Dark on the Waters [Dark Data]

[Freeza]

“Thanks guys,” he complained, sarcasm twisting his sassy tone, “Way to leave all the FLYING ones to me. Tch, they’re just lucky I have unrivaled super-elite piloting skills.”

Jaco flittered across the sky on his red whirling spacecraft, more visible than his own speeding ship was the trail of stardust fuel drizzled from his tailpipe as he streaked across the sky. The shadows were hot on his tail, flocking like flesh-hungry seagulls. Manipulating the condensed swarm’s own mass against themselves, Jaco performed a barrel roll, looping around the fleet of enemies that rivaled a train with several cars. He had continuously dodged their energy barrages, but now they'd crossed into the realm of friendly-fire and the shadow-warped creatures fell to the sharks after being hit with their own attacks.

Next Jaco executed a lag roll, creating distance between his enemies and causing several of them to slam into one another, next he was forced into yo-yoing loops in the air, activating his advanced evasion tactics. Alone in the sky, faced with mortal danger, Jaco felt the deepest temptation to turn tail and run.

The super elite patrolman hated being on the frontlines where tactical calculations were at their slowest. He was already in overdrive, his mind and eyes darting from the blaring scanners to the one-eighty view from the glass half sphere; Jaco’s stomach was in his throat and not from motion sickness, he was nauseous from fear.

The risk of death and mortal danger riddled his alien bones, making them chatter with shivering terror as he clutched at the steering grips for his life. A glimpse of Protoman down there, his charisma blazing in battle, gave Jaco a logical reason to continue, it wasn’t to fight the Darklings, it wasn’t to nobly save the verse, it wasn’t even to avoid being strangled by his scarier commander. It was simply to not let his idol down. The noble android would never even spare Jaco another look if he fled mid-fight.

In that defining moment, Jaco proved cowards could be brave, and on the flipside it had to be true that even the courageous could fall to their knees in fear. Not Protoman.

Coward no longer, Jaco adjusted the drift that was weighing on his mid-air acrobatics and a sheen glossed over the wingless jet. Jaco’s red bullseye in the sky had accumulated quite the swarm of flying black pests. Quickly, his galactic eyes appraised his surroundings, doing a quick twist in the air to calibrate his calculations. He caught sight of Protoman and Kohler’s struggle and newfound rage surged within him.

“You dare gang up on the Omniverse’s greatest hero? Oh, now you’re dead!” Jaco narrowed his eyes and while layers of trepidation coated his tingling body, a single jerk to the wheel caused the jet to spiral down through the sky like a corkscrew. In a vehement tornadoing spin, Jaco’s aircraft plunged dangerously close to slamming into the horizon, where trees had been lit like torches and the ocean was scattered with ugly-looking insectoid monsters.

His stomach wrenched more than his lithe ship when Jaco cranked the entire craft up, grazing inches from the surface speckled with small trees and shrubbery that darted from sight while the flying swarm of locusts were carried by their own momentum into the ground; steamrolling one another, at least a third of their fleet had crashed into the splintering, flaming branches. Hearing the howls of burning pain, Jaco felt himself encouraged by his momentary victory, “Take that, suckazzz!”

Rolling in front of him was a massive cliff with a single crevasse no wider than his own ship. Quickly, Jaco twisted in the air, angling his saucer vertically and taking down his glass protection. Windshield-less, the alien felt the whirl of a hurricane collide with his face as he grappled with the graveness of reality, Jaco braced for his fiery tomb if his precise execution had not been within a needle’s length.

The voracious beasts blindly followed, their vicious claws had nearly scraped holes through the metal of his ship. But none reached them, Jaco rocketed through the narrow corridor while Darklings found their skulls crushed into the rock, piles of them began to litter the ground like crumpled black garbage bags.

One alone was able to rival Jaco’s finesse in flight. Behind him, a tar-colored feathered beast closely followed Jaco’s ship. The corrupted Staraptor had also been able to slide vertically through the crevasse, it couldn’t quite flap its wings more than a few inches but it keenly followed its prey, waiting for the mouth of the tunneling cliffs to open up, so that the aerial predator could chomp down.

“Oh don’t make me do this…” Jaco’s lip quivered as his finger dangled over the glowing square button on his control panel.

The Staraptor was unrelenting, unyielding, and it was gaining speed, sailing the freshly funneled wind through the widening tunnel as the air around the flying-type transformed into a powerful molten aura.

“Ahhhh!” Jaco’s bug-like eyes widened as he hit into overdrive, wondering if this was sufficient enough reason to eject or flee. The Poke-ling’s aura had changed color into an azure hue and its speed defied the constraints of the narrow hollow.

“Time for my super-elite getaway!!!!” Jaco slammed his foot on the boosters and aimed his lasers at the ceiling of the widening cavern. The cacophony of a wrathful thunder roared as the ceiling began to fall.

Jinking from left to right, swerving around the crumbling ceiling of fallen hunks of stone in zooming jolts, while evading the now much wider room’s walls was all Jaco could do as incoming boulders tumbled from the ceiling, the alien’s eyes caught on it amid the fallout from his vaguely kamikaze-esque attack.

The one.

Given his current momentum and trajectory, he and emo-hair over there would avoid it. That wasn’t an option, shadow-charged lightning was already crackling from the creature’s wings. Jaco throttled back, cranking the steering vines and catapulted downward. The birdbrain immediately followed. The apartment-sized boulder was looming over both, all while Jaco’s ship was rocketing awfully fast toward the cave’s jagged crystalline stalagmite.

“Don’t die, don’t die!” He coached himself while the wind filled his ears, “NOW!”

Orange thrusters created a shockwave of monumental power, it was enough to stop Jaco from plummeting into the stone blades and launch him ninety degrees jousting a complete mid-momentum turn.

The beast of a bird was completely crushed, a cascade of black lightning filled the cave while Jaco looked up to find pebbles and particles of dust filling the innards of his ship. He rocketed out and free of the tunnel, cleaning off his dashboard, being a distracted driver, and still at mega-speed, his boosters perpetuated the spacecraft into a large yellow, glossy rock. Also known as Hornet.exe’s head.

Skittering out of his control, Jaco was jolted from his mid-battle cleaning session and while his precious baby was dented, he had two other problems. His pod spiraled like an out of control boomerang and there was a horrifically large hornet pissed at him, apparently it didn’t like being being reduced to the othered splattered bug guts that had accumulated on Jaco’s aircraft.