The DX Chronicles (Book 1): Not Against Flesh and Blood

by Brian Cody

  “Klinge!?” David called as he stood at the top of the right arm, his voice carrying over the electric surges rushing into the empty mace.

  “Hold on a moment!” Nate groaned as he clasped his hands to condense his charge into a beam that rushed into the mace and exuded a yellow radiance interspersed with azure flashes. “Ten seconds!” Nate exclaimed as that ethereal mass ballooned to half of that mace’s outline, then two-thirds, then the entirety of its area in a circulating blue and yellow sphere. “Five seconds!” Nate gasped as he angled his surge. The sleight in motion loosed electric bolts against the ground and allowed the mace to hover several yards above the road, while similar bolts of the energy rushed out of from the arm’s uneven length and caused it to levitate.

  “Klinge, I’m going long!” David exclaimed as he bolted down the road.

  “Wait, Dave_!” Nate called as he stumbled under the floating mass, “D*** it!” he coughed as he spread his legs and swiped. That arm, oozing with electricity, bulleted over the road with sagittal haste, while David ran with it. David looked to the machine from fifty yards off, and he leapt as the arm spiraled overhead. As the colossus spun after Shawn from thirty yards off, David latched onto the edge of the arm and tightened his grip, while electricity poured into him. As the colossus looked to him from ten yards off, and as Shawn ran to Turrisi underfoot, David swung.

  The mace slammed against the center of the colossus’s chest, and, in a thickening plume, the energy field receded from the circular gape, while Shawn grabbed Turrisi by the back, stepped, lifted his left, and pitched. Turrisi, as he moved past his zenith and descended towards the stumbling colossus, reached to his side, clasped his pistol, lifted it to eye level, and inhaled. He heard the scraping crash of the mace behind him; he felt the wind rushing against and soothing his bruised form; and he sighted that azure glow retreating towards an encompassing point around the white robot which, at that moment, was aligned with his barrel. Turrisi squeezed, and the firearm coughed his remaining round. He exhaled as his arm lurched backward, and, ahead of him, that singular bullet zoomed towards the colossus, towards the alabaster form controlling it, and then for the cracks along that form’s chest.

  The bullet jabbed halfway into the vertical crack of the white machine’s chest as the force-field closed behind it. It shot backwards, slamming into that repulsing field and ricocheting at the machine for a second impact. Energized by the azure glow, it struck with greater force, cracking the automaton’s side; yet, once more, it was repulsed, and, as it slapped into the blue field again, it was ricocheted back into the machine, only to be repelled again. With each subsequent strike, the force of its impacts were augmented, and, as it was heated into a molten wad, it struck with breaking, then fissuring, and then tearing force. As the seconds passed, the automaton writhed and jolted from the goring strikes. After five seconds, the glowing semi-solid diffused into a dozen broken and tearing remnants, and, after ten seconds, those masses boiled into puffs of mist that painted the machine in a molten spew. The alabaster phantom, littered with gapes and bleeding azure sparks, seized for the next few moments before its eyes dimmed and its limbs slackened. In response, the colossus’s head bowed, and its left arm straightened and swayed.

  Standing in front of that unmoving form, David kept his fists clasped. As he waited, his jaw dropped. He shook; then, he smiled, inhaled, and spun. “Okay, Albert!” he bellowed as he looked past the severed limb and towards Shawn, who was rubbing his forehead.

  Walking up from behind Shawn, Nate looked past David, and called, “You okay, Turrisi?”

  “Oh shoot!” David spun to just in front of the machine, where Turrisi, having lain in the middle of the road, rolled off of his back, and pushed to his knees.

  “This armor’s starting to not help”, Turrisi replied as he stood, his lips slamming shut to conceal his groan.

  “I guess we should’ve thought about catching him too”, Shawn chuckled as he stepped to David.

  “I guess we should’ve thought about catching him too”, Turrisi wailed. A chime filled his ears at the same moment, and, with pistol in hand, he spun back to the pale corpse. David about-faced, and Shawn and Nate looked up, with both jouncing as they found the uppercase pi then illuminating the white machine’s chest.

  “Oh, dang!” Nate coughed, “is it still_!?”

  “No, it must be a last resort—anything that succeeds in destroying us!” Turrisi exclaimed as he stumbled away.

  “How long!?” Shawn called.

  “That’s irrelevant”, Turrisi replied, “If the big guy can’t survive the blast, it’ll be a thousand pieces of shrapnel.”

  “Well, Nate, can you do another EMP?” Shawn asked as he spun around.

  “Yeah, give me twenty-four hours”, Nate replied.

  “Well, that certainly won’t_”

  “I got it!” David interjected.

  “What’s your plan?” Turrisi asked.

  “I’ll launch it a couple thousand feet into the air”, David replied with a nod as he turned to the colossus and took his first step.

  “Won’t help”, Turrisi replied, stopping David.

  “More like tens of thousands of feet”, Nate replied.

  “Still won’t help”, Turrisi retorted. “If all of the matter’s not vaporized, it’s just shrapnel being launched over a much wider radius.”

  “Just throw it over Igneous”, Shawn suggested.

  “Huh!?” Turrisi and Nate wailed.

  “No, not over campus!” Shawn fired back, “over Igneous Mountain—on the opposite side. There’s next to no one living around there.”

  “And if we still happen to level one of the few houses in the area?” Turrisi asked.

  “We’ll personally rebuild them!” David called as he turned to the machine, “No time!”

  “You can’t rebuild people!” Turrisi exclaimed.

  “Piekarsky, I’ll back you up!” Shawn called as he jogged to David.

  “No, I got it”, David replied as he hovered into the air.

  “Piekarsky, you’re exhausted too, and what about B-mon_?”

  David shot forward, wrapping his arms around the machine’s right leg and rushing into the air with the automaton behind him. The final line flashed and rang with its sixth chime as David, his jaws grating against each other and his arms shaking from that swaying tonnage, shot over the tallest skyscrapers and turned southeast. The twelfth chime sounded as he levelled off at fifteen thousand feet, and spun the machine three times before launching it another two thousand feet and several southeasterly miles.

  The colossus gyrated past the firebrick monogram of Igneous’s campus and descended beyond the far side of the slope when a pulse of blue light erupted from it. David winced at the radiant expansion and the strident clap which succeeded it. A transparent, bubbling wave expanded to be a mile in diameter before dissipating and launching fragments along the mountainside; yet, the residential areas of the college campus and the city beyond them, went untouched.

  “Nice”, David muttered as the wind strengthened. He blinked and watched his arms rise, and he faced forward and watched his body tilt. “Huh”, he muttered as he looked towards the buildings increasing in size. “I’m falling.” He tensed to exert the mental control that would induce flight, but there came no volitation, only an all-engulfing ache. “This sucks.” As he plunged past ten thousand feet, he looked towards the western edge of the city, where, sprouting and shaking in a distant wind, clouds of fresh smoke ascended into the atmosphere; clouds that, as far as David could tell, hadn’t formed during their extended battle. “I wonder if Garcia and B…” He closed his eyes. Can I take this crash? I think I can take it… It’ll still hurt…

  David gaped his eyes at the sensation of being tugged. He spun as Shawn swung him around his back and held him up. “I gotcha”, Shawn stated as he turned groundward and, with David in tow, descended past the skyscrapers.

  Chapter Twenty: Monday, 3 May [Part Four]

 
“…mon…”

  “…B-mon…”

  “B-money!” With a stertorous wheeze, Bryen gaped his eyes, and, with a seizing exhalation, lifted his left arm towards that blinding blue sky and swiped. His head flailed from left to right as he grunted and gasped. He spun as he scanned his surroundings and, as he felt the backs of his feet drag along craggy ground, he kicked. “B-money!” Erik called, his arms wrapped around Bryen’s chest as he dragged him up a slope of pulverized cement. “B-mon_”—Erik stopped as Bryen’s arms swiped an inch from his chin. He reared back and grunted. “B-money, stop flailing!” Erik called out. “Nope, nope, stop—stop flailing, stop flailing; B, B, you’re safe!” Bryen’s left arm stopped as it hung, and, with his chest still heaving, he stared. Erik stopped as he felt the ground level off underfoot. He then looked back to a small, two-lane road. Behind him was a two-door sedan with its windows shattered into a fine dust; reclining alongside of it was his katana, and beyond the sedan was an alley between two brick, three-story buildings that stood as the terminal markers for the downtown development. “Okay, I’m gonna let you down now”, Erik called as he knelt and released Bryen.

  Bryen rolled to his right side and outstretched his right to press it down, but the moment he placed weight upon it, his elbow buckled, and he toppled. With a jittering swat of his left, he pressed his palm and, with a steady but shaking hold, he rolled to his knees and stared at the asphalt. Erik, while catching his breath, tried to make eye contact. Bryen, however, glared at the road. With each breath, he would shake, and, every few moments, he would convulse, while beads of sweat formed along his forehead and slithered around the bruises and cuts on his face.

  “You feeling okay, dude?” Erik asked. “Your skin was freezing when I started to drag you; you feeling sick?” Still, Bryen was unresponsive as he stared at the ground. Erik huffed and then looked past Bryen, towards the slope he had dragged him across—the rising and uneven perimeter of a crater twenty feet in depth and nigh-fifty feet in diameter. Bomb? Maybe an airstrike? Erik suggested as he looked to the nadir of that crater, where the remains of the hunter—of the one he had been sent to stop—were littered. The first white machine’s torso was engraved with rough cracks that painted its once unbreakable form with a pronounced fragility. Both its left leg and its right arm had been severed from their highest joints; and both of those limbs had been pulverized into countless parts. The right leg was severed at the knee, with dozens of cords protruding out of the joint; the left arm appeared uneven, partly dislocated along the elbow, and bore a quartet of fissures along its forearm. The machine itself—that monstrous and unrelenting fiend—lay inactive.

  Bombs strong enough to cause that level of damage do exist, but unless I’m missing something about explosions, the rest of this block should have been levelled as well… If not a bomb… Erik stepped back and scanned the surrounding area, but found those structures, though missing panels, to be whole. Then what…or…who? Erik looked to Bryen, watching as his gasps strengthened and slowed over several seconds to a gradual and calming rhythm. Ten minutes since you disappeared and before I found you...six hundred seconds...an eternity in combat...so what...?—Erik inhaled to speak, but, as he watched Bryen grasp reality with steadier cognizance, he held his tongue. Later… “Hey”, Erik called. Bryen looked to Erik while dragging his right arm along the ground to place weight upon it. “It sounds like the explosions have stopped; Piekarsky and company were getting things done when I left, but they might still need our help; let’s make our way back there. Can you walk?”

  “It’ll take a few minutes”, Bryen replied, his voice stammering between a monotone and respiring grunts.

  “I’ll help you walk”, Erik replied as he knelt and, with his arm over Bryen’s right shoulder, reared up so that they were upright. “What happened to your trench coat?” Erik asked as he took his first step.

  “Burned”, Bryen replied as he stared at the ground.

  “That sucks; what about your sword?”

  “Melted”, Bryen sighed.

  “Well, if we’re not sent to jail, Lamback could probably get you_”—a clank sounded between Erik’s words, causing him to stop, and causing Bryen to seize. Erik spread his legs and looked over his shoulder, down into the crater and along its slope, where the battered remnants of the white machine lifted its left arm and slapped it onto the pavement. Another clank sounded from its joints and a burst of sparks rushed from its chest as it heaved itself by the drive of its remaining arm, lifted it, and smacked its fingers into the pavement. “Shoot!” Erik exclaimed as he looked to the machine’s dimmed, blue eyes.

  Erik turned and continued forward with Bryen by his side—just need my sword! Behind him, the white machine lifted its tattered arm above the crater’s apex and slammed onto solid ground, and, with one last pull, it heaved its torso past the crater, and then used the remnants of its right leg to prop itself. It then outstretched its left and opened the panel to its left forearm. Erik glanced back as a rocket was propped, and he jerked around as he heard the initiating hiss of propelling flames. “Brace yourself!” Erik roared as he released Bryen, enflamed his hands, and pitched a fireball which met the rocket ten feet before him.

  Erik lifted and crossed his arms as a fulmination detonated before him. He tensed, and, via his faculty, that deluge of flames was diverted around him and Bryen; yet, the milliseconds of that explosion burned within Erik’s mind; and, as he cried out at the failure of his mental shield, his mind, comprehending the fullest extent of his exhaustion, blanked. He awakened with an ashen swat as he hit the smoldering road and spun. He coughed and cradled his arms while tightening his chest to restrain his wails. As he breathed, and as he realized that he had been overwhelmed and launched, he scanned the road, looking past the contorted shape of the destroyed sedan, and finding Bryen outstretched and face-down another thirty feet across from him. “B-money!” Erik coughed as he rolled onto his knees. Bryen was unresponsive, and unmoving. “B-money!” he shrieked. “D*** it!” he wailed as he pulled his hair and then jerked back to the automaton still standing and lowering its arm.

  The pale machine glared, another burst of sparks leaping from the many crevices along its body and the glimmer in its eyes further dimming. As it turned to Bryen, Erik squeezed his hands and tensed his legs. He held his breath as the seconds passed, but, before he could push off, the machine turned to him, its ocular glow diminishing along its false pupils.

  “Passed.”

  Erik seized, and the machine’s head bowed. Erik held his breath, and, with his mouth agape, replayed that garbled utterance that zoomed not from the machine’s false mouth, but, it seemed, from the core of its tattered shape. It had spoken to him, or perhaps it had spoken to them, perhaps in a pre-recorded response, or, perhaps, as Erik recalled its mannerisms, its cunning, and its near-ravenous seeking out of their destruction, it had spoken with intelligence; it had chosen that one word as its last, and, as far as Erik knew, its only audible utterance.

  “What?” Erik gasped. He stood, his arms falling as he watched the automaton remain still. Before he could ponder further, a red pulse illuminated the machine’s chest. The insidious marking then flashed and then commenced its countdown. “Shoot!” Erik stepped to Bryen, but stumbled as his legs gave and he fell to his knees. “B-money!” Erik called as he spun to the machine and watched it complete its eighth chime. “B-money!” he exclaimed as he rose and ambled to Bryen. “B!” he exclaimed as he collapsed next to Bryen and shook him. Bryen jerked up in a leaping flay, swinging, kicking, and turning onto his back. “Nope, nope, dude!” Erik roared as he caught Bryen’s hands, “you need to learn to not flail.”

  “Oh”, Bryen gasped, “second nature, I guess…” Erik nodded, then latched onto Bryen’s arms, and stood. “Uh, Erik”, Bryen gasped as he found the inactive automaton and the second of its three lines passing its sixth flash.

  “I know; don’t worry”, Erik replied as he started with his arm wrapped around Bryen’s shoulder
. He moved twenty feet behind the machine before grabbing his katana from the burned sedan. He then continued for another fifty feet before aligning himself with that vehicle and kneeling.

  “Uh, sir, we are not far enough”, Bryen grunted as he looked to that third line’s commencing flashes.

  “I know”, Erik replied as he looked to the sedan leaking gasoline. “I’m spent; I don’t have enough strength to takeoff with both of us, so, when the robot explodes, the shockwave will detonate the car in front of us, and I’ll use those flames to shoot us into the air.”

  “Okay, and if your timing is off?” Bryen asked with slanted gaze.

  “It’s whatev’s; it’s not like we don’t know where we’re going if we die.” That azure radiance, beaming with solar intensity, flashed behind them as Erik finished. Erik, though battered and still exhausted, perceived the rending of the earth around the machine’s frame as the shockwave sped outward. He watched the aerial distortion rush towards them, and, milliseconds after the eruption, he watched as that same shockwave slammed into and pulverized the broken vehicle before them. The few remainders of gasoline combusted in an orange pulse as that shockwave came within a moment of striking Erik and Bryen, and Erik, his eyes locked onto and concentrating upon the fiery glow, kicked against it. The push-off drove his feet into the flames, in turn, causing the fires to condense and to launch him across the ground. He jerked into supersonic flight and thrust himself and Bryen past that shockwave’s reach. Despite the torturous acceleration, Erik maintained concentration, and, as he spiraled through the connecting alley, he ascended over surrounding buildings. “You good?” Erik asked as he spiraled and moved eastward.