A Call From Across The Universe (ONC Entry)

Chapter 08

Move. By now the other has noticed me. I wheel around to his last position, but he's already coming at me at a breakneck pace. No time to dodge, I raise my gun, and pop off a few rounds. If they were effective, he didn't show it, instead he just kept moving faster. I engaged the jumpjets and rerouted power to the inertia dampeners, ready to receive a-

WHAM!

Even with the countermeasures, I could still feel his hate behind the strike. There was no way I was getting out of that one unscathed- but before the pain could set in, the adrenals kicked in once again. What may have been my ribs cracking against the force of a freight train felt more like a light touch. That doesn't mean I didn't take damage, just that I couldn't feel it.

I engaged the jumpjets to boost against his momentum, slowing us down just enough in the snow. I couldn't let him take the lead here, I have to maintain control of the flow of the fight, I don't have a lot of time left. The powercell energy warning flashing in the corner of my HUD didn't help matters either.

With my sidearm hand wrenched out of his grasp, I took aim and fired as many shots as I could in the gut. They connected. I know they did. So why wasn't he slowing down. Could his armor be heavier? Didn't seem like it.

I felt a hand grasp the gun's barrel, and crush it with brute strength. Great. It's useless now. Guess we're doing this the old-fashioned way.

I altered our center of balance, and kicked him over. I rolled back onto my feet and wheeled around, engaged the jumpjets and delivered a haymaker directly to his head as he was turning. He reeled, I could see his head snap back, yet he recovered almost immediately.

Not giving him time to take the control of the battle. I boosted around his flank as he tried to to swipe something at me. It looked like a knife, but in this blizzard it's hard to tell.

With his back facing me, I wrapped my arms around his throat and pulled him down to the snowbank. I twisted the arm which held the weapon and wrestled it out of his clenched fist, thinking quickly I grabbed the knife, twisted his head up as far as I could and jammed the knife between the armor plates as many times as I could. Until he stopped thrashing like a mad beast and went limp. He had to be dead now.

I rolled him off, onto his stomach and took a deep breath. I won. But not at a cheap price. My suit's power cell was only barely powered now, it could fail at any moment. Not the best thing I could've done but at the time there were no other options.

Something caught my eye about the armor. I didn't recognize the model, markings, or even who might've built it. That probably meant these guys aren't part of any major pirate collectives, just independent raiders. Bastards.

"Hm?" Was I seeing things? The proportions seemed kinda off. The chest was rather barrel-shaped, but the waist was almost gaunt by comparison. The limbs were long and slender and the fingers... only four? Had this guy been in some kind of accident?

Curiosity was overpowering my self-preservation instincts, or maybe that was just the blowback from the meds kicking in. I kneeled down, and ran my fingers along the helmet, trying to find a release latch or something.

In the corner of my vision though, I saw that same creature again. Oh. Right. In the battle, I completely forgot about that thing. As it got closer, I just ignored it. Couldn't do that much harm.

Then I noticed something else that I hadn't even bothered to register before. In all the confusion, I had hyper-focused on killing these two. So I hadn't taken notice... all the corpses that were here before were now gone.

Beep.

"Wait, what was that noise?" I hadn't even had time to consider where the corpses may have gone off to, before the high-pitched beeping noise caught my attention.

Beep beep.

That did not sound like a good noise. I saw the suit beginning to light up as steam started to vent outwards. My HUD was detecting a large buildup of unrestrained power.

Unfortunately, Lady Luck's boyfriend got a bit jealous, and turned her gaze away from me. My suit's powercell had run dry, which meant my defensive countermeasures were now depleted, and the adrenals had finally worn off so I was now feeling the extreme amount of pain that my suit had been suppressing.

I couldn't escape from this.

"Oh sh-" was the last thing I remember saying before I was consumed by a white light, and felt my suit fragment and sear into my flesh and bones, the skin peel away, as my body flew into multiple directions.

The last thing I saw was my own headless body being blown into metal chunks, and that creature staring right back at me, following my vision.