by Logan Jacobs
I was about to lose all hope as my anger faded and dark dread took its place when I saw a familiar spherical bulge wrapped up in the tattered strips of gauze near the mummy’s stomach. I looked down and saw the pin of my high explosive grenade as it dangled on my combat harness.
I had maybe two seconds before the incredibly powerful baseball sized device went off with a blast that would make C4 look like a pussy, so I pulled my knees up suddenly as close to my chest as I could and wedged them against the mummy’s chest as it reared up to deliver a final, skull crushing blow. Then I kicked out with every bit of strength I had left and used the remaining momentum to roll behind what was left of the sarcophagus.
The mummy flew a few feet into the air, somersaulted, and landed on its feet. The light of hell blazed behind its eyes and satan’s cruel laugh began again in its throat for a brief second before the grenade went off and blew the undead beast to pieces.
I’d had just enough time to cover my ears against the blast which was deafening in the enclosed stone room. When the dust settled the mummy was there no longer. All that was left was a leg and the thing’s hideous skull. The jaw had been blown off, and it sat dark and lifeless in the corner of the room. I watched as time finally caught up to it in an instant and the ancient bones turned to dust before my eyes.
I had a brief second of silence as I collected my SVAs and reslung them on their magnetic holders on my back, and then the whole room began to rumble and shake.
“Oh fuck right off!” I yelled in frustration and made a move to run toward the hallway that had taken me into the room. Then I watched as the walls fell and blocked the hallway in a pile of green rock. Cracks spiderwebbed the ceiling and large chunks of the granite began to crash all around me, but my Parkour mod managed to keep me one step ahead of the slabs of rocky death as patches of bright blue sky began to appear.
I wasn’t sure, but I thought I felt the floor beneath me begin to sink, and my stomach dropped as if I were on a roller coaster. I climbed up on top of a pile of rock and scrambled toward the swath of blue sky above me.
Going on blind faith I reached up with my arm as the walls began to close in around me, and I knew I was going to be crushed.
Then I saw a bright green angel soar down from the heavens above. PoLarr grabbed my outstretched hand and pulled me from what would become a dark doom just as the pyramid sank into the jungle floor with the sound of crashing rocks. Right before the last boulder fell and closed the ruins off for all of time, I threw out my left hand and called out hopefully with my mind. The star weapon spun through a thick cloud of green granite dust and into my hand.
PoLarr flew as high as she could and then set me down at the edge of the clearing where the top of the pyramid had once stood. Nova and Aurora grabbed me and held me up by my shoulders.
“Marc,” Nova yelled concerned, “are you okay?”
“Yes,” I coughed out a mouthful of grime and held up the star weapon so that the sunlight could glint off the bright silver blades. “I’m better than okay. I have a motherfucking glaive!”
Chapter Eleven
“A glaive?” PoLarr yelled and punched me in the arm. “Get the fuck out of here.”
“I will not,” I said as I whacked her back. “I totally had to fight a mummy to get it too.”
“You had to fight someone’s mother?” Nova questioned confused.
“Not mommy,” I corrected. “Mummy. Old dead dude wrapped up in lots of bandages apparently sent from the pit of hades.”
“Oh,” Nova uttered and nodded her head. “That makes sense. What is a glaive?”
“It’s this cool made up weapon from a--” I started to explain.
“Totally cheesy action movie called Krull from like, the mid-Eighties,” PoLarr finished for me.
“Check it out,” I said like a kid with a new toy as I swung my arm around in an arc and sent the glaive spinning out into the jungle. It cut a small path through the brush and returned to my hand with a satisfying ching.
“That is, as you would say, pretty fucking cool,” Aurora noted and eyed the giant remote control throwing star. “Did the pyramid have the loot crate?”
“Oh yeah,” I remembered and pulled the boost cards out of my cargo pocket and looked at them. “Looks like we got ultraviolet heat vision for five minutes, three times stealth factor for five minutes, and something called spider monkey for five minutes. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that's for climbing. See what I did there? With the limb?”
“Yes, very funny,” Nova said while she decidedly did not laugh. “Who should get what?”
“Ultraviolet vision could be very useful from my high up vantage point,” PoLarr said. “I could spot enemies hiding in the bush. Don’t you dare comment on what I just said, Marc.”
“Who me?” I said and shrugged although I desperately wanted to make a joke.
“I’ll take the stealth,” Nova said and grabbed the card. “Sneaking around is not my best feature.”
“Aurora, I guess we have to roshambo for it,” I said and turned to her.
“I will do nothing that vulgar,” Aurora said somewhat shocked, “at least not in the jungle. There are bugs. I’ve got my dark matter and still have plenty of energy to veil myself if PoLarr spots any baddies lurking in the undergrowth.”
“I guess I shall be able to climb like a monkey,” I said. “Before we activate the boosts, what the hell has been going on up here? How long was I in the chamber of ancient horribleness?”
As if to answer my question, Chi-Chesire’s face appeared on the backdrop of treetops next to a large bracket tree with several large Xs over team names.
“Team Havak successfully conquers the Tomb of Targor the Terrible!” He said excitedly. “Six teams remain in our rumble in the jungle, folks! Remember, only the top four will advance. Who shall meet their doom in the oppressive heat and humidity of this inhospitable landscape? Let’s make it more interesting shall we?”
Chi-Chesires face exploded outward in a mass of leaves, flapping wings, and loud screeches as a flock of large raptors dove from above the trees. They were pretty damn big, with wingspans that must have been ten to twelve feet from wing tip to wing tip. They looked like giant falcons but had the coloring of tropical parrots with bright red, blue, green, and gold feathers.
The raptors also must have had insane eyesight because I watched as one of them honed in on what I thought was a green leaf on the side of one of the trees. Its wings folded flat against its sleek body, and it dove at a forty-five degree angle until it was mere feet from the tree which is when it spread its mighty wings and reached out with two talon tipped claws that snatched a now screaming champion from the side of the tree.
The champion tried to get his bladed weapon up to stab at the bird but the raptor tossed him into the air and plucked his head off with one snap of its razor beak.
“What is with all the beheadings in this match?” I asked to no one in particular.
Two other raptors snatched the headless body out of the sky and tore it to shreds. A volley of arrows flew from another tree and hit yet another raptor in the eye. The bird squawked in pain and crashed head first into the trunk of the tree.
“Um, let's get out of the open,” I suggested. “And, maybe activate our boosts.”
I pressed my thumb against a small circle on the bottom of the card, and it turned blue in my hand. I then felt a rush of blood and adrenaline and a buzz at the base of my spine as the boost loaded into the nanochip that had been implanted there when I first became a champion. I had the sudden urge to run up the nearest tree I saw and swing into the branches. I also wanted to defecate into my hand and throw it at things. Thankfully I kept both impulses in check for the moment.
Nova and PoLarr activated their boosts as well. PoLarr seemed to stare just past my shoulder and then with a battle cry she activated her jetpack, twirled her tonfa blades, and shot into the underbrush just to my left hugging the ground. A second later screams came from the
PoLarr sized hole in the brush. I glanced at Nova and Aurora and without a word, we dove into the thick vegetation where PoLarr had just disappeared.
Ten feet in there was a roughly circular area of trampled brush that still had a criss-cross canopy of fern fronds, leaves, and vines that acted as a roof that I imagined kept us hidden from anyone or thing looking down from above. PoLarr was wrapped up in tight, close quarters combat with no less than five champions who attacked her with various bladed weapons. Right at the spot where the little chopped away tunnel led into the larger circular area, there was a dead champion with dark red blood still pouring from his lifeless body. His arms had been severed from his torso at the shoulder and lay on the ground next to the corpse. In their cold, dead grip was a hand-held mortar that looked like it had been aimed at the exact spot where we had gathered just a moment before. That must have been what her recently engaged ultraviolet vision had detected, and without concern for her own safety, she had flown into furious action like her Val’Keeyre training would have demanded of her.
And she still fought with violent purpose against overwhelming odds.
Her tonfa blades spun and twirled as she blocked blow after blow from a six-foot tall mosquito looking alien that held two short gladius type swords in its skinny arms. She deflected a swiping cut from Mosquito and at the same time lashed out with a wicked back kick that caught a ten foot long, two-foot thick python with arms right in the chin.
I felt a whisper of movement to my left and saw the slight telltale blur but otherwise completely invisible shimmer of Aurora’s veil as she crept quickly into the clearing. I glanced behind me to shout a command to Nova but when I looked back, she was nowhere to be seen. A rustle of brush was all I saw. That stealth boost much have been pretty damn powerful because subtle and quite Nova was not. I didn’t want to be outdone by my teammates so, with a shrug, I rushed into the clearing with a war cry. I figured I could help conceal the motions of Nova and Aurora if everyone was focused on the screaming idiot who ran full force into the melee.
And I was more than happy to be that idiot.
Python-Head had recovered from the heel to his face and slithered back up to PoLarr’s back. Gladiator-Squito was fucking fast, and it was all she could do to keep up with the constant flurry of sword strikes as he flitted around her. Python-Head coiled a few feet away, and I could tell he was going to strike from a distance. In one motion I threw the glaive out, gave it a quick mental command, and drew my SVA with my right hand. The glaive shot out a spinning pinwheel of death and caught Python-Head just as he launched his muscled body at PoLarr. The glaive caught him mid-strike and sliced into his head right down the middle. It followed Python-Head’s body all the way down his scaled body before it flew back into my left hand.
“Ow,” Python-Head hissed and his body literally fell in half.
I heard a twig snap behind me, spun around and brought the SVA up in time to block a rapier thrust from a pale-blue female alien whose skin rippled like liquid metal.
The rapier was actually just her right arm elongated into a deadly point, and her left hand had flattened into a round metal shield that she used to block my counter strike. She opened her mouth to snarl at me, and all that came out was a loud mid-Nineties modem noise. The inside of her mouth looked like a circuit board from Star Trek TNG that pulsed with red light. Her eyes were actually clusters of what looked like about a thousand mini-camera lenses.
Oh, and she was fast as hell.
Female T-1000 stabbed at me again and again with her rapier arm as she danced back and forth like an Olympic fencer hopped up on Human Growth Hormone. The whole while screeching at me with her Twenty-eight hundred baud voice. My SVA was not a match for this type of combat, and it was all I could do to use it and the glaive in my left hand to parry the strikes.
“Move her to your left,” I heard Nova’s voice whisper in my comm. I didn’t have time to answer because the pinky thin rapier blade nearly stabbed me in the neck. I shoulder rolled to my left and came up in a crouch a few feet away from Female T-1000. She skipped forward as her shield hand elongated into another rapier and she stabbed the ground violently where I had been only a millisecond before.
I’d rolled again so that her back was next to the thick foliage that made up the makeshift wall of our little battle circle. I tried to dodge again, but she’d been expecting the movement, and I felt a hot stab of pain as one of her rapiers sank into the soft flesh of my left shoulder. Once the point protruded out of my back, it morphed and turned itself into a hook that curled over the top of my shoulder. My regen mod locked down the pain, and I could actually feel my flesh trying to mend itself back together, but I couldn’t move away.
Female T-1000 snickered in victory as she pulled me toward her inexorably. Her blue-chrome lips pulled into a computer chip smile as she reared back her other rapier arm, the tip pointed right at my head. Then two massive Ghurka blades emerged from her chest in a spray of red sparks. Her head jerked back and forth, and her mouth opened and closed in a staccato clicking as red energy sprayed out like electronic blood. The Ghurka blades moved slowly down and then crossed over each other neatly cutting Female T-1000 in two. The noise from her face turned into the sound of a hard drive dying and then she burst into an acrid blue-red flame that put off black acrid smoke.
Nova stood in the spot where Female T-1000 had been only a moment earlier with a huge smile on her face.
“I’m sneaky,” she said before we both turned back to the center of the clearing in time to see PoLarr cut Gladiator-Squito’s proboscis from his face. He buzzed in pain as he dropped his two swords, and his insect hands flew to the thin stump that now oozed black blood. PoLarr wasted no time and ran one of the long blades of her tonfa sword in his chest. The buzzing stopped, and he fell to the ground.
She saw us and grinned ferociously. Then the brush over her exploded inward in a blast of leaves, and a short spear sank into her belly.
“PoLarr!” I screamed and ran over to her, catching her as she fell backward. At the same time, the remaining two enemy champions emerged from where they’d held back, concealed in the cover of the underbrush all around us. One was a medium sized blob-like alien who had covered every inch of his pale pink skin with dirt, leaves, and branches in a kind of makeshift Gilly suit and held what looked like mini pitchforks in each hand that glowed red hot and trailed little tendrils of smoke as they burned the surrounding air. The other alien was a run of the mill humanoid alien who looked just like an Earthling except he had indigo skin, antlers, and a big circular saw where his left hand should have been that roared angrily.
They emerged not a foot away from where I was crouched over PoLarr as she grimaced in pain with her hands wrapped around the haft of the short spear that protruded from her belly. The enemy champions grinned in victory as they raised their weapons to smite us. I’d dropped my SVA and the glaive as I’d rushed to catch PoLarr, and there was no way I could get my arms out from where they cradled her torso. Nova, while now very stealthy, still wasn’t the fastest and there was no way she was going to be able to cover the distance between us in time.
I prepared myself for death and hoped that by going first I’d buy enough time for Nova to avenge me, but then I watched in fascination as a large, violet gash opened up Saw-Arm’s belly and his intestines spooled out of his gut like a pile of over cooked noodles.
“Ghunk,” he grunted and fell over. His spinning circular saw hand flopped over and landed on his neck. Violet blood and gristle sprayed into the air as he chopped his own head off.
I saw a ripple in reality behind Pitch-Forks just before he flipped in on himself and folded like a spring bladed knife opening, only in reverse. He landed in a heap next to the mangled remains of his buddy, and I saw blue life force burst from his mouth like steam on a cold day. It flowed into the shimmer of air just above his mouth until it was all but drained. Then Aurora’s voluptuous body seemed to melt into existence as she straddled the now dead alien’s ches
t.
I didn’t have time to celebrate because the ground around me thudded from the impact of a half a dozen of the medium sized spears. My head whipped up, and I saw what for all intents and purposes was a spear gatling gun bolted on the back of a giant tree sloth that hung off a limb a hundred feet in the air. It was operated by a female squirrel alien with a bright orange mohawk. I watched as she loaded another belt of spears into the open breach of the spear-chaingun and racked the bolt. The VW bug sized sloth began to climb the tree limb so that she could get a better angle on us.
“Move!” I shouted and drug PoLarr into the underbrush. Nova kicked the still smoking corpse of Female T-1000 while Aurora grabbed the hot pitchforks and tossed them into the leaves on the other side of the clearing. Black smoke billowed from the combo of burning electronic guts and the damp jungle foliage and obscured Squirrel-Girl and Sloth-Tank from view. If we couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see us.
PoLarr grunted beneath me, and her chest rose and fell in shallow breaths. I glanced down at the wound and the Combat Medic upgrade buzzed at the base of my skull. I did not like what it had to tell me. The wound was bad. Very bad.
“Marc, I’m sorry,” she gasped.
“Shut up,” I yelled at her. “I will give you hell for jumping into danger without your teammates when we get back to the gym after we murder every last one of these motherfuckers to win this match, okay. For now, just shut up. Oh, and this is going to hurt.”
Without warning I yanked the spear out of her belly. She screamed but to her credit, did not pass out. Bright blue blood poured from the wound, so I pulled some first aid pads out of a pouch on my belt and jammed them into the bloody hole. In seconds they was soaked through. If I didn’t figure something out quick, PoLarr was going to bleed out.