Herokiller

by Paul Tassi

  The crowd was melting down, screaming in terror as Mark left his sword in the sand and charged toward Ethan with the guard’s weapon, firing more rounds from the clip. One missed the shield and hit Ethan in the side of the knee, and he stumbled backward, crying out.

  “You cheating motherf—” he began, but Mark collided with him, ripping the shield sideways with a free hand. Ethan tried to bring his sword around with his left, but Mark turned the weapon and fired a shot into Ethan’s wrist plating. It went through a gap just under his palm and no amount of drexophine would save him from feeling it. His scream rebounded around the entire arena. The shortsword tumbled uselessly to the ground, and Mark grabbed Ethan by the lip of his silver chest armor. He turned the SMG sideways, and jammed the barrel up under Ethan’s exposed chin.

  The confidence had fled from his blue eyes. Instead, Mark saw the familiar black void of fear.

  “Wait, just—” Ethan started, tears tumbling out of the corners of his eyes.

  Mark thought of Moses’s warm smile. He thought of Aria dancing on the hill. They never had a chance. They weren’t fighters, they were prisoners, always doomed to a death sentence. Crayton staged it, and the crowds cheered.

  Fine.

  Then I’ll give them one more execution.

  Mark pulled the trigger.

  An entire country let out a collective scream.

  The Crucible had its winner.

  45

  MARK DID TWO THINGS then. First, he let the bloody mess that used to be Ethan Callaghan drop from his arms. Second, without pausing, he took aim at Cameron Crayton, a hundred yards away, standing at the window of his box. Before the man could even flinch, Mark fired the entire remainder of the SMG clip, a dozen and a half rounds, at the glass. More screams rang out as white spatters erupted all over the window, and Crayton dove out of sight. But as the gun clicked empty, it was as Mark feared. The glass was bulletproof, and the small caliber of the weapon in his hand had no chance of piercing it. He tossed away the now-useless weapon, and dropped to his knees.

  Again, not wasting a second, he started rifling through Ethan’s armor, pulling off pieces of it left and right, like he was looting the corpse. And in a way, he was. He was looking for one thing in particular, and he found it tucked underneath the plating on Ethan’s shield arm. Three small syringes with a familiar-looking liquid inside.

  Mark grabbed at them like a desperate man dying of thirst and jammed all three vials of drexophine into his neck. The autoinjectors sent the drug racing into his system, and he felt the unimaginable pain slowly dulling all throughout his body, and even his boiling face. It went from hellfire to an ache in the course of twenty seconds, but to Mark it felt like diving into a pool on a hot day. No kind of relief had ever been sweeter.

  The ground was littered with garbage, hurled by a frenzied crowd that was about to riot after Ethan’s death. Strangely, many were actually cheering, motivated by the violence alone, perhaps. Mark slowly picked himself up and retrieved his discarded sword from the base of the wall. He grabbed Ethan’s eagle-embossed shield too for good measure, and walked into the center of the arena.

  As he expected, Glasshammer troops burst in through the main entrance, pouring out onto the sand. They spread out in a circle around him, all aiming rifles and submachine guns at him. Looking at the rim of the Colosseum, Mark saw every sniper drawing a bead on his head, just waiting for the command. Everywhere, camera drones buzzed, projecting the chaos to untold millions of viewers at home.

  And then, there was Crayton. He walked out onto the sand, escorted by a full contingent of guards, and Wyatt Axton himself. Mark had never seen Crayton look like this, face twisted with barely constrained rage. He was livid, just like the frenzied crowd.

  Mark felt the last few pieces of his sanity slipping away. He chuckled. He laughed. Loudly. And then he couldn’t help himself. He doubled over, sticking his sword in the sand to prop himself up, laughing uncontrollably at the absurdity of it all. Crayton drew closer, and Mark found another dozen weapons aimed at his head.

  Mark wiped tears from his eyes and slowly got his breathing back under control. He stood up, still smiling.

  “So what?” Mark said to Crayton, standing twenty feet ahead of him. “What are you going to do? Disqualify me?”

  More laughter. He couldn’t help it.

  Crayton stood silent, wheels turning in his head. Mark winning had to have been impossible. Unthinkable. But here he was, alive (barely) with Ethan’s crumpled body a few feet away, missing most of his pretty face.

  Crayton let out a long sigh, and slowly his face morphed into a vague approximation of a smile.

  “Well, you did put on a hell of a show, Mark.”

  He wished he’d saved a bullet, had he known Crayton would come down himself. Mark gripped his sword a little tighter. There were two dozen guards between him and Crayton. Making a run at him was suicide.

  When has that ever stopped you?

  “What happens now?” Mark said, slowly shifting his feet, ready to launch forward into certain death.

  “I—” Crayton began.

  The ground shook, ever so slightly. It wasn’t much, but enough for everyone to notice.

  An earthquake?

  Then Mark heard distant screams.

  Mark and Crayton searched for the source, and saw something odd in one of the northeast sections of the Colosseum. Smoke was pouring out from one of the entryways that led to the concession stands. A few tiny shapes were emerging from the blackness, and the crowd around the area was pulling back, frightened.

  “What is—” Mark began.

  Another rumble. Mark saw a flicker of flame this time. An explosion, shooting out from another entryway a few sections over. More screams. Louder. More of the audience saw it.

  “Is this—” he turned to Crayton, but the man’s eyes were filled with confusion and fear.

  “Secure that area and find out—” he began, pointing at the fresh plume of smoke.

  But the explosion of the arena wall stopped him short.

  The blast was powerful, tearing through the eastern wall on the sand, showering the Glasshammer guards, Mark, and Crayton with chunks of debris. Everyone lost their footing, and Mark’s ears rang.

  He blinked through the dust and smoke, and saw a guard next to him with a piece of shrapnel sticking straight out of his visor. Mark scrambled to regain his senses. He searched himself for wounds, but in his full plate armor, he seemed to be okay.

  What the hell was going on?

  Zhou’s words came to him.

  “Things are in motion that cannot be stopped.”

  It’s a siege, Mark realized. This was China. This was the MSS. This was Zhou’s final move. It had to be, somehow. If they couldn’t kill the man, they would kill the temple he built, and as many of his worshippers as they could.

  Holy fucking shit.

  He could barely see Crayton, who was being helped to his feet by Axton. The floor shook with more unseen explosions.

  He pointed directly at Mark.

  “Take him!” he screamed through the panicked roar of the crowd, as Axton dragged him back through the entryway. The guards who were just getting to their feet turned to point their weapons toward Mark.

  Mark the spy.

  Mark the traitor.

  And now, presumably, Mark the terrorist.

  Mark lunged forward and regained his grip on his sword and Ethan’s shield. He brought it up just in time to deflect the first spray of bullets from the closest guard.

  Mark watched Crayton disappear into smoke. His mind immediately raced elsewhere.

  Find Carlo and Brooke.

  But no. Something had changed. Mark’s blood was molten. His vision was crimson mist. Everything around him was fire and smoke and death. There was only one thought that consumed him fully, all the way down to his core. He wouldn’t get away. Not this time. This was his reckoning.

  Kill.

  Crayton.

  Mark f
elt himself lose control of his own body. The drexophine had erased the last echo of pain from his body, and he raced forward into the surviving wall of guards sealing Crayton’s exit out of the arena floor. He tucked himself behind his shield and charged as they opened fire.

  A hundred rounds hit the shield before Mark closed the gap, but once he did, it was carnage. The Glasshammer guards wore kevlar, armored up for a different era of war. Mark tore into them like thresher maw, his sword slashing, hacking off limbs, feeling bullets glance off his armor. At close range, they fumbled with their guns, but once their ammo was spent, they were dead before they could even reach for a new magazine.

  Mark ripped through a half dozen soldiers like paper, making sure to keep Ethan’s shield actively blocking shots from the mercs that were farther away. Fresh blasts kept rocking the stadium, causing everyone’s footing to slip, and their shots to fly wildly off course.

  Dancing from the pile of butchered guards to individual soldiers near the mouth of the entryway, Mark sliced off the arm of a man trying to get out his combat knife and drove his sword through the chest of another fumbling with a fresh clip for his rifle. Mark didn’t care who these men were. This was war. His mistake had been not seeing it sooner.

  Mark heard a sharp crack and was knocked off balance as a .50 caliber sniper round tore clean through Ethan’s shield and into the wall next to his head. That was his cue to dart inside the mouth of the arena floor, which guards had tried to seal shut, but an explosion had detached the hinges on one of the doors, so Mark was able to slip through.

  Inside was literal hell. Everything was ablaze, from vendor stalls to human beings, and stinging smoke occluded Mark’s already impaired vision. Alarms were blaring, and the CMI staff assigned to the ground level were as panicked as the fans as they raced toward the exits. Mark had stopped counting the explosions by now.

  This is why Zhou didn’t care if he helped you, Mark realized. This was always the endgame.

  “I will have the last laugh either way.”

  Mark pushed away thoughts of Zhou and followed a column of guards in newly equipped gas masks that had to be trailing Crayton. Mark shoved the back few rows aside with his shield, but once they figured out what was going on, he had to start slashing with his blade again. Fans screamed in terror as impaled, bloody guards crashed into vending machines and hot dog carts. Mark almost lost his head when a guard at the front reeled around touting an enormous, drum-mag LMG, but the shield took the initial few blasts and Mark followed with a quick stab through the man’s throat. As he fell, Mark could see more guards and in the smoky distance, the scarred, silver head of Wyatt Axton.

  Mark picked up the pace of his run and leapt over the burning corpse of an unfortunate fan.

  And then the ground gave way.

  The blast was in the basement level somewhere, but it caused the floor to collapse completely, and Mark found himself tumbling down in a freefall. He hit the stone hard, along with a few other unlucky bystanders. He blinked, regaining his senses from the fall, which was mostly broken by his armor. Looking around, he saw one woman impaled on a piece of rebar. Another man had his head crushed by a twelve-foot-tall support beam. Mark scrambled to his feet and pulled his sword out of the rubble. Ethan’s shield had slid down the mound and was baking in a flaming pile of debris behind him. Mark decided it wasn’t worth going back for, and ran toward the nearest doorway marked STAIRWELL.

  Halfway up, he ran into another pair of guards. He didn’t hesitate to headbutt the first one so hard his visor shattered, and he threw the other one tumbling down the stairs with a judo toss. The cracked-visor guard let lose a pair of shots with his pistol. One hit Mark’s plating while the other ricocheted off a railing. Mark grabbed the man’s gun with his free hand, twisted it around, disarming him, then emptied the clip into his face, saving one bullet for the guard recovering at the bottom of the stairs. As the dead guard slid down the wall in front of him, Mark yanked the riot shotgun off his back and held it with one hand with the sword in the other. Both were heavy, but Mark was long past pain and fatigue. Adrenaline had taken over completely.

  Three blasts with the shotgun cleared an unknown number of additional guards out of the top of the stairwell, and Mark pushed past their corpses to get back to ground level. He sprinted in the direction where he’d last seen Crayton.

  Someone wearing a CMI polo was screaming at someone wearing a CMI windbreaker in front of one of the Colosseum’s dozens of bars. Mark could barely make out what he was saying over the din of the panicked crowd.

  “The kegs! They’re in the beer kegs! I saw one go off!”

  He pointed to the top of a silver keg behind the bar. Mark heard an electronic chirp coming from the metal cylinder as he got closer.

  “Get the hell away from that!” Mark screamed and the two men started running with everyone else. When Mark was rounding the corner, he heard the blast and felt the heat from the fireball, which dissipated only a few feet before it would have engulfed him.

  Kegs? Jesus.

  Zhou’s team had probably hijacked a vendor truck and loaded it up with lead-lined, C4-filled replacements to be distributed throughout the entire stadium. That’s what Mark would have done. None of it mattered now. All that mattered was the hunt.

  Crayton was sending guards backwards to try and stop him. They should have all been fleeing for their lives, but they were all trying to be heroes, trying to bring down the infamous Mark Wei.

  They were idiots. The remaining Glasshammer mercs were disorganized and terrified and in no shape to take him on. Mark pumped through the last four rounds of the shotgun into too-slow guards before tossing the empty weapon and reverting back to the sword. He ran into a trio of mercs who had managed to get their hands on riot shields, but he simply rolled over the top of them and carved up their backs with his blade. From one of the bodies, he scooped up another SMG and emptied the clip toward the reappeared, fleeing shape of Wyatt Axton, turning the corner into another hallway marked EXIT. A flood of stampeding fans followed him, and Mark had to push his way through, knocking them left and right with his armor.

  Mark could see wide double doors at the end of the hall. Flashing red and blue lights had appeared outside. The smoke wasn’t as intense as the hallway widened near the exit, and Mark could finally see Crayton himself just ahead of Axton. Mark pulled the trigger on the SMG, but it clicked empty.

  Another blast. Close. Disastrously close.

  This time, it was the ceiling that was raining down in chunks above them, pieces of the second and third levels hammered the ground like meteorites, crushing people left and right and blocking the exit. Mark kept his balance, and through the fresh plume of dust, saw Axton rushing to Crayton, the mogul’s lower half trapped under concrete, and screaming something into his radio. All the other guards were dead, had fled, or were walled off by rubble and the mass of fleeing fans behind Mark.

  Crayton was stuck under a hulking slab of stone, one or both his legs crushed, from the looks of it. He had nowhere to go. All that was standing between him and Mark now was Axton.

  While his back was turned, Mark shoved recovering fans out of the way, grabbed his sword, and sprinted forward. But even over the screams, Axton heard his metal feet clanging on the cement, and turned toward him, his Desert Eagle in his extended hand. Fans had spread out and cleared the space in between them, watching in transfixed shock.

  There was no more shield to protect Mark. Instead, he simply threw his armored arm over his exposed head, dipped down and shoulder-charged toward the gunfire.

  He felt the bullets hit. A few glancing shots, but the direct hits were like sledgehammer blows to his armor, with a few breaking the metal and burying themselves in his body. But still, he made it, and slammed into Axton, throwing him into the rubble blocking the exit. He turned to Crayton, who was wide-eyed, and brought the blade up for a downward stab. But Axton didn’t even need a half second to recover. He leapt up and speared Mark, sending him sprawling
onto the cement. Mark lost his grip on his sword, so instead sent a steel fist in Axton’s side. Axton countered from his mounted position by plowing a forearm into Mark’s face, which dazed him and wrenched his head to the side.

  He turned back toward Axton, and his lone eye was bleary and unfocused. He saw the man towering above him, his eyes blazing with rage, raising both his hands far above his head. In them, he held an eight-inch, black-bladed combat knife, the one always dangling off his chest, and as he reached the arc of his swing, he drove the blade down toward Mark’s skull.

  There was a sharp pop, and Axton’s head snapped back. The knife fell from his grip, and skittered off the concrete next to Mark’s head. Mark scrambled back as a figure walked right past him, firing more shots that riddled Axton’s chest, neck, and face.

  Her blonde hair was brown with dust and soot, but Mark knew the curled ponytail immediately. Brooke turned back to him, her face blackened, her nose and mouth covered by a torn cloth. She extended her arm, and hauled Mark up to his feet.

  “You alright?”

  Mark nodded, but looking down at his armor, and saw that there were more than just dents in it, there were bloody holes. He couldn’t feel a thing.

  “I’m good,” he said anyway, as Brooke looked concerned. She held the Glasshammer-issue sidearm at her side, the barrel still smoking after emptying its contents into Wyatt Axton, who was now missing most of his head.

  Now there was just Crayton. The devil trapped in a hell of his own creation.

  Mark turned to Brooke.

  “Gideon, he … it was all—”

  “I know,” she said, coughing through the cloth on her face. “I know what happened, what Crayton did. Or I have a rough idea, at least. But we have to get out of here. I got the Riveras out, but this whole place is coming down.”

  “Not yet,” Mark said, turning back toward Crayton.

  “No,” Brooke said. “No, Mark, not—”

  Mark wrenched himself free of her grip, took a few steps forward to pick up his dropped sword. He stumbled forward toward Crayton, pinned in the rubble. The man’s eyes opened wide as he saw him approach.