Fifteen levels? Thirty SP? It was the most he had ever earned for completing a quest. His body was suddenly flooded with a crackling, kinetic energy, rippling through his muscles, enhancing his senses, and instantly washing away his pain and exhaustion. The Regeneration skill went into overdrive, snapping his broken bones back together and healing his remaining injuries in seconds, leaving him feeling totally revitalized.
The Dread must have sensed the nanite activity, because instead of immediately killing Luna, he yanked the blade out of her shoulder and turned around to look at Stu. "What the hell...?"
Stu was way ahead of him. Calling up the skills menu, he used his sixty skill points to purchase Golden Moment...and then, just as quickly, he activated it.
He felt no different upon activating the skill, but it was obviously doing something to him, because the contours of his body were suddenly limned by a bright, golden, almost angelic light, in which he was totally enveloped. Ten minutes. Ten minutes of perfect invulnerability.
The Dread stared at him with silver eyes. "Well, that's a new one," he said conversationally. "You're just full of surprises, aren't you?" But then he sighed. "I'm starting to lose my patience, though. I don't have time to waste on you two idiots."
He started for Stu, approaching him again in that casual, unhurried way. When he got within ten feet, he suddenly shot forward, his blade-arms slashing.
Stu didn't take a backward step. Trusting to his new skill, he raised his arms to block the blades.
The first blade shattered when it struck Stu's forearm, and the second snapped in half when the Dread attempted to stab him in the throat. He jumped back, surprised, and stared at Stu. "Well, ain't that some shit?" His blades grew back, and he started circling Stu warily. Stu, having gone up several levels, was now faster and stronger, and though he wasn't anywhere near the Dread's level, his eyes were now capable of following his rapid movements.
The Dread came at him again. Stu allowed him to get close, then batted his blades away with his arms and launched an offensive of his own: he activated the Red Wave skill.
The Red Wave turned out to be similar in some ways to the Chainsaw Ballet attack -- as soon as he activated it, his body was no longer under his complete control; he started dodging, ducking, moving, and throwing punches like some kind of pro fighter. But while the Chainsaw Ballet attack took him over completely, the Red Wave allowed him to keep one hand on the wheel -- he had some measure of control over it, allowing him to freely improvise. The alien in his brain was working with him.
He ducked under the blades, grabbed one, and broke it with his bare hand. The Dread countered by transforming one arm into a gigantic, slithering tentacle, which wrapped around Stu's legs, but the Red Wave skill simply spun Stu around, unwinding him out of the tentacle's grip. Jumping in close, Stu delivered a tremendous, stone-shattering punch to the Dread's midsection, cracking his armor and causing him to grunt and stumble away.
"How the fuck did you do that?" the Dread complained. He transformed his other arm into a tentacle as well, and caused scythe-like blades to develop at their tips. He began flailing around wildly, trying to strike at Stu, but the Red Wave skill had enhanced Stu's reflexes and fighting instincts to superhuman levels, and he had no trouble avoiding them. He dug in, steadily closing the gap between himself and the Dread. The Dread, surprised by his agility, and by the rapidity with which he closing in, tried to levitate out of danger, but Stu seized his leg as he was launching himself into the air and slammed him back down to the ground, jumping on top of him.
The two of them were now face to face. It was a very strange experience, struggling against someone who looked almost identical to himself; seeing his own face up close like this was like looking into a weird, distorted mirror.
The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
He refused to be distracted by this strangeness, however. He struck at that face, at his own face, over and over again, hammering at it in ground-and-pound fashion. The Dread's flesh and bone must have been unusually resilient, because it took multiple blows for Stu to even begin to draw blood, but he kept at it, relentless, showering his doppelganger with smashing punches. In between blows, Stu saw, for the first time, a degree of panic enter the Dread's silver eyes. He reformed his arms and tried to push him off, but Stu brushed the arms aside and continued wailing away. He broke his teeth; he caved in his nose; he drove his head into the floor. He punched and punched and punched, until his own knuckles were bleeding.
The Dread tried to say something, but Stu was too busy pounding away to give him the opportunity. Carried away by the Red Wave, he battered the Dread's face until there was nothing left of it but a sopping, bloody mash of flesh, bone, and brains.
The Dread's arms fell to his sides, and his strange, writhing armor ceased to writhe. Breathing heavily, and covered in blood up to his elbows, Stu rolled off the Dread's body, slowly climbed to his feet, and looked down at his opponent. Was he dead? He wasn't moving.
But he had to be sure.
Staggering over the blood-slicked tile, he found one of the Dread's broken-off blade-arms and used it to completely sever his head, sawing it off at the neck -- just as he had done to the Lab Rat back in Heart's Glow. It was another one of those ghastly experiences that he was sure he would never forget.
This accomplished, he tossed the blade aside and went to Luna, who had also managed to climb to her feet. Stu took one of her hands in his, drawing on his Protector power to heal the injury to her shoulder, and asked her, "Are you all right?"
"Yeah." She looked past him, at the Dread's body. "Is he dead?"
"I think so," he replied, glancing at his dead doppelganger. He was splayed out on the floor -- his head missing, his nano-armor slowly melting into a kind of a graphite goo. It was an ignominious end to the world's first zombie. "What are you doing here?"
"I came to get you," she said. "We're ready to leave."
"You shouldn't be moving around like this. The infection--"
"Dr. Snowe gave me the serum."
"And it works? You're all right?"
"I seem to be." She looked past him again, this time at the smoking, smoldering wreckage near the mall's main entrance. Several zombies were beginning to crawl over it. "We can talk later. Let's get the hell out of here."
"Y-yeah," he said. He was worn down, both physically and emotionally -- exhausted from the fight, sickened by the experience of bashing in and then cutting off the head of his identical twin, and yet thrilled to learn that Luna had been cured. He started to follow her, but stumbled.
Fortunately she was still holding his hand, and she caught him before he could fall. She threw his arm over her shoulder to support him. "You're hurt," she pointed out.
"I heal fast."
Her eyes wandered over the piles of bodies. "Did you kill all these yourself?"
"Not bad, huh?"
She shook her head in amazement. "You're incredible."
"I don't want to be incredible," he said wearily. "I want to go back to what I was. I want to go back to being a regular guy." He looked down at her, and their eyes met. "Did you really mean that before?"
"Mean what?"
"You know what."
She turned away from him, smiling in a sly sort of way. "Maybe I meant it, maybe I didn't. But in that moment...well, I had a feeling you needed to hear it."
* * *
They caught up with the others a few minutes later. Lucky and Millie were waiting for them at the mall's rear entrance.
"They're alive," Millie acknowledged, when she saw them. She winked at Lucky. "See? I told you there was nothing to worry about."
"I wasn't worried," he said petulantly. He called out to Stu and Luna: "Let's go, you two. They're waiting for us."
Dr. Snowe and Ula, having finished loading the last of their equipment into a truck, were now preparing to leave. They asked him about the Dread.
"I killed him," he said simply.
Ula was clearly skeptical, but Dr. Snowe, studying his blood-soaked clothes, merely nodded, as if he understood everything. "Well done."
There were still a handful of zombies stumbling around the mall parking lot. With the Dread dead, they were no longer acting collectively, which made them somewhat less dangerous, but a zombie was still a zombie, and neither Stu nor any of the others had any desire to linger here. They quickly climbed into the truck -- Ula took the wheel, and Dr. Snowe joined her in the cab, while the rest of them climbed into the back -- and sped off.
It was twilight now -- the sky had turned purple, and a sprinkling of stars were beginning to appear. Stu leaned back and looked up at them, but only for a moment; his eyelids were growing heavy. Even after having gone up fifteen levels, he was damn tired. It had been a long day.