Hardman's Bar

By Hadrian Howell (Hardman)

Chapter 36

The air screamed a whistling death as the spearhead shot by me again, and I ducked low and powered forward. This was a dumb idea, and I knew it, because she could have opened up with those Siege Vulcans at any time and literally put me down.

For some reason, she didn’t, though, so I didn’t look the gift horse in the mouth and slammed into her with all the power I could get behind me. It was like hitting a tank with my shoulder, and coming from me, that’s saying something. She may have shifted back about an inch or two, and she rocked with the blow, but other than that, and a small scrap in her armor, she registered little to no damage.

The spearhead clicked back into place and I knew she’d be stabbing it into me if I didn’t do anything quick, so I grabbed her left arm at the elbow and held it there, at the same time catching a powerful punch from her right arm in my other hand. Her immobile face showed no strain at all, but neither did her body.

I, on the other hand, was finding it hard to resist her overpowering strength, which was something new to me. She had a greater stability afforded to her by her very design, and whoever had built her really, REALLY didn’t like me, since she seemed designed to bring me down.

She was wordless as I strained to stop her from pounding my face in, and it was a very calm clicking sound that brought out those awful Siege Vulcans. At this range, they might even punch a hole in my armor, and the magnetism would almost surely kill me.

With a mental swear word, I let go of her right arm, which slammed home into my face, but also caught her off guard. She was obviously a little inexperienced, since she’d assumed I’d hold off her punch and had started to lean on me instead, taking away the power behind the blow and sending her twin guns off course, stitching lines of tiny craters in the floor. The magnetism involved in both the bullets and firing mechanism still made me feel sick to my stomach though.

Using a rare moment of misguided balance on her part, I fired off the arm holding her left, spinning her almost on her heel before it dragged her only five feet away and the Knuckle gave up, returning to me. She took a thunderous step forward and stabbed at me with the spearhead, but I managed to dodge out to her left side and slam my right fist into her torso.

In a moment of total unfairness, she didn’t even register the impact, and merely whipped around at the waist and stabbed me in the right shoulder. My shoulder pad immediately turned to dust as I fell backwards, and my arm followed my shoulder pad to the ground with a sound like falling construction equipment. I swore loudly and tried to back away, my feet not wanting to listen to me when I screamed a mental command to stand up.

With mounting horror, I watched the gaping hole that used to be my right arm start to spread like a spider web across my chest. Siegema’am turned toward me with a single step.

“Now do you realize how futile this is?” She asked me.

Mentally, I agreed. The deck was stacked against me on this one, and I knew it. If I only had help, I might still be in one piece, instead of one big piece and one rapidly decaying piece. I scrambled away from her and stood up, turning just in time to watch what was my right arm turn to so much crumbs.

Strangely enough, the part of my arm that was the Hard Knuckle remained undamaged.

“I call a time out,” I gasped, fighting off the ghost pain of my arm. System shock for losing a part is much, much worse for a robot than it is for a human. Thousands upon thousands of preprogrammed lines suddenly become very, very pointless.

“Time out?” she intoned. “There is no time out in war.”

“I stand by my statement,” I coughed.

“And you shall perish by it,” Siegema’am told me in a deadpan voice. I watched as her head, literally, from the eyes up, opened up, revealing a sort of turret with a cannon on it. The barrel of the gun didn’t extend past the half-sphere base it was mounted inside, and the whole thing swiveled with a mind of its own to point at me.

“Aw, crap,” I grumbled as a massive, WAY too massive beam of green-blue light shot out of the barrel and slammed into me. I leaned into the blast, holding my remaining arm in front of my face, and I could feel myself sliding backwards, my feet digging trenches in the ground. For what seemed like hours, I felt the armor on my front crumble away, and then the light and energy and pain subsided, replaced by a cold, empty feeling.

“Ouch,” I managed before my legs gave out again.

Past the ringing in my head, I heard voices. “Yeah, she’s going to kill him,” Geminiman was saying.

“Don’t you DARE give up on him,” Sparkchan shouted.

“LOOK at him, will you?” Geminiman told her. “God, I can see his support structure. That’s ugly.”

“I can’t look,” Snakeman said with a shiver.

Through the colors clouding my vision from the pain, I could see Geminiman was right. I was missing the entire front chest plat of my armor, leaving only a few pieces hanging on to other parts and my support structure, which was like a weird, sideways ribcage. It was a little weird and entirely too painful all at the same time. Then I remembered something.

I got to my feet slowly, and my breath came in ragged gasps as I look at my opponent. Siegema’am seemed opposed to motion of any sort. She’d taken maybe three steps since our battle had begun, and she only attacked me with one weapon at a time. Was that her weakness? Was she actually SLOWER than I was?

Not something I wanted to put money on right now, but…

A familiar booming sound gave my feet the order to move aside as the spearhead sailed by. The chain tensed and started retracting the deadly weapon as I hit the mental activation switch for a weapon I’d never used as Hardman. Four of my central support struts snapped apart and opened up like the double doors of some grand skyscraper, and a short, round, and above all else LARGE cannon slid forward to fill the new opening.

I took a hasty kind of aim and fired the cannon, unleashing a massive spiked ball that would have put Knightman’s own signature weapon to shame. It flew through the air with a sharp, evil kind of whistling sound and crashed into Siegema’am’s head, knocking aside eyes, lips, cheeks, and other such parts to continue an unabated swath of destruction into the wall twenty feet behind her.

Siegema’am was sufficiently rocked by the blow, but stayed standing as the spearhead clicked back into place.

“Oh, FALL OVER ALREADY!” I shouted as the cannon, its single shot spent, rolled back into my torso.

“Siege Buster offline,” she intoned.

“That’s IT? I just literally KNOCKED YER BLOCK OFF!” I admit I might have been slightly hysterical by this point. She honestly didn’t have a head anymore! Don’t people usually stop moving at that point?

“Incorrect,” she said in that gratingly annoying one tone voice of hers. “My shell’s head has indeed been destroyed, but you have failed to damage any systems aside from my Siege Buster.”

“Shell’s head…?” Snakeman voiced the question on everyone’s mind. “So, wait, you’re actually IN that thing?”

“Affirmative,” Siegema’am said.

“Oh, this is so much bull $^%&,” Geminiman said, rolling his eyes.

Siegema’am ignored him, raising the spearhead again to aim at me. “Simply surrender, Hardman.”

“Wait, there’s a give up option?” I asked. “Seriously?”