Mardock Scramble

by Ubukata, Tow

  Balot snarced her left glove. A metallic mass appeared. She gripped it tightly and felt its weight become part of her body. Balot and Oeufcoque were one.

  ≡

  Balot remembered how it was she used to survive.

  Bad customers and good customers, she used to act in the same way: she just killed her breath and waited.

  Waiting until she became used to it. Releasing herself into space. So that her heart wouldn’t be trapped in one place. It was harrowing in the extreme. Looking back, she was amazed at herself for putting up with so much.

  It was all different now. And yet it was also the same. She had to do something. If she stopped her own breath, she knew she would die. But if she lost her focus on her opponent, she would also die. There was no point now in trying to escape from the reality that she was here. If she tried to box her heart up and put it somewhere for safekeeping, it would mean she wouldn’t be able to be here right now. She just couldn’t afford to hide her heart away.

  She kept a steady rhythm, extending her consciousness, searching for a road to victory, letting go.

  She took a quiet breath in. Then out. She sensed that Boiled had reached the top of the stairs. She felt the temperature in the room drop. Such was the creature that now stood on the other side of the thin door.

  “I’m disappointed…” A voice came from beyond the door. A thick, heavy voice—one that she could have heard wherever she stood. “I anticipated that you would kill Shell for me.”

  Something about the way Boiled spoke struck Balot as being very incongruous.

  “You know the way I do things.”

  The words pressed down on her now. Her breathing slipped, and she corrected herself, ensuring she maintained her breathing rhythm at all costs. Suddenly Balot realized why Boiled’s words had struck her as being so strange.

  “Tweedledee was delighted to have found someone like you. Someone the same as him,” said Boiled.

  Boiled was speaking directly to Balot, and to Balot alone. He had always spoken to Oeufcoque in the past.

  “I’m delighted too, for the same reasons,” continued Boiled.

  The air in the room went from cold to freezing. The oppressive air threatened to rob Balot of all her senses. But Balot was prepared for this. She felt a moment’s opening within the rhythm that she had been keeping, and she knew she had to take it. She knew that Boiled would be ready too. She had to bet everything on that fearful moment. She steadied her gun.

  Balot realized all too well that she was hoping against hope for the jackpot. Boiled’s jackpot—she had to wait for him to make the first move. After all, she could fire as many bullets as she liked at him, thousands, but they’d all be deflected.

  Her only choice was to aim for the instant that Boiled couldn’t generate his PseudoGravitational Float. The instant that he fired his own gun.

  With those thoughts running through her head, Balot started firing. Over and over. Aiming for his gun hand.

  The fateful bullets should have flown straight toward Boiled, blowing his own bullets off course along the way.

  But Balot realized that something had gone wrong. It wasn’t only the air that felt as cold as ice—now the cold was encroaching on her heart.

  Boiled hadn’t fired. She’d fallen for his feint. A circle opened up in the door, a circumference of bullet holes. The bullets that Balot had fired that were supposed to converge on one single point. Balot immediately crossed her arms to protect her face. A moment later she felt the impact.

  Boiled’s bullet slammed into her crossed arms.

  She flew backward.

  The shock pummeled her very consciousness just as much as it did her flesh.

  The door flew open and Boiled piled into the room.

  Balot was numb, but the impact of the giant figure entering her territory brought her abruptly back to her senses.

  She fell onto her back and rolled backward farther still to absorb the shock, then stood right back up again. She moved like a prima ballerina, leaving everything to her body’s instincts and to the suit that covered her. She stopped thinking with her mind and went with the flow.

  She checked that both arms were still working fine, which they were. She had been far enough away.

  Oeufcoque was just strong enough to protect Balot from bullets fired from a distance. It would have been a different story at point-blank range.

  Boiled moved in to close that distance. Balot’s eyes filled with the giant man advancing on her with murderous intent.

  Balot suppressed the fear and scowled. She snarced Boiled with all her might, as if she were baring her teeth. He noticed just in time.

  Boiled’s whole body jumped up, like a football, and he fell to the ceiling. He twisted his body around so that he was just out of range of Balot’s snarc. On the ceiling. Only a few meters away.

  Still, he was too far for her to try and penetrate his gravity shield and snarc the technology inside him.

  At the same time, though, Boiled was too far away to be able to pierce Balot’s bodysuit with his gun. It was a deadly standoff, and whichever one of them could get just in range in order to fire the fatal blow just in time would emerge victorious.

  Again Balot unloaded the contents of her gun at Boiled. He ran across the ceiling and hid himself behind a pillar.

  Balot fired at the pillar in a reflex reaction. No sooner had she done so did she realize that this was Boiled’s second feint. He had already started running down the pillar, and he extended his arm and a cacophonous roar exploded.

  She may have been able to sense his location, but she couldn’t predict which way he would move in his three-dimensional space.

  Balot’s mind went blank as she sprang to the side.

  The artillery-shell-like bullet grazed her shoulder. A small corner of her suit tore off and burst into yellow flame. But Boiled’s bullet had still missed her actual body.

  Balot rolled away to a safe distance, but as she did so Boiled kicked against the pillar he was climbing down and flew sideways across the room. Or rather, he fell sideways, toward one of the walls.

  Balot simply couldn’t tell what was coming next, and she hastily battled down the growing, treacherous feelings of inadequacy that were about to erupt inside her. Immediately she reached out and grasped the situation in the room, as if to convince herself to believe in her own abilities again.

  Her opponent could move as he liked. The important thing to Balot was that she knew where she was.

  Balot’s mind flipped through all the places in the room that were likely to put her at the greatest advantage. In barely a second she had determined her spot, and she ran for it.

  A battle of life and death was essentially a battle of will. If your will was taken away from you, so was your ability to move. That’s how you became so pathetically incapable of even lifting a finger. Well, Balot wasn’t about to let that happen to her a second time.

  Balot ran, and as she did so she gave up on the idea of trying to predict Boiled’s next move. Just as she would give up on a busted hand in blackjack and turn her mind to a new hand that she might stand a chance of winning. Instead of trying to second-guess Boiled’s position, she would make sure that her own position was as good as it could be. She continued toward her perfect position, the place she knew she could use, and as she did so she fired off a number of shots at Boiled as a feint, to try and distract him from her maneuver.

  Balot was seeking the perfect moment, a single opportunity. She needed split-second accuracy and willpower to find the chink in Boiled’s armor, so that she could fire her arrow of Paris at his Achilles’ heel.

  All while Boiled was in turn cutting off her escape routes and looking for his opening.

  When Balot tried to slip behind a pillar, Boiled was one step ahead of her. He broke into a run across the wall and jumped. He was like a giant jaguar on the trail of a fawn in the headlights. It was the danse macabre. He landed on the ceiling and took three more leaps, as if he were moving a
long a carefully choreographed path. With his final step, his upper body spun around, and he thrust out his gun in a final pose.

  With the muzzle trained on Balot’s unprotected back, he put his finger on the trigger, ready to fire.

  That same instant the darkness all around flared up white, and the brightness assaulted Boiled’s eyes.

  Balot had snarced one of the lights in the ceiling, judging the timing just right.

  Boiled’s eyes narrowed. The light was coming from right below him, making it impossible to see Balot in her white bodysuit.

  Boiled’s eyes darted from left to right to try and locate her, his finger hovering over the trigger. Just then he heard a loud noise somewhere overhead, on the floor.

  He honed in the muzzle on the sound and fired. Then he gasped. A reflex action, without thought or meaning behind it.

  Boiled’s shot pulverized its target. Only thing was, the target was the cell phone that Balot had placed on the floor just a moment ago. She had snarced its ringtone to play. Balot herself, of course, was nowhere to be seen.

  Boiled realized immediately that he was in a trap. He prepared to move but found his whole world plunged into darkness again. Balot had used her snarc for the third time in quick succession, turning the lights off again.

  Boiled lost his bearings, so sudden was the darkness in which he had been engulfed.

  He realized what Balot was up to.

  She was right underneath him. Both arms above her head, pointing her gun right at him. She had given up trying to anticipate his movements and in doing so had found herself the perfect position. She had doubled down, staking everything. But even as Boiled had temporarily lost the use of his eyesight due to the sudden light and dark, his years of training and experience as a soldier kicked in, and he was able to anticipate Balot’s next move.

  Balot fired her gun so quickly that fire seemed to dance around the muzzle. A fraction of a second later, Boiled crouched down, activating his PGF, using it as instant body armor.

  Balot’s first few shots squeezed past, just before the impenetrable shield had been fully activated. Bullets pierced Boiled’s right arm and leg, causing fragments of material from his jacket to flutter to the floor. But that was all. The rest of the bullets had their flight paths diverted, creating a ring of bullet holes that encircled Boiled on the ceiling where he crouched.

  Even as his body took the bullets, Boiled removed his gun from under his right arm and aimed. He wasn’t relying on his eyes anymore, but even so he had a perfect shot at Balot’s chest. Balot sensed Boiled looming in the darkness and shuddered.

  Had the first few bullets that had slipped past the impenetrable shield managed to hit home in Boiled’s head or heart, the outcome might have been different. Or if the bullets had been of a higher caliber, powerful enough to blow off his arms and legs… But now was no time for excuses. The simple fact was that the moment Boiled had worked out Balot’s position based on her actions, he’d seen through her. Her double down had failed spectacularly. Bust.

  Balot scrambled away as quickly as she could, desperately trying to put distance between herself and her giant oppressor. She was also simultaneously snarcing her gun to make it larger, give it a bigger aperture—all unconsciously, of course; it was a manifestation of her earlier shiver of fear.

  A deadly roar assaulted her. A bullet slammed into her left breast and she went flying backward. It was almost as if it were the noise itself that was forcing her back.

  Balot was saved by her positioning. She smashed into one of the taped-up glass windows.

  The window crumbled into fragments, and light scattered all around. Had it been a wall that she’d hit, there would have been nowhere for the shock to travel, and her rib cage would have shattered. But because the bullet threw Balot into the air and out of the building, much of the energy was dissipated and the impact to her body was lessened.

  Her bodysuit had hardened instantly to form a defensive breastplate, and this now crumbled away, having absorbed the shock. At the same time the hems of her bodysuit spun out new material, wrapping Balot up as she scrunched herself into a ball in midair as she fell through the window and toward the ground below.

  A giant white egg formed around her and bounced like a rubber ball against the street.

  Two or three times it bounced, hitting the wall of the building on the other side of the street. A crack appeared in the egg. The white bulletproof container opened up and Balot emerged. Her hems returned to normal, and fragments of shock-absorbent material fell off her like powder.

  She sensed Boiled pointing his gun at her from the other side of the window. In a slick, inevitable movement, Balot fired at him. Boiled fired. The bullets clashed, and Boiled’s deflected round hurtled into a lamppost. The lamppost toppled and smashed into the street, scattering shards of debris.

  As this was happening, Balot summoned a shield. A car—headlights blazing—sped over to her to hide her body. It took the bullets meant for her, its door smashed and hood crushed. Balot jumped out of the way just in time to see its gas tank igniting and spewing out a tongue of fire.

  Across the fire, she sensed Boiled jumping down from the window.

  Balot summoned another car just before he landed. Not as a shield this time—the car’s lights flashed on and off aggressively as it hurtled toward the spot Boiled was going to land on.

  Boiled fired at it the moment he landed. One of the tires blew, and the car flipped onto its side and careened into a telephone booth before slamming into the storefront of a multi-purpose building.

  Hiding behind the wall of fire, Balot focused her senses on how much damage Boiled had taken.

  Two bullets to his right upper arm, one to his right thigh. Blood was spilling from the wounds, dripping down his arm and leg.

  Even so, the walking menace known as Boiled loomed as threatening as ever.

  Voices were heard—townspeople, tentatively emerging from nearby buildings, reacting to the commotion. Then a voice closer to home—an old man emerged from the entrance hall that had been wrecked by the car. He was yelling something and brandishing a shotgun.

  Balot stared at him in surprise, but Boiled’s left hand was casually lifted up and pointed right at him…

  Balot fired as quickly as she could to stop Boiled. Boiled was forced to activate his anti-gravity shield, which changed the flight path of his own ferocious bullet—instead of taking out the old man, the bullet slammed into the wall of the building right next to him. The old man was thrown, and his shotgun fired off in a random direction, smashing the shop window of a building on the other side of the street. The old man collapsed in fright, and a couple of younger men jumped out of the building he had emerged from and hastily dragged him back inside.

  “When monsters like us fight each other, civilians only get in the way,” Boiled muttered, and fired at the wrecked car now embedded in the storefront. The hydrogen-powered engine, so typical in the River Side district, didn’t stand a chance. The car flared up and the whole building trembled violently.

  That was all it took for the remaining bystanders to run back into the safety of their buildings. Boiled and Balot were the only two people left in the street on the whole block.

  Boiled ejected his empty cartridge, and it clattered to the ground with a metallic ring. He used his blood-soaked right hand to pull out a speed loader from his pockets and effortlessly reloaded his gun.

  “As long as the gunfire continues, the police around here will keep their distance.” His voice was as eerily calm as ever. “Let’s finish what we started.”

  He shook his revolver sideways. The cylinder was now back in position.

  For a moment Boiled seemed to Balot not only inhuman but something quite otherworldly. His face was blank. His eyes were utterly ruthless, glinting with fire. His limbs were as steel, impervious to pain. And his heart was an engine fueled by hatred and murderous intent, its only purpose to combust and consume all in an explosion of nothingness.


  Balot bit down hard on her lip. She tried desperately to avoid taking to heart the phrase Boiled had just spoken so casually. Monsters like us.

  It was true that both Boiled and Balot existed somewhere between human and machine. But Boiled was one step farther down the line—his heart was like a machine too, cold and unfeeling in the face of death. No, that wasn’t quite true—it killed in anticipation of some sort of feeling. That was what made him the monster.

  Balot forced herself to keep her rhythm, taking deep, deliberate breaths. Her body was hot, her heart aflame.

  She was so hot she wouldn’t have been surprised if the magazine she ejected from her gun glowed a bright red.

  She took her right hand off her gun and made her right glove turn into another gun.

  She held both guns up and concentrated on Boiled’s current position.

  Balot knew a second before he moved that Boiled was about to break into a run. This time, she was considering not only the best position for her but the position that Boiled would be looking for too. This would be the key to how they maneuvered in their deadly dance.

  A number of gunshots were fired almost simultaneously—they echoed as one. Boiled’s shot, Balot’s many.

  She was using the gun in her right hand now. The gun in her left hand was her bankroll—her reserve, for when she needed it the most.

  Bullets met in midair; they clashed, crumbled, ricocheted. The remainder of Balot’s volley of bullets was deflected harmlessly.

  They both ran, circling round, trying to outflank each other.

  Balot activated her snarc, and Boiled kicked hard against the ground. His massive frame flew up an incredible distance, landing on the wall of the building behind her.

  Balot knew what position he was heading for even before he got there. She had readied her gun to fire long before he landed and was moving much faster now. She fired.

  Boiled didn’t return fire. Instead, his right hand pulled something out of his pocket.

  “Faceman was right about you. Every time you experience combat, your abilities develop in all sorts of unpredictable ways,” Boiled muttered. He was acknowledging Balot’s ever-increasing abilities, as if he could keep them in check by the mere act of recognizing them.