Chapter 160: Something Stinks

Chapter 160: Something Stinks

Matador’s claim to fame was his billowing crimson cape, but it was more accurate to think of it as a gaseous substance that could rewrite reality inside of its area of effect. Perry’s Dimensional Tinker senses felt heaviness...potential, radiating off the cape like heat waves.

Maybe it was Matador living with the potential of having anything, while being devoid of an internal life that caused his nihilism. It was like being pressed up against a glass pane while the world passed you by outside.

Perry was pretty sure his congeniality and talkativeness was mostly for show, some subroutine in his programming written by his long-dead creator to make him more tolerable. Matador didn’t want anything.

Except maybe to kill me. Matador’s most powerful ability was that of controlling his surroundings, and he was currently strangling Perry with it.

“Tap out?” Matador asked, leaning against one of the train’s radio towers while the surrounding security detail cheered Perry on, their chits in hand.

“No, this is great practice,” Perry croaked through the asphyxiation, his focus on his hands where they tried to interact with the crimson mist tightening around his throat.

Normally, Matador’s crimson cape was a one-way interaction. It acted on the world, but not the other way around, a very difficult ability to counter. Perry’s hands were clawing through the mist, slipping off the true extradimensional force that was tightening around his throat.

Perry was focusing on his dimensional senses, trying to recreate what he’d done to the thing in the egg in Professor Replica’s lair. He didn’t want to eat the cape, but if he could just...touch it...

Perry’s vision began to dim, and he tapped out before he lost consciousness. Passing out was bad news.

“Awwww....” The crowd groaned before money began changing hands, sliding towards a few lucky individuals who’d predicted his tap-out time.

Perry took a minute to catch his breath and dispel the stars shooting across his vision.

Once everything was back to normal, Perry took a deep breath and crouched before blasting forward.

Electrowasps.EXE

Tiny disc-shaped drones detached themselves from Perry’s armor and surrounded Matador, channeling Static Shock between them to form a net of living lightning.

Matador’s physical body stepped through the lightning like it wasn’t there, his cape lunging toward Perry.

Tap out.

With fine control of his booster, Perry was able to play keep-away from Matador for a solid sixteen seconds, trying a variety of attacks before the Magnum Opus snagged one of Perry’s ankles.

Tap out.

Tap out.

Tap out...

This is really starting to piss me off.

The amount of time Perry was able to play keep away kept getting longer and longer, but only by tiny increments. One second here, one second there, and that still wasn’t an answer to how to actually score a hit on the elusive Magnum Opus. He literally controlled everything that happened inside his range. A bit like Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation, but constant, and weaponized.

The days went by as Perry tweaked his armor between sparring sessions, trying to recapture the otherworldly sense he’d gotten against the egg.

“Don’t be ashamed, you’re getting better faster than I’m getting better. Against a learning computer, that’s pretty solid,” Matador gave him unhelpful encouragement as a tendril of crimson smoke caught an arm.

Rather than tear off his hand, Perry allowed himself to be reeled in, where the powerful force embedded in reality just underneath the crimson smoke began choking him out again. This time the force wrapped around Perry’s arms as well, preventing him from reaching his own throat.

Let’s try this. Perry thought, instructing the dimensional defenses of his armor to fluctuate randomly, spiking his suit’s extradimensional permeability beyond its capacity to handle the strain, falling back on the suit’s self-healing properties to maintain functionality.

The grip on Perry briefly tightened as his suit’s defenses dipped to nothing, then seemingly evaporated as the carbon heated up to white-hot where it made contact with Matador’s cape.

“Ow!” Matador said as Perry slipped out of his grasp. “Ow?” The robot frowned in confusion, his body going momentarily stiff.

Ow? Perry thought as he dove forward, aiming to punch the robot in his face. Matador bobbed out of the way like his namesake, aiming a brutal strike at Perry with his cape that would bisect a normal human from head to crotch.

It cut a hairline gouge out of his armor before Perry jutted out a foot and blasted its thruster to change direction in midair, using it like an air-jump.

Now that I think about it...maybe Matador is more like a snail. Maybe his real body is the crimson smoke, and the humanoid shell simply houses the organ that produces more of it.

Somehow the picture of a nihilist snail cemented itself in Perry’s mind as he dodged around Matador’s grabs and make a feint for the robot shell’s head. He’d never tried attacking the cape seriously, until the snail analogy.

When the cape moved to intercept him, Perry slipped out of the way before blasting his jets to give himself momentum, treating his body like a spinning top to swing his foot around with blinding speeds.

The man paused for a moment, clearly thrown off script as he thought of how to handle it.

“...I see, of course. Would you like a map of where the buses are going to help you decide? The nearby hotels aren’t the best, but if you’re amenable...”

“That would be great,” Perry said.

A nearby assistant seemingly apparated, handing the well-appointed underwear model a datapad with a color-coded map of the city, with three distinct areas highlighted, bus numbers stamped beside them.

“Alright, Perry murmured. “I’ll get this area, and you two can get these two areas,” Perry said motioning to the two places that were closer together. There was even a motel in between the two that Chemestro and Sin-eater could operate out of.

Not a great one, but none of them were particularly spoiled. Except maybe Perry.

“That’ll work.” Chemestro said.

“I’ll take one of the buses in the one hundreds, you two split up and take one of the buses going to these two.”

“Ugh, fine. We’re going to share a room at the motel, though.” Sin-Eater said.

“No, we are not.” Chemestro said, carefully scanning the city layout, probably memorizing escape routes through habit that had been trained into him.

Not a bad idea. Perry pulled up a map of Washington on his HUD and devoted it to memory.

“Booo,” Sin-Eater groused. “Wouldn’t it be safer if we bunk up together?”

“Not for me,” Chemestro said, prompting a guffaw from Perry. Thankfully, Perry turned off his speakers so nobody actually heard it.

He didn’t want to make them to seem any less professional than Sin-Eater already had.

Perry hopped onto bus #83, while Chemestro took #115, and Sin-eater took #240.

Moments after Perry was settled, the buses got underway.

Perry reviewed the footage as the bus rumbled down the streets of Washington, idly glancing up at the street signs to make sure they were going the direction the map had indicated.

So far so good.

Perry isolated the hand-signal the sickly woman had thrown in the grainy security cam footage and compared it against Washington city’s standard military signs.

Abort.

What were they aborting? Perry thought, his skin cold. As far as he knew, they directly represented Washington City, so what the hell was Washington City trying to do to Perry et. al. that required an Abort code?

This had happened before any dialogue had been exchanged, so...what was the trigger for it? What had gone wrong? Were they holding a food order, or cancelling some gimmick they’d arranged to entice them over to Washington City...or something more sinister?

That’s pretty suspicious.

Perry reviewed the footage of their greeter, pausing a moment to glance up at the street signs. Still going to the right place. All the other buses were with him too.

The guy was wearing an earpiece, Perry noticed when he received the datapad from the assistant. Just a tiny flash of flesh toned earpiece meant to be discrete when he turned his head.

Following a hunch, Perry reviewed the moment where the greeter had paused when they’d refused the limousines.

He isolated the man’s ears in his recording and turned up the audio a thousandfold, allowing him to hear bits and pieces of the orders he’d been receiving.

Give ~~~~~~~ map. ~~~~ separate themselves.

Well, now, that’s REALLY suspicious. Actionable, even. They were looking to isolate and exploit them for...something. Perry didn’t really care if it was as innocuous as selling them a timeshare. It still set off all his alarm bells.

Perry glanced up at the camera at the front of the bus watching all of them.

Now I just need to get us back together without moving from my seat and raising suspicion which would send these scumbags skittering back to their holes. Awesome.

This is gonna be a really funny story if they’re just trying to separate us to give us the hard sell on moving to Washington. Otherwise...I think I caught the scent of the ‘something rotten’ Solaris was looking for.

The heel of Perry’s armor constricted its thruster down to a pinhole and began carving a tiny hole through the floor.