Over the comm, I asked, “Was that you?”

“Me?” Marcus shook his head, “No. I just connected.”

Victor stared at me and looked over at Rachel. Then he shouted, “I see you for what you are—avatars of the Artificers. Die!”

Then all the lights winked out as the doors on the boxes that Cassie called “psychotic monkey boxes” opened. For the record, they weren’t monkeys. They were bipedal, but they had two extra arms compared to regular monkeys. They also had tails, but that wasn’t weird.

What was weird is that they didn’t have fur. They had dark, gray skin, glistening with what I assumed to be moisture, but didn’t have to be water. My gut feeling was that it was some kind of oil.

They also didn’t have eyes, ears, noses, or anything more than vestigial heads—at best, they had head nubbins.

To the degree that they had heads, they were all mouth, mouths that expanded the head nubbin when they opened. Complete with gummy ridges, their open jaws delivered croaking noises that carried undertones that started my anti-Dominator defenses going.

I didn’t know for sure why, but from the way I flinched before my defenses kicked in, I guessed they were going for paralyzing fear.

Thanks to prior preparation, I avoided being manipulated by them, only having to deal with my internal fear. Sure, I was in armor, but I’d never seen these things before and from what my implant had said, they were dangerous even to the Xiniti.

The creepy, gray monkey things leaped from the ground, landing on the lab equipment, and jumping again, aiming toward us with a speed that barely gave me time to pull up my arms and aim and loose a salvo of bots.

Much like hand grenades, my bots weren’t dependent on my ability to aim—which was good because I didn’t have time. Between my implant and the bots’ programming, I essentially thought, “Hit the small things jumping toward me,” and the computers translated it into targets.

The result? Pretty awesome.

As much as I’d like to think that I didn’t go into heroing out of a need to feel powerful, now and then, I could enjoy the ego boost. Every one of my bots hit and every one of them turned the psychotic flesh monkey it hit into splattered monkey bits.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Out of the 33 leaping monkeys, I killed 15—almost half.

Everyone else was limited to one attack at a time—though to be fair, in Jaclyn’s case, those attacks followed each other in a blur. She took out 10 by herself. Cassie and Rachel took out the other eight while Marcus continued to hack into the Abominators’ computer logs.

You could say it was on Victor’s recommendation because all of the monkeys Jaclyn destroyed plus three of Cassie’s had been aiming for Marcus. The rest had been aiming for Cassie or me.

Her blur of destruction left Jaclyn standing near Marcus amid a cluster of Abominator tech and money splatter, “I’ll protect Shift. See if you can take out Victor.”

I couldn’t argue with her battle plan. Victor was the problem. Everything he threw at us would just be his weapons. Like her, I didn’t doubt that there would be more.

I wasn’t wrong. As she said it, the monkey boxes flashed and 33 more monkeys leaped out toward us.

Eyes glowing, they began to leap for us, but this time I was better. I fired as soon as their eyes appeared in the darkness, hitting eleven with the initial salvo, the bots exploding as they hit.

It wasn’t luck either. I tried to do that.

I had a few hundred bots while Victor had infinite monkeys. If we took out the boxes, we’d only have to fight a finite number of monkeys, turning it into a fight we could win.

Beams of white-hot energy from Cassie’s gun wiped out most of the rest of the monkeys, leaving only a few for Jaclyn and Rachel—but mostly Jaclyn.

“Nice work with the boxes,” Cassie said over the comm. “I only got one. If I wanted more, I’d have to shoot through things.”

“I hope we took them out,” I said, zooming in on the shattered boxes.

Between the rounded edges and light gray color, they reminded me of iPhones. While I didn’t think it would be above Steve Jobs to copy Abominator tech, it seemed unlikely.

Zooming in further showed me the edges of one of the boxes that I’d exploded. In the Rocket suit’s HUD, the composite sensor view showed not only that the edges had a red tinge, but that they were hotter than the material next to them.

I couldn’t be sure from the visuals alone, but I thought the box was growing back. Noticing a crack glow red and then disappear confirmed that thought.

“The boxes are growing back, but the more pieces that they’re in, the longer we’ve got,” I said and ran forward, using my laser to cut the nearest untouched boxes in two and firing off more bots to blow up the others.

With any luck, Marcus would get the time he needed. As for myself, I could serve him best by getting Victor’s attention, “Hey, you don’t have to throw monkeys at us. We could talk. I know I’ve got a connection to the Artificers, but I don’t work for them.”

Victor screamed. If he thought what he said made sense, he was wrong. It could have passed as the scream of someone being tortured, but I couldn’t pick out a single word in the raw, throaty gasps and sobs.

If it stopped there, it would have been bad enough, but it didn’t. The artifact in the cluster next to him began to glow white. Blue sparks arced across its cone-shaped body.

Since releasing psychotic monkeys hadn’t solved the problem, he’d gone to plan b.