“Well, this is… pretty bad,” Ava muttered to herself.
If anything, she was understating things. Soo-jin’s psychic attack had massively overdosed both of Konstantinov’s parasites, causing them to merge and devour his brain entirely, keeping only the stem alive to maintain the body’s basic processes; what remained was essentially a human shell being used as a puppet by the parasite, operating entirely on feeding instinct. The creature was known to the researchers who had worked on Maxim, who believed it to be a hypothetical result of exposing him to severe psychological trauma, as Code: Rage.
To Ava, it looked like nothing more than a massive, walking tumor, spitting tendrils of flesh and metal out of what used to be Maxim’s arms and legs as it shambled. It looked at her and screamed an inhuman howl of rage and agony.
This is very, very bad, right? Ava thought to Soo-jin, hoping she was still hooked in.
Correct. This is pretty bad, Soo-jin thought in Ava’s mind.
If I die taking this fucker down, tell Sam I love him, okay? Ava thought. If she didn’t die, she could cross that bridge whenever she felt like, but if she did end up kicking it, she wanted him to have a little peace over it, at least.
Regardless of the logic behind the statement, over on the sidelines, Soo-jin blushed, and Ava heard a squeal of happiness in her mind.
The combat drugs were starting to wear off; Ava’s body felt heavy, and she wanted to sleep. However, she still had half of the big vial, as well as all of the smaller one.
Hey, Soo-jin, fair warning, stay out of my brain for a bit, you’re not gonna like it, Ava thought, fishing the smaller vial out of her bra, and grimacing at the way the sweat coating it felt on her fingers.
She popped the cork and held it up to her nose, and took a deep sniff, leaning her head back to make sure every bit of it got into her sinuses. It burned, and she gagged for a second, coughing up foul gunk that tasted like Windex and pain, and swallowing it back down to make sure she got the proper effects of the drugs.
She looked up, and she was in the dream of blood. All that was there was her, her enemy, and the specter of death. It felt like her consciousness had left her body, and she was in a third-person view of herself, like in a video game; at the same time, she could feel the deep, hard thump of her heart, twice as fast as usual, making the Earth shake and rattle for her with every beat.
Her enemy, the beast known as Code: Rage, seemed to be moving in slow motion. She dashed up to it, grinning like a maniac, and threw a hard punch at its shoulder, putting her full killing intent into it and manifesting the gauntlet. It chewed through flesh and metal with a sickening creak, sending the arm flying with a spray of dark blood, but then tendrils of muscle, cable, and flesh flew out, reattaching it to the stump as it hung loosely, still gushing fluids. Its pectoral muscle deflated; another tendril, short and skinny, snaked through the outside of the ring and over the wall into the audience.
As Ava dodged to the left for a hook to the side to split it in half, the tendril caught a man in the leg and absorbed his body mass, using it to repair the creature’s arm and rendering it even larger than before. With that arm, it threw a snaking blow at Ava’s head, hoping to catch her and envelop her face to absorb her; however, its attacks seemed to come in slow motion in Ava’s drugged frenzy, and she quickly dodged to the left, turned around, and threw another punch as hard as she could at Code: Rage’s midsection, tearing a massive hole in it with another sickening creak and a spray of blood, sparks and metal shards.
The creature screeched in pain, but stayed standing, despite the attack seemingly having punched out its liver and kidneys, and started shambling towards Sam and Soo-jin.
“Oh, fuck no, you don’t,” Ava yelled, throwing another punch with the gauntlet and hoping to take out its spine in the process. She missed her target, but instead caught the creature in the leg, ripping a giant hole through its thigh and staggering it.
It shot out another tendril into the audience and absorbed another few bystanders, repairing the holes in its body, and turned towards Ava, shrieking its inhuman screech of anger.
The announcer held up her microphone as audience members started to panic, rushing out of the arena.
“Everyone, please proceed to the emergency exits in an orderly fashion!” she shouted. “We’ll have this taken care of shortly, but for now, please enjoy the other amenities of the Isla-“ Ava grabbed the microphone from her, for one, final time as the creature shambled and roared.
“Y’all motherfuckers stay in your damn seats and watch me,” she yelled into the microphone, and threw it down on the ground, sending ear-piercing feedback through the speakers that staggered the creature even further. Ava took the opening, and threw another hard punch, directly at the center of the creature’s chest, with the gauntlet.
It felt to her like it was happening in slow motion, or maybe not even happening at all, like she was watching herself in a movie. And yet she could feel the creature’s ribs crack. She could feel her own wrist straining and crunching in the gauntlet, as she put every bit of force she could muster into it. Even through the gauntlet, she could feel the faint thump, thump of the creature’s heart as the mega-parasite tried to keep it barely-alive enough to move around.
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Her fist stopped, failing to break through and destroy the heart entirely, but with a quick enough reaction, that was all she needed. She gripped the creature’s heart with her gauntleted hand, as firmly as she could, and pulled, angling the blades to cut the arteries as she tore its heart out.
She held it up as it thumped its last beats and the creature collapsed, half expecting, in her drugged-up point of view, for Shao Kahn to come out and declare her the winner by way of fatality. There was no such voice, however, and the creature began to crawl again, the mega-parasite using its own bioelectricity to haphazardly fire its neurons. It launched a tendril at Ava’s leg, latching on to try and feed.
“No the fuck you do not,” Ava said, throwing a punch down directly at its head to kill the mega-parasite itself, and crushing the skull into powder as green goo spurted from it.
The announcer picked up the microphone that Ava had thrown down.
“And our winner of this year’s Parasite Tournament is…” she began, only to realize that the microphone was broken and no sound was coming over the speakers. “God damn it!” she yelled, throwing it down herself.
Regardless, it was obvious to the crowd that one finalist was standing, and the other was dead. And so, they cheered, screaming louder than they had ever screamed before, and showering the ring with roses, foam fingers and money in various currency denominations.
Ava’s legs started to wobble, and she couldn’t stand up anymore. She fell to her knees, and then to the ground entirely.
Man, this floor feels nice, she thought as everything went black and she fell unconscious.
----------------------------------------
When Ava woke up, she was back on the boat, in the stateroom’s twin bed, with Sam and Soo-jin by her side.
“Whoa, what’s up? Are we, like… good? Did we get our money?” she asked, bolting upright. She felt oddly good. “Did someone heal me? Wait, did we get Scott back!?”
“Okay, that’s a lot of questions, settle down,” Sam said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Want me to go in order?”
“Yeah, that sounds good,” Ava said.
“Yes, we won. You’re the champ. We got our money,” Sam explained, and Ava grinned, giving him a huge hug. “Five million each. And, yes, someone healed you, but no, it wasn’t Scott, he’s still dead. Probably pretty proud of us, though.”
Ava sat back.
“Wait, if it wasn’t Scott, then who did heal me?” she asked. A middle-aged man with dark, tanned skin, wearing a stethoscope over a black button-down shirt and Khaki slacks, walked in.
“Oh, you’re awake,” he said. “That would be me.”
“Guessing you have some kind of healing Code too?” Ava asked.
“The Code of Surgery,” he confirmed. “If I have some sort of medical tool or device to channel it through, I can fix injuries and cure diseases like it’s nothing.” Ava looked down at the stethoscope.
“So I’m guessing that’s the tool you used?” she asked, gesturing at it.
“Yep,” he said. “Read your heartbeat, and it went from being faint and irregular to being completely normal. Rest of your body stitched itself up just from me doing that.”
“Damn, why do people even go to regular doctors?” Ava asked.
“Rich people don’t,” the man said, handing her his business card that named him as Dr. Siddharth Rao. “If you’ve ever wondered why Tom Cruise has looked thirty for twenty years, I’m why.” Ava raised an eyebrow.
“Actually, do you do dental?” she asked.
“Check inside your mouth,” he said. She wiggled her tongue in both of the missing molars’ spots, only to find that they were not, in fact, missing and she had perfectly good teeth in there.
“Are those…” she began to ask.
“Nope, not fake, your body Wolverined them because of my Code,” Dr. Rao explained. “Completely real teeth. Just don’t get ‘em knocked out again.”
She had another flicker of a thought that made Soo-jin start giggling, and flexed her butt cheeks.
“I’ll be damned, you gave me a Brazilian butt lift too,” she said. The good doctor burst out laughing and turned red with embarrassment.
“I, uh… didn’t mean to do that?” he said. “When my Code does cosmetic stuff, it’s because your self-image didn’t quite match your actual body. So that’s all you.”
“That’s… both appreciated and kinda savage? Like, c’mon, I had an ass before that,” Ava said, smiling and also turning a little red. It was at this point that Sam went from holding back laughter behind his hand to giggling uncontrollably.
“God, I’m glad we have you back,” he said through his fit of laughter. “And yes, you totally did have an ass before.”
“See?” Ava asked, gesturing at Sam. “Vote of confidence in my favor. So I’m guessing we can’t expect to see you around, Dr. Rao?”
“That would be correct. I did this as a courtesy to the new champion; my services are ordinarily much too expensive for a teenager such as yourself, even with the prize money you’ve won,” Dr. Rao explained.
“That’s fair, I guess,” Ava said, disheartened, as he started to walk out. She looked at Sam and Soo-jin. “So, what do we all do now?”
“Well, Soo-jin’s going to meet up with her sponsor at Bush Intercontinental when we get back, and if she’s still on with them, it’s back to Seoul for her,” Sam said. “If not, though, we might have to let her crash with one of us for a while.”
“Speaking of us, uh…” Ava started. “About me kissing you and… did Soo-jin tell you what I told her?”
Yeah, I did, Soo-jin’s voice rang out in Ava’s mind. Honestly, we thought you were gonna die until Dr. Rao showed up. Ava went cherry red with shock and embarrassment.
“Holy shit, uh, um,” she uttered. Sam laughed.
“It’s okay. I get it. Desperate stakes. But, like… does that mean we’re, like, a couple, though?” Sam asked.
“Honestly? Let’s go on a date when we get back home and see how it works out. You’re a good partner in these kinds of weird life or death situations, but it’s been life or death situation after life or death situation, and I don’t know what you’re really like when shit’s just, like, normal and people aren’t dying all over the place around us,” Ava explained.
“Yeah, that’s fair,” Sam said. “Also, like… weren’t you gonna murder the whole tournament committee after we won? You should be a little more angry than you are, I feel like, you kinda missed your shot at them.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “I’m the champion. I’ve just gotta wait five years and then I can finish getting my revenge for Luke and Scott. No big. We already got the guy who pulled the trigger, and the guy who ordered it; why stress about the other random suits when I can just get them later?”
Sam blinked.
“Damn, I like where your head’s at on this,” he said.
“Best served cold, right? Might as well sit on it,” Ava said.
With that, the three allies sailed off, with the other survivors of the Parasite Tournament accompanying them, into the Gulf of Mexico, ready to face the next challenges that awaited them.