Herokiller

by Paul Tassi

  “They can’t keep dying,” he said. “Or I’m going to lose my mind.”

  “You’re trained better than that.”

  “I know that, in theory. But it’s harder in practice.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you?”

  “It’s how I feel every day, knowing that you could be discovered at any moment and executed in a cellar somewhere, or that you could die at the hands of a crazed actor, a traitorous Tibetan commander, or now maybe a psychotic gymnast, and that’s if things go well. I want to tell you to go AWOL. Or kill Crayton. Or both. I want this to be over.”

  “But it can’t be.”

  “Not yet. And I think deep down we both know that. There’s a larger picture here we’re missing.”

  Mark knew that. He felt it. The mission was all wrong. Crayton made even less sense as time went on. China’s involvement was murky and getting murkier. He understood why he couldn’t go off book. Not to save anyone, not even himself.

  “Wish me luck,” he said. Brooke turned to leave, and surprised him by wrapping him up in a tight hug.

  “Just survive.”

  THE RAIN RETURNED THE following afternoon. It turned the sky gray and the sand to mud. Two downpours in less than a day was unusual for Vegas, though in the last decade weather patterns had shifted in disconcerting ways almost everywhere. Still, the flood warnings hadn’t kept the crowd away. That would have been too much to hope for, Mark thought.

  Tagami’s angle that Crayton’s team had crafted for him was “mysterious old man.” Not flashy, but great with older viewers and it got the job done in terms of building interest in his “character.” His intro video was nothing but picturesque scenes of nature, spliced with past clips of his victories. The music was Tibetan throat singing, showing Crayton knew that much about him at least. But Mark figured only a few people alive actually knew the story Brooke told him.

  Tagami’s gray robe was almost black from the rain and mud. He stood silently, as he always did, and seemed oddly content, given the weather, his possible impending death, and hundreds of thousands of fans screaming all around him. He wiped away the rain from the top of his bald head, and stared at the sky. He didn’t even acknowledge Mark when he entered the arena.

  Do you really want to go through with this? said the doubting voice in Mark’s mind. He tried to tell himself what he was planning would be better in the tactical sense, given the weather, but he knew he was planning on doing it anyway, rain or shine.

  For honor? You’re an idiot.

  Maybe he was. But the old man deserved better. Mark could see in his eyes that he hadn’t sold out his unit. This was the kind of man who tried to sacrifice himself to save everyone, but lost them all the same. Because he failed, shame was his only armor.

  Crayton gave Mark his usual booming introduction, gesturing broadly at him from behind his glass booth, shielding him from the rain. Mark’s metal feet sank into the mud as he trudged toward his mark opposite Tagami.

  “So Mark, does Chicago’s favorite son have anything to say on this lovely afternoon?” Crayton said, looking around at the rain. Laughter rippled through the crowd like a wave.

  Mark paused.

  “He deserves a fair fight.”

  The audience buzzed as Mark began stripping off his armor plating. Arthur had shown him how to do it quickly earlier that day, though he questioned the wisdom of him doing so. He was right, no doubt.

  Mark planted the bastard sword in the mud, and dropped his helmet that he held at his side. It was easiest from the top down. First were the pauldrons, then his arm and forearm plates. The chestplate came off smoothly, and the wolf’s head faceplanted in the mud. Then went his gauntlets, legs, and boots. In the end, the black plates were scattered in the muck around him, and he wore only his fiber undersuit. It was built to reduce friction from the armor, and offered no more protection than Tagami’s robes. Possibly less, as you could stab at the billowing robe and hit nothing but air. The same certainly wasn’t true of the skintight undersuit.

  Mark wiggled his bare toes in the mud, as the suit stopped at his ankles and wrists.

  The audience was murmuring in confusion, and even Crayton looked a bit concerned, which Mark was curious to see. Was it not bullshit? Was Mark really one of the man’s favorites? That would be ironic, considering rarely a day went by where Mark didn’t imagine killing him in a dozen different ways.

  “Are you sure you want to do this, Mark?” Crayton said solemnly into the mic.

  “If he can, so can I,” was the only reply Mark could come up with. He was just trying to do the right thing. Hopefully the right thing wouldn’t get him beaten to death in the next five minutes.

  Tagami finally turned his attention toward Mark, sizing up both him and his gesture. Would he take it as an insult, or a sign of respect, as Mark meant it?

  The old man went rigid, and then gave a low bow with his arms at his sides. Riko had taught Mark the nuances of polite bowing before he’d met her ultra-traditional parents in Aoyama-Itchome, the old money section of Tokyo. Mark returned Tagami’s gesture with the most formal bow he could remember. If the man was pleased, he didn’t show it. Still, something passed between them, and it wasn’t animosity.

  She’d be proud you remembered that, Mark thought. But Riko wouldn’t be proud of anything he’d done the last few years.

  If she lived, where would you be now?

  Mark didn’t know. It made him too sad to fantasize about what could have been, so he simply lost himself in memory. The photos, the videos. The life he once had. But it had been too long. When was the last time Mark had heard Riko’s voice, even on a recording? He’d forgotten himself in this mission, this tournament.

  You’re coping. You want to forget her. Forget them.

  No, no he didn’t. He tried to picture Asami’s face. Round and bright with joy. He saw nothing. He tried to hear Riko’s voice. Hear her sing again in his mind. But there was only silence.

  He should have died in China. Perhaps the man in front of him should have too.

  One of them would find peace at last.

  Mark hated that it couldn’t be him.

  Not yet.

  When the countdown concluded, there wasn’t booming thunder or flashing lightning. Nothing so dramatic as that. Just cold, gray rain that made it very difficult to see a gray staff whipping towards him at a few hundred miles an hour. Mark absorbed the first blow to his ribs, and felt far less pain than he imagined he would, the lingering drexophine in his system doing its job, perhaps. But the second, third, and fourth shots made him realize that shedding his armor had probably been a very, very bad idea after all.

  Mark finally got his sword up, learning on the fly how to block the insanely fast blows from a man who looked far too old to possess such speed. Mark had only trained against a staff a few times, and when he had, it was Moses wielding it, who was a much larger target. Tagami was practically darting in and out of raindrops, and as the downpour intensified, Mark was losing him in the mist, despite the fact they were the only two people on the arena floor.

  The mud limited both their speed somewhat, making for sloppy footwork. There was a hard layer of stone a few inches down, but the goo covering it was something neither had had to deal with yet. The crowd was just a dark blur punctuated by pinpricks of light from flexscreens and phones trying to take photos.

  Mark swatted Tagami’s staff aside as it whirled overhead, sending crashing blows toward his unarmored head that he was barely able to deflect. When that didn’t work, Tagami launched himself into the air and whirled around with a one-armed backhand that connected with Mark’s shoulder and set him sprawling into the mud, his undersuit now more brown than black. Mark scrambled back to his feet and barely dodged a follow-up slam that would have likely broken both his legs.

  He was disoriented. Every side of the arena looked the same. He couldn’t make out Crayton’s box, nor the one where Carlo, Aria, Ethan, and Brooke were all huddled together
to watch him. Of course it would be his luck to be fighting in the middle of a monsoon in the Nevada desert. Behind Tagami, he could already see water starting to pool where the drainage systems had been clogged.

  Mark finally went on the attack with a pair of spinning strikes that Tagami dodged easily. Eventually, one close swing made the old man stop it cold with his staff, and Mark was secretly hoping the razor edge would slice clean through the metal staff, but he had no such luck, and the result was only a shower of sparks, which were quickly extinguished by the rain.

  Readjusting his grip, Mark realized how much his forearms were aching. His armor normally absorbed a huge portion of the shock from these metal-on-metal clashes, but now his arms were taking the brunt of it, and they already felt like lead.

  Tagami was relentless. The bottom of his robes was thick with clinging mud, but he kept striking furiously, fighting like a man possessed. It had taken Mark all of a couple minutes to understand that all the stories were true about Iman Hirota.

  But he was just a man. Mark had to remind himself of that. He was a legend in the Himalayas, and was built up to be some kind of force of nature through his mysterious Crucible promos. He was skilled, especially for his age, and Mark didn’t even want to know how many years he’d trained while in exile, but he was human. He could die. He would die.

  The crowd got behind him, though. Mark heard the dull roar of a chant beginning to build over gusts of wind. “Shin! Shin! Shin! Shin!” Mark really couldn’t catch a break. In an age when the country was largely distrustful of Asians in the wake of Cold War II, he was still the least favored out of the two in the tournament. They were all still sore about Chase Cassidy, Mark supposed. As usual, he just had to put it out of his mind.

  Tagami lunged forward with a low, pointed strike meant to take out Mark’s knee, but he side-stepped it, then brought his shin crashing down the staff, which caused Tagami to topple forward ungracefully into the muck while retaining his grip on the staff. But when Mark leapt forward with a double-handed downward strike at his skull, the man was forced to leave the pole in the mud and fling himself out of harm’s way. The staff slowly sank into the brown earth, and now Mark stood between Tagami and his weapon.

  A tiny part of Mark wanted to flick the staff out of the mud and hand it to Tagami as a show of sportsmanship, but his aching ribs reminded him he’d been far too chivalrous already. When he had an advantage, he had to press it. He dove forward at the unarmed man, blade first.

  Tagami was even quicker without his staff. He palmed the blade aside with his left hand and gripped Mark’s wrist with his right. A half-second later, Mark found himself cartwheeling through the air over Tagami’s shoulder. By the time his ass hit the ground, the crowd was already going wild, and as Mark leapt back to his feet, he turned and saw Tagami had already fished his staff from its resting place and the rain was washing it clean.

  They circled each other, and the rain was starting to lighten, just a bit. It was easier to see, and for a moment, Mark saw a new face in front of him. A narrow one littered with tiny scars. Mark blinked, and the wrinkled visage of Tagami returned.

  This is no time for a psychotic break, he thought. A drone looped slowly overhead, projecting the pause in the fight up on the mammoth screen to their right. Underneath the image, Tagami’s heartbeat was slow, almost inhumanly so. Mark’s was racing, peaks and valleys spiking as he tried to catch his breath.

  He’s just a man, Mark thought. He lunged.

  Tagami deflected the blade down and spun left, bringing his entire staff with him. Before Mark knew what was happening, something hard slammed into the back of his head, and his eyes exploded with stars as he fell face forward to the ground.

  He turned so he hit the ground facing upward, blinking through the encroaching blackness as his skull was screaming in agony. His vision returned just as he saw Tagami moving in for the killing blow, a huge downward swing aimed straight at his forehead.

  Mark went to clench his fist around the grip of his sword to bring it around, but realized he wasn’t holding it. The staff flexed as it whipped toward him, and he had to squirm sideways so that it planted itself just next to his ear. Looking left, Mark realized he was lying in the middle of his own armor pieces, scattered on the ground after he’d stripped them off before the fight. His shoulder plates were behind him, and his boots were sinking into the mud to his right. It gave him an idea.

  Tagami went to lift the staff back up for another swing, but Mark had enough sense to grab it. Tagami froze, unable to win the tug of war just long enough for Mark to knock his leg sideways with his bare foot, causing him to lose his balance. He wrenched the staff forward as Tagami pitched toward him.

  They both rolled. Tagami to avoid falling directly on top of Mark, and Mark so that he could pull out the dagger hidden in his shinplate of his disembodied boot a few feet away. Once he had it in hand, he spun around and planted it through the corner of Tagami’s robe, halting the man’s escape as it pinned him to the ground. Mark flew at him with a hard cross punch the now immobile man couldn’t dodge, and his fist cracked against his jaw.

  Stunned, Tagami went to yank his robe free of the blade, but Mark beat him to it. In one motion, he kicked out Tagami’s left leg and pulled the knife out of the ground with his right hand. The man hit the mud and twisted out of the way as Mark’s knife dove toward his chest.

  While the blade missed the man’s sternum, he couldn’t move fast enough to dodge it entirely. It plunged into the left half of his gut, and blood bloomed through the mudded robes. There was deep, horrible pain on his face, but still, he didn’t cry out. Instead, he kicked Mark back and grasped his side, scrambling for his staff.

  He found it and brought it around, but his strength on that side was gone. Mark caught the staff in his armpit, and wrenched Tagami toward him. Again, the knife plunged into the man’s stomach and the entire crowd was now on its feet.

  Mark knew he’d speared something vital that time. The energy simply evaporated from Tagami as Mark held him. They both sank to their knees, the blade still lodged in Tagami’s abdomen.

  Mark looked over the lined face in front him. He saw pain and regret. The same thing he saw in the mirror most days.

  “Just one more,” Mark whispered to Tagami in Japanese, hopefully out of mic earshot.

  Tagami nodded stiffy. Mark’s head was throbbing. Tiny scars kept appearing and fading on Tagami’s face. He had to end this. The knife slid out easily.

  “Arigato,” Shin Tagami said, his voice hoarse after untold years of silence.

  Tears welled in Mark’s eyes. He didn’t even know why. This man was nothing to him. A stranger from halfway around the world.

  He is you. What you will be. Alone.

  The knife found his heart. Mark was doomed to live another day.

  35

  UNLIKE HIS LAST FIGHT, Mark was still conscious and able to walk out of the arena to a mix of boos and cheers. He was treated by on-site medics who constantly blinded him with tiny flashlights to check the status of his head, but he was supposed to be shipped back to Dr. Hasan in the estate’s medical wing. He blinked and was losing seconds, sometimes minutes, but he was still standing, still walking. His head felt like it was full of cement. He was pretty sure at least three of his ribs were free-floating.

  “No stretcher,” he said, pushing it away as some EMTs showed up at the door. Ethan and Carlo were waiting outside and rushed to his side as soon as they saw him.

  “We got him,” Ethan told the EMTs, and both he and Carlo took one of Mark’s arms over their shoulder as he forced himself to walk barefoot down the long, curving hall toward the back exit.

  “Hell of a fight,” Carlo said. “You about gave me a heart attack when you let him smack you upside the head like that.”

  He pulled lightly at the bandage wrapped around Mark’s head. The question wasn’t if he had a concussion, but how severe it was, and whether or not his skull had been fractured. But he could walk and tal
k, so that was a good sign, though he suspected he was slurring a bit from the painkillers they jabbed into him. The fogginess in his head told him it wasn’t drexophine, which could probably only be administered by Hasan himself.

  “Where’s Riko?” Mark asked, slurring.

  “Who?” Ethan said, eyebrow raised. “You mean Aria? She and Brooke are meeting us at the compound, don’t worry.”

  Shit, shut the fuck up you idiot, Mark thought, momentarily panicked about the slip. But the meds mellowed him out again almost immediately.

  “You’ve got a fight tomorrow,” Mark said, looking at Ethan. “You should be with your family.”

  “Well I’ve got a brother in need at the moment,” Ethan said, flashing that disarming smile of his. Mark felt his vision go black again for a second, but Carlo and Ethan steadied him. He started to ask where Moses was, but caught the question on the tip of his tongue.

  To their left, Mark saw a young man in a suit keeping pace with him. He had shiny hair and a tiny camera drone floating above his shoulder. A reporter.

  Shit.

  “Mark, how are you feeling?” he asked, holding out a thumbnail mic. Carlo swatted it aside.

  “Chill, man. He ain’t in the mood for this bullshit.”

  Mark cast a sideways glance at the camera drone.

  “I’m fine. Just need some rest.”

  The man was soon joined by two women, each with their own camerabots.

  “Mark, why did you remove your armor before the match?” one asked. “Why taunt Mr. Tagami like that?”

  “Taunt?” Mark said, surprised. “I was doing it out of—”

  “We’re almost there,” Ethan said, motioning toward the double doors ahead of them. They picked up the pace and his escorts pushed them open.

  Mark was blinded by a hundred flashes of light, and deafened by another fifty questions being shouted his way. They’d stumbled into an absolute swarm of press camped out in the parking garage. Behind them, Mark could see the flashing red lights of the ambulance.