In the distance, Crelyos and Sarge leapt and bounded around one another in vicious combat. Unfortunately for my blond comrade, Sarge's smile and lack of any significant wound indicated who possessed the advantage. Just before my situation recaptured my attention, I watched him easily lean back to avoid one of Crelyos' left-handed punches by a hair's breadth. Sarge quickly retaliated; he kicked Crelyos' knee inward and unleashed a torrent of blows that sent him sprawling across the ground.
I was in no better position, myself. As my body descended, I glanced down to see Izuma with his hands outstretched toward the dust and metal cloud that used to be Eugene's mansion. Though I assumed his low frequency vibrations to be strong, witnessing a person bring down an entire building with a mere touch still shocked me, but the worst sight approached from directly below. With bloodshot eyes seethed in rage, Nomeiko leapt through the air covered in bruises and blood with her blade pulled tight to her side.
Without the ability to change trajectory in midair, Nomeiko easily found her mark; she thrust her katana forward and impaled me. The sharp, cold steel contradicted the fiery electrical burst that coursed through my body as she plunged her sword through my chest. Thankfully, I managed to lift my dagger against the side of her blade to keep it from penetrating my heart or lungs, but it tore easily through the flesh near my shoulder. The force behind her airborne tackle as she brought her blade to bear slammed us both into the ruins of Eugene's mansion with a loud clatter and a puff of dust.
“Stupid bitch, I'll kill you!” Nomeiko brought her weight down upon her sword, shoving it clean through my body and into the steel ground beneath me. I clenched my teeth and fought the urge to spasm as my muscles convulsed with the bursts of electricity pumping through them. The pain threatened to tear my mind asunder. As the palpable sparks coursed across my teeth and singed the very tissue beneath my skin, I prepared to deactivate my pain receptors. A familiar voice drifted from an apparent hiding place behind one of the nearby buildings.
“Ihlia, dear child, if you do what I think you're thinking, I will not be responsible for the consequences!” Oswald emerged and, while keeping a safe distance, approached Eugene's destroyed manor.
“Who the hell is this geezer, you old hag?” Nomeiko twisted the blade in my chest and stood erect, glaring at Oswald as electricity coursed along her fingertips and weapon. “Look, old timer, get lost or get fried.”
“Oswald… it's no good… she's too fast…” I groaned between pulses of electricity. I lifted my bloodshot eyes to the old surgeon who stared at me with a mixture of earnest concern and genuine fear. I reached up to grip Nomeiko's blade and continued during a lull in the pain, “And besides…I'm randomly losing control of my own body… it must be a side effect of her electricity. Cutting those receptors… is the only way.”
“Hm? Oh! Ihlia, no! You're likely talking about the effects of your new nanite! I tried to tell you about it before you vanished into the wilderness!”
File 34: A Changed Man
“I've been trying to design a nanite to supplement your Cognitive Accelerator. What I came up with is roughly based off the technology you described in Al's nanite, and involves exciting your fast twitch muscle fibers in short bursts. The design is intrinsically different, however. Perhaps you're familiar with reflexes? Myotatic and polysynaptic reflexes and the like? No? Well, reflexes normally bypass our brain and respond directly to external stimulus using sensors in the muscles themselves!” Oswald exclaimed excitedly.
“They do this by firing impulses to the spinal cord; while your brain becomes aware of reflex movements, it does not control them. In this way you snatch your hand from hot fire or your foot off a sharp nail far faster than you would if you actually thought about doing so! The augment I implanted in you sets up a network of nanites to bridge the connection between those synapses, your spinal cord, and your brain! In other words, your voluntary muscle fibers, when you activate the nanite, can operate at the speed of your reflexes!”
“As a bonus, the nanites serving as the conduits excite the impulse rate at which your synapses fire by several hundred fold! Of course, a normal human being would not be able to control such movements. The brain is such a limited tool; after activating the nanite to stimulate the muscles hundreds of times faster than normal human reflexes, you would then need to reactivate it to stop that motion or redirect the energy; in short, to stop or change direction. Alas, humans cannot think so quickly. Oh, wait. You can. Haha!” Clearly, Oswald's speech spiraled into the realm of excitement he referred to as his “zone.” I referred to it as his “ranting.”
“Laymen's terms… you old codger. We're kind of… on a time crunch.” I reached up and grabbed Nomeiko's wrist. Though she seemed to keep a curious ear open to the words of the good doctor, she maintained the force behind her painful blade twists. In fact, with a vehement growl she placed one of her boots atop my throat and began stepping down. As in all of her endeavors, she applied pressure slowly with the desire to inflict as much pain and discomfort as possible.
“Ah, right. To be frank, you do not have Al's super running speed. That nanite strains the muscles with voluntary electric impulses and destroys them by pushing them passed their limitations, thus taxing Panacea. You have quickness. Bursts of fast movement that capitalize on the body's synapses by bridging your voluntary and involuntary actions while multiplying them several hundred times their normal speed. Humans do not have the brain processing power to normally accommodate this, but during cognitive acceleration, you do,” Oswald carefully explained.
“You should notice you move far closer to your normally perceived 'speed' during cognitive acceleration. At least in terms of quick steps, jumps, or hand motions. The muscles can still be strained and overburdened if you overuse it, thus taxing Panacea, but it is a far more reliable nanite than Al's.” Oswald pressed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose and nodded.
“So I have super speed… as long as I'm not trying to run…” I rolled my hips back and pressed the bottom of my combat boots against Nomeiko's chest. Despite the constant spasms caused by the electric current in my body, I was determined to get the psychotic sadist off me.
“You could… have just said that from… the start!” I roared and activated my new synapse enhancement. The muscles in my legs bolted out in a furious kick that, without being in a state of cognitive acceleration, sent Nomeiko whistling through the air and me chaotically rolling to my feet. As I stumbled forward into a crouch and planted my hands against a nearby distorted metal pillar to steady myself, the sound of Crelyos howling in agony averted my attention. I instantly enhanced my senses to better perceive the situation.
Sarge's fist drove into my comrade's spine like a drill. The fact that Sarge faced Crelyos' back implied the copper-haired commander somehow danced a complete one hundred and eighty degrees around my ally. Infuriated, Crelyos pivoted and drove his left fist toward Sarge's face, but due to the wide distance the blond mercenary needed to spin in order to reach him, Sarge followed Crelyos' entire motion with the passive interest of a bird-watcher.
In the last moment, Sarge dipped low and allowed the strike to pass directly over his bristly red hair. Using the recoil of his crouch, he then sent a crushing uppercut into Crelyos' jaw and followed it with a swift roundhouse to the side of his face. The overwhelming force behind his foot threatened to pop Crelyos' head from his shoulders, and I thought the sound of several cracking vertebrae reached my augmented ears as my ally slammed into a nearby building. Sarge finally glanced in my direction, and when his gaze averted to the Storm Duo, he shook his head with disappointed dismay. “Enough is enough,” Sarge grimaced and pressed a finger to his ear. “Hoverbuster Alpha, this is Sarge. Punch a hole in this clam and prepare the ballistic missiles, I want scorched earth policy on this place. Torch it all.”
“No!” Crelyos cried out, pulled himself off the building, and dashed toward Sarge, who turned t
o face him. The commander's eyes widened; though I was unable to discern if the misty gray saucers glistened with excitement or concern. For Crelyos' right metal arm cut through the air directly toward the copper-haired soldier, and it sang with the vibratory force of his Harmonic Resonance. Part of me felt relief that Crelyos put the safety of the town before his desire to save one old war buddy; another part of me felt a heart wrenching sadness knowing Crelyos likely hated the nanoseconds between his punch's launch and its connection more than any other moment in his life. Either way, Sarge would not survive.
At least, I thought that to be the case. I was sadly mistaken.
As Crelyos' deadly punch neared Sarge's face, he simply lifted his left hand directly in the trajectory of my comrade's cybernetic limb. The heavy thud of Crelyos' prosthetic rang out like a detonation, and Sarge's clothes billowed back with the shockwave created by the powerful impact. My jaw dropped, however, when Sarge stood in the wake of Crelyos' blow unscathed.
Did Crelyos hold back again? Was he simply unable to bring himself to kill an ally even if it meant the lives of hundreds of innocent bystanders? Upon closer inspection, I realized how far from the truth my hypothesis actually was. Crelyos' metal fist hovered almost an entire foot from Sarge's outstretched hand. The steadiness with which it vibrated in the air made it appear as though Crelyos struck some solid object, but the gap between his fist and Sarge's hand contained only empty space.
The cold bite of the whistling wind swept through the city as the only prominent sound. I was stunned and confused. Nomeiko used her katana as a brace and shakily stood; she parted her lips and unleashed a torrent of her trademark sadistic laughter.
“That's what I tried to tell you. He can't even touch the commander,” Nomeiko panted between her wicked chortles and shifted her weight to her feet. With a deep inhale, she readied her katana and sank into a battle stance in front of me.
“Psychokinesis? With enough force to stop a punch like Crelyos'? Why doesn't he just pick him up and throw him around like a rag doll with his mind, then?” I flipped my dagger into a reverse-grip and sank into my own typical combat stance.
“Psychokinesis? Sarge doesn't have psychokinesis. His nanites generate electromagnetic fields that respond in shape and power to his will. Repulsion, attraction, a dome, a line. He's mastered it,” Nomeiko beamed proudly.
I had to hand it to Nomeiko, her unshakable loyalty to Sarge impressed me. She downright idolized him. Sarge's unique nanite certainly explained why my metallic bullet ricocheted off some invisible force field; if Sarge kept a basic electromagnetic field up around his body with enough strength, it would easily double as his own personal anti-bullet dome.
“That's why that giant dipshit doesn't stand a chance,” Nomeiko continued, “because Commander Sarge has absolute control over metal! And in a world full of glistening steel and metal…” Nomeiko's countenance darkened, and a smile spread across her lips. Behind me, the metal debris left over from the collapsed mansion shook and rattled.
I glanced back in time to watch various steel beams and metal plates dislodge from the ruins. An inexplicable force tugged on the dagger in my hand, threatening to rip it from my fingertips. It took considerable effort to merely hold onto my weapon. Nomeiko's lips parted, and her words accompanied a proverbial, split second calm-before-the-storm that suddenly overtook the air, “… the entire world is his weapon.”
The metal behind me snapped forward with the force of a locomotive. I instinctively activated my Cognitive Accelerator and Synapse Augment; no better time to test the doctor's invention than when a volley of deadly building guts were traveling through your location like a meteor shower. To my relieved surprise, I found the maneuvering transpired precisely as Oswald described.
While I marveled at how intricately the old codger understood my Cognitive Accelerator, I shifted to the left of a jetting steel beam and ducked beneath a tumbling metal panel. Though a faint sluggishness remained, for the most part my body moved as it did in my typically perceived sense of time and space. Everything around me, however, moved at a fraction of its actual velocity.
A grin touched one corner of my lips; in all my years of slowing down my perception of reality, I never felt so liberated. Every motion brought a sense of omnipresence, every twist of my head and dart of my eyes invoked a plethora of new information in nearly three hundred and sixty degrees. Before, my neck's range of motion limited my analytical processing power to the scope of vision I possessed at the time I activated the Cognitive Accelerator. Even swiveling my head took place at the pace of a sluggish crawl. But with the Synapse Augmentat, I understood my entire surroundings at any given moment in time. The elation nearly swallowed me whole.
To the naked eye, I must have blurred like a ghost between tiny debris particles and sheets of steel. When the river of rusty death passed, I deactivated the nanite combination and admired my muscle contractions by gazing at my palm as I opened and closed it. When I looked up, Nomeiko and Izuma's mouths hung open in amazed silence. I looked past them to Sarge.
His right hand extended in my direction, but I understood his palm actually targeted the metal behind me. That metal traveled with purpose across the expansive distance between where I stood near the Storm Duo and where he struggled with Crelyos. It perfectly demonstrated the degree of control he possessed. Crelyos struggled to draw back his right metal arm, but as he did, Sarge must have altered the polarity of his magnetic field. Rather than repulse Crelyos's prosthetic, he drew it torward him and angled his arm down; Crelyos's metal fist drove straight into the ground. With his left hand free, Sarge quickly returned to his strange combat stance in which both his arms hovered in the air several inches away from his sides. I soon understood why.
As it raced through the air toward Sarge, the debris changed its trajectory and began circling in a wide arch around Sarge's backside like a swirling storm of steel to his left hand. He precisely manipulated his limbs, and with his mysterious nanite, he lifted the metal into the air before slamming straight down atop Crelyos in a dome shape. I lurched forward; my brows furrowed with involuntary concern, and I felt the thump of my heart sink into the pit of my stomach.
“Crelyos!” I shouted before rushing in the direction of my fallen comrade and his new rival. Honor or no honor, man to man or not, I would not allow the stubborn fool to die!
“Not so fast, old hag!” The sound of crackling lightning and rushing wind passed in front of me. I immediately leapt to the right and barely avoided a vertical cut from Nomeiko's katana intent on removing a chunk from the left side of my body. As I twisted to face her, the rumbling sound of the metal refuse pile drew the attention of my peripherals. A mere few seconds passed, but the time felt like years. Finally, the metal exploded in a partially disintegrated cloud of glittering chaff. Crelyos emerged covered in wounds and seeping blood from every conceivable pore in his body. His chest heaved rapidly beneath his shredded clothes, and as he staggered from his painful prison, Crelyos glanced toward me and lifted his cybernetic thumb skyward.
“I'm fine… You have your own shit… to deal with. Stop trying to interfere… just mind your own damn business.” I thought that any one of his given words would surely be the last he sputtered before collapsing to a useless heap, but to my constant surprise and admiration, Crelyos regained his composure and assumed a fighting stance in front of Sarge.
“Unfortunately, time's up,” Sarge crossed his arms and turned to the city's east wall; in particular, his gaze fell upon the slit in Loftsborough's dome near the elevator tower. At precisely the moment he folded those arms, a powerful explosion tore open a gash in the city's protective plates. The pressure change sent a blast of wind roaring through the city; the elongated whistle drowned the sudden screams that emanated from within the houses where the citizens took refuge.
The noise bombarded my sensitive hearing; it sharply peaked like a screeching speaker befor
e I shut down the augment to avoid injuring my ears. Meanwhile, the humming Hoverbuster engines joined the whipping wind in an overlay of ear-piercing noise. My long tendrils of hair sprayed about like black waves, and the piercing cold penetrated my skin as sharply as Nomeiko's katana.
“Sarge… don't do this!” Crelyos coughed both words and blood. The copper-haired commander sighed, shook his head, and stepped toward my blond comrade. With a wave of his hand in a downward direction, Crelyos' metal arm slammed into the city's steel floor. Unable to resist the force, Crelyos followed suit and found himself pinned beneath the electromagnetic force Sarge generated. Crelyos stared up at his former commander with a look of horror on his face. Sarge casually pressed his finger against his ear.
“Open fire.” The Hoverbuster opted out of using its electromagnetic rail guns and instead launched conventional missiles from the craft's underbelly. The hiss of the ballistic warheads emanated from the carrier like a bell toll from the Reaper. Crelyos' face contorted in anguish as the homes near him exploded. The shrill screams of the innocents quickly escalated to a gruesome pitch, only to be extinguished in the merciless flames of the Hoverbuster's arsenal. So many homes filled with frightened families changed into a sea of fire in the blink of an eye. I shook my head.
“No… This can't be. Sarge, you couldn't have…” Crelyos whispered with a quaking voice. His metal arm creaked beneath Sarge's magnetic force, and his bloody and broken body tightened with fear, frustration, and heartbreak.
“I told you. It's on your hands, Crelyos. Take that with you to whatever life is after this one.” With his free hand, Sarge willed one of the metal beams from the dome of debris into the air above Crelyos. After Crelyos blew it to pieces, it left one of the ends jagged and pointy. Sarge pointed that spear-like end at my blond comrade's head.
My heart tightened in my chest, my breath caught in my throat, and I abandoned all attention on Nomeiko; I focused solely on Sarge and Crelyos. Just as I prepared to dash toward the two men, a distinct sound fluttered through the wind: an audible “tink!” Sarge, Nomeiko, Izuma, and I all glanced back toward the source of the odd noise, the Hoverbuster. The high-tech aircraft carrier toppled to one side but quickly stabilized itself with a wobble. Whatever struck the Hoverbuster did so with enough force to jar its hovering despite the meek little “tink” that echoed from the hull.
NANO Archive 01: The City of Fire Page 42
