“Ryuuk, I heard you struggling in your room last night,” I explained, trying to control my irritation. “When I went to investigate, your room was trashed, and you were missing. Then, witnesses saw these two carrying your unconscious body out of the bar. So, what do you mean, you weren’t kidnapped?”
“Oh, uh...those are all true statements,” Ryuuk said. “But it’s not like that.”
“We saved your friend’s life,” Zayn said. “He nearly poisoned himself.”
Ryuuk shrugged sheepishly.
“I uh, took this potion I got from a store yesterday in town,” Ryuuk explained. “It didn’t quite work like the lady who sold it to me claimed. I started freaking out and throwing stuff around. The last thing I remember was fallin’ and hittin’ my head on somethin’ hard.
“Luckily! These guys showed up and took me here, pumped my stomach and patched me up,” he continued. “I’ve been feelin’ under tha’ weather, so they said I should stay here for a while to rest up.”
“Leave it to Ryuuk not to even know when he’s been kidnapped,” Dick muttered from behind me.
At his words, I saw Zayn and Tonno tense slightly.
“But I haven’t!” Ryuuk exclaimed, then grabbed his head in pain. “I can leave any time I want, right guys?”
“Sure,” Zayn said. “But you’d probably be better off here. None of these guys would have been able to save your life, Crackshot.”
I shared a bewildered look with Vomero as Zayn spoke, mostly because nobody had ever called Ryuuk Crackshot. Also it didn’t rhyme or alliterate with his name.
“It’s just something the guys started callin’ me,” Ryuuk said, slightly embarrassed.
I sighed in frustration, wondering why I was having to explain something so painfully obvious to him. Luckily, Gramps saved me the effort.
“Ryuuk, these men aren’t your friends,” the old man said, stepping forward but not moving toward the three of them standing in the middle of the room. “We’re your friends, and we’re telling you to trust us. Everyone we’ve talked to about them have said they’re always up to something bad, taking advantage of people like you.”
“You mean gullible idiots like me?” Ryuuk challenged, sounding hurt.
“No, people with a good and trusting heart like you,” Gramps responded. “And while trusting people is a good thing, you need to learn to start putting your trust in the people who’ve earned it.”
“Again,” Zayn said, “we did save his life, old geezer. Where were you when all that went down, huh?”
“Ryuuk,” I interjected. “Why do you think they were in your room in the first place? Complete strangers?”
“I reckon’ they must’ve heard all the commotion like you did, Skye. They just got to me first.”
Vomero took out the order pad he had commandeered from the bar and pulled up a document. With a flick of his wrist, he threw the digital image onto the giant holovid screen, displaying it for everyone in the room to see.
“So, you’re telling me it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the 1 million credit reward someone is offering for your capture?” Vomero asked sarcastically.
Ryuuk stared transfixed at the giant image of himself in the theme park advertisement. I watched him carefully, noticing an unusual play of emotions cross his face. He looked equal parts ashamed and angry, looking at the image.
“Where did you get that?” he asked, quietly.
“The same place your new friends got it, I imagine,” Vomero continued. He was done trying to reason nicely with Ryuuk. His tone was blunt and harsh. “These guys were there to knock you out and drag you away. Luckily for them, your dumb ass did half the work for them.”
“But they saved my life!” Ryuuk argued. “Why do that, if they weren’t really trying to help me?”
Cash, who had also lost all patience by this point, shot a round from his blaster at the screen, it passed through the holographic projection to leave a scorch mark on the wall behind it just beneath the poster where the reward message was displayed.
“Because you’re not worth a damn thing dead, apparently,” Cash said. “Though I’m starting to strongly disagree with that sentiment!”
“Look, I can explain...” Ryuuk started to say, but I cut him off.
“We don’t need you to explain,. We need you to move away from these two assholes so we can get a clear shot at them if they try anything stupid.”
Ryuuk looked back at Tonno and Zayn, who wore matching unreadable expressions.
“I doubt they knew about this,” he defended, motioning to the poster on the wall. “Right guys? Tell em’, or they really might shootcha. They’re a trigger happy bunch.”
Zayn looked at Tonno before rolling his eyes and pulling a blaster from underneath the couch he was still standing by.
“Fine, Tonno,” he said. “We’ll do it your way. Entertaining this nutcase was becoming tedious anyway.”
He leveled the gun at Ryuuk. The sound of several weapons priming echoed through the empty warehouse in response.
“You’re not going to shoot him,” I said, attempting to call his bluff. “You don’t get paid if he’s dead.”
“We don’t get paid if you take him, either,” Zayn countered. “So, all of you need to lower your weapons and stand down because I have a feeling it matters a lot more to you that he stays alive at this point than it does to us.”
Ryuuk hadn’t said a word since Zayn pointed the gun at him. I could tell he was struggling with the realization his new friends were liars and con artists. Seeing the disappointed and disheartened look on his face, I almost felt bad for him. I would have felt bad for him, in fact, if he wasn’t always being such a pain in my ass.
Zayn walked up behind Ryuuk and placed the barrel of his blaster to the back of the Avian’s head.
“Walk,” he commanded, motioning to the exit behind Tonno.
Ryuuk took a hesitant step in the door’s direction.
“Stop,” I countered Zayn’s order. Ryuuk teetered to a stop, looking uncertain.
“Don’t listen to her you naïve idiot!” Zayn shouted in frustration. “I’m the one with the gun to your head.”
“Look, I don’t know what to do,” Ryuuk complained. “On one hand, you’re right. You got the gun. But on the other hand, Skye is scary and trust me you don’t want to cross her.”
“He’s not going to shoot you, Ryuuk,” I said. “It’s two against seven. Even if he shoots you in the head right now, we’d rip them both apart before they got away.”
“That’s not the most reassuring scenario, Skye!” Ryuuk squawked awkwardly.
“I said move!” Zayn shouted in frustration.
Ryuuk took a stumbling step toward the door again, losing his balance in the process and falling clumsily to one knee. An angry Zayn reached down to jerk him back to his feet but was met with a stiff upper cut from Ryuuk’s feathered fist, instead.
Seizing the moment of surprised distraction, I instantly summoned and flung my light dagger toward Zayn, watching it sink into his throat with a satisfying thud. He stepped back, shocked and sputtering blood from his mouth as he tried to speak.
Looking straight at me, I watched his face turn from horrified pain into a smug sneer. For a moment, I thought my vision was wavering as two more of him seemed to step out of the place he was occupying. Two more stepped out from each of these new versions and so on and so on until there were at least thirty copies of him standing in the warehouse around Ryuuk.
The one nearest to the original stepped forward and attempted to pull the light dagger from his throat, but I dissipated it with a thought. The original Zayn fell face down on the floor, twitching in silent pain.
“You’re not the only one with tricks up your sleeve,” Zayn taunted. He kicked the fallen copy with a foot in disdain. “Oh well, one down, 30 more to go.”
A grunting roar of pain emitted from Tonno’s direction. Glancing his way, I saw he appeared to be growing and morphing into a veiny, muscle-overloaded version of himself. He was also about 15 feet tall, nearly half as tall as the warehouse itself. I had fought people with berserker qualities before, though this was the largest one I had encountered.
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“Oh, sorry, buddy,” Zayn said to Tonno, then turned back to me to continue his goading. “That’ll be 31 to go, though we sometimes count him as two.”
I looked over at Dick. Cash was also looking at him.
“Don’t look at me,” he said. “I don’t have anything that big.”
Cash snorted in amusement.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Dick mocked as he flung an ugly look toward Cash. “Talking about his dick. What an original joke. Asshole.”
He crossed his arms stubbornly in a pose reminiscent of a pouting teenager.
“Calm down,” I teased. “Size doesn’t matter.”
“Whaa! I have plenty of size thank you very---you know what, fuck it. Let’s just do this already.”
Without another word, Dick transformed into his Geovite form and launched himself at Tonno.
As Dick barreled into the giant berserker, I moved to attack the Zayn clone nearest to me only to find myself assaulted by three of the clones at once. I immediately realized Zayn’s fighting tactic relied more on overwhelming his opponent with numbers than actual fighting skill.
As I dodged the bare-fisted attacks of the three clones, I heard the others engage in the fight around me. From the corner of my eye, I watched two more clones wrestling Ryuuk toward a door.
“Matthew!” I yelled to the young void walker who was trying to use his tentacle things to pin down clones. “We can’t let those two get Ryuuk out.”
I suspected Zayn’s cloning ability wasn’t like most I had seen. In those scenarios, if you killed the original, the others would disperse. Instead, I was sure that he only needed one to survive, which meant he was content to throw the rest out as fodder as a distraction.
Just as Matthew moved to block the exit with more void tentacles, however, Dick’s solid, Geovite body sailed through the air above us to crash into the far wall. As he went, he took out two large concrete pillars before sinking into the thick wall like it was a soft, foam bed.
The impact startled everyone in the warehouse. I used the opportunity to fling one of the clones against a pile of rubble left by the broken pillar, impaling him on a piece of metal rebar sticking out of the concrete. At the same time, my now free arm whipped my blaster from its holster and fired another shot through Clone #2’s forehead. The third one halted his assault, either thinking better of it or waiting for backup.
“Ugh,” Dick groaned from the pile of rubble that now only vaguely resembled a wall. He sounded winded. “You know, you guys can start helping anytime you want.”
His words were directed at Cash and Vomero, who had yet to join the fight. Instead, they had been laughingly watching Dick get manhandled by Tonno.
“Hey, we weren’t wanting to step on your toes,” Vomero called, goadingly. “It looked like you had him there for a minute.”
Dick didn’t bother answering, just made an inappropriate gesture toward his groin in response.
“You just take a nap, buddy,” Cash added. “We’ve got this.”
With that, he turned to Tonno and clenched a fist. Even from my position, I could feel the crackle of static electricity permeate the air and hear the sound of his systems amping up. Bending briefly on his one bionic leg, he shot up from the ground as if propelled from a cannon toward the berserker.
I didn’t have time to watch the outcome of his attack, however, as Zayn’s clones had regrouped and were back for more. This time, they’d brought more friends. Like the others, they seemed unarmed save the one that had picked up the original Zayn’s gun.
I realized they were weaponless because Zayn couldn’t reproduce them for the clones. That was good news I could use to my advantage because I had no shortage of weapons to cut them down.
As several rushed toward me from across the warehouse, I summoned my light bow. Activating a tattoo on the back of my bow hand, my light arrow split into three as I launched them toward the rushing clones.
“You’re not the only one who can multiply either,” I said, echoing Zayn’s earlier taunt.
Two of the arrows hit their mark. I fired another volley immediately after, hitting another clone before having to switch to my daggers. Despite having the superior fighting skill and being armed, their sheer numbers were quickly overwhelming me.
I took several hard hits from fists and feet flying from every direction, eventually taking a hard kick to the stomach that knocked the wind out of me. Just when it seemed like I might have to do something drastic to get myself out, a boulder came crashing through the pile of clones, knocking half of them away like bowling pins.
Several were crushed under Dick’s weight as he tackled a pile of the clones off of me. I grabbed the closest clone still near me by the face.
“Supernova,” I said, and light exploded directly in his face, no doubt permanently blinding him. He stumbled away, screaming and holding his eyes in pain.
Resummoning my daggers, I felt them flicker slightly as I cut through a couple more clones. My stamina was running out. Calling down the stars might not be an option for long, even if I were willing to incapacitate myself.
From across the warehouse, there was more rubble flying as Cash and Vomero met Tonno blow for blow. They were slowly destroying the integrity of the building, I noticed. Cash would use his juiced up bionics to deliver what should be crippling blows. Individually, his hits barely seemed to affect the larger man, but collectively, the strain was starting to show.
What was also starting to show was the necrotic damage ravaging his system from the swipes Vomero snuck in as Tonno focused on fighting Cash. Farther on the other side of the warehouse, I saw Matthew engaging the remaining clones who were trying to abduct Ryuuk.
Whenever his dark energy tentacles managed to snag one of the clones, the lockdown was relentless. As the swirling appendages held them in place, they slowly stopped struggling until they hung limp and lifeless in the tentacle’s grip.
I gave an involuntary shiver. I’d probably never get used to watching Void magic at work. I wasn’t going to complain, however, as more tentacles emerged from the ground near me to wrap around a clone and start siphoning off his energy. I swiped at him with my dagger, unable to avoid slicing through the part of the tentacle entrapping the clone.
As my light dagger pierced the tentacle, however, an unexpected wave of energy rushed through my body. I stopped, stunned, as Dick continued to hold the clones around us at bay. Startled, my gaze collided with Matthew’s across the warehouse where he was still fighting.
It was obvious he had felt it, too. Somehow, my ability had absorbed the energy his tentacle had drained from the clone. It didn’t appear to have any adverse effect on Matthew, however, probably because it wasn’t actually his energy I was stealing.
We shared a bemused shrug across the battlefield, and Matthew summoned another tentacle nearby to snatch a clone off of Dick’s back. This time, I let it drain the clone for longer before stabbing through both the tentacle and the clone.
Feeling a fresh wave of stamina pour into my body, I set about helping Dick cut down the rest of the clones swarming us. Vomero and Cash’s battle with the berserker quickly made the warehouse an unsafe area to remain. We had to finish this fight quickly and get out before the entire building came down around us.
A few minutes later, we managed to cut down almost all of the clones. The berserker was starting to look pretty grim, as well. From across the room, I saw Matthew had freed Ryuuk and taken care of the clones that had been on that side of the fight. More of them had been fighting Dick and I, but Matthew had really held his own against the ones who were trying to drag Ryuuk away.
“Do you think any of Zayn’s clones got away?” Dick asked. He had transformed back into his human form and was kicking over dead clones as he spoke.
“It’s hard to say without counting the bodies,” I answered, looking around at the pile of corpses littering the floor of the warehouse. “It doesn’t really matter to me if he got away. We don’t have time to linger here.”
I nodded to the roof to emphasize my point as crumbling debris fell from the ceiling. I scanned the warehouse carefully, looking for any sign that one of the clones was hiding nearby.
“Dammit, you bastard!!” Cash roared from across the warehouse.
I pivoted to see what the commotion was about. We didn’t really have time for them to draw their fight out any longer.
“Oh shit,” Dick said.
Tonno was lumbering slowly toward a partially destroyed wall of the warehouse in retreat. His giant hand was clutching Gramps as a hostage, squeezing him so tightly it threatened to break his bones.
“Stay back!” he groaned. “I’ll crush this old man if you follow me. I swear to—”
The words died along with him as a high-powered laser shot ripped through his forehead, eviscerating his skull almost completely. As he fell over dead, his grip loosened on the old man, who tumbled free onto the ground.
Across the warehouse next to Matthew, Ryuuk crouched with his rifle propped on two long, extended legs. It was his rifle, but it looked different. A large laser barrel that hadn’t been part of its feature before whirred smoke and sparks as it cooled down from the powerful shot.
Even as I watched, it appeared to shrink and retract back into the rifle’s inner mechanisms inexplicably. Ryuuk slung the gun over his shoulder and walked over to the old man. He looked hard, as if blowing a man’s brains out who he had recently called a friend didn’t bother him in the least.
Helping Gramps to his feet, Ryuuk pulled the old man into a big bear hug, letting the rifle fall to his side. The older man just hugged him back before pulling away and patting him on the shoulder.
Beside me, Dick shook his head in bewilderment.
“I’m never going to understand that guy, am I?” Dick said. “One minute he’s all peace and love, and the next he’s dead eye executing someone.”
I was about to respond when the building shuddered ominously around us.
“Time to go!” I yelled, “unless you plan to make this place your tomb.”
As the building started to crumble around us, Cash scooped up Gramps as he and Vomero ran for the hole in the wall Tonno had been headed for. Ryuuk flew through a hole in the roof, while Matthew teleported out from the other side of the warehouse where he still stood.
“Shall we?” Dick asked, transforming into his angelic form like he had during our escape from Veridi.
Without asking, he picked me up in his arms and flew toward the open sky left by the crumbling roof. Maybe it was the adrenaline still pumping through me after the fight, or maybe I had just come to see him in a different light than I used to, but as we landed outside the collapsing warehouse, I had the sudden and uncontrollable urge to kiss him.
He released my legs and let my feet slide slowly down to the ground, but I didn’t move away from him or remove my arms from around his neck where I had been clutching him during our flight. He must have noticed something in my expression because his eyes darkened to a stormy blue, and he tilted his head in question.
“Skye?” he said softly.
“Yes,” I said, making it a statement instead of the question it was meant to be.
His head lowered toward mine hesitantly, but he stopped just short of kissing me, as if waiting for me to finish it. With a shaky sigh, I made up my mind to do just that.
“Put your hands where we can see them!” a loud, mechanical sounding voice shouted over the sound of the rubble falling behind us.
Jerking apart, we both turned to see at least two dozen law enforcement officials and first responders stationed around the destroyed building. The enforcers were dressed in full body armor that looked like it could double as a space suit. Their faces were obscured by the accompanying helmets they wore. Several pointed blaster pistols and rifles in our direction, as the amplified voice of the person in charge blasted over the speakers again.
“I said hands up! And kneel slowly on the ground! You’re in violation of peace code 287 and will be remanded into custody.”
Glancing at Dick, I slowly raised my hands and knelt to my knees. He did the same. From the corner of my eye, I could see more enforcers leading other members of our team in handcuffs to the transport vehicles.
“Been here less than a day,” I whispered to Dick. “This has to be a record even for us.”