THE STORM AFTER THE CALM
----------------------------------------
It was a nightclub.
The anomalies had turned up at a nightclub. During the run there, he’d been rather hopeful that the anomalies were just a bunch of people who’d been displaced from their universe and were now partying like crazy. But upon arriving there and seeing the tape around the place, the cop cars parked outside, and wounded civilians who’d been evacuated, he knew at once he was dealing with more than just partiers.
This was further confirmed when an explosion blasted a hole into one side of the nightclub and a sentinel head came flying out, landing on the ground just at Dang’s feet, smoke emanating from it. The sentinel’s eyes dimmed slowly until it was fully extinguished. Dang picked the smoking head up. It was warm to the touch which meant it would have been scalding hot to a regular person.
Were sentinels battling each other in a nightclub? Or was there someone else in there with them?
Whichever it was, he couldn’t go in stupidly. He drew a deep breath. “Resonate,” he said, taking on the properties of the metal from which the sentinel was made, feeling himself get stronger instantly.
He took a step forward but a police officer immediately charged in his direction and blocked his path. “Sir, you can’t go in there. I’m sorry but I’m going to have to ask you to leave the area.”
“Relax,” Dang smiled at the officer and turned his hair silver. Glowing his eyes at the officer, he left him with a confused expression on his face. He slid his sunglasses back on. “I can deal with this kind of stuff. You and your boys just make sure no other civilians come in, alright?”
The officer was hesitant for a moment, his eyes wavering in confusion. But when there came another explosion from the nightclub and another sentinel head was sent flying, this one almost hitting the officer in the head [it would have been Dang if he hadn’t moved the officer out of the way in time], the officer nodded and stepped aside, granting Dang permission to go into the building.
Dang returned the officer’s nod then continued forward, hands in his pockets. He stepped over the tape all over the nightclub and headed straight for the nightclub’s entrance, listening to the sounds coming from inside the nightclub–consecutive blasts and loud yelling. There really was another person in there.
He strode in through the front entrance and had to duck at once to avoid being impaled by a sentinel hand that had been sent flying through the air. The hand dropped to the ground, twitched for a moment and then started to move again, crawling toward a sentinel that was currently doing battle with someone that had his fists engulfed in flame. Dang scowled in confusion. He assumed it was Wombat and had been about to ask when Wombat had gotten there when suddenly, the person split into four more people.
It was weird. The clones were made out of flame at first, and then formed into appearing more human-like. Their eyes still burned with flame, as did their hair…but there was no mistaking that they were clones.
Dang froze. Wombat couldn’t do that. At least not to the best of his knowledge.
Not to mention, this person looked somewhat taller than Wombat and was wearing a red leather jacket with a tall collar, black chains lining the shoulder, above a black T-shirt, with red chains around his neck. He wore leather pants too, chains dangling from his belt, and this was paired with black 19th century-styled boots.
Last time Dang had checked, Wombat dressed nothing like that.
The boy, and his clones charged at the sentinels. The clones moved just as fast as he did and acted independently, fighting differently from him, but with a similar level of strength, launching flame blast after flame blast at the sentinels. His flames actually were doing some solid damage. One sentinel was on the receiving end of a pinpoint blast of flame that caused it to explode with tremendous force, body parts rocketing in every direction.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Dang watched in awe what was going on, and it was only when the boy cried out and clutched his side that Dang moved. A sentinel had fired off a blade out of one of its fingertips - one the boy hadn’t seen coming. It had gone straight into his side, temporarily distracting the stranger from the battle and leaving him open to a powerful pulse blast that sent him flying. The stranger crashed into a wall and slid to the ground where he remained, unmoving. The clones he’d created vanished at once. Clearly, it required concentration or a certain degree of consciousness to keep the clones going.
The remaining of the sentinels started to advance on the boy who looked like he might have been knocked out cold. Dang grunted and shot forward. He slammed a hand into the back of a sentinel’s head from behind, and sent it flying right off. The sentinel’s headless body spun around but Dang slammed a fist straight into its chest and ripped it apart before it could launch any failsafe attacks.
The destruction of a sentinel caused the others to halt and turn to Dang, diverting their attention back to him. Dang tensed and held up both fists.
“Rematch?”
The sentinels responded with whirring sounds and then attacked. These were different from the first ones Dang encountered back at the construction site. They were quicker, and they could morph body parts, which Dang learned the hard way. Dang had moved back to avoid being grabbed by a sentinel hand, only for the hand to morph into a fourteen-inch blade at the last moment, piercing Dang’s skin and flesh, despite the activated Resonate.
Dang put more space between himself and the sentinels before they could follow up with more brutal attacks. His wound started to heal almost immediately. He nodded, knowing now not to let the sentinels get too close if they were capable of reshaping themselves to adjust to situations.
“Alright,” he smiled. “My turn.”
What the sentinels had in speed and adaptability over the ones he’d had earlier, they balanced out by severely lacking in proper physical strength and endurance. It explained why the sentinel’s blade had been able to pierce his flesh so easily. Endurance wasn’t one of their traits and so it wasn’t one he’d taken on.
But that also worked in his favor for one reason: his blows were particularly devastating to them, and it was easy for him to rip off head after head, and limb after limb, cutting through the sentinels with speed that almost matched theirs. In less than ten minutes, every remaining sentinel had been reduced to smoking parts left on the nightclub floor; the nightclub’s neon lights still flashing gently overhead.
There were smoking holes in the wall from the fight and Dang’s clothes had been torn and burnt in different places. But he was largely unhurt, just merely exhausted. He stood straight, panting, beads of sweat trickling down his face.
His phone rang then. He pulled it out of his pocket, raised it to his ear and answered: “Hey,” he said, sounding out of breath. “It’s handled.”
“What was it?” Daedalus’ voice came through from the other end of the line, sounding rather concerned.
“More sentinels,” Dang answered, then looked to the unconscious boy. “There’s someone else too…A dude.”
“Who is he?” Daedalus queried.
“I don’t know,” Dang murmured. “Haven’t seen his face yet.” This was true but there was something about this boy, something uncomfortably familiar to Dang. Even now, as he stared at the unconscious boy whose hair had fallen over and covered much of his face, he couldn’t help but feel like he knew who this was. He needed to confirm. “Heading for a closer look,” he said. “Dude’s knocked out cold right now.”
“You knocked him out?” Daedalus asked.
“Nah, a sentinel did,” Dang responded. “Hang on, give me a sec.”
He started toward the boy and stopped only a few feet away from him when he heard a scraping sound. He halted and spun around. But he was too slow, too late.
A sentinel whose body had been torn in half was flying at him, a hand morphed into a glowing blade. His eyes widened in horror as he knew he wouldn’t be able to get out of the way. And then the sentinel exploded into flame right in midair.
One moment, it’d been flying at him, the next it’d been reduced to flaming pieces of metal on the ground.
The boy scoffed. “They’re a little annoying, aren’t they?” he spoke, in an eerily familiar voice.
Dang turned around, slowly this time, an unnerving feeling in him now. He had a hunch about who it was and he wasn’t sure he liked it very much.
The boy was rising to his feet now, one hand still clutching the side where he’d been wounded. He brushed hair out of his face with his other hand, revealing what he really looked like, and it was a face Dang had seen before. It was a face he saw daily actually, mostly in the bathroom, each time he glanced in the mirror.
The boy in front of him was the spitting image of him. His eyes were wilder, his jaw more defined, hair higher and rougher, but there was no doubt about it. The boy was him.
“What the–,” Dang’s mouth dropped open.
“Yeah, I know,” the boy grinned. “Let me guess…your friends call you Dang too?”