Chapter 43: 12.3 Plan B

  The sunshine is now covering the entire field and bodies are lying over one another like sandbags stacked to reinforce trenches. The incoming fighters have to high step over piled corpses in some places, stepping around or on top of them in others.

  Jack looks back over at Wolf as he continues to brawl. His sword comes around in a wide arc but always leaves him exposed afterwards. He then lets go with one hand to claw, kick, and occasionally bite those that get too close. Jack smiles and nods when another explosion erupts from the treeline, another trap finding a former adventurer.

  Several more fighters fall forward from the trail as they get shoved from behind. Some of them trip over the person in front of them, while others trip over the corpses littering the ground. Tree tops rustle as an eight-foot giant ducks under the foliage and steps into the clearing. Stumbling fighters are trying to get out of the way, then turn to rush towards Sarah. The giant points to Jack, then marches towards him.

  Another giant steps out after the first, looks around briefly, then heads in Wolf’s direction. Sarah opens fire, emptying a clip into the second giant. Entry wounds pockmark his arm and side like stones tossed into sand. The creature swings its arm like shooing a fly but doesn’t otherwise acknowledge Sarah. She looks down at the locked slide, then turns to meet an attacker, deflecting his blow as five more fighters rush her.

  Jack stares the giant down as it approaches, grunting in his direction. It has an underbite and pustules mound up around its right temple. A belt and a loin cloth are draped around the chalky-white skin of its torso and scars cover its body like beads of welded metal.

  Short chains around its ankles and wrists drag and follow its movements as it rears back to swing a rusted bastard sword in an attack. The action is slow and deliberate, the creature never needing to attack more than once. It swings the weapon around like a baseball pitcher sending his fastball towards home plate. It’s definitive, inevitable---unstoppable.

  Jack plants his feet and raises his axe across his body to meet the attack. The strike hits the axe’s haft, and Jack doesn’t flinch as the attack is rebuffed. He stares across his upraised block, his eyes looking out from an immovable object as the giant’s confused look processes that his unstoppable force was stopped.

  The giant’s face shifts from confusion to madness. It takes hold of its weapon with both hands, then swings again, enraged.

  Jack’s haft is again raised, and he arrests the attack, unphased by the blow. But the sword shatters and the giant’s swing continues, the broken blade passing under Jack’s upturned guard and slicing across his ribs.

  Wolf stares at the monstrosity approaching with a great sword gripped in one hand. He heaves his sword around, and the giant swats the attack with its own, like Dikembe Mutombo knocking away a shot, suggesting ‘Not in my house.’

  Wolf snarls as the giant swings a follow-up attack. He brings his weapon back around to meet it, but it’s knocked in the direction of the giant’s swing. Wolf holds onto his sword but stumbles as his body follows its changed momentum.

  Wolf looks at the giant again and growls. He pulls the handgrip back to his side, extending the blade out ahead of him, and charges. His left shoulder is forward as he barrels ahead, aiming center mass.

  The giant turns its grip upside down and swings its sword with the blade pointing towards the ground, attempting to brush the attack aside. Its blade contacts Wolf’s but only off centers the attack. The blade buries in the creature’s side, above its hip, until Wolf’s shoulder collides with the giant.

  Wolf looks down at the sheathed blade, then up at the standing giant whose hip it’s sheathed inside of. The giant looks down at the stab, then back to the increasingly concerned Wolf. It reaches across its body, then strikes him with a backhand.

  Wolf stumbles backwards, spins and collapses to his back, the arrow’s haft breaking and the point thrusting through the front of his upper chest.

  Wolf howls.

  The giant casually looks down at its wound, the handguard flush against its hip. It grabs the handle, then pulls while still holding its own weapon. It grabs-pulls until the weapon is out of its body. The creature grips the blade in its palm, fixating on the sight of its own blood coating the weapon. Hateful eyes then turn to the insect that wounded it.

  Wolf scoots away on his haunches. The left side of his face is bruised and blooded while his shoulder lances with fresh pain. The giant flings the weapon away as if it were a simple card that it was flinging over into a discard pile, then marches towards Wolf.

  Sarah deflects the first attacker and steps past him as she looks at the other five. She brings her sword back around, the fighter behind falling to the ground, where his head rolls away from his body. Her posture continues to dip into a crouch as she brings her grip up to the right side of her face, extending her blade forward with the edge up. Even as she dips like a compressing spring, her eyes glance across the field, taking in the state of things.

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  Sarah sees Wolf sailing away from the backhand and a wounded Jack clutching his ribs. Her eyes look forward again as her awareness marches over to a mounted red box with the words ‘In Case of Emergency.’ She breaks the glass barrier, then reaches in to pull the handle, jettisoning her restraints.

  The five fighters run at her in a staggered line, and she opens a portal beyond them as the spring reaches its maximum compression. You’re in the way, she thinks, then releases. She bounds forward like the fox chasing the rabbit. The rabbit jukes in a slalom and the fox follows, but then the rabbit tumbles and separates into pieces as the fox passes by. The fox leaps into the portal as all the fighters fall away with severed appendages.

  Sarah exits a portal in the sky and sheathes her weapon as she falls back towards the clearing. She retrieves the goggles from inside her collar and sets them over her eyes so the wind doesn’t force her to close them. Her katana comes back out again, and she opens another portal ahead of her.

  Sarah leaves an exit horizontally and from the opposite side of the field. She brings her sword around in a double gripped swing, her blade passing into and through the back of the first giant’s hamstring. The giant throws its head back in despair as she tucks into a roll, then slides to her feet. She looks towards Wolf and opens a catching portal as the other giant tosses away Wolf’s weapon.

  Sarah turns back to the hamstrung giant as it tries to take weight off the leg. Jack is holding his ribs and returns a nod as she runs back behind the creature, slices the opposite Achilles tendon, and leaps into another portal.

  Sarah exits in the sky again, Wolf’s weapon tumbling nearby. She opens a portal ahead of it, tossing the weapon back upwards to arrest momentum, then passes into the same portal. Her katana comes around to deflect the sword as they both become weightless at their apex. She grabs the weapon and sheathes her own.

  Sarah rotates downward and accelerates with the blade pointing forward in her headfirst fall. She reaches back to her katana, opening a portal ahead of her to see a giant’s upper body framed within the opening. Its weapon is pulled back over its head, poised for a coup de grâce. The giant’s expression shifts from disdain into uncertainty as it sees her glare approaching like a projectile.

  “Keep your fucking hands off him,” she screams.

  Sarah leaves the portal horizontally, appearing out of empty air from Wolf’s perspective. The sword’s tip enters the giant’s nose, and the handguard quickly becomes flush with its face. Her body turns and slams into the creatures chest, causing it to fall backwards like a lowering drawbridge. She holds onto the grip, scrambles to get her knees under her and against the corpse’s chest as she rights herself.

  The sword tip contacts the ground as the makeshift-drawbridge is lowering. It pushes the weapon back up and out, causing Sarah to stand while holding the grip, where her hold quickly passes her height. The sequence leads to a pole volt, the weapon levering within the skull, and requiring her to leap off the creature and ride the handgrip back over to the ground.

  Sarah turns back after landing, the blade still stuck through the skull and into the ground. She leans away and attempts to pull it free with both hands.

  Jack runs over, having finished his foe. “Here, let me,” he says.

  Sarah nods and allows him to pull it free. “Defend Wolf,” she says. “I’m starting Plan B.”

  “I got it,” he replies, nodding.

  She opens several portals around the field, absorbing corpses and mounding them up at the trail’s exit. Another explosion echoes from within the trees and she disappears through another portal.

  Sarah steps out onto the plateau, the sun well into midmorning. The three fires are still burning hot, each cabin having over two feet of fuel and comprising the larger logs that are framing the base. She looks back over the ledge to see smoke rising from the detonated traps, then glances upwards to the large portals over the fires. Jack is there, looking up at her as she looks up at him. He gives her the thumbs up, and she nods.

  Sarah removes her scabbard and dispels the portals as she re-sheathes her blade. She compresses the gap, then draws another dark-blue blade and swings it. A wave travels towards the first fire, and the cabin falls through a portal that opens beneath it. She looks back over the ledge to see the flaming timbers descend onto the trail just outside the clearing. The treeline immediately catches fire as the components pass into and wedge within the canopy.

  Sarah nods, resets her sword, then drops another one in the same area. She searches further up the valley, seeing a low point snake along between the two ridge lines. Another clearing looks to be around a mile back up the trail. She drops the remaining cabin on the other side of it and the valley soon becomes an inferno.

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