NANO Archive 01: The City of Fire

by Jason Crutchfield

  “Izuma, do not interfere again. I do not need your meager assistance or your half-assed nanite.” The woman stepped forward and placed her boot against my shoulder. She applied pressure, and I toppled to the side with a confused groan. The young man she called Izuma finally recovered from the severe blow I dealt him enough to struggle to his feet. He bowed his head solemnly and took a few steps away from me and the woman.

  “As… you wish… big sister,” He responded between sputters and coughs.

  “You may be feeling a bit under the weather. You shouldn't have let my brother get so close to you, I'm afraid,” The woman grinned and sent a swift kick into the nearly-sealed gash on my stomach that she inflicted back in my temporary quarters.

  I grunted and protectively curled inward to the best of my ability. It felt as though an oncoming train had barreled into me. Considering the only damage I suffered stemmed from the woman's katana and electric shock, I grew more confused the more my mind dwelt on it. It took several seconds for my assailant's words to fully sink into my disoriented brain. Close to me?

  “Why… is that?” I stammered.

  “Nomeiko… Sis, is it really necessary to divulge? Just kill her, as per our orders,” Izuma spoke up after fully regaining his composure.

  “Quiet, useless brother. The order was to eliminate the sniper, and eliminate her I shall. I want to see what kind of pain I can inflict on her, first, though,” Nomeiko responded harshly, and as she returned her attention to me from her apparently “useless” brother, she placed the tip of her katana just above the metal roof and channeled her electrical abilities through the blade.

  The hot, blue light sparked and cracked as the bolts jumped from the tip of her sword to the roof; they discharged harmlessly over the expanse of metal, but they were still powerful enough that I felt a faint buzz against my cheek and exposed midriff. Either the charge she emitted lacked the power to injure, or the surface area of the metal roof extended too far for the charge to carry.

  “Impressive… but I know that trick… already,” I groaned.

  “Indeed. As you can probably guess, my nanite converts my bioelectric field, which is a chemical process, into an actual electromagnetic field. In addition to revving up the power a lot, it allows me far more control over the currents than the normal involuntary functions they serve. My brother's nanite, however, is a bit more complicated.” Nomeiko scraped the tip of her blade across the metal rooftop; an ear piercing screech resounded.

  When she spoke, her lips curled into a devious grin, “His nanite produces and manipulates sound waves. More specifically, the vibrations responsible for sound waves.”

  “Boring, heard that one already, too. That crater down there wasn't from the city spontaneously exploding. My ally, Crelyos, matches up harmonic resonance frequencies instantly and disintegrates the objects using vibratory waves,” I strained to form the words, but at the very least, my voice recovered enough that I could speak without dramatic coughs and groans. Still, I was far from a condition worthy of standing or fighting back. I needed to keep her talking a little longer.

  “So that's what that was. See, brother? Why can't you be more useful, like the guy who's about to die down there?” Nomeiko quirked a condescending brow at her brother, who stood silently with his head bowed. She giggled sadistically beneath her breath and returned her gaze to me, “Unfortunately, my brother's nanite works a bit differently. He uses preset vibration frequencies which he consciously controls. At their lowest frequency, they can cause tremors on surfaces or in bodies. At their highest frequencies, however… well, you're suffering those effects now.”

  “I'll give you a hint: it directly affects the eardrums and sense of orientation. Just a quick pass of his hand and whoosh, he can turn your world upside down!” Nomeiko's giggles perfectly belied the pleasure she derived in the torture of others.

  “I see, so it doesn't matter if he actually hits your or not. As long as he gets close, his nanites will take care of the rest,” I finished the line of thought and glanced toward the submissive Izuma.

  His head, still bowed in avid respect to his older sister, lifted only faintly until his narrow eyes met mine. It lasted a brief instant before he returned to staring at the rooftop, but in the second our eyes locked, I perceived his grave concern and anxious spirit. He confirmed my suspicions when next he spoke, interrupting his sister's cruel laughter and sword scrapes.

  “Sis… she'll be functional soon. Something's off about her; I don't trust this feeling. Please hurry and kill her so we can go back to Commander Sarge's side!” The desperation in his tone leaked like a dripping faucet. I might have offered a passing grin if not for the poker face I fought to maintain throughout the experience. Izuma's worrisome emotions were quite justified.

  “Just a few more seconds…” I thought to myself.

  “Hm? You're awfully demanding today, brother dearest. Commander Sarge needs our help about as much as I need yours. Although…” Nomeiko folded one arm across her underdeveloped chest and gripped her opposite elbow with her free hand.

  From our vantage point on the roof, her gaze swept out over the central square of Loftsborough as though she worked to hastily analyze the crater formed by my blonde comrade. I twisted from my position on the ground and followed her stare. When she spoke again, her tone possessed an acute curiosity, “Although I wonder what kind of side effects a destructive force like that must have. Surely it takes its toll on him somehow.”

  “His right arm,” I rebutted.

  I began testing my stability by swiveling my head back and forth; when my vision moved from the sky to the city square without the accompanying vertigo, I released a relieved sigh. When I stopped, my gaze rested on Crelyos still engaged in combat in the city square. The strips of false flesh that hung from his prosthetic arm had vanished completely, and he used his fully revealed cybernetic limb to make short work of the remaining stragglers in Sarge's platoon.

  The few guards which I failed to exterminate during my infiltration fired at the former soldier from afar, but Crelyos used his metal arm to cover his vitals as he closed the distance to each of them. I witnessed one attempt to swerve behind one of the buildings for cover; he obviously failed to understand the nature of Crelyos' ability from his former display. No sooner did the soldier think himself safe with his back pressed against one of Loftsborough's odd buildings than the corner of the structure exploded in a spray of infinitesimal metal fragments.

  Crelyos cleaved through the building with a single punch and continued the blow through to the unfortunate soldier's back. Though the soldier cried out in pain and his back snapped with a deafening crunch, Crelyos did not activate his Harmonic Resonance. Or, perhaps, he could not? After careful thought, I deduced that the Harmonic Resonance probably could not activate in rapid succession. After blasting the wall to pieces, it needed a small window of time before reactivating. But how long was that time? Two seconds? Three? Even longer?

  To my surprise, Sarge remained inert through the entire ordeal. As Crelyos ducked and weaved from one soldier to the next and eliminated them, the copper-headed commander stood silently in his original position. He maintained his folded arms, and I could have sworn an amused grin touched one corner of his mouth as he watched his own men fall to Crelyos' unbridled rampage. What was his game?

  I glanced up at Nomeiko, who still seemed confused with my limited explanation. Even as she watched Crelyos obliterate the men around him using only his cybernetic right arm, she failed to piece together my words. I hardly blamed her; I spent many years next to the blond mercenary without so much as suspecting he even possessed a faux limb, let alone discerned its secrets.

  “The Harmonic Resonance has a backlash effect. When he used it before the Titan Crisis, the backlash completely disintegrated his arm, shoulder, and part of his chest in addition to the object he punched. His metal replacement is
designed to absorb the backlash effect so that doesn't happen again.” I despised divulging so much information to the twins, but I needed a believable excuse to continue the conversation.

  “Besides,” I thought to myself, “I have no intention of letting them leave here alive, anyway.”

  Nomeiko placed a hand against her mouth and drew in a sharp inhale. My brow twitched involuntarily because I understood, deep in my gut, that her gasp dripped with the same sadistic sarcasm she exuded in all her actions. A few seconds followed, and my instinct proved correct when she erupted into robust laughter. I gritted my teeth and flattened my palm against the metal roof with palpable anticipation. “What's so funny?” I nearly growled.

  “Oh, nothing. Just… the chances of your little friend's survival went from slim, to none. He can't even lay a finger on Sarge with that kind of ability.” Nomeiko sauntered back to my location and gripped a fistful of my long raven locks in her free hand. The force she exerted as she dragged me toward the roof's edge threatened to rip the hair from my scalp.

  I clenched my teeth and grunted until she stopped; her paltry upper body strength barely allowed her to lift the upper half of my body into the air. As she forced my face in Crelyos' direction, Nomeiko stepped forward into a half-lunge and held the position. Her back bent and she lowered the elbow of the left hand she used to grip my hair atop her extended knee. Her long katana stretched out, and she pressed the tip flush against the back of my neck. “Let's watch, shall we?”

  File 33: A Hopeless Battle

  “Sarge, looks like it's going to be man to man after all!” The glint in Crelyos' eyes radiated his daunting excitement. With his metal limb embedded in a partially disintegrated soldier, Crelyos squared off in front of his former commander. As the deceased soldier slid from Crelyos's prosthetic limb to the ground with a disgusting squelch, the blond mercenary took up his trademark stance that resembled a cross between trained martial arts and good, old-fashioned street brawling.

  Sarge quickly scanned the surrounding area; to my surprise, his eyes flitted over the locations where the soldiers I dispatched might have emerged had they lived. His attention to detail was more than impressive. A smile touched his lips, and the copper-haired commander unfolded his arms and took up his own stance, drawing both his arms wide away from his sides with his palms opened and turned toward Loftsborough's metal floor.

  I twitched against Nomeiko's blade; Sarge's combat stance was unlike any I had ever seen. When he spoke, his words left him with the calm resolve of a seasoned combat veteran. “It seems your sniper friend helped you more than I thought. Very well, Crelyos. It pains me to fight one of my former comrades, but if that is what it will take to crush your spirit, then so be it. I will fulfill my orders.”

  “Get ready, Sarge! I'm not the same green piece of shit you left all those years ago!” Crelyos charged forward and drew back his left arm; he sent his fist sailing through the air toward Sarge's jaw. I activated my Cognitive Accelerator to view the fight in slow motion, and I noted that the slate blue eyes of Crelyos' former commander effortlessly followed the punch throughout its entire swing. Instead of a large unnecessary motion, Sarge waited until Crelyos' knuckles threatened to scrape his jaw before twisting his head and body to match the flow of the punch. Crelyos' lips twisted into a premature smile the moment he believed his blow would connect.

  Under that misconception, the blond mercenary threw his entire weight into the attack. Sarge spun on his heel with the force of a tornado at the exact moment Crelyos passed the point of no return, and he stumbled forward through empty air. Using the centrifugal force of his spin, Sarge forcefully drove his elbow into the back of Crelyos's neck with an expert hip twist. I marveled at the lack of any wasted movement on Sarge's part and the unfaltering confidence with which he allowed Crelyos the illusion of success. Even with my Cognitive Accelerator, I was unsure I possessed the nerves to maintain such a ruse for that long before enacting countermeasures.

  I snapped my perception of motion to normal; Crelyos stumbled forward with an agonized cry. As he dropped to his hands and knees with stunned groans and bloodshot eyes, his hand lifted to rub at the painful knot forming at the base of his skull. Sarge stepped forward and drove a combat boot swiftly into Crelyos' ribcage; the kick provided enough force to lift the bulky blond from the steel floor, but as he rolled with the momentum of the strike, Crelyos growled and leapt to his feet.

  Crelyos entered his typical frenzy, throwing blow after blow in Sarge's direction. With each attack, Sarge waited until the last conceivable moment and slid aside. His nerves of steel were astounding, but his acute perception surprised me more. He smiled with pleasure when Crelyos did not throw his entire center of balance off during any of the strikes that followed his unfortunate first. Somehow, Crelyos understood that Sarge had taken advantage of his imbalance and learned from that single incident. Crelyos' intelligence and cunning played far less a part in his adaptation than one of his attributes of which I was already keenly aware; apparently, so was Sarge.

  “I see your combat instincts are as sharp as ever. Throw everything you got at someone more experienced than you, and the result is pain and discomfort. Very good.” Sarge's words floated through the air with the same fluid tempo he displayed as he danced around Crelyos' flailing limbs. But what startled me most as a witness to the display was that Crelyos' attacks, even when filtered through my analytical discernment, possessed very few flaws.

  His punches, knees, and kicks from his natural flesh limbs, while wild and lacking finesse, cut through the air with pinpoint precision, blinding speed, and properly trained technique. In fact, given Crelyos' natural instinct to evolve and grow over the course of a fight, every subsequent blow that rocketed from my blond comrade escalated in efficiency and expertise at an alarming and impressive rate.

  Unfortunately, with each stage of evolution, Sarge increased the level of experience he displayed by a margin exactly what I might consider “one step ahead” of Crelyos. In each moment of prescience, when I believed Crelyos might strike his former commander down, Sarge twisted a fraction of a second faster or dipped in a new and effective direction to bypass Crelyos' entire attack. I watched the mix of horror and frustration creep across Crelyos' face like a deadly plague. Sarge was simply toying with him, and he knew it. We all knew it.

  “You grow stronger the longer you fight someone. It's such a rare gift, that combat instinct of yours. However…” Sarge's voice trailed off. Crelyos roared and threw a brutal knee straight into Sarge's diaphragm. When the blow connected with an echoing “thwack” and Sarge doubled over, a glimmer of hope soothed some of the agony in my body. It quickly vanished, however, for as Crelyos drove his fleshy left hand down toward Sarge's temple to incapacitate his former commander, the man performed a feat similar to the one I witnessed in slow motion at the bout's start.

  It seemed as though Crelyos' confidence in his victory encouraged him to give his punch the entirety of his force and weight. Such an action played heavily in Sarge's favor; he twisted with the energy of Crelyos' fist and spun into an upright position. At the end of the twirl, Sarge securely gripped Crelyos' left wrist. The copper-haired commander's right hand drew back with an open palm aimed high above Crelyos' extended elbow.

  Sarge's words hung in the air like a bad punch-line, “… you're holding back and treating this like some kind of game or spar! When, I assure you,” Sarge grunted as he hammered his open palm into Crelyos' joint. The resounding snap and blood-curdling scream that escaped my ally as Sarge turned his elbow inside-out rattled my core. It swallowed my glimmer of hope and redeposited all the agony in my body with compounded interest. Sarge finished his sentence as Crelyos lay writhing on the ground, his arm flopping about unnaturally, “it is no game and no spar. I'm serious. So long as you hold back that ability of yours, and that right arm, you will not beat me. When you get up, I will come at you to kill you; I suggest you do
the same to me.”

  “Crelyos!” I instinctively screamed. In my concern, my body lurched forward on its own, but the tight grip on my hair and the dangerous depression of Nomeiko's sword against my neck made short work of my movements. The cry garnered my comrade's attention, however, and he lifted his sky blue eyes to my position atop the roof. His countenance darkened, and he rose to his knees and gestured toward me with a single metal finger.

  “Sarge, let her go. She has nothing to do with this,” Crelyos spoke calmly but with a foreboding sense of darkness laced in his voice. Despite my heightened auditory sense, I almost failed to distinguish his words.

  “Not that speech again, Crelyos. She slaughtered quite a few of my men and made an attempt on my life. She'll be killed. So will you, if you do not back down. Last warning.” Sarge returned to his strange combat stance and Crelyos fought to his feet. He slung his elbow back into a proper shape with a disgusting crunch, and Panacea began the tedious work of stitching the joint back together. Crelyos gritted his teeth.

  “Not her, Sarge. If you hurt even one hair on her head, I'll rip you apart even if it's the last thing I do. Let her go.” Despite the pain which no doubt sang through Crelyos' arm like an obese opera singer's vibrato, he resumed his own combat stance.

  “Interesting. Tell you what, I'll issue the order for Nomeiko to release her with my dying breath. That is, of course, assuming you can defeat me. If not, she dies. I think those stakes should prove most…” Sarge abruptly ended his speech when Crelyos' left fist rocketed into his nose with enough force to concave his face.

  The muffled, tortured cry that escaped Sarge's busted lips as his nose all but exploded beneath the force of Crelyos' punch echoed in my ears. The copper-haired commander staggered back several feet, and his head arched back so far I anticipated the sound of his snapping neck to join his echoing cry in my enhanced ears. Crelyos growled and followed up with a vicious front thrust kick into his former commander's stomach. Sarge's jaw dropped, and the sound of a dry heave escaped him as the force of Crelyos' blow drew his former commander into an involuntary curl. Crelyos carried through with the momentum of his kick; he drew his metallic right arm back and launched it skyward in a brutal uppercut that cleaved into Sarge's jaw.