The sudden anchor of my mag-boot latching to the van's bumper cracked me like a whip, slamming my arms and head into the trailer. I flopped against the road for a second, disoriented and flailing as I bounced off of the gravel. I got one hand onto the top of the trailer, and I pulled myself up before I was dragged completely under the flatbed, then got my other boot latched onto the rear door of the van to steady myself. My world rocked again as the truck rammed the back of the trailer once more, and I nearly lost my grip but was just able to maintain my hold.

I craned my neck to get a view of what was happening, stuck in my position, stretched like a bridge between the back of the van and the trailer. I watched as the chasing truck revved harder and pulled sideways, trying to drag the trailer over into the ditch. The van was slowing down and swerving wildly, and a couple of the motorcycles overtook us on either side as the cloud of dust caught up to us and enveloped everything as we stopped.

The truck continued forward for a few more feet, pushing the end of the trailer down as one of its front wheels climbed up on top of it a few feet behind Tevin’s armored form. My end of the trailer rose as the back was pressed down, and I heard the trailer creak, groan, and then jolt with a snap as the abused coupler gave up and popped upwards. I finally let go, both with my hands and my feet, unlatching my mag boots from the bumper and falling to the gravel.

Gunshots continued to fill the air, bullets zipping by in both directions through the cloud of dust. I could easily make out the ripping sound of Jorn's heavy rifle, distinct from the slightly smaller charges of the older assault rifles of the rebels. I pushed myself up to my feet, then popped up from behind the raised edge of the trailer, looking through the dust at the truck's dark form in the thermal vision Max was still piping to me from his drone.

I only had one thought pass through my mind. There were a bunch of these assholes, and the only advantage I had would dissipate once the wind cleared all of the kicked-up dust from our little section of country road. Now was not the time for thinking, it was time for action.

I jumped up onto the trailer, dashing forward and yanking my plasma knife from where it had been clipped on my chest. The crystalized anger that still smoldered in my chest reignited into glowing hot determination. I hated this, the fighting, the killing, the corner I had been backed into. What I hated, even more, was how these guys had decided that attacking my friends was a good idea.

After vaulting onto the trailer and taking three quick steps, I planted one boot on Tevin’s chest, kicking off and jumping over the rest of the trailer and up onto the hood of the truck. With one more step, I cleared the cab and smashed into the small group of guys in the back of the truck as they were scrambling to dismount. I triggered the knife in my hand, the glowing plasma loop lighting up the dust and filling the air with the acrid smell of vaporized stone particles.

I didn’t know a whole lot about knife fighting, or fighting a group of guys, let alone how to fight them after crashing into them like a bowling ball and falling into a confused, blinded, pile of armed and plate-carrier-wearing wannabe freedom fighters. I just slashed the knife around wildly, feeling and hearing it burn through flesh and bone as everyone started screaming, smoking, and shooting. I felt an instant of pressure poke through one of my legs, took an elbow to the mouth, and felt something crunchy break under my knee as I pushed myself upright in the pile.

I rose to the top of the group and slashed downwards in every direction, clenching my jaw and trying not to breathe in the fumes of burning flesh, plastic, bone, and metal from the passage of my knife. I felt a hand come out of the dark mass of bodies beneath me, grabbing at my face. I gripped the offending wrist with my free hand, wrenching it off to the side and severing it with the knife before tossing it away and continuing my work.

As the shouting and fighting mess of rebels died or gave up and stopped fighting back, I reoriented and scanned around for my next move. The dusty cloud seemed thinner, and I could make out the rough details of the second truck where it was parked behind the first. My whole vision was a muddled mess of my real eyesight and the stark black-and-white thermal image as Max stitched the two together for me.

I reached down and felt around with my free hand, looking for a gun to shoot at the next truck that had just pulled in behind the first. I quickly found something, yanking a rifle off of one of the writhing, chopped up, cauterized enemies beneath me, snapping the straps right off of the guy. I changed up my grip, using the crook of my elbow to hold the weapon as I grabbed the handle, and then swung the rifle up and pointed it towards the truck.

The rifle felt light in my hands after using Tevin’s primary, the old assault rifle was like a toy in comparison. I ignored the thought and squeezed the trigger, only to have nothing happen. I tried again before turning it to the side and spotting the melted gouge from my knife across the receiver. I was rudely interrupted by a bright pain in my lower abdomen and fell backward, reflexively recoiling from the sensation.

I dropped the rifle and clutched at the pain, quickly discovering someone else's hand already there, wrapped around the handle of the knife they had shoved into my guts. I think I shouted something then, screaming a string of F-bombs at whoever had just stabbed me. I pulled back with my arm that was still holding the blazing plasma knife and punched in the direction of the arm attached to the knife.

I felt their nose break under my fist and kept screaming as I slammed it into them a couple of more times for good measure. The pain spiked for an instant before being washed away with a numbing sensation, most of my body going fuzzy and feeling slightly pressurized, like I was underwater, or wrapped in a skin-tight bodysuit. Before I could think about what that meant, bullets started to ping into the back of the truck I was now laying in, punching holes in the bed and finding new homes in the mostly unmoving pile of rebels I had hacked to burned bits.

Not taking the time to stop and think about things, I rolled and pulled myself over the side of the bed, hanging onto the side and letting gravity swing into an upright position to land on my feet.

I thought I heard someone scream my name, a hoarse and shrill voice piercing through the chaos of gunfire, idling trucks, and buzzing motorcycle engines. I spun around to look for the voice, almost able to see clearly through the settling dust.

Before I could spot who was yelling for me, a guy on a motorcycle ripped past me, swerving hard and falling over in a controlled way to miss some of his allies as they came out of the dissipating dust. The rider slid over the packed gravel while the bike tumbled away. The three guys who had jumped out of the back of the second truck and caused the rider to swerve moved towards me, but only one of them had a firearm.

The first blast from the shotgun caught me in my already injured shoulder. It didn’t hurt, it only felt like someone gave me a hard shove to my shoulder, so I ignored it and charged the group. The other two in the formation stepped forward to meet me with a bat and a crowbar, while the shotgunner pumped a new shell into the chamber.

While I did not have much training in fighting with a knife, the dwarves had given me an intense month-long crash course in melee fighting in general. It would have been nice to have a shield, and the plasma knife was tiny compared to the staff I was used to, but the basics were similar enough and some of my reflexes carried over.

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I had, however, been involved in a couple of street fights, which I’d mostly won using a handful of tricks I’d learned from having grown up alongside Tevin through our early teen years. Tevin had liked to spar and fight for as long as I’d known him, and I’d occasionally played training dummy as he showed off the fruits of the boxing and judo lessons his parents paid for.

I cut the end of the bat off as the first guy swung it at me. He was a skinny fucker, and had a cloth mask pulled over his face that was painted in the blue and white bars of the region's old flag. After cutting his weapon in half, I crumpled him with a kick to the gut and leaned back to avoid the swing of the crowbar. Bat-man fell back from my kick, and I thought to grab the crowbar swinging arm to pull the guy off balance, but found my free-hand was dangling uselessly again after the shotgun round to the shoulder.

My misstep cost me a blow to the face from the steel bar, which gave a dull ring and snapped my head back, but surprisingly did not daze me or even hurt all that much. I had a vague sense of Max shouting encouragement and shadowboxing on the sidelines like a fan watching his favorite fighter in the ring, but paid it no mind as I backpedaled to maintain my balance.

Crowbar-guy followed me and swung again. He was more filled out than bat-man and looked older, a grizzled beard surrounded angry bared teeth under a set of scratched up sunglasses. This time I narrowly leaned away from his attack, before finally catching traction. I sprung forward, getting within his reach and slashing down his chest. I scored a 4 inch deep gouge in him from collarbone to hip with the white hot loop of plasma. He cried out in pain, falling away and dropping his crowbar.

A flashing red warning pinged on the windshield, a split second before bullets tore through it and showered me with glass. I ducked down beneath the tall hood of the vehicle so the driver would lose their angle, and the flash of a mental image from a movie I’d seen long ago sprung to mind.

The scene must have come from Max, because he was starring in the main role of the mental movie. In an instant that played out like a short soundless video clip, a wig-wearing Max hooked his foot into the handle of a metal bucket and kicked it into the face of a nameless enemy that morphed into the guy holding the shotgun.

Not really having any time to think about things, I took his cue and did the same thing with the crowbar that the guy had just dropped. I shifted my footing, caught my toe through the hook, and kicked out, flicking it at the guy who was about to shoot me with the shotgun again.

The hexagonal steel bar shot straight towards the guy, not flipping or tumbling at all, and the blunt U-bend of the hook nailed him right in the throat. His second shot went wild, Max cheered, and I continued forward. I slid to a stop next to the driver's door, and in one motion reared back and punched through the tinted glass at the driver.

The window shattered into a million tiny cubes and my fist carried through, but missed the leathery looking woman who was driving the car. She shrieked and leaned away from the glowing plasma blade as it tore through the headrest of her seat and set it on fire. I grunted and leaned forward, swinging the knife at her again as she started pulling the trigger of a handgun. A younger looking guy sat frozen in the passenger seat, his watery eyes wide as he clutched an antique lever-action rifle to his chest.

Most of her shots missed me, but I felt a few hard pokes into my ribs as a couple of them punched through the thin sheet metal of the door. I shrugged them off, and jabbed my knife downwards into her side where I could reach. She screamed and looked me in the eyes, causing some part of me, that I had shoved into the darkest corner of my mind, to join her.

I reached farther, partially crawling into the window and pushing the knife upwards, searing into her until it burned through her heart. She started to spasm, throwing her handgun out of the truck and behind me through the open window right over my back. The younger guy in the far side of the cab finally unfroze, screaming in rage as he swung the rifle towards me like a club.

I flinched and ducked my remaining good eye away, catching the first blow on my forehead on the other side. It knocked me around a little, but whatever changes Max had done to me let me shrug it off like a blow from a kid with a toy foam sword. That still did not stop the guy as he rained a few more ineffective blows down on my head and good shoulder.

I dropped my plasma knife, cutting off the energy and causing it to fall to the dead woman's lap, and grabbed the rifle's barrel. I yanked the weapon away from the young man and then pushed it back at him, jamming the butt of the stock into his nose and breaking it. His head rocked back and bounced off of the wall, and he went limp in his seat.

I shimmied backwards, dropping back out of the window of the truck just in time to get flying tackled by a guy off the back of a motorcycle. His driving partner continued on while me and the rider rolled in the gravel next to the truck.

He was screaming something, but I was too zeroed in on fighting to pay any attention to what he was saying. Something about his family, mixed in with grunts of effort and angry insults. We rolled three or four times, and I came up on top when we stopped. He yelled something else and yanked a pistol out of his belt, angling it towards my head.

I only had the one good arm, and had somehow kept ahold of the rifle in the tumble, so I couldn’t grapple him for his handgun. Instead, I lunged forward and smashed my forehead into his face, once, twice, and was interrupted before I could deal a third blow by yet another guy running up on me and kicking me in the face.

The first guy was limp, and the new contender let out a muffled shout inside his closed motorcycle helmet, taking a limping step back after my jaw proved to be a harder target than he expected. I rolled off to the side, so I could bring the rifle that I was still gripping by the barrel around and bash helmet-head with it. My angle kind of sucked and it felt like a rather weak blow, but it still knocked him to the side and probably broke a few of his ribs.

Still, he did not go down and limped back another step, his helmet swiveling as he looked around for a weapon. I was stuck on my back, and took a couple of seconds to roll over and push myself up with my one good arm. I used the rifle I was still holding to prop myself up and unsteadily rose to my feet, feeling sluggish and lightheaded but determined to see this thing through.

I gained my footing at the same time that helmet-head got his hands onto the handgun the woman had thrown out of the truck. I stumbled forward towards him, winding up a swing with the rifle, while he raised the pistol and fired. While many of the guys I’d fought today seemed to be pretty bad shots, this guy emptied the rest of the mag into a tight grouping in the center of my chest.

Still, even though each bullet felt like a sledgehammer wrapped in a pillow, I made it close enough to slap the gun out of his hand with the buttstock of my rifle. He fell back, crab walking away from me as I pushed forward and kept swinging at him. I missed a few times, unable to keep up with him as my body became more and more numb and unresponsive, but finally landed a sideways swing into his knee that caused him to scream and roll to his side.

I cracked a few more blows down on him, bending the rifle and shattering the stock until all that was left was a twisted barrel with a half of a mangled receiver on the end. I took in a deep shuddering breath, and turned around to look for the next threat.

It was hard to walk, and I realized one of my legs had completely locked up, refusing to bend at the knee. The noise of the fight had quieted though, and all I could hear was the idling of engines and groans of the injured. The gunfire had died out. The buzzing engines of the motorcycles had ceased.

Not seeing anyone moving or trying to get up, I stumbled back towards the van. As I made it around the last in the line of vehicles, Jorn stepped out from between the two idling shot-up pickups with his weapon up.

“Oh… oh shit. He recorded a bunch of that. Uhh, damn. Stupid well-built Gon tech, he managed to pipe it to Katie around my filters, he sent it through a whole new connection they must have held in reserve. She cracked her shell and just triggered a high-power beacon? I don’t recognize the code it's transmitting, it’s not in any of the logs or briefs I’ve captured.”

I stopped, swaying on my feet and looking down the barrel of Jorn’s massive rifle as he raised it and aimed at me. He took a step back and squared his stance, looking slightly shaken for the first time, and spat out. “What the fuck are you?”