Mardock Scramble

She sensed Boiled pointing his gun at her from the other side of the window. In a slick, inevitable movement, Balot fired at him. Boiled fired. The bullets clashed, and Boiled’s deflected round hurtled into a lamppost. The lamppost toppled and smashed into the street, scattering shards of debris.

As this was happening, Balot summoned a shield. A car—headlights blazing—sped over to her to hide her body. It took the bullets meant for her, its door smashed and hood crushed. Balot jumped out of the way just in time to see its gas tank igniting and spewing out a tongue of fire.

Across the fire, she sensed Boiled jumping down from the window.

Balot summoned another car just before he landed. Not as a shield this time—the car’s lights flashed on and off aggressively as it hurtled toward the spot Boiled was going to land on.

Boiled fired at it the moment he landed. One of the tires blew, and the car flipped onto its side and careened into a telephone booth before slamming into the storefront of a multi-purpose building.

Hiding behind the wall of fire, Balot focused her senses on how much damage Boiled had taken.

Two bullets to his right upper arm, one to his right thigh. Blood was spilling from the wounds, dripping down his arm and leg.

Even so, the walking menace known as Boiled loomed as threatening as ever.

Voices were heard—townspeople, tentatively emerging from nearby buildings, reacting to the commotion. Then a voice closer to home—an old man emerged from the entrance hall that had been wrecked by the car. He was yelling something and brandishing a shotgun.

Balot stared at him in surprise, but Boiled’s left hand was casually lifted up and pointed right at him…

Balot fired as quickly as she could to stop Boiled. Boiled was forced to activate his anti-gravity shield, which changed the flight path of his own ferocious bullet—instead of taking out the old man, the bullet slammed into the wall of the building right next to him. The old man was thrown, and his shotgun fired off in a random direction, smashing the shop window of a building on the other side of the street. The old man collapsed in fright, and a couple of younger men jumped out of the building he had emerged from and hastily dragged him back inside.

“When monsters like us fight each other, civilians only get in the way,” Boiled muttered, and fired at the wrecked car now embedded in the storefront. The hydrogen-powered engine, so typical in the River Side district, didn’t stand a chance. The car flared up and the whole building trembled violently.

That was all it took for the remaining bystanders to run back into the safety of their buildings. Boiled and Balot were the only two people left in the street on the whole block.

Boiled ejected his empty cartridge, and it clattered to the ground with a metallic ring. He used his blood- soaked right hand to pull out a speed loader from his pockets and effortlessly reloaded his gun.

“As long as the gunfire continues, the police around here will keep their distance.” His voice was as eerily calm as ever. “Let’s finish what we started.”

He shook his revolver sideways. The cylinder was now back in position.

For a moment Boiled seemed to Balot not only inhuman but something quite otherworldly. His face was blank. His eyes were utterly ruthless, glinting with fire. His limbs were as steel, impervious to pain. And his heart was an engine fueled by hatred and murderous intent, its only purpose to combust and consume all in an explosion of nothingness.

Balot bit down hard on her lip. She tried desperately to avoid taking to heart the phrase Boiled had just spoken so casually. Monsters like us.

It was true that both Boiled and Balot existed somewhere between human and machine. But Boiled was one step farther down the line—his heart was like a machine too, cold and unfeeling in the face of death. No, that wasn’t quite true—it killed in anticipation of some sort of feeling. That was what made him the monster.

Balot forced herself to keep her rhythm, taking deep, deliberate breaths. Her body was hot, her heart aflame.

She was so hot she wouldn’t have been surprised if the magazine she ejected from her gun glowed a bright red.

She took her right hand off her gun and made her right glove turn into another gun.

She held both guns up and concentrated on Boiled’s current position.

Balot knew a second before he moved that Boiled was about to break into a run. This time, she was considering not only the best position for her but the position that Boiled would be looking for too. This would be the key to how they maneuvered in their deadly dance.

A number of gunshots were fired almost simultaneously—they echoed as one. Boiled’s shot, Balot’s many.

She was using the gun in her right hand now. The gun in her left hand was her bankroll—her reserve, for when she needed it the most.

Bullets met in midair; they clashed, crumbled, ricocheted. The remainder of Balot’s volley of bullets was deflected harmlessly.

They both ran, circling round, trying to outflank each other.

Balot activated her snarc, and Boiled kicked hard against the ground. His massive frame flew up an incredible distance, landing on the wall of the building behind her.

Balot knew what position he was heading for even before he got there. She had readied her gun to fire long before he landed and was moving much faster now. She fired.

Boiled didn’t return fire. Instead, his right hand pulled something out of his pocket.

“Faceman was right about you. Every time you experience combat, your abilities develop in all sorts of unpredictable ways,” Boiled muttered. He was acknowledging Balot’s ever-increasing abilities, as if he could keep them in check by the mere act of recognizing them.

Or it could have been something else, something simpler. Perhaps this was the only situation in which Boiled was ever able to speak to anyone in a friendly manner. He could only experience intimacy when earnestly trying to take the life of another, when under attack himself.

“I’m going to have to contain those abilities.”

He tossed the object in his hand to the ground. For a moment, Balot thought he had simply discarded a spent magazine.

Boiled’s tactics were so perfect that he even anticipated Balot’s momentary error. He was a flawless strategist, and the implication of this was that his actions were constantly calculated to put Balot at the maximum disadvantage.

Reflexively, Balot shot at the object—a black sphere the size of a man’s fist.

If it were a grenade or something similar then Oeufcoque would have no trouble protecting her from its effects.

But the object didn’t shatter and didn’t explode. It just landed quietly on the street and rolled toward Balot until it was only a few meters away from her. Then it released something—something invisible to the naked eye.

Balot suddenly felt the whole of her skin turning itchy. But only for a moment. The sensation quickly changed into something much worse: she was hit by severe pain in her back and stomach and arms and legs and face. It felt like her skin was peeling off of its own accord.

Balot staggered backward. The pain made her dizzy, and she almost lost consciousness. She lost all sense of precision and could no longer feel her surroundings. She was terrified.

“An Area Defense Weapon!” Oeufcoque said. The black sphere wasn’t an explosive—it was something far worse than that to Balot. “A nonlethal weapon; it emits electromagnetic waves that cause terrible pain in all exposed areas.”

Balot couldn’t even respond—it was all she could do to shake her head.

“He’s coming! He’s right above us!”

Balot’s arms shot up. She was completely following Oeufcoque’s lead now. Boiled fired a shot, and his bullet scored a direct hit on Balot, slamming into her arms. Balot was enveloped by a wave of pain. It was like she had been slashed with razors all over and had hooks inserted into the thousands of cuts, and then had her whole skin ripped off her in one hideous flash.

“You need to snarc your bodily senses back into place! Balot—” Oeufcoque cried.