This is going to be an interesting fight.
We circled each other a few times, each of us unwilling to make the first move. The only defense we had was distance. My only offense was my speed, so I decided to use it.
I attacked, sending several jabs at the Enforcer’s feet. He danced away and swung his sword down in a wide arc to burn me in half. But I rolled to the side and kept rolling. A wave of heat washed over me as it trailed from the Enforcer’s blade.
I jumped to my feet and answered with two quick jabs to the alien’s thigh. My sword, it seemed, didn’t care for armor. I barely felt the impact as the blade sliced through metal plates, and the creature screeched in pain.
I took a big step back as he thrust his plasma blade. Normally, I would have knocked the offending sword aside and punished the attacker by slicing his forearm or his neck if I was close enough. But I had to stay out of reach. I could lose my head if I didn’t stay alert.
The Enforcer reversed his swing, faster than most because his sword literally weighed nothing. The plasma was nothing more than superheated air, concentrated at the edge of the forcefield. Besides a little bit of wind-resistance, there was nothing to slow it down.
Wind resistance. A germ of an idea began to form, but I couldn’t quite tell what shape it was yet.
I stepped slightly to my right, then jumped to avoid the Enforcer’s blade. He had shown me his speed already, so I knew he was toying with me, trying to draw me into a false sense of confidence while he attacked with wide slashes and obvious thrusts. Eventually, he would try for a sneak attack, a quick move while my guard was down. A move he would not expect me to be ready for.
I faked a slow hop, saw a slight shift in his shoulders, and knew what was coming next, but I held my leap until the last possible moment. The Enforcer planted his feet and brought his blade up in a diagonal slash meant to take my left leg and half my torso with it. I scuttled backward as my opponent shifted into a quick horizontal slash that would have cut me in half, armpit-to-armpit.
I counterattacked as he finished his maneuver. Despite his intentions, there were no human body parts falling to the ground. There was no human cry of pain. Instead, he made a stupid expression with his mouth and brought the stump of his right arm up to his visor. Dark red blood pumped from his wound in wet gouts.
I waited, but the creature only stared. He must have been dumbfounded, stunned that he’d been injured. With cool tech like a personal plasma field, I didn’t blame him. He had probably never lost a fight in his life.
Likely, most of his victims had surrendered. Some, like Skrew—wherever he’d run off to—considered the tech to be magic. Hell, had I not been raised in the Federation, I might have too. But Mars was trying to create the exact same thing to use in shuttles, medium-size war machines, and, eventually, starships. The problem was that the tech was still new, so the amount of power it took to create a plasma field was astronomical.
For that reason, I didn’t want to destroy the Enforcer’s armor. If I crushed or otherwise ruined it, like I had the creatures under the trees, I would have nothing to examine and no clue as to how it worked.
“Ahem,” I said to the alien as he glared at me, blood still pouring from his stump.
I needed the thing to surrender. Otherwise, there would likely be some armor damage. I could easily have chopped off his head, but the tech was too important. If I could bring back working plasma tech, the Xeno wouldn’t stand a chance.
The Enforcer raised his stump and touched the cleanly sliced end to his own plasma field, screeching in pain as he did. With his wound cauterized, he slowly turned to face me.
“Surrender,” I ordered, holding my sword at the low guard position, blade edge down and tip nearly touching the dirt.
I thought maybe he’d had enough, with a bleeding thigh and a stump for an arm, but then I saw him smile from behind his helmet’s visor. He flexed, twisted his head back and forth, and cracked more vertebrae than a human had in their whole spine.
The Enforcer lowered his head like a rampaging bull and charged. I sprang into the air, felt the heat of the alien’s plasma shield passing beneath me, and landed lightly on my feet.
“I take it you’re not going to surrender?” I said, followed by a disapproving tsk-tsk.
He roared and stopped mid-tantrum when a flash of light and sparkle of disintegrating stone splashed into the shield near its head.
“Die, tree-face lizard-breath!” Skrew bellowed from far enough inside the treeline to ensure he had a chance to escape.
The Enforcer turned to regard the gray, four-armed interloper. He lifted his left arm, the only one he had with a hand attached to the end, and pointed a finger at my companion.
“You’re next,” he said in his high-pitched voice. “But I’m going to kill you slowly.”
I wasn’t sure how I could understand the alien, but I’d been able to understand the vrak and the Ish-Nul, too. I figured either everyone on this planet spoke the same language, or it was another gift of the Lakunae, but I didn’t bother trying to answer the question now.
The Enforcer squeaked when I decided I’d heard enough and separated his other arm at the shoulder and his legs at the knees. He screamed for only a second before a backhanded slash ended him. His body parts lay scattered on the ground, but his forcefield was still active.
I carefully poked the button
