Mardock Scramble

bullets, manipulated Welldone, and manipulated Oeufcoque.

Drenched in sweat, she stayed her hand for a moment. The muscles in her wrists were throbbing, numb. The impact from firing the gun was now being absorbed by her, not her dress.

She realized that she could no longer hear Oeufcoque’s voice, and that it was she herself who was suppressing it by force, as if she hadn’t known what she had been doing.

Balot let go and released all the power that had been building up in her body.

Her eyes prickled with smoke and she couldn’t see well.

She tried to snarc the lights and the air conditioning in the parking lot but realized that most of the circuits had stopped working.

Fires blazed all around.

Balot took a step back to survey a vista of rubble. The parking lot had been reduced to ruins; the ceiling had caved in where the pillars had been destroyed, and the contents of rooms on the first floor were strewn around the place.

The Doctor’s research lab, too, thrown into the mix. All of a sudden Balot’s eyes fell on an aquarium that she had seen before. At the back of her mind, Balot remembered the Doctor’s words—that he was trying to find a way to regenerate her voice box.

The aquarium was obliterated, its burnt-out fragments intermingled with jagged shards of concrete.

The smoke cleared abruptly.

For almost the first time, Balot properly registered the appearance of her assailant.

His bullet-riddled body stirred.

The body that she had thought of only as a target—she had completely forgotten that he was a living, breathing thing.

The multitude of dark red wounds that punctured his body reminded her of this fact.

All of a sudden, an incredible, unbearable nothingness pressed in on her from behind.

Dreadful footsteps.

Sensing the air, snarcing—no use.

–Oeufcoque! Balot cried out to the gun. A heartfelt cry, different from any that had gone before.

–Oeufcoque, please answer me! Help me, Oeufcoque!

There was impatience in her plea now. Like she was trying to un-crush something that she had unthinkingly squeezed to pieces.

Balot called out Oeufcoque’s name as if she were trying to piece back together a broken egg.

The gun in her hands warped into a crooked shape.

The gloves that had been melded together now split apart, and from that gap a bundle of fluffy honey-colored fur emerged.

–Oeufcoque.

Gwah…a slight moan. Oeufcoque’s limbs twitched, convulsing, and he writhed in Balot’s palms in agony.

Like the man he had just shot.

Without warning, Oeufcoque was violently sick.

A large volume of vomit spewed from his mouth, more than seemed possible from his tiny body, and dripped through Balot’s gloved fingers.

–Oeufcoque? Oeufcoque? What’s the matter?

Balot’s eyes filled with tears.

Oeufcoque vomited again.

He spoke in a raspy voice, as if he were wringing something out of his body in between his heavy breathing. “Let go of me.”

Balot didn’t understand what he meant by those words. Rather, she tried to hug him tighter to her than ever.

As she did so, Oeufcoque twisted his head around to try and shake her off. “Please don’t touch me…I’m begging you. Let me down, please…”

Gwah…he was sick again.

Balot stood there like an idiot. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do—and Oeufcoque, the very person who was supposed to tell her, was frantically trying to escape from her hands.

Desperate now, she tried to pin Oeufcoque down, tried to stop his limbs from writhing around.

“Stop it! Leave me alone!”

Balot shook her head, determined. Her eyes were soon overflowing with tears.

She desperately searched for an escape route from the horrible feeling that overwhelmed her, the feeling of being plunged into a pit of darkness, and Oeufcoque was the only person she could think of that could save her.

Oeufcoque vomited still more copiously, then collapsed limp and senseless.

Balot stood there silently, waiting for Oeufcoque to speak.

She was more scared than she had ever been. She felt like she had been turned down, with stinging words of rejection thrown into her face.

Tears flowed, but all she could do was wait.

But when he did finally speak, it was to tell her something completely different.

“He’s coming…” Oeufcoque spoke in the reediest of voices. “Go to the roof. The Doctor will…quickly.”

Confused, Balot tried to work out what he meant. And also how she could best apologize to Oeufcoque. Her thoughts flew from one place to another.

Then she noticed the presence of something coming toward her—something large.

She raised her head. Her tears had stopped.

An incredible mass of something was charging toward the shutters at the other end of the car park.

A threat.

Balot snarced Oeufcoque as a reflex action.

Oeufcoque let out a cry of pure anguish.

A loud crunching noise silenced his cry.

The shutters exploded open, and a giant trailer rushed into the parking lot. It smashed through a number of pillars, a wake of sparks behind it, zigzagging across the space and scraping up against the walls, before finally running aground on the rubble.

The coupling connecting the vehicle to the container split, and the giant container was thrown toward the pillar where Welldone lay prostrate.

Sandwiched between the concrete and the giant silver container, Welldone’s body burst like a balloon.

Balot stared at the monstrosity that had just emerged from the blazing inferno, still holding Oeufcoque, her back to the wall.

The air was fizzing with tension.

She could see a man getting up from the driver’s seat.

She heard the door swing open, and a man came toward her, walking over the flame-flickering rubble.

“Run away…” A cracked voice emerged from Oeufcoque’s lips.

But Balot stood still, staring at the overwhelming figure of the man. Not out of fear. Compared to what had just happened to Oeufcoque, she wasn’t afraid in the slightest.

On the contrary, she felt excited—uplifted, even.

The flames from the fires lit up the man’s features.

The blank features of the giant man.

The man who had threatened Balot on the roadside, at the courtroom.

His name was Dimsdale-Boiled, and he was stepping over the body of the man he had just crushed and coming right at her, an enemy and a true threat.