by A. J. Markam
“Stay back!” I yelled at Yuki and Nova as I stepped in front of them.
Spike roared and leapt at me.
Of course, I was significantly stronger since the last time we’d met.
I threw up a shield between the two of us and felt Spike’s hand slash across it like a hundred razor blades dragging across steel.
Uncomfortable, yes, but less than 0.1% of the strain of what it had taken to kill the hundred Yakuza.
Spike bellowed and started pounding the invisible shield with his fists. Each punch would have been enough to break the neck of any normal man, not to mention shred his face – but none of those punches were getting through.
“You know a punch like that’s not gonna bother me, right?” I asked him, turning his own earlier words back on him. “Whereas this one – ”
I slammed a spherical forcefield into his face. His head snapped backwards, he staggered, and his white-pupiled eyes went the slightest bit unfocused.
“That’s gotta hurt,” I grinned, and then unleashed holy hell on him.
A flurry of forcefields hit him from every direction. It was like getting a simultaneous smackdown from Muhammed Ali, George Foreman, and Mike Tyson in their prime.
All three boxers had died long before I was born, but so far the 21st century hadn’t produced a badass who could touch any of them.
Not until superheroes were created – and supervillains like Spike.
He weathered the storm pretty damn well. I mean, the bastard’s skin was essentially bulletproof, and he could survive an 80-story fall. My punches were fucking with him, but there was no danger of me killing him.
Especially not after his boss showed up.
Antimatter lowered down through the burning hole in the ceiling, hovering on spouts of flame shooting from the soles of his feet.
Something new about him, though: he was carrying a human shield.
He had Mama-san in front of him in a half-nelson, her head level with his chest.
She was a 90-pound old woman, so he was basically just dangling her in front of him like a rag doll. His right hand was free to fire at me.
Mama-san’s eyes rolled in terror as she looked at me, begging me silently to save her.
Yeah, RIGHT.
I had no idea why Anti thought Mama-san was an effective shield. The bitch had just turned on me yet again. If I had to go through her to get to him, I would do it without a second thought.
Of course, I didn’t have time to go through her, since Antimatter came directly at me first.
As soon as I saw his free hand spark with energy, I threw up a forcefield – which Anti hit with everything he had. A ray of pure energy blasted from one palm into my shield. It was like somebody had brought a chunk of the sun down to earth and slammed it against my forcefield.
During training, Nova’s heat blasts had been excruciating.
This?
This was a whole different level.
Spike rolled out of the way of our fight. On his side of the shield it must have been blisteringly hot, because his thorn-covered, rhinoceros-hide skin was starting to spontaneously combust in spots. The carpet beneath him incinerated, exposing concrete flooring that quickly charred black.
After about three seconds, I could tell things weren’t going to go my way.
You know that feeling when you’re doing the final rep of a bench press, and you’re fighting to get the bar back to the top when it slowly starts to dip? No matter how hard you scream, no matter how hard you fight back, the bar’s not going back up. It’s not even holding steady. It’s just going down, down, down, a millimeter per second, and you know it’s only going to get worse – and fast.
That’s hopefully when you have a good spotter to save your ass.
Superheroes don’t exactly have spotters during battle.
Any second now my shield was going to buckle.
Without looking behind me I screamed, “NOVA, YUKI – GET OUT OF HERE!”
Then I dove behind a heavy metal desk.
My shield collapsed.
Antimatter immediately switched targets and hit the desk with a power blast.
The desk pushed me across the floor as the carpet to my right and left blackened and charred. The air around me sounded like I was inside a wind tunnel made of fire.
I was betting the desk would last maybe another three seconds before it disintegrated – so I threw up another shield, but this one was way weaker. I held it for maybe two seconds before I could tell it was going to fail, and soon –
And then Yuki and Nova tried to end the fight once and for all.
After I’d yelled at them to move, Yuki had apparently phased Nova down into the floor or through a wall, because suddenly they appeared behind Antimatter.
I saw them emerge from a wall about 30 feet behind him.
I saw the spark of flames on Nova’s hands –
Unfortunately, Spike saw them, too.
“BOSS!” he roared, and pointed from the ground where he lay.
While still keeping his right hand blasting at me, Antimatter turned in the opposite direction to see what Spike was screaming about.
That’s when Nova got off her shot.
A fireball roared through the air straight for Antimatter’s head.
His left arm was entangled around Mama-san’s shoulder and neck. There was no way for him to get his left hand free in time to blast the fireball. No time to use his right hand, either.
Nova had him dead to rights – if he’d just stayed still.
But instead, he rose up about 18 inches by increasing the force of the blast streams from his feet.
And he twisted his body.
Putting Mama-san right in the line of fire. Literally.
The old woman screamed as the fireball caught her full in the chest and flared up into her face.
Antimatter howled in pain. Mama-san had taken the full brunt of the blast, but the flames scorched the unprotected portion of his arm.
He yanked his burned arm out from behind Mama-san and let her drop screaming to the floor.
She landed with a crunch as her brittle legs splintered in directions they were never meant to go.
I doubt the broken bones registered much – she was already in a world of pain. She started flailing on the floor and screeching as the fire consumed her alive.
I looked over to see Nova staring in horror, her mouth open and her eyes brimming with tears.
I felt terrible for her. It was a hard thing to take a shot and have it go bad. To accidentally kill someone – a little old lady, no less – even if the bitch deserved it.
But Nova wasn’t paying attention because of that, and it was going to get her killed.
Antimatter pointed his hand towards Nova and sighted down the length of his arm.
“YUKI, GET HER OUT OF HERE!” I screamed.
I would have thrown a shield up in front of them, but I could barely maintain the one keeping me alive.
Yuki dragged Nova back into the wall a split second before Antimatter’s energy beam turned the drywall into smoking cinders.
My heart stopped in my chest for a split second until I realized they were safe.
With Antimatter’s attention divided, his attack on me had gone from agonizing to merely horrifically painful. My shield, which had been about to fail, now held steady under the reduced attack. Which was about to get a whole lot more reduced.
“Handle McNeil!” Antimatter roared at Spike.
“Gladly,” Spike grinned as he got up from the ground.
Antimatter cut off his attack on me and began racing through the air towards Yuki and Nova’s last known position, his body levitated by the fire blasting out of his feet.
On the ground, Mama-san’s burning corpse had finally gone still.
Spike’s foot crunched her charred face as he headed full-steam for me.
Dumbass. He hadn’t been able to handle me last time, so why the fuck did he think he could handle me this time?
>
I threw up a shield and stopped him dead in his tracks. He cursed and started punching.
I noticed that his hits on my forcefield hurt a lot more this go-round.
There was only one explanation: Antimatter’s attack had significantly weakened me.
But I didn’t have any time to waste dicking around with Spike. Yuki and Nova weren’t ready to handle Antimatter – not on their own.
I didn’t know exactly how to kill Spike, so I settled for the next best thing: getting rid of him.
Twenty feet to the right of us was a manager’s office with a window overlooking the city.
Hey – if it had worked last time, it would work again.
“Hey Spike!”
“Yeah, asshole?” he asked as he kept whaling away at my shield.
“See you outside.”
With that, I clamped another forcefield around his body and slammed him out through the office window.
“YOU DICK!” he roared as he shot through the air.
I threw up a forcefield beneath the window to catch all the glass from his hasty exit.
I also couldn’t afford to have him hit a pedestrian, so I used the forcefield clamped around him to propel him all the way across the street, where I crashed him through another window into the darkened skyscraper facing us.
Let him take the elevator down and come find me again.
See you in 10 minutes, dumbass.
In one second flat, I folded up the forcefield holding the broken glass, brought it all back inside, and dumped it on the floor.
Then I ran after Antimatter.
It was an easy path to track: I just followed the burned-out holes in the walls and floors.
Yuki must have been phasing them down from floor to floor, because there were plenty of flaming holes to go through.
I hopped from floor to floor on levitating forcefields until I came to Antimatter. He’d corralled the girls into a corner of the building, and was apparently trying to force Yuki outside the building’s walls into the open air where he could let her have it once and for all.
Yuki could survive a lot in her ghost form, but a sustained onslaught of 5000-degree ionized blasts was not one of them.
Antimatter was standing on the floor above a smoking hole at his feet. I didn’t even have to see – I knew Yuki and Nova were right below him.
He raised his hand to fire.
That’s when I attacked.
A more honorable man might’ve yelled at him first. Something like, Pick on somebody your own size!
Fuck that.
Nobody in Special Forces yells, “HEY!” at armed jihadis before they shoot them in the back.
I just slammed him in the back of his head with a forcefield.
I tried to hit him as hard as possible, but to tell the truth, his prior attack on me had seriously blunted my edge.
My forcefield punches at Spike had been like Muhammed Ali and George Foreman.
This one was more like Joe Bob the 140-pound bouncer at an Alabama titty bar.
No joke to a normal person, but no Mike Tyson, either.
Antimatter cried out and whipped around to face me.
I took the extra second to use a shield to SLAM him against the nearest wall.
I could have pinned him there, too – and crushed his head to boot – if it hadn’t been for his goddamn powers.
He was sparking a tiny ball of antimatter-generated energy in his palms – a crackling, BB-sized sphere of negative light, basically the precursor to his normal plumes of fiery energy. He was keeping the antimatter psionically contained, but if he let it touch the air, well – BOOM.
But instead of generating a blast of ionized fire, he just slapped the black ball against my shield.
Ever try breaking a car window with a baseball bat? It’s goddamn nigh impossible. The bat is too blunt and ends up diffusing all the force across the surface of the window, which can hold up extraordinarily well to a lot of pressure spread out over a uniform area.
But if you take a tiny shard of enamel – the kind you’d get off an old sparkplug from one of those dinosaur gasoline car engines – and throw it, you’ll break the window easily. Same with any tool that comes down to a super-thin point.
It’s because all that force gets concentrated onto one tiny spot as big as a needle tip, and the glass isn’t strong enough on a microscopic level to handle that much pressure in that one spot. And it shatters.
Antimatter’s ball of energy was his ‘window-breaker,’ as far as my shields were concerned. That much concentrated energy on one point?
My forcefield immediately failed, and my skull felt like a grenade had gone off inside it.
“AAAAAH!” I screamed as he fell from where I’d pinned him against the wall.
He landed on all fours, lifted one hand, and fired at me again.
I dove out of the way just in time.
The bank of office windows behind me blasted into shards.
However, I didn’t have any time to spare on stopping the glass from falling.
Sorry, pedestrians. Hope you learned something from the last five minutes and got the fuck away from this building.
I leaned out of hiding from behind my new metal desk.
Anti was still on all fours, panting and grimacing. He was obviously hurting or he would be flying again – or at least up on his feet.
But even if he wasn’t on his feet, he wasn’t down for the count.
He saw me and fired again.
I ducked back and threw up a shield, which disintegrated in less than a second.
The desk – now my only protection – rattled and shoved me backwards a few inches.
FUCK.
I was done. Stick a fork in me. My shields were basically useless against his attacks, at least until I could rest back up – and God only knows how long that might take.
It was right then that Nova, bless her heart, tried again.
Yuki must have phased her back up through the floor, because there was Nova on my left, standing in front of the blasted-out windows.
Thankfully she was as dishonorable as me in a fight, because she threw a fireball at Antimatter as soon as she appeared. No warning shout or anything.
He saw it coming, though, and ripped her fireball apart with one shot of his energy blast. Got it at the very last second, right before it charbroiled his head.
Then his hand kept moving another six inches to his right as he aimed at Nova.
I saw the glint of energy building in his palm.
WHERE’S YUKI?!
Yuki wasn’t phasing Nova out of harm’s way.
Maybe Nova’d had a plan. Maybe Yuki had left her there as bait and was about to do some daring ambush on Antimatter. Who knows.
All I knew was that Nova was about to get charbroiled, and my shields couldn’t stop Anti’s attack. My forcefield would crumple as soon as his power blast hit it.
So I did the only other thing I could think of.
I pushed Nova out of the window with a forcefield.
She went through backwards, screaming bloody murder as she fell.
The plan was to get her out there and suspend her midair on another shield, then lower her gently to the ground.
Didn’t quite happen that way.
Anti fired.
He didn’t hit her, but he did clip the edge of the forcefield pushing her out the window – which obliterated it.
Gone.
So now Nova was falling without my shield to stop her.
And I couldn’t just cast a forcefield beneath her, sight unseen. The odds were one in a million I’d get it right.
Either it would materialize above her and she would miss it and plummet to her death, or it would be too far below her and she’d hit it at 70 miles an hour and die.
This wasn’t a hundred Yakuza I was intentionally trying to kill. I didn’t have any margin for error.
The only option I had was to go out there and get her.
Which I d
id.
I put forcefields around my arms and made them pull me forward. I shot across the floor like I was literally flying.
At least Anti was surprised, which was good. He even reared back in surprise after the blast, like, Wait, did I get her? Or did she just JUMP out the window?!
Then he saw me and it was like, Wait – is that fucker FLYING?!
I shot him the bird as I cleared the window, then used the forcefields to plummet down faster than the pull of gravity.
Madame’s was at the top of an 80-story building. But we weren’t in Madame’s anymore.
We were several stories below it, about 75 stories up – 800 feet or so, give or take.
Which meant Nova had roughly seven seconds until she hit the ground.
She’d been falling about two seconds by the time I cleared the window.
So I had five seconds to save her.
I saw her a hundred feet below me.
She was screaming in terror.
I sent my forcefields into overdrive and forced myself to fall even faster.
I caught her hand maybe 400 feet above the ground, three seconds to impact.
There was no way to slow our deceleration that fast – not without a 99% chance of fucking it up and turning us both into superhero puree.
So I winged it.
I created a forcefield that started vertically and then curved quickly, faster and faster, until it was horizontal with the ground. A thousand feet long in a curving ‘L’ shape – the world’s longest kiddie park slide.
As soon as we hit it, we began to slide along the curve, our vertical velocity rapidly becoming horizontal velocity.
Nova didn’t know that, however. She couldn’t see the forcefield.
All she knew was that she was falling to her death.
By the time we should have hit the ground, though, we were zooming over stalled traffic and freaked-out pedestrians. They’d already seen a hundred dead guys splatter earlier – now they saw two live people flying.
Exciting night for the citizens of Tokyo.
The slide petered out hundreds of feet away inside the small park across the street, where people were screaming and running away from us. Maybe because Nova was still shrieking hysterically.
As we slid to a halt, I grabbed her and shouted into her face, “It’s okay! It’s okay, I got you!”