by Lee Bond
“I don’t know.” Ragar admitted a heartbeat later. “I just do. It might come from watching Mirabelle all this time. She moves so much quicker than the rest of us. If she’s not careful, she becomes a blur, e’en when she stands still, thinking those deep thoughts of hers. Enforcers are the same, I guess. Though with powered suits of armor instead of whatever resides within her bosom.”
Marshak was about to make a comment about bosoms and the old man’s obvious semi-necrophiliac tendencies when six quick pops shunted themselves into the air in extremely quick succession.
Poppoppoppoppoppop.
The regular folk down the way a bit –all of them being protected, or herded from danger, as the case may be- all flinched and started trying to look over one another, but his men held fast. Mirabelle’s insistence that they all remain unharmed was a double-edged sword ready to harm the man who let it happen.
Out on the field of battle, where the six had been running to their intentional doom, four heads erupted into a gooey mass of exploded skulls and brains, one woman lost most of her chest in a particularly vile splash of organs and bone and one poor soul –caught in the middle of leaping sideways over a pile of debris- lost his entire lower half in an unfortunately comical-looking detonation that sent each of his legs flying off in different directions.
Near to the ground, Mirabelle belted out a harrowing shriek of inestimable loss that burst through the dusty air like an actual weapon of mass destruction, throwing small, light objects and filth all over the place. The Enforcer, caught in this unexpected maelstrom, threw his hands up to shield his helmeted visor from untoward damage. For Mirabelle, still aloft, the explosion of rage pushed her back upwards into the air, wind caught inside the gleaming, voluminous robes she wore.
Ragar shook his head in disgust. “I don’t know why you did that, or why they agreed to it in the first place! She’s going to be angry with you. So angry.”
Marshak nodded, once, firmly. “I did that because from the sounds of things elsewhere on this godforsaken level, the conflicts are damned near close to coming to an end. We weren’t exactly first on the ground, Raggy. Sorry, Ragar.” The ex-ranger dipped his head by way of apology. “Mirabelle has made her intention to be the only one to lay a hand on that Book of hers, and that’s super fantastic, but none of the other Arcadians have fallen yet. I doubt they will. She continually swears off violence, and that’s all well and good, but right here and now, no matter what she wants, the situation demands violence. If our Lady wishes to lay hands on book and no one else, she must truly embrace all that she is. There can be no half measures this day."
Above all their heads, Mirabelle shrieked again, and the clatter slammed into the Enforcer like an invisible thousand pound weight. Some of the regular folk moaned incoherently and fell to the ground, blood in their eyes and leaking from their ears.
Marshak grinned toothily. Gods, they could’ve used a woman like this on the battlefield. One of those horrific screams and half the enemy would’ve dropped their weapons and run off like terrified schoolchildren. “And my men? They volunteered for death because we are all here for the same thing, Ragar.”
Mirabelle was nearly to the ground once more, red eyes yawning wide like gateways to Hell itself, fingers curled into savage claws, mouth set to release a never-ending stream of rage at all comers. Enforcer rolled his armored shoulders and squared off, ready for whatever the Arcadian decided to bring.
“What’s that?” Ragar asked half-heartedly. He didn’t like how easily Mirabelle had been manipulated into waging combat with the Enforcer, didn’t like how reasonable Marshak’s reasons for doing so sounded. Didn’t like that in the pit of his own stomach, the ring of accordance chimed.
“We all seek redemption down here in the dark, Master Ragar.” Marshak applauded loudly when Mirabelle twitched and was suddenly directly in front of the Enforcer. “All of us, everywhere, desperate for it. The Lady of the Weeping Eye, more than all of us combined. The difference is, she’s got somewhere to go where that can be made true. I aim to be there. Don’t you?”
Ragar didn’t answer. There was no need to. Marshak was right. They’d started following the pale white woman with the endless tears trickling down her ravaged face because she’d seemed to be a beacon of hope, a pathway, somehow, to the very redemption that Marshak spoke of.
Fifteen feet away, Enforcer drove a fist into Mirabelle’s midriff…
***
“Gee, you think?” Abby ended the comm with Clint with a savage snarl. Their eye in the sky wasn’t precisely doing the best of jobs at the moment, not when two of their own were down for the count and he was in the process of getting his own ass kicked. “’Keep them away’. What a wonderful concept. Wish I’d thought of that. Oh, wait, I didn’t even want to be here today.”
“Calm yourself, Abercoign. Mirabelle does approach. Ready thyself.”
“No.” Abby shook his head mulishly even as the weird-as-fuck Arcadian –who was somehow, at that particular moment, floating on nothing more than her goddamn dress- began to descend once more. “No. You don’t get to talk to me anymore, and you sure as hell don’t get to talk to me like that. I only know what ‘thyself’ means because of fucking context.”
“Six kills confirmed.” Suit intoned softly. “Prepare yourself. Running filters. Bracing for hypothetical impact.”
On the HUD, you could see the descending Arcadian’s eyes flick this way and that, taking in the sudden and violent deaths of the six trespassers. The transmutation was instantaneous; one second, more or less on her way from ‘cooling down’ into her ‘regular form’, the very next second, her eyes burned with the illumination of dying red giants and her already unhandsome face split wide into a horrific caricature of itself, complete with needle-like teeth in an impossibly stretched mouth.
You could see her draw in enough breath to deliver a second terrifying scream.
Abby shied away inside his Suit, trying to get as much space between him and the front of the armor as possible. “Your filters better work!”
“The only guarantee in life is that the moment we are born, we but wait for death, Abercoign.” Suit’s voice was … impassioned. Almost as if it were speaking from personal experience. “Here it comes, squire.”
“Stop talking to me, asshole.” Abby shut his eyes the moment the very first sounds began spilling from the woman’s venomous-looking mouth.
Turns out, it didn’t matter if his eyes were closed; the vocal onslaught hammered and buffeted the Suit magnificently, causing the entire armored frame to shudder in place, literally bouncing the human driver around like a bean in a can. Abercoign found he was shouting incoherently back at Mirabelle, adding his own vocals into the mix, as it were, but as pressure from the scream grew more flagrant, the Enforcer noticed something.
And it scared the living shit out of him.
Even though his eyes were closed, even though it seemed that Suit’s filters were working to sift out the overly destructive components of the acoustic assault –to Abercoign’s inexpert ears, it sounded as though there were ten or fifteen or even more layers to the scream- there were still things reaching him. The landscape of his mind perked and popped with bright colors that exploded into confetti that had him flinching from their intensity. The colors grew and grew in intensity, the explosions turned from tiny little firecrackers to full-sized grenades and the confetti became bursts of napalm, searing an already much-abused brain further.
“Stop!” Abby howled into the Suit. “Stop! Stop! Stop!”
The pandemonium ceased as quickly as it’d come, leaving Abby to rest his head thankfully against the small cushion he’d had set into the inside of his helmet specifically for that reason. It took a second for the pressure in his skull –it felt as though the bones of his abused cranium had been slowly spreading apart from the assault- to dissipate, and when it did, the Enforcer let out a ragged breath.
“We are not yet done.” Suit pinged loudly until Abby moved his he
ad back and gazed into the HUD. “She is preparing for a physical attack.”
“Don’t care.” Abby snapped, dialing up some anti-nausea meds to be flushed into his system, ignoring the automatically generated warning flashing across his screens. He knew goddamn well the chems rushing through his bloodstream right that second would have an impact on his efficiency, but he flat out didn’t care. Between a Suit that suddenly had a personality and a fucking Arcadian who could scream so loud his head turned into a fireworks display that eventually dripped acid onto his brain, he just … didn’t … care.
“I am detecting significant internal damage to the limbic region of your brain.” Suit sounded mystified. “It appears as though my filters were not entirely efficient.”
“Shut up!” Abby screeched, bashing his head into the cushion. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut u… ah, shit, here she comes.”
“She moves very quickly.”
“Go fuck yourself.” Abby snapped just as Mirabelle’s bony fist slammed into the side of his helmeted head. “Sideways.”
***
Mirabelle thought about moving towards the Impertinent Herald and suddenly, she was there, fist flying through the air towards the odd-looking helmet. It collided with an impressive clang that rocked the Enforcer sideways a few steps, but that was it. She went at the armored fool with everything she had then, intent on delivering her enemy to the peace of the grave as soon as she could engineer it; her people were just as affected by her piece in this little battle as her enemy’s, and it would take time and effort to prove to them that the strange visage she now wore was not aimed at them.
The Enforcer danced back a few steps, righted himself, then came right back at the Arcadian, powered fists flying faster than even the most-augmented could detect. The first punch collided solidly with the bony side of the Arcadian’s exposed wound, cracking the cheek bone and eliciting a throaty growl of anger, and the second one came close to drilling itself right through the woman’s soft, exposed abdomen but suddenly, a hand was wrapped around that fist, locking it into place.
Momentum still carrying the fist that’d connected well past the woman’s face, Abby suddenly found himself spun into Mirabelle’s embrace. She squeezed, and for the first time ever, Suit’s unbending armor creaked and groaned.
“Give up.” Mirabelle whispered at the silvery helmet. “Give up, lay down your arms, and I will desist. There has been too much bloodshed this day.”
“Go fuck yourself.” Another brief round of creaking and groaning filled his senses as Mirabelle worked her arms around to gain better and possibly permanent hold of him. Alerts and warning and all kinds of suggestions were buzzing through the HUD as Suit’s OS attempted to find some sort of permanent solution to their predicament.
“Close proximity like this is injurious to systems that are ordinarily hardwired against these kinds of assaults.” Suit warned direly. “Automatic systems are shutting down. Make some space. I will attempt to bring weapons online. There will be risks.”
“Does it sound like I care?” Abby targeted the Suit’s mechanical systems and ordered a diversion of power from the upper portion of the Suit –which wasn’t doing much more than being squeezed into pieces at the moment- to the lower half, ordering it to be carefully managed and timed. “Do you see what I want, Suit?”
All around him, the confines of his armor echoed from the duress being put on it by Mirabelle’s deadly bear hug. Damage sensors already had the breastplate at eighty-five percent operational, the lowest his Suit had ever been.
“Yes.”
“Don’t let whatever fucking weirdness you got going on right now distract you from doing this right.” Abercoign was deadly serious. “Once we lose power to the chest, that 85% will drop to at least 65%, maybe less. I need to back-kick this bitch into the level’s ceiling as soon as possible, and I need the power back to the chest right away.”
“I said I have it, squire. No need to belabor the point, hey?”
“Goddamnit.” Abby didn’t even know if there was an actual, literal place where he could take his Suit for a fucking overhaul. Personality purge. He was going to make it out of this. No matter what it took, no matter what kind of dirty pool he needed to get up to, he was going to walk out of Stack 17 alive. If he needed to be dragging his fucking armor behind him, so be it. “In 3 … 2 …”
***
Herald’s boot pistoned backward into her, colliding painfully with the upper part of her thigh and a portion of her unprotected stomach, but Mirabelle didn’t let go, not at first; the sounds of cracking armor had reached her ears and she would be damned if she sacrificed causing her enemy damage in lieu of taking care of herself. The bastard had already found it within himself to injure her people when she were stood right there.
Once she were gone, there’d be nowt left to save ‘em.
And so, with traces of blood –at least she did now know that she weren’t completely immune to harm, which were good for future reference- trickling past teeth turned into razors, Mirabelle did redouble her efforts at squeezing the absolute life from the impertinent Herald.
“Effort,” Mirabelle whispered into Herald’s electronic ears, “always brings payment, you horrible person.”
Inside the Suit, Abby tried keeping calm, and was managing to do so, but he walked a very thin, very fine line; the damage to his breastplate was more significant than he’d projected and whenever he looked at the Suit’s OS/icon, surges of anger threatened to rattle his already fragile mood.
“What else we got?” Abercoign demanded, diverting extra power from the arms to bolster the chest; acceptable losses were now a part of the game they were playing, and if he lost either one –or God forbid- both in the next few minutes, he’d at least be able to jettison the damaged machinery and continue onwards.
It’d mean fighting Mirabelle with his own two bare hands, a situation markedly less exciting than some might think.
“The Arcadian’s grip is unbreakable.” Suit announced suddenly. “The only thing we can do is more of the same.”
Lips pressed thinly together, Abby revisited the steps required to deliver a kick powerful enough to rattle Mirabelle. Data from the point of impact suggested that, due to her struggling and his impatience, the booted foot hadn’t struck a precise enough location to cause lasting injury. A few of the threesixty cams built right into the body of the armor revealed that at long last, one of the indestructible Arcadians was showing signs of injury herself; thin streaks of blood coated her lips and a few of those razor-like teeth.
“That is a grim fucking sight.” Abby listlessly checked the big weapons. Still blacked out. Same with the comm systems reaching towards Trinity; wherever their machine mind was, whatever It was doing, It wasn’t anywhere or doing anything that’d be of help to them. High in the sky, Clint was doing his best, but with his orders being what they were, there wasn’t all that much he could do, not without compromising the Omega Plan.
“Obsidian Golems have always been the stuff of nightmare and fodder for the damned.” Suit intoned knowingly. “Examining the data suggests that we should divert all power from chest and arms into the single leg, the resultant kick should be sufficient enough to remove the problem. Temporarily.”
Obsidian Golem. Something else to join the long list of weird shit coming out of Suit’s non-existent mouth.
The list was growing too long for comfort and if he survived, Abby wasn’t even sure he wanted to deal with it. Simpler still to take Trinity’s long-offered ‘freedom’ path and become a regular citizen. It’d mean a Class A memory wipe complete with a few bells and whistles that’d leave him more or less in the dark about how he’d spent the last three hundred years, but it was either that, or deal with a Suit talking about stuff it shouldn’t know anything about in a manner that suggested precisely the opposite.
“We do that, there’s nearly a hundred percent guarantee we lose the chest and at least one of the arms.” Abby pursed his lips, ears echoing with the sou
nd of grinding plates. The breastplate was already nearly done for; thanks to Mirabelle’s ministrations, whole sections had cracked completely open for the first time since Suit’d been constructed, revealing the inner workings to the outside world. Not enough damage yet to result in a cascading shutdown, but pretty fucking close.
“There is also a very high chance that once you are dis-armored, she will leave you alone.” Suit said this with confidence. “This particular Arcadian seems largely concerned with the protection of people incapable of protecting themselves. Without me, you are just an ordinary person. A non-threat.”
Abercoign didn’t like how that sounded and was in fact about to open his mouth to deliver a resounding reminder of just who was in charge around here when a particularly loud and destructive-sounding groan clattered inwards from the breastplate.
“Fine. Let’s do this. Get it going, Suit.” Abercoign took a few deep breaths. “And Suit?”
“Yes, Abercoign?” The HUD began flickering with it’s efforts to program a properly-powered and excellently delivered kick.
“If we both survive this, you and I are going to have a very long talk about all the shit’s been coming out of your mouth.”
“Whatever you say, Abby. Whatever you say.”
***
The second kick came –as she knew it would, as it must, considering her bearish grip- just a few seconds later, and was definitely the better of the two blows. Receiving it directly into her midriff, Mirabelle grunted in actual pain, wondered if the popping sensation within her gut were summat to worry about, then let go of the Herald as the booted foot continued on with it’s attempt at driving her loose.
