“I noticed,” I say. Calm. Stay calm.
My phone chimes with an alert. You have five minutes remaining, the AI says in my head. Best of luck, Mr. Moretti.
I want to curse and stomp and do all kinds of things but I can’t risk setting of Isabella. Apart from the fact that that’s really not what she needs right now. If she panics, she could accidentally kill me just as easily as Plague Doctor. Speaking from personal experience, being thrust into a whole new body is wildly disorienting.
“What was that?” she asks, stepping forward and lowering her hands from her face. The way her ears perk up is actually kind of endearing.
The building shutters. Plague Doctor’s not just outside. She’s outside trying to get in.
“Plague Doctor’s here,” I say, calmly. Calmly. “And that was my phone—we have five minutes to broadcast the cure. I promise—promise—I will help you through whatever this is…we need to act now.”
I take a deep breath. Deep breaths have been my default method for managing my anger since I was little. I think my track record speaks for how well that technique has worked for me. The damn app is about a thousand times better. But the app’s not going to help me with this and I can’t think of anything else to do to help keep me under control so that I can do what needs to be done.
The building shakes again. I don’t have time to compose myself. “I need you to either get that equipment working or we need to get the hell out of here.”
Isabella meets my eyes and holds my gaze for a few moments. Then she’s a blur of activity, hands flying over switches and turning things on. I don’t understand any of what she’s doing but she must have wrung quite a bit of information about how this stuff works from that ex-boyfriend.
“Dammit!” She says and accidentally smashes her hand through a thankfully clear space of table.
I hurry to her side. “What’s the matter?”
“There’s no power to this machine,” she says. “A lot of this stuff is barely working. They must have a backup generator here. But this stupid thing isn’t hooked up to it.”
“Let me try something,” I say, and step around her to press my hand to the machine.
I’ve been in Las Vegas for days and haven’t had to charge my phone once. Something about the chip in my hand keeps it powered up. I think it was designed that way so that none of the players would accidentally be forced out of the game by a dead battery.
My palm meets the machine and it lights up.
Isabella grabs my face and kisses me. Seven feet tall and purple or not, it’s a hell of a kiss.
The wall and half the roof pull away, revealing the sky outside. And Plague Doctor.
Or part of her anyway. She’s too close to take all of her in, which is its own kind of terrifying. Like seeing only part of a shark big enough to swallow you whole swim just beneath your feet.
“Dammit,” I shout and push my hand more firmly to the machine. “AI, activate the damn thing.”
The signal is activated. You must now complete the broadcast.
“Broadcast broadcast broadcast!”
Isabella lunges across the room and flips a switch. “Broadcasting!”
Signal is being broadcast, the AI says. Your quest is complete. Congratulations, Mr. Moretti. Taisaur has leveled up. How would you like to allocate your points?
Plague Doctor moves outside. I can’t tell what she does, only see a shifting of carapace, and the floor goes out from under us. How the fuck am I supposed to think about spending points on Taisaur’s stats right now?
Isabella reacts faster than humanly possible, leaping across the room to catch me and pull me close to her body. Her momentum carries us forward as we fall and we roll into a hallway and come up with me slung over her shoulder as she runs. My world is spinning but at least it’s not a bridal carry.
Would you like to allocate your points now, Mr. Moretti? The AI chimes again, more insistent.
“Dammit, AI, dump all the points into HP again,” I snap as Isabella hauls me through the building. “I need to summon Taisaur!”
“So, summon him,” Isabella calls over her shoulder without slowing down. “I’ll carry you while you’re out.”
That’s when I realize my hands are empty. I must have lost my phone when we fell. “I need a computer!”
“Are you shitting me?”
“I lost my phone.”
Taisaur’s HP is now sixty, the AI interjects.
“Of course, now you lose it.” Isabella shakes her head and turns to rush down a different hall, only to spin around as an enormous spidery leg passes through the building, cutting off our path and demolishing everything in its way. It’s like the buildings are made out of foam to this thing.
Another turn and we’re in a room full of dead people with red needles sticking out of them. One of them is clutching a tablet.
“There!” I wriggle free of Isabella’s grip and hit the ground moving.
I pull the tablet out of the corpse’s hand. It’s as dead as he is but that’s okay. I shove my hand to it and it powers on.
There’s a passcode to open it. “Dammit!”
The Kaiju Wars Online app appears, overlaying the numbers. For once I’m not about to look the gift horse in the mouth.
I select the app. “Go-go-go-go-go!”
Skipping preliminaries, the AI says in my head. Summoning Taisaur to your current location.
That’s…actually helpful. “Thank you,” I say, then can’t speak as I’m lost to a swirl of colors.
Next thing I know I’m in the air. Like really, really high in the air. I fall several feet…actually several dozen feet. I’m Taisaur. And my sense of scale hasn’t caught up with me yet.
But I don’t remember Taisaur ever being this tall.
The ground beneath me shifts violently, nearly dislodging me. No, not the ground.
The AI dropped me right on top of Plague Doctor. I’m balancing atop her spiky, bulbous abdomen as she tears into the Pearl Theater.
You’re welcome, Mr. Moretti. The AI has never sounded so damn happy.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I hate my AI.
It doesn’t take Plague Doctor long to realize I’m on top of her. She lets out that horrible hissing shriek and lurches backward, bobbing up and down and tearing away half of the Pearl Theater. I lose my footing and spread out flat across the back of her abdomen. It’s like laying down on a thorn bush. Her spikes dig into Taisaur’s flesh even as I dig his claws into her carapace.
Taisaur’s tail goes up and then slams back down, driving the spikes along its length deep into Plague Doctor’s bulbous body. Once. Twice. I score three strikes, each one releasing a gout of green fluid like geysers of apple flavored slurpies.
Solrin must have given her some practice with having a kaiju attack her from above though, because three shots is all I get before she curls her legs up and rolls over. It’s not the building she smashes me through or the spines on her carapace digging into me like so many thorns that makes me lose my grip. It’s the sheer weight of the bitch crushing me.
Plague Doctor is probably the largest living thing to ever walk the earth and all that poundage drives me into the ground and squishes me. It’s like getting body slammed by three sumo wrestlers simultaneously. Plague Doctor doesn’t need technique or aim. She can just crush me. The hit rattles me so bad that for a moment I can’t really think. When I do regain my faculties my first coherent thought is that it’s so weird that I have to worry more about being squished now that I’m a kaiju than when I was in my human body.
Plague Doctor rolls off of me and keeps going, leveling several more buildings with her mad, almost ridiculous technique. Is technique even the right word? My kaiju kung fu is stronger than yours! My brain’s clearly not back in the fight yet, so that mad rolling works in my favor.
I shove myself upright and relearn how to breath with lungs that have never had the wind knocked from th
em. My HP is down by a quarter from that hit. Taisaur is a freaking tank meant to take punishment and that was hardly what I’d call an attack. Hit points are his specialty. What the hell?
But then I understand. It’s only because Taisaur’s got so many hit points that Plague Doctor’s attack didn’t take us out. While my kaiju’s a tank, after hit points he specializes in soaking up special attacks. His regular defense isn’t nearly on par with his special defense and for all the weird and gross abilities at Plague Doctor’s disposal, she’s primarily a physical attacker. Which means I’m going to have to rely more heavily on speed this time than soaking hits.
Fortunately, Xenatlas just gave me some good practice. My head clears by the time Plague Doctor finishes her mad roll and rights herself. She lifts off the ground, glaring down at me from high, high above. Then higher still. Mother fucker, this was a terrible idea.
Plague Doctor surges forward and I fully realize just how right I am. There’s a misconception spread about by Hollywood and videogames that big equals slow. This is very, very untrue. Consider, speed is distance over time. Plague Doctor has many legs, each of them propelling her bulbous body hundreds of feet forward with every step. Before I can blink, she’s just about closed the distance between us and it’s all I can do to dodge a combo attack of her thrusting proboscis and stinger.
It’s the former that’s got me the most worried. She doesn’t have an HP bar to gauge but I know that between me and Solrin we had to have hurt her. If she gets that needle of hers into me, she could heal it all away. Sadly, this is looking like a game of keep away where the goal is whittling down her HP. In an endurance match, the contestant who can constantly replenish themselves is going to win. Especially when they’re already starting with such a clear advantage.
The combo is followed by a flurry of stabbing legs. Each of Plague Doctor’s limbs is like a skyscraper sized spear attempting to skewer me. I really, really don’t want to get skewered now that I’m actually feeling everything Taisaur is. The throbbing from where he’s been stabbed by those spines is already bad enough.
I manage a counter strike with my tail, catching one of those limbs and damaging in. Not significantly though, and I pay for it as her stinging tail swings up from underneath. I barely get the Burning Aurora up in time to block it and the impact still sends me airborne. I hit the ground next to a building and it comes down from the shockwave.
I release the Burning Aurora quickly. Like my fight with Xenatlas I can’t afford to waste my rage keeping it perpetually up. A shadow falling over me is my only warning and I instinctively roll away just in time as a massive foot comes crashing down right where Taisaur’s head had just been.
In an undignified and decidedly feline twisting leap I get myself upright and find Xenatlas glaring at me from across a leveled city block.
You died, I say stupidly. I watched you die.
The last time I “died” as Taisaur in our world I went comatose for a week. Judging from the so-called updates dying now should have some serious, potentially permanent consequences.
Got you to thank for that, Gene says through Xenatlas’s roar. I got extra lives from that mission you helped me complete back when I thought you might be a half-decent person and not a pile of shit.
The Game Masters had offered me money to do their special missions before. Same with Solrin, or Max, rather. But Gene wasn’t like us. That he’d ask for some kind of special in-game benefit as his reward for completing their special missions really shouldn’t come as a surprise. But it does.
This is not fair. This is beyond not fair. What kind of gimmicky bullshit is this?
I knock over the building next to me because dammit, it needed to die and so does Xenatlas because that is not fucking fair.
I’m so distracted by his sudden appearance and the sheer wrongness of him getting freaking phoenix powers that Plague Doctor runs into me. I throw up the Burning Aurora before I hit the ground but my HP drops from the hit and I’m rolled along the ground like a children’s toy beneath her legs.
A White Hole fired from Xenatlas’s horns hits her while she’s on me, striking with such force that she actually staggers. Xenatlas’s special attack is apparently not something even Plague Doctor can just shrug off.
The kaiju catches her balance, shakes off the ash, and charges back at us. I spoke too soon. Apparently, she can shrug it off. Damn.
She charges us and I don’t think the giant bug actually cares which one of us she gets so long as she gets to kill something. Her fury is terrifying and the ground beneath her scurrying legs is transformed into a cloud of debris so that it looks like she’s bringing a literal storm with her. I take off to the left, trying to put as much distance between Xenatlas and Plague Doctor as possible. With a little luck they might just take each other out.
That hope is dashed quickly as Xenatlas spews green flames into my path forcing me to come up short. It’s not much of a hesitation, but it’s enough for Plague Doctor to reach me. I barely avoid her stabbing proboscis and leap between her legs, twisting to avoid the stinging tail. A leg catches me and sends me toppling. It’s by accident rather than design, as evidenced by her lurch after Xenatlas.
Her proboscis sinks home in his shoulder at a point in between his segmented, insectile plating. Blood courses up through the needle and into her and several punctures I opened on her back seal closed.
Dammit no! I roar and launch myself forward, Burning Aurora blazing as I swing Taisaur’s tail at Plague Doctor’s rear legs. One of them snaps in half at my assault, making her shriek and rip her proboscis free of Xenatlas. But she’s been still long enough for him to charge up a second White Hole and this one hits her just below the head just as her back legs give out.
Plague Doctor doesn’t just stagger back, she flies. When she hits the ground, it seems like every building still standing in Vegas is under threat of collapsing. Including the Paris casino, which she’s landed almost right next to and which is still playing impromptu refuge to hundreds of refugees that are no longer condemned to death by her illness.
They might just die anyway if she keeps thrashing around.
Plague Doctor shrieks again, but it’s different this time. The bug is hurting.
Cracks have formed in her armor and ichor seeps from them as she struggles to right herself. She’s got so many legs that you wouldn’t think the absence of one would be that big a deal but when you consider just how much weight each one of those legs is carrying…we’ve crippled her.
For the first time I feel the alien kaiju’s mortality. She can be beaten. And now she knows it.
I’m about to take advantage of her struggle when Xenatlas hits me from behind, hard. I sprawl forward, scrabbling like mad to avoid the inevitable follow-up attack.
Shut up and hold still, he roars.
The attack never comes. In fact, my HP bar hasn’t changed at all. That wasn’t an attack.
Plague Doctor lets out an irritated shriek and pulls herself completely upright again, withdrawing her tail from a strike that would probably have caught me in the throat. She was bleeding but her position was righted and she didn’t look nearly so hurt as she had a second ago. The bitch had been faking it.
And Xenatlas caught me before I could run head-first into it.
She skitters about like a confused and wounded insect. It’s hard to say how hurt she actually is after that bluff of hers though. It doesn’t matter. She’s too close to the Paris and if she keeps doing what she’s doing it’s only a matter of time before she stomps through it.
Dammit she’s going to kill the survivors! I leap away and run with everything I’ve got to the Paris, putting myself between it and Plague Doctor and activating the Burning Aurora just in time to catch another leg before she can level it. I dig my feet in but feel myself being pushed backward, digging immense trenches through the ground.
The Burning Aurora’s hurting Plague Doctor but not enough. Contact with the Burning
Aurora’s set her into a battle frenzy. She doesn’t care about little things like pain anymore. I slide backward and feel myself being pressed into the Paris.
Xenatlas hits Plague Doctor from the side like an emerald truck and sends her staggering off of me. My Burning Aurora goes out. My rage meter needs to recharge, and if I move he’ll demolish the Paris and kill everyone I just worked my ass off to save.
Just my luck.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎
Xenatlas glares down at me and I brace myself for his attack. Whatever happens, I cannot go backward. One wrong move and we could kill everyone hiding in the casino.
His attack doesn’t come.
Instead he cocks his head. There really are people in there?
Now he’s willing to talk? Now! Shit, at this point I’ll take it. Yeah. Lots of people.
His mouth opens, revealing rows of pointed teeth. They’re all dying anyway. Why do you care if they get crushed?
How the hell do I explain in a few seconds the entirety of the quest I just underwent? Because a few seconds is all I’ve got. Plague Doctor is getting back to her feet and she looks ready to slaughter everything around her.
I won the cure from the Game Masters, I roar.
Plague Doctor charges. I can’t abandon my position. Dammit, if I’m going out, I’m going to go out shielding these people.
The ground shakes as Xenatlas lowers his horns and charges forward to meet the alien kaiju. Plague Doctor’s craftier than I thought, even in her fury. She towers over Xenatlas as they close, so tall his horns barely reach her bulbous belly and makes to stab him with her proboscis. But it’s a feint and the real attack comes a second later when her tail swings up from beneath her, the stinger aiming right for his head.
Xenatlas gets his massive claws up just in time and the stinger sinks into his hand instead of taking him in the face. He roars and lashes out with his other hand, striking at the tail. Start talking, Aaron!
Kaiju for Dummies Page 19