Code Jumper

by Zachariah Dracoulis

  “I apologize for using the incorrect nomenclature, but on a more important note, I do believe you should prepare for impact. I don’t think my shield’s ra-”

  It was too late, the fires had cleared and the tanks had opened fire, their energy blasts hitting both sides and the back of my car, sending the invulnerable but not grounded vehicle flying forward into the building.

  Remember kids, seatbelts are always important.

  “Ow…” I groaned as I tried to shuffle onto my side along the upside-down car’s roof, “You feeling alright?”

  “Of course I am,” Quinn chirped happily, “you’ve made it inside the building.”

  “What?” I asked, all grogginess having disappeared from my voice as I looked around at the settling dust and debris, “Shouldn’t I have bounced off of kind of shield or something?”

  “Apparently Callomezi didn’t think you would make it this far…” Quinn started excitedly before trailing off with unmistakable concern, “Or maybe he just wanted it so that his troops could get into the building if you breached the perimeter.”

  The song had finally died down, giving way to the sounds of brutal fighting and, in my more immediate vicinity, boots crushing glass and shifting rubble.

  “That’s… less than ideal.” I muttered as I tried to think up a plan, “They aren’t gonna be able to get past the shield, right?”

  “No, but neither can you. Unfortunately I’m not as creative as you when it comes to alterations.”

  “Don’t say that,” I said as comfortingly as I could, “You’re the one who caught me before I hit the stairs, which is probably the only reason I survived.”

  “That’s also what led to you getting trapped in here.”

  “Yeah, well…” I trailed off as bullets started hitting the shield and an idea came to me, “you got us this far, and that’s all I can ask of you.”

  With that, I snapped my fingers again, shattering the car into a million shards of metal and glass, before sending them shooting out in all directions and ripping every single one of Callomezi’s soldiers to shreds.

  “How’s the Freedom Two holding up?” I asked while walking through and admiring my handiwork, my hand cannon still drawn as I made my way toward the elevator, “We set off any alarms in the system yet?”

  “Surprisingly, no,” Quinn replied, her voice indicating she was both shocked and appalled, “are you just going to leave it like that?”

  I rolled my eyes and smiled at the fact that Quinn had apparently grown a slight attachment to my car, “Why not?” I asked sarcastically as I stepped into the elevator, “It’s not like I can’t just summon another one.”

  “Yeah, but still, it took so long for us to get back to her…” Quinn said with what sounded like genuine sadness.

  “Ah, what the heck.” I replied before snapping my fingers, pulling the newly blood-covered car back together and closing the elevator doors on the warzone playing out in front of me, “Mind chucking on some more music? Something… epic and fighty.”

  “Joe Esposito’s You’re the Best now playing.”

  Not going to lie, that made me laugh a little.

  MEETING THE SAUSAGE

  “And you’re sure that’s gonna work?” I asked after finally being able to hear out Quinn’s plan thanks to the exceedingly long elevator ride, the song having ended barely a third of the way up.

  “No, it relies on a lot of variables, and they’re all based on human error, but it gives us a shot. You think you can stall them long enough for it to not seem suspicious?”

  “I’ll play up the defense, don’t you worry about that.” I replied as I checked the floor number to make sure we were still moving, “You think we’re gonna get out of this?”

  “Again, no.” Quinn said, forcing me to think that she was counting on me to die, “But I’m confident you’ll put up one Hell of a fight.”

  A weak smile landed on my lips at that, “You really believe that, don’t you? It hasn’t crossed your mind for even a second that I’ll just do what I did in that horror game and make a run for the portal?”

  Quinn hesitated to respond before letting out an amused huff, “Let’s just say I’d be surprised if you did.”

  “Heh, haven’t we talked about you rooting around in my mind?”

  “You haven’t ever strictly forbidden it, so you can’t blame me, but no, I didn’t have to.”

  I tilted my head confusedly, “And why’s that?”

  Again, Quinn hesitated, “Because you’re a good person. You weren’t before, and while that’s not to say you were evil, you certainly weren’t the best person you could be.”

  This voice inside me wanted to prove her wrong, snap about how she didn’t know me or something like that, but instead I just let out a little laugh, “Yeah, well, maybe a few years being ass-rammed by life has taken its toll on me.”

  “Maybe.” Quinn remarked contently, “Are you sure you’re ready? Another few seconds and the doors’ll open.”

  “I’m sure,” I replied before making sure my pistol was good and ready, “I’m sure…”

  Those final few seconds were spent in silence, my smile fading away to nothing as the cold realization that I was in the home stretch dawned on me.

  “Hey…” I trailed off right before the doors of the elevator opened, revealing a bare brown wall and a rich red carpet running the length of the hall, “Quinn?”

  “Yes?”

  “Which door do you think I should take?” I asked as I stepped out, “Callomezi and his sausage to my left, or the portal to my right?”

  Of course I had no way to actually know if the other door was to the portal, but I felt it was fair to assume based on the fact that it had ‘DO NOT ENTER’ in place of a name plaque.

  “That’s really up to you,” Quinn replied, “you can choose to just go ahead and save the world, leaving here to do… whatever in the hopes that the devs will come and fix it when we’re gone-”

  “Or we can save this world, because what’s the point of all of this if we leave as it is?” I finished for Quinn before letting out a sigh, “Alright, just… give me a decent entrance song before I get obliterated by what I can only assume is a Super Saiyan.”

  “Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity now playing.”

  My smile returned with a vengeance, I turned to Callomezi’s office door with my pistol held at about where I expected a head to be, and I pulled the trigger. The bullet hit the glass and in an instant went to work tearing the door and the majority of the surrounding architecture to pieces.

  “Knock-knock!” I called happily as the dust settled, revealing some kind of protective metal shell, and I practically skipped toward the office, “Anyone… home…”

  To say I was stunned as the shell peeled back and revealed Callomezi and his guard would be a gross understatement, much like saying he was simply smiling.

  “Good to see you again,” Tony said with a familiarity that made me uncomfortable for some reason, “it’s been a while.”

  He looked exactly as he had when I’d last seen him, only he was wearing a suit instead of old underwear and a shirt, but even though it was clearly my old friend, his presence set off this sort of warning system in my gut.

  It was like I was staring at some… wrong version of Tony, like there was some kind of weird aura of corruption and evil around him.

  Like an early years Disney villain.

  “So,” Quinn whispered with obvious discomfort, effectively interrupting my thought process and jarring me back to reality, “I’m going to just go ahead and turn the Jamiroquai off, yeah?”

  “Yeah…” I replied, my gun arm falling down to my side, “I… I think that’d be for the best.”

  ONE HELL OF A FIGHT

  My head was swimming. I hadn’t seen Tony in years, he wasn’t exactly the type to stay in contact either, though I’d always half-expected him to release some kind of egotistical ‘tell-all’ or wind up dead after picking a fight with the wrong dung
eon master.

  “You alright there?” Tony asked without losing his smile, “You look like you’ve seen a-”

  “Don’t say ghost…” I muttered as I resumed my walking toward him and Callomezi who, to my great surprise, was practically cowering behind Tony, clutching what I guessed was the book that caused all the trouble in the base game.

  “Alright then, I’m not a ghost.” Tony replied, putting his hands up in faux defense, “How’ve you been? You look healthy.”

  I had so many questions, but my mouth only ended up letting out the one that mattered most, “Callomezi or Messiah?” I asked boldly.

  “Pardon?”

  “Callomezi, the whimpering little shit behind you, or Messiah? Don’t make me ask again.”

  Tony opened his mouth to say something, maintaining his look of bewilderment as he did, before deciding to skip the charade and straightening up, “Messi-”

  I didn’t give him the chance to get out the last syllable before firing from the hip in his general direction, but the bullet never hit, no, instead that pompous prick caught it.

  “Interesting approach to seeing an old friend,” Tony mocked as he looked over the bullet, “but I suppose we were never really friends, were we?”

  “Look out!” Quinn shouted, giving me just enough time to hit the deck as Tony cast the bullet in my direction at full speed before apparently disintegrating it before it hit the portal room, “Shield, now!”

  I did as I was told, snapping my fingers and bringing up a brilliant wall of red light that separated me from Callomezi and Tony, “So, what?” I asked after scrambling to my feet, “You took Callomezi hostage? Made everyone think he was some evil dictator when in actuality you were the puppet master?”

  “I’m sure you’d like to think that,” Tony replied as he inspected my shield, clearly looking for some kind of exploit that he wouldn’t find, “but no, I’m just here to look after the portal. Callomezi here made that easy what with all his fearmongering and whatnot, but I’m not the one who corrupted this world. He’s pretty useless now though, like nipples on a man.”

  I wasn’t sure if that made me feel better or worse, but I decided to press on with distracting him, “And you expect me to believe that you had nothing to do with any of this? That you’re completely innocent?”

  “I don’t give a shit what you do or don’t believe. Fact of the matter is my life was ruined after…” Tony trailed off, showing me that he wasn’t completely blinded by Messiah’s crap, but then he smiled again, “Point is that I’m in the clear now. I help Messiah with this, I get to create worlds. It’s a win-win really.”

  “Except everyone dies.”

  Tony shrugged and let a half-smile crawl across his lips, “Except a lot of people die, not everyone. Humans are a lot more resilient than you give them credit for.”

  “You say that like you don’t see yourself as human anymore.” I said before noticing and quickly fixing a section of the shield that had been faltering, “Do you really think you’re a god because you play make-believe in Re.Gen?”

  “Don’t you? I mean, sure, you must’ve been somewhat brainwashed in your quest for ‘good’, but you have to admit there’s still a part of you that sees yourself as this all-powerful being.”

  I took that as my cue to shrug and smile, “I guess this whole thing has been somewhat perspective changing. Just a little while ago I not only turned a rabbit into a mythical killing machine, but I was also killed by a dinosaur.”

  “And now I’m going to kill you again.” Tony said, his voice showing just how irritated he was starting to get with me and my shield.

  “Wait, are you saying that you were the dinosaur that killed me?” I asked, deliberately playing dumb.

  Unsurprisingly, that caught him off-guard a bit, not enough to throw him completely off his game, but enough to piss him off, “You knew what I meant, now hurry up and take this down so I can kill you quick-like.”

  I pretended to think on his demand for a few seconds before scrunching up my nose and shaking my head, “Nah, I don’t think I will. There’s no benefit for me if I do that.”

  “How about if you do it I kill you?”

  I furrowed my brow in fake confusion and scoffed, “I don’t think you know what a benefit is.”

  “Oh trust me,” Tony snarled slightly, his psychotic anal-retentive side beginning to show, “it’s an upgrade from the unending torture I’m going to enact upon you if you don’t let me out so I can tear you limb-for-limb.”

  “In what time? Hmm? You know as well as I that your boss is gonna flash fry this place pretty soon, which means you’d get to torture me for what, a day? I’d probably pass out before you even got to the good stuff.”

  “I’ll be able to keep you alive for as long as I possibly want. I control Callomezi, I control the buildings, I control…”

  That’s when a realization dawned on both of us.

  “Ah, tits…” I muttered as I watched Tony phase through the ground like it was made of jelly with an undeniably evil grin on his face, leaving Callomezi to stand there pissing himself while I looked around waiting for my former fellow Code Jumper to jump out at me like some kind of Halloween skeleton, “Where’d he go?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Quinn quickly replied, “he’s still registering as a sausage, and it’s really hard to track a sausage that doesn’t want to be found.”

  “He’s not a sausage,” I snapped, “the last thing I need to be is worried that I’m going to end up getting killed by a sausage… If you can hear me Tony, do not take that as a suggestion.”

  “Don’t worry,” Tony whispered as he floated up behind me, “we’re gonna have a whole lot more fun than that.”

  I managed to snap my fingers just in time if the sizzle of flesh and Tony’ high-pitched yelp were to be believed, before spinning around and seeing that Tony had gone to punch me with massive green hands in place of his regular ones.

  “Really?” I laughed, “All-powerful being comes at me with ‘Hulk smash’? That seems a bit dumb, even for you.”

  Tony didn’t say anything, instead settling for a snarl and leaping through the ceiling, which absorbed him much like the floor had.

  “Quinn?” I asked with a smile before holstering my pistol and snapping my fingers, enclosing a box of the red shield around me, “I’m thinking Joan Jett, thoughts?”

  “Joan Jett’s Bad Reputation now playing,” Quinn replied robotically before letting out a concerned sigh, “good luck.”

  “Eh, you know me,” I replied as Tony came down on the other side of the box with some kind of electrified brass knuckles, “ever the lucky one.”

  I wasn’t sure what Tony had planned until he started laying into the shield with his electric fists, each pound breaking down the red box a little more as I retreated to the back.

  “You think he’d buy it yet?” Quinn asked fearfully right before I quickly snapped my fingers and replaced the wall Tony had broken down with relative ease.

  “Not yet,” I said, watching as Tony increased his overall speed and strength, “he’s too… incensed.”

  “Understatement of the day goes to…” Quinn lightheartedly mocked, undoubtedly to hide the fact she was genuinely concerned I was going to lose.

  Suddenly Tony threw his arms down at his sides, turning his brass knuckles into some kind of full arm cybernetic enhancement that was wrapped in blue and white electrical energy, before laying into the wall of light again, breaking it with two heavy swings.

  “Shit…” I cursed under my breath as he moved for the next wall and got ready to throw another punch, “Time to go offensive I guess…”

  With that, I clapped my hands, sending a sort of sonic boom that sent Tony, who’d just come through the final wall, flying backward with an unceremonious grunt.

  “What, no snap?” Quinn joked.

  “Clap seemed more appropriate.” I replied as I got into a fighting stance and watched as Tony got back up to his feet, “So, I bet yo
u’ve been calculating, what’re my chances of survival here?”

  “I have no idea, that’s not really something I can predict without having more evidence.”

  Quinn had barely gotten out the last word before Tony had crossed his forearms and swept them out in front of him, causing everything from the top floor of the tower up to unfold like a cardboard box into a flat battleground.

  “I can honestly say I didn’t expect that…” I murmured under the sound of the swirling winds, “Any ideas?”

  “Well… the portal’s exposed,” Quinn said, drawing my attention to the glowing green finishing line behind me, “but Callomezi’s also far less protected now…”

  “Heh, like it’s even a choice.” I scoffed before snapping my fingers and spawning a large, armored rhinoceros in front of me that, upon seeing Tony, went into a rampant frenzy and charged, with me doing my best to follow it at a full sprint.

  “Really?” Tony laughed, “A rhino? You never were that creative, were you?”

  I didn’t get a chance to let out a witty retort before, out of nowhere, a semi made of what appeared to be lava and kryptonite appeared and plowed into the side of my rhino, taking it off the edge of the fighting plane and down into the street.

  “This is fine,” I told myself as I turned my attention to Tony and saw that he was building up to do something big, “this is absolut-”

  I was interrupted by a tsunami that seemed to only affect me pulling me in to its base, my fingers only just barely managing to snap in time to turn it into a cloud before it could crush me.

  The cloud being… well, a cloud, settled over the playing field, reducing visibility to nothing.

  “This would be a lot easier if you just let me kill you!” Tony called out from somewhere as Quinn helped me to switch my vision over to infrared, “I promise I’ll make it painless!”

  “Painless for you or me?” I asked once I’d found him, both his and Callomezi’s burning heat signature piercing through the veil of mist and giving me a distinct advantage for the first time since the fight began.