by Logan Jacobs
“Okay, one, no more Stim-Cola for you,” she said as she took my second can away from me. “Two, once I do that I’m down for the count. I usually can barely walk.”
“Right,” I acknowledged, “true. Very true. Which is why Aurora is going to go through the unconscious knuckleheads and siphon off all the essence she can handle and use it to get you back up to speed. Bam! You'll be good as new.”
While realization filled their eyes, and they looked at each other in a new light, I slid into the harness for the jetpack as if I’d done it a hundred times. PoLarr’s soul gaze was able to hammer through the hyped up excitement from the Stim-Cola which was starting to fade, so I tightened the straps in all the right places to ensure that it was as snug as it could be without pinching anything important.
Aurora had her cloak’s hood up over her head. The contrast between her pearl white skin, the blood red lining of the cloak, and the jet black exterior was really eye catching and made her look even more alluring and sinister.
“Knock ’em dead, kid,” I called after her just before she went all Predator and disappeared.
“That’s the plan, darling,” she replied from out of thin air and was gone. I assumed so anyway, because she was invisible.
Nova had taken most of her armor off which left her in a pair of tight fatigue pants that were slung very low on her waist, and a matching sports bra top that looked like it was going to lose the battle of containing her very large breasts any second.
While she flexed and stretched her muscles like a competitive fitness model, I couldn’t help but stare.
“What are you looking at, human?” she said a bit grumpily.
“Um, a smoking hot badass warrior chick,” I replied in all honesty, “with an incredible body who I am very happy to call my teammate.”
She was honestly taken aback by what I had said. “I have never had my,” she hesitated for just a moment, “body complimented before, especially not while on the battlefield.”
“I call it like I see it.” I grinned. “Now haul that sexy ass, Paladinian. We don’t have all day!”
Nova sprang into action. Well, sprang might be a strong word. She jogged into action, and by the exertion written on her face, that took every ounce of strength she had. Artemis had said that she was about four times as dense molecularly so I imagined that was hard to displace under gravity.
Nova closed the gap steadily, and when she was about twenty feet away, I hit the button on my chest strap, and the jet back ignited. Bright blue wings made of pure energy flame unfurled from the back, and I rose into the air.
Nova was ten feet from entering the anti-grav field when I triggered the thrust on the pack from a small handheld device connected to the harness, and the wings folded behind me as I blasted off.
The wind whipped at my hair and my stomach did a series of fast somersaults, but holy shit, I could fly.
I started my bee line to Nova just as she entered the anti-grav field, and it flung her into the air. Thanks to her densely packed molecular structure, she didn’t go nearly as high as the poor bastard from earlier. She made it about a hundred and fifty feet in the air before she started to fall.
I looked down just as her upward momentum slowed, and her eyes went wide.
“Havak!” she yelled in frustration before she fell back toward the planet.
“Don’t worry!” I called back as I bent at the waist and dove straight for her, the pack’s jet wings aided by the weird gravity. I caught up to her in plenty of time, and she bear hugged onto my torso with a vice-like grip that almost squeezed the air out of me.
“Too close for comfort, Havak,” she yelled.
Streaks of red laser fire streaked past us as we continued on our dive. I glanced over and saw several of the bad guy Champions as they took up positions to fire on us. Great.
“We ain’t outta this yet, beautiful,” I yelled back as I tried to pull out of the dive. Between the weird constantly shifting thermals of added gravity and zero gravity and Nova’s added mass, we were too damn heavy and approaching the hard, jagged, metal surface of this godforsaken planet in a hurry. And getting shot at.
I tried to spin us out, but once again, we were just too heavy.
I had one option, and hopefully it wouldn’t completely fry the jetpack.
When we were about fifty feet up, I gave the thrusters a quick burst and did a flip in the air so that my feet were aimed at the ground. Just as I pulled out of the flip, I yanked hard on the control handles, and the wings shot out of the pack horizontally, and we began to flare up. The engine screamed under the strain as the thrust of the wings tried to slow our terminal velocity.
I thought maybe the pack was going to explode, and that was going to be it for Nova and I, but damned if the little thing didn’t hold it together, and our decent slowed us to a crawl three inches off the ground.
Nova and I looked at each other with relief. We had a second to start a laugh before we shot back up into the sky.
I was ready for that one, and as we hit our apex, I throttled the thrusters, and we began to fly through the anti-grav field. It was damn near impossible to maintain any lift between Nova’s extra mass, and the weirdness of the anti-grav field. At one point, I was barely able to skim a foot or so off the ground. Nova banged her head several times on the tops of some junk heaps.
“Climb, please,” she said through gritted teeth just as we hit a gravity thermal and flew high into the air. I caught sight of Aurora floating steadily across the terrain contained in crackling purple energy, her face a mask of effort and concentration, she couldn’t hold the invisibility camouflage and maintain her dark matter sphere at the same time. Thankfully, she was almost across, and it seemed like none of the bad guys had noticed her yet. Nova and I were a pretty damn spectacular diversion.
We burst out of the hold of the anti-grav field, and I put us into a little victory spin... which lasted all of about two seconds.
The twenty or so bad guy thug Champions in the far distance had decided to aim their weapons at Nova and I. A few of them had machine guns, and I thought I caught a glimpse of a rocket launcher which would end this trip real quick.
“You seeing this, Nova?” I asked as I tried to keep us out of the range of most of the guns.
“Damnit!” she cursed. “Yes.”
“I’m not sure I’m going to be able to get us close enough for you to land,” I told her through gritted teeth as I put us into a short roll.
“Then don’t,” she said with determination. “Dive bomb me.”
I really hoped for a second that was a colorful euphemism, but alas, it wasn’t.
“What?” I shouted over the wind.
“You need to dive bomb me,” she yelled again. “Fly straight up, then come in high and fast, drop me when you are still out of range and then haul ass. Got it?”
“Are you sure?” I asked, more than a bit worried. It sounded more like a suicide bomb.
“Of course I am not sure, but there is no other way,” she said with finality.
The group of bad guy Champions had massed around the base of the tower and took potshots at us as we flew by. I saw two of them start to set up a mobile guided missile launcher. Once that was operational, it would be good night, nurse.
I flew up to about a thousand feet, which is a hell of a lot higher than it sounds and hovered for a few seconds. The jetpack whined under the strain of holding us both in the air. While Nova looked as awesomely fit as a professional physique competitor she probably weighed ten times more than me.
“You ready?” I asked her, my voice strained from the effort of keeping us airborne.
“I am a Gunn-Fahim of Paladin Prime,” she spoke with pride, “it is my duty to be ready. Farewell, human. Hopefully, this will not be the end of our journey together. You are growing on me.”
Nova leaned up and kissed me on the mouth. Hard. And with a flash of unexpected but certainly welcome tongue. It only lasted a second, but it was one of the h
ottest kisses I had ever received. She broke off and looked me in the eye with a combination of lust and fury.
“What are you waiting for, human?” she bellowed. “Today is as good a day as any to die!”
I gave the engine a slight kick and arched my back so that we did the first part of a loop until we were pointing straight down. I opened the throttle up to maximum, and the fiery blue wings spread out like an angel of death ready to rain devastation from above.
I hit the afterburners, and we flew even faster as we zoomed on an almost ninety-degree angle toward the center of the bad guy Champions. As the ground rushed up, they fired at us, but none of the bullets or lasers even came close.
At two hundred feet, Nova let go, and I flared the wings and pulled out of the dive with a twisting barrel roll. Nova seemed to hang in the air for the briefest of moments, surrounded by nothing but sky. Then she pulled her knees into her stomach, flipped in the air and pointed herself straight down, fists balled at the ends of her extended arms like Superman.
I remembered what she said about hauling ass so I started to fly straight up.
Nova flew like a comet full of rage, and I hoped that this wouldn’t kill her. Right before she hit the ground, the mob of Champions tried to scurry away like rats, and she pulled herself into a tight cannon ball. Just as she was about to smash into the surface of the planet, a shockwave exploded from her, and I watched in amazement as she used the force of her kinetic blast to modulate her landing so she didn’t burst like a bag of raspberry jam. Crazier still was that by the time she stood, the landing site looked like an atomic bomb sans the fire as an expanding circle of pure force destroyed the surrounding area.
The bad guy Champions who had been closest to her point of impact had their insides jellied instantly by the shockwave. They fell like marionettes with their strings cut into blobs of formless flesh. The others were thrown twenty feet plus into the air or smashed into the ground like a hard line drive. The Junk Tower rocked from the force, as trash, metal, and bodies flew in every direction.
As the Junk Tower shook from the blast, one of the thug Champions, an alien who looked like he was made out of living metal, flew through the air as if he was shot out of a catapult and crashed head first into the Hadron cannon. The cannon tore free from its railing and toppled end over end until it slammed into the ground and exploded in a blue ball of flame.
“Ah, shit!” I yelled. Looked like we were going to have to come up with plan B for how to get rid of ole’ Amohot.
As soon as the blast dissipated, I dove for where Nova had hit. As I got closer, I could see Aurora as she made her way through the outer rim of bodies. Whoever wasn’t dead found themselves staring at a gorgeous demon of doom. Her skin glowed white, and her purple eyes sparkled as she sucked the life force out of them with a fatal kiss one by one. She looked demonic and terrifying and sexy as fuck.
I landed next to a small crater as Nova pulled herself out of a fetal position and sat with her head between her knees and took deep breaths. Her orange skin looked pale. How that was possible I didn’t know, but it did. Her face was gaunt, and she looked incredibly weak.
Her hands shook as I gave her a protein bar, and she had to concentrate to get the bar into her mouth.
“Told you.” Her voice was hollow and weak, like a copy of a copy of her normal voice. “I’m as useless as a baby afterward.”
“That was, ah, big,” I said. It was all I could manage at the moment.
“Just the way I like it.” She managed a weak smirk before she put her head back down in her hands.
Aurora floated over to us, and her mouth ‘dripped’ with life force. Pale blue gossamer strands of the stuff clung to her mouth and chin like saliva. Her body vibrated from all of it, and power shimmered off her in mirage-like waves.
“I am gorged,” she said with a voice that was dark and heavy as she flew down in front of Nova, who tilted her chin up, and opened her own mouth. The gossamer flowed out like shiny ribbons and into the Paladinian’s mouth.
I could visibly see Nova’s body inflate with the fresh life essence. In an instant, she was a bright vibrant orange and actually looked a few years younger.
Aurora broke off, stumbled and righted herself.
“Oh, my,” she sighed, her voice almost back to normal. “I may have overdone it there a bit. I’ve never consumed so much all at once.”
“By the gods of Alamoor Glade, I feel alive like I have never felt,” Nova exclaimed as she stood, and her eyes blazed with life. “I wish to fight, and fuck, and consume all the things.”
As she spoke I started to think that she might actually be really fucking high.
“We can save most of those things for later, Nova,” I said. “Right now, we need to get into that damn tower and figure out who the hell is left so that we can kill them. Come on. Use that passion to get us the hell out of here.”
We had all just turned toward the tower when we heard the most god awful roar in the universe, like a thousand souls cried out in agony and then were wrapped in cruel laughter.
I looked over at the tower and where the cannon had once been stood the nightmare creature with the black horns, its maw open, back arched, as it screamed into the air. Amohot, I presumed.
A quick glance at the HUD showed just four blips on the radar. Nova, Aurora, myself, and that thing.
“Oh fuck me,” I said as I realized we were going to have to go through the heinous beast in order to win.
“That would be Amohot,” Aurora said as she dropped into a fighting stance and purple-black dark matter gathered around her clenched fists.
“We are all going to die,” Nova whispered quietly. All of her stoic, feudal pretense was washed away by sheer terror.
Amohot leaped into the air, and before our eyes could send signals to our brain, the beast landed in the center of us.
I was knocked thirty feet into the air, and the jetpack must have had an emergency deploy protocol because the next thing I knew I was five hundred feet in the sky. I looked down at my companions as they were about to be destroyed.
Amohot held Aurora by the neck in one of its monstrous clawed hands. She struggled and kicked and tried to launch bolts of dark matter at the creature, but they either fizzled or bounced off.
Nova’s fear must have broken because she fought like a banshee. Pure animal violence. She punched and kicked and gouged with every ounce of her new being, but it was as if she were fighting a wall.
Amohot just laughed at the folly of the two insignificant creatures before it.
And there I was safe and sound five hundred feet in the air. I had a thought. Find a safe spot to hide until either Aurora or Nova were killed, and the match would be over since I would be one of the last three champions alive. I would win for sure. Be a Champion. Bring favor and glory to Earth.
That thought was an asshole.
“Fuck that,” I said out loud as I hit the thrusters and dove once more into certain doom.
The creature had opened its mouth wide to devour Aurora. Her kicking had gotten weak as she struggled for oxygen. Amohot backhanded Nova, tired of her nuisance, and she flew as if made of plastic and crashed into the base of the Junk Tower. It was just about to shove Aurora into its impossibly wide maw when I came screaming out of the sky and flew right into its mouth.
Yeah, I flew into a demon-dinosaur’s gaping mouth hole.
And it was as if I had entered hell itself. I wasn’t in some kind of extra-large stomach. I now floated in a sea of torment where there was no joy or love or hope. Only desolate pain and fear.
I forgot everything. All that I was or ever would be was agony. Forever and ever. I didn’t know if I had been here a moment or a millenia.
I was on the verge of going mad with the sheer terror of it all when I heard a voice in the back of my head. I didn’t recognize it at first. It was a soft voice. Female.
“Marc Havak,” the voice said. “You are not allowed to die on me.”
As soon as she said my name part of me was back. I knew that the voice belonged to Artemis V. I knew that she was pretty. I knew that she was smart. I knew that I cared for her tremendously even though I had only known her a short period.
“Havak,” a gruff, male voice rang out. “You could perish now and certainly no one would say that you had died without a valiant fight.”
I knew this voice as well. It belonged to a person I called Grizz. He was a great warrior. I knew he was alive but also dead. I knew I looked up to him tremendously although I’d never let him know it. I knew that he was my friend.
“You have a promise to keep, do you not?” the Grizz voice asked in my head. “An oath you made and swore to the Great Blade, Havak”
I nodded and felt the terror fade a fraction.
“There is only one sure thing in this life and that is death,” the Artemis voice said, steely, and unwavering. “It will come for us all, eventually. And when that day comes there won’t be a thing any of us can do to stop it. So I guess it’s a damn good thing that day… IS. NOT. TODAY!”
“WREAK HAVOC, HUMAN!”
The chains of my fear shattered. My name was Marc Havak, and I wasn’t done killing yet, not by a long shot.
I reached to my belt to find something, anything, to use as a weapon and the plasma torch filled my hand. Molten molecules burst from the tip in a tongue of plasma a foot long and two inches wide that burned away the darkness. I stared at a three foot tall reptilian eye that nervously flicked around in its lidless socket as if it searched for salvation.
“Your turn to go to hell, you son of a bitch!” I screamed and stabbed the plasma torch into the eye. It pierced the thick sclera with a violent hiss.
Everything shook, and a pain filled shriek consumed the world. I shoved the torch in deeper until the eye burst in a shower of vitreous gore.
The shriek hit a crescendo, and I was shoved into the spot where the eye had been until the leathery skin around it tore and I was pushed out onto the cold ground of the junk planet, the plasma torch in my hand, covered in slime.
The steaming, reeking corpse of the creature lay in a heap three feet from me. Its bowels sliced open from the inside. Black viscera spilled all around.