by Brian Cody
“I don’t think I stuttered”, Nate replied.
“Can I trust you?” Bryen squealed as he reared back.
“What?” Nate groaned.
“Can I trust you now?” Bryen repeated. “What’s keeping you from using me as your human shield? What’ll I have to do to annoy you enough to take my life?”
“Give it a couple more seconds, and you’ll find out”, Nate replied.
“Huh”, Bryen replied, his visage reverting to its monotonous glaze. “Okay then.” He turned and pushed off.
“Yep.” Nate jumped and angled along the opposite side of the bus, where he turned, and, with that horde of machines before him, where he charged. Alongside of their racing forms, a rocket sped past and struck the bus, igniting it, while they continued for those dozens continuing for them. Nate fired an electric surge that eclipsed one of the machines before detonating it. He jogged through that diminishing flash and clotheslined a second machine with his right before spiraling and firing a blast with his left. Across from him, Bryen clasped the hilt to his long sword, and, with a sharp tug, exuded his double-edged blade. He swung down on one machine, driving the tip of his weapon into the automaton’s neck and pushing off before turning and swiping towards an adjacent machine. That machine leapt back, but Bryen, in response, fired a length of his shadow that followed his sword’s trajectory and sliced that machine’s chest. Bryen then redirected that shadow with a spiraling turn of his sword, and swiped it upon the first machine he had brought down to bifurcate it.
A step in front of him, Nate balled his fists until his hands were enveloped in an electric radiance and opened fire on one machine’s gut, dealing three malleating and electrifying blows, before firing a hook strong enough to behead it. Nate then looked to his right as he lifted his left to forge an electric shield, and, with his right outstretched, he magnetized the surface of a black Mustang and launched it to slam, roof-first, against two machines. Closing his grip, Nate caused the vehicle to enwrap the two automatons, and, with a fling of his left, Nate fired a concentrated surge that drilled through the contorted undercarriage, and ignited it.
“You know, while we’re at it”, Bryen called as he ran past bouncing debris and pushed through the expanding smog, “let’s find all of the expensive cars and use them as_” Bryen paused and lifted his sword to direct a line of his shadow into a shield against gunfire, “artillery rounds”, he grunted as he shot a spearing limb into one machine and launched it backwards. He then spiraled to the right to retract and then to re-launch that same limb in a grabbing tug that flipped the second machine into the air.
“One-fifth!” Nate replied as he forged an electric orb in his right hand, lifted, and deflected a right hook from one machine, and then slammed that ethereal mass into the machine’s chest.
“What?” Bryen replied as he jumped and swung his sword at the machine he had launched, his horizontal thrust beheading the automaton as it landed.
“My electric blasts are about one-fifth as effective as they are on humans”, Nate replied as he lifted both arms and shielded against gunfire.
“So…that means?”
“Screw it”, Nate groaned as he lowered his arms, inhaled, and fired a more blinding eruption that engulfed and consumed five machines. As that blast dissipated, Nate pulled back his hands, then engulfed, and opened fire, punching a machine, and, in two strikes, causing it to erupt.
“Why don’t you just create a super-magnet to attract the machines to one place, like the side of a building or something”, Bryen asked as he pulled his blade out of the back of a falling machine.
“Thought about it before we started charging”, Nate replied, “From what I’ve gotten, about forty percent of their armor is composed of an alloy I’ve never come into contact with. It only responds to a specific wavelength, and I would have to spend the bulk of my time concentrating on reaching and sustaining that wavelength. I’d be better off just letting them shoot at me… Hey, B-money”, Nate called as he grabbed a machine by the right leg and pitched it into the side of another.
“Hi”, Bryen replied as he dissevered the left arm of another machine and poured his shadow into the gaping joint.
“Let me use your sword”, Nate replied as he ducked and rolled, a rocket shooting overhead, and detonating behind him.
“Why?” Bryen asked as he slid along his shadow.
“I just want to try it out”, Nate replied as he magnetized and then redirected another rocket into a building.
“I don’t know”, Bryen replied.
“B-money, you have a shadow that’s sharper and way more maneuverable.”
“Still don’t know”, Bryen replied as he shielded against gunfire.
“B-money, I swear_!” Nate exclaimed as he pointed at Bryen.
“All right, Cain”, Bryen mumbled as he tossed his blade.
“Yes!” Nate growled as he caught the blade with his left, passed it to his right, and darted at another set of machines.
“Don’t break it”, Bryen muttered as he thrust his left leg in a high roundhouse kick, a jagged burst of his shadow beheading a machine in front of him. He stepped and flipped, while Nate swung at another machine, the electrified blade chopping through the machine’s side. Bryen landed and thrust his right leg, firing a fisted length from his shadow that slammed into a machine’s gut and launch it skyward. Bryen then darted up his spearing length, hopped onto the chest of the damaged, airborne form, and, with a downward stomp, directed another length of his shadow that drilled through the left side of the automaton’s shoulder. Bryen landed as the machine slammed onto its back, and he turned to his right as he jogged past its erupting form and watched Nate throw his long sword into a machine’s chest. Nate then fired an electric surge which engulfed the sword, and, as Bryen winced, which pulsed through its neck and poured into the machine. Bryen groaned as Nate lunged onto the collapsing machine and yanked out the weapon.
“Sloppy”, Bryen called.
“What?” Nate called back.
“You’re too sloppy”, Bryen replied.
“This coming from the guy who got his training from ‘YouTube and anime’”, Nate humphed.
“I want my sword back”, Bryen called back.
“Three_” Nate grunted as he hoisted the weapon out of a machine’s side and swung at a second behind it, “three more!” he exclaimed as he quartered that machine, then severed the gun-firing arm of the third, spun around its opposite side, gored the blade into its back, and used the subsequent explosion to push off and behead a fourth.
“You said three more!” Bryen called as he back-kicked another machine.
“I meant three more…now!” Nate replied as he clasped the sword with both hands, parried a right jab, and fired a concentrated surge from the weapon’s cusp.
“Nate, I swear if you ruin it_”—Bryen stopped, lifted his hands, and forged a shield which he maintained with his left while pulling out his phone. “Erik”, Bryen spoke, the gunfire blasting in his ears as the projectiles ricocheted against his palisade.
“What’s up?” Nate asked as he sliced off a machine’s leg and side-kicked its limping form.
“Erik wants us to keep count so we can see who gets the highest number of kills”, Bryen explained as he returned his phone.
“Are you kidding me?” Nate groaned.
“What?” Bryen asked as he fired three extensions from his shield and simultaneously let it descend. “I thought you were a Math Major.”
“That was last year”, Nate replied, “and, I thought you were in the middle of fighting a group of automated death-bringers!?”
“Aren’t we both?”
“If I had known we were keeping count, I probably wouldn’t have wasted my brain power in thinking up strategies.”
“Seventeen”, Bryen replied as he ducked and formed a shield against an exploding machine.
“What?” Nate replied.
“I’m at seventeen. I’ve roomed with Erik for almost two years,
so I suspected he would want a competition of sorts.”
“Well if you’re at seventeen, I’m somewhere around twenty”, Nate stated as he yanked Bryen’s sword out of a fallen machine, and, after letting the weapon’s cusp bounce across the ground, lifted it.
“I want my sword back”, Bryen replied.
***
“Oh!” Shawn coughed as he stepped back and thrust his arms. In a susurrating mass, several hundred papers were condensed into a spiraling maelstrom that imploded in front of Shawn’s hands and then flattened into a rectangle. “Turrisi!” Shawn coughed in time with the launch of four rockets. Turrisi reared up from behind the last intact vehicle of their barricade and darted for Shawn. He jumped and rolled behind his teammate, and Shawn pulled in his arms to curve the shield into a semicircle. The missiles impacted a second later, erupting in a rebarbative peal that rattled the fortification, while Shawn knelt and gritted his teeth, tightening every muscle to maintain his mental augmentation over those paper sheets while squinting at the earsplitting rush of flames behind and above him.
The flames vanished after a second, and Shawn knelt and gasped while still outstretching his arms, and while the urge to cover his ears resounded alongside of his thoughts. Have to maintain this shield…they’re still charging…they’re…way too many, Dave…but I would’ve regretted turning back as much as I regret listening to you. “Dang it, Piekarsky”, he muttered as a plume of smoke ascended around them. If they could feel wariness…if they were humans…they’d wait for the smoke to clear…but…
Shawn looked to Turrisi kneeling behind him, staring at his rifle, and emptying his spent clip. Turrisi gasped as he examined his rifle, his breaths speeding between his tightened lips as he respired with a more controlled resistance against exhaustion. Shawn bowed as he also gasped, but reared back up as he found that utterance to be detectable, and the sting in his ear canals diminishing. A slight grin extended in a rising curve as he took in the sound of his rushed breaths, and he looked to Turrisi as the gunman stood with gun clasped and nodded. Shawn, however, looked past him, a spinning wheel resting atop an SUV’s hood reinvigorating his flustered mind. “Turrisi”, he began, “you said you could ride?”
“Yeah”, Turrisi replied.
“And can those rounds fit in your Glock?”
Two hundred feet in front of them, the clanks and brass squeals of charging machines bolstered into a cacophonous flood as twenty of the automatons charged. They lifted their right arms as they came upon the smoke, and, as the first of that moving line dove into the pale miasma, they opened fire. Sounding in front of them, however, a whirlwind of documents blustered into the line and into the leading machine, driving it back while expanding in diameter. With a thrust, a gape several yards in width was forged down the center of the formation, and, as the documents settled, another, more droning, resonance took their place.
In a sixty-mile-per-hour blur, Turrisi bounded into the paper-filled gap atop a yellow sport bike, his left squeezing the throttle, and his right clasping one of his Glocks. He aimed as he landed, he pointed as he accelerated, and he fired at the first machine, loosing two shots to its neck before spinning to his left and firing at another. He swung his smoking pistol to siphon air into its chamber, and he slammed the gun into his side-pocket, clasped the handlebars with both hands, and reared the bike up to slap the undercarriage into an intercepting machine and to launch it back. Turrisi jumped off of the bike in the same moment, with his legs kicking under and then behind him as he gyrated, and his arms closing over his head a moment before he slammed onto the roof of a charred sedan and bounced along the ground. Though unscathed from the impact, Turrisi staggered to his feet. Though shaken, he regained his bearings and clasped his hanging rifle as his borrowed motorcycle jounced across the street and in front of three machines. He aimed and fired thrice at his bike, with the first shot striking the engine and the following two drilling into the gas tank and causing the vehicle to erupt and to engulf the rushing trio.
“Eighteen!” Turrisi barked as he fired two shots at one of the flailing shapes, “nineteen!” he continued as he brought down the second with a bullet to its right armpit, “twenty!” he roared as that second automaton detonated in a stronger eruption which fragmented the third.
Thirty feet behind him, another of the machines spun to Turrisi and lifted its left, but seized as documents slithered up its back and wriggled through its joints. It about-faced to aim at Shawn, but the documents rushed out of its abdomen and torso and sped back towards their wielder, while the machine seized and vomited plumes of smoke. “Eighteen”, Shawn gasped as his papers coiled around him and formed a lasso with a bladed edge, “and here’s nineteen!” he grunted as he spiraled the blade over his head and harpooned it through the chest of a rushing machine. “How about we switch things up”, Shawn suggested as he squeezed his hands over the lasso to cause the papers jabbing into that machine to disperse and to reshape in a bind. “There—!” Shawn growled as he hoisted the mechanical bludgeon into the air, “is number twenty!” he exclaimed as he hammered that machine into another. “Here’s twenty-one!” he then called as he swung the remainder of his lasso along the ground, coiled it around the leg of an aiming machine, and yanked it towards his fist.
***
A cauldron of flames blossomed along a skyscraper’s roof as Erik, descending, turned, spun, and rolled away from a quintet of machines diving after him. He jerked to the right as a blaze of gunfire rushed to his left and sliced into the tops of automobiles, and he jolted leftward and then upward as a rocket shot past him and detonated below him. He dove to fifty feet above the road and doubled his pace as he neared the two buildings halving his fifty–foot-wide path.
Erik’s eyes widened as he detected a clamor beyond view, and he analyzed the chime of pulverized glass to his left at the same instant that he came between those structures. He spun to fly on his right side while clasping his blade and looking to the panes on his left. He then looked back to the five pursuing him as five more drilled out of the skyscraper across from him, their barrels flashing with loosed gunfire, and their rockets armed and exuding flames. Erik swallowed at the same millisecond that he tensed, and he unsheathed his sword as he locked onto the first rocket’s ejection. That rocket, aligned with and swerving towards his chest, was ten feet off as those moments ticked by within his adrenaline-soaked mind. Erik looked back to the five still pursuing and also arming their rockets; then, he examined the five machines rushing perpendicularly to him—their trajectories, their planned trajectories, the lines of ammunition blustering above, in front of, and behind him, and the gaps between all of them—and, as he planned his maneuver, he smirked.
He blinked, as if to return his mind to a faster pacing, and, in that moment, he became engulfed in rocket-fire, gunfire, and ten intertwining and swarming automatons. Erik turned, swung, flipped, swung, fired a burst of flames, spiraled, and ducked under a passing rocket as he sheathed his katana. Those machines, once ten, were cut down to five intact forms, and, as Erik shot out of that eclipsing space with burned and exploding portions around him, he turned and pitched a fireball that struck a sixth machine and detonated it and a seventh. “Meh!” Erik proclaimed as he dove with three automatons giving chase. He jerked skyward, and, with another push, accelerated over a thirty-story building, deactivated his volant flames as he back-flipped over its roof, and plunged and slid along its opposite end.
He glanced back, but, finding his foes absent, faced forward, grabbed his sword, jumped up, and unsheathed once more. Simultaneously, those pursuers burst out of the building, spiraled to face him, and opened fire. With retorting spins, pulls, and tugs, Erik wound past their barrage and bifurcated the first—”twenty-two!”—quartered and enflamed the second—”twenty-three”—and decapitated the third—”twenty-four! Yah, tricks!” He stabilized into level flight, looked around, and accelerated into a near-sonic rush.
***
“Do you think they’ll cancel fin
als?” Bryen asked as he kicked one machine, lifted his sword, and parried a metallic jab from another.
“The city’s being invaded by flying robots”, Nate replied as he held an inactive machine in front of him, the clatter of gunfire along its chassis resounding as he ran. “They’ll probably give a one-hour delay for everything.” He front-kicked that inactive machine into his opponent, but the shooting machine bounded over its corpse. “Dang it”, Nate groaned as he outstretched his hand to the hood of a car, magnetized the metal cover, and yanked it towards his grip while folding it into an angular point. “Or”, he began as he enveloped that makeshift point in an electric blaze, and pitched it through the automaton, “they’ll probably leave it up to professor’s discretion.”
“Awe, crap, I figured as much”, Bryen groaned as he countered again, jumped, and hook-kicked his foe’s gut to launch it away. “Hey, cover me, I need a breather”, Bryen called as he flared his shadow to block against three bursts of gunfire.
“You wouldn’t need a breather if you went to the gym with us; and you should be the one covering me”, Nate replied as he formed an electric shield to block four bursts of gunfire.
“We’ve both been fighting for almost twenty minutes”, Bryen replied as he spread his legs, stepped back, and raised his arms to strengthen his shadow.
“I’ve killed more than you”, Nate replied as he magnetized a street light and launched the metal beam at four machines.
“Uh, no, you lost count, sir”, Bryen replied.
“And you didn’t?” Nate asked.
Bryen, with a rising sway of his hands, compressed his shadow into a spiraling column which ascended to twenty feet. He swung down, that obsidian mass stiffening into a fist that hammered a machine. “Twenty-one!” Bryen gasped as he bowed, his arms reaching out to rest upon his knees, but his torso jerking uprightly as the machine he had struck twice landed beside him and punched. “Dang it!” Bryen growled as he ducked in an uneven leap, lifted, and then kicked his left. The machine lunged in the same moment, but was batted fifty feet behind him by an ethereal fist.