Mardock Scramble

she were baring her teeth. He noticed just in time.

Boiled’s whole body jumped up, like a football, and he fell to the ceiling. He twisted his body around so that he was just out of range of Balot’s snarc. On the ceiling. Only a few meters away.

Still, he was too far for her to try and penetrate his gravity shield and snarc the technology inside him.

At the same time, though, Boiled was too far away to be able to pierce Balot’s bodysuit with his gun. It was a deadly standoff, and whichever one of them could get just in range in order to fire the fatal blow just in time would emerge victorious.

Again Balot unloaded the contents of her gun at Boiled. He ran across the ceiling and hid himself behind a pillar.

Balot fired at the pillar in a reflex reaction. No sooner had she done so did she realize that this was Boiled’s second feint. He had already started running down the pillar, and he extended his arm and a cacophonous roar exploded.

She may have been able to sense his location, but she couldn’t predict which way he would move in his three-dimensional space.

Balot’s mind went blank as she sprang to the side.

The artillery-shell-like bullet grazed her shoulder. A small corner of her suit tore off and burst into yellow flame. But Boiled’s bullet had still missed her actual body.

Balot rolled away to a safe distance, but as she did so Boiled kicked against the pillar he was climbing down and flew sideways across the room. Or rather, he fell sideways, toward one of the walls.

Balot simply couldn’t tell what was coming next, and she hastily battled down the growing, treacherous feelings of inadequacy that were about to erupt inside her. Immediately she reached out and grasped the situation in the room, as if to convince herself to believe in her own abilities again.

Her opponent could move as he liked. The important thing to Balot was that she knew where she was.

Balot’s mind flipped through all the places in the room that were likely to put her at the greatest advantage. In barely a second she had determined her spot, and she ran for it.

A battle of life and death was essentially a battle of will. If your will was taken away from you, so was your ability to move. That’s how you became so pathetically incapable of even lifting a finger. Well, Balot wasn’t about to let that happen to her a second time.

Balot ran, and as she did so she gave up on the idea of trying to predict Boiled’s next move. Just as she would give up on a busted hand in blackjack and turn her mind to a new hand that she might stand a chance of winning. Instead of trying to second-guess Boiled’s position, she would make sure that her own position was as good as it could be. She continued toward her perfect position, the place she knew she could use, and as she did so she fired off a number of shots at Boiled as a feint, to try and distract him from her maneuver.

Balot was seeking the perfect moment, a single opportunity. She needed split-second accuracy and willpower to find the chink in Boiled’s armor, so that she could fire her arrow of Paris at his Achilles’ heel.

All while Boiled was in turn cutting off her escape routes and looking for his opening.

When Balot tried to slip behind a pillar, Boiled was one step ahead of her. He broke into a run across the wall and jumped. He was like a giant jaguar on the trail of a fawn in the headlights. It was the danse macabre. He landed on the ceiling and took three more leaps, as if he were moving along a carefully choreographed path. With his final step, his upper body spun around, and he thrust out his gun in a final pose.

With the muzzle trained on Balot’s unprotected back, he put his finger on the trigger, ready to fire.

That same instant the darkness all around flared up white, and the brightness assaulted Boiled’s eyes.

Balot had snarced one of the lights in the ceiling, judging the timing just right.

Boiled’s eyes narrowed. The light was coming from right below him, making it impossible to see Balot in her white bodysuit.

Boiled’s eyes darted from left to right to try and locate her, his finger hovering over the trigger. Just then he heard a loud noise somewhere overhead, on the floor.

He honed in the muzzle on the sound and fired. Then he gasped. A reflex action, without thought or meaning behind it.

Boiled’s shot pulverized its target. Only thing was, the target was the cell phone that Balot had placed on the floor just a moment ago. She had snarced its ringtone to play. Balot herself, of course, was nowhere to be seen.

Boiled realized immediately that he was in a trap. He prepared to move but found his whole world plunged into darkness again. Balot had used her snarc for the third time in quick succession, turning the lights off again.

Boiled lost his bearings, so sudden was the darkness in which he had been engulfed.

He realized what Balot was up to.

She was right underneath him. Both arms above her head, pointing her gun right at him. She had given up trying to anticipate his movements and in doing so had found herself the perfect position. She had doubled down, staking everything. But even as Boiled had temporarily lost the use of his eyesight due to the sudden light and dark, his years of training and experience as a soldier kicked in, and he was able to anticipate Balot’s next move.

Balot fired her gun so quickly that fire seemed to dance around the muzzle. A fraction of a second later, Boiled crouched down, activating his PGF, using it as instant body armor.

Balot’s first few shots squeezed past, just before the impenetrable shield had been fully activated. Bullets pierced Boiled’s right arm and leg, causing fragments of material from his jacket to flutter to the floor. But that was all. The rest of the bullets had their flight paths diverted, creating a ring of bullet holes that encircled Boiled on the ceiling where he crouched.

Even as his body took the bullets, Boiled removed his gun from under his right arm and aimed. He wasn’t relying on his eyes anymore, but even so he had a perfect shot at Balot’s chest. Balot sensed Boiled looming in the darkness and shuddered.

Had the first few bullets that had slipped past the impenetrable shield managed to hit home in Boiled’s head or heart, the outcome might have been different. Or if the bullets had been of a higher caliber, powerful enough to blow off his arms and legs… But now was no time for excuses. The simple fact was that the moment Boiled had worked out Balot’s position based on her actions, he’d seen through her. Her double down had failed spectacularly. Bust.

Balot scrambled away as quickly as she could, desperately trying to put distance between herself and her giant oppressor. She was also simultaneously snarcing her gun to make it larger, give it a bigger aperture—all unconsciously, of course; it was a manifestation of her earlier shiver of fear.

A deadly roar assaulted her. A bullet slammed into her left breast and she went flying backward. It was almost as if it were the noise itself that was forcing her back.

Balot was saved by her positioning. She smashed into one of the taped-up glass windows.

The window crumbled into fragments, and light scattered all around. Had it been a wall that she’d hit, there would have been nowhere for the shock to travel, and her rib cage would have shattered. But because the bullet threw Balot into the air and out of the building, much of the energy was dissipated and the impact to her body was lessened.

Her bodysuit had hardened instantly to form a defensive breastplate, and this now crumbled away, having absorbed the shock. At the same time the hems of her bodysuit spun out new material, wrapping Balot up as she scrunched herself into a ball in midair as she fell through the window and toward the ground below.

A giant white egg formed around her and bounced like a rubber ball against the street.

Two or three times it bounced, hitting the wall of the building on the other side of the street. A crack appeared in the egg. The white bulletproof container opened up and Balot emerged. Her hems returned to normal, and fragments of shock-absorbent material fell off her like powder.