by Lee, Tristan
“You’re on a roll today, Sweetie-Pie,” Demoness compliments.
“Thank you.”
When they turn around a corner on their way back, they encounter a force of twelve aliens searching the streets presumably for them. These aliens are different from the ones Defender encountered, these ones are similar to gorillas, only grey, and covered in scales. They have snake-like tongues that occasionally slide out of their mouths to taste the air. No eyes though, but they must have some other way to sense their surroundings. The aliens are armed with brown, rifle-like weapons; whether or not they operate like human guns is yet to be seen.
“What should we do?” Titan asks.
“We should hit them until they don’t get up.”
“They’re big,” he says uncertainly.
“So are you. Just follow my lead.”
“Let me try negotiations first.”
“You think you can negotiate?”
“I convinced your people to let me stay on this planet. Just follow my lead.”
Demoness rolls her eyes, but follows him out onto the street regardless. Titan struts out into clear view of the aliens with Demoness trailing a few feet behind him cautiously.
“Hola, aliens,” Titan says loudly. “Mi nombre es Titan y ella es Demoness.”
The aliens turn in their direction and cock their heads in curiosity.
“You’re an idiot,” Demoness whispers.
“It’s working,” Titan whispers back. Louder, he says, “We are here peacefully, not messing with you at all. So, if you could just sort of get off our planet, then that would be great.”
“Dear God, you are sooo dumb,” Demoness hisses.
Before Titan can respond, one of the aliens, this one with bronze scales, lets out an unintelligible shriek. Titan shows his thumbs-up to Demoness.
“Sorry, but I don’t know what you’re saying. Do you speak English, Xorian, Spanish, or French?”
The aliens do not respond, instead, they shoot Titan in the chest, sending him flying down the street.
“Balls,” Demoness curses as she throws up an energy shield to protect herself from the onslaught of alien gunfire. Her shield reflects all of the blasts, sending them flying erratically.
Titan comes flying from wherever he was blown and slams his fist into the ground near the aliens. His strength causes a massive shockwave that sends the alien squad flying into the air. Once the aliens are helpless in the air, Demoness expels her shield and begins to shoot them down with her energy blasts. Each blast disintegrates its target, causing piles of grey dust to fall from the sky.
The aliens that Demoness misses are greeted on the ground by Titan’s fists. He kicks one in the chest, sending it flying for five blocks until it impacts an overturned bus hard enough to make it explode. Three remaining, two of them try to flank Titan; the one on his left throws a punch that he catches and uses his grip on the alien’s arm to smash it into its ally, who was attempting to kick out Titan’s feet out from under him. The alien is smashed into, or rather, through a neighboring building; the hole it makes is clean and the street on the other side of the building can be seen through it. Titan changes his grip on the alien so he is holding it by an arm and a leg. Then he slams the alien’s back down onto his knee. There is a sickening snapping sound as the alien’s vertebrae is snapped in half; the only things holding it in one piece are its skin and muscle. The final alien tries to run, but Demoness catches it with her telekinesis and pulls it back at a high speed, where its head makes contact with Titan’s perfectly timed punch.
The result is similar to shooting a watermelon with a rocket launcher; the alien’s head is completely decimated, literally nothing remains except for its now-headless body and its black blood that coats Titan’s arm up to his elbow.
“Ain’t nobody frackity-whacks with Demoness and Titan,” Demoness says in celebration.
“Amen,” Titan agrees, “c’mon, let’s go find this damn hotel.
Ronin and Nightshade happen to land a street over from where Demoness and Titan encountered the alien squad. Unfortunately, they arrive after the skirmish is over and are unaware that their teammates are a scant two blocks away.
“Where are we?” Nightshade asks.
Frank touches two fingers to his temple and his eyes glow blue behind his blindfold for a moment, “We’re twelve minutes away from the hotel. That way.”
He points forward, towards a pile of crashed cars and the famous streetcar at the top, like a crown.
“I’m not sure if you noticed, but that way sort of has a fifty-foot high blockade,” Nightshade points out.
Ronin backs up a few steps and starts sprinting at the barricade; when he is about fifty feet away, he leaps. The Blind Swordsman’s jump takes him well over a hundred feet up, easily clearing the barricade. He lands in a roll and smoothly climbs to his feet.
“I don’t know how to freaking fly!” Nightshade screams at Ronin from over the barrier.
“You can,” Ronin says. She hears his voice in her head instead of out loud.
“How the-“
“Don’t question it. Clear your mind.”
“It’s pretty damn hard to clear with someone talking inside it.”
“Just try.”
Nightshade takes a deep breath a closes her eyes for a moment, “Okay, that’s about as clear as it’s going to get.”
“Keep your eyes closed. Run at the barricade as fast as you can and jump.”
“When do I jump?”
“You’ll know.”
She decides to trust the swordsman as blindly as he is and starts running. With her eyes still closed, she hears another voice. It isn’t Ronin’s, and it isn’t hers either.
“Jump,” it whispers, “jump now.”
And she obeys. When she leaps, she can feel herself soaring through the air. She opens her eyes and sees the ground a hundred feet below her. Then she descends as smoothly as being in an elevator. When she touches the ground, her mouth drops open in shock.
“I just did it. Didn’t that take you a decade or something to learn?”
“Yes,” Ronin answers, “in that decade, I also learned how to lift things and move them as I please with telekinesis.”
“You son of a bitch.”
Nightshade realizes her mistake as Ronin freezes mid-step for a moment. He regains his composure and keeps walking as Nightshade jogs to keep up.
“How did you get those fighters off of us, anyway?” Nightshade asks, changing the subject.
“I used psychic impulses to influence what they were thinking.”
“Like mind control.”
“No, mind control is overriding one’s natural thought process while they are conscious of the action. Essentially it’s hijacking someone’s body.”
“How is that different from what you did?”
“I didn’t make them do anything. I just planted an idea in their heads that it would be a really good idea to start shooting each other down. They were in complete control of themselves.”
“So you can’t control minds?”
“I can, but I won’t. It’s a horrible thing, taking over a man’s mind. I could make him kill everyone he’s ever loved, and then make him break his own neck. And he’d have no say in it. There is no defense against it and there’s no way to see it coming. It’s the power of a god, and I refuse to partake.”
“That’s very . . . decent of you.”
“Thank you.”
Nightshade sighs, “I wish I had powers.”
“It’s possible that you do have powers and they’re too deep in your genetic code for you to just discover them like Demoness did. You might have to do a bit of looking,” Ronin hypothesizes.
“How do I do that?”
“I could look for you.”
Nightshade takes a step away from him and gives him a scrutinizing look, “Are you going to be reading my mind?”
“Only if you want me too.”
She thinks about it for a
moment, “Maybe some other time.”
“Alright.”
“You’re actually not as scary as you seem and a whole lot nicer.”
“Thank you.”
Ronin stops walking suddenly and raises a fist, so Nightshade stops in her tracks. His eyes glow blue behind his blindfold again and stay blue as he scans their surroundings. The glow turns red as his gaze passes over a half-destroyed skyscraper.
“Down!” Ronin roars. When Nightshade opens her mouth to ask why, Ronin tackles her to the ground.
Less than a second later, a bolt of green light blows a crater three feet in diameter and a foot deep in the same spot Nightshade was just occupying.
Ronin unsheathes his sword with one hand and pulls Nightshade up with the other. She shakes herself off and loads her crossbow.
“Where are they?” Nightshade asks.
“There, no, they’re on the move. Shit, they surrounded us.”
Almost on cue, hundreds of aliens start climbing down the side of the buildings. These are yet another kind of alien. By far the most similar to a human, the aliens look to be somewhere between a rotting corpse and an anorexic person. Their grey skin is stretched tight across their skeletons, revealing the ridges of bones and the palpitations of at least three hearts. The aliens’ faces seem to be completely blank, but occasionally their faces split in half vertically to reveal razor-sharp teeth and a long, thick tongue.
The aliens form a ring around Ronin and Nightshade, hissing and spitting even though they don’t attack them. The two heroes go back-to-back and turn in a circle slowly with their weapons raised.
“Why aren’t they attacking us?” Nightshade whispers.
“I don’t know. I don’t care, quite frankly,” Ronin responds.
By some unspoken command, the aliens’ ranks part, allowing a taller figure to emerge. The new entity is revealed to be one of the gorilla-like aliens that Titan and Demoness encountered. It drags a man by a chain attached to his neck.
The man is obviously malnourished; he looks as skeletal as the swarm of aliens. The man wears nothing but a filthy loincloth and is filthy himself. His gaunt face might have been handsome if it didn’t show the ridges of his skull. A silver ring in looped around his forehead and pulses with light every minute or so.
He stands shakily, “We . . . we come in p-p-peace.”
“Who are you?” Ronin asks.
“I am no one, simply a speaker for my masters.”
“Who were you before you became a speaker for your masters?”
“I was called Solomon Wraith.”
Nightshade frowns, “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
“Once, it might have. Now, not so much.”
“You’re human,” Ronin says questioningly.
“I was.”
“What happened to you?”
“My masters found me and captured me. After four years, I finally saw that they meant us no harm and I decided to aid them. I learned their language and became their translator.”
“Who are your masters?”
“They are a species called the Aotiuer. They come from a planet six billion light years away from Earth. Although you think that they only came to Earth less than a month ago, they have been in your solar system’s asteroid belt for seventy years. The Aotiuer took me on their first voyage to this planet.”
“Why are the Aotiuer here?” Ronin interrupts.
“The Aotiuer species have been trained in the art of combat ever since the beginning of time. They are the universe’s foremost army-for-hire.”
“They’re mercenaries.”
“That is the term your people use.”
“Who paid them to wipe us out?”
“The Aotiuer didn’t rise to the level of notoriety they are at by violating client confidentiality.”
“Is there any way for us to pay them to leave us alone?”
“The Aotiuer don’t break contracts either.”
“So it’s us or you.”
“Yes, yes it is.”
“I choose us.”
Ronin slices Solomon Wraith’s head off in one blow with his sword. Normally Ronin’s blade makes clean, precise cuts, but a jet of blood shoots up from Solomon Wraith’s neck, some of it splashing into Ronin’s mouth.
“Anyone else?” he asks.
The Aotiuer let out a loud, collective shriek and rush forward. Ronin shoves Nightshade, but instead of being shunted backwards, she appears on top of a nearby skyscraper.
“Damn it, Ronin,” Nightshade mutters. “You don’t have to do everything alone.”
He does, however, do a good job about it. He wields his blade effortlessly, as if it were a part of his arm. Ronin spins in a circle, cleaving Aotiuer in half with every rotation. The man becomes less visible with every revolution until finally he is just a blur of razor-sharp, spell-forged steel. Black Aotiuer blood sprays everywhere like a sick hose. On the rooftop, Nightshade raises her crossbow to her shoulder and fires a bolt into an Aotiuer’s ugly face. She reloads and fires again, this time she pins two of them together with one bolt. Ronin stops his rotation of death, he looks up to her position and gives her a brief nod before continuing the bloodshed.
Ronin pushes at the air with his free hand and a telekinetic blast sends at least half a hundred Aotiuer flying down the street. Nightshade loads one of her explosive bolts and uses it to devastating effect against the Aotiuer.
After twenty minutes of firing into the crowd, Nightshade reaches back to her quiver, but pauses and decides to address her mounting frustration.
“Ronin, get me down there,” Nightshade says out loud.
Ronin answers inside her head, “It’s not safe.”
“Don’t start that not safe shit with me, Ronin.”
“There are over ten thousand aliens out there.”
“So what? Now teleport me down there.”
Nightshade appears on the ground next to Ronin, he severs an Aotiuer’s head from its body and uses his telekinesis to smash the corpse into another Aotiuer.
“Nice seeing you down here,” Nightshade says.
“Find a weapon and fight,” Ronin orders.
Nightshade slings her crossbow over her shoulder and slides a stiletto out of each boot, slashing at the Aotiuer. With both Ronin and Nightshade using their blades to deadly effect, the Aotiuer ranks thin quickly and eventually they retreat.
“Good work,” Ronin compliments.
“Shut up and take me to this damn hotel.”
In the same garden that Titan used to play mahjong, Dr. Invictus starts to come online again. The Aotiuer fighter’s cannon almost punched a clean hole through his torso; the sparking of the severed wires and blown circuits are visible through the hole, but his back plating is still intact. As his systems start up, a blue screen becomes visible to him.
“Dr. Invictus. Wake up,” the robotic voice of his artificial intelligence assistant, Veronica.
Dr. Invictus groans and tries to stand, but he collapses onto the rubble of a brick wall after a few steps.
“Don’t try to move,” Veronica warns. “Your systems are severely damaged. Almost fatal, but I was able to start up your backup generator. However, your generator has only three hours of power. If we’re going to be freeing an occupied city, we’re going to need a lot more juice.”
“Show me a list of possible power sources. Closest from my location to farthest,” Dr. Invictus grunts. “Make it quick.”
“You’re quite rude when you’re critically wounded,” Veronica remarks. “Pulling up a list. There’s a downed power line across the street.”
Dr. Invictus rises again, this time managing to keep his balance. He staggers towards the power line; even though the journey is less than a hundred feet, the journey seems like a thousand miles to the Mechanical Man. He grunts with a final, Herculean effort and collapses in front of the power line. Gripping the severed, sparking cable in one hand, Dr. Invictus gingerly searches inside the crater made in his che
st for his power source. Once he finds it, Dr. Invictus gently pulls the glowing blue pyramid out of his chest cavity and pushes the sparking cable against it.
The second the end of the severed wire touches his power source, Dr. Invictus’ back arches as the current courses through him. After a moment, he drops the cable and falls to his knees, the power source still in his opposite hand.
“Veronica?” Dr. Invictus says shakily “Status report.”
“You’ll live, but I suggest that you get repairs soon.”
“That’s not going to be an option. Can you get me another android?”
“I can get one to you, but I can’t guarantee that they won’t shoot it down.”
“What models have a cloaking function?”
“MK. X Stealth.”
“Not going to be useful in a brawl. I need something that can fight.”
“I could send you the Predator.”
“That’ll do.”
“Deploying. Just stay alive for the next fifty minutes until it gets into range.”
The range Veronica refers to is how far away an android can be before Dr. Invictus can take control of it from another android. Although Dr. Pryce can take control of any of them from any distance, an android must be within five miles of another android to take control. Returning to Dr. Pryce and then taking control from him is possible, but since Dr. Invictus and Dr. Pryce are two different entities rather than a man and his alter ego, changing between the two can be problematic.
Dr. Invictus stands up, puts his power source back, and squares his shoulders; he’s extremely vulnerable since his power source is exposed, but he could handle himself in a fight if the need arises. He opens his hands and activates his palm-mounted high-heat leasers. They glow orange for a moment, but they flicker and then spark, and finally they die.
“Damn,” he mutters.
If a skirmish should happen, now he would have to fight hand-to-hand, putting his power source at greater risk. His android gives him superhuman strength and reflexes, but Dr. Invictus had always preferred to use his high-heat lasers before resorting to melee combat.
Dr. Invictus is about to set forward down the street he is on when he looks up and realizes that he is adjacent to the hotel. Upon further exploration, he finds the hostages, at least two hundred of them, bound at the wrists and ankles with black cables. There are Aotiuer guarding the hostages, these ones are the large, gorilla-like subspecies. Three actively patrol inside the mass of hostages, three more move in a circle around them, and two of them are positioned on opposite balconies with what seem to be sniper rifles, their positions giving them a good line of sight on the hostages and farther down the street.