Arrows nocked, Skills ready.
He squinted to prepare for the flash and kept his gaze away from the center of the room.
The true boss monster appeared with the flash and immediately went for the two soldiers.
Three arrows exploded around it.
Sticky goo expanded on the two arms on the left side of its segmented torso. Razor web cut through the translucent chitin of its two many-jointed legs even as it bound them tight. Seeker drill bore into the side of its disturbingly human-looking head.
Tough chitin allowed the monster to rip the last out with its free hands before it could find purchase.
Soldiers’ pistols popped like yapping creatures, chipping chitin.
The dim green glow pulsing through the monster swelled quicker and brighter.
Sticky goo began to drip and flow like watered honey.
“Hold on to something!”
Al stowed his bow, replacing it with a solid mythril bludgeon.
The hulking soldier stabbed his knife into the floor, while the young women flexed clawed fingers to do the same.
Al raised a clenched fist and pulled.
Everything in the room shot toward him.
Desks, chairs and other broken debris slammed into his immovable body like waves upon a mountain.
The monster reached him last, melting a path straight through to Al and his raised bludgeon.
Enchanted with the weight of a giant the bludgeon cracked into the monster’s chest.
Iridescent green splashed across Al’s breastplate and bare arms.
Enchanted steel as thick as his thumb smoked and sizzled.
His divinely-strengthened skin fared better.
He remembered to smile.
“Hot, but I’ve bathed in a hellhound’s breath!”
It was important to show the soldiers his strength and through it the glorious possibilities of faith and service to Adras.
The bludgeon fell like a falling star between the monster’s six eyes.
Chitin crunched.
Green splattered.
Al made a joke about overripe fruit.
The monster found it lacking and expressed displeasure with a dozen blindingly quick strikes with its scythe-like limbs.
Stinging pain flared as several landed on his bare biceps rather than his vambrace.
He struck back one for the many.
A simple downward blow to the leaking chitin in the monster’s forehead.
It tried to parry.
Thin chitin was better for cutting.
Its scythe-like arm snapped like a twig.
It was enough to alter Al’s blow.
He crushed its cheek and snapped one mandible.
The monster didn’t make a sound as it lashed out at his exposed face forcing him to block.
A split-second was enough for it to leap and plant spiked feet into Al’s chest.
Armor held, but the impact staggered him back a handful of steps.
It reminded him of juvenile trihorns at play.
The monster blurred toward the soldiers.
For them, close quarters combat was a losing move.
Unfortunately, it was between them and the exits.
The hulking soldier stepped forward, stabbing.
His strength was well-beyond the limits of human possibility.
An inch of blade penetrated into the forehead hole Al had made.
Scythe limbs punched through his armor, lifting him up close for a face of radioactive vomit.
The monster hurled the soldier into Al, who caught the hulking man and ripped off the melting helmet.
The soldier stared up with his remaining eye.
The entire right side of his face was gone.
Skin sloughed off in rivers of red meat turned gooey liquid revealing the ivory of skull and teeth.
Somehow, the soldier still lived.
As for the young woman?
One of the few successes of the Eidolon of Sut’s efforts.
She fought with the unbridled ferocity of a jungle cat backed into a cave by a great bear that had waited too long to secure a safe place for its hibernation.
Knife and claws against scything limbs and radioactive body fluids.
Her quickness matched it strike for strike, but she was still constrained by her biology despite the eidolon’s alterations.
Armor melted, then clothing, then flesh as the longer the monster fought the hotter it radiated.
A glancing blow from a scything limb knocked her helm off to reveal a dark-skinned face covered in bubbling blisters that threatened to burst.
Al thundered into the fight, interposing his gigantic bulk between the much smaller two.
She scratched and stabbed at him for his trouble.
The monster did the same.
He grabbed a scythe-like limb and ripped it off.
Another cut glided across his face a finger’s span from his right eye.
He answered with his bludgeon, jabbing it into the monster’s mouth before it could spew.
The hulking soldier appeared wrapping a thick arm around the monster’s neck.
A brave fool, he ignored the heat as he began to smoke and sizzle.
Al met his eye and saw the grenade in his hand.
A nearly imperceptible nod from the soldier.
Al shoved the monster, sending it and the soldier flying.
He turned and wrapped the young soldier in a tight hug despite her snarls, scratching and biting.
The grenade wasn’t a standard issue one.
It had been improved with alchemy.
The explosion consumed the entire room in fire.
It rocked Al forward, driving him and the young soldier into a corner.
Which was just as well, since he could better cover her from the flames.
The heat was unpleasant on his back and it sucked the oxygen from his lungs.
The young soldier stopped yowling as she was reduced to a wordless scream.
Al slammed headfirst into the wall, cradling the young soldier.
Luckily, there was another room still filled with life-giving breath.
The young soldier screamed as he placed her on the floor.
“Stay here.”
The words seemed unnecessary.
She could do no more than gasp for air despite her glare.
He stepped back into the command room.
The inferno had scoured it clean.
Small fires lingered amidst the charred ruins.
There was nothing left of the hulking soldier.
That was a man that knew his end was certain and died on his feet.
“Honor to you, soldier.”
The monster yet lived.
Translucent chitin turned black.
Green pulses grew slower and dimmer.
One scythe-like limb remained and it snapped when the monster tried to push itself up.
Its legs ended in melted stumps.
Its head was unrecognizable.
Al put it out of its misery with a simple strike of his bludgeon.
The monster’s light vanished.
The spires gave confirmation.
The facility and its great weapons belonged to their rightful owners once again.
----------------------------------------
“Stop right there!”
The person was wearing a hazmat suit minus the oxygen tank so it made it difficult to gauge whether they were a man or a woman. It didn’t help that a bright neon yellow-green poured out of the helmet.
The voice, however, was the high-pitched whine of a young-ish woman.
Perhaps even younger.
Death’s Dancer observed her parlay with Captain Patriot from a distance with a few other members of their elite special unit.
“Please, don’t accept our challenge,” Captain Patriot said.
“Please, don’t challenge then,” the hazmat girl put her hands on her hips and actually stomped a foot.
He half-expected an earthquake from that and was relieved one wasn’t forthcoming.
“Yup,” Lt. Rico touched his ear piece, “tripled confirmation. Radiation detectors are going crazy. Shit’s leaking out of her despite the suit.”
“Captain shouldn’t be there then,” Lt. Contrary said.
“Relax, her power can fight it off for at least a few hours,” Lt. Rico said.
“It’ll be trouble if we need to fight her.”
“Seems easy, just pop her from here,” Lt. Contrary said.
As they spoke multiple snipers in multiple positions were ready.
The challenge acceptance timer had started at thirty minutes and was down to almost ten.
Once it hit zero…
Death’s Dancer didn’t like that idea.
He had observed the facility and its lone occupant over the last few days.
Radioactive Girl didn’t seem like a bad person.
He had picked up dozens of context clues that seemed to point in that direction.
“She’s wearing the suit to protect others from her. Shoot holes in it and we might be looking at a meltdown scenario or worse.”
“Irony would be dying in a nuclear explosion when we’re here for nukes.” Lt. Rico chuckled.
“Wasting time. That big ass eidolon already secured his,” Lt. Contrary muttered.
“Then that means ours is no longer critical,” he said.
Which was good.
They could avoid the ugliness that accompanied any sort of fight.
“The captain would look bad.”
“C’mon, Contrary, you don’t need to carry her water. She can carry it herself,” Lt. Rico said.
“It’s a matter of pride. Plus, we can’t look weak or they might get ideas.”
Both were right.
Death’s Dancer was uncertain of the eidolons’ value.
One had turned a few dozen young volunteers into animalistic soldiers superior to their homegrown supersoldiers aside the added wildness.
It sent a shiver up his back.
Command kept a tight hold on information, but poking around got him a number north of a thousand volunteers that entered the program.
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Where were the rest?
Hopefully, in reserve or still in the process.
The alternative on the other end of the scale would raise a lot of hard questions for his commanders to answer.
As far as he was concerned the eidolons hadn’t lived up to the hype.
They hadn’t needed them to fight people or monsters.
The big one had won that ridiculous tournament in Florida and had killed three giant roaming monsters by himself, which Death’s Dancer had to admit was impressive.
However, they had done nothing for his nation’s biggest issues with Rightful Destiny.
The biggest, most powerful communities continued to cling to their independence.
The smaller ones they’d brought back into the fold didn’t even amount to a tenth of the size of the largest community in Southern California or ‘Commiefornia’ as the older soldiers called it.
“— chartreuse. That’s the color,” Lt. Rico said.
“It’s neon,” Lt. Contrary said. “Like the casinos.”
“Neon isn’t a color.”
“Neither is whatever that word you made up is.”
“It’s not made up. It’s just a fancy word for yellow and green combined.”
The two lieutenants argument would’ve continued for far too long for his taste, so Death’s Dancer redirected their attention.
“I’m glad you’ve moved on to the questions that really matter.”
“You can go fuck yourself double D!” Lt. Rico’s white teeth suddenly gleamed in the shadows. “By the way, I’m giving you the finger.”
“I know, I can see in the dark.”
“Boys will be children,” Lt. Contrary shook her head.
“The fuck? You two are the ones arguing about a stupid color. I didn’t even say anything.”
“That’s cause you’re brooding, which you think makes you look cool and dangerous,” she snorted.
“I’m observing, which is what we’re supposed to be doing.”
The timer dwindled down to five.
Throughout it all the radioactive girl badgered the captain to leave.
“Just leave me alone. It’s not like I like living here all by myself.”
“If you cede ownership I will do my best to ensure that you will have a home. Here or elsewhere,” the captain said.
“Pfftt! ‘I will do my best’. That’s not even a promise. I know you soldier types. You’ll say whatever you think will work because you know that your commander will say no and you can wash your hands of the whole thing and say ‘I was just following orders’. You can’t guarantee shit, which means you have nothing for me.”
“Combat isn’t advisable for you.”
“I’ll say the same thing. I’m not wearing this for my benefit. I mean, you’ve got a blindfold on so you can’t see the glowing chartreuse light coming off me. Then again, you’re eyes are glowing too, so maybe you can see. Whatever. Shoot me, cut me, stab me. You might kill me, but breach the suit and you’ll kill yourself too. And do you even know what that’ll be like?”
“I’m aware.”
“Oh, I don’t think so, otherwise you wouldn’t have come within twenty miles of me.”
“Please, we don’t want to hurt you. Just concede.”
“No. This is my home. I hate it, but I have nowhere else to go unless I want to kill everything around me. And until the timer hits zero you can’t do anything.”
“I can’t guarantee your safety when that happens. This facility belongs to the United States of America and we have a right and duty to reclaim it for the safety of its citizens, which includes you.”
“Does it? I’ve heard and read about this United States of America. I was born after the spires when it stopped existing. So, maybe, I’m not a citizen and since I’ve been here for five years, this place is mine. The spires says it’s mine. You saw my name on the list of owners, right?”
The captain gave a curt nod.
“Then leave before something bad happens.”
A soft boom exploded somewhere in the distance.
Followed by another, then another.
Louder and closer.
Death’s Dancer pressed his throat mic.
“I hear incoming. Anything on radar, Black Hatter?”
“Negative, Death’s Dancer.”
“Magical detection?”
“Positive hit. Identity unconfirmed. Waiting on positive ID.”
“That shit needs to be better. It’s useless if it can’t tell the difference between a bird and a thunderbird,” Lt. Contrary said.
“No fire, I repeat, no fire unless I give the word. Silent protocol starting now.”
A great gust of wind washed across a wide swath of the area, shaking the trees and sending sleeping birds flying.
The flying asshole hovered a few feet off the ground between the radioactive girl and the captain.
“Oh, it’s you again,” he frowned. “We’ve got a minute before this stupid challenge timer hits zero. Then I have to fight you. Just to be clear. Me being here means that small children somewhere within the arctic circle are in grave danger of being put into a magic sack and carried off to make toys out of other small children and eventually themselves. If even one child suffers that fate—” he shook his head, “I hold you, your army and government responsible. All of you.”
He landed and deliberately turned his back on the captain and the multiple snipers to approached the radioactive girl.
“Sorry I took so long.”
“Nah, it’s cool, that, uh… thing… you’re dealing with sounds important.”
“Thanks for standing your ground. That was brave.”
“Didn’t want to hurt anyone,” she shrugged.
“And you won’t,” he smiled. “Why don’t you go back inside?”
The radioactive girl ran back into the facility.
The timer drew closer and closer to zero.
“All this for nukes? Who are you even going to use it against? Cause if you’re thinking me? It won’t work.”
“That is irrelevant. This is property of the United States of America. You are illegally in possession. On top of all the other felonies on your record.”
“I’m sorry? I wasn’t aware that I had felonies. Did you try me in absentia? Cause that’s the stuff of kangaroo courts and such. That’s a no-no for freedom democracies. Ten seconds left. You can’t win.”
“We can win without winning.”
He sighed.
“You mean keep me occupied while you take the other nuke places? You’ve gotten one. Let’s see how many you can take and more importantly, keep.”
Zero.
A blur.
Thunder.
Death’s Dancer drew his short spears.
“Engage!”
Captain Patriot vanished.
One moment she stood ready in a combat stance, the next the flying man hovered off the ground a few inches and she was nowhere in sight.
It took them a moment to catch up to the figure digging a shallow trench through the asphalt and into the forest dirt with her tumbling body as a plow.
They didn’t have much to go on to figure out how the flying man stacked up to them on the scales. There were few skirmishes close to twenty years ago where he smacked soldiers around without noticeable difficulty. More intel gathered in recent years through sources of variable reliability seemed to place him even stronger. The best information they got was courtesy of the eidolons and the conclusion was that they couldn’t beat him under any circumstances barring some heretofore unknown weakness suddenly being discovered.
Lead didn’t work, judging by the bullets bouncing off his skintight black suit.
Maybe it was a special suit?
Though it looked much like what they wore when training.
Even had the familiar swoosh.
On the plus side they didn’t have any records of him outright killing any of their soldiers.
On the negative side they had records of him killing evil assholes.
Most of the latter info came from the eidolons.
Thus, their op was to keep him busy as long as possible without pissing him off too much where they’d push him to the negative.
Death’s Dancer hit close to a hundred miles per hour within ten strides.
The dirt churned in his wake.
He bounded a hundred feet forward and stabbed his spears into the flying man’s shoulders.
Enchanted or not, the solid steel crumpled like rolled up tin foil.
He went invisible as he kicked both boots off the man’s chest for distance.
A backflip carried him dozens of feet.
The moment he touched the ground he was dashing across the parking lo—”
A gust of wind struck him.
A vise-like grip robbed him of air.
“I can see you.” The man sighed.
Wind whipped around him.
His vision darkened around the edges as he kicked at the man.
The hand loosened just enough so that he wouldn’t pass out and die.
“Stop that or I’ll drop you… well, maybe that’s not much of threat for you. We’re a couple of thousand feet up, but once you reach a certain durability threshold altitude doesn’t matter all that much thanks to terminal velocity. You seem like you’re tough enough to survive it, but that’s only if I let gravity do the work. Things change if I give it a helpful throw.”
“You… talk… lot…” he managed to get out.
The clouds flowed around them violently.
Darkness gripped his heart.
He could barely see anything.
A glance down gave him nothing but black.
“I’m giving the rest of your soldiers time to worry and think.”
“Don’t… have… places…”
“Yeah, but a few are being taken care of by others. This place had the girl and she’s been given a shitty hand already without you fascists making things worst. And the captain’s here. I’d like a word. So, how’s the devil’s bargain with the eidolons going? I noticed that you’ve got a few of their creations with you. You ever wonder why so few?”
Death’s Dancer kept his mouth shut.
Let the flying man talk and reveal intel.
This psy-ops shit the man was spewing wasn’t anything they hadn’t trained against.
Only a moron would take what the enemy said on faith.
“You know what… screw it. I was supposed to be all coy and shit,” the flying man scowled. “Dude, that creepy ass scarecrow eidolon fucker is churning through your loyal young soldiers. I heard he’s got a ninety percent failure rate. The lucky ones just the die. The unlucky ones… so, do you care about your brave young soldiers? Maybe you don’t. I mean, a guy wearing an old American flag skull mask probably gives about as much of a shit for darker-skinned soldiers lives as he does for the flag code. You little shit probably didn’t even know that, huh? Wearing the flag is illegal. At least you aren’t wearing a flag poncho, but the skull mask? Trying to be intimidating? Scary? Oh, I get it. That’s the message. It’s like pirates. When you see the skull you shit your pants. You painted it in the flags colors because you want people to be scared of old America.”
“Fuck. You.”
Death’s Dancer pulled a grenade from his belt and flicked it into the man’s face.
It wouldn’t hurt either of them, but the surprise might be enough to—
The grenade exploded.
Heat and shrapnel washed over them.
“Idiot. Not very smart. Clearly, my information about you was wrong.”
They went from zero to north a few thousand in an instant.
He actually blacked out.
The next thing he knew he was on his back being dragged across the asphalt by his boot.
“Remember, what I said,” the flying man said. “Is being a soldier a true brotherhood, sisterhood, for you? Or are there levels of concern for you? Does darker skin make your fellow soldiers less of a family. Like say Asians are more like cousins and Blacks are more like that neighbor down the street that as soon as they move in you put your house up for sale?”
“Asshole,” he drew his machine pistol and emptied the magazine into the man’s muscular back.
Yup, just like he expected, the bullets bounced right off. Didn’t even scratch the compression shirt.
A yellow orb of sloshing liquid fell out of the sky.
The man stopped, letting it splash in front of him.
“They don’t care about friendly fire.”
The magical acid ate a foot deep into the asphalt.
“Dangerous for you? Well, whatever. Think about the side you’re on. Think about your choices and the consequences.”
Death’s Dancer went up, up and away, spinning like a flying saucer into the dark night.
“That’s the small fish,” the flying man murmured. “Time for the big one.”
Mortars bombarded his position.
Regular ones bathed him in fire and showered him with shrapnel.
Enchanted ones fell next.
Arctic cold meant to freeze him and cause the blood in his body to expand violently.
Did they really think they could freeze the sun?
The small hill of ice melted as quickly as it formed.
He hovered forward, inviting continued gunfire and shelling.
It was important for him not to kill any of the soldiers.
Even a single death would harden the hearts they needed to reach and allow the eidolons to sink their claws deeper.
“Hearts and minds,” he murmured, “what a joke.”
The optimal choice was to simply beat them all up until they did what he wanted them to.
That would’ve been the responsible thing to do, but then they’d be a chain around his neck forever.
His daughter might have wanted to be a solar tyrant.
He did not.
Hell, he needed to spend more time with her so that the words ‘solar’ and ‘tyrant’ would only come out of her mouth as a joke.
What adult actually wanted to be an immortal dictator?
Evil dicks, that’s who… it was right in the name.
He flew faster and reached down to rip a huge chunk out of the parking lot.
Up he went.
Well above the tree line.
He saw them all.
All the concealed mage-type positions, the fire teams, the mortars and the larger artillery pieces much farther away.
A single glance could’ve cleared each one in an instant, seconds if they had good magic shields and Skills.
However, he only used what power was necessary to achieve an objective.
Full power was usually overkill and why reveal what he could do for them to come up with counters?
Plus, he couldn’t kill any of them.
He ripped hand-sized chunks of concrete and threw them lazily at the soldiers.
Great aim meant that he only destroyed equipment and perhaps knocked out a few mages from the feedback of their shields being shattered.
Half an oak tree hurtled out of the dark forest forcing him to float higher.
A masked soldier leapt from the tree and wrapped him up in a tight hug.
Muscles like steel squeezed around his neck and his mid-section.
The soldier grunted like an animal.
“Ah… you poor young lady. I’m sorry that was done to you.”
Gently, he pried the superstrong limbs loose and flipped her over.
He was on her broad back in a flash.
Her thick neck was no match for his squeezing bicep.
She kicked for a second before falling limp.
A streaking fireball catapulted from the tree line on the other side of the facility.
He turned to take it on his back and protect the young soldier.
She had a knife in her belt, so he borrowed it to send into the rocky outcropping between the mage’s boots.
Maybe, she’d get the message.
“You people are terrible with the friendly fire!” He swooped down and deposited the unconscious soldier on top of a rogue-type soldier that thought he was hidden in the shadows.
The young soldier was a lot heavier than she looked, which gave the rogue something else to do rather than try to backstab, backshot, or any number of dirty rogue tactics.
They came out of the forest.
The elites.
Suppression Fire failed to keep him in place.
Taunts bounced right off since they were just words, which couldn’t hurt him.
Glowing stuff shot out of fancy-wiggling fingers did about as much, which was nothing.
A smoke grenade that was also a caustic acid exploded in his face.
He blew the cloud away from the soldiers.
Idiots always failed to take the wind into account.
It was like they really wanted to do some friendly fire.
Sticks and stones glowing with white energy came firing out of the darkness.
He felt those.
Reminded him of playing catch with his daughter when she just got her powers.
“Kind of you to give me stuff to throw, captain.”
He sent the sticks and stone, now devoid of her imbued power back to the soldiers.
Sometimes it was difficult to properly gauge how much a person could take.
Which was why he aimed for limbs when he didn’t want death or maiming.
Bruises and broken bones were acceptable.
One soldier took a stick to the knee.
The tough guy didn’t fall despite it bending the wrong way. He merely took aim with an odd-looking rifle and squeezed the trigger.
A net crackling with arcs of blue-white light unfurled.
He debated letting it hit him so that he could break it and make them look even more impotent.
“Nah.”
He dropped like a meteor, coming to a stop just shy of the ground.
The earth rumbled.
Three soldiers had their hands planted into the ground.
Three giant hands erupted from beneath him, crushing him in their grasp like a gnat.
“Did that work?” one of the soldiers aimed her assault rifle at the grinding hands.
“Doubt it. We’re just buying time, remember,” another said. “Captain, status?” he spoke into his throat mic. “Double D, status?”
“Alright, someone grab them,” the first soldier gestured at the rogue pinned beneath the young soldier. “Everyone else fall back. We aren’t on his level. Stick to the plan. Engage and annoy.”
The ground suddenly rumbled.
“Not an earthquake!” she snapped. “Scatter—”
The earth erupted beneath her boots.
“Too late.”