NANO Archive 01: The City of Fire

by Jason Crutchfield

  The energy behind the strike was such that Sarge's hat sailed from the top of his head and he flew back, completely airborne, several yards. When Sarge's shoulders collided with Loftsborough's metal floor, he rolled backward and planted his feet firmly onto the ground to stabilize himself. From his crouched position with one hand slammed down on the city's steel ground, Sarge coughed and spat blood onto the town's lower plate.

  “… I'll beat you, but I'll do it my way. I'm not your soldier now, and I don't take orders from you anymore.” Crelyos slammed his flesh fist against his open metal palm.

  “Hahaha,” Sarge laughed and shakily rose to an erect position. Over the course of their brief dialog, Panacea already reversed much of the aesthetic damage caused by Crelyos' furious onslaught. The former commander drew the ball of his thumb across his nose and lips to wipe away a stray trail of blood; such an action also revealed his sinister grin.

  “So she's worth enough to get serious… but not serious enough. You won't save her that way. A pity. I suppose to really make you angry, I need to go ahead and kill her then.” Sarge lifted his hand and drew his fingers together with the intention of snapping them; as Nomeiko pressed her blade more firmly into my neck, I assumed she awaited the snap as a sign to carry out my execution.

  “You're mistaken about two things,” Crelyos held up two of his cybernetic digits. “One, I'm serious. If I have to use my nanite to blow your guts out to wake you up then, damn it, I will. I just wanted to give you the same fair warning you gave me. When you broke my arm, that could have easily been my neck. Cheeky hypocrite bastard, you held back too. So now we're even.” Crelyos made an uppercut gesture with his metal right arm. I grinned from my “captive” position.

  It was true; if Crelyos wished, he could have easily activated his nanite and turned his former commander's head into red sludge. Though I found his sense of honor endearing, I wondered if such an action might return to haunt him.

  “And two,” Crelyos grinned, “you're underestimating that girl up there. She's Junction City's top mercenary and the best damn fighter I know. I don't need to save her, and I'd be much more worried about Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumbass up there, if I were you.”

  My grin widened; his words served as the precious motivation and cue I needed to propel myself to action. I quickly reached up and gripped the buzzing wrist of my captor; I prepared myself for the debilitating shock. When the electrical buzz shot through me, I managed to withstand its effects long enough to swivel my head sideways and alleviate her katana's pressure against my neck. I clenched her wrist involuntarily as her electrical currents seized control of my muscles, and with a deep growl I drew my head down and forced the edge of her blade across the small handful of hair she tightly clutched in her fingers.

  The obsidian wisps flew off into the cold breeze. I snatched my hand from her wrist and pressed my palms into the rooftop, freed from her grasp. Using the roof's edge as leverage, I lifted my hips, split my legs, and clamped them around her neck. Such an action became immensely easier considering her knelt position. The currents of electricity she kept flowing through her body worked to my advantage as they forced my muscles taut. I willed my convulsing body forward and activated my Supersoldier nanite.

  With the tight clench of my thighs about Nomeiko's neck, the forceful momentum I gathered due to the roof's gentle incline, and the strength my Supersoldier nanite imparted on me, it took a matter of seconds to arch into a handstand with Nomeiko in tow. Not wishing to lose the power behind the movement, I continued the motion and toppled the two of us over the edge of the roof, but at the last moment, I gripped the roof's edge. The added resistance and introduction of gravity sharply snapped us down.

  While my back collided forcefully against the building's wall, I released my grip on Nomeiko's neck at the peak velocity of the descent. She relinquished a surprised shout when her body plummeted like a wayward asteroid into Loftsborough's metal floor several stories below us. Without waiting for her grim impact, I flipped backward and landed safely atop the roof in a readied crouch.

  “Sis!” Izuma shouted; the rapid tap of his boots hammered against the roof as he rushed toward our location. As my nerves settled and the sparks from Nomeiko's nanite wore off, I bolted passed Izuma to the location where I first collapsed to retrieve my dagger. I snatched the hilt of my blade up and spun into a combat stance facing Izuma who stood at the roof's edge.

  “She's… not moving. You bitch!” Izuma turned and charged across the roof in my direction. In the distance, the sound of Crelyos and Sarge exchanging blows mingled with the howl of the wind whistling through Loftsborough's numerous openings.

  Izuma drew back his right hand in preparation of a vertigo-inducing hook; I nonchalantly lifted my empty left hand and stepped toward him. His punch slammed into my waiting left palm, and I immediately clutched it in a tight grip. The vibrations emanating from his unique nanite sent chills up the length of my shoulder, but the further they traveled from their source, the more their effects harmlessly dispersed. Against his mind-altering, high frequency waves, I merely needed to intercept the blows before they approached my head.

  He grunted and applied pressure behind the blow, as though he aimed to overpower my hold. His stance was flawless, and based on the force behind his strike, I surmised his training was far above adequate. In a regular military during a regular time, Izuma would have made a fine soldier despite his feeble build. But the times in which we lived were absurd, and normal exceptionality simply did not cut it.

  Keeping Izuma's fist in a wide arch away from my head, I pulled his arm far to my left using the force he exerted and my own enhanced power. Synchronously, I flipped the dagger in my right hand into a reverse grip and sent a hard jab straight for his throat. Despite being tugged slightly off balance, Izuma lifted his left hand to parry my punch.

  Though my body lacked the raw speed exhibited by Nomeiko or Al, in the eyes of those without speed augmentation, my swiftness knew no equal. Though Izuma's wrist caught mine, he only succeeded in lifting my fist from his throat to his face. My knuckles drove into the bridge of his nose with a satisfying crunch, and as his head jolted back and he released a stunned cry, I glanced over his shoulder toward the roof's edge. A familiar yet undesirable hand clenching a katana emerged over the rooftop's lip; Nomeiko heaved herself halfway atop the roof. Blood seeped from a rapidly healing wound in her forehead, but the scuffs covering her leather suit and the various bruises and dirt smudges informed me that her impact had not been very pleasant.

  While Izuma sputtered and attempted to recover from the shocking blow to his face, I swiftly took hold of his outfit's collar. My feet left the ground in a guided jump, and I sailed over the top of his head; with my hands firmly clasped about his attire, the restriction snapped my body down directly behind him. I pressed my back flush to his and tugged myself forward, keeping a firm hold on his outfit. I clenched the muscles in my abdomen, and using the momentum I accumulated during my flip, I pulled Izuma up and over my back in a reverse shoulder toss that sent him flipping through the air with the power behind my augmented muscles.

  At that precise moment, Nomeiko finished clambering to her feet atop the building. “You crazy bitch!” She shouted with disdain, “I'll make you suffer for th—” Her words stopped short as her brother's flying body collided with her. The Storm Duo careened off the rooftop, and though the prospect of watching Nomeiko slam harshly into the city's steel ground a second time amused me, I wasted none of the precious little time I acquired.

  I sprinted to the roof's edge and placed the hilt of my dagger between my teeth. I hopped from the roof and simultaneously spun to face it; after gripping the rooftop's lip, I used it as an anchor to swing through the window into the room that previously served as my sniping nest. I gripped my rifle and chambered a fresh round before shifting toward the window.

  “Those kids are good and well trained
, but they're young and inexperienced. They swing about wildly and waste motions, and that girl is too caught up in causing pain.” I mused to myself as I leaned from the window to take aim at my two immobile targets below. Unfortunately, another jarring surprise lay in wait. Nomeiko's infuriated face awaited me below, but it stared at me from a closer distance than I anticipated when I leaned from the window. Somehow, in her unbridled rage, Nomeiko leapt like a spark of electricity from one protrusion of the building to another and reached the window far more quickly than her first climb back to the roof.

  With the tip of her blade extended, Nomeiko attempted to impale my face during her rapid ascent; I barely ducked back into the room in time to avoid a lobotomy. Her slender body filled the window, and I instinctively lifted my rifle's underbelly to parry her oncoming assault. She brought the blade down in a diagonal slash aimed to bisect me from the right shoulder, down between the center of my breast's modest swell, to my left hip. She almost succeeded.

  My father's rifle, which I carried with me for so long, split in half as the flawless katana sliced through it like it was a stick of butter. Though it failed to stop her cut completely, it succeeded in buffering it from potentially fatal to excruciatingly painful. My skin and clothes tore apart with a spray of blood as I staggered further back into the room.

  With a hiss of pain, I dropped the two pieces of my father's rifle and released my jaw's hold on my dagger. It fell into my waiting right hand. Considering that my previous experience parrying her attacks ended with shocking amounts of pain, I instead opted to weave and dodge in the wake of her unrelenting assault. Unfortunately, she was just too fast for me to completely avoid her attacks, and as we danced around the room, more than one fissure opened up in my pale skin.

  My muscles buckled beneath the coursing electricity with each consecutive blow she landed, and every spasm slowed my movements and increased the disparity in our speeds. A few times her blinding movements forced me to parry in order to protect my head and heart; I immediately regretted each of those times. The currents of lightning conducted between her metal blade and mine sent my body into spasms.

  Speed; I needed speed more than anything, and not just the speed of thought I acquired during Cognitive Acceleration. Even if the jarring electrical shocks would not shake my concentration and deactivate the nanite, which they would, my mind's swift processing power meant little if my muscles lacked the raw ability to keep up with my opponent. I had always known the Cognitive Accelerator possessed such a weakness. While its applications in tactics and situational awareness provided a paramount advantage, the ability to utilize it in actual combat was inarguably limited.

  As the clang of our blades met in rapid succession followed by several buzzes of swift electric discharge through my body, I found myself defensively pressed against a wall. The sight of her katana's tip stabbing toward my forehead seemed to slow time to a crawl even without the activation of my Cognitive Accelerator. If I died, my chances to kill Bradich died as well. If I died, I would never know why he betrayed us and killed everyone we ever loved. I could not die. I would not die.

  My head snapped to the side at the last possible moment. Nomeiko's katana embedded itself in the metal wall with an audible whine, but as I expected the intense burst of speed to end and my head to pause in its rightful position just to the right of her sword, I surprised myself by staggering toward the opposite wall from the uncontrollable momentum caused by my simple head motion! Her head cocked to one side, and our gazes locked.

  “What the hell was that? It was like some kind of piston rammed into the side of your head,” Nomeiko growled as she wriggled her blade from the wall.

  “Hell if I know, I'm trying to figure it out myself.” I shook my head a few times hoping the motion would clear the strange haze that settled into my skull like an obscuring fog.

  “You're a crazy old hag,” Nomeiko spat and dashed across the short distance to the wall which I used to steady myself. She dragged her katana behind her like a deadly steel tendril, and as she closed the gap separating us, she swung it in a blinding horizontal arch toward my neck.

  Perhaps she grew tired of our game because her action carried with it the clear intention of my decapitation. I knew as soon as her arm began the swing, I would no longer be able to visibly follow her movements as I could with lesser opponents. I needed to react immediately and focus on the muscles in her shoulders; I needed to concentrate and keep my cool. Deadly, flashing silver made that a little easier said than done, however.

  As soon as the indention between her clavicle and shoulder twitched, I commanded my body to move. The fast-twitch muscle fibers responsible for swift jerky movements reacted to that command, and I forced my body to the floor in an impromptu crouch. As the blade sang over the top of my head, I noticed the same unfortunate event occurred in the partial second that passed between my crouch and Nomeiko's attack. My entire body rocketed to the ground as though being drawn to some invisible black hole in the floor.

  Once I initiated my movement, I seemed to lose control over my body's momentum. The result, as before, was an over-the-top extravagant maneuver. It felt as though my own swiftness overwhelmed me, and I lost the ability to stop once I set myself in motion. By the time I planted both palms on the ground and regained control of my legs enough to stop my descent, I was glancing up at Nomeiko's bewildered face from a near prone position against the floor.

  “What… what the hell are you doing all of a sudden? Stop wiggling around and just die already!” Nomeiko drew her blade back over her head. The force behind her preparation as she drew her muscles taut fluttered the short spikes of her styled black hair. I rapidly shoved my feet into the ground and propelled myself straight into her sternum with a blinding shoulder tackle. Not surprisingly, my body refused to stop once it collided with hers.

  The two of us tumbled across the room with flailing limbs; as the painful sparks of her electricity passed through my body, I growled and struggled to regain control of my movements. By the time I succeeded, we had rammed into the metal frame of my temporary bed. Without a full range of motion, Nomeiko possessed little alternative than to ram her bony elbows and knees into various parts of my body. I retaliated with several quick wild blows that left the two of us grunting and groaning. Before long, the soft cover atop my bed wriggled its way between our writhing forms and entangled us.

  “Blasted cotton contraption!” I growled to myself. After a second of thought, it dawned on me like a scientific “Eureka!” Though the material was not actually cotton, its synthetic properties imitated the extinct material almost perfectly!

  I ceased my wild assault on Nomeiko and focused my energy on freeing myself from entanglement. When I emerged from the cotton-like tethers, I gripped the flailing end pieces like reins on a steed. The material worked as I expected; despite my connection with the lightning maiden, I felt no painful buzz or spark course through the insulating material. And with the weight of Nomeiko as an anchor, I was able to safely utilize the fluke burst of hyperspeed my body exhibited, and the consequential, uncontrollable flailing, to my advantage.

  I felt the pressure of Nomeiko's body within the soft cocoon, and I immediately tugged the ends taut. With my Supersoldier augment still providing me increased strength and the new, freak occurrence of quickness, I yanked Nomeiko, sheets and all, from the bed and slammed her into the nearest wall with enough force to dent the steel and crack the stone.

  Her cry echoed in time with the environment's destruction, but I offered her no time to lick her wounds. With another powerful heave I drew her body from the wall and slammed it hard into the ground. The process continued, with each strike leaving one of her bones broken or a piece of furniture destroyed. To my admiration, she kept her katana clenched firmly in her hand, and despite the amount of pressure I applied to her body by swinging her wildly about, I watched as she prepared to cut the blanket in which I ensnared h
er. I had no intention of allowing that to happen. With a final heave powered by my determined shout, I flung her cocoon encased body toward the window and released the sheets. She howled as she descended to the hard floor of Loftsborough for yet a third time.

  I dropped to my knees and reached over to grip my dagger. Even the simple motion of extending my arm threatened to rip it from its socket since I was unable to keep from thrusting the limb out like a striking serpent. I sighed and slowly encircled my fingers around my knife. Every motion I made required extensive thought to keep from moving too quickly lest I lose control. When I finally reached my feet, I exhaled a slow, methodic breath. But as soon as I felt a calm envelope me, the entire building violently groaned and shook; with the rumbling metal and stone cracking around me, I nearly lost my footing.

  Within seconds the interior began falling apart; the steel sheets twisted, the giant stone blocks crumbled, and the floor sank under the weight of the rattling mansion. I fought to maintain balance and growled as several pieces of falling debris struck various parts of my body. As the definitive instant approached when the whining steel and cracking stone silenced for a split second before the structure's utter collapse, I bolted for the open window. I launched myself from the implosion; the dust and debris fell just behind my backside like sheets of rain.