Arena 3

by Logan Jacobs

  A crazy idea flashed through my brain. Without giving it another thought, I picked up my SVA, ran the blade over the palm of my hand and squeezed. My dark maroon blood dripped into the wound and mingled with her blue. A deep purple spread as our blood mixed, and I watched as the regen mod that coursed through my veins started to course through her’s. Blood vessels mended. Capillaries fused together. A thin, delicate scab formed over the wound in her belly, and the torrent of blood stopped. It still must have hurt like a motherfucker, but I could tell that some of her fear and tension had left PoLarr’s face.

  “Well, that was unconventional,” she laughed up at me and then winched. “Laughing hurts.”

  “Then don’t do it,” I responded and felt some of the fear that had wormed its way up from the pit of my belly recede.

  “Oh, well, well, well,” Chi-Chesire’s voice boomed from above. The thick layer of smoke made it so I couldn't see his fat, smug cat face. Which was probably a good thing at the moment. “We are down to five teams left. Who will advance and who will meet their doom?”

  “You’re gonna have to fend for yourself here for a few minutes, PoLarr,” I said as I handed her the glaive. “Throw this and just think where you want it to go.”

  “Copy that,” she sighed and took the glaive in her right hand. The gem in its center glowed, and I saw a spark flare in her eyes at the same time as I felt the connection I had to the mind-controlled switchblade throwing star fade. Then I picked up my SVA and unsheathed its twin from my back.

  “Aurora! Nova!” I yelled out. A second later both of them were at my side, their own blades held as if they were hungry in their hands and vengeance was burning in their hearts. “Let’s go kick some ass.”

  Aurora veiled and shot up on a wafer thin disk of dark matter.

  “Hop on, Havak,” Nova demanded as her grappling-harpoon shot up through the smoke. I jumped on her back, and we rocketed into the air.

  Wind whipped my sweat-soaked hair as we soared into the tree tops.

  “Thanks for the lift, babe,” I tossed out as I let go of her back and fell.

  She continued on into the leaves of one of the huge tree’s branches. A second later I heard the clink of metal on metal.

  I fell about ten feet, slung my SVA, and grabbed a nearby vine with my left hand. My downward momentum swung me out and away from the tree, and I saw the Sloth-Tank three trees over. Squirrel-Girl sent a steady stream of the spears at Aurora’s dark matter disk as it zoomed around the trunk of another tree. Aurora was after a group of champions who had found a hollowed out part of the tree to hide out in and shoot arrows from. It must have been Squirrel-Girl’s alliance mates because she was singularly focused on bringing Aurora down.

  I let go of the vine at the top of my parabolic arc, front flipped in the air, sheathed my other SVA, grabbed a branch, and began to swing through the treetops as if they were monkey bars on a playground. One of the Raptors caught sight of me and tried to snatch me out of the air, but the combat awareness mod blared in my brain, and as the bird was about to pluck me from the branches, I let go and kicked out with both of my feet.

  I hit the giant falcon square in its double wide breast and heard its hollow bones break. The bird cried out in pain and banked off to the left. I reached out and grabbed its feet in both my hands and used the injured bird like a hang glider.

  I steered the Raptor toward the Sloth-Tank and let go once we were fifty feet above the beast as it clung to the tree with its climbing claw appendages. I star-fished my arms and legs to slow my airspeed and just before I crashed into the Tank-Sloth’s light brown pelt I flipped again, pulled my SVAs, deployed the bloodthirsty blades, and sank them with all the momentum I had into the beast’s back.

  In seemingly slow motion it raised its head and let out a low-pitched moan that sounded like a super-slowed down recording of a grizzly bear. I felt the cry deep in my bowels, and it made me smile.

  Squirrel-Girl whipped her head around lightning fast, especially when juxtaposed against the agonizing slow movements of the sloth. She jumped up from behind her spear cannon and scurried over to where I hung to the beast’s side like I was a particularly tasty nut.

  From the corner of my eye I saw Aurora unveil and shoot into the hole in the tree as bolts of destructive dark matter shot from her hands. I couldn’t watch longer because I had to roll out of the way of Squirrel-Girl’s tail which had half a dozen spiked balls on chains instead of a big ball of fluff. They sailed past my head and struck the sloth, and It wailed again as it lost its grip on the tree.

  Squirrel-Girl and I both held on for dear life as Sloth-Tank flipped upside down on the branch, held on for the briefest of seconds, then with claw tipped fingers scrabbling desperately, let go of the branch completely. We fell straight down for at least a hundred feet, and I thought we were going to get squished under its bulk as we smashed into the ground, but just before we careened into the jungle floor like a fur covered meteor two Raptors sank their talons into the sloth’s hide and soared back into the air.

  Squirrel-Girl and I stared at each other for a beat as wind whipped at our bodies, but then we both shrugged and attacked at the same time.

  I had yanked my right handed SVA out of the sloth’s body with a bloody squish as the raptors arrested his fall before attempting to fly off to feast upon his body and used it to slash at the gore-covered blade at her hands. Simultaneously, she had raised her lower half up to grab the sloths fur with her finger-like toes and swung one of the medium sized spears that looked like a full sized spear in her hands, at my face. Just then one of the Raptors lost its grip on its half of the sloth, and we swung out of control as the other Raptor couldn’t hold all our weight aloft.

  We bounced off a tree trunk before the first Raptor dove in and grabbed hold again. Squirrel-Girl and I were now right side up but totally disoriented. The Tank-Sloth let out a terrified wail, and I heard the disgusting sound of flesh tearing. The Raptors, each wanting the sloth for themselves, flapped their massive wings in the opposite direction and were literally tearing the sloth slowly in half.

  From my left, I saw Nova roll out onto the thick limb of one of the trees and come up with her Ghurka blades spinning. She had connected the handles and twirled the big blades around her like Darth Maul as an alien with the body of a scorpion and the torso of a naked humanoid female advanced on her. It snapped at Nova with huge, serrated edged claws, but my orange-skinned girlfriend deftly blocked the attack and jumped back as the Cent-Corpion tried to sting her with the kitchen-knife-sized stinger on the end of its tail. Then Nova spun out of the way, sliced the end of the tail off, used her bottom blade to cut through three of the alien’s six legs, and kicked it off the branch where it promptly fell to its death.

  My attention was brought back to Squirrel girl as she launched herself at me, and I blocked a strike from her ball and chain tail as I brought my SVA filled fist into her face.

  “Youfuckingcocksuckingassholethatfuckinghurtyoudick!” Squirrel girl yelled at me in a high pitched Alvin and the Chipmunks voice.

  “What did you just say?” I yelled back, cause I honestly only caught about half of it.

  “FuckyouHavakI’mgoingtomurderyourass,” she squeaked. She was just about to smash me with her medieval weapon tail-appendage when, from out of fucking nowhere, the glaive shot through the air and cut if off where it connected to her ass.

  I looked down and saw PoLarr on one knee as she held herself up on a vine stump. She shot me a “Devil’s Horns” sign with her right hand.

  “Agghmyfuckingtailyouchoppedoffmyfuckingtail--” Squirrell-Girl started to rattle off just as I kicked her in the face. She fell off the sloth and began flailing through the air. She only made it about twenty feet before a Raptor swooped in and snapped her entire top half in its beak.

  “Boring conversation anyway,” I said to myself as I scrambled to my feet on the Sloth-Tanks back. Somehow the thing had managed to get a claw into the Raptor that held its top half. The t
earing sound had stopped for a moment but I could see rivers of blood as they poured out of rips in the sloths skin.

  “Ohhh shiiiiittt!” I heard Aurora yell through the comm and a moment later I saw her shoot out of the dark hole in the tree trunk surrounded by a protective ball of dark matter. One of the last enemy champions, a giant walrus on two legs, loped out of the hole a second later with a look of utter terror on his face. Not a heartbeat later a swarm of five inch long termites exploded from the hole in the tree like a biblical plague. They overran the walrus alien and ate him as he ran. One second he was there and the next he was simply a walrus shaped mound of termites.

  Apparently this scared even the Raptors because they let go of the Sloth-Tank just as we were about to burst through the treetop canopy, and we began to tumble toward the ground.

  I assumed since I hadn’t teleported that Sloth-Tank was an actual champion and not just an oversized war horse which meant I needed to get rid of him before we crashed into the ground which, by my estimation, was going to be in about four seconds.

  As we fell, I slammed into the seat of the spear gatling gun. With one hand holding on for dear life, I reached up with the other and yanked back on the bolt and prayed that there were still a few spears left in the ammo belt.

  The ground rushed up to meet us as I swung the barrel around until Sloth-Tank’s head filled my vision, and I pulled the trigger. The last spear in the belt flew out and struck the sloth right between the eyes just before we smashed into the jungle floor in a cloud of dead leaves and angry termites.

  Chapter Twelve

  I landed in a heap and began to swat at my body with my eyes closed tight. I didn’t want the termites to eat my eyes. I guess they could just eat through my eyelids but rational thought had definitely taken a back seat. While I was swatting and kicking my legs like I was having a conniption, I felt a heavy weight smother me. I assumed it was the sloth and let out a muffled yell. After a second I realized that the sloth smelled like strawberry Chapstick and Irish Spring soap with a hint of Paul Mitchell Tea Tree shampoo. I was unaware that sloths were so particular about their personal grooming. Then the sloth began to kiss my face.

  “Marc! Stop kicking me, you idiot!” The sloth yelled in Artemis’ voice. “Open your eyes!”

  I did and saw Artemis’ angelic cherry-lipped face an inch above mine as she cupped my face in her hands. My upper half was spilled out of the bottom of my mat-trans tube which is where Artemis had apparently jumped on me. I kissed those very cherry lips and let a wave of relief wash over me. My hunch had been right about Sloth-Tank and as soon as I dispatched the speed challenged tree hugger I must have teleported back into the gym. It always took my brain a second or two to recalibrate once my molecules reformed and the events of the match flooded back into my memory.

  “PoLarr?” I shouted as I sat up and looked at Artemis.

  “Shh,” she said and brushed my sweaty hair out of my eyes. “It took the matter transmit AI a few extra minutes to separate your molecules from that of the sloth and about ten thousand angry Denarian Tree Termites. Nasty little progenitor fornicators. PoLarr is already in the med-bay and recovering well. How did you know that your regen upgrade would transfer to her through your blood?”

  “I didn’t,” I admitted. “It was all I could think of to make sure she didn’t die.”

  “It saved her life, Marc,” Artemis said and held my gaze. Her eyes were always like a glimpse into heaven itself after the chaos and carnage and bloodshed of a match. If it wasn’t for them and the amazing woman who they belonged to I was pretty sure I would have gone quite mad. Moments like this washed away all the killing and terror and the irony of a computer program AI housed in a bioengineered body being my link to my humanity was not lost on me.

  “By the Halberd of Hoggar the Horrendous!” Grizz bellowed as he appeared over us. “You are going to give me an oozing stomach demon, Havak!”

  “Huh wha?” I muttered. The adrenaline rush had gone and post-match brain fog was setting in very fast.

  “Stomach ulcer,” Artemis explained and helped me to my feet.

  “I am glad you all survived,” Grizz continued. “But it is a miracle of miraculous proportions. We need to double our efforts on coordinated teamwork. And I mean that for everyone, not just you Havak.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “We kind of fell apart there at the end, didn’t we?”

  “That is an understatement worthy of Unlak the Underestimator,” He said deadpan.

  “I don’t know who that is,” I replied just as deadpan.

  “Of course you don’t, he’s not called Unlak the Guy Everyone Knows is he?”

  “I’m so confused,” I said as I turned to Artemis suddenly very tired.

  “Come on,” she hushed. “That was a particularly rough match. Everyone else is in the med-bay getting some much needed Blue Betty.”

  Artemis helped me into the med-bay, and my limbs suddenly felt like they were socks filled with lead sand.

  “I feel terrible,” I moaned as she practically poured me onto one of the medical gurneys that emerged from the wall.

  “Downside to your regen mod,” Artemis explained as she passed a bio-scanner over my body. “Once it cycles off, your cells need to recuperate.”

  I glanced over and saw Nova and Aurora on either side of me. They lounged back in their reclined beds and each had an IV of Blue Betty connected to their arms. They waved as I laid my head against the memory foam pillow.

  Shiny metallic med-bot arms stretched down from the ceiling and in a flash had an IV of Blue Betty in my arm as well. I felt the familiar cool rush of the amino acid, electrolytes, and mild painkiller flow into my veins.

  “Oh, that’s the stuff right there,” I sighed.

  “Right, sugar?” Aurora drawled from my right. I could see several angry welts on her arms and shoulders. She saw me look at them and shrugged. “Termite bites.”

  I winced in empathy.

  “Those insects are a blight,” Nova added from my left. “I nearly succumbed to blind revulsion when they burst from the inside of that tree.”

  “Sugar, you are not saying anything slick to a can of oil,” Aurora nodded. I felt a small swell of pride at how my team was starting to pick up on my ridiculous use of euphemisms.

  There was an agreeing moan from the bed across the room from Aurora, and I looked over to see PoLarr raise her hand in a thumbs up. She was covered from head to toe in a translucent casing that made her look kind of like a sausage, and it was connected to several tubes that descended from the med-bot over her bed. The casing was clear but cloudy, like an inflatable pool toy made from old school polyvinyl chloride, and I could tell that she was alluringly naked inside. I watched as a small, spider-like robot crawled down one of the tubes from the medical console that protruded from the ceiling, entered the casing with a little plop and floated to PoLarr’s stomach area. It was very Matrix-y and kind of disconcerting.

  “Don’t worry, Marc,” Artemis said as if sensing my sudden unease. “It’s a flesh-synthesizer-bot. It will help mend PoLarr’s wound while in the Rejuva-skin casing. Should take about twelve hours but she’ll be good as new.”

  “Stop doing things like that!” I yelled at the PoLarr sausage. “Two matches and two major injuries! Stop being all valorous and shit.”

  Her thumbs up turned into the middle finger before she lowered the arm completely and let the creepy spider-robot thing do its job.

  “All right, Team Havak,” Grizz said to draw our attention as he stood before all of us with his hands on his mighty hips. “We shall start with the good. Or, adequate I should say. The amount of decapitation and dismemberment was commendable and made me swell with pride.”

  “Disturbing, but I’ll take it,” I mumbled as I felt the painkiller in the Blue Betty kick in.

  “You all also performed well as a combat unit,” Grizz added.

  “We be some bad mofos,” I slurred. This batch of Betty was particularly strong. Ar
temis made a face at my comment and tapped a few buttons on her forearm mounted holo-screen. My pain level remained manageable but I no longer felt stoned to the bejesus belt.

  “Until the debacle at the pyramid,” Grizz finished his thought and glared at us sternly. “Your instinct was correct in trying to give yourself protection, but it was a mistake to split yourselves up like that. Assume that anytime you encounter something that is that far out of the ordinary you should approach it as if it were an obstacle for the entire team.”

  “Kind of like a dungeon in D&D,” I nodded in agreement. Everyone looked at me like they had no idea what I was talking about. Which, I realized, they didn’t.

  “Did his brain not reform correctly?” Grizz asked Artemis.

  “His cerebral functions are all operating normally,” she answered as she checked a few of my vital signs and flashed a penlight into my eyes while she held my eyelids open with her fingers.

  “It’s a fantasy role-playing game on Earth,” I explained as I batted her fingers away with my hand. “You play as a team. No one would approach a dungeon by leaving team members on the outside while everyone else went inside. They’d have nothing to do and would just eat all the Cheetos.”

  “Check your readouts again, Artemis, I still don’t know what in the Great Cloud’s Catapult he is talking about,” Grizz said and shook his head.

  “Nevermind,” I shrugged. “I get it. Don’t split up when it looks like we might all be needed for something.”

  “Yes, exactly,” Grizz said and nodded. “After PoLarr pulled Marc from the crumbling ruins of the ancient temple all your coordinated teamwork went to the Eternal Burning Pitch Pit Where The Evil Dead Turmoil in a Woven For One Hand Basket.”

  “Indeed,” Artemis added, “You all very much twisted the canine on that one.”

  “There is so much wrong with what both of you just said that I don’t have the energy to either comment or correct,” I said and threw up my hands weakly.

  “Also, Havak, while I’m sure your improvised munition upgrade will come in handy at some point,” Grizz turned his attention directly to me, “it was probably not the best choice for a jungle planet.”