NANO Archive 01: The City of Fire

by Jason Crutchfield

  Surging forward, I drove both arms down in a diagonal criss-cross slash against his chest. The flesh starting at the base of either of his pectorals split apart with a satisfactory squelch that ripped down to the diaphragm where the wounds crossed paths before finishing their merciless exit a few inches above his wide hips. He howled in pain and jerked his blade from the chunks of stone in preparation to strike.

  My eyes flashed, and with enhanced strength coursing through each of my legs, I sent a herculean spin kick into the underside of the giant's left forearm. The concussive force sent his hand, and the blade encased by it, flailing far to the side. As I brought my leg down, I used the momentum to drag my body into a spin and put my daggers to work. Applying centrifugal power to my attacks, I tore two horizontal wounds across the breadth of his middle with both blades. Before Joachim could stabilize his left arm to prepare another swing of his cleaver, I coiled as much power into my left leg as I could muster and brought it in a wide, powerful roundhouse toward the blinded giant's right temple.

  With his eye still clamped shut and healing from the previous gash, I intended to end the fight by rendering the man unconscious and executing him during his stupor. To my astonishment, his bulky hand shot up like a rocket and encompassed the circumference of my ankle before the kick could connect. How was that possible? My eyes widened as he stepped back and yanked my body off the ground with that single hand. Up and over the top of his head, he swung me in an enormous semi-circle; he twisted to maximize the velocity of my descent and slammed my body into the ground.

  The iron floor groaned beneath the force of impact, and as the bones in my shoulders and back crunched, I opened my eyes and looked up from the small crater of bent metal in which I rested. My gaze locked onto Joachim; the enormous man wasted no time bringing his cleaver down with the titanic power of a falling anvil. I twisted my body to spin from the blade's projected path, but was stunned to find my range of motion limited. A glance down revealed my ankle still entombed in the vice clamp of his hand.

  I grunted and snapped to an upright seated position while criss-crossing my blades above my head and aligning my spine to prevent injury. Though Panacea worked tirelessly to stitch my broken bones together, I knew the impact would devastate my battered shoulders, so I steeled myself for the inevitable pain like a child preparing for a vaccination.

  The clash of steel against steel sent a small shockwave along the ground when the great sword slammed into the wedge created by my blades. My shoulders and collar bone immediately popped in rapid succession. Normally, I would never attempt to directly compete with someone of Joachim's stature in a contest of strength. Even with my Supersoldier augment, the sheer volume of his muscle mass overwhelmed me to the point that I cried out in hopes my adrenaline would respond and offer me the small amount of power I needed to merely survive the exchange.

  Oddly enough, I learned in that moment Joachim did not possess a strength enhancement. If he had, the contest would have ended far more quickly; how lucky for me. My arms quivered with the strain of trying to keep his blade at bay; as I gazed up at the dark warrior, his right eye snapped open.

  “I see you…” He chuckled and drew the blade back in preparation for another strike. He knew, as I did, that a direct assault would eventually break every bone in my body. Why cleave me into pieces if he could just bludgeon me into dust? I gritted my teeth and lurched forward the moment I felt relief from the suffocating weight of his cleaver. I plunged both of my blades down into his large forearm; in particular, the one belonging to the hand keeping my ankle prisoner. Strangely, even with the return of his eyesight he made no attempt to deflect the blow. He growled in agony when my sword and dagger squished into his flesh.

  “You bitch!” He shouted and instinctively flung my body to his right with enough force to send me rocketing through the air as though he had just thrown a softball. As I cut through the sky, I beamed the sword I borrowed from my former opponent at Joachim's face with the velocity of an arrow loosed from a bow. Despite the constant pain distracting me, I forced my Cognitive Accelerator to activate if only for an instant: the moment the blade should have penetrated the warrior's skull.

  His free hand, wounded from my previous attack, drifted up in the sluggish manner with which I perceived the world. Thick fingers wrapped around the blade's edge just before it could impale his forehead, and a few streaks of blood splashed from the slice the weapon made against his palm as punishment for grabbing the wrong end. Interestingly, several seconds in my slow motion world passed after his daring catch before his right eye slid over in its socket to actually behold his own action.

  A grin spread across my lips. I deactivated my Cognitive Accelerator and turned a flip in midair; as a result, my feet touched the ground with feline grace, and I retained my balance as the throw's remaining force acted upon my body and slid it back several feet across the ground.

  “I understand…” I spoke cryptically and glanced down. Joachim's throw succeeded in distancing the two of us, and it came with the added perk of launching me across the battlefield to the slouched thug wearing my other long dagger in his throat like a deranged piercing. I reached down and gripped the hilt of my familiar weapon, and when I tugged it from its fleshy sheath I twirled it nonchalantly in my hand. I returned my gaze to the stout warrior. Joachim smiled and tossed the sword he plucked from the sky aside like a used toothpick.

  “Oh? I think you're bluffing,” Joachim growled.

  His guttural sounds resembled a ferocious excitement instead of an annoyed frustration. I quirked a brow and stopped twirling my long dagger; as I gripped the handle properly, I could not help but relinquish a sigh of relief. Nothing compared to the comfort I felt wielding my own weapons. I trained for years to turn them into machines of efficient death dealing, after all. I dropped into my combat stance and steadied my nerves before hissing with a misty breath, “Why don't you find out?”

  Joachim rushed at me with a roar of anticipation. I reciprocated his gesture and dashed with a pregnant silence across the iron ground. I kept low, cutting through the whipping night wind with predatory agility. Before the world turned to ash and exterminated earth's animals, a spectator may have easily confused our confrontational charge to be a lumbering bear and swift panther engaged in mortal combat. Joachim still held the cleaver fast in his left hand, and swung it when he reached a distance that his professional fighting experience suggested would be most effective.

  By taking an infinitesimal half-step just before the blade crashed into the ground, I avoided having my chest opened like a stuffed animal with a split seam. The quickness with which I prided myself took control, and my feathery footsteps tapped against the broad edge of his blade as I ran along the blunted edge. His shot his right hand across his chest in an attempt to pluck me from the air in a similar manner as he did the first time.

  I grinned and leapt toward his left when I reached the handle of his great sword to avoid the grapple. For a moment it seemed as though I attempted to disengage completely, and during that moment Joachim switched his grip. Releasing the blade with his left hand, he curled his right fingers around the cleaver's hilt. His sent his left hand through the air to the position in which he predicted I would descend; he intended to snatch me up before I had the chance to put my agility to work.

  “You think you can just zip around like a gnat and poke and prod at me to wear me down?! Not happening! Haha!” His words cut through the night sky like a signaling pistol shot for me to act.

  I twitched in my moment of prescience and plunged the blade in my right hand into his left bicep; keeping a firm hold against the hilt I used the long dagger as a pivot to swing my body up and around Joachim's colossal frame. Like a gymnast on the parallel bars, I vaulted onto his left shoulder and left the long dagger shoved within his massive arm.

  With one foot on his collar bone and the other braced against the dagger protru
ding from his bicep, I quickly fished the revolver from my waistline with my newly freed hand and took aim at the open portion of his mask where his right eye glared at me. I depressed the trigger and braced my injured shoulder for the recoil; the gun spit its spiraling cone of lead from a cloud of fire. In time with the cacophonous crack, Joachim moved. At the last possible second, the dark warrior's head swerved to the left and the bullet skimmed passed his cheek.

  “Hah, what, point blank was your answer? I'm disa—” Crunch. The sound of Joachim's spine separating at the base of his neck near the brain stem ceased his haughty ramblings and widened his eyes. My left hand held fast to the pommel of my long dagger which I buried to the hilt in Joachim's neck. He began twitching and sputtering, trying in vain to move his body. With his nerves cut and his spinal cord severed, Joachim could only shiver, gasp, think… and listen.

  “I understand,” I repeated as his body swayed in the wind, “You have no spirals in your eyes, so it's safe to assume you possess three implants. Panacea is a given for all mortals living in this world. So that's one. You praised me for my analytical prowess only to tell me it would not work on you. That was your first mistake. My tactics only failed because of how you fight; you left me with no way to analyze your thoughts because you didn't think. Your entire fighting style revolved around instinctual reflexes that must be enhanced by a nanite.”

  “It's easy to over think the actions of a person if they're only operating on base levels, so when you reacted to attacks and your body betrayed no signs of your attacks or defenses, it simply left me to assume you were just that quick. But that wasn't the case, was it? Your second implant is one that augments your reflexes. Yet you did nothing to dodge attacks on your body or the one I drove into your forearm. Your inconsistency was your second mistake.” I twisted the dagger; the action released a satisfied crack that caused Joachim's eyes to roll into the back of his head as blood sprayed from the gruesome wound.

  “Your reflexes activated only in the proximity of your head. Their superhuman quality screamed 'nanite,' but the masterful manner in which they prioritized your most vital spot, your brain, spoke volumes of your experience as a fighter and suggested that the nanite is implanted in your frontal lobe. Interesting choice for an involuntary effect like your reflexes. As long as one did not approach your face or head, you were just a normal fighter, albeit a damn good one. But the nature of reflexes in the human body is the sharp reaction to stimuli from a sensory organ. In your case, your third mistake was this mask.” I reached forward with the barrel of the revolver and tapped the mask on the area covering Joachim's left eye.

  “Your mask hinders your eyesight. I assume it's either an injury to your left eye, or some other form of defect that renders your sight on that side useless. Because of this, as a seasoned fighter, you decided your last implant would not be enhanced vision as many fighters use. Instead you chose to enhance your hearing. By linking your hearing to your reflexes, your body responds with inhuman speed to anything perceived by these ears of yours. And since your ears operate at a superhuman level, the synergy between the two implants makes you almost invincible. If you at least pretended your left eye wasn't useless by not wearing a mask, it might have taken me longer to deduce that you used hearing instead of vision.”

  I shook my head, “Instead, it was easy to discern that you caught my sword with your hand long before you actually saw it after you threw me. This is because the sword's path disrupted the air, as did my kick earlier when you could not see at all and still managed to catch it, and when you charged straight at me but did not avoid your comrades on the ground. That's because you heard my heartbeat but didn't hear theirs since they no longer have one. Am I right? Ah, you can't answer. Then, I'll continue.”

  The dramatic manner in which his body remained standing reached a climactic finale, and as the breeze fluttered through my long black tresses, I remained atop the massive being as he descended slowly, in my mind's eye, toward the ground.

  “Your pride was your final mistake. You did nothing to hide these things during our fight, likely because you assumed I experienced the world the same way everyone else does. There's no way normal or even enhanced vision can detect the details I did. I have my own secrets… but they don't mean anything to you now, I guess.” His body thundered against the ground like a felled tree. He continued to sputter and twitch as he struggled to grip the true extent of his situation; he was going to die.

  “But how… did you… defeat… that?” He managed to choke out words.

  “Simple,” I shrugged, “you were too sensitive. When your senses are amped too high, controlling them becomes difficult. If you have sensitive touch, then pain is just as enhanced as pleasure. If you have sensitive hearing… loud noises are just as enhanced as quiet ones. You reacted to the sound of the gunshot, as your nanites were programmed to do. It was the loudest stimuli, and because it was so loud it overloaded your auditory senses and made it impossible to detect the disturbance in the air when I stabbed you at the same time.”

  “Kind of like coughing at the same time someone claps. You don't really hear the cough, just the clap. Because there was no stimuli to react to, your reflex nanite didn't activate when I drove this dagger into your neck. Think of it like your Achilles' heel.” I stood erect over his fallen form and slowly removed the rifle from its strap against my back.

  “Amazing… I couldn't have… asked for… a better opponent… Please, Tell me your name… before I die. I want to take it with me… ” Joachim's eyes were fading fast. I sighed softly and pressed the tip of my rifle against the center of his mask.

  “Sorry. Where you're going, names don't exist, traitor.” I squeezed the trigger.

  File 11: Leaving Loftsborough

  I desired more power. As I stood over the spreading red pool of Joachim's former cranium, I grimaced. I grimaced because the snap, crackle, and pop of my bones finishing their rapid regeneration sent zaps of pain surging through my body. I grimaced because the battle with Joachim took far too long and exacted too severe a toll on my health. I grimaced because if Bradich had fought Joachim, the fight would have ended before the traitor had the chance to speak a word.

  I grimaced at the thought of my own weakness; I felt an unbridled rage at my hypocritical drive to chase Bradich without the knowledge that I possessed enough power to extinguish his treacherous life. As I discarded the revolver I used to fool Joachim's sensitive hearing, I retrieved my possessions. I loaded another shot in my rifle and slung it across my back before gripping my long daggers and returning them to their sheaths. Suddenly, I felt a jolt of pain course through my entire body induced by a crushing slap planted between my shoulder blades. It was Crelyos.

  “Hey, good job. Not sure why you got this pissed mist all around you.” Blood covered the former soldier from the tips of his blond hair to the toes of his combat boots. As I stared at him, he drew his lips into a lopsided smile. How was it Crelyos went from a storm of rage and anguish one moment to a happy-go-lucky child the next? On the other hand, I started the fight feeling exhilarated and ended with an overwhelming despair. The irony coaxed a brief, empty grin from one corner of my mouth.

  I looked beyond Crelyos to the area where he fought Raze's remaining goons while I dealt with Joachim. The iron floor appeared as though someone repeatedly slammed a wrecking ball on it with careless abandon. Disintegrated holes of various sizes, ranging from that of a human body to a huge sinkhole, peppered the imaginary arena as craters peppered the moon's surface. Nestled in the craters' lowest points, crimson smudges indicated that Crelyos' unique ability made short work of the offending assailants. Though Joachim kept me too busy to watch Crelyos' confrontation, I imagined the battle ended fairly quickly given his overwhelming combat prowess.

  As Panacea finished mending my injuries, I arched my back and stretched; the sound of my healed bones creaking and popping joined my satisfied sigh. I gave my
arms a few rotations for good measure and returned my gaze to Crelyos. I examined his wounds; though blood covered his entire body, most of it belonged to his opponents. The liquid trails that stemmed from injuries he might have sustained had long since healed. I quirked a brow at him.

  “Just how long were you watching, anyway?” I crossed my arms beneath my modest chest and cocked a hip to the side; I purposely attempted a nagging housewife pose.

  “Long enough, girly. I'd say about the time you got that rip in your shirt,” Crelyos gestured to the scrape the maniacal spearman made down the center of my chest. The exposed flesh was a bit scandalous, but I merely glanced down at it with an apathetic stare.

  “So basically the entire fight with tall, dark, and handsome,” I sighed and shook my head.

  “Pretty much. Once I got rid of mister Uzi, the rest of their gang was a joke. You seemed fairly involved with the black guy though, so I decided to let it play out. Don't worry, I'd have saved you if I thought you really needed it.” Crelyos placed both his hands on his waist, widened his stance to that of a cocky brat, and bellowed a boisterous laugh into the night sky. I rolled my eyes and stepped passed him; my languishing gait carried me toward the town's exit, but a hoarse, dusty cry of shock stopped me in my tracks.

  “Wh-wh-what have you done?! My town! There's blood everywhere! And holes, and… oh my goodness, what is that?! Youngsters these days!” Mayor Trumark appeared out of nowhere; the wrinkled codger gripped his face and wriggled in place with the speed of a sloth. In my opinion, even a sloth's moved far too fast a pace for an old timer in his condition, but the surprise of Loftsborough's new decorations may have warranted such a reaction. The womenfolk of the city poked their heads from the windows and doors of the various houses, and an overall sense of conflicting horror and joy washed over Loftsborough as Crelyos and I trudged toward the exit.