Chapter 22 #2
My entire right arm slammed into the ground in a plume of dust of debris.
The loud clang was the only thing that covered my anguished scream as the pain seared through me.
A spray of black oil coated both of us like blood, exposed wires sparked between us, and I was damn near tears, the pain was so vivid and real and hot and sharp and why the fuck do Shinka share our nerves?
I covered the exposed socket with my remaining hand to soothe phantom pain, while Elio looked at his left forearm that was hanging off its elbow, barely holding on by some stubborn circuitry.
He finished the job by grabbing his own limp, damaged arm, and ripping the dangling half free.
He tossed it into the pile, clanging his lost limb against mine, like having his arm ripped off from the elbow down hadn’t even fazed him.
This man really was a fucking monster. It was insane to me that he was second to someone like Sebastian, who was so refined and methodical by comparison. Elio was the kind of beast you had nightmares about.
“Weight savings,” He said with a laugh, as he rotated his damaged arm at the shoulder. The pain was still churning my stomach as I took a nervous step back.
“Aww, does it hurt, baby?” Elio mocked me through our COMMs. “Don’t worry.
Once you’ve got a bit more experience, you’ll start to like it.
” He tossed his blade in his remaining hand, letting it twirl in the air above him, then catching it again and again in threatening rhythm.
“I’ll be more than happy to be the one to teach you. ”
Elio caught the blade by the hilt after the third rotation, then fluidly and viciously, he closed the distance again.
I didn’t have time to breathe before I drew my sword, then deflected and ducked low.
He predicted my movements better than I could, and in a volley of clashes, dodges, and articulate footwork, he was forcing my retreat with effortless violence.
Stone and metal scattered in a whirlwind around us, as we used shin, heel, and shoulder thrusters to increase the pace and reinforce every impact.
He was good. Fuck, he was good. But the longer I defended, the more I came to understand, and I was starting to match his ferocity.
However much I lacked in my own body, I could do everything and anything he could in this one, and I wasn’t going to back down until I was space dust in the atmosphere.
The only stakes in this simulation were the limits of my pain tolerance, and that was one thing I had in spades.
Our battle took us through the mock city, and I started using the environment to my advantage, grabbing and throwing broken slabs of concrete, or using the rubble as a shield.
I made distance between us, so we were both relegated to long range weaponry, as we ran side by side down the ravaged streets.
No more talking, no more taunts. We ran amidst a soundtrack of pounding footfalls, swinging blades, and heated gunfire.
A cross roads into a densely built city brought us back together, and strategy shifted from bullets to environmental manipulation.
I blocked a shot with an abandoned vehicle as a shield, then he launched off the outer wall of a high rise apartment building, creating a cacophony of shattered glass as his white-hot propulsion jets destroyed five floors of homes.
He threw himself toward me, staying high overhead, then came down with his sword drawn and pointed.
I side stepped the blow, avoiding losing another arm by mere inches, then I countered his following slash with my own energy enhanced blade.
Purple lights clashed in a hail of sparks that burned everything they touched. I held and I pushed back against him, digging in my heels, using that propulsion in my back and my shoulders to aid me, and putting everything I had into every swing and every hit.
We broke apart only long enough to take a single breath, where I sheathed my blade on my back, then grabbed the variable weapon canister, and activated a training staff.
Not the best weapon with only one arm, but I was more familiar with the weight, strike path, and range than I was a sword.
We connected again, falling into a new routine. I centered my mind, imagining I was back in the gym with Vann again. Dodge, counter, duck, swing, spin.
The longer we engaged, the more intense his frustration. He’d not expected me to last this long, I could tell, and that alone seemed to be enough to rattle him.
Our weapons came together, and I leveraged the full length of my staff, sliding along his sword’s glowing edge, creating a fountain of those glowing purple sparks as I pushed against his power.
In one fluid movement, I struck downward, dropped my baton, then spun to his right, and grabbed one of the smaller blades on my thigh to shove into his side.
“The fuck—” The accidental transmission was satisfying, but only for a fraction of a second.
He grabbed my hand, hilt still in my grip and dagger still in his side, and he used his heel thrusters and his whole machine to bowl us both into a building.
The ache of impact was lost to my adrenaline, while he remained completely nonplussed by my blade that was so deeply embedded in him, the sharp point was protruding from the opposite side of his Shinka’s waist. Nothing slowed him, as he pounded into me, forcing my suit beneath him.
Straddling my hips, he activated the cannons on his one good arm, and he blasted into my only shoulder, sending thirty viciously hot orbs of concentrated hate through the joint, until he completely obliterated the connection.
My arm fell from my body, hitting the floor at my side.
My true body trembled and threatened to black out as that wash of agony splintered through my soul, but it was force of will alone that forced my splintering vision to recenter.
The taste of bile on my tongue was the cruel reminder that I was still human, and the impact on my body was more real than the sum of the simulation.
Elio picked up my liberated appendage and tossed it into the rubble, purely in a show of intimidation.
It was effective.
“You didn’t need that, did you? Didn’t seem to be doing too much good, anyway,” he mocked me, the smile evident in his voice. It wasn’t lost on me that, in all of this, at no point did he bother to remove my knife from his side. It was as if being gored meant absolutely nothing to him.
I was trapped beneath him, and now I didn’t have any arms left to use my weapons. The rawness of my rended body was still radiating excruciating misery through every inch of my nerve endings, while my adrenaline attempted to mask it, my anger laughed at it, and my stubbornness refused to care.
I wasn’t fucking done yet.
In a split second, as he retracted his cannons to reached for his blade, I activated my back propulsion unit, sending my head into his Shinka’s chest with a hard, dramatic impact.
The unexpected force of it knocked him back, sending him into a pile of concrete and giving me the freedom I needed.
“I see what you mean about the weight savings,” I shot back.
Truth be told, I might not have been able to get the level of impact that I’d needed if not for having lost both arms. The head butt had been enough to damage my vision, but through the flashing warning lights, I saw my only chance.
I launched high, and before he could orient himself, I used the full force of my propulsion power to slam a heel down into his chest, precisely where the pilot chamber was located.
The impact was crushing in its own right, but it was the heat and power of my heel jets that did him in, when I activated the propulsion force directly into his core.
He fired off one last blast, but the shot froze a millisecond before connecting with my cockpit. That single millisecond was the only one I needed. If the shot had connected, I would have lost. But he was too late.
The simulation had frozen with the sound of his cracking pilot chamber.
“Battle: Over.” The voice said. “Winner: Mishka.”
I was still shaking—though I couldn’t say if it was from fear nerves, adrenaline, pain, or joy—as I was ripped back into reality, and the cockpit and controls released me.
I…
I won.
I fucking won.
I was laughing in my pod, so overjoyed, I missed the satisfying moment when my ranking rolled down nearly to a triple digit number.
One-thousand-ninety-nine. I was only a hundred ranks from being a pilot.
I fist pumped, before I committed to climbing out of my VR cockpit.
If I wouldn’t be relentlessly bullied for it, I would have even skipped as I returned to the locker room.
I didn’t see any sign of Elio, and I barely cared.
He was probably sulking in his pod. The vindictive and petty side of me only grinned wider at the mental image of him crying over me beating him at what was basically a hyper realistic videogame.
I tapped my chipped palm to my locker and opened the door, then started changing out of my Imperium suit.
I undid the neck clasp and peeled the material off of me, tugging the garment that clung fiercely to my sweat.
I undressed and redressed without incident, still on top of the world as I started heading back to my dorm.
I was actually surprised the coast was totally clear. I had half expected Elio to come after me in retaliation, but I’d already made it to the main building and not heard a peep.
I even twirled in excitement—once and very quickly, only after I made sure no one was looking, just in case men didn’t experience joy so pure you had to spin it out—then I reached for the entry panel to the complex.
It was then that a large, warm, rough hand wrapped around my bicep and yanked me backwards.