“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” says the Vitruvian. His hair hangs limply in the air, without a breeze to run through it. “You refuse to listen to reason. I beat you, like I always do.”
“I’m not my father,” I remind him, without malice in my tone. He draws breath to respond, but I cut him off quickly. “For example, I recently managed to solve a problem that plagued him for years.”
Without any ambient noise, we don’t need to shout to make ourselves heard. However, sound travels exceedingly poorly in this state of stopped time, since the air doesn’t flow except within very close proximity to either of us. It gives words an odd, flat quality to them. Light itself is obviously still moving, because we can both still see, which calls into question exactly how the device behind the Vitruvian is accomplishing this effect.
“What problem would that be? Free will?”
Naturally, he can’t resist a jab. When you think of yourself as having moral superiority over everybody you meet, it’s impossible not to let some of that condescension slip into the way you speak, no matter how hard you try to project the image of a saint.
“Not quite,” I reply.
Unlike last time, I’m not allowing myself to take his bait. Some time after our last conversation, I realized that he was trying to irritate me intentionally, so that he might exploit my anger in a fight. A common enough tactic among heroes, and one that worked often on Father, though he’d never admit it.
“You see, Father spent a long time trying to understand you. Not merely your psychology- that’s simple enough. No, what fascinated him was that armor of yours. It’s incredible. Beyond anything I’ve ever seen, save artifacts from a millenia ago or more.”
As I speak, I slowly reach for my utility belt, and unbuckle it. Dropping it to the side, I suppress a laugh when it simply stops in midair the moment it leaves my hand.
“At first, he tried to find a weakness. Something you’d overlooked. But that’s the trick- unlike you, that armor can change and grow. So he changed tactics. Began attempts to replicate it, instead. Unfortunately, those attempts had failed to yield results by the time he died. There was simply something that you possessed, that he lacked.”
Taking a step towards the Vitruvian, I shrug off my jacket, letting it hover behind me as I continue to speak. He takes a step back, seemingly without even realizing he’s done so until he brushes up against the still-spinning golden orb.
“So his notes languished in a filing cabinet for forty years. Until I got my hands on them a few days ago. And wouldn’t you know it? Whatever you’ve got that my father didn’t have... I’ve got it too.”
“Conrad...”
“Do you know what it is? The answer is simple enough that even you should be able to figure it out.”
Black metal begins to build from a spot right on my spine, constructing itself at a mental command until everything below my neck is covered. It takes a matter of seconds, and then my Winter Warsuit is complete.
“I’ve got something to fight for.”
In the span of the same second, a helmet closes around his head and mine. I don’t need a HUD in the visor. The Warsuit is wired directly into my central nervous system. It reacts to my thoughts without a fraction of lag, and feeds every bit of information I might need right into my brain. Really, it’s less a piece of technology, and more an extension of my body.
“Now, let’s finish this.”
Dramatic one-liner delivered perfectly, I launch myself at the Vitruvian. The Winter Warsuit grows a set of rocket-powered wings, and my gauntlets become cannons, firing a rapid stream of hot plasma straight at the Vitruvian’s golden faceplate. I can’t see the look in his eyes, but I’d bet anything it’s surprise. After all, I just displayed a capability his own armor lacks. It can effectively cannibalize itself to fire bullets, or other kinetic projectiles, but energy weapons are off the table without a specific power source to draw from.
I didn’t just replicate his technology, I improved upon it. Using the portal technology that allows me instant access to my extradimensional armory, not to mention letting me bring back Father’s corpse, and the Vitruvian himself, I can access external power sources in an instant, without having to build them into the armor.
Throwing up his arms, he generates a hard-light shield that the plasma sprays off of. Instead of falling to the ground and burning through the roof beneath our feet, it hangs in the air. Still headed straight for him, I flip around and deliver a kick straight at the shield- while using the Warsuit’s boosts to fire an energy pulse that disrupts the hard-light construct. Then, before he can react, I fire cables that hook into his armor, and spin him around, straight into the frozen plasma. When he hits it, it unfreezes, leaving shallow burns in the armor’s surface.
The Vitruvian rights himself in midair, sprouting wings of his own. Unlike mine, which essentially resemble those of a plane, albeit much smaller, his look like those of an angel, made from golden metal rather than white feathers. It’s so on the nose I almost want to throw up.
“That was a clever move,” he says, tearing the cables out of his armor. I retract them before he can attempt to use them against me. “But taking a page out of my book doesn’t mean you can beat me.”
He isn’t wrong. The armor alone isn’t going to win this fight. He’s certainly got much more experience with his than I do with mine. But that isn’t the only advantage I have. Even after what I just told him, he still thinks he’s fighting Father. Maybe the armor is keeping him in stasis, preventing him from changing tactics, or maybe it’s just a personal flaw. Either way, I’m going to take full advantage of it.
Rather than respond, I generate a gun in my right hand, intentionally mimicking the design of Father’s ‘death ray.’ Firing an energy beam, I sweep it towards him swiftly, but he swoops underneath with ease. Just then, I deploy a drone from the back of my other hand, which- having flown closer to me to avoid the beam -he’s now unable to avoid in time. The drone seems to have taken the shape of a hummingbird, likely influenced by my subconscious, but as soon as it strikes the Vitruvian, it shifts into something closer to a spider, attaching itself to his chest. Before he can remove it, the mechanical creature slips into every minute crevice and crack it can find, before I reach my hand out and yank it off of him magnetically.
“I don’t know what you just did,” the Vitruvian proclaims, “but I hope you made it count, because you’re not going to get another chance.”
One chance is all I’ll need. My logic is simple enough. The Vitruvian developed his armor when computer science was still in its infancy. Of course, he was decades ahead of everyone else, but his design process was still influenced by the technology of the era. As such, while he may understand what malware is conceptually, he’ll be ill-equipped to deal with it. My virus isn’t too powerful, as he’d likely be able to identify and eliminate it if it were. Its only function is to slow down his armor’s response time by fractions of a second. Not much, but in a battle that’s effectively being fought at the speed of thought, it may prove crucial.
Generating a scimitar in each hand, the hero soars towards me. I’m sure it would impress most people, but to me it’s just an example of how limited his linear thought process is. All the potential of that armor, and he still thinks he’s restricted to what he can hold in two hands? To make my counterargument, I generate an extra pair of limbs, before manifesting a different blade in each one. That doesn’t deter him from approaching, though.
The Vitruvian swings a scimitar at me, earlier than expected. At the last second, he increases the blade’s reach, preventing me from simply dodging it as I’d intended. None of my four blades are positioned close enough to deflect it, so I retract one, and extend it out of the other side of the handle, where it emerges just fast enough to keep me from getting an unwanted haircut. Seizing the moment, I strike with all four blades at once, forcing him to wrap his wings around and use them as shields. While he’s fending off my assault, I manifest a tail on the back of the armor, keeping it out of sight until the right moment. Then, it snaps out, the barbed tip slipping past his defenses and piercing his abdomen. As I suspected, the Winter Warsuit is capable of striking through his suit, which means he’s capable of doing the same to me.
Unless he’s more of a fool than I thought, the Vitruvian likely made sure his armor had more than enough available materials before this fight, just as I did. That means neither of us is going to win a battle of attrition. However, I suspect I still have the advantage, both because of my trick with the virus, which is likely how I managed to get that hit in before he could move to block it, and because my armor is simply more advanced. I had access to the best workshop in the most technologically advanced nation in the world, not to mention the benefit of our decades of progress in every field imaginable.
“There’s still time to surrender,” I inform him, retracting the tail and pulling back a few feet. “I don’t want to kill you.”
“Don’t worry,” he says grimly. “You won’t.”
His wings disappear in an instant. I suppose they were never strictly necessary for him to fly, just an aesthetic flourish that doubled as a shield in a pinch. The swords go next, replaced with a pair of what look like battering rams. Then he slams into me, fast enough that I barely process the fact that he’s moving before I find myself crashing straight through the oil rig below us. As we plunge into the depths, I retract my additional limbs and the weapons attached, instead grabbing onto his forearms. Wires shoot out from my wrists and dig into his arms, but he doesn’t so much as acknowledge them as they burrow beneath the surface of the armor.
Having seemingly attached his fists to my suit magnetically, I can only struggle in vain as he drives me deeper beneath the waves. The wires I deployed are unable to get past the armor to the man beneath, and I retract them, swearing under my breath. Though the suit protects me, the rapidly dropping pressure proves disorienting, and it takes me several moments before I can get my bearings. Then I realize something that should have been obvious from the start. I may have put myself on equal footing with him by replicating his armor, but the Winter Warsuit isn’t the only weapon I have available to me.
With a thought, I summon a gravity amplifier from the armory and plant it directly on his shoulder. Then, with no small amount of effort thanks to the time-frozen water’s resistance, I twist around so he’s beneath me. Planting my boots on his chest, I push off, putting every bit of power I can muster into it, until I break the magnetic hold he has on me. A moment later, I activate the amplifier, sending him straight to the bottom.
Rather than pursue, I head straight for the surface. That move bought me a few precious seconds, and I intend to take full advantage. Right now, that means flying back to the rig and planting my feet on the ground. That allows the Warsuit to begin processing the raw materials- namely metal. In effect, I’m refueling. But before I can take much, I see the Vitruvian behind me. Within the Warsuit, I can essentially see in every direction at once, meaning I’m impossible to sneak up on. He tries anyway, firing a salvo of spikes at me. That’s a risky move, considering it’s directly expending materials, but perhaps he’s past the point of caring.
Unwilling to risk a direct hit, I throw up a force-field instead, replicating the one he used at Avernus and locking the spikes in space for an instant. When I drop the shield a second later, they remain frozen, this time temporally rather than spatially. The exact mechanics of this time-freeze aren’t entirely clear to me, since projectiles seem to remain in motion once fired, but stop when redirected or otherwise manipulated.
Retreating into the air, I allow the Vitruvian to reclaim the projectiles. Perhaps a tactical misstep, but I have bigger priorities. Momentarily pondering the time-freeze gave me an idea so simple I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier. I accepted without question that this was going to be a fight between two men for the fate of the world. But that way of thinking only benefits one of us, and it’s not me. The Vitruvian’s allies are all dead or beaten, while many of mine remain in fighting condition. There’s absolutely no reason not to allow them to help me, except pride- and that’s not the kind of man I am.
When he realizes where I’m headed, the Vitruvian pursues swiftly. Realizing he isn’t going to overtake me, he fires a cable instead, and I’m unable to stop it before it can hook me by the leg. He whips it back, throwing me through an empty oil tank, which crumples around me. Instead of immediately launching myself back at him, I allow the Vitruvian to get close, even giving him the chance to slam an oversized fist into my face. Only then do I shift the Warsuit’s chest into a cannon, and blast him with plasma again. It engulfs his armor before he can react, and I push past him while he’s dealing with it.
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Forming a drill around my fist, I rocket towards the orb atop the central tower, intending to smash it apart with a single blow. Instead, when the tip of the drill connects, it pulses with energy, sending me flying back through the air.
Still reeling, I’m unable to prevent the Vitruvian from tackling me straight upwards. The plasma is an effective weapon- it burns through his armor, forcing him to use his reserves to replenish it. But he’s recovered fast, and now launches a counterattack. His hand morphs into a blade, which then sprouts a number of rockets around the wrist. A moment later it slams into my shoulder, biting into my flesh through the Warsuit. There’s pain, but with the pain comes clarity.
First, I snap the blade off while it’s still lodged in me. Then I yank it out, allowing my armor to close around the wound and begin treating it. With the shard of his suit in my hand, I close my fist and begin to process the materials into my own armor. It’s barely a scrap, but what matters is that I did it at all- and the Vitruvian certainly seems surprised by that. Surprised enough that he doesn’t react fast enough to stop what I do next. Namely, manifesting another extra set of limbs. Unlike before, though, they aren’t just copies of my own arms. They’re twice as long, with several extra sets of joints, and claws. And there are six of them, not counting the ones that I came with. They grab him wherever they can, holding back his limbs and preventing him from escaping. Finally, he tries to grow another set of arms himself, only for me to add another two of my own and grab them as well. Thanks to my brief refuel, I’ve got enough excess materials to keep him occupied for the moment.
Reorienting in the air, I drive him back down towards the ground. I’ve got a specific target in mind, though. Namely, the time-sphere. It may be capable of defending itself against my attacks, but I’d wager it won’t do the same thing to its creator. The Vitruvian struggles twice as hard when he realizes what I’m doing, but it’s too late. We crash through the orb together, shattering it into pieces.
A number of things happen at once. First, the Vitruvian absorbs the pieces of the orb into his armor, which gives him the edge he needs to force his way out of my grip. At the same time, the rain resumes falling, which- to my ears, having only recently adjusted to the near-total silence -sounds like the loudest thing in the entire world. It’s enough to disorient both of us for several seconds, during which I hear the oil rig creak dangerously beneath us. Apparently, the parts I absorbed were at least somewhat load-bearing.
When I’ve gotten used to living in a world of sound again, I retract the various additional extremities, preparing for the fight to continue. Before I can do anything, however, a silver blur slams into the Vitruvian like a freight train. Naturally, Adamant was the first one to put together what happened- she processes information far faster than the others while transformed. While they tumble through the air, she attacks without mercy- not with punches, but by tearing chunks out of the Vitruvian’s armor, one fistful at a time.
A single blow sends Haley flying, while the Vitruvian repairs his armor at a safe distance. Before she can fall back to earth, I detach a portion of the Winter Warsuit and send it after her. It wraps around her shoulders, forming a pair of black wings. She swiftly discovers that they respond to her mental commands, and flies up to join me.
“So this is the surprise you were talking about.”
“Damn right it is.”
The real surprise, I suspect, may be the fact that I rejected the terms of my ‘duel’ with the Vitruvian. Father would certainly never have done so. He had allies, of course, but actually admitting that he needed their help was something he was congenitally incapable of. But despite what the Vitruvian might think, I’m not the same as the man I was cloned from.
Down on the platform, the others are looking up at us. A plan slowly begins to form in my head, the pieces clicking together like a well-constructed machine.
“Keep him busy for a minute. I have an idea.”
Adamant nods, and I fly back down to where the others are. Planting my feet on the ground, I immediately begin processing as much of the metal as I can, without regard for the structural integrity of the rig. Using some of that excess, I reach out and wrap Atlas in a suit of his own. Unlike mine, however, he won’t be able to control it at all. Nor will he be able to escape- not with the memetic attack I just hit him with. The same one the Vitruvian used on Network, in fact.
“You can take that out,” I tell Ishtar, retracting the Warsuit’s helmet so they all know it’s me. “He won’t be going anywhere.”
Looking skeptical, she does so slowly, backing away the moment the psychokinetic blade exits his skull. To her surprise, however, Atlas doesn’t stir in the slightest.
“This whole place is going down soon,” I inform them, another worrisome creak confirming the veracity of my statement. “Kellan, bring in the Hercule and get everybody out of here.”
Before he can respond- the gun still pointed at Atlas’s head, despite his immobilisation -Adam Apex speaks.
“Hold the phone. I’m not done yet, yo.”
“Are you certain you can handle this?”
“Is the Pope a Christian?”
I roll my eyes with a smile.
“Conrad, are you sure about this?”
“Yes,” I answer firmly. “Now get out of here. If Tahir dies, Marisa will kill the both of us.”
Kellan laughs, holstering the gun. At his instruction, the Demon Armor lifts up Atlas, while he goes to get Evrimci. Meanwhile, his VTOL descends from its position in the clouds. Apex hefts the bat and takes off to go back up Adamant, giving me a moment alone with Ishtar.
“You’d better make one of those for me,” she says, smirking.
“Oh? And what are you going to give me in return?”
“Survive this,” she says, “and you’ll find out.”
Leaning in to kiss me on the cheek, she turns away with a laugh, following the others into the Hercule. Somehow Nemesis is already inside before anybody else. While the doors are closing, I turn away, back to the fight. As I’m flying, I open a channel to Zero.
“Sandra, are you there?”
“Winters? Are you out of the blackout field?”
I pause, realizing suddenly that I’m not. Apparently the Warsuit bypassed the blackout field without even needing my conscious command.
“Something like that,” I reply. “What’s the situation with Network?”
“He’s getting back on his feet,” she informs me. “Are you- is it done?”
“It’s about to be.”
Cutting the line, I increase my speed until I’m going as fast as feels possible. Using my fists as bludgeons, I slam into the Vitruvian, knocking him back, then shift them into plasma cannons and lay into him with them before he can come back at us. That buys a little time, which means I can focus on helping out the others. Apex seems to have gotten himself stuck in the amber-like substance that the Vitruvian used to trap Tahir during the fight at Avernus. Placing a hand on it, I shift rapidly through vibrational frequencies until I find the one that shatters it.
“Thanks,” he says. Then, looking sheepish, “I kinda, uh, dropped your bat.”
With the Winter Warsuit’s sensor suite, I locate the Superdensity Slugger almost instantly. It’s already halfway to the ocean floor, but with a directed magnetic beam, I yank it straight back up and into my hand, before passing it to Apex. He looks suitably impressed, smacking it against his palm and turning to face the Vitruvian. Adamant flies closer to us as well, her flight pack looking like it’s taken some hits. I reach over and provide some surplus material to shore it up.
Beneath us, the rig is now beginning to truly collapse. I mainly targeted the ‘legs,’ seeing as they’re made of solid metal, rather than being mostly hollow like the rest of the structures on the platform. That means that they’re beginning to buckle under the weight of everything they were previously supporting. It also means I’ve got more than enough in the way of resources to finish this fight.
“What’s the plan, Winters?”
“We hit him hard and fast, don’t give him a second to breathe. Focus on the armor- he can’t keep repairing it forever.”
Adamant nods seriously. Instead of resuming his assault, the Vitruvian is hovering in place a few hundred yards away. There’s no way he’s just waiting for us to attack- he has to have something up his sleeve, some new trick he’s waiting to unleash. Whatever it is, it won’t be enough.
“Go.”
All three of us strike simultaneously. As we’re hurtling towards him, I fire a series of miniature missiles from the back of the suit. They circle around him, but rather than striking directly, expand in the air to form a hollow half-sphere behind him. Energy arcs between the gaps, effectively boxing him in. With nowhere to run, the Vitruvian deploys a pair of wrist-mounted cannons, focusing on Adamant and Apex. Without the ability to access external energy sources like I can, he must be drawing from the armor’s own reserves- a risky play, but perhaps the only one he feels he has left. It’s also ineffective, unfortunately for him. That kind of attack is something both of my more naturally durable allies can shrug off without effort.
Slowing my approach slightly, I generate an oversized particle-beam cannon on my back and immediately open fire. The Vitruvian brings up a kinetic shield- force-fields don’t do much good against energy weapons -to block it, but finds that it doesn’t do much good. After a second or two, the shield begins to melt, the intense heat of the energy attack liquefying his construct. Forced to drop it, lest he lose more material than he can afford, he’s immediately struck by the Superdensity Slugger. Apex’s hit sends him flying into my trap, where the electrical current conducts itself through his armor, leaving him writhing in agony. That’s when Adamant swoops in to take another chunk out of his armor- this time a sizable portion of the chestplate. Before he can reform it, she takes her other hand and jabs him twice. It’s her equivalent of a love tap, but more than sufficient to break a pair of ribs.
Tearing himself out of the electric trap, the Vitruvian sends both Adamant and Apex flying back with a pair of force-blasts. According to my armor’s analysis, he was using pressurized air, a fairly clever attack that allows him to conserve resources. Folding back the particle cannon, I dispel the electric trap as well, summoning those components back, before constructing an oversized battleaxe in my hands and swinging it straight for his neck.
A quickly-constructed shield on one arm blocks the blade, but instead of matching me with another traditional weapon, he shifts his free hand into a gun, firing a hail of golden shards at me. Though I manage to catch some with a force-field, quite a few manage to hit me. Worse still, they continue moving even after they hit, as if trying to burrow through my armor. Luckily, my synth-fluid uniform beneath prevents them from penetrating flesh, which gives me time to absorb the material into the Warsuit.
“Batter up, bitch!”
Normally, I’d advise against announcing your intentions before you attack, but Apex moves fast enough for it not to matter. Clotheslining the Vitruvian with the Superdensity Slugger, he launches the hero away from me. Adamant comes up behind him, ripping off another chunk of armor and repeating the same maneuver as before. This time, however, a decidedly more vulnerable area is exposed- his spine. She doesn’t shatter it completely, even though doing so would undoubtedly be easy. Instead, she restrains herself to a single two-finger strike, that nevertheless seems to do a great deal of damage. A part of me hopes that spinal damage would prevent him from controlling his armor, which would end the fight without further violence, but we don’t seem to be that lucky. Instead, he throws up a force-field, hunched over himself in the air. The three of us swiftly surround it from multiple angles.
“You know,” Adam continues, “I used to think you and Atlas were hot shit when I was a kid. Mostly him, but still. You were kicking ass and taking names before it was cool. But look at you now. You’re just a--”
Before Apex can finish his sentence, the Vitruvian fires another blast at him, this one wide enough to cover his entire body in amber. The brawler immediately drops out of the sky, and I hear him splash down in the water beneath us a moment later. Forced to decide between going after him and pressing the attack, I choose the latter. Letting up for even a moment might give him time to replenish his reserves from what little of the oil rig is still above water.
I blast the same frequency Zero used to disrupt his shield at Avernus, and go in for an attack at the same moment. Morphing my hands into deadly claws, I grasp the sides of his helmet and tear it in half, exposing his face for a split second. There’s blood matting his beard, and a wild, desperate look in his eyes, which only intensifies as he reforms the helmet and hits back, carving into my chestplate with a spinning circular sawblade.
Adamant intercedes before he can pierce my synth-fluid uniform, grabbing the Vitruvian’s arm and tearing off the armor protecting it. The thought doesn’t even have time to fully form in my mind before the Winter Warsuit reacts, a set of deadly pincer blades forming to snap together around his vulnerable flesh. In a spray of blood, the arm is gone, and the Vitruvian roars in pain and fury. Golden threads weave their way out of the wound, first wrapping around it to stem the blood loss, then taking the shape of a new arm, closer to the old one than the more intricate design of his armored gauntlet. It fuses with the armor itself at the shoulder, and he clenches the new fist experimentally, before cleaning my clock with it.
Somewhat in shock, I retract the pincer blades and pull back. It’s hardly the worst wound I’ve ever inflicted, but with the nature of this fight until now, it was easy to forget that we’re both real people underneath the armor. People who can bleed. People who can die.
Opening his palm, the Vitruvian launches a miniscule device towards Adamant. I only realize what it is a second too late, as she instantly plummets to the ground. He must have mentally reverse-engineered my gravity amplifiers while we were fighting. Even assisted by the armor, that’s an impressive feat, one I doubt I’d be capable of under the same circumstances. Then again, he did just let me amputate a limb, so perhaps he should have been paying closer attention to the fight itself.
“Clever move, bringing them in,” he says to me. “But you’re all out of human shields.”
“I beg to differ,” replies an unexpected voice, a second before a stealth-rocket strikes the Vitruvian in the back. Behind him, the Hercule decloaks, and I spot Kellan behind the controls, grinning.
“The others--”
“Translocated out once we left the blackout field. Did you really think I was going to leave you behind, though?”
“You should have, but I appreciate the assist. Now pull back. You’ve got all the maneuverability of a hot air balloon in that thing, compared to him.”
If we weren’t speaking through our communicators, I doubt I’d be able to hear him over the sound of gunfire from the VTOL’s cannons, keeping the Vitruvian occupied for the moment while we talk.
“Not a chance. I’ve wanted a shot at this asshole for weeks.”
Though I sigh theatrically to him, I can’t help but smile on the inside. Then I do two things at once. First, I launch myself at the Vitruvian. Second, I fire a small device towards the Hercule, which attaches itself to the hull magnetically. A moment later, the VTOL ceases firing of its own accord, and begins to pull back, giving my opponent and I some room to breathe. It’s not about honor, or even respect for the hero. Just simple logistics. The Hercule isn’t fast enough to keep up with us, and if I have to spend the whole fight worrying about protecting Kellan, I’m going to lose.
“You win this round,” Hawkshaw says, halfway between amusement and annoyance. “But if he beats you, I promise I’ll make sure everyone in the supermax knows it’s your fault the world is going to shit.”
Laughing, I cut the connection and focus fully on the fight in front of me. For a few moments, we cross blades at blinding speeds, each forgoing other tricks in favor of a duel. But it swiftly becomes clear that I hold the upper hand, and not merely because fencing is one of my favored pursuits. The virus I infected his armor with is still working behind the scenes, slowing him down just enough to give me an edge. For every blow he lands, I score two, and mine are longer and deeper.
Slamming his blade against mine with renewed force, the Vitruvian constructs a high-powered thruster on his back and drives me toward the ground. Augmenting my strength, I keep our swords locked in place with one hand, while transforming another into a claw again. While he pushes against me, I begin tearing away at his chestplate, intent on removing as much material as I can. The Warsuit provides me a great deal of information, but unfortunately the amount of excess material in the Vitruvian’s reserves is not available to me. That means I don’t have much choice other than to hope I’m slowly wearing him down.
Manifesting micro-thrusters on my chest, I subtly shift our flight trajectory towards the roof of the central tower, which still sticks up out of the water, even as the rest of the rig has collapsed. We slam into it, and he pulls back, letting me skid across the surface. My Warsuit cushions me, but the fall is still disorienting. Before I can get my bearings, the Vitruvian charges towards me, swinging his blade. It’s a falchion, slightly shorter but no less deadly than mine, which took the form of a claymore, the first that came to mind. Luckily, weight is a non-factor, as it feels as light as a feather in my hands.
Thrusters both driving us towards each other, we remain locked in place by our blades. Neither able to attain more speed or force, we’re locked in a stalemate. Suddenly, inspiration hits, desperation forcing my mind into overdrive. I focus on the edge of the blade itself, sharpening it to a single, monomolecular point. Before the Vitruvian can put together what I’m doing, my sword slices through his, a clean cut, and bites into his armor. He cuts his engines and dashes backwards. But instead of instantly regenerating, the sword stays broken- as does his armor, which still has a number of deep gashes in it.
There’s only one logical conclusion. He’s out.
Realizing it right as I do, the Vitruvian’s thrusters angle down, preparing for him to make a move towards the roof. If he has a hope of winning this fight, it hinges on him being able to acquire a few scraps of sheet metal to repair his armor. I don’t give him the chance. My blade goes from rigid to flexible in an instant, and I snap it towards him like a lunging viper. The tip spears him through the heart in an instant.
Helmet retracting, the Vitruvian looks down at his chest in shock. Already, blood is beginning to bubble up in his throat. He lets it run down his lips, and slowly looks up to face me. Retracting the blade, I pull him towards me, unable to risk letting him touch the roof even now. He makes no move to resist, coughing violently as I slide the sword out of his chest and retract it into my Warsuit. His armor is still shifting, rededicating all available resources to try and seal the wound, but it’s too late.
“You’re... just as bad as your father,” he wheezes, voice growing weaker by the second. The light in his eyes is dimming. “Just as much of a monster... as he ever was...”
I know what I’m supposed to say. What the son of Byron Winters would say. What he’s expecting me to say. What he wants to hear, because it would mean he was right, even in death. That I’m not as bad as Father- I’m better than him, because I finally beat his mortal enemy.
I know what I’m supposed to feel. Pride, satisfaction at having finally avenged my father. But all I feel is hollow. There’s one thing that the Vitruvian was right about. The deaths by your own hand are the ones that hurt the most, because they mean that you failed. That you couldn’t find any other way.
“No. I’m worse.”