Walking a few miles barefoot down an entire parkway wasn't really good for the bottoms of my feet that had previously been softened after being in the water. Blisters for days.
I would never take a pair of shoes for granted again.
We walked fast enough to make it to Coney Island in less than thirty minutes.
I never really wanted to go, but I always figured my hypothetical first visit would have been more fun. Not a nerves-filled trek where I was constantly looking over my shoulder for someone to try and kill me.
My nausea was starting to fade away the more time I spent in the sunlight, which was good. I wanted to be aware and not worrying about whether or not I was seeing one or two cars coming down the highway at us.
Ruth was still without a blindfold, and we got a lot of looks because of the whole 'no eyes' thing. By the time we reached the boardwalk proper, I snagged a pair of cheap, oversized sunglasses for her to wear for the time being. I also grabbed a pair of cheap piece-of-crap flip-flops to put on my road-worn feet.
Again, thanks guy who was guarding me. You really were brand new to carry a phone and your goddamn wallet while you were on-duty for a criminal group, weren't you?
It's okay. I was brand new too. I was just taught better.
Saberwolf went off to scout while I got on the Ferris wheel with Ruth to get my own look at what was going on, and to give her a chance to rest. I'd been cutting a tough pace since we got out of the water and she didn't have my kind of stamina.
The area around the ride was also populated enough that anyone sane would think twice about starting something dangerous right there where tons of people could get hurt. At least, I hoped so.
I couldn't see any guys with guns, but then again I hadn't the first time I'd been taken by surprise either. Other than Donald Pierce, they all wore things that could pass in public. And they weren't all full-body cyborged out like him either.
"Children? Can you hear me?"
Both Ruth and I perked up at the thought that belonged to neither of us. That was Frost's voice. I had never been so happy to have that woman in my head.
"Yes, darling. I'm happy to dig through your thoughts again too."
Well, I didn't miss that.
"Help is on the way. You've both done well so far to stay safe and-," She went silent for a moment before projecting her thoughts at us much more urgently, "Mister Marcher, to your left. Be careful!"
I saw exactly what she was trying to warn us about. Apparently we'd been spotted on the ride first before I could see them. The guy who saw us had a rocket launcher, and looked way too pleased to be taking the shot.
Posted up on one knee on top of a booth, he had the weapon set on his shoulder, aimed right at our cabin, "Oh you mother-!" I got up and fired a blast from the palm of my hand through the grate window just as the grenadier fired his RPG at the Ferris wheel.
My aim was good enough to blow it up in the air before it could take us or anyone else out, but from that point on, it was absolute pandemonium.
The ride shut down, leaving me and Ruth stuck ten feet off of the ground. I blew the door to our car off of the hinges and jumped out while the smoke was still clearing from the first explosion.
People screamed and ran away in panic, giving the two of us a chance to drop down and start running.
Reaver goons had to muscle through the crowd to chase us, if they could pick us out at all. That wasn't a problem for the guy with the launcher. He'd gotten a very good look at us, and had a bead on us no matter where we tried to run to.
I kept turning my head his way to keep him in sight and saw him taking aim for another shot, people around us be damned. It wouldn't have just killed us if it had hit.
I stopped and tried to take aim myself to try and hit him or intercept the shot again, but people kept bumping me and throwing off my shot. I missed badly.
Before the worst could come to pass for all of us, Saberwolf rushed the booth that the guy was perched on and cut it to spare lumber. His shot was thrown off as well, sending it high into the air instead of crashing into the boardwalk.
The crowd scattered for the gigantic wolf robot running our way, which was handy for us getting the hell out of Dodge.
"It is good that you are both unharmed," Saberwolf said as he caught up with us, "I was delayed by the enemy when they began to swarm the area."
I wasn't about to whine about him taking too long to scout when he had just saved who knows how many lives, mine and Ruth's included.
"Whatever. You picked the best time to show up I could have asked for," I told him, keeping my eyes peeled for anyone else with metal parts or guns, "We can't keep running the length of the boardwalk. Someone's gonna pick us off sooner or later."
Ruth tugged on my arm and offered a bit of input, "Pardon. Shall we hide at the aquarium?"
I don't know if that had been premonition or what, but I didn't necessarily think about it either, "Fantastic idea. Let's go."
"Question: The girl designated as Ruth is a telepathic/precognitive abilities, correct?" Wolf asked me as we kept running.
"Yeah. And?"
"You were both ambushed when you were captured. How?"
"I don't know. I didn't exactly see anything before I got knocked the fuck out," A burst of automatic gunfire hit the ground between us. I shoved Ruth away and hit the deck as Saberwolf avoided it. Turning to my belly I saw the Reaver firing at us and hit him dead center with an explosive blast, "Can we deal with that later?"
A black SUV pulled onto the boardwalk and drove right at us with men hanging out of the window shooting at us. I was still low to the ground and in position to take another shot, this time with both hands. I didn't miss and flipped the vehicle off of the boardwalk onto the beach.
I laid there and admired my handiwork for a moment until Ruth pulled me up and we continued running. The original idea of heading to the aquarium to wait out a rescue was still the plan. We didn't know where else to go to meet up with the X-Men, and it was probably the best place to make any kind of stand if it came to that.
Before we could get through the front gates, Ruth pushed me out of the way, off of the sidewalk in time to avoid more gunfire from inside of the aquarium. I wanted to punch a wall in frustration, but it made sense that they would have spread out all over the Coney Island Boardwalk to try and find us.
Taking cover, I started shooting back, and my aim was better than theirs. My blasts didn't have any recoil like their automatic weapons did, so I didn't have to adjust my targeting.
Bullets still flew our way regardless. I pushed Ruth's head down and waved my hand to bring Saberwolf over, "Watch out for her," I told him before breaking out from behind the wall we were at.
They were standing on the main paved pathway of the aquarium grounds. There was very little cover for them. I barely had to try. Light blasts from both hands hit everything that so much as seemed hostile, and I never stopped running forward. Full steam ahead, all the way through, and I didn't stop until I ran out of people ahead of me to blow away.
The last one I shot fell into the water of the aquatheater where they put on the sea lion shows. He fell in face down and didn't move. The shot itself didn't kill him, but drowning probably would. I couldn't bring myself to care at the moment. I looked around at the still environment.
There had to be someone else. I wasn't expecting that to be the end of it, and I didn't want it to be. I was good and pissed.
Use me like a lab project for a few days and shoot at me and my friend when we get away? To hell with them. They got the open-hand explosive blasts. If they got up eventually, good for them. If not, I wasn't going to shed any tears over it later. Fighting like this, I could put enough emotional distance between myself and the moment that it wouldn't have mattered.
"WHO ELSE WANTS SOME!?"
...Kind of.
I was mad. I wanted a fight. I wanted to let them know just what a poor decision they made. If there were people that wanted to get rid of mutants just for the hell of it, I was going to let them know that this one in particular wasn't going to be some soft target.
If you took me out, you were going to lose some serious resources.
"You're turning out to be more trouble than you're worth."
I could feel the scowl on my face at hearing Donald Pierce's voice from the back of the stands and took a shot at him. He jumped all the way down and landed on the concrete bridge I was on that separated the two pools.
"Oh, you can just kiss the darkest part of my ass," I said. The warm glow of my power supply behind the skin of my hands was a comfort that made me feel bold, "The X-Men are coming, and I already took out how many of your goon squad? Nice recruiting job, by the way. They new?"
Again, yes, I was taunting him even though I was afraid. Fuck that guy! He was so tough when I was strapped to a table, stuck full of wires. If he was really that bad and expected me to shake in my boots at the sight of his ugly mug, he'd have to give me a reason.
Pierce held up a metal hand that gleamed in the sunlight. The tips of the fingers were sharpened to a nasty point, "Your kind only ever truly understands their place underneath humanity's boots when they're literally there," He said, "I wanted you alive, but I don't need you. I also don't need you to be in one piece."
"Buddy, if you think I'm gonna lay down and let you kill me, maybe your brain is what needs an upgrade instead of your body."
"I definitely don't need your tongue intact!"
He charged. I fired. He didn't dodge, but I sure didn't blow him away like I wanted. He paused for a moment, more like he was stunned than actually hurt by anything I'd just done. He reached up and ripped away the damaged clothes from his chest.
His body was just as shiny and metallic as his arms. Good God, he'd done that much to himself? Why? How did you do something like that to yourself by choice?
"The time for games is over, boy," Pierce seethed at me. He yelled like a lunatic and rushed me the rest of the distance.
An explosive shot didn't hurt him like I wanted, so I hit him with a concussive blast instead.
He didn't even stop that time. He just ran right through it, barely even slowing down. I had to move. It was wild how fast he was once the weak bit of resistance I had running against him dropped off.
I could barely avoid a swing of his hand that would have slashed my throat. I cut a clumsy roll under his arm and landed on my back right behind him.
He looked right at me under his armpit and got a good look at me double-barrel blasting him in the ass.
This time, I did move him. Instead of hitting him from an angle he could brace for, it was all in the hands of physics. The explosion lifted him clear off of the ground and knocked him down.
His pants were destroyed and I was able to confirm that yes, his entire actual body was cyborg. This guy was out of his mind.
Solar energy powered my muscles as I rolled to my feet and sprinted at Pierce as he went to stand. I jumped clear over his back and landed on the back of his head.
When I felt my feet touch his feathered, douche hair, I dropped all of my body weight on the base of his skull.
-Because fuck his spinal cord.
I never broke bricks or any of that gimmicky stuff when I trained, either in the dojo with other students or privately during one of my insomniac run-ins with Mister Logan. He was more about teaching you how to fight by making you actually fight. But I had to think that breaking bricks was just done to get people used to knowing when you hit that sweet spot. That kind of blow where you just felt everything about your enemy crumble underneath your powerful power.
Yeah, I didn't land that.
There was no crack when I jumped on his neck. No snap or pop. No give.
I got off of him and immediately felt him grab me, his metal talons digging into my calf. That hurt like hell.
"Gah, godd-!" I didn't even get to finish my curse before Pierce slammed me like a rag doll by my leg into the pavement three times.
Trust me, I counted.
I lay facedown on the ground, bleeding from my face and my leg. Pierce nudged me over to the edge of the water with his foot pressed it to the back of my head to try and drown me.
I held my breath for as long as I could, and was fortunate that it was long enough for him to get bored.
He pulled me out by the back of my shirt and held me up in front of his face with his lame, smug-ass smile.
Donald Pierce promptly received a wonderfully snug headbutt to the face. And that was a mistake on my end.
Instead of his head snapping back, mine did. It was like headbutting the business end of a mace. His skull was not bone. Not a chance, "Buh!" I gasped involuntarily. Concussions were always fun immediately after, "What the… fuck! Is your head metal?"
"Just the lengths that humankind has to go to in order to vanquish overpowered mutant scum," Pierce laughed in my face, before drawing his hand back to stab through my face with his entire hand, "I've wasted enough time with you. Any last words?"
"Heh… your junk is missing."
If you're going to die, you might as well be a jerk to the bitter end to whoever's doing it.
The scary sound of revving and whirring drew his attention away from killing me for just a moment. Instead of putting a hole through my not-so-pretty face, he quickly turned around and used his arm to block Saberwolf's attempt to slice his head off with a chainsaw.
I grit my teeth and channeled power to one of my hands to blast him in the side of the head while he wasn't looking. Whether it hurt or not, I didn't know. But he put me down, and that was good enough for now.
After the advantage from that little opening ended, there was still the problem that he wasn't supposed to be there, "Wolf, what the-? I told you to stay with Ruth."
Saberwolf stood in front of me, using the length of his body to shield me in case Pierce tried to come at us before I had enough time to recover, "The mutant called Ruth was not about to be killed. You were," He explained, "If you were killed, Donald Pierce would likely come for us next. I could not fight him alone and keep the girl safe at the same time. One or both of us would have been killed. This was the most logical choice to ensure all three of us survive."
I tried to get up. It was hard. My body didn't want it anymore. I wasn't going to be much good for this. Any mobility I might have had was gone, "So you're not going to leave?"
"She does not need the assistance. You do. The intelligent warrior never fights alone."
"Neither do X-Men, I guess."
And truth be told, I felt much better now knowing that there was help. I still had no idea how I was going to be of any use in fighting the guy, but one problem at a time.
He could take both versions of my blasts, concussive and explosive, head-on. It was so hard to try and stop him in his tracks. I couldn't do it. It had been proven repeatedly. He just tanked whatever I threw at him.
Even the blast I had just landed to the face. The explosion had blown the skin off of his face, showing the cybernetics underneath. For a guy big on preserving the human race as the dominant species, was anything left of this guy actually flesh and blood?
Fine. If he was a cyborg, I had a robot. I figured it was high time to use some of that robot proxy goodness to cut him down to size.
"Do you have any of his weaknesses in your database?" I asked. It seemed like it only annoyed him.
"I have no 'database,' Bellamy. The symbol grounding capabilities or my neuro-AI allow me to identify information only in terms that the human mind can," Saberwolf said, "I can judge whether I 'think I may have seen him before,' but I do not have the accuracy of a database."
My face was swollen and numb, so I'm sure that made whatever stunned reaction I had that much more jarring, "What? You're an A.I.," Either I didn't know what an A.I. was before this experience, or the people who made Saberwolf didn't.
"An A.I. modeled after the human brain, and thus as flexible and occasionally vague as any human's. The only way to obtain that information is to be told, and even then I may have trouble recalling it if it was vague or given to me in passing instead of directly."
Wonderful.
"W0-11f," Pierce said Saberwolf's model number, getting a good look at him, "Hm. I should have taken you apart sooner."
Saberwolf bored him? How could something that you designed and built bore you? "Didn't he make you?" I asked, "Wait. I thought you said they were going to wipe your memory."
Wolf shook his head, "My original creators shut me down after I failed to meet their expectations. Pierce found me and reactivated me, but found the same problems with my development. He kept me locked away. He would have wiped my memory so he could remove and study my neuro-A.I.," He said, "It would have been the same thing, but my body would also have been destroyed."
Pierce's hand morphed into some kind of cannon that he pointed at the two of us, a maniacal look on what was left of his face that was muscle and tissue, "And I was right. For all your so-called 'intellect' you're not even as loyal as the dog you're supposed to be designed after," He said, "You're protecting a mutant. You're meant to kill them."
"I do not just take orders. Like a human, I must accept a reason in order to act. Be it my own beliefs, belief in the person issuing the command, or force," Wolf declared, "I have free will. The influences I have been exposed to have shaped my memes, therefore I do not believe in the irrational fear that would lead to slaughtering an entire species. And you cannot force me to do anything."
"Then you really are a failure," Pierce said as he charged his cannon and fired.
I aimed over Wolf's back and shot a concussive blast that cut through his. I was able to fork Pierce's shot around us, but it wasn't just a matter of trying to hit us with it.
We were blind to everything outside of the area of the shot, which let him get close enough to wail on us again. Pierce smashed Wolf into the ground and reached for my throat. I grabbed his wrist and moved out of his way, trying to melt through his arm. Whatever he was made of, I couldn't heat it fast enough to even make a dent.
A swing of his arm shook me off and threw me ten feet away off-balance.
Wolf got up and corkscrewed through the air, leading with his claws. Pierce caught him out of the air and held him in place, but there was still the chainsaw being freely swung by his tail. He sliced Pierce across the chest and made him let go, just to take a kick that sent him flying for all of his efforts.
The mechanical yelp that came from him sounded a lot like a real animal sound of pain. It pissed me off. Could Wolf feel pain?
I didn't still didn't know if Pierce felt pain, but I learned something more important from that little scuffle – Saberwolf could actually do something to him. Not on the skin of his face, even I could do that, but on his actual cyborg body.
There was a horrible groove carved into his chest from the chainsaw.
I prepared blasts in both hands as Pierce turned to me again. Instead of aiming right for him, I pulled my shot and aimed around him, grazing him just enough to keep him on a straight and narrow path. Saberwolf jumped over the beams and landed between them, latching his claws onto Pierce's arms tight.
His tail lifted the chainsaw up into the air before driving it down into his back. The sound of metal cutting through metal was horrendous.
Pierce fought and cursed, but eventually Wolf's chainsaw went right through his torso. Once the hard exterior, the most fortified part of his body – was broken, all of the good stuff on the inside was fair game. Wolf hacked off everything underneath his belly and hurled away what was left like garbage.
He went flying in the direction of the boardwalk and the beach, screaming in rage all the way.
At the apex of his flight, I shot an explosive blast at him, just to put a little bow on it. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
Saberwolf replaced his chainsaw on the swiveling stand on his back so he could put it back inside of his body and began walking up to me, "I guess he messed with the wrong wolf," I said to him once everything settled down a bit, "You saved me. Thank you."
"We had an agreement, but your gratitude is appreciated."
I wasn't buying that. Not for a second. He didn't owe me, "You could have ditched us after we got to the surface. Why'd you stay?"
The deal was that if I let him loose, he would help us all get out. We got out of the Reavers' hideout and he stayed along for the rest of the ride. When we reached topside at the buoy, he could have gone his own way, and I wouldn't have thought anything of it. He had done enough then and there.
"We were not yet free," Wolf explained, helping me walk by giving me his body to put my hand on, "If we had separated, one of us, either you and Ruth, or myself, would have been caught and killed."
It definitely wouldn't have been him. The way he moved, the way he fought when he had to, he would have been fine. He would have at least lasted longer than us, "Bullshit. Me and Ruth might have been caught and killed. You would have gotten away."
"I had a debt to pay," Saberwolf was still on about that line of reasoning. I figured he would have realized by now that he wasn't convincing me, "The terms had not yet been completed."
"Wow, that's actually pretty human of you."
"I contest that statement. Many humans possess little or no sense of obligation at all. And many are entirely willing to trample their fellow man for personal gain."
After the last few days, I couldn't really argue with that, "I know, but, I mean, is that it?"
"I did not want you to die."
After that, I didn't ask anymore about it. It wasn't really important anyway. He had helped me. We were all still alive. That was the only thing that mattered.
Well, other than what he was going to do next. Where did you go? What did you do when the only thing you knew in life was how to take orders? What did he like? What did he want? Did he have dreams or goals, or anything like that? Had he even thought about that?
"So what will you do now?" I asked quietly.
Saberwolf hesitated in the middle of his answer, "I... do not know."
"Until you do, you want to come with me?" I offered. I tried to make it sound like an off-handed thing, like something I was throwing out there to be nice. The truth was, I really wanted Saberwolf to accept, "I'm pretty sure I could swing it with the Institute. At least for a little while."
He paused for a long time to think about it. Long enough for us to get outside of the aquarium, almost back to Ruth.
"I will consider it," Saberwolf finally said.
It wasn't a no, and I was fine with that.
Apparently, there had been a reason why the number of Reavers had abruptly cut off at some point during the battle on the boardwalk. The X-Men had gotten there right around the time the fight with Donald Pierce started. They had been buying him time to pick up his specimen (me) and get away to a new hideout, but I hadn't made it easy.
If Pierce had killed me, they would have caught up to him very soon after. That might have given me a little solace in death if that had happened, that I could have at least slowed him down. But fortunately, the worst had not come to pass.
By the time I'd met back up with Ruth and sat down against a wall to lick my wounds, I could see the blue and yellow outfits of the senior X-Men headed our way on-foot.
I promptly blacked out.
Hey, I could sleep after all! All it took was the beating of a lifetime coming right beforehand.
I preferred the insomnia.