Mardock Scramble

instructions.

“Electromagnetic waves causing interference? Shit…” Rare tut-tutted, and was ready to throw the bracelet away as useless when, without warning, it started moving of its own accord.

“Remote control?” Rare stood there, astonished, and could only watch as the wires snaked across his left hand and wove an intricate path toward his body.

Rare shivered in terror, his face suddenly pale.

The very next moment the wires returned to the bracelet at breakneck speed, and Rare’s left arm—from the elbow joint down—was diced like a steak, shredded into small pieces that dropped into a pile on the floor.

A scream—neither quite from a man or a little girl—gushed forth from Rare’s mouth.

Rare tumbled into a heap, watching as the wires flew into the air once more before igniting in a mass of sparks and disintegrating along with the bracelet.

Blood oozed slowly from the stump where Rare’s arm used to be before its amputation.

“I’m going to kill you…” Rare’s voice was full of venom but was masked by the sound of gunfire.

A bullet pierced Rare’s shoulder with pinpoint accuracy.

Rare collapsed head over heels but used his remaining good hand to scramble for one of the pull-out lockers, using it as a makeshift shield.

Even as he did so another bullet pierced his left leg.

Giving a half-crazed yell, Rare still managed to move quickly and precisely, using the pull-out locker as a stepping-stone to get a better view of the figure hiding in the shadows, the figure that he had almost hit earlier. He leapt at it.

Bullets flew through the air, scoring direct hits on his right elbow and knee.

But Rare didn’t stop. He descended on the figure, plunging his blade downward.

More sparks lit up the darkness.

The blade, blocked firmly by two guns being held in a crucifix shape.

Steel melted, and the sparks lit up the room, allowing Rare to finally see his tormentor’s face.

“Looks like he has an artificially reinforced bone structure. The odd gunshot here and there isn’t going to be enough to bring him down.”

A voice. Oeufcoque’s voice.

But the only person standing in front of Rare was that actress from the kiddie porn flick, all cherubic and innocent.

Pressing the gun barrels away with his knife as hard as he could, Rare gritted his teeth and squeezed out the name from the corner of his mouth. “Rune-Balot?”

At that very moment Balot relaxed and let go. She knew exactly what needed to be done to throw the enemy off his footing.

She let the crossed guns slip downward to the right, and Rare stumbled.

She would have shot him in the back as he fell, but she couldn’t—the gun barrels were now half-fried.

Even as Rare collapsed to the ground he used his reinforced legs and loins to wrench his body around, facing Balot.

The tip of his knife sped toward Balot’s flank.

More screeching and violent sparks.

Balot blocked the knife with her left-hand pistol. The incandescent blade ground into the body of the gun.

Rare stared at the girl, a confused expression on his face, as if to ask What’s going on?

“Is she a PI who’s had her features surgically altered to make her look like her client?” Rare voiced out loud, having decided that this was the only possible explanation.

Balot didn’t answer—she just thought back to Oeufcoque’s words, let go to get go.

She parried, sidestepping Rare like a toreador.

Rare’s feet tripped over themselves, and his blade made a red-hot arc that rent the air.

But he’d be back up, thrusting the knife right at her again, in just a moment.

Balot snarced the guns in both her hands.

The guns melted, fused together, and turned into a Hutchinson Knife, the exact same model that Rare wielded.

Rare’s expression was a sight to behold—but he didn’t stop swinging his blade for a moment.

Balot switched the knife’s powers on and used her knife to block Rare’s blow.

The two highly magnetized blades collided, and an eruption of sparks burst in the space between Balot and Rare. Two bodies went flying.

Rare braced himself for his landing, gripping his knife the other way round now, while Balot consciously relaxed her muscles and flopped to the ground.

Rare brought his knife down on her, and Balot nimbly thrust her knife upward.

Incredibly, the two knifepoints met exactly, in an infinitesimally precise head-on collision.

The knife flew out of Rare’s hands.

It twisted violently in midair before plunging into Rare’s chest.

“Gah…” Rare moaned as he staggered backwards into the locker-lined wall.

The knife was buried deep in his chest.

Frantically he tried to gain purchase on the hilt to pull the blade out, but the impact of the electromagnetic current caused his fingers to flail uselessly.

He slid down the wall into a heap.

The stench of burning flesh emanated from his every orifice.

Balot grimaced at the vile smell. She almost vomited.

Before long Rare’s mouth was gurgling, overflowing with blood. The fact that the blood wasn’t evaporating was proof that his knife’s electromagnetism had just about faded to nothing.

Rare was at death’s door but still conscious.

“Including you there are four intruders total, right?” Oeufcoque asked, and Rare looked at Balot with an expression somewhere between rage and tears.

Then his jaw twisted in a strange way. He opened and closed his mouth, and a reedy voice just managed to escape. “I’ll have you gang-raped by pigs…princess…”

A gruesome sneer descended over Rare’s pallid features and Oeufcoque cried out, urgently, “The smell of death! Balot, retreat!”

Balot understood immediately. Telecommunication equipment and reinforced sinews weren’t the only things implanted inside Rare’s body. She leapt away from him, snarcing Oeufcoque to cover her whole body. Oeufcoque responded as rapidly as he could.

Light filled the room.

There was a thunderous roar and a blast of pressure.

For Balot this was the worst sort of scene imaginable—one that she had already experienced.

Rare’s body exploded. The lockers were crushed flat, the ceiling warped, and the images of the fossils were wiped clean by the blazing inferno that swept the room and the corridor outside, blackening all the walls.

A large elliptical object emerged from the rubble, bouncing with a plop, then rolling across the room. It looked almost like a giant white rubber ball.

A crack opened from the top, and from it emerged the figure of Balot, hugging her knees tightly to her chest. She jumped down to the ground.

The rubber ball-like object spat out a snow-white garment that started slithering back into place around Balot’s body, hugging her tight, like leather bondage gear. Shock-absorbent material peeled off, sprinkling the floor like a cracked eggshell.

“Balot, are you all right?”

Balot surveyed her surroundings, scowling, staring at the still-flickering flames.

–I’m never having my body go up in flames again. I hate it.