Mistrunner - Chapter 52 - The Importance of Preparation (Patreon)

I know that, sooner or later, my lifestyle will catch up to me. It may happen tomorrow or a hundred years from now, but it will eventually happen. That’s one of the reasons I chose to train Mirabelle. Even when I’m dead and gone, I hope that she can be my legacy. I hope that she can be better than I’ve ever been.

Jeremiah Braddock III

A huge, red alien with a musculature that would have excited Nora to no end stepped forward and barked a rasping series of words I couldn’t understand. But with him gesturing at me with his massive axe, the threat was clear. My eyes shifted from one entity to the next. Six identical robots, each carrying a rifle not dissimilar from my Kicker and half-again as many aliens. Some of the accompanying aliens were like the axe-wielding leader, with muscles on top of muscles, but others held their weapons tentatively. I quickly surmised that they weren’t much – if any – better than the ones I’d already slain. If the leader and his ilk were warriors, the others were more like caretakers.

Or slave drivers.

Either way, they didn’t seem all that threatening to me. Not unless I stood still and let them shoot me, which was the last thing I intended to do.

Even as the leader continued his rasping orders, I summoned my detonator. It was a small device, maybe three inches long, with a pair of buttons. One would disarm the bombs I hoped were still attached to the robots’ power supplies. The other would detonate them. I wasted no time in pressing the latter, and to my enormous satisfaction, I was rewarded with a series of sizable explosions.

I didn’t take any time to appreciate them, though. Instead, the moment I hit the detonator, I was moving to my right. I got three steps before I felt like I’d been slapped with the world’s largest pillow. I lost my footing and went flying through the air. I twisted so that when I hit the ground, I did so with a roll that eventually brought me back to my feet.

Summoning my Kicker from my Arsenal Implant, I darted to one of the nearby buildings to take cover. Crouching at the intersection of a pair of prefabricated walls, I leaned out and took in the sight of my handiwork.

And it was glorious.

Aliens – mostly the caretakers, I noted, but there were two of the warriors as well – sprawled on the ground, bleeding from a dozen wounds. White blood pooled beneath their still bodies, evidence of their ignominious deaths. Of the robots, there was no sign, but that wasn’t surprising. So long as no one had removed the charges, their fate was sealed. I’d made those explosives myself, and I knew they packed enough force to punch through the side of a tank. I knew because I’d done just that with my first batch, much to the delight of my explosives instructor, Anna, who had a habit of clapping and cheering like a child while we were testing my creations. I understood her feelings, though. There just wasn’t anything quite like a good, solid explosion. Or six.

But as happy as I was to appreciate my handiwork, the battle was far from won. The leader had only been thrown forward to sprawl on his face, but as he picked himself up, he looked none the worse for wear. In fact, he just seemed angry. The remaining four warriors were similarly unaffected, though they all looked a bit disoriented. I decided to take advantage of that.

Squeezing the Kicker’s trigger, I fired a burst that took one of them directly in the head. White blood sprayed as the alien’s head exploded, and I moved on to the next. This time, because she was forewarned by my previous shot, my burst of bullets went wide of my intended target. Instead of hitting her in the head, her shoulder erupted in a spray of white blood and viscera. She screamed, but I didn’t hesitate to shift my sights to the third. And after I got similar results, the fourth.

Finally, I fired at the leader, the bullets taking him in the chest. To my surprise, though, they thudded against his muscles with no discernable damage. That’s when he locked his eyes on me, and with a roar, sprinted in my direction. I unloaded the rest of my magazine, but to little effect.

And then he was on top of me.

His axe, which glimmered with blue energy much like my nano-bladed sword, whistled through the air as he swung it with inhuman strength. I ducked and rolled away, dismissing my Kicker as I did. With a metallic clang, his weapon smashed into the building’s corner, carving a huge chunk out of the strange material. He screamed something unintelligible as he aimed a kick in my direction. I didn’t have the leverage to dodge, so I had no choice but to tense up and take the kick.

His foot hit me with the force of a sledgehammer, and, for the second time since I’d left the Rift, my comparatively small body went flying. I twisted and turned, summoning Ferdinand II as I sailed through the air. Then, just before I hit the ground, I fired. Ferdinand II barked, sending his explosive payload in the direction of the warrior, who was tugging on his axe, trying to dislodge it from the building. The round hit him in the forehead, detonating with a small, contained explosion that sent him sprawling to the ground.

For my part, I hit the ground on my back, which knocked the breath from my lungs. Even as I struggled to breathe, I knew I couldn’t stop, so I rolled to the side and pushed myself to my feet. Dismissing Ferdinand II to reload my Kicker, I very nearly missed the club coming for my face.

At the last second, I leaned back, and the knobby metal weapon barely skipped across my forehead. My vision went momentarily white, but I kept my wits about me well enough to continue backing away. I felt the wind of a narrowly missed swing, and then, after only a second, my sight returned.

And it was just in time to see one of the wounded warriors looming over me. Discarding my plan to reload my rifle, I summoned my nano-sword instead. I dodged the alien’s overhand swing, then swept my blade across her torso. It bit deep, not stopping until it hit her vertebrae, and when I pulled it free, strikingly human-looking entrails fell free with a wet plop.

She screamed, dropping her club to grasp at her innards, but I pushed her from my mind. She wouldn’t be much of a threat going forward. Gut wounds weren’t immediately fatal, but it was difficult to swing a melee weapon when your insides had become your outsides. So, I turned my attention to another one of the recovering warriors whose arm I’d almost severed with my second volley, and activated Engage to rapidly close the gap.

I was on him before he could react, and my nano-bladed sword descended upon his other arm, cutting through it with surprising ease. I finished him off with a horizontal swing that sent his head flying from his shoulders.

As I turned my attention to the second-to-last warrior, rain began to fall in great, fat droplets. I ignored it as I saw the male alien taking aim with a small pistol. I resummoned Ferdinand II and before he could even squeeze his trigger, I’d already sent two explosive rounds into his face, thanks to Quickdraw.

They weren’t nearly as effective as I’d hoped, likely because the warrior had a decent constitution attribute, but it was enough to send him skidding across the increasingly wet ground. I used Engage again to close the ground between us, and before he could recover, I’d started hacking him to pieces, using Eviscerate to make sure that, even if I didn’t kill him immediately, he’d die soon enough. It was unnecessary, because after only three swings, I’d sliced through his frantic defenses and into his chest. Once his heart and lungs were exposed, I wasted no time before cutting them free.

A deep growl cut through my bloodlust, and I looked up to see the leader – with his shirt burnt through and his face blistered from where I’d shot him – glaring at me. He said something to me, but I still couldn’t understand it. My lack of a response only served to infuriate him even more.

He hefted his axe, which he’d managed to rip free of the building. In the driving rain, I stood my ground, the thick, white blood of his companions dripping from my sword. I could recognize a challenge when I saw one. I could respect it, too. After all, I’d just killed everyone in the alien’s party. What’s more, I knew from the files I’d read before jumping into the Rift that he and the other aliens had little more choice than the humans they’d enslaved. At best, they were hired hands. At worst, they were something akin to indentured servants. Either way, they didn’t deserve to die.

Except that they’d invaded my planet and were complicit in the worst kind of slavery. Whole generations had lived and died under their horrible regime. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t had a choice. They had still done it. And because of that, I had few regrets concerning my actions.

He charged, his heavy footsteps splashing in the rapidly accumulating water. I tightened my two-handed grip on my nano-bladed sword, shifting one foot slightly behind the other as I turned my body. And then, he reached me.

His axe cut through the air in a diagonal cut aimed at my shoulder. I swayed to the side, letting it pass within a half-inch of my chest, then whipped my sword out. Eviscerate activated, and I used my superior speed to cut him four times in quick succession. None of the wounds were deep, but influenced by my ability, they bled profusely.

The red alien let out another roar and redirected his axe into a horizontal swing that he intended to cut me in two at the waist. I leapt, clearing the axe at the last possible moment, then used his shoulder for leverage to spring over his head. I twisted and flipped, my sword once again whipping out to cut into his scalp. When I landed behind him, I stabbed forward, the nano-blade piercing him through the side. Like lightning, I withdrew, and a spurt of white blood followed.

He didn’t stop, though, swinging around and aiming a backhanded blow at my face. I ducked under it, then rolled to safety. I regained my feet and my sword darted out, slicing through his vulnerable hamstrings.

As the enraged but flagging alien turned again, I sprang backward, then backed away. I watched as he glared at me. Bleeding from a half-dozen cuts, his blood had begun to pool beneath him, staining the puddles of rainwater milky white. He growled something in his foreign language. I ignored him, shifting back into my stance.

He came at me again because, in the end, he had no choice. He couldn’t retreat or his masters would punish him. He couldn’t hesitate, or he would bleed out. Even though he knew he was outmatched, the only option open to him was to keep at me. So, that’s precisely what he did.

And for a few more minutes, he made a good showing. He even managed to clip me a couple of times. But his attacks were weak and rendered ineffective by his blood loss. They were no more than flesh wounds, and I bore them easily.

In the end, the fight came to a close anticlimactically when he fell to his knees, and pitched forward onto his face. The blood loss from a dozen profusely bleeding wounds had finally done him in. I had won.

But I didn’t feel good about my victory.  How could I? It had been nothing but a slaughter. Sighing, I whipped my sword out, sending the white blood flying, before I dismissed my weapon. Over the next few minutes, I inspected the bodies of my assailants, but I found nothing of worth. So, I retreated into one of the buildings where I treated my wounds. Nothing was serious, so I made do with a med-hypo and a few foam bandages.

When I emerged from the building, I felt exhausted. Not physically. I’d had plenty of rest, and most of my injuries were mere annoyances. Sure, they hurt a little, but I’d grown used to pain, especially lately. Instead, my fatigue was purely mental. It felt like I’d been living on the ragged edge for months, if not years, and I just wanted to take a few days – maybe a month or so – and rest. Being in the field was a lot different from even the most intense training, and the Rift had ratcheted the difficulty up by at least a few notches.

But I suppose that was the point of it all. My uncle had sent me in there, likely with the express purpose of forcing me to find my limits. I still hadn’t, but I had come very, very close. Especially in the corridor of pain that had preceded the final room. I never wanted to revisit anything like that ever again.

I knew I probably would, though.

First, though, I had to remember that I was still in enemy territory. For one, I didn’t know if the nearby settlement had any other alien warriors to send after me. If they did, I felt confident in taking care of them, but that wouldn’t be the case if I was unfocused. I was just about to leave when I remembered a recent lesson I’d learned.

A little more than a year before, I’d let Jack live. And that had very nearly come back to bite me. My uncle had taken care of it, but after doing so, he’d chastised me for leaving such a blatant loose end dangling in the wind. I had resolved to never do that again. And yet, here I was, about to make the same mistake all over again, except on a much larger scale.

As much as I wanted to be gone from the area, I still needed to rid the area of the alien menace. So, with tired determination, I rigged the Rift stabilizers with explosives, which I detonated as I left the fort and set myself on a course towards the village. It was only a couple of miles, and the forest wasn’t nearly as thick as it was further to the south, so I made good time. When the village came into view, I settled down into a concealing thicket, where I decided to watch for a bit before making my move.

What I saw was disgusting. Everywhere I looked, I saw people – human beings – being treated like little more than animals. I could scarcely watch the horrid scene, and with each passing second, my resolve firmed. After a couple of hours, during which the rain had continued to fall and the sun had begun to dip below the horizon, I decided to make my move.

Summoning my Kicker, I quickly reconfigured it into its sniper mode. Then, I took a prone firing position and sighted in on my first red-skinned target. I fired, not even waiting to see his head explode before quickly adjusting my sights to another target. That one went down a moment later, and I moved on to the next. Then the next after that. One after another, I assassinated the aliens until thirty-two bodies decorated the village.

As the aliens dropped, the dirty and bedraggled human slaves wailed and screamed, falling to their knees and pulling out their hair. I ignored them. As much as I wished I could save them, they were already lost. My actions weren’t about that. Instead, I’d killed the aliens so I could stop the injustice. Certainly, I knew that the human slaves would likely die. But that was a price to my conscience I was willing to pay. I even managed to convince myself that I was doing them a favor. After all, what they had wasn’t really a life.

I almost believed it, too.

So it was with a heavy heart and a significantly increased body count that I retreated back into the woods and started the long trek back to Mobile.  I could only hope that when I returned, I would have a little time to make peace with what I’d just done. I didn’t mind killing aliens. Even if they never had much of a choice, they were still invaders. But I couldn’t help but wonder if I should have just included the humans in my massacre.

And that thought terrified me. I didn’t want to become the sort of person who could kill people rather than give them a chance to live a better life. But I knew that if things continued along the way they were going, that would be my inevitable destination.