The Blood Fist tore through the steal like cheap foil. Only after he had burst up into the air did Asmundre remember that Yohan was still above, but he spotted the man limping away through the junk with his hands covering his head. Bits and bobs of torn metal rained around Asmundre - around the mech.
When the machine came to life, the screens had switched from black to an image outside the mech one at a time, until they formed in mosaic an image of his surroundings. When he raised his arm, the machine raised it’s arm. When he took a step, it lurched forward. And when he leapt, the Blood Fist shot through the roof of the cave.
The mech crashed down, sinking to it’s knees in the junk. The exoskeleton resisted Asmundre’s steps in echo of the resistance the larger machine must be facing as it waded through a pile of metal. Asmundre yanked the mech’s foot free and climbed onto the surface. He tottered for a moment, the exoskeleton shifting as the Blood Fist rocked. Tricky. Not as natural as his arm, which had long since become part of him, driving the blood mech felt like trying to run in a dream. He knew what he wanted to do, where he wanted to go, but the machine’s stride was long and slow.
Asmundre flexed every joint, listening to the way the cogs hidden below him ground with each motion. He raised the mech’s hand and examined the fingers, making and unmaking his fist. The panels outlined his fingers in a thin blue line. They didn’t just show him the outside world, they enhanced it. Besides the blue line around his own mech, the edges of everything leapt out at him. When he glanced down toward the rock his home huddled against, he saw the range - 5 clicks, give or take - though the machine did not see fit to tell him how far a click was.
Oh, this was awesome. Asmundre picked up a chunk a metal - a massive discarded piece of scrap bigger than his house and threw it. This must be how his father felt - had felt - in his exoskeleton. Powerful. Like he could do anything.
And, oh, he knew just wear to start.
Lurching forward, he started toward the village. Soon he fell into long loping strides. The mech could fly, assuming he figured out how, but for now he enjoyed the heavy way it clunked around him. He’d always known driving a blood mech would be exciting, but he’d also imagined pulling levers or pushing buttons. He’d imagined heaps and heaps of blood-traced displays, like the one that counted down the time on the hot box in little green letters. Nothing at all like this.
The mechs of those two Midgard goons were still in the village where he’d last seen them. One big, square, and bulky, the other thin and lithe. But big was a relative term - they didn’t seem so tall now. The Blood Fist was a head above the larger of them. As Asmundre charged down the slope, lights flashed on on their shoulders. Both of the mechs turned to face him.
Asmundre pulled his fist back and plunged forward. He caught the larger of the two across the metal chin. The impact shook the machine around him, sending a shock wave back through the exoskeleton hard enough to numb his stump.
“Yohan, you fucking traitor,” Jorge sneered in his ear.
Asmundre jumped, spinning around, losing his balance and staggering back a step as the machine tried to keep up with his motion. Jorge wasn’t there. It’d been the machine, whispering in his ear.
“Not Yohan,” he said. “You don’t remember me, Jorge?”
“What?”
Hugo stepped in front of the smaller mech.
“You stopped me outside the shop, remember?” Asmundre wished he could see Jorge’s ugly pointed face. “Tried to take my arm. You remember that, right?”
“What are you doing in the Blood Fist?”
“Driving it. Obviously.” Asmundre threw himself forward again. Hugo raised his hands and caught Asmundre’s fist in hard steel fingers. Hugo skidded back a step, but it had taken both hands for the other mech to stop one of Asmundre’s. So he hit him with the other one. Metal crunched.
Jorge drew a knife. Fitting - but in the hand of a blood mech, the knife was a massive piece of steel - maybe twelve feet long. The edge shimmered as Jorge stepped forward. Holding it with both hands, Jorge drove it downward. As Hugo staggered back, Asmundre reached up and caught the blade. Sparks shot off his fingers and the knife screeched. Some kind of saw whirred along the edge, a toothed chain grinding into Blood Fist’s hand.
“That machine belongs to the Midgard,” Jorge said, grunting with the effort of pushing the knife toward Asmundre. “Get out of it now.”
“Where’s my sister?”
The blade inched inexorably back, sliding toward Jorge’s face even as it cut through Asmundre’s fingers. Odd how he already thought of them as his fingers, and not the machine’s. Jorge breathed heavily in his ear.
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“Where is she? What did you do to her?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Asmundre yelled and slammed the knife forward. Just before it sank into the metal face of Jorge’s mech - just as pointy as the man inside - a massive hammer took Asmundre in the side of the head and sent him sprawling.
His head rang. A dark shape flashed downward toward his face, and he rolled just as the hammer in Hugo’s hand smashed into the ground. Hugo wretched it up and swung it again, and Asmundre took it in the shoulder before he could get all the way back to his feet. He tumbled sideways, the junk bound up around his ankles, and he fell again.
Hugo advanced on him. Asmundre pushed himself up, backed up a step. Jorge passed his big knife from hand to hand, Hugo hefted his hammer.
“Hey kid,” Yohan’s voice crackled in his ear. The former Midgard was faint, as if yelling down a long tube. “Kid, can you hear me?”
“Yohan?”
Asmundre kept his metal hands ready as Jorge circled left and Hugo right. He might be bigger than them, but that hammer packed a serious punch.
“Yes! Ha! I got this old piece of junk to work!” A burst of static interrupted him. “..it’s name?”
“What?”
Hugo stepped forward and swung. Asmundre dodged sideways and took Jorge’s knife to the gut, the chain screaming as it tore across Blood Fist’s armor. That little red tear drop at the edge of the display started blinking again.
“Use the fist. They’re no match for you.”
Asmundre shoved Jorge away with a grunt. “I tried punching.”
“No, use the damn fist. Repeat after me - Homing blood fist!”
What? Hugo’s hammer flew for his head. Asmundre caught it with his left hand, fingers wrapping around the shaft, just in time to hold it back. He grunted as he pushed against it. Behind Hugo, on a rise above the junk, stood a small figure in a mechanical exoskeleton - his father’s exoskeleton. “Say it,” Yohan said.
That couldn’t possible do anything. “Homing blood fist,” Asmundre said through gritted teeth. The display lit up. A circle appeared, shrinking, centering itself on the Thorn Hammer, then blinking. Asmundre clenched his fist and extended it forward as the circle flashed red and yellow, then suddenly green. An instant later, his fist - the machine’s fist - shot forward on a stream of fire. It struck Hugo’s mech in the chest and tore through the metal, bursting out the far side. It remained connected to his arm by a thick chain, which then began to clink back one link at a time.
Hugo staggered. The fist reeled back in, sticking for a moment in the hole it had made, then Hugo’s machine fell sideways. Asmundre wrenched his fist free and searched for Jorge.
He picked up Hugo’s hammer, appreciating the weight of it. Jorge waited for him knife drawn, but somehow instead of looking feral as it had before, the metal face of his machine had become scared. Asmundre hefted the hammer in both hands.
“Hang on,” Jorge said. “Hang on, you’ve got the touch, haven’t you? You want to be a mech pilot, kid? There’s a couple of openings.”
“You’re a weasel.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure. I’m a weasel. You got me. I can get you in - you can be Midgard.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Yohan said.
Asmundre raised the hammer. “Tell me where my sister is.”
Jorge raised both hands, palms out, taking another step back. “I don’t know anything about your sister. But maybe - maybe I can help you find her.”
“I know what you do to kids with the touch, Jorge.” He brought the hammer down.
“I’m not -” Jorge cutoff with a crunch. He tried to catch the hammer, but his little mech was nothing compared to Blood Fist. The hammer smashed through the smaller machine’s hands and into his head, crushing it down into the mech’s body. The machine sparked and fell into the junk, indistinguishable from the trash around it. Asmundre left the hammer there.
“Good job kid.”
Asmundre searched the heaps for Yohan and found him picking his way down the hill with a metal canister cradled in the exoskeleton’s arms. The adrenaline left a void as it rushed out of Asmundre and he suddenly felt tired and absolutely spent. One by one he undid the straps then let himself sag out of the harness. Using it to support himself, he opened the hatch and sucked in the night air.
Down below, Yohan had reached the mech’s feet. The canister had a tube dangling from one end, which he plugged into a port in the side of the mech’s leg. “That’s only about two liters,” he called up, rubbing his hands on his pants. “Not much but it ought to be enough to get over the wall.”
Asmundre glanced back at the display - the red drop had vanished. Then he shook his head. “I’m not going without my sister.”
“She’s already at Valhalla boy, and I’m sure Jorge will be back quick after he drops her off.”
Huh? “I just crushed Jorge, didn’t I?”
Yohan looked between Asmundre and the rubble under Hugo’s hammer, unable to decide which to keep his gaze on. “Oh,” he said. Then he laughed. “You thought those two were Hugo and Jorge?”
Well - yes. Asmundre shrugged.
“Thorn Hammer makes Blood Fist look like a little kid, uh - kid.”
“It’s Asmundre.”
Yohan turned away to yank the canister, now drained, out of the blood mech’s leg. “Those two were just some low-level enforcers. Nobodies. Barely even Midgard and not skilled enough to drive a real mech. No - we need to be long gone before the real Midgard come back, or they’ll do to you what you just did to that one.” He punctuated his sentence by kicking the downed mech. “Now let’s go, Pilot. We’ve got some stuff to do first if we want to have any hope of rescuing your sister from Valhalla.”
As Yohan clambered up the side of the mech, the exoskeleton rendering him nimble, Asmundre sat down in the hatch and watched the first glimmer of dawn strike the top of the wall. Down here, dawn was still minutes away, and if he watched long enough he could see the edge of the morning creep down that steel face.
Just thugs. Not Hugo and Jorge. He almost wanted to laugh.