Code, Chapter Two

Moltron, a brawny humanoid whose rippling musculature glistened like slick liquid, was first among Scientooth’s bodyguards to stomp growling forth and begin swatting at the Neetkins sisters with heavy hammer-blows. After taking a fall or two courtesy of this powerhouse our heroines were quick to serve out the counterattacks, which knocked Moltron down only for him to rise again each time. Nor did this thick-headed aggressor confine himself to fisticuffs, for at intervals his whole torso would burst open in a tidal barrage that ripped across the stage and cast all four girls spinning at once. Sometimes in addition he would mutate his hand into a huge amorphous cocoon which swelled and swallowed Neetkinses without warning, at which Moltron would adopt swaggering postures and raise his enveloped victim above his head to apply a squeeze before flinging the prisoner aside.

This giant however was far from invincible. His most exploitable weakness was a recurring tendency to stand and do nothing but roar aloud, whereat he might be pummelled without fear of retaliation or hit with a well-aimed flame-burst or blubulous bomb. Gradually such damage mounted up and started to take its toll on Moltron’s sluggish hide, such that his very sheen became agitated as if coming to the boil. Finally the sisters’ strikes made it through, and Moltron, spreading his anguished thighs a wider distance apart than any seen before, gave voice to one last bellow and erupted wetly in a dozen places at once. He splattered to the rocky ground little more than a puddle.

No sooner was Moltron overcome than two more of the guardians hand-sprung into the fray together. This pair could have passed for humans, one an aloof pretty girl named Magnolia whirling some weapon like a hook on a knotted rope, and the other a lean lusty man, Schiss-Zazz, who but for a pair of vicious steel shears mounted on either wrist was more or less naked. Leaping and cartwheeling at lightning speed this deadly duo plunged into the Neetkins quartet to lash out with kicks, then shot away again before reprisals could be made. Our heroines were hard-pressed to dodge Magnolia’s flying grapple and the snaps and slashes of Schiss-Zazz, this latter all the while voicing strange snipping noises which seemed to indicate amusement.

Meeting his consort while they were both mid-vault, Schiss-Zazz slid his bare toes into the hollow of her hook and the airborne acrobats embarked on a devastating double-team. Magnolia flung Schiss-Zazz about like a flail as she pirouetted toward ground, lashing out again and again with sweeping arcs that took in half the arena but ended in strikes of terrifying pinpoint exactitude. Phoenix Prime was grounded by the looping rope while the man at the end of it impacted bodily upon each of her comrades in turn, and though they were spared his blades through desperate parries with the power-arm, the haft of the blaster or Phoenix’s energy-shield, sheer momentum was enough to bowl the girls from their feet in one blow. Magnolia and Schiss-Zazz were the only two combatants who landed on the stadium floor upright.

“Nobody can stop me, nobody!” shrieked he.

It looked as if the pair was planning to capitalize on this success, for they were backflipping into each other’s airspace once more. This time however our heroines were ready, and as their adversaries flew apart fifteen feet up, Phoenix let rip with a sharpshooting gauntlet-beam which flayed Magnolia’s line neatly in two. Schiss-Zazz blundered into a kamikaze dive, suddenly deprived of support from above, whilst his partner wheeled head over heels in the opposite direction as she rode out alone the mighty swing intended for her counterweight. Thus brought to earth and into the sorority’s waiting clutches, it wasn’t long before Magnolia was trussed-up with her own severed cable and Schiss-Zazz reduced to a gibbering wreck with all four of his dagger-tips embedded uselessly in the soil.

The last among Scientooth’s underlings was an alien cyborg of yellowy flesh offset by gleaming silver armour, including a helmet and one clawed metal hand. “Face Technus!” boomed this beast, who as a conversationalist might have rivalled Schiss-Zazz, wherewith the whole of that biomechanical body began to flicker in and out of existence. A moment later, Technus filled the stage. Swelled to titanic proportions through a molecular mass-shift, he towered above the tiers of seats and dwarfed the girls before him.

Phoenix triggered her glider-wings, extending six bars of radiant light from apertures on her backpack which lifted her gracefully from the ground. Spreading her own flaming pinions Phoenix Prime joined her, while Carmilla fired up the rocket-booster on the tail-end of her bulky weapon and 4-H-N hit her mechanical arm’s hidden jets. Together the girls ascended to the gaseous junk-strewn heavens, four high-tech fighter-bombers confronting a final gargantuan foe.

They piled on their payloads as one. Fireballs, needlepoint rays, blubulata and 4-H-N’s rapid-fire cannons accosted the target in a cataclysmic deluge, sparking off preliminary explosions which raced up and down Technus’s considerable topography. These he weathered, and then disgorging great lozenge-like projectiles from his metal claw summarily broke the Neetkins formation. Our heroines dodged and wove, but each single shot from Technus split into many mid-flight and all of these would power forth at various different angles to the horizontal, turning the sky into an impassable minefield. No sooner had Carmilla swung round one sizzling ingot and ducked under another than she collided with a third and went down, 4-H-N not far behind her.

Twin torpedoes belched from Technus’s armoured shoulders. Phoenix and Phoenix Prime swooped to evade their first pass, but with no less swiftness the missiles began to circle back. “Heat-seekers!” yelled Phoenix Prime, as she and Phoenix took flight.

“Lead zem to zeir source!” that one commanded, diving headfirst at where Technus loomed.

4-H-N and Carmilla, while they waited for their rockets to reboot, were making their stand on the bleachers. Kicking slumped android bodies out of the way they leapt nimbly throughout this range of staggered rows, sometimes climbing to the uppermost and sometimes scrambling downward, all the while staying one step ahead of the blasts from Technus which ploughed into platforms they had seconds ago quit. At every opportunity the sisters would hold steady and lay it on to the lower portions of Technus’s carcass, for this was a dire race to disable his brutal blunderbuss before it demolished every last ledge. At length though, 4-H-N’s rattling muzzles and Carmilla’s gelatinous grenades prevailed. Technus reeled as his cyborg forearm detached itself from his slimy body and dropped to the arena floor, a hundred blossoming blooms of fire dancing about its dented charred framework. The next instant brought Phoenix and Phoenix Prime hurtling to within an inch of Technus’s helmet, whereat they hairpin-swerved straight up and delivered the heat-seekers directly unto the adversary’s face.

Carmilla’s engines were back online. Tucking her heavy blaster under her arm she jetted from one of the few remaining seats, and drove at gigantic Technus whose overheating machine-parts were by now simmering a dangerous red. He, giving voice to a valedictory “Face Technus!” unlatched his very breastplate, the two halves of which expanded and telescoped into a great pair of iron tentacles writhing like monster snakes. Each one’s head was a fearsome spiky contrivance circling preparatory to the lethal dash at our onrushing heroine, but the first that thrust she met full in the jaws with every blubulous bomb she had left. A cascade of explosions took out the chain segment-by-segment in speedy succession, destruction proceeding along its winding path to ultimately pound Technus at the junction with his torso. The second serpent made its pass, but Carmilla slipped inside of it and like a harrier tore along its undulating flank. Her gloved fingers tapped the self-destruct sequence into her control-keypad and thus she released her hold, free-falling the rest of the way to the ground and rolling into a touchdown while the blaster ended its nosedive against Technus’s chest and detonated.

Everything, as if in slow-motion, faded to white. Then just as gradually the glare dwindled away, disclosing Technus a ruined heap of his original proportions prone on the stadium floor, and the Neetkins sisters standing victorious over him.

END OF CHAPTER TWO