“Veronica, h-hey, there; you, uh, you look nice with a b-body and stuff.”
“You killed me, Blake!” she shrieks. “Perhaps you thought I was ‘just’ a BiM, so it wouldn’t add to your rising death toll? Well, the joke is on you, Master Blake, I’m more than just a Tela now and I’m more than capable of fighting back. Let’s see how you do on an equal playing field--body against body!” She lunges high into the air at me with a vicious scream, her chainsaw-arms whirring just as loudly. She crosses them in front of her, readying to decapitate me as she descends with mach speed. I’m trying to think strategically in the half a second I have to respond, but being sober is my only advantage--I’m still fat, my cheek’s spewing blood all over the place, Tela is probably dead, I’m a depressed wreck over it, and I’m still missing an eye which doesn’t help with the whole depth perception thing.
I roll quickly to my left, hoping this will buy me some time as she slams into the ground or something, but she doesn’t! She lands with perfect precision and turns around directly to my right, leaping ceiling-height again to make another attempt on my life while shrieking an even more blood-curdling war-cry. I quickly fire off my left Guntlet, frantically emptying the clip up at her, but the bullets glance harmlessly off her like so many tiny rubber bouncy balls. The scene is really quite horrific: droplets of blood from my cheek fly at me as the dual-chainsaws edge down towards me in what I perceive as slowmo, reflecting the madly glowing red in her pupils.
I instinctively lift my right hand to block the blades with the one metal thing I have on me--the BS chan implanted in the tattoo. For a moment, the saws’ teeth choke as they struggle to tear through solid steel, but in a moment the device in my hand explodes into a cloud of smoke and “glitched” reality around the crushed zero-point bay inside, sputtering one more slight burst of flame as the blades tear through the Guntlet chan beneath. The saw continues into the skin: I lose all feeling as I watch my right hand become a visceral spray of blood, meat, and bone until all that’s left is a dangling blob of dripping raw meat burbling forth from my wrist where it used to be. My vision blurs. A pain greater than any I thought previously possible sets in, a sensation I can only describe as white-hot lava coursing through every vein in my hand except I don’t have a fucking hand!
Shrieking, tears streaming, I can only watch as she continues to close in towards my chest. “Let’s see if you’re really as heartless as you seem, Blake!” I feel the frenetically trembling air from the blade’s keys whizz closer and closer to my chest hair, splatters of my hand flying off the blade and blinding me as the fleshy chunks sting my eyes worse than accidental shampoo. The only thing worse than the pain in my hand is the grinding, churning, agonizing sensation of the keys digging through my chest like dozens of piranhas eating my flesh off chunk by chunk and shredding my pec muscles to bits. I shake my head to clear the blood from my eyes, but my vision is going white with pain now. Too affected to even scream, I gasp breathlessly for air as I both watch and feel myself get ground to a pulp. Think about taking a rusty nail and sticking it under your fingernail, then hitting it with a hammer–that’s what my chest feels like right now, times eleven million.
“Aww, what’s the matter, too much gore to see through!? Open your fucking eyes, Charles! I want to watch every last bloody tear drip out as I tear your cold heart from your chest and devour it beating! I want you to be forced to stare into those eyes that had to stare through yours for so long!” Oh, right. Haha. I open my eye, focus all my energy on getting even a slight picture of her face through the gory haze and barely manage to lock eyes with her dilated, glowing red pupils. They reflect the ferocity and sociopathy of a cat playing with a wounded mouse before devouring it--about what I expected.
“Any last words, Charles?,” she asks, leaning her face in as close as possible without cutting her chin on her own blades. “Care to make one last groveling apology?”
“Yeah,” I reply. “Sorry about the optic blast.”
With our eyes locked, the OcuLaser is a direct hit: I may only have one eye to fire with, but I’m able to sweep the shot across her eyes as it fires. The laser pops both like the synthetic balloons they are; she falls backwards with a primal yell, smoke pouring from the busted artificial flesh that used to reside in her eye sockets. I pull myself to my knees quickly with my left hand and struggle to my feet, an army of white specks invading my vision from the blinding pain. I try to survey the damage she’s done to me through my gushing tears and the bloody chunks still dripping down my face: an “X” shaped gash has been carved in my chest from the points in the center so deep my sternum is visible in the center and blood is oozing fast. This is unsustainable; if this goes much longer at all I’m going to die.
I glance back over at Veronica: she’s back on her feet and her eye sockets fill in with more mochi-like artificial skin to stave the torrent of white blood now pouring forth. Two fleshy stalks emerge from the top of her skull, contorting into ball shapes as a pair of backup pupils emerge in the center of each. “Wasn’t that Tela bitch into BDSM, Blake!?” She screeches. Her arms retreat into her body and re-emerge as massive barbed whips of nano-flesh, crackling with electricity generated from her ZPE core. “Well, I can do that better, too! I hope you like Estim, ‘Master’ Blake!” She lashes out and before I can get totally out of the way, her whip gets me on my LEFT cheek, sending an agonizing jolt through me and ripping the left side of my face open. Well, it matches the right cheek now, and at least the whip is better than the chains–nope, she’s going back to a chainsaw on her left arm. Fuck me.
I swallow hard, my perception of time slowing to a crawl as my ingenious mind, now at full adrenaline-fueled-power, calculates my options. There’s nothing in here that’ll really function as a weapon, and I doubt she’ll agree to settle this in a match of Marvel vs. Capcom 2. My OcuLasers won’t do shit to anything that she won’t apparently be able to horrifically regenerate, her terrifying eye-stalks are moving around too quickly and erratically atop her head to be hit, and… that’s all I got, my remaining hand’s Guntlet is out of ammo.
I have one last backup plan, but I’m going to have to do something I hate to do--ask for help. I pull out my badge and flash it to the horrified but secretly super fucking pumped crowd. “I’m with the OVPD, I need someone to lend me their Telaphone, QUICK. I’ll put your name in my book about all this, you’ll be a hero, it’ll be great. Throw it to me!” Some random guy I forget throws me his Telaphone and I quickly dial Nat’s phone number with my non-dominant-but-only-remaining-hand as I narrowly slide out of the way of another whip attack. Pick up, damnit, pick up…
“Hey Blake, how’d your date go? Pretty well I’m guessing, since you didn’t show up to work today--”
“Nat, I’m being a big man and admitting it: I need help, like, Pneumat help, like, NOW.”
“Oh, I don’t have my suit right now, Charles; I’m out grabbing lunch.”
NO FUCKING PNEUMAT SUIT, THE ONE TIME IT WOULDN’T BE OVERKILL!? I try my damnedest to stave off the vertigo with sheer willpower as I glance down without thinking and see how much more blood I’m losing and how fast. There’s gotta be something I can use… I glance at the Telepods, and then at Veronica. Bingo.
“Th-that’s okay then, I just need your car, Nat. Pull up outside Flippers; get out and leave the key in the ignition. Then run inside and start making bird calls, then take your shirt off and say ‘I love you, I always have, I always will.’ Trust me on this.”
“That makes no--”
“I'm not joking. I have a plan, damn it; do it or I die and then probably you next. When can you get here!?”
“Be there in less than a minute. I’m at the Dunkin’ across the street, thought I’d do my usual and work them off on the Pump it Up cab in there. Let me just grab my order real quick--”
“NO, GET OVER HERE, NOW, OR YOU’LL BE GRABBING UP THE PIECES OF ME OFF THE DAMN FLOOR AND TRUST ME, YOU’D NEED A BIGGER BAG.” I hang up and toss it back to the random hero dude, giving him a thumbs up and oh fuck also giving Veronica an opening–the whip, now laced with barbs, smacks across my back and knocks me to the floor again, its tiny spikes carrying chunks of flesh away as they tear out of me. I can feel a ton of blood oozing down my back now, too, but I can’t be distracted by tiny details like being about to die from blood loss–focus, Blake, focus!
She’s standing right under one of the big neon flipper signs on the wall–before she can lunge at me again I launch my OcuLaser continuously (“OPTICBLASTOPTICBLASTOPTICBLASTOPTICBLAST”) to carve out the glass frame and drop the neon tube itself on her. It shatters, sparks, and knocks her off balance–this is likely my one opportunity. If I remember correctly, the door of these damn pods is the exact same model as the one on the DrivePods, and I remember from earlier how fucking obnoxiously resilient that Flexiglass is. I know ARTs are Special EMP (the ZPE-nullifying bullshit the bikini chick had used on me) shielded from the outside--it’s built into their skin (and in this case almost surely in the nanobots, too). But what good is a condom with holes in it? While she’s reeling from the hit, I snatch the door off of what used to be my pod. It’s large, but of course it’s light, being Flexiglass–light enough to hold it behind my back.
“Hey, Ronnie,” I shout, as her attention quickly snaps back to me. I can see through the front wall of windows that Nat’s car is pulling up, so my timing is perfect. “You’re probably trying to make me feel guilty, but killing you was the best thing I could’ve done. Tela and I have had so much fun, I made her into an ART too and we have the best, kinkiest, most fucked up sex all the time, it’s great. And the best part is, you’re too much of a fucking chickenshit cuck of a secretary to do anything about it--you can kill me, but you’ll still go down as the only Tela I’ve had who hasn’t fucked me! You’ve already lost, dumbass; so ahead, kill me now if you want, but it’s all for nothing. You destroyed my body, but you’ll never feel it. You’ve lost the only battle you really cared about.”
That’s all it took. She shrieks again and leaps at me chainsaw first, ready to bear down on my heart and grind it out of my chest and probably season her tea with it, I don’t know. The second before she reaches me I pull out the Flexiglass and use it as a shield: I can see the horror in her eyes as she processes what’s about to happen. The chainsaw rebounds and slices through Veronica’s left shoulder, jamming inside as blob after blob of white artificial blood erupts. She struggles to get it loose, but it’s taking too much to figure out how to get it out, reform it, heal, etc. all at once--so much complicated processing of nanobots, and so much at stake if she fucks it up and reforms wrong or leaves herself open to attack, and for better and for worse, she’s only a human upstairs.
Nat runs in right on cue, making horrible “bird noises” at the top of her lungs that sound more like a dinosaur from Jurassic Park. Veronica, confused in the fashion anyone would be to suddenly hear bird calls in the middle of a chainsaw fight, turns to face Natasha. She walks towards Veronica and, in accordance with the plan, takes her shirt off and locks eyes with her, saying “I love you, I always have, I always will.” I didn’t realize she was going braless, too, but hey, whatever works. Veronica looks at her, freezing in place and blushing, trembling. A lot for her to process, but my hunch was correct--her bizarre obsession with Nat was reignited, and the poor bisexual ART was blinded by the sensation of total and sudden flustering lust like is only possible when you’re seeing Nat’s amazing tits with your own eyes.
I race and weave through the crowd in the confusion, out of the arcade and into the open door of Nat’s patrol cruiser. “So that’s what it is, Nat?” Veronica says, noticing me in her peripheral vision and finally ripping her chainsaw arm from her shoulder with no regard for the damage it causes her artificial flesh. “You have no interest in me either--you’re just trying to help him escape. I should have known… but at least I can test this new body out later when I’m getting off to the memory of tearing your sexy body limb from fucking limb!”
Natasha jumps at Nat chainsaw-arm first, and I’m sure that Natasha had a moment of wondering if I was just going to sacrifice her and run, but that’s not how I roll. In one swift motion I can’t quite believe I pulled off (and that all my times of reckless drifting while drunk made possible--don’t try that at home, kids), I swerve the cruiser through the damn wall of the arcade, right between Natasha and Veronica, and watch Veronica slam into the windshield as I come to a stop. Veronica, pressed humorously against the glass at this point, looks at me like I’m insane, as if I thought that hitting her with a car was enough to defeat her. “Don’t you know what I’m capable of?”
“I do. But do you know what these come standard with?” I flip the switch to activate the car’s SEMP field. The field only affects the area directly around the car, but she’s smashed on the windshield: the current climbs up her artificial blood dripping down the glass, through her gaping shoulder wound, inside her body and through to her ZPE core, totally frying her from the inside out in a haze of silent red particles. One brief shriek, one last ditch desperate reach into the air with both arms, and she falls from the windshield to the ground, the chainsaw slowing to a stop and steam rising from her twitching body.
The makeshift weaponry in her arms, along with all the flesh on her body, start falling from her like sand as the nanobots cease to connect together.
“I’ll be back, Blake,” she says as the light in the pupils of her creepy eye-stalks fades. “I’m on the same kind of backup, still! I’m immortal now, Blake! I’ll be back, and I’ll…” but all that’s left is a metal skeleton, a puddle of white blood, a pile of artificial organs, a Flexiglass box containing her BIM and fried ZPE core, and a smattering of machine parts. Her assumption of revival only works if Kilroy is outside of a prison, which he isn’t going to be when I’m done with him, so SUCK IT!
“Holy shit,” Natasha screams, throwing open the driver’s side door and hopping in. “How did you know that would work?”
“I know how she works. She was stuck in my head for a looong time. Nobody could be trapped there as long as she was and not develop an unhealthy appreciation for you and your brilliance and tits.”
“I guess so, but I still feel kind of bad about--”
“She tried to wipe your brain and steal your body.”
“Okay, fair.”
The crowd cheers, nearly rioting with excitement until a second OVPD vehicle pulls up and tells them to disperse. Natasha (after putting her shirt back on--boo!) guides me to the back of a medical squad car and sees to it that I get a quick transfusion and that I’m patched up quickly with the finest nanomeds by the Drorbs... well, as much as I can be, at least. The pain meds they inject are top of the line, and they make me feel veeery happy.
Wait. I lift myself up from the stretcher I’m confined to enough to look over to the pile of carnage and--maybe I’m just really high, but I have an idea. “Hey, you. Uh, doctor lady.”
“Yeah?” the head of this med crew replies, looking slightly perturbed.
“You should put one of her mechanical pupils in where my missing eye is. You can do that, yeah? The Drorbs are Chan models, they can do that kind of stuff; no sweat. I mean, they can’t sweat, but–but still. It’s how they gave Chad his taser finger thing. Riiiight?” God I’m high.
“I mean--technically--but you destroyed the outer part that makes it look–”
“Don’t care! I have a mini ZPE core installed in my torso to power the other chans, just run it from that. I know it’ll make the eye glow red, but whatever, it’ll be soooo badass. Hahahaha, I said ass!” Then I pass out.