[4-14] The Town

[Karl Jak]

Still too spry for the hacker, Carmelita hopped back as the machete crashed into the ground, splintering the surface and releasing a cloud of powdered linoleum.  Hiro scowled as he wrenched the bloodstained blade from the floor, but just as it came free, a blast of electricity crashed against his chest.  A moment later, the side of the shock pistol crashed against the side of his head, sending him face-first through a nearby cubicle.

Carmelita turned sharply and slipped out of the way as the katana thrust through the air where she’d once stood.  She saw the mercenary’s masked eyes get a little wider in the moment before she shot him square in the face with a ball of electricity.  As Deadpool started to shout something, she sank her knee up into his crotch, grabbed him by the neck, and threw him on top of his friend.  The two swordsman, their limbs jumbled together as if they’d lost a game of Twister, groaned in unison.

Before the cop could properly secure them, she heard someone clapping behind her.  Spinning on her heels, her eyes narrowed at the sight of Karl Jak standing in front of the open vault door.  The executive had a briefcase tucked under an armpit as he continued his ovation for the policewoman.  “Well done, Foxy, but you’re aware that you probably committed a hate crime, right?  Mr. Protagonist is a minority, and Wade over there is probably clinically insane.  How shameful of you to beat up someone who needs our help.  He needs to be nurtured and resocialized… not victimized.”

“Hand over the case, Karl,” Carmelita rasped as the shock pistol’s barrel started to hum.

“I’m not playing this with you anymore, Sweetheart,” Karl muttered as his smile melted away in an instant. Before Carmelita could find the trigger, the gun was torn out of her hand by an unseen force and flung against the wall with enough force to shatter it into a hundred pieces.  “I’ll have my people send you a check for a new one.”  He muttered as he threw the case into the air over Carmelita’s head.  The fox watched as the case crashed into an overhead sprinkler and set off the entire room, causing a few dozen sprinklers to start spewing cold water down into the vault area.

The case landed with a wet thump near the exit.  Although unarmed, Carmelita could see an opening in the executive’s hubris.  She broke into a sprint through the downpour of water, but before she could get even halfway to the case, a dark hand grabbed her foot.  As she spun to deal with Hiro, Carmelita felt something colder than the synthetic rain push through her back.  A moment later, a blood-soaked katana blade tore out of her stomach a few inches to the left of her belly button.

“This kind of penetration doesn’t count as bestiality, right?  It’s only the penis, right?”  Deadpool twisted the blade, but despite his mirth, the woman responded by bashing him in the jaw with her skull.  The mercenary lost his grip on his weapon long enough for Carmelita to spin around and catch him with a pair of clubbing forearm strikes to the head.  With Deadpool momentarily dazed, the policewoman moved forward and threw herself against the nearest wall.  The bloody sword hit first, and by the time Carmelita felt the wet brick against the side of her face, the katana was on the ground and staining the puddles around it a pale shade of crimson.

Turning as quickly as she could, Carmelita caught a glimpse of Karl blowing her a kiss as he casually strolled out of the vault room with the briefcase containing the town records.  Clenching her blood-stained teeth together, she went for the katana lying on the ground and beat the smart mouthed mercenary by a few moments.  A frantic swipe opened up a bloody line across Deadpool’s chest and sent him stumbling back.  Realizing that she had to put an end to this if she wanted to catch up to Karl, she pushed through the pain and the smelly rain of sprinkler water.

The katana slipped easily into the space right below Deadpool’s left clavicle, but the bloodied cop had been aiming for the heart.  She tried to pull the sword back for another go at it, but she lost her grip amid all the various fluids.  As she pitched back, Carmelita caught herself, even though the office seemed to be spinning around her.  A hand grabbed her from behind and spun her around to face a battered-looking Hiro Protagonist.

“I got your severance package.”  He mumbled almost incoherently as he swung the machete.  The blade found its mark on the woman’s right shoulder and sank down into the flesh and bone.  Carmelita let out a scream as the blade passed through her armpit.  Hiro, his own body spent by the exchange, let go of the weapon rather than deal with the tug of its momentum as it clanged against the ground.  Fresh blood spurted from severed blood vessels as the policewoman’s severed right arm hit the ground and thrashed about for a few moments like an ensanguined fish on the deck of a boat.

Carmelita bit down through her own tongue to keep down the scream as her knees buckled.  The world was slipping away from her, but she had just enough of that fiery spirit inside her failing form to grab at the machete handle and swung it up into Hiro’s crotch.  A bloody grin spread across her face as Deadpool’s katana removed her head from the rest of her body.

***

There was a lull on the battlefield as the group tried to catch their breath.  Christa and Red, their bodies their own once more, found Abner and Colonel and eyed the smoldering, smoke-filled crater.  On the far side of the wreckage, the plague marine stood still, unwilling to remove his focus from what should be the grave of the creature.  A few yards behind him, Fiara rested on one knee and waited for the next hell to unfold.  

“Can we be sure it’s dead?”  She asked the festering bulk of metal and chaos.

Okor had no response for the phoenix.  He could already see that something was stirring down there in the cratered street.  When the tentacles came shooting up out of the smoke, the plague marine was ready for them.  Those that attempted to assail him were ripped apart or torn to shreds by his cancerous hands.  On the other side of the crater, Abner and the others pulled away before any of them could be pulled to their death.

When its retaliation failed, the monstrous humanoid leapt up from the crater and landed in a crouch before the four primes.  Although its body was ravaged by the various assaults from the warriors, the tyrannical creature still had enough spring in its step to try one more time to be their undoing.  A broken fist swung out and caught Christa in the jaw.  She felt the bone snap as she collapsed into a heap on the street.  A beat later, Red pounced onto the Tyrant’s back and started to rip apart what remained of the beast’s already shredded blood vessels.

Although it should have been dead, the monster reached back and closed a fist around Nanaki’s neck.  A beat later, the noble beast was a red blur crashing through the side of a brick building.  Like a bloodied lion backed into a corner, the ‘Tyrant’ lashed out and landed a crushing blow against Abner’s chest.  The Stormtrooper folded like a house of cards and felt blood in the back of his mouth as the shadow fell over him.

“Fucking…” Abner tried to lift his blaster, but for some reason, it was like the gun weighed a thousand pounds.  Before the deathblow landed, the oncoming arm separated from the body of the goliath and skidded to stop a few yards behind the dazed trooper.

Behind the tyrant, Colonel smirked faintly for a brief moment.  The small victory was short-lived—what was left of his opponent’s remaining hand closed around his sword arm.  The pressure that followed crushed his limb as if it were aluminum in the grip of a child.  With a frzzt, the Colonel Saber vanished, leaving behind a few smoldering wisps of smoke.  Colonel clenched his teeth as he tried to free himself, but even with a rapidly approaching pair of Okor and Fiara raining hell upon the creature, it lifted the machine up by his arm and brought him crashing down against the pavement.

Colonel felt one of his legs shatter as a slew of warnings started to populate his internal display.  With his good hand, he lashed out and managed to shear away a handful of the monster’s face using only his fingers before it whipped him up and brought him crashing back down to the ground.  The tyrant released its grip and stepped forward—onto Colonel’s skull.

Abner watched with wild eyes as the machine’s head was crushed underneath the mangled foot of the soulless, seemingly unstoppable monster.

“Son of a bitch!”  More adrenaline screamed through the man’s veins, enough to numb the pain and bring him scrambling to his feet.  Under the combined onslaught of the blaster bolts, phoenix fire, and phosphex rounds, the tyrant wavered—its massive bulk unable to maneuver amid the attacks.  It managed a lumbering step before it proceeded to lose its balance entirely.  As it did, the momentum of its hulking form carried it through the wall of the nearby structure.

With Christa stirring on the ground, Abner couldn’t pull his eyes away from the lifeless shell of steel lying a few yards away.  Every few moments, a bolt of electricity would arch across the corpse, causing the broken joints to shudder briefly before settling back into a calm repose.

“We need to make sure it’s dead.” Okor remarked as everyone had their attention pulled elsewhere by the sound of bricks and debris shifting in a different building.  Although they were all on edge, the group withheld the urge to start shooting at anything that moved, and a moment later, a groaning Nanaki shambled out from underneath the ruins of a wall.

Unfortunately, the joy was short-lived.

The Tyrant erupted from where they had seen it fall.  Always on point, Okor was the only one who managed to get in a few shots before a bulking, three-fingered fist smashed the weapon from his grip.  A beat later, the plague marine was backhanded across the street as if he were a small child.

Eyes wide, Fiara fired everything she had left in her Phoenix blasters.  She kept firing even as the hand closed around her skull.  She kept firing up until the pressure crushed her skull.

Abner’s knife sawed against the tyrant’s elbow, attempting to get through the limb—trying desperately to cut the muscles before it could kill the girl.  When he heard the gurgling scream beneath the bloodied gray flesh of the monster, he clenched his teeth and didn’t relent.  He finally felt bone, but by then, the monster had its eyes set on him.  It beat him down with the back of its forearm.  Abner lost his knife as he fell, but he grabbed for his rifle.  A foot came down on his chest a moment later, knocking the air from his lungs and fracturing more than a few of his ribs.  The tyrant pressed down, attempting to slowly crush the man, but it never had the chance.  A piece of rebar punched through one side of its neck and out the other.

With a crazy glint in her eyes, Christa jammed the metal rod through the monster’s neck, but even that wasn’t enough to drop it.  It turned to look at her—its face now little more than a twisted mockery of the human countenance.  Colonel’s parting gift had torn away half of that visage and left the beady-eyed monster with a permanent smile on half of its face.

Christa wanted to say something.  She wanted to spit right into that hideous mug.  She wanted to roar out with defiance, but her jaw had been broken in a few places.

So she did what she could do best.  She wrenched the rebar free and sent it right through the tyrant’s smiling visage, shattering the teeth as the steel punched out the back of the monster’s skull.

A moment later, the forearm came down and hit her in the side of the head.  Christa Adams hit the ground with a wet thud and an audible snap.  Abner, just a few feet away, watched the light leave her eyes.

The scream that left his wearied maw was a blend of grief and rage, but the concentrated burst of energy that roared from his weapon was pure, concentrated malice.  The blast struck the Tyrant square in the chest, and in that singular moment of undiluted fury, the beast was found wanting.  The energy tore it apart, reducing its body to a collection of gory pieces that were thrown to the winds.

Abner let the warm rifle slip from his hands as he moved to Christa.  Red, despite a serious limp, joined him just a few moments later.

Okor, who had been looking down at the broken body of Fiara—discarded as if it were a piece of yesterday’s trash—heard the sound of a man clearing his throat.  

“I’m sorry,” Karl interrupted.  The survivors turned to see the producer staring at them with what almost seemed to be a morose expression on his face.  A few yards behind him, a ghost-white Hiro was managing to stand only with some assistance from Deadpool.  “We need to get the fuck off the island.  Now.  We have a small window to get to the docks and off before stuff worse than that thing come for us.  So say goodbye to your corpses, because I'm not waiting.  Sorry, not sorry."  With that, Karl and his two gentlemen were gone.

Deadpool has suffered 6 points of Accumulated Damage.
Hiro suffered a Major Injury (8 points)
Okor suffered 4 points of Accumulated Damage
Red suffered 4 points of Accumulated Damage
Abner suffered 4 points of Accumulated Damage

Abner used Tier 1 Super Move – Energy Launcher (2 SP Left)

Fiara, Colonel, Carmelita, and Christa are dead and the last 3 will respawn at the Nexus in 7 days.