Red had known this garden was a Sanctum. She wasn’t blind to all the signs. The incongruence of all this colour living within the facility’s grey concrete. An elaborate expansiveness, built up over centuries. An eternal, ideal beauty that defied all understanding.
Just our luck that its owner is home.
Never taking her eyes off an enemy, Red regarded the creature lying on the floor with her peripheral vision. Why had it come here? Led them all to die? But when she saw the way its machine face glared at the Immortal scientist, she strangely found herself identifying with the animosity in the creature’s eyes.
Flight wasn’t an option, so Red knew she had to fight, no matter how slim the odds were. She put on a wicked grin. It hid the trembling of her lips.
I should be glad. There are worse ways to die than fighting the kind I hate most in this world. I’ll at least try to smash his skull in, and rip out that snaking tongue of his.
The Immortal’s body looked like that of an aged man, but of course that didn’t fool her. Nearly all Immortals possessed the minimum baseline of augmented physical powers. His residual wrinkles merely indicated that he had undergone the Immortal Ascension in his advanced mortal years. His skin would not break easily. That didn’t stop Red from trying, though.
Red seized a computer off a table, ripping out its cables. Excuse me, just borrowing this to type out a report!
Heaving it over her right shoulder, she yelled and charged the Immortal, aiming at his head. The Immortal stood his ground, prepared to strike her exposed body. However, when she came just a stride away, her stance drooped, narrowly dodging a punch that sailed over her neck. She switched from a high to low carry, swinging the computer down like a wrecking ball into his left leg. The heavy metal housing shattered against his kneecap, causing him to careen forward, thrown off balance from the force, as Red took this window to dive for the discarded baton. The hot slag collected around it scalded her hand, but her grip didn’t loosen one bit.
At the same time, Oak had carried a table over his head. The muscles of his forearms bulging, he lifted it mightily over the Immortal’s body, then sent it crashing downwards, sending books and papers flying along with wooden splinters. Oak was a far less violent person than Red, but he certainly hadn’t come this far as an operative without being able to handle himself in a fight with his life at stake.
Following up, he stomped on the Immortal’s back, squeezing air out his crushed lungs—producing not a breathless choke, but a bemused chortle. As if he was simply experiencing the mild discomfort of lying on his stomach, not so much the combined weight of a man crushing his spine.
“That’s all you’ve got?” He breathed, before abruptly twisting about and grabbing at the leg that was pinning him, bringing Oak down to the floor with him. They wrestled, devolving into a tangle of limbs. Oak put up a sturdy resistance at first, but his strength could not hold out against that of a genetically enhanced Immortal. Red tried to assist, but couldn’t strike without the risk of melting Oak’s skin.
The Immortal rose to a half-kneel and punched Oak square in the gut with an explosive strength, sending blood and spit shooting out Oak’s mouth. Red finally had an opportunity to swing with the slag bat, but he rolled away, stood, and lunged back at her, seizing her neck and lifting her up in one arm. Immediately, all air supply severed and she was reduced to a choking, twisting mess.
She had lost the slag bat. She battered her fists against her attacker’s body, but they did nothing against his ultra-hard flesh and bones. Oak lay incapacitated on the floor.
“—FHHUK. YGHOU.” The words barely squeezed through her throat like fat slugs.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
The Immortal smiled sadistically back. He brought her contorting face up close to his. “You aren’t even valuable as a lab rat.”
He was toying with her. Drawing out her suffering. To him, an Immortal who would live forever, she was just a meaningless ant. His grip steadily tightened like a vice. At this rate, she would sooner die from a crushed neck than asphyxiation. She had seconds left to live.
----------------------------------------
Even for the brief moments where the two newcomers seemingly had the upper hand, MACHINE FACE, who was uselessly spectating from the low vantage point of the floor, wasn’t satisfied.
WHITE COAT MINE! I KILL HIM!
His leg was still immobilised from the white coat’s injection. An idea sparked through his brain circuits. He contorted his body, bringing his face up to his leg. Then, with no hesitation at all, his jagged teeth sank down, severing cable and bone. The metal was thick, so he had to thrash his jaws around to snap it. Soon, he no longer had a leg there, just bloody and oily tatters—for the moment.
Threads of flesh and metal began to weave themselves at the amputated stump. In seconds, the threads thickened to thick cables, which lengthened and bound until they formed an entirely new leg.
MACHINE FACE was back in action! He wasted no time repeating what he’d first tried: tackling the white coat like a wild boar. Given how distracted he was choking the woman in his hand, he never saw MACHINE FACE coming, who sent both of them crashing out the side and onto the glade. The woman was dropped and left at the gazebo.
MACHINE FACE and his quarry rolled down a shallow incline, flattening dirt and grass. In a blood-fueled rage, he blindly whipped his claws downwards, shredding skin and rending sinew. Except, the dewy fragments dripping off his hands weren’t his enemy’s flesh, but instead his (now) freshly cut lawn.
“HA! None of you ever scored high on the psychological assessments, did you?”
The Immortal simply delivered a kick, and MACHINE FACE was off and away, flying for several metres. The Immortal took a leisurely stroll down the glade towards him.
MACHINE FACE got up, began lunging with his jaws and claws. His rebar limbs had reach, and his cable muscles bore the tension of steel. Any glancing strike would fracture bone. But he was acting purely on the instincts of a rabid beast. The Immortal dodged his attacks far too easily.
He was currently a scientist, yes. But unless an Immortal spent their centuries living inside a cage, they did not live that long without inadvertently becoming adept at many skills—chief among them, combat.
He shot two quick jabs that snapped MACHINE FACE’s neck. Then, a front kick whose impact exploded throughout the glade, crumpling his stomach and sending him to the air once again.
MACHINE FACE soared into the forest, his body cracking against a tree and leaving a gory crater in its thick trunk. His broken limbs began to heal far too slowly.
A resonant voice began to echo through the forest.
“You know, a garden is no different from a jungle that has its disorder trimmed.”
A light crunching announced the Immortal’s emergence.
“A jungle has its insects,” he tilted his head towards the gazebo where the two mortals lay, then continued, “and it has its apex lifeforms, the strongest beings, as we Immortals believe ourselves to be. ‘Survival of the fittest’, as the rule goes.”
He stood over MACHINE FACE’s shattered body.
“But we don’t wish to be strong. We wish to be perfect. And so we spend eons trying to engineer the perfect existence, which the forces of nature and the universe itself cannot form.”
He crouched over MACHINE FACE, his face just barely above his gnashing jaws.
“The creation of us True Immortals came close. Yet the final apogee still lies above our reach.” He sighed longingly.
Then, he gazed up at the domed sky, not as if those heavens were real, but as the engineered construction their advanced technology could accomplish. He turned back to MACHINE FACE, a renewed glint in his eyes.
“Fortunately, your friend may very well be the key to our problem,” he said, and then an eclipse overfell his face. “You, however, disappoint me.”
“I suppose there’s no use delaying it. Your disposal will be carried out now.”