by R H Nolan
ENHANCEMENTS: Level 6
Energy Reserves: 4000/4500
Disintegration
Efficiency: 25 units per cc
Energy Blast
Intensity: 4500
Base Range: 70 feet
Accuracy: 38%
Rapidfire
Intensity: 5 rounds of 900
Base Range: 70 feet
Accuracy: 31%
Triple Shot
Intensity: Up to 1500 each
Base Range: 70 feet
Accuracy: 20%
Lightwave
Intensity: 500
Focus: 50
Electrical Current
Intensity: 500 volts
Base Range: 8 feet
Accuracy: 50%
Energy Storm
Intensity: 4500
Base Range: 50 feet
Accuracy: 40%
Diameter of Attack: 15 feet
SOUL POINTS: 10/6400
ARMOR: 195/300 (58%)
Chest 60/100 (60%)
Back 55/100 (55%)
Helm 60/100 (60%)
All of his stats had bumped up slightly, and he’d gained a new power called Triple Shot. He assumed it meant he could fire at three targets at one time, in which case it was going to come in handy very shortly.
Max stood there in wonder, awed at how he could feel so incredible amidst so much horror and death. He was back up to full Health, and power seemed to pulse through his body.
“Stop! Don’t hurt them!” a voice echoed throughout the canyon.
It was Saris.
29
Max whipped around.
The other side was advancing. The Bloodletters were all dead, and the Neo Angeles soldiers and Chaotix that remained were tromping over the dead bodies that littered the canyon floor.
But as soon as Saris yelled, they all halted.
Well, at least the soldiers did.
The Chaotix kept on advancing.
“Scavenger!” Saris yelled angrily, pointing at Invok still standing atop the canyon walls. “Tell your men to stop!”
The cannibal chief scowled resentfully but complied. “Do as he says!”
The twenty or so surviving Chaotix halted twenty feet out in front of the Neo Angeles soldiers.
Max thought fleetingly that he and his friends’ odds were better than they had been at any other point. Saris’s army was one fifth as big as it had been, and the remaining soldiers were severely weakened.
Unfortunately, there were still at least fifty blaster rifles aimed at Max and his friends.
Not to mention that Ayla, Herk, and Trox’s Health all ranged between 50% and 70%. There was no way they would survive a volley of blaster hits. And once they were dead, Max and Lyra would soon follow.
Saris walked up behind his ranks of soldiers, though he was still out of Max’s range of Accuracy.
“I wondered why you kept clustering around the girl,” Saris said, pointing at Lyra. “Why you took the teleporter back to her. But now it all makes sense: she’s a healer, isn’t she?”
Max didn’t say anything. Nor did any of the others.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Saris said with a smile, then barked at the soldiers, “Bring her to me unharmed!”
“Screw that!” Herk yelled as he ignited his flames and flew up off the ground towards Saris.
Saris blasted Herk with a sonic wave that stripped the green flames off him and sent him tumbling to the ground.
Max didn’t have time to think—he just fired at Saris.
But the distance was too great. Max’s blast went wide, and hit a soldier close to Saris instead of the Governor himself.
“Spare the girl, disable the others!” Saris roared.
The soldiers all opened fire at once.
Max felt five shots slam into him all at once—three in the chest, one in his thigh, and one in his right arm—and he slammed over onto his back.
Blaster hits didn’t pierce deep, but they did searing damage to skin and muscle. Max’s arm and leg screamed in pain.
His armor had absorbed most of the damage to his chest, but because of his arm and leg, he was still hurt pretty badly—all in the blink of an eye.
HEALTH: 1170/1500 (71%)
Core: 680/700
Secondary: 230/600
Nourishment: 82/100
Sleep: 70/100
ARMOR: 128/300 (43%)
Chest 59/100 (59%)
Back 54/100 (54%)
Helm 15/100 (25%)
His friends didn’t fare much better.
Herk screamed in pain as blasts hit both his real leg and his metal one.
Ayla went down to the ground, shot in the side.
Trox had flattened against the ground, hands covering his head, so he was spared getting shot. Only he and Lyra remained untouched.
“STOP!” Saris yelled, and the guards ceased firing. “Bring the girl to me. If the others resist, kill them!”
Before a single guard could react, two Chaotix raced forward. They were already twenty feet ahead of the guards, and they raced past Max and the others and grabbed Lyra by the arms.
“WAIT!” Invok roared, then slid down the side of the canyon on his rear end.
Saris watched in confusion as the ugly chieftain strode out onto the battleground—not like a coward who had sat out the fight, but a pompous fool who thought he was a war hero.
But he was a pompous fool with a plan.
At some invisible sign Invok made, one of the Chaotix beside Lyra raised his club over her head, ready to strike.
“Pay what you owe us, Dweller!” Invok shouted at Saris.
“Now is not the time,” Saris snapped, then pointed at the two Chaotix holding Lyra. “Bring her to me!”
“Hold!” Invok yelled at the two Chaotix with their prisoner, then turned back to Saris and grinned with a mouth full of rotting teeth. “Now is exactly the time. I want those powers you promised me.”
Saris stared at him with utter contempt. “What?! That has to be done with special equipment. It takes time—”
“I WANT THE POWERS NOW, OR THE GIRL DIES!” Invok roared.
Max wanted to yell out, You idiot!—but Invok was a cannibal who lived out in the ruins, an illiterate and savage who didn’t know anything but murder and theft. He definitely didn’t understand anything about the powers Max and Saris had. He just assumed they were something that could be easily handed off, like a machete or a club.
While everyone else’s attention was on the two men’s faceoff, Max dissolved more sand and got his power reserves as high as they could go.
Saris stared at the metal-pierced, blood-smeared cannibal… then smiled.
“Of course. My apologies.” Saris held out his hand to the Chaotik chief, palm up, like he was offering something to him. “Guards, please give all the filthy vermin what they deserve.”
Before Invok could even register the insult, Saris hit him with a sonic blast that liquified his head. His skull blasted off his neck in a spray of blood and fragments of bone.
At the same time, all the soldiers opened fire and cut down every single Chaotik still standing.
Turned out that the Chaotix ignoring Saris’s initial order to halt, and instead striding twenty feet ahead of the guards, hadn’t been very smart. It made them easy targets for a massacre.
The only exceptions were the two Chaotix holding onto Lyra.
She was more than capable of handling them, though.
Black energy flared from her arms where the Chaotix were holding her.
Suddenly the two men screamed and fell to the ground. Their withered bodies burst on impact, their putrid, blackened insides exploding through the decaying flesh of their bellies.
“Oh ho!” Saris laughed in delight. “So Max wasn’t lying about your powers! Life and death, healing and destroying… very interesting…”
With all the Chaotix and Bloodletters dead, and Max and the others wounded and lying on the ground, Saris apparently fe
lt emboldened, because he walked through the soldiers and closer to Max.
But not too close.
Saris pointed his hand at Max. “Discharge all your energy into the sky, or I kill you now.”
Max tried to calculate the odds. Given his Accuracy, he probably had a 60% chance of killing Saris at this distance—
Saris snarled and hit Max with a blast of sonic energy.
It felt like his face was being peeled off and his skull was being cracked open from the inside.
Max screamed and fired at Saris, shooting off all his remaining energy in one blast. He was in too much pain to be able to concentrate enough to aim. All he could do was hope for a miracle—
Which he didn’t get.
The shot went up in the air and exploded harmlessly against the canyon wall.
And now he was out of energy.
Suddenly the sonic blast stopped.
Max gasped for breath, then groaned. He was obviously still alive, but he felt like Invok had looked after Saris got through with him.
Max checked his Health. Still at 62%, so the sonic attack had been more about pain than damage.
Saris walked over to him, his palm pointed at Max’s head, and sneered, “It always has to be the hard way with you, doesn’t it?”
Max only had one thought in his head: He’s within point-blank range.
I can’t miss.
“It does,” Max coughed, and dissolved sand with his left hand touching the ground.
Except Saris had been expecting it.
The Governor stomped his boot viciously into Max’s left forearm.
There was a sharp crack as Max’s bones broke.
At the same time, Saris fired a sonic blast at Max’s other arm with his outstretched palm.
It was like someone had hit Max’s forearm with a sledgehammer, shattering the bones inside like glass.
“AAAAAAH!” Max screamed in agony. He arched his whole body and tried to get away, but couldn’t. Saris’s boot pinned down his broken left arm, and his right arm felt lifeless and dead.
Max’s stats blinked in the corner of his eye.
HEALTH: 678/1500 (45%)
Core: 492/700
Secondary: 34/600
Nourishment: 82/100
Sleep: 70/100
“Uncle… please…” Ayla’s voice sobbed. “Don’t hurt him…”
Saris looked up, an amused look on his face. “Ah, now we hear from my darling niece.”
Max looked over his shoulder from where he lay on the ground.
Ayla was on her stomach ten feet behind him, tears streaming down her face.
Saris chuckled. “You know, Max, I wanted to keep you alive. Even if you and I couldn’t come to an agreement, I figured you would be a good subject for experimentation. Maybe I could learn something from what the Bug did to you. But in all my optimism and plans, I nearly forgot the lessons you’ve taught me.”
Suddenly a familiar voice spoke inside Max’s head. “Max, it is Zryk. Saris appears to be on the verge of killing you.”
The Bug had a flair for stating the obvious.
“Can’t talk,” Max whispered, hoping Saris didn’t hear him.
Saris didn’t. The Governor was too in love with the sound of his own voice. “I don’t think I’ve told you about those lessons, Ayla. Now’s as good a time as any.”
“I understand,” Zryk replied. “I merely wanted to inform you that I am in communication with the others through their implants, and am coordinating a simultaneous attack with them. However, its success depends on your disabling or killing Saris in the first strike.”
Max would have laughed if it wasn’t so ludicrous.
“I can’t,” he whispered.
Saris was still droning on. “You see, Ayla, I knew Max’s parents. His father was my chief scientist. When he refused to do the necessary experiments required to give me my powers, I exiled him and his family into the Wastelands… including Max.”
“I know that the bones of both your forearms are severely broken, but I would like to point out that you were never limited solely to your hands for the application of your powers. You can fire your energy blasts from other places on your body. If you recall, you can use your himirini chest armor to focus your energy reserves and fire.”
He’d totally forgotten. He had used the himirini armor to blast a pile of Sandwalkers on top of him, back when he went on his first mission for Zryk.
“The blast will probably not be as focused, since there is extensive damage to the chest plate, but it will still work. You need only disintegrate enough sand to power the blast.”
“He’ll see my hands…” Max whispered.
Saris was still talking to Ayla. “That was over a decade ago. But I always worried that my solution wasn’t permanent, and that my leniency might come back to haunt me. Which it did, as we’ve all seen from the events of the last couple of days.”
“Perhaps I was not explicit enough: you do not need to disintegrate solely through your hands, either. You can do it with any part of your body, including your feet. I assumed you always used your hands because you did not want to disintegrate your skates. However, you are no longer wearing them.”
Max’s eyes widened as he realized that Saris had never seen him disintegrate or fire his blasts with anything other than his hands. Now that the Governor had broken both his arms and was standing on one of them, he probably thought Max was completely out of commission.
“I would suggest you act quickly,” Zryk said. “You are going into shock from your injuries, and your efficiency will be severely lessened.”
Max dug his right heel into the sand as far as it could go. Then he concentrated as best he could.
His heel felt like his fingers did when he disintegrated sand—like they were melting it away. Not only that, but he could feel his entire foot slowly sinking into the ground.
He knew he was disintegrating the back of his boot, too, but he didn’t care. He just hoped he wasn’t glowing enough under his clothes to draw anyone’s attention.
He was only barely listening to Saris, but since Zryk wasn’t talking anymore, Max heard a little more of what Saris was saying to Ayla.
“As time went on, I decided that I’d been too soft on his parents. So when others betrayed me, I acted decisively. I didn’t banish them—I killed them.” Saris paused, then smiled. “Like your parents.”
Max looked up in horror.
WHAT?!
Saris had killed Ayla’s parents?!
He heard Ayla’s strangled cry of horror behind him.
“Everyone, get ready,” Zryk said. “On the count of three, do as I instructed you.”
Saris sneered. “When my brother and his wife found out about my experiments, they threatened to tell the entire city. To turn the citizenry against me and remove me from power.”
“One…”
“So I did what needed to be done. But rather than merely banish them, I killed them in secret and made it look like an accident. And I never lost a night’s sleep over it.”
“Two…”
Saris’s eyes narrowed as he stared at Ayla. “I always wondered if I should have killed you, too. I think we’ll remedy that here today.”
“Three!”
Max’s chestplate fired directly upwards into Saris’s face.
Zryk had been right—the damage to the chestplate diffused the energy blast and made Max’s aim less than perfect.
But it was enough.
The energy beam raked up across Saris’s face before blasting up into the sky.
The Governor screamed and staggered backwards, his hands clutching at his smoking flesh.
At the same exact instant that Max fired, Herk ignited his green flames and flew to the left of all the Neo Angeles soldiers. He then flew in a straight line one foot in front of their chests, slamming into their rifles, knocking the guns askew or smacking them completely out of the soldiers’ hands.
The soldiers had been surprised b
y Max’s attack and the governor’s scream of agony. They hesitated out of confusion.
Two seconds later, most of them were without guns, thanks to Herk—and the ones still holding rifles weren’t aiming at the kids anymore.
Trox teleported behind the soldiers, picked up a rifle from the ground, and began firing into the soldiers’ ranks. Trox was at an angle, so he was firing directly into a crowd. If he didn’t hit the first guard he aimed at, the blast hit the second or third or fifth man behind him.
Chaos broke out as the soldiers didn’t know whether they were being attacked from behind or in front.
Ayla waited until Herk had slammed his way through all the rifles in the row. Then she began using her telekinetic powers to fling still-armed soldiers twenty feet into the air.
As soon as he got to the end of the soldiers, Herk turned around and started slamming into their bodies this time.
Immediately after firing at Saris, Max started disintegrating more sand with his foot.
Lyra ran straight to Max and put her hands on him. A warm glow coursed through his body, and suddenly the agony in his arms began to subside.
He barely noticed it, though.
His attention was entirely on the Governor.
Saris pulled his hands away from his face—or what was left of it.
Max’s energy blast had burned all of the Governor’s skin, leaving a charred, black mask in its place.
The red mechanical lens was cracked. Sparks popped from its exposed interior.
The Governor’s remaining human eye stared out of a lidless socket.
His nose was completely gone. Teeth gnashed in a lipless mouth.
The metal plating was still there, though. It was the only familiar thing on the Governor’s ravaged head.
“I’LL KILL YOU!” Saris screamed. As his jaw moved, a shower of black char flaked off his face, revealing red, raw muscle beneath.
Saris pointed his hand—
Max fired again.
This time the energy bolt slammed directly into Saris’s chest, and he went keeling over backwards.
But Saris still got off his sonic blast.