NANO Archive 01: The City of Fire

by Jason Crutchfield

  “Raze, I take it? You were watching us?” I gestured to the monitors. “It's impressive that you have surveillance equipment that still works. But why didn't you sound an alarm or prepare for our arrival or something? What's your angle?” I folded my arms at my midriff and waited.

  “Eh, Crelyoz? Who iz zis little wench who darez to speak out of line? Sacrebleu, zee nerve of intruderz in zis day and age. It iz enough to drive a man abzolutely crazy.” The man flipped his hair, a motion he accompanied with an indignant hand gesture and slow sip from his silver goblet. I clenched my jaw and tried to remain patient.

  “Uh. You got cameras, Raze. Why didn't you try to stop us if you knew we were comin'?” Crelyos repeated my question with an arched brow.

  “Ah, zat iz a most intelligent queztion, mon ami. I alwayz knew you were zharp as a tack, haha!” Raze pressed his fingertips to his lips before extending his hand toward Crelyos. To my surprise, the former soldier leapt aside as though seriously attempting to dodge some unseen projectile. My patience grew thinner by the minute. Raze continued.

  “Oh, my. Where are my mannerz? You are zee one zey call Doctor Ozwald, oui? Bienvenue to my humble chateau!” Raze bowed then opened his arms to gesture to the entirety of his mansion, “as for your queztion, mon ami, the answer iz zimple. I dezired entertainment. You provided it for moi. It becomez so boring around here, you zee.” Raze tossed a wink toward the two men.

  “Enough. I want information, and I want it now,” I reached for my rifle, spun it over the top of my slender shoulder, and took aim at our alleged host. “How do I find Bradich, and why are you collecting hyped?” I growled.

  “Hm, mon ami… I believe zat your dog iz barking. I do not zpeak canine, but I can surmize from zee rifle zat zhe planz to fire if you do not rub her belly or somezing. I would warn her of zee dangerz of firearmz in my prezence if you wish for her armz to remain intact, Crelyoz.” Raze seemed completely undisturbed by the business end of my rifle. Crelyos placed a hand on my shoulder as if to say, “calm down, girly.”

  “Raze, we need info. Why are you collectin' hyped for Bradich? How do we get to Bradich? That's the whole reason we're here. So just go ahead and let us know and we can put this messy business behind us,” Crelyos stepped forward.

  “Zo allow me to get zis straight. You break into my fortrezz, kill mozt of my guardz, zneak into my chateau, and zhen expect me to offer you information?” Raze placed one of his elongated fingernails between his teeth and scrunched up his face, “I knew I liked you for a reazon, mon ami. You are just zo brazen and demanding. Zuch fine qualitiez in a man.” Raze turned and leaned his rear against the rails.

  “Unfortunately, I cannot give you zee anzwers you zeek. You zee, I do not know where Bradich iz, though I am aware zat I am ultimately working for zat ravizhing man. You are miztaken on one point. I am not collecting hyped directly for Bradich. I am collecting zhem for Sarge.” Raze turned his face just enough to ascertain what manner of response he invoked in Crelyos.

  He was not disappointed; Crelyos' face contorted with a combination of curiosity, shock, and rage. His lips parted, and he shouted up toward his old military friend, “Sarge is workin' with Bradich, too? What the hell, where is he? How can I find him?”

  “Non, non, non,” Raze said synchronously with three wags of his finger, “zat iz all zee information you shall get from me. Unlezz, of courze, you can provide me wiz even more entertainment, haha!” As if by command, every door in the room burst open and a flood of guards dashed in to surround us. I twisted my head in observation. They outnumbered us by quite a radical ratio, especially taking into account Oswald's poor combat capabilities. I shouldered my rifle and sighed.

  “I guess it's just going to be one of those nights…”

  File 15: Ballroom Blitz

  “I believe this may be too obvious an observation, dear compatriots, but it would appear that we've been surrounded.” Oswald's ability to remain calm in situations others would consider dire resonated through his voice during his tasteless quip.

  “Ya think? Man, you're the dumbest smart guy I ever met.” Crelyos' battle stance failed to waver even as he served the doctor blatant sarcasm.

  I held fast to my rifle and glared at Raze, the grand orchestrator standing above his deranged symphony. The assortment of bandits encasing us in a circle of death displayed all the same fashions and attitudes of their fallen allies: pretentious red and white clothing, ugly gritty faces contorted with the anticipation of slaughtering us, and that damned flame tattoo permanently marring their right cheeks.

  For some unexplainable reason, after actually meeting the haughty crime lord, the tattoo started annoying the living hell out of me. I parted my lips to speak, but I was interrupted when a scrawny thug stepped forward and reverently lowered to one knee. A red scarf concealed the lower portion of his face, and a head full of messy, haphazard dread locks hung low. He likely took a knee to show Raze some kind of due respect. I rolled my eyes.

  “M-my lord, I a-apologize for my blunder. To think these l-low level m-miscreants were able to bypass s-security, I take f-full responsibility!” Obviously in charge of security or some high ranking officer in their pretend caste, the shivering thug clenched his eyes shut and delivered his profuse apology. I would have pegged him as suffering from a speech impediment if not for his apparent apprehension. He slapped both hands together in front of his head in a pathetic begging motion, “P-please forgive me, Duke Raze!”

  My eyes traveled to and fro between the remorseful minion and his apathetic master. Each word aimed at degrading us that reached Raze's ears pulled the corner of his lips into a wider smile. Just before the bandit's final appeal, I noticed Raze lift his hand dismissively as though preparing to, in his boundless grace and mercy, forgive the insignificant human of his egregious transgression.

  Suddenly, however, his countenance morphed. The slow building Cheshire cat grin sank like an iron weight into a callous frown. Raze's exposed crystal blue eye, once the picture of merciful salvation, darkened with the vehemence of the perpetually black sky. Raze lifted his hands before his body and began swirling them about one another ceremonially. The movements resembled the theatrical motions used by magicians to capture the attention of their audience. The bandit reacted immediately.

  “No! Your eminence! Your grace! Please have mercy, I beg you! I don't want to die! Please!” The man was on the verge of tears. His companions all murmured amongst themselves, phrases ranging between “By the stars we no longer see, not Mortimor,” and “He done fucked up!” stirred the suspenseful atmosphere. I returned my gaze to Raze, and for the first time since our encounter, the amazement he instilled in me stemmed from wonder rather than disappointment.

  “It iz Duc! You impertinent zwine!” Raze ended the extravagant motions of his hands and snapped his fingers. The instant sound of roaring flames elicited a tortured scream from the apologetic minion. In the very moment Raze snapped his fingers, the man spontaneously combusted. Flames twisted around his body from head to toe and wasted no time consuming hair, clothing, and flesh.

  The man's coat of fire took less than a minute to reduce him to a hissing pile of charcoal. During the course of the unpleasant bonfire, I noted another extraordinary quality of Raze's flame: It grew over the duration of that minute. Rather than die down as less of the man's body was left to burn, the flames intensified like someone tossed fresh heaps of wood atop him. For the first time in a long time, my jaw dropped a little. The entire room observed absolute silence following the grim execution. After a few moments, a robust voice awkwardly cut through the air.

  “I told you, Fancypants! I told you he has pyro powers!” Crelyos roared and began frantically pointing at the unfortunate victim's charred remains. I glanced to Oswald; even his jaw had dropped. Crelyos' voice snapped him from his stupor, however, and the doctor lifted a finger to push his glasses up the bridge of his no
se.

  “Yes, ahem, well. Clearly there is a logical explanation for this occurrence. And it's pyrokinesis, you buffoon.” The gleam off the doctor's glasses hid his eyes. I suspected that beneath the reflective light, those eyes darted left and right as he scrambled to provide a satisfactory reason for Raze's encroachment on his concepts of reality.

  “Whatever, it's ‘I was right, you were wrong.’ That's what it is,” Crelyos puffed out his chest. I steeled my resolve and turned my attention back toward the man with the unique ability to conjure flames from the air. As I clenched my teeth, I realized that if we were unable to end the man quickly, all the efforts of our infiltration would go up in smoke. Literally. Of course, considering the familiar hatred that stirred in the pit of my chest, I had another reason for wanting to end him without delay.

  ‘Are you going to argue all zee night long? Zer' iz no reazon to fight, monzieurs, zer' is quite enough of me to go—” Raze's eyes widened. With the swiftness in which I excelled, I raised my rifle into a firing position. I trained the iron sights on Raze's forehead and depressed the trigger without hesitation. No sooner had the cacophonous crack echoed throughout the ballroom, than something felt horribly awry in my right arm. The sound of smashing glass followed by buzzing electricity drifted down from the balcony; the bullet found its new home in one of the monitors against the back wall.

  Raze had swerved his head to the left with enough regal grace that the bullet merely passed by his cheek. Several strands of blond hair fluttered down from the balcony, and after a few seconds passed, a thin strip of blood seeped from a small gash along the side of his face. I only grazed him, and based on the wrathful glare that emanated from his eyes, it pissed him off. But I was sure it was nothing compared to the disgust swelling in the pit of my stomach after watching him kill one of his own.

  “Treacherous snake…” I mumbled.

  “Enough of zis. Kill zem.” Raze dismissively waved his hand as though he merely gave an order to take out the trash. In his mind, that was probably exactly what he did..

  I slung my rifle into place against my back and tugged my long daggers free. My body instinctively inched toward the doctor; I regretted allowing him to accompany us. Protecting myself and Oswald at the same time would prove nigh impossible. A grim smile found its way to my lips when I attempted to recall the last time I felt so alive due to almost certain death. I swiveled my head and offered the old codger a glance from the corner of my eye.

  “So, Doc, what are our odds?” The thugs roared their approval of Raze's orders. Their thunderous clamor rattled the walls as they began their brutal charge. My mind drowned the blustering cries into a sound that resembled distant waves crashing against the shore. The advancing bandits blurred as I focused my gaze solely on the good doctor whose glasses still reflected too much light to reveal his eyes. He grinned up at me.

  “Do you want our chances of victory or our ETD?” He asked. The silence hung in the air like a cracked glass table. Our conversation was as a thumb tack descending in slow motion toward it.

  “ETD?” I inquired with a soft chuckle.

  “Estimated time of death.” He tilted his head up toward me, revealing his eyes. They radiated confidence.

  ‘Oh, perfect.” The words that escaped my lips were the tack's collision against the glass table. They became the catalyst, refocusing the image of the bandits and transforming their cries from a distant wave to a deafening tsunami. The time for talking and thinking passed; our options were to die or fight and still, probably, die. I preferred the second option sans the death, but beggars could not be choosers.

  The first thug approached; his right fist, buried in a heavy steel gauntlet, arched wide overhead aimed toward my slightly uplifted face. Unfortunately, his inexperience betrayed him; his shoulders generated the lion's share of his power, and it threw him off balance. I stepped to the outside of his attack while offering gentle pressure to the back of his armored forearm with my blade. Its twin sank into the side of his neck as he passed by, pausing only briefly when the tip rammed against his spine just beneath his skull. The crunch following the pause sent the crimson-painted tip out the other side of his neck, and he relinquished a brief, choked gasp before his sudden death.

  I withdrew both daggers and allowed the oaf to slump to the ground. A prickle at the back of my neck drew my attention; as I spun, I instinctively criss-crossed my blades above my head. An attacker's sword viciously clanged against my impromptu parry. I exerted tremendous effort, enough to push his sword up and away from its dangerous position, and brutally front-kicked his exposed chest. The precise activation of my muscle enhancer strengthened the blow enough to conjure the sound of several cracked ribs and a shattered sternum from his chest. The unfortunate man flew backward into a group of his companions who began trampling over him with little remorse.

  I turned to see Oswald shrinking into a corner; at the moment his apparent plan to remain as obscure as possible seemed to be working. The ruffians took far more interest in the blood waiting to be drawn from Crelyos and me. My blond companion seemed right at home in such a brawl. When a goon gripped a dagger in both hands and charged toward Crelyos aiming for his chest, the former soldier dipped to the side at the last second. He lifted his right fist at the same time, and the solid thunk of Crelyos' forceful punch resounded throughout the room. The soft buzz of transferred motion sent a gooey explosion of disintegrated flesh spraying from all directions of the thug's midsection. I returned my attention to my immediate surroundings.

  Another combatant drew close for a chance to take my head; his hand gripped a thick metal shaft connected to a wide axe head. His wide, horizontal attack swept the broad wedge toward the base of my neck. Unfortunately for him, the dangerous properties of an axe were mostly illusory. While the entire breadth of the weapon's attack appeared threatening, the bladed edge retained the only substantial threat to one's life. And much like the kick of a man with extraordinarily long legs, revealing its weakness was as simple as darting forward toward the source of the assault.

  I immediately closed the gap between us, drove both my blades into the center of the man's chest, and gripped his extended arm in one fell swoop. Using his forward momentum and the enhanced strength in my core, I twisted and hip-tossed the lamenting bandit onto his back in front of me. The pain coursing through the front of his torso from my daggers and the ache racing along the center of his spine from the impact of my throw shattered his concentration and loosened his grip on the axe. I relieved him of it with little effort.

  From my crouched position over the felled minion, I activated my Cognitive Accelerator and surveyed the ballroom. The adversaries to my immediate front finally finished trampling across their fallen friend and inched closer with every passing second. With my senses peaked, I detected the thunderous thump of a thug's heartbeat in close proximity at my back, and the heavy hum vibrating the air above him suggested he was rapidly twirling something over his head.

  In the distance, Crelyos held a bandit taut and outstretched in a horizontal position; he dedicated one hand to encompassing the thug's face while the other secured his white and crimson pants line. Using the strength in his upper body to drive the bandit down, Crelyos simultaneously drove his knee up into the unfortunate man's back. I winced at the ear shattering bone cracks; the human body was most definitely ill-equipped to bend in such a manner.

  While my companion focused on his living rag doll, a few of Raze's men broke from the group charging toward me and, instead, rushed toward Crelyos' back. The man leading their sneaky charge leapt into the air with a metal bat drawn high overhead. I foresaw a most unwanted skull bashing in Crelyos' future. While an axe or hatchet remained quite the unwieldy melee tool, it made an excellent projectile.

  The heavy head allowed for an impressive traveling distance when properly tossed, and its sheer mass ensured gratuitous bludgeoning damage even if the bladed w
edge failed to connect. The axe I pilfered from the stunned opponent beneath me would serve such a purpose. As the man first began his jump toward my muscular companion, I heaved the axe like a tomahawk at the space in which the man would reach the apex of his jump. The bladed edge embedded itself in his temple as he crossed its trajectory. His body jerked from the air in a manner that reminded me of a leashed dog bounding carelessly across a yard only to find himself yanked back when the leash drew taut.

  The bloody crunch and pained cry served their purposes as Crelyos, newly alerted to his rear assailants, spun about to acknowledge their murderous intent. Without missing a beat, the blond mercenary sent his right fist into the nearest bandit's chest; his entire torso disintegrated with a loud squelch. The sudden splattering jarred my awareness to normal levels, and I used the momentum I gained from chucking the axe to spin about and face the threat behind me. My reflexes seized control when I beheld a silver glint whirring down toward my face. Until that moment, the assailant spun a chain above his head like a helicopter, but when I turned to face him he swung it down and cackled delightedly.

  The chain was roughly ten feet long with weighted grappling hooks attached to either end. I quickly threw my right arm above my face at an angle; the metallic links jingled as the chain wrapped around my arm several times. An inward hiss escaped my lips when the claws of the grappling hook on one end pierced my forearm. The thug tugged viciously until the loops about my arm clenched tight and the hook's fangs tore into my flesh.

  “Hoo-hoo-hah! Looks like I caught a little birdie!” The man's voice sounded like it belonged to a prepubescent punk. It was full of squeaks and cracks.

  The two of us stood locked in a test of strength. The chain rattled from the tension applied to each of the links. While the bandit pulled with the weight of his body and an iron grip which he supported by coiling the chain about his knuckles, I suffered with every pound of resistance I offered. The grappling hook squished deeper into my arm until a steady stream of blood trickled along the metal links. I heard the men upon whom I turned my back drawing closer. Through the searing pain, a grin tugged at one corner of my mouth.