and down through his.
“Ow!”
“You heard what Raze said. Unless we fall, those doors will stay open and the same thing will happen to the mountain that did last time.”
There was more, but I hadn’t wanted to broadcast it to the Dregs. “It also means that we can’t do something stupid, like get taken prisoner. The worst-case scenario is that we get ourselves stranded in a broken Mech, forced to watch the Heroes waltz past and destroy everyone in the mountain without being able to lift a finger to stop them. Bingo, make sure that we always have enough juice to self-destruct, okay?”
“Easy! I’m fightin’ ta keep us from detonatin’ as we speak. If I stop doin’ what I’m doin’, we’ll crater in less den a minute.”
“Well, that’s good, I suppose.”
I was desperate to get us as far from the mountain as I could, but I had to change course when we started down the other side of the hill. The new river of lava was there, and I wanted to keep my distance from it.
I shifted us to the left, crunching down the rear of the hill, sloshing through blood and bone until finally the smoke and haze cleared enough for me to see the golden dais that had caught me in my fever dream.
Commandant Sanguine, surrounded by blackrobes and the better part of fifteen thousand leaking corpses, waited for us. Warwick was beside her, naked.
“Now that’s just plain offensive,” I said.
“Dis guy again?” Bingo asked.
“It seems so. And don’t you think it’s disrespectful to pretend that this guy’s a match for us? I killed him with a can of spray paint the first time…”
Patch was peering at her screen so closely that her nose was touching it. “You can pretty clearly see his war wick, too.”
I rolled my eyes, dialing up all our power and focusing it through the Head Canon. I hadn’t used it yet, mainly because everyone had convinced me that I wouldn’t get a second shot without reloading it manually. I swapped every screen that was still working over to aim mode, although instead of drawing a bead on his junk, I went for the head on his shoulders.
I was less than 100 yards away, close enough that the force if the impact would kill him even if I missed.
When I pulled the trigger I felt the Pepsi leave the rail gun just as everything went black.
“You have got to be shitting me,” I raged, smashing my fist against the console. “Who is writing this fucking script? Patch, Bingo, get us going again!”
Patch was wildly trying to do as I asked, and I realized that the comms weren’t working when I could only hear her voice drifting up faintly through the small hatch between her and the cockpit. “It’s not us. Well, it is us, but I mean it’s not just us. It’s everybody. Or everything.”
“I’m going to need you to be a little more concise and a lot more eloquent.”
“Da bitch turned off da lights, jackass,” Bingo said. “But our power’s out, too.”
“Gotcha. Well said. Fix Mother while I go topside and see what the deal is.”
Patch gasped dramatically, her hands clutched to her buxom bosom. “You’re going out there?”
“We can’t just sit in here blind.”
She nodded up at me. “I know. I just wanted you to know I cared.”
“It’ll be okay. Warwick’s got to be dead. I felt the Head Canon fire.”
“Me too,” she said. “Third time’s the charm, maybe?”
“Fingers crossed.”
Without power, the glassteel couldn’t de-ice. The temperature out there must be dropping fast, because all I could see was rime. I wrestled with the cockpit release, resorting in the end to throwing my shoulder against it to break the frost.
Bingo was right. It was night again. The sun was gone, and so were the moons. There wasn’t so much as a hint of glint or shadow.
It was a complete and total void, and I realized that I couldn’t hear the ever-present rush of the Rift or the pitter patter of it dropping Pokémon, or that ET game that nobody wanted, or old girly magazines that somehow people always found in black plastic bags in the woods.
The entirety of the world was full to the brim of nothing.
And then there was something. Just a flicker. And then another, and another, and then a thousand and then a million. Purple sparks were coalescing on the corpses, outlining them as they slapped together with an audibly wet wallop. The first ones melted into the base of a fleshy tower, and the later bodies slurped themselves up the sides and added themselves to the top.
On and on they went, seemingly reaching all the way up to the heavens.
Somehow, the Head Canon hadn’t killed him. I saw a massive pit and dozens of bloody black robes twisting in the wind behind Warwick where the Pepsi had impacted. The shockwave should have flayed him to the bone, but all he did was smile at me. His eyes glowed with the same light as the stuff covering the dead Heroes.
He was still a football field away, but those baleful orbs stared right through me. I felt them weigh my soul and find it lacking.
He took a step toward us. A hand that wasn’t his own dropped from the tower and landed on his shoulder. It remained there, even though gravity should have pulled it to the ground. Another step, and what was left of six bodies oozed down and encased him in their offal.
By the time he’d left the dais, he was a fifteen-foot-tall golem of gore. The spire of sacrifices dipped toward him, tumbling and falling as they consolidated themselves into a new form around the Paladin.
He strode with purpose, growing taller, wider, and more imposing as he advanced on us.
Some of their flesh twisted and contorted around his body while the rest sloughed away in his wake. We had a Mech, but this monstrous Warwick smiling disarmingly at us would be a hundred feet tall by the time he g
ot to us.
I closed the cockpit. The other’s hadn’t seen him, and I wasn’t exactly sure how to explain what I’d just witnessed.
“So,” Patch asked, “how are things?”
“I missed. Start the Mech.”
Bingo growled in frustration. “Can’t. Ain’t quittin’ on it, but no dice so far.”
The purple was fading and sunlight was coming back, but when I looked out the window I didn’t like what I saw. Warwick was 50 yards away, almost 60 feet tall and rising.
Patch, curious as ever, opened her hatch and stuck her head out. “Raze, is there something you want to tell us?”
“Nope. You’re welcome to explain it to Bingo though, if you want…” It was a cheap trick. I didn’t know how to account for the monstrosity coming at us, but as I fought with the switches and levers it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to get us underway, either.
I tried everything I could, the Player 1 button, Illgott’s key, the Konami code… None of it worked and we didn’t have sixty seconds for me to use Off and On Again.
Finally, the Mechanical quivered. I grinned, trying to work out what I’d done to get the tremor. “We might be okay after all,” I said. “Let me just see if I can finagle a fix, here…”
“Raze?”
I felt the shiver again, only this time I hadn’t touched anything. “Yeah?”
“Brace!”
I looked up in time to see a titanic Warwick leering down at us. Thousands of lifeless Heroes had unwittingly donated their muscles to stitch him a new grotesque anatomy, and he used it to haul off and punt us with every ounce of his stolen strength.
Right before his foot smashed into us at breakneck speed I realized that I’d forgotten to buckle up again when I’d gotten back into my seat.
Tenacity Roll
Raze: 15
Result: Success
Damage: 12
Hit Points Remaining: 5
I heard a familiar voice say, “Hang in there, Raze!”
“Mother?” Relief washed over me. “I know you told me to keep them quiet, but I had the worst dream of all of them!”
Bingo’s gruff, gas-mask-enhanced voice swooped in and shattered my delusion. “She’s not yer mother, sicko. At da very least, she’s your girlfriend.”
My eyelids fluttered open. I was upside down, my face pressed to Patch’s hatch. That’s what she said, I thought groggily. “I think I kinda drifted off, there.”
Her nose was bleeding, and not just from the ring she’d added. Patch reached up and gently stroked my face through the opening between our compartments. “We tried. More importantly, you tried,” she told me wistfully.
“I did, didn’t I?”
“Yep. Now get your ass in that seat and try again.”
“Huh?”
“You heard me. Do what you can to make sure that I don’t go down in history as the chick in the Mech that got killed by a skyscraper nudist.”
“On it.” I found my feet, although I admit I took a moment to stare down her shirt, first. If I was headed for oblivion, I was at least going to burn her breasts into my retinas first.
The Mech was in a bad way, flat on our left side. I could see dirt piled up outside, which probably meant that we’d plowed a furrow when we’d hit the ground.
The first thing I did when I got to my seat was strap in. The harness was broken, but at least it let me hang within reach of my controls. I’d expected all of the screens to be black, but ‘Hero Within’ was flashing a familiar message at me.
Continue?
Nine
Eight
Seven
I wiggled the joysticks and pressed the Player 1 button.
Six
I shouted, ‘Yes!’ and flicked every switch and lever in sight.
Five
“Yer boy’s finally lost it, eh?” I heard Bingo ask.
“Naw. This is just part of his process.”
Four
Three
and then it hit me. The components around me had been in arcade games for a lot longer than they’d been in the Mech. It only had one way to ask me if I wanted to get back in the fight, and I had only one tried and true method of answering it.
I wiggled out of the broken harness and dove at Patch. “Sorry, not sorry,” I said to her as I thrust my hand into her plunging neckline and retrieved the coin with Bingo’s face on it from her cleavage.
“No need to apologize,” she told me, flushed.
I gave her a wink and bounded back to my chair. Once I was there, I rammed the coin into the slot, turned the key and hit the ‘Player One’ button like a Gearblin possessed.
1 Life Remaining
Unlike last time, everything powered up at once. Comms, hydraulics, weapon subsystems, everything was there. There was still some ammunition left, and I’d be damned if we died before I threw what was left of our arsenal at the fast approaching Warwick Kaiju.
Chapter 40
Good luck or high-quality engineering had allowed Mother to tuck and roll when we’d come crashing to the turf after his last attack.
The Mech felt like it was helping me stand her up, and when I did the screens that were still functioning filled with images of Warwick’s flesh golem self.
The bodies that clung to him were still lined in purple, and his eyes hadn’t lost any of their blaze.
“Source?”
“Yes boss?”
“War Pigs. Black Sabbath. Make it happen.”
He did. “Anything else?”
I closed my eyes and let the music fill me. “This song lasts almost eight minutes. I intend to be around to hear the end of it.”
I don’t know how he managed it, but Source didn’t laugh. “Anything else?” he repeated.
“How far away is Warwick right this second?”
“36.576 meters.”
“In Freedom Units, if you please.”
He sighed. “40 yards.”
“And his height?”
“Something akin to 72 feet tall.”
“Okay. Now, where are we?” I asked the others.
“Concussion,” came the diagnosis from Bingo’s side of the Mech.
“No!” I said. “Well, maybe, but we’ll get that sorted out later. Where are we on the terrain? Too many of Mother’s cameras are broken for me to tell what’s at our back.”
Patch was fast and brave, but too late I realized that if I couldn’t tell, neither could she. Not that she let that stop her. She unsealed her hatch and stuck most of her body out, craning her neck and hanging on to the superstructure as she tried to steal a glance past our bulk.
“Get in here!” I shouted at her. If we went through all of this and I lost her now, I didn’t know what I’d do.
“You’ve got the lava river about 20 yards behind you,” she informed me, swinging back in and buttoning up the armor again. “So I wouldn’t back up very much, if I were you.”
“How tall is he now, Source?”
“66 feet tall, give or take.”
I nodded, gingerly coaxing the mech backward a couple of strides. “Actually, I’m sort of betting our lives that he is giving, to be honest.”
I don’t know if Source had caught on yet, but he obliged my whims by keeping up a running narration of Warwick’s advance. “35 yards, 60 feet. 28 yards, 52 feet. 20 yards, 39 feet.”
I brought up the weapon systems and made sure that the only thing that wasn’t working was the Head Canon. Thanks to my crew and the hard work of the Dreg support team, I had a little fuel to burn and lead to throw. The rocket launcher was full, but I had no idea what sort of payload the Alchemical Storm was loaded with.
I suppose it was only natural, but Bingo was morbidly obsessed with Warwick’s approach. “15 yards away. Annnnnnd… He’s stopped. Just lookin’ at us, now.”
“Okay,” I said. “How tall is he?”
“My turn,” shouted Patch, wildly guessing. “Like, 200 feet.”
Bingo snorted. “Don’t listen
to her. He’s no more den dirty-five.”
“He is 31 feet tall,” supplied Source. “And judging by the increments at which I’ve taken readings, when he reaches us he’ll measure approximately 24 feet in height.”
I didn’t look up from the screen I was using to shunt power into the only weapon other than the Head Canon we hadn’t tried. “Okay. Now for the most important question. Are the bodies following him?”
All three of them said “Huh?” at once.
I jabbed my finger at the screen. “This bastard’s impatient. The farther he gets away from the dais, the weaker the magic and the more bodies he’s shedding. I want to know if the flesh that he’s shucking is catching up with him, or staying still.”
Source answered first. “I detect no movement.”
“Perfect.”
Patch looked at me expectantly. “Raze, why aren’t we shooting?”
“Because I don’t think Mother’s in any condition to chase him down. If this asshole made of other assholes retreats or waits us out, he’ll win easy. Hell, right now he could probably march right into the mountain, though it may be at the limits of his power.”
As if he could hear me or sense my thoughts, I saw Warwick take a long, careful look in the direction of Rule of Cool’s base.
“Oh no you don’t,” I whispered, turning on what was left of the Mech’s outside speakers and linking into the external comms channel. “Hey, dipshit. Remember me?”
He flinched, but didn’t turn to face us.
“What’s the matter, Paladin? Afraid of losing to a Gearblin again? When your god handed you your second life, did you tell him that you died while you were in the middle of killing rats? Did he know you were trying to cheat at the easiest quest there was?”
He whirled on us, but held his ground.
“Oh, and before I forget, congratulations D’Havilin. You’ve got to be, without a doubt, the only fuckwit in the whole damn history of the world to get killed by the same Gearblin twice! Wait’ll the bards get a load of that!”
Know Your Roll Page 38
