by Logan Jacobs
“Fallon,” I said in my best Mid-Atlantic accent, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
“I agree,” She said as she shook my hand, “but why are you talking like that?”
“Get used to it,” Nova answered. “He does it all the time. His brain is full of obscure Earth entertainment references. It is endearing and annoying all at the same time.”
“Ah,” Fallon responded as if she knew what Nova was talking about when I could tell she had no clue. “Keep your eyes open for my little birdies. I will have to be frugal with my gifts for the time being but once our coffers are refilled, I will be able to help out much more.”
“Thank you, Fallon,” I said as we walked to the door.
“Thank you, Marc,” Fallon said, “good luck, as always, in your next match. And, don’t be afraid to drop by sometime.”
She leaned in and gave me a brief kiss. I bit her lip playfully as she pulled away and I saw a flare of desire dance across her emerald eyes.
“You can count on it,” I said as Nova and walked down the front porch and out into the street. Fallon watched us leave for a moment, her tail swishing back and forth in lazy figure eights.
A quick hover-cab ride later, and we were back at the command console in our gym at the Hall of Champions. Artemis, Grizz, PoLarr and Aurora were all gathered around as I finished telling them about Fallon’s offer.
“As much as I distrust her breed,” Grizz said as he thought about what I’d just told him, “we do need sponsorship if we hope to continue to advance.”
“Yeah,” Artemis chirped, “and the heads up on the venue of the next match is incredibly helpful. I’m assuming most of the other teams won’t have that info until tomorrow morning when it was scheduled to be announced.”
“Marc, sugar,” Aurora said as she moved next to me and pressed her body against mine, “it is a very good thing you have copious gifts because you sure do like to spread them around.”
“I’m a giver. I give,” I tossed back at her with a cocky grin.
“That is what I hear,” PoLarr said as she field stripped and cleaned her Equalizers on the table next to the computer set up. “I’ll just have to take everyone else’s word for it.”
“Ha, ha, ha,” I said sheepishly.
“Have no worries, PoLarr,” Nova added, “it is a gift well worth the wait.”
“Comment,” Artemis added with a knowing smile. “Comment to your maternal parent.”
“Word,” I corrected her. “Word to your moms.”
“I was not aware that Nova had two maternal parents who raised her,” Grizz said without a clue. “It is a common occurrence on my planet. I am very pleased to see it is an accepted practice elsewhere in the universe. The warriors produced by such rearing were formidable indeed.”
“Grizz,” I said with admiration, “you and your people never cease to amaze me.”
“Yes, we are quite an amazing people,” Grizz smiled proudly. “Our amazingness is only outweighed by our humility. Now Artemis, bring up the climbing construct. Set it for maximum difficulty. Havak, you are first.”
I watched as our floor opened up, and a three-story-tall rock wall from the bowels of bouldering hell emerged.
“Yay me,” I said to myself and leaped up onto the first handholds. I was a pretty good climber having never met a tree I didn’t wish to conquer when I was a kid and pretty soon I was halfway up. “This isn’t that hard.”
“Now, I want everyone to start shooting at Havak,” Grizz growled mischievously.
“Great, me and my big mouth,” I managed to mutter before splashes of stunning laser fire crashed around me like water balloons full of electrical shocks of pain filled doom. It was going to be a very long day of training.
Chapter Nine
The now familiar and mundane tingle of my atoms reforming as I was teleported into the arena raced across my body like being covered in a million ants. As soon as the tingle subsided I opened my eyes and found myself completely upside down and wrapped in rope-thick, bright green vines dangling at least fifty feet off the ground.
“Typical,” I muttered as I tried to pull myself up so that I wasn’t completely perpendicular to the ground. The blood started to rush to my head, and I could feel my heartbeat pounding in my eyeballs. The vines that held me were thick and seemed incredibly strong and just happened to be wrapped around my legs as if we’d just played a particularly violent game of Twister. After a few seconds of scrabbling at them with my fingers, my stomach muscles started to burn from the effort of basically doing an inverted prolonged crunch. I let out a frustrated breath and let myself dangle again.
The jungle arena I’d teleported into was thick and dense, like the rainforest in Brazil crossed with the Waipoua sky forest of New Zealand, which I had seen in a really cool Netflix series. The tree I was currently hanging upside down from was at least a hundred and fifty feet tall with a large, bush-like canopy that let shafts of bright sunlight into the shade of the jungle. It was also about twenty feet in diameter and could have easily let a school bus drive through it with plenty of room. Every shade of green, from emerald to Hulk, was on display in the thick foliage all around me. Ferns grew up and around the trunk of the tree to mingle and sprout with the tree’s own leaves. It reminded me of the jungle I’d experienced in my first trial where I’d tricked a Mad Max looking dude on a motorcycle to jump to his death into the vines, only way bigger. Now that I’d been able to take a halfway decent look around it was a lot like the jungle planet of Pandora in James Cameron’s mediocre but visually stunning Avatar.
“Marc, quit messing around and get down here!” I heard Nova shout from below me. I leaned my head back and saw my alliance mates all safe on the ground. This was a full alliance death match with the top four teams advancing. Thirty-two alliances and champions total were competing in our second Silver Tier outing.
“We don’t have time to hang around,” PoLarr joked and cracked herself up. Our Soul Gaze connection became much more prominent during times of duress, and the adrenaline of teleporting into an arena was pretty duressful.
“Ha-ha-ha, very funny,” I muttered and reached behind my back. My gloved fingers closed around the cool blue steel handle of my Space Viking Axe or SVA for short. They’d been one of my most trusted weapons since I’d begun competing in the Crucible of Carnage. I pulled the foot-and-a-half long blue-gray cylinder from the magnetic sling on my back, passed my thumb over the blade engage button, and a laser-honed, razor-sharp slightly curved axe head appeared at the other end. It totally looked like the kind of medium length battle axe that Viking raiders had used circa Eight hundred A. D. which is why I called them Space Viking Axes.
I brought the blade of the SVA across the vines that wrapped around my right ankle, and it sliced through them as if they hadn’t even been there which I had totally expected. What I hadn’t expected was that as soon as I cut through them, the ones wrapped around the rest of my body and holding me up in the air cried like little babies and completely unwrapped themselves like snakes escaping a fire.
“Oh shit!” I was able to yell and then I started to fall through the air upside down.
My combat boosts kicked into high gear, and I twisted like an Olympic diver to get myself right side up just in time to bounce off a large branch. I fell too fast to be able to get a good grip on the limb, and all it ended up doing was knocking the air out of me in a whoosh and sent me ricocheting into another branch a few feet down like a pinball off a bumper.
“Ow! Ow!” I uttered as the second branch gave just a little then flung me back in the opposite direction. I managed to get the SVA up and into the trunk of the tree which slowed my fall a bit but before I came to a complete stop, the tree trunk literally spit the blade out with an audible “ptew”. I was still a good forty feet up and gravity took hold of me once again to send me plummeting to the jungle floor. My Parkour mod lit up like the fourth of July with little blue veins of potential routes I could take covering just ab
out every square inch of the world in my vision. A large branch rushed up at me, and I braced myself for the impact. My legs bent slightly like a coiled spring when my feet finally slammed into the tree branch. The bough bent but thankfully didn’t break, and I managed to surf my way down the remaining twenty-five feet to the ground like Tarzan in the animated Disney film, riding the branch like grinding a sweet rail on a skateboard.
I landed in a sweet roll and popped up on my feet right between the rough semi-circle that PoLarr, Nova, and Aurora had formed as they watched my descent.
“Did someone order up a ruggedly handsome, tree surfing, deadly, yet incredibly witty hero?” I quipped to cover the fact that I was kind of surprised I hadn't broken anything.
PoLarr raised her hand unconsciously. She looked up at it as if it had a will of its own and then quickly lowered it again. Nova shook her head and Aurora let out a small chuckle.
“Okay then,” I said with as much leadership aplomb as I could muster and dusted a few leaves and twigs from my armor. “Sitrep?”
“Um, we’re in a strange and deadly jungle with nothing but bladed weapons,” Nova replied without any sense of humor.
“Captain Obvious for the win,” I joked. Nova just stared at me.
“I recommend we get out of the open, maybe in the root structure of the tree, and take stock,” PoLarr suggested.
“Affirmative,” I said, and we jogged over to the large roots that grew out of the soft, dark, musty smelling earth of the jungle floor. There was a decent sized hollow created by several of the roots as they emerged from the ground and up into the base of the massive tree. All of us were able to squeeze past them comfortably and into the hollow where we could take a knee without hitting our heads.
I took quick stock of our situation. All of us were decked out in some form of camouflaged jungle armor. My standard black motocross chest plate and forearm protectors had been painted in a dappled pattern of greens, browns, and blacks so that they practically disappeared when I was up next to any vegetation. Weapons wise I had my SVAs, a large vibra-machete with a serrated edge at my waist, and one thermal grenade.
PoLarr’s normal armor had been painted the same colors, and her jetpacks exhaust had been modified so that it would burn dark green when activated, although with the amount of vegetation around I doubted she’d be able to maneuver very well below the tree canopy. She’d had to trade in the trusty Equalizers she had for two long, slightly curved tonfa blades like the one carried by the bad guy Kroenen in the first Hellboy movie. She could hold the handle in her hands, and the blades came out at a ninety-degree angle, one running the length of her entire forearm to protrude past her elbow, and the other poking about nine inches past the front of her fist. They were made from a black metal that gleamed bright blue from the razor edge. Tucked into little sheaths that were strapped to her thighs where her holsters normally belonged were twelve leaf bladed throwing knives, six per leg.
Nova’s typical blue and white Paladinian medieval style armor had been streamlined and painted greenish brown instead of its normal bright white and blue. Strapped to her back were two oversized Gurkha blades that would burn white hot when activated. She could also connect the handles together to make an awesomely badass looking double Ghurkha, which, when I thought about it, was a pretty rad band name. On her hips sat two micro-harpoons connected to mechanized winches and filament-thin rappelling wire that would allow her to shoot the harpoon-grapples up into the trees and propel her through the air. Kind of like the 3D maneuver gear from the Attack on Titan anime.
Aurora had on her standard battle dress uniform of a corset, thigh-high boots, boy shorts, and her cloak. Her boots had been altered for the jungle terrain and instead of heels had chunky, almost cleat like soles and her entire ensemble was alternating dark green and black. Her silver-white hair was pulled into a tight ponytail at the back of her head so as not to get caught in any branches or overgrowth. She had two ten-inch long recurved karambit knives in sheaths on either hip. I had watched her practice with the blades that were a version of which were standard self-defense weapons on her home planet, and she was as fast as she was deadly with them. Once pulled, she could twirl and spin the sand-blasted titanium blades in a hypnotic blur that had left a combat dummy in shreds on the floor of the gym.
Once we were huddled into the little root cave, the sounds of the jungle assaulted my ears. There seemed to be movement everywhere. Twigs snapped. Branches rustled. Some type of monkey howled in the treetops. Birds squawked violently. As well as a dozen animal calls, growls, and cries that I couldn't even begin to identify.
“Welcome champions!” Chi-Chesire’s energetic feline voice boomed out across the jungle as his face appeared against the backdrop of the treetops. “To the forest of Zoov Nuj Txeeg. A planet so inhospitable and deadly that no race has ever been able to colonize it. The thick underbrush is teaming with a thousand species that wish to eat you. Lizards, and bugs, and raptors, oh my! There will be two loot box drops, and the top four alliances advance out of a field of thirty-two. Who will emerge as lords of the jungle?”
“Okay,” I said as soon as Chi-Chesire’s face faded from view, “clearly those two loot boxes are going to be incredibly valuable. I say we fan out in a loose line and start to comb the jungle for where they could be. Nova and PoLarr, you take the treetop level while Aurora and I will take the ground. Let’s all stay in visual contact if possible.”
“Agreed,” Nova said. PoLarr and Aurora nodded in agreement.
“Alright,” I said as I looked each of my alliance mates in the eye. “Team Havak go!”
We all emerged from our little root hut. PoLarr fired up her jetpack and flew up close to the tree canopy. Nova unsheathed her massive Ghurka blades and activated her grappling harpoon. They shot out from her hips in little bursts of compressed air and up into the tree trunks. With a wicked grin, she sprang up twenty feet into the air and began to swing from tree to tree almost like Spidey in the PS4 game.
I drew my machete, activated the vibra function which made the blade vibrate so fast that the naked eye couldn’t detect any motion at all, and started to hack my way through the underbrush.
With a pinwheel spin of her Karambits Aurora danced off to my left and disappeared into the thick jungle growth.
After ten minutes I’d gotten about ten yards into the jungle. My upgrade was working like a charm because my shoulder still felt strong and fresh even though I had been working nonstop to chop away the thick ferns and creeping ivy that was like a shoulder-high wall across the jungle floor.
I had just slashed down a particularly lush plant with bright purple sap that ran like maple syrup from the inch thick fronds when I found myself face to face with a champion who looked like a two-legged salamander. She had just cut away a swath of jungle with a large two-handed scythe. Behind her was a shorter alien with dark brown leather skin that had tiny horns covering every inch of his exposed flesh and a squat, tank looking creature on all fours with what looked like two dull green barrels embedded into its armadillo-like shell.
We stood looking at each other for a surprised second. I actually raised my hand in a wave and smiled before I had to leap out of the way of a double stream of a flaming liquid somewhat like gasoline only gelled from the openings of the tank creature’s natural protection. I dive-rolled into a thicket of brush and barely blocked the scythe blade with the machete as it aimed to take my head off.
“Hey, guys!” I grunted under the leverage of the longer weapon. “Ran into a little company down here.”
Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of Horn-Face as his fists doubled in size, essentially turning them into spiked maces, and he readied himself to attack. Fire-Dillo flanked Horn-Face and started to move, very slowly, to face me in order to let loose another stream of incinerating flame in my direction. The swath of jungle where his last blast had fallen was now charred and smoldering as the gelled fuel burned out. The foliage of this particular jungle must have ha
d a tremendous amount of water content because the napalm-like substance hadn’t started a huge fire.
“Havak!” Sycthe-Mander spat at me, her voice wet and high-pitched. “Your luck runs out this day. Silver-Tier is no place for--”
Her voice was cut off as one of Nova’s giant Ghurka swords separated her head from the rest of her body. Neon blue blood geysered from the stump as Sycthe-Mander’s heart continued to pump, not realizing that there was no brain to send oxygen to anymore.
Horn-Face screamed and swung his fist at me. I dropped the machete, ducked under the blow, reached over my shoulder, and brought my SVA’s off their magnetic holders. With a criss-cross swipe of my arms, just as the laser-honed axe heads deployed, I slashed at Horn-Face’s torso. His swing had taken him off balance, and my blades caught him on either side of his neck as they drove across and down. He had half a second to register shock and dismay before the top half of his body, from the left side of his neck down to his right hip, slid from the bottom half.
Nova and I turned to Flame-Dillo who was charging us. We each leapt out of the way, and the stout, armored flame tank on four legs just barreled past and into the underbrush, apparently deciding that discretion was the better part of valor.
“Thanks, Nova,” I said as I resheathed the SVAs and picked the vibra-machete off the ground.
“You do have the best and the worst luck all at the same time,” she said, smiled, and shot back up into the treetops.
“Hey, sugars?” Aurora’s sultry voice came over the comm. “I found something that ya’ll might want to come and see.”
“Copy that,” I responded and began to cut my way through the brush toward where her position showed on my Occuhancers. A few minutes of nonstop chopping, and I emerged into a small clearing in the jungle brush.
Aurora stood near the entrance to a two-story tall square-topped pyramid. It was hewn from jade green granite and looked to be centuries old. The jungle had all but reclaimed the space for itself with the surface of the pyramid covered in vines, ferns, and scrub brush. The way the huge blocks seemed to grow out of the dark soil under the thick layer of fallen leaves made me think that what we saw was the very top of a much larger structure that sank beneath the jungle floor like the underside of a massive iceberg.