When Ava, Sam and Soo-jin got to the ring, the air was dead silent. On the opposite end of the tile from Ava stood Maxim Konstantinov, the Iron Russian.
This was no longer just a way for Ava to turn her power into financial security. This was personal. This was a vendetta, signed in the blood of her allies. She knew Maxim had simply been operating on orders from Mr. Johnson, the Lockheed Martin executive who had been paying their way, in some sick ploy to toughen her up; she’d already gotten her revenge on him, though, and as satisfying as it was in the moment, she still had that twitch in her mind that someone needed to trade their own blood for Luke and Scott’s.
Moreover, something seemed… wrong about Konstantinov. Part of the damage from Scott’s sacrifice had been healed, presumably by eating his previous opponent, but gaping wounds, cuts, and tears still covered him; his Code of Steel seemed to be trying to patch them by forming chunks of metal in the gaps, making him emit a sickening creak with every breath and movement.
Not only that, but he was grinning. Something told Ava that he knew that he was either going to die here, or assert his dominance one final time as the strongest known fighter among all of the world’s parasite hosts, and that he was perfectly all right with either option.
Shoot me a signal if you need me to step in, Soo-jin said in Ava’s mind.
Ava smiled.
I’ll let you know. Glad I’ve got the backup, Ava thought. From behind her, Soo-jin waved to make the point.
“We’ve finally reached the finals of this Parasite Tournament, and on the entrance side, we have our challenger representing Lockheed Martin, Ava ‘Boxing Queen’ Hidalgo!” the announcer yelled into the microphone. The crowd cheered. “And on the concourse side, our champion, Maxim ‘Iron Russian’ Konstantinov!” The crowd cheered even louder.
The bell rang, and Maxim assumed a fighting pose to match Ava.
“That’s unusual,” Ava said. “You don’t usually, you know… fight. You just sorta eat, right?”
“My orders were very specific,” Maxim said. “I am to avoid using my Code of Absorption until you are already dead.” With that, and a dash that seemed almost inhumanly fast, he threw a left hook at Ava’s midsection, cracking a rib with a sickening crunch as she yelled out in pain.
“Moreover,” he added, “I am to kill you with my bare hands.”
“Is this the tournament committee’s orders?” Ava grunted. “Because that sure doesn’t sound right.”
“My sponsor had… different ideas on how I should handle this,” Maxim said, delivering a soccer kick to Ava’s stomach that sent her flying out of the ring (and that, she was pretty sure, ruptured something in there).
Ava staggered to her feet and fought the pain, climbing up to the ring again even as every muscle, every nerve and every organ in her body resisted.
“Still alive, are you? That should have destroyed your liver,” Maxim said. “Unfortunate.”
“How is that unfortunate for you?” Ava asked.
“The more mass I have to destroy in the process of killing you, the less I can take,” he said, throwing a punch at Ava’s head, attempting to destroy her brain. She swiftly dodged to the right and caught his arm in her elbow, carrying the Russian’s momentum into a judo take-down that sent him out of the ring himself. He picked himself up, seemingly unharmed.
“You’ll have to do better than that, little girl,” he said, climbing back up with little effort as Ava backed towards the center. She was hurt, and tired; he wasn’t. It was time to even the score, and she fished the larger of the two vials out of her bra.
I’m sorry, D.A.R.E. teacher from fourth grade, she thought to herself, popping the cork, holding it up to her nose, and taking a big whiff, getting a decent dose of the powder- about a third of the vial- into her sinuses and running through her bloodstream. Thank fucking God they don’t care about PEDs here.
Her heart thumped, hard and loud, as the scientist’s speedball of sorts took effect. Her vision was bright, and everything was as loud as it could possibly be, while simultaneously perfectly clear.
She grinned, a manic, terrifying grin of bloodlust. The pain was no longer pain, but battle scars in progress; she wanted more of it, and she wanted to make goddamn sure she gave exactly as much back or more.
She leapt at Maxim, with more power than she’d ever been able to summon up in her life previously, and threw a haymaker at his jaw, her Code even seeming to have gotten bigger from the drug. It didn’t kill him instantly, and clanged, but she knew from the way his body reacted to the impact that she’d done a lot more damage than she did on the cruise. She went for another hook, clanging against the side of his head and leaving a massive dent in his cheekbone; he countered with his own punch to Ava’s midsection, that cracked another rib, made Ava cough up blood, and only made her sickening, bloodthirsty grin even bigger. She drove her knee into his stomach, sending more of that beautiful pain through her body as she felt it crack against the metal, and more importantly, giving her leverage to push him down to the ground.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
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What the hell has gotten into her? Soo-jin thought at Sam. She’s not usually this, uh… how do I wanna put this…
Suicidal? Sam finished the thought. Yeah, you’re right. This is fucking madness. She's tearing herself to pieces on him, and yet she won’t just go down and let the announcer count ten.
You think I should step in? Soo-jin thought.
Yeah, I… I would strongly advise that before he starts eating her, Sam thought.
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Ava dug both her good knee and her chipped one directly into Maxim’s sternum, making him grunt with pain.
“Oh, am I hurting you now, you fucking piece of shit?” Ava said, throwing a left hook at his face that sent two of his teeth flying out of the ring when the iron gauntlet connected. A fan in the stands eagerly caught one, and was quickly mobbed by his neighbors in the audience for it.
Stand back for a second, I’m going to step in, Soo-jin’s voice rang out in Ava’s mind.
What the fuck are you talking about? Let me kill this fuck already, Ava thought.
Dude, he’s going to kill you if I don’t help. Every hit he gets on you is a hospital bill all on its own, even without the whole eating-people thing. Let me make an opening for you. I’ll keep him standing so you get the kill, but he’s gonna be tied up for a minute, Soo-jin thought in Ava’s mind.
You know what… yeah, I’m good with that, Ava thought.
Suddenly, Maxim stood straight up, seemingly undisturbed.
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When Maxim Konstantinov looked up, he no longer saw Ava Hidalgo, his supposed opponent. He saw a short Asian girl, wearing a black skirt down to her knees and a black button-up blouse, smiling.
“Who are you?” he asked.
I’m sorry, I don’t speak much English, the Asian girl thought into his mind, making the eternal migraine caused by the tandem parasites swelling his skull even worse. Unless you know Korean, this is how we talk.
“Please don’t do that,” he said in Korean; somewhat strangely accented Korean, that indicated he had learned the language in the North, but Korean nonetheless.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Soo-jin responded in kind, in her native language, out loud this time. “Your Korean is… weird, but I can get the gist.”
“So, who are you?” Maxim asked.
“I’ll be your attendant for this flight,” Soo-jin said. “Buckle up.”
Everything, including Soo-jin, melted away and faded, and Maxim was trapped in a vortex of inky black.
Suddenly, he was in the laboratory again, with the Soviet scientists who had grafted a second parasite onto him. Just as he was then, as a child, he was strapped to an operating table, with no anesthetic to numb his pain. He thrashed against his restraints, but was unable to burst them, like he would have easily been able to in the real world; one of the two scientists grabbed a drill, and his face, which in his actual memory had been oddly kindly for the extraordinary pain he had inflicted, was that of a demon, reddened and twisted, with sharp fangs.
The scientist whirred the drill, and began plunging it into Maxim’s skull, sending unimaginable agony through him. As soon as the drill hit brain, however, the pain stopped, and the nightmare changed.
This time, he was in Afghanistan. He was fighting alongside his old unit, assaulting a mujahideen stronghold in Kandahar Province; this time, however, the battle was going worse than it had ever gone in real life. Sergey, the machine-gunner, had been caught by a rocket-propelled grenade almost directly, blowing him in half and leaving his twitching, screaming upper body trailing intestines across the desert. Alexei, the man on point, was gutshot, and screaming for his mother. Nikolai, the young rifleman who had looked up to Maxim as a sort of surrogate father for a time, was on the ground, a massive hole punched through his helmet from a 7.62-millimeter bullet, twitching and dripping blood onto the ground.
The mujahideen advanced on the unit’s corpses, their faces red like those of the doctors and their fangs even longer, feasting on the dead and those approaching death alike. Maxim attempted to shoot at them, but his bullets just passed through harmlessly, and sometimes even hit his allies instead; he attempted to absorb one, but it was his hand that got caught in the apparition instead.
Then, the nightmare changed, yet again. This time, he awoke at home, with his family, or so he thought; he turned to check on his wife, and found her dead, rotting and almost skeletal, beside him.
“Stop toying with me, little girl,” he said in Korean. “This is not your fight.”
“Oh, is it not?” Soo-jin’s voice rang out, in her native language, despite her seemingly being nowhere to be found. “It seems to me like it very much is, given Ava's my friend.” Maxim’s wife started to awake, and her rotten corpse began to dance around the bedroom, destroying mementos and knocking over everything it could in the process.
Maxim’s face darkened, and his head started to hurt even worse than the permanent migraine had. He screamed, an almost inhuman roar that took Soo-jin aback, and fell to his knees. The center of his forehead was bulging and twitching, both in the dream and in the real world; it seemed almost as if the two parasites in his head were not only growing, but merging into one mass.
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Despite what it may have appeared like to Maxim, the whole ordeal took about a minute; what’s more, his twitching had actually made his movements surprisingly unpredictable, and he dodged all of Ava’s wild, drugged punches without even realizing.
Ava, holy fucking shit, run, Soo-jin’s voice rang out in her mind. Get… get to the other side of the ring as soon as possible, like, now.
What the fuck, why? What are you doing? Ava thought to her ally.
I, uh. I think I went a little too far, Soo-jin thought in Ava’s mind. Turns out when you put someone who’s got one of these in a nightmare world based on their worst fears and memories, you run the risk of their parasite going apeshit.
Ava noticed the bulge in Maxim’s forehead, and that Sam and Soo-jin were themselves running like all Hell to the opposite end of the ring from Maxim; she realized it would probably be wise to do the same.
From a distance, Ava saw Maxim thrash as the bulge started to grow and encompass his entire head, then compress in on itself as the parasites fed on the remainder of his brain. This had, after all, been the primary goal of the research that created him; the Soviet Union had no use for Maxim Konstantinov, the human. Their goal, by taxing his pineal gland beyond its capabilities, was to create what stood at the opposite end of the ring, a barely-sentient parasite zombie that they referred to, in their hypothetical documents, as Code: Rage.
What the fuck did you do!? Ava thought at Soo-jin, as she beheld the form of the creature that used to be Maxim, having seemingly repaired all of its wounds and grown even bigger, letting out shrieks of inhuman rage and hunger.