End Boss

by Bryan Nyaude

  “I did that to him,” I thought to myself, and then I started feeling bad.

  I wish I hadn’t, but it was either him or us, and I chose to save us.

  “Whoever did this will pay,” she hissed and punched the ground so strongly her fist sunk into the ground.

  I imagined that being my face and suddenly felt strong chills creeping up my spine. Was this fear I was sensing? Definitely it was; however, it felt so strange, and yet so strong, that it shook my entire being. Ever since arriving on this planet, I had been feeling rather uncomfortable and downright nervous. I mean, this planet was crawling with terror beasts and powerful alien enemies: I couldn’t phantom it.

  “I wouldn’t mind being pounded in the face by her fist,” Rick sighed again. “Oh crap, I didn’t know the com link was on so forget what I said bahahaha.”

  Yeah right, it had been disturbing to hear him say that and it was going to take a miracle to get that thought out of my mind. Either way, it looked like he was going to get his wish after all. The alien girl was furious and it looked like she was about to burst into rage.

  “Forget about that, Rick, we need to move now,” I whispered as I looked one last time at her and the boy, turning away to search for another way out of this mess.

  From what I could tell, we were surrounded and all our paths were blocked by these gray people. It was also strange how they didn’t even need a gravity armor suit to move about or oxygen tanks, and yet the old man said they were human.

  “Wait, look at those footprints,” the girl said, looking on the ground, “they are still fresh, we can’t be too far behind them.”

  Darn, I had not taken that into consideration. Behind us, we had left a large trail of footsteps which were easy to follow. This wasn’t good at all. If they followed those tracks they would find us fast and we weren’t that far ahead.

  “Let’s go now through there,” I said to Rick, once I found a safe passage through the trees.

  There wasn't many aliens patrolling in that area. Our best option was to run and flee from the ship as fast as we could. Dalla was safe as long as she stayed in the ship. We would come back for her, eventually, once they were gone.

  “Where to, Den?” Rick said, sounding impatient and agitated.

  Rick was right to sound irritated because I felt the same way, considering the odds against us. We were badly outnumbered. Quietly as possible, we moved swiftly in the grassy terrain, barely avoiding contact with our new enemies.

  “Guys, where are you?” Dalla spoke as her armor beacon came on our sensors.

  Crap, she had woken up too soon. I stopped in my tracks and looked back—my heart began to beat really fast. Dalla was surrounded by a horde of alien warriors and she had no idea of this. Even if we went back for her, there was no way we could fight off those powerful enemies and triumph. Her best chance was to sit still and wait them out to leave. Our ship was still in camouflage mode; however, it wasn’t going to last for hours, since we were running on backup power.

  “Dalla, stay where you are, you are surrounded by a battalion of alien enemies.” I said harshly, alerting her of how serious I was. “We might be in over our heads on this one. Rick and I are going to try and distract them for a bit, to buy you enough time to diagnose and fix the ship, if possible.”

  “What did you guys do to our ship?” she responded quickly in anger. “It looks terrible.”

  “Nothing much,” I replied, laughing nervously. “Remember, we crashed the ship when our power supply ran out, and well, the rest is history.”

  “Shhh do you guys hear that?” the girl with the gray skin spoke, almost a few yards away from us.

  I was surprised, almost jolting out of my skin. I saw the alien girl pacing towards us, following the trail of our footsteps. Her eyes glued to the ground like white on rice. There were a few alien warriors following behind her, with weapons unknown to me.

  “Geez, she doesn’t know when to quit, does she?” I said speaking to myself.

  “Well, what do you expect?” Rick responded, but in a quick whisper. “You fried that little guy like soft chicken.”

  True, I hated it when he was right, especially when it came to situations like these. Rick’s com link suddenly went high static, in a loud screech, and suddenly all attention turned towards our direction. I saw their faces turn, looking directly in our exact position. The alien girl tilted her head up and began to move slowly towards us.

  “Turn it off, Rick,” I yelled, but it was too late as our new enemies were running towards us.

  In a jiffy of a second, I dodged one of the gray men who almost nabbed me. However, I wasn’t fast enough to evade the other warrior who suddenly pinned me from behind, and tossed me on the ground. His grip and power was incredible.

  “I have faced people with your type of armor before so that won’t work on me,” he said, standing on top of me with one of his legs pinning me. “I don’t need to see you to know where you are.”

  Now I suddenly knew how Rick felt, when that little boy had his leg on his chest. It felt like a truck was crashing me to the ground and I didn’t like the feeling. Unexpectedly, the man fell on the ground and I heard a voice say, “Run, Den.”

  It was Rick and he had been the one who had tackled the man, who had me pinned. I quickly got up on my feet and began to run in the direction Rick was running as fast as I could. Jolting hard, I dared not look back at our enemies who most likely were on our tail. Our camouflage system no longer fooled them as before.

  “I can fix it, but it will take some time,” Dalla spoke to us from the com link.

  “Hurry, Dalla, time is definitely one thing we don’t have,” Rick said, panting really hard.

  “Well, try fixing a nuclear fission engine by yourself and see how quickly you can do it,” Dalla growled at Rick rudely.

  Darn, this wasn’t the time for a sibling argument, but apparently they didn’t care. I took a risk and glanced back for a second. The aliens were a good bit behind us and losing ground. We ran even further through the terrain, rushing through trees, in a zigzag pattern, to confuse them. Our random movements were not enough to truly lose them, although it would buy Dalla the time she needed to fix our ship.

  “Man, she doesn’t give up,” Rick glanced back.

  “Are you serious?” I spotted the alien girl slightly behind us and gaining on us.

  Her speed and tracking abilities were beyond comprehension. She was on our trail like a hound dog and there was only one way to lose her.

  “We have to split up,” I said, looking at the alternative choices we had.

  We could either stop and fight her, but considering how potentially strong she was, that was not the most rational choice. She moved swiftly with such remarkable agility, one could not help but admire her. Our best choice was to keep running and lose her by splitting into two opposite directions.

  “Okay, Den,” Rick agreed with me, changing direction quickly.

  I shifted my body and dashed through in the east direction. The alien girl gained speed and followed behind me, easily moving through the trees. I definitely couldn’t lose her if I kept running on the ground. Flying was my only option in this dilemma. Well, there was slightly one kink in that plan. The propulsion system was offline, more than half the power had been redirected into the camouflage system mode. I had no defense weapons and to make things worse, my armor had suffered slight external damage from my previous encounter. I felt her breath directly behind me and getting closer—her arms extended out like she was trying to grab me. I looked back and saw her face, her eyes dimmed with fierce fire, and an intense desire for vengeance. Knowing what awaited me, I ran even faster and gained a few yards from her grasp.

  From the corner of my ears, I heard a terrible roar of a terror beast and found myself in their territory. She still didn’t quit chasing after me, despite hearing the growling echoes of these terrifying creatures. Wait a minute, that roar sounded so familiar, like I had heard it from before. It remi
nded me of the terror beasts we had encountered before, but that was impossible, wasn’t it? Had they been tracking us the whole time? I felt my stomach turn at the thought.

  Before I knew it, I was on the ground barely able to move my body. It felt like my armor had shut down completely without my consent.

  “I will make you pay for what you did to my brother,” a feminine voice hissed in harsh tone.

  I could sense the incredible danger I was in and yet there was nothing I could truly do. She was strong just as I had projected. She had me pinned down completely, using some martial art technique I was not familiar with. My shoulders were completely locked out, and any sudden movement could dislocate them, not good. I sighed slowly as I thought my way out of this dire situation.

  “Listen,” I began, with fear in my voice, “I’m sorry about what I did to your brother, I wasn’t meaning to kill him or anything. Let’s get out of here first and you can do whatever you want to me later. Terror beasts are everywhere and we need to run, right now.”

  She didn’t respond to my reasoning; I felt her grip tighten though. Her body movements gave her feelings away. The moment I mention her brother, I felt her breathing slow to a halt. She definitely cared for him a lot. Something moved, hidden behind the trees—it lingered and growled softly as if stalking its prey.

  “Wait here for a while,” she ordered and jumped away from me so gracefully she was like a ballerina.

  I sensed the impending danger and ignored her command. Quickly, I deployed two drones from my suit for surveillance of the area, in order to estimate the number of terror beasts in the area. I was surprised by the sheer number alone which ranged above 20 or so. We were definitely done for and there was no escaping unharmed, or better yet, in one piece. As soon as my drones were far above the sky, out of range from any terror beasts, I began to try to reboot my suit; however, most of my power had been drained out. It was going to take a while to redirect the remaining power to my weapon system. I felt the camouflage fade out as I became visible again. In a glimpse of a second, I caught sight of the girl with the gray skin, running and ducking in the forest above me. She wasn’t that hard to spot considering everything around us was blue and so were the terror beasts, which in my opinion, was quite annoying. The girl took out a weapon, which emitted electricity, and began to fight her way into the horde of the terror beasts. It seemed my intuition was right; electricity did harm the beasts greatly. My eyes tracked the alien girl’s movements, from left to right, and then up with great difficulty—she was just so fast.

  One thing was for sure, she was quite fearless and bold. One by one, the terror beasts dropped on the ground, like feathers, but more appeared, joining the ranks with every passing minute. I tensed my body as I thought through about my next move. I realized I had to help her if we were to survive this situation. Plus, that was the only chance I had to show that I wasn’t a bad person. Before I realized it, two more terror beasts fell next to me, stunned out cold completely as if dead. I jumped away, surprised, but amazed. Just who was this girl? Two things were certain for sure, she was no slouch and using electricity on the terror beasts was one way to knock them down. But why had no one on earth figured this out yet? But what if they did and were somehow withholding this information from the rest of the public? No, something about this situation felt out of place. I assumed the terror beasts on this planet were weaker than the ones ravaging earth. Yep, that made more sense to me.

  “Darn this,” I yelled at myself, knowing how helpless I was.

  I couldn’t figure out this puzzling mechanical mystery and stood there silently. The frustration kept building up as I knew that any second from now could be my last. The ground shook hard from the sheer mass of the creatures. In that moment, I had a baffling realization. This wasn’t a coincidence, was it? I just couldn’t put my finger on it yet, but this situation felt so out of the ordinary, and yet so familiar.

  “Follow me,” the girl appeared in front of me without warning.

  She nicked my armor hard, pushing me a little back at the same time. Strangely, my suit came back online and all my systems became operational again. Had she done something to it when I wasn’t looking? Possibly, when she pinned me to the ground. Could explain why it took so long to reboot the power and weapon systems back. I looked hard around while following behind her.

  “Where to now?” I asked, carefully observing a terror beast that had set its sight on me, out of everything else.

  Oh no! I knew this beast; it was one of the big terror beasts that I had seen after I fried the small terror beasts in our previous encounters. I had a feeling this might happen, although I thought I was just paranoid. The creature growled, stealthily moving in close.

  “Just follow me,” she hissed and began to run fast towards east.

  I watched her move for a second, before looking back at my stalking enemy. There was no way I could keep up with the alien girl, let alone outrun the beast. Quickly, I turned on my flight system and took off for the skies, using my new propulsion system. The rocket thrusters roared out, blitzing me up into the sky faster than I had ever done, previous to now. I was glad to have got rid of the wings because they were complicated. They were fun to begin with, but the feeling got old quickly. Just as I thought I was finally safe, I sensed something. I looked down quickly, barely ducking out of range from the terror beast I was running away from. It had jumped into the trees and used them as leverage to gain a momentum leap towards me. Thankfully, I noticed it in time to evade safely. The creature descended down, landing on a tree forcibly. It turned its large head and looked back at me, with a snarling look. This creature was incapable of emotion and yet it wanted revenge against me for what I had done. Knowing this, I shot a few proton bullets at it with Rick’s gun, to slow it down for a while; however, it just stood there and took all the hits like they were nothing.

  “Show off,” I chuckled and flew out of range, planning to get away from both the terror beasts and the girl from before.

  If she was also bent on revenge, it was most likely she was tracking me from the ground. But if I was to move out of range, in the sky, she wouldn’t find me for a while. Well, that was if I was lucky enough to stay out of sight. The sky was so clear, and so blue, it almost made me throw up. Honestly, I was getting tired of seeing this blue color all around this planet. You would think they might, I mean just maybe, find something else on this planet with a different color. It was indeed strange and yet fascinating to say the least. How could one planet be composed of only one color? So many variables seemed out of place. I looked down and everything seemed tiny from this distance. With each second, I moved further and further from Rick and Dalla. The com link signal was static for some unknown reason, as it appeared to be some kind of interference from an outside source. I could still hear terror beasts roaring beneath me, but it wasn’t as loud as before. Abruptly, I felt a slight disturbing vibration within my armor. I was losing power with each minute of flight. Probably, due to my overuse of the electrical weapon system.

  “Rick, can you hear me?”

  There was no answer and I was barely picking up any signals. I stopped halfway, in the air, hovering effortlessly to conserve power. My mind reassured me that I was out of harm’s way for now—it was time to go back and rejoin the others. We had lost enough time already as it was. Quickly, I recalibrated myself and coordinated my tracking system back to the cargo ship. I was fifty-six miles away from them, east from the ship’s position. It was going to be tricky getting back, considering there might be a trap waiting for me. I seriously hated this planet with a passion.

  “Oh well,” I sighed out, placing my hand against my visor.

  I decided to take the gamble and go back, but just close enough to survey the area. Time was critical, every passing second could decide my fate. I turned around and flew back rapidly to our ship—my heart thumping greatly with agonizing expectation. Once I got close enough to where the ship was, I landed on one of the high trees an
d tried to blend in. Rather a difficult ordeal, since I stood out from everything else blue. There was a rustle in the wind, followed by a really long silence, as if everything went dead around me. I looked everywhere and caught sight of nothing in plain sight and not even a trace of heat to pick up from my scanners. I knelt down, on one of the trees’ branches, and tried my com link one more time, but it was still nothing but static. To be safe, I waited ten more minutes, quietly, hidden safely on the branches of the tree. Nothing moved or echoed at all. After one more minute, I slowly climbed down and moved through the trees, making my way towards the ship. From what I could see, Rick was still missing alongside with the ship. Was this the right location? The crash site was right in front of me, but everyone was gone. I walked around, resetting my bearings again, and stumbled upon a small, little cube box on the ground. It was the size of a small stone and yet so well built. I couldn’t tell what it was, but it looked important—possibly, a component from the ship. I bent down and slowly picked it up anyway, placing it in my empty pocket for safe keeping. Suddenly, I realized that the sky was turning dark and gloomy. What was happening now? The sky thundered out as precipitation built heavily up above me.

  It felt like rain was about to fall except it was impossible for this planet to have rain, wasn't it? Nah, it was definitely impracticable, and maybe I was just imagining things. My scanners beeped out loudly, projecting my exact location. Now what?

  I knew where I was and the exact location of the ship; I was not misreading my bearings. Something must have happened while I was away. I knelt on one knee and scanned the ground thoroughly. There were no signs of struggles and no residues of proton burst particles. So what did it mean? Had Dalla escaped or been captured? Scanners picked up heat trails, showing me that the ship had moved a few miles away from my location. I quickly twisted my body and began to run towards it, hoping to find Dalla and Rick. I ran for a couple of miles, but I didn’t find them—the trail went cold, all of a sudden. All I felt was empty air all around me. I looked up and realized that the ship had taken off for the skies. So to make things clearer, I was all alone on this freaky planet, surrounded by terror beasts and strong gray aliens, who considered me their enemy. Crap! What else could go wrong? With the com link nothing but static, and my power supply draining out, I had to think of something fast, otherwise, I was stuck here. I stopped in my tracks, zoning deeply into my thoughts. Logically, I had to rely on the power of my intellect.