The Hunter Warrior Killer

by viggen

A monster stalks the Scrapyard. I moved this story over from GBA because nobody else seems to be posting in this catagory.

Battle Angel Alita The Hunter Warrior Killer
by viggen

Lazarus came pounding down the stairs into New Kansas as if his boots were on fire. His usual woven cap was torn along one side, misshapen by some unknown force. At his side, dangling uselessly, was the remaining half of his left cybernetic arm. The arm was cut cleanly just above the elbow. Breathing heavily, Lazarus didn't quite seem to care that the limb was damaged. Though, given Lazarus, the damage could've been weeks old.

"Everybody!" he wheezed loudly, stumbling slightly to keep balance, "We found the Hunter Killer. Zapan and McBride had him cornered outside Factory 17 at the entrance to the Ghetto, but he got away. Killed McBride in the process, damn him. Zapan's still chasing him."

"Probably Zapan killed McBride. Get the bounty for himself that way," Somebody scoffed.

"Hell no!" Lazarus bellowed, "I was there, Damn you! Bastard Killer took my arm off...woulda got me too, if Zapan hadn't been a second behind me! We gotta get this Bastard tonight!"

A murmur swept through the bar, Hunter-warriors conversing nervously. While nobody had wanted to take care of Makaku, the Hunter Killer was a different story. It had started several weeks earlier, an anonymous individual wearing a black cloak was seeking out Hunter-warriors during the night and brutally murdering them. In the Scrapyard where killings occurred so frequently that method and motive obscured the lines between one killer and the next, a predator specifically seeking Hunters was a rare breed indeed. Unlike so many other murderers, the Hunter Killer stood alone in the heinous efficiency with which he wrought death, murdering thirty-seven in as many days. Only missing once. Only a single hunter that had knowingly faced him had yet survived. It was not often that a Hunter-warrior became the hunted, but the threat made by the Hunter Killer proved more serious by the day. Fearing for their own heads, nobody in the New Kansas bar was unclear about why the Hunter Killer needed to be stopped. Unlike the Makaku situation, the Hunter Killer was a threat brought deeply home.

Ido nudged Alita with his elbow to snap her out of her reverie. She'd been acting not quite herself in the past few weeks. Gonzu had made the comment that she had a Spring glow about her, with which Ido heartily agreed. He and Gonzu both suspected that she recently acquired an eye for a certain young handyman who went from building to building fixing wind generators. Despite her minor distraction, Alita was displaying an almost exponentially increased zeal for the macabre job of hunting. In the few months she had managed already to sculpt a name of notoriety among the elite Hunter-warriors.

Alita startled alert, "Huh?" she said, shaking her raven haired head.

"Lazarus," Ido told her, bending close to her ear, "he had a run in with the Hunter killer. He's trying the rally everybody into chasing the killer down."

"It would be a good idea; the Killer's a menace. Somebody shoulda taken his head weeks ago."

"If anybody could get close," Ido reminded her.

"...was even yellin' and moanin' about how incompetent we hunters are. Says he'll take us all out. So we have to take 'im now! He's trashin our pride!" Lazarus shouted in conclusion, "Who's gonna go?!"

Her brow furrowed, Alita was the first on her feet, thrusting her fist into the air, "I'm with you! Even if nobody else here has the guts, I'll go!"

Normally, a few groans and odd looks would've accompanied Alita's last comment. Hunters were an egocentric bunch.

To Ido's surprise, nobody made the slightest comment. In quick succession, several warriors came to their feet, mounting an outburst of vocal willingness. The division between individual and mob quickly hazed as dozens of angry men stood.

"Let's get the bastard!"

"Let's go!"

"...Yeah!" "Thata way!"

"Hey, hey!" The barkeep cried as hunters thundered toward the door, dropping glasses and upending chairs. He grabbed Koyomi from her high chair, hugging her protectively, "I just got this place fixed. Nobody go breaking my tables."

Pulling himself off the stool in the excitement, Ido glanced through the pushing and shoving ruckus in an attempt to find Alita. Thrusting feverish bodies were about to force him along with the mob toward the door when a powerful grip seized his arm. Glancing down, he saw Alita holding his wrist, staring back up at him with a somber look in her eyes.

Moments later, the small pub was nearly empty. With a stricken squeak, an ill balanced table thumped to its side. Spilled liquor wet the floor along front of the bar, tainting the air with tart apple jack. The fluid held black boot prints from stomping feet. Ido thought he scented the tang of alcohol laced vomit mingling with human sweat. An odor of anxiety, not quite shadowed by fear. Baby Koyomi made a burbling sound in contentment.

Alita and Ido stood near the middle of the nearly empty room. A select nine or ten others, all of significant note in the Hunter-warrior trade, were the only patrons remaining in the bar. Standing at the counter or sipping quietly at a drink, all seemed at ease. Ready to go to work.

Crazy Marrel -the one hunter, until tonight, who had survived fighting with the Hunter Killer- was leaning back in his chair, his feet kicked up on a table, arms folded behind his head and his fedora pulled over his face. Sitting at the bar, his elbows firmly on the counter, Kharid Salim poured the contents of a frothy mug into his trapjaw mouth. Several of the others regarded Ido and Alita in mild interest. Ido had dealt with all of them on various occasions, knowing them to be generally narcissistic as people, though not entirely dishonorable as hunters.

"Clever Flower!" Marrel laughed, pushing his hat back so that he could look at Alita with boxy eye sensors. He dropped his feet to the floor, leaning forward in the chair, "Leave it to Lazarus to go off half cocked. Probably ran away from the killer flailing his arms an' screaming like a woman in labor. Comes in here moanin' about gettin' somethin' done, gettin' every honest hunter so riled they're spoogin' on the counter. But you, you see all them barflies ready to follow him across the city without a second thought. Fix me if I'm wrong; you gave them a push in that direction knowin' they'd bite. Now they'll run like a pack of rabid dogs into the corners of hell, chasin' our little fox the whole way. Leaves salary men like us to deal with the real problem. Too bad Clive Lee's off on other matters right now; he woulda enjoyed this. So Alita," he continued, rubbing his hands together, "what'd you have in mind."

"I agree with Lazarus," Alita declared, her voice all business. She walked toward Marrel, "The Hunter Killer's gotta be stopped as soon as possible. If he gets away tonight, a hundred more Hunters will die trying to take him out. I've gotta believe that the Hunter Killer is a smart guy, with almost forty hunters dead at his hand. If he's that good, he's sure to be a difficult to bounty. I think that the only way anybody's going to catch him is to stop and play a thinking game. If he ditches the bunch with Lazarus, we might have a chance to catch him unaware. If we can find him." Several of the remaining hunters nodded at the statement, but said nothing, "Marrel, you were with Hiro Pedoric when the Hunter Killer murdered him, maybe you could tell us something more about the Killer. Give us some idea of what we're really facing."

Marrel coughed, his eyesensors glazing over with recollection, "Not that much ta tell, aside from what everybody already knows. Clever bastard; rather scope you out an' know wha'cha think before takin' ya out. Brutal too; take any self respectin' hunter apart like a piranha. No one wanted to touch Makaku 'cause he was too much a pain in the ass. Everybody'd rather not touch the Hunter Killer, but is too afraid of what'll happen later. Hunter Killer kills hunters, not respectable folk. Of course, everybody's been hearin' the stories people tell about the Killer following a hunter into an alley, then only the killer walks back out, black coat a' flowin'." He paused to take a drink, basking in the glow of attention.

"Me an' Hiro were out looking for the Hunter Killer at the time. Given his MO, we weren't even expectin' to run into him. The guy came out of nowhere in a black cloak, his face hidden. He blew Hiro's head off an' put a fist size hole through my right lung armature...even b'fore I knew what was happenin'. Used some weapon I ain't seen before -crossbow maybe. By then it was over an' I was running like hell, spilling fluid all over the place. Spent 250 thousand credits an' all last week outta action getting the damage fixed. Damned well hope I got a good blow in. Alls I can say beyond that is that the Hunter killer is a bounty you have to earn. Strange though...Lazarus said the Killer taunted him. Killer hit me an' Hiro nice an quiet. Didn't utter hardly a word."

"You have a better description of him than what everybody hears?" Kharid asked.

"Nah...Just the cloak. Big black billowy thing. Make you think of orchids."

"Orchids?" One of the other hunters chided.

"Yeah, what of it? Saw one in an antique shop once. Soot black one, hung in glass where you couldn't touch it. Musta sold to a factory manager for ten million credits. Ya'know, think I heard somewhere some orchids got poison in 'em..."

Ido knew well that Orchids were among the many flowers which were no longer around on this dying world. He listened slightly, gazing at Alita in contemplation, wondering how many other rare flowers were left, even trapped in glass.

"We should go then," Alita concluded, "teams of two didn't work, so we should stay in groups of three or four."

"Nailling him at factory 17 ain't going to be easy," someone said, "If he don't want to be found, we don't find him. No matter how experienced we are. I think the Killer has something in mind."

"What other choice do we have. Finish it together, or fall separately. I'd just as soon do it myself..."

They left new Kansas in a rush, catching a ride with taxi-shuttles. Ido rode with Alita and a Hunter who went by the nickname "the Vassal," and claimed to know some tremendous fighting art. Ido didn't much like the man, but couldn't deny his record. Alita had once made the comment that she'd never seen the man perform in any way that hinted at a powerful art. The driver was a malformed youth with a tendency toward the right...his taxi leaned to the right on worn out shock absorbers, his turns veered right even when he went left and his body sloped to the right like that of Quasi Modo. Ido was also quite sure that the driver's right rolling eye stayed on Alita the length of the trip. Three other hunters, who sat in the tiny bed behind the cab of the taxi, bellowed complaints at every jostling.

Following Marrel's cab -of which Marrel was the full time driver- they bounced up a set of worn stairs, dodging a group of pedestrians that seemed convinced right of way was still enforced and then hung a screeching left at the landing. The taxi's hydrogen powered engine gave a sickly whine as they bumped up the second flight, shooting off the stairs onto the adjoining road like a scalded cat. Party goers and pedestrians dove to the sides along the crowded street, shouting out vile oaths and curses at their passing.

Ido sometimes wondered why there were so many varieties of swear word in the Scrapyard. After long observation, he had found that shuttle-taxis, hunter-warriors and many other factory associated figures tended to be connected with the foulest cussing. Perhaps this was because Scrapyard dwellers had the most to swear about of anyone in the entire world. In his on and off collection, Ido had found a number of interesting entries pertaining to the term "Deckman."

"Where is Factory 17?" Alita asked under her breath.

"Up ahead..." was Ido's reply, bit off as he stared out the window.

Organlegging establishments, taverns, open markets and twisted buildings of all manner flicked past the open window of the cab. Reflected from the bottom of the giant floating city, the night of the Scrapyard was lit into a contorted version of day. There were so many lights in the monstrous factory town that stars couldn't be seen most evenings. So huge was the city, Ido knew, that it took weeks to cross by foot or days by battery or hydrogen powered auto. The trackless cement roads were constantly pitted and mangled by all manner of affliction, ranging from mud to overuse to septic debris. Long ago, the factory had ceased to maintain these roads, knowing that they would only tend toward the same disordered state. Pipes, scaffolds, conduits and gantries, sections of endless factory defined the very nature of the angular town. Plugged storm drains reaching up from below with dreary promises of Tipharean paradise floating down from above. On one side of the cab, there slipped past a burned out hulk of a warehouse whose rusted walls were as worn as tattered cloth. Inside hundreds of huddles of people could be seen crouched over cooking fires and piles proprietary refuse.

Barreling in, over, around and through stairs, alleys, open markets and hordes of people, often the only sign of Marrel's cab was the plume of fresh dust lifted by the recent passage of the other taxi-shuttle. Ido's living nose tickled at the sensation of the airborne grit, forcing him to stifle two separate sneezes. The little vehicle rocked about on its mushy springs, bouncing slightly over bumps with its bubble tires, but never once floundering. Sometimes on turns, the entire crowded cab forced its weight at Ido. Alita's metal body felt like a stack of iron shod parts when forced against his hip and shoulder. Cramping matters further, the door handle pressed uncomfortably into his other side.

"We should be getting close," he wheezed as Alita crashed bodily against him during one bouncing turn.

Rising darkly ahead was the ruination of factory seventeen. As all folk knew, the Scrapyard was a study of old and new. Some elderly buildings had their innards ripped out, gutted and painted and refurbished until they looked new. Fresh, clean, new buildings were usually built straight onto the tops of other older structures, leaving an architectural patchwork that looked both sturdy and tumble-down. More often, older buildings grew obsolete and were simply abandoned, forcing the Scrapyard swell like some oversized fungus. Factory seventeen represented one such relic of old.

Dirty and polluted beyond all possible use to derelicts, the factory complex nestled in an ellipse around a half moon shaped mound of junk that reached a hundred stories into the sky. Standing in pools of murky water, the buildings resembled shadows of a time long lost from active memory. Perhaps even from when Tiphares was young. The buildings of Factory seventeen, marred to the point of disintegration from persistent elemental abuse, muttered little night time noises through the open windows of the cab. Wind tickling through the decrepit ribs of a long dead corpse, doted a melancholy timpani. In the silent distance, settled comfortably behind the foul ambiance rising from the dirty section of factory, the gigantic pile of refuse sparkled with tiny lights from hundreds of cooking fires and gas lamps. The ghostly factory formed an almost impenetrable moat before the mound of garbage, which was now used as a ghetto. Not just a ghetto, The Ghetto.

"Want I should drop you off here?" asked the trollish cab driver, pulling slowly to a stop before the gates to the ruined factory. It was agreed that somebody should watch the gates of the factory. The three hunters in the bed of the shuttle jumped to the ground.

"The rest of us are supposed to join the others in the Factory. Why don't you follow them?" Ido asked the driver, pointing after Marrel's cab, which was leaving a trail of dust along the deserted boulevard that led through the middle of the factory complex.

"Sorry, this ain't my turf," the cabby explained in a sniffling voice through the right side of his crooked mouth. He gestured toward the door of the cab.

Ido suffered an invisible moment of anger, which he quickly swallowed under an instant of rationalization. He couldn't blame the driver for not wanting to go into Ghetto country; he couldn't find any good reasons why he wanted to go there himself.

Slightly disheartened at the prospect of walking, the three remaining hunters disembarked the little shuttle cab, which jumped lightly at the passing of each.

"Four hundred," the driver grunted, sticking out his chubby hand. The other hunters, including Alita, looked at Ido. Hissing his breath in minor annoyance, Ido paid off the driver. Why did everyone always expect him to have the money?

Clasping the chips, the driver stomped on the gas. He pulled a maniacal right hand U-turn at the factory gate, throwing up a thick rooster-tail of dust that made Ido release that long suppressed cough. With a tinny buzz, the taxi shuttle took off down the ramshackle roadway in the direction from which they'd come, clutch popping as it bounded over the hill out of sight.

"Thought you were going to go into the factory." One of the other Hunters said to Ido, Alita and the Vassal.

"The driver refused to take us." Ido intoned, with a slight shrug, "We're on our feet for the rest of the way."

"Probably better that way," Alita commented with a smirk, "Marrel wasn't kidding when he said that this was the only way out of the Factory seventeen complex, was he?"

"Nope," replied one of the hunters, "Nobody but Homeless live back there. The Poor of the poor. When they were having problems with gang bikers in this area, some of the healthier residents got together and blocked up all the other entrances with junk. You want an unreachable island in the middle of the Scrapyard, this is it. One way in, one way out. Almost nobody's got the time to wade through a quagmire of industrial waste just to get nothing from a buncha has-beens. Not even your average junkies go back in there..."

"Good a place as any for a serial killer to hang out," Alita said.

"Yeah," Ido returned with a smile, "But only if the killer preyed on people with nothing. The Hunter Killer kills Hunters, which makes this a poor place to hide; most hunters really don't have the time or interest to hunt the Ghetto. Without a doubt, there are plenty of killers residing back there at any given time, though no one really cares to find out."

Alita shook her head, "But if there are a lot of killers back there, why aren't there more hunters looking for them? Gotta be a profit hunting where anybody might be hiding."

"Without wheels, it's going to take us half the night hiking to reach the Ghetto," the Vassal told her in a leery voice. "People back there don't talk to outsiders, so how would you know who killed who? 'Sides, who really cares if a nobody washes up in a cesspool that everybody else stays away from. Factory only puts out prices on heads that make themselves easy to find."

By in large, the Vassal was right, Ido knew, crimes that were forgotten stayed forgotten. Especially in this particular backward community. In his earlier days as a Hunter Warrior, Ido too had wandered into Factory Seventeen looking for easy marks, but found there was little or no means of separating innocent from guilty in the midst of the shivering huddle that lived on the distant mountain of garbage. "We ought to get moving; at this point, we ARE going to be walking for half the night. If we're lucky, Lazarus and the main group -or, more likely, the six with Marrel- will take down the Hunter Killer. Maybe, walking down the road, we'll keep anybody from slipping out of the complex unnoticed."

"If we're lucky," the Vassal commented, "the road won't be washed out. Industrial marshes are not for wading, even with a high quality cyberbody.

"The Hunter Killer does seem to have a gift for the unexpected," Alita sighed in a whisper intended only for Ido. It was obvious that she wanted to be involved in this kill, but Ido couldn't understand why.

Leaving the other three behind, Ido, Alita and the Vassal began their walk along the gloomy roadway.

Nothing lived here. That was the only thought that could possibly be provoked by the strip of desolation that ran a weary path through the factory ruin. The cool air was ripe with the pungent odors of sulfur and methane, mixed teasingly by the dying organic note of filthy amines. Numerous other chemical presences permeated the weak breeze, through which only the strongest few could be distinguished. Despite the pharmacological multiplicity wafting over the road, not a single scent invoked images of life. Pools of water and brackish sludge ate at the ill-kept road, which was poor even by Scrapyard standards. Dead noise, meaninglessly white, was all that could be heard, contributing to an effect that made the landscape appear as barren as that of the moon.

Even of the periodic clear puddles that appeared along the way, not one contained any signs of more than the most basic bacterial life. Alita had heard once that breeds of such organisms had grown apt at feeding on even the most indelible materials. Samples of many could probably be extracted from any of the shallow ponds that lined the dreary roadway. The few varieties of hearty microbial inhabitants were likely the most prolific contributors to the caustic air, since human influence over the area had long since ebbed. In spite of being a vivacious example of life, these tiny, invisible, invincible creatures were no consolation that the ruined factory land was anything more than an ancient waste. -And we came here willingly,- Alita mused to herself.

In one way, it almost seemed like a wonderland of impossible spectacles. Eddies of chemical vapor rose in plumes from pools and solid waste. Translucent gasses expelled from the ailing ground warped the very sky, bending the cold light from distant Tiphares into hideous apparitions. In some areas, massive orange willow wisps danced and glowed in their own shadows. Ghostly fairy fire guttered above sludge pools with temperatures barely warmer than the ambient air. Alita swiped her hand through welling of silent flame that persisted near the side of the road, causing it to fragment and disappear. Lost for a moment in the draft, the bulb reappeared again noiselessly, as though untouched. There was an odd, almost cynical beauty in the absence of humanity, even in places horribly scarred by the passage of human hands. She almost caught herself smiling in bewildered wonder. In her mind, she was dazzled by a whimsical image of frosty methane snowflakes falling here in the dead of winter.

With nature having time to work over the architecture, many of the large warehouses and machines shops that once composed Factory Seventeen had been transformed into pieces of an ornate landscaping, accented by the littered waterways ripe with decompository elements. The lonely path, scored by marks from the recent passage of Marrel's taxi, meandered in and out. In places, fallen wreckage had obstructed the original road, forcing short detours that had become permanent with the passage of time. This resulted in numerous blind corners that gave the feel of a ancient angular canyon. Rising brokenly around them, many of the ruins were high enough that they prevented direct line of sight to the garbage tower that marked the Ghetto -now only a mile distant. Night time quietly gave a sigh against the watchful glow of Tiphares glistening balefully above. Light floated down to mingle with dull shadows cast by the spent hulks littering every tumble-down corner.

Trudging endlessly, with one foot placed lethargically in front of the other amid the dust and continual ichor, the trio plodded on. Neither Ido nor the usually silent Vassal could be coaxed to talk. Alita supposed that the waste had sapped their desire for discussion, but didn't really understand. Truthfully, she had never seen such a forlorn place before. Each new example of weird nothingness brought questions from the bottom of her soul. Questions which Ido had refrained from answering except in listless nods. Bewildered, Alita began to wonder if there was something else about this dusky place, just barely on the verge between life and death, that had in some way dampened a critical element of human curiosity in those who had been here before. Or maybe it could all be explained in pretense of nervousness; the Hunter Killer might be close at hand. Whatever the reason, up to this point, Alita had never seen true revulsion adorn any face. At the moment, she now found a healthy example displayed prominently by Ido, a man who possessed the greatest integrity of anyone she had ever met. She had never before seen her mentor so rigidly ill at ease.

Ahead, a left hand curve in the path rounded a stout pillar of unknown constitution, going out of sight. Either side of the path, consumed in dismal shadow, was barred by towering remnants of refinery machines to form a sort of box canyon in Cubist representation. A hint of an age old lesson gnawed at the back of Alita's mind. She could not say why, but suddenly she found herself becoming tense. There was an indescribable menace surrounding this particular blind corner, despite the fact they gone around a couple dozen others exactly like it in the past hour. She tugged at the hem of Ido's coat, drawing his attention.

Ido might not have said anything, except that he saw the look on her face, "What?" he whispered shortly. The Vassal stopped and looked at her as well.

"Something's wrong. Go slowly." she replied stiffly, looking at the corner. Easing forward, she led them on, searching desperately for the source of her instinctive apprehension. The broken walls looked untouched for centuries except for elemental wear. The ground was a mix of dust and concrete, like most of the rest of the Scrapyard.

Fresh tracks from Marrel's cab cut into the free dust, stirring rubbish, missing -she noticed- several dusty bulges set at even increments along the ground. At first glance they'd evaded her notice with their remarkably subtle spacing. Alita crouched by one, brushing the dust with a tentative finger. It moved easily at her touch, betraying the fact that it had been recently churned and then carefully repositioned to make it appear natural. She gestured for the other two to stay back. Brushing ever so softly at the loose sand, Alita cleared away the mound a little at a time to reveal a metallic object shaped like a disk nestled neatly into the buckled concrete underlay. A mine.

"How did you know?" Ido asked. From the look on his face, he hadn't anticipated this; Firearms, such as guns and implements of war, like mines, did not usually appear on the streets of the Scrapyard given the lack of supplies and the inherent illegality in either keeping or building them. Perhaps Ido had seen guns. Most likely he'd chased a few bounties under suspicious for owning such weapons. He probably punished those same people with death over the offense. Alita felt certain that he'd never before dealt with Mines.

Still, he'd stumbled across a Berzerker purely by chance, and Mines were infinitely more simple. Not that a Berzerker was any different than a Mine in essential nature. Could a Berzerker be considered a firearm, Alita wondered to herself. What really did Ido know?

"I don't know," She shrugged, hesitating slightly, "Instinct I guess." Then she pointed toward the other mounds, "Don't step on any of these; you might not live to regret it. I think we've stumbled over the trail of a well equipped enemy, probably the Hunter Killer."

Winding their way past the small field of mines, they rounded the corner.

"Alita!" Ido cried. Alita didn't need to be told, her eyes had seen it a second ahead of Ido's. Before them was a spectacular wreck. The vehicle had passed through the principle field of mines on a surge of pure luck only to run cleanly over a final mine placed just after the corner. Ringed by a berm of splattered dirt, the mine had left a crater not even a half meter wide when it had discharged straight up. Caught in the front left axle, the vehicle had stumbled and somersaulted from excessive speed, leaving a trail of oil stained parts as it careened another twenty-five meters until it smeared itself against a broken segment of five meter wide refinery piping.

Even more to their surprise, the passengers of this brutal wreck had been dragged clear and dumped in an almost tidy pile in the middle of the forgotten roadway. At that point, each passenger had been cleanly eviscerated of cybernetic parts, leaving behind a blood washed collection of naked humanly remains that were so contorted as to be unrecognizable. Placed deliberately, the pile was stacked as though it were a hedonistic sculpture depicting the worst possible sin. The cybernetics themselves were plucked clean of valuable materials and dumped uselessly next to their owners. Of the entire mess, the only truly recognizable element of humanity was the presence of six convoluted gray-red lumps of organic matter suspended by a whitish cord from a piece of rusty conduit that projected from the garbage wall. Laying on the ground, not far from the heap disembodied cybernetics, was Marrel's ocular implant separated from the familiar face.

"My god," Ido exclaimed softly, realization dawning after the instant of shock.

The Vassal said nothing, but shook his head.

While they had all three seen messes in the past, none had seen anything quite so thorough. -Or, quite so hateful,- Alita thought, glancing at the extracted brains hanging from the rope of braided spinal tissue. Bile thickened in the back of her throat, hate searing in her heart. "This has to end tonight," she said, finishing the thought for them all.

Then, before anything else could be said, there came a cry from above. It floated down like the feral shriek of a hawk hungered to the brink of panic, "HUNTERS!! Tonight HUNTERS!" The words were rough, verging on unintelligible, as they echoed off the walls of the technological canyon. Despite all, a tone of anger raged through each howling syllable with a flame of zealous spite that went beyond what was possible for the most maligned soul.

Alita's eyes glanced up into the unblinking gaze of Tiphares. High above, perched almost invisibly against the theater of night was a flowing figure. It stood hunched in a swaddling of dull black folds that stirred like tinsel on a Christmas tree at a passing breath. The cloak wrapped high around the form, moving, yet not, in a bizarre twist of shadow that bore uncanny resemblance to the unopened petals of a large, dark flower bud.

For a long time, there was no movement. Alita sensed that the instant had become frozen. Hunter regarded prey and vice versa, either side thinking that it was somehow the predator. To her left Ido stirred breathlessly. This opponent was abruptly becoming fiercely tangible, and not just the perpetrator of a long list of brutal, though faceless, crimes. That second remained infinitely fixed with both dread and anticipation, while the dying echoes of those last few screaming words still faded.

Both parties moved at once, as though releasing a taut leaf spring. High on the top of the broken mechanical ledge, the night colored cloak twisted in a peculiar fashion, lobbing something into the sky. "Join your bed mates, Hunters!" The invocation floated down with the falling object.

"Get back!" Alita shouted to Ido and the Vassal, "I'll handle this!" Her knife danced out of its pocket in a flicker of motion. Above their heads, the falling thing split into a hundred shimmering fragments. Her eyes locked on the cloud, Alita jump backward in a mule-kick, one foot planted against Ido and other against the Vassal. Both of her companions pushed out of the way, Alita's hands flared out to catch the ground. She paused in a momentary single handed handstand, then blasted herself into the air with her feet spinning outstretched around her. A mist of pressure condensation puffing into being about her, she came to rest on a piece of rubble three meters off the ground and out of the line of fire the instant the shards hit, each one exploding with shuddering power. Her knife held in reverse grip, with the flat against her forearm, Alita pushed off from her perch in a way that only the Berzerker body could possibly have managed. Likely faster than human eyes could follow, the dance truly began at that point.

Steel coil strength driving her upward, Alita bounced from one side of the gorge to the other, using the sheer walls as another might use a stairway, gaining four stories of height with each spring. As Alita sailed upward, the Killer ducked back from the ledge in a shimmer of stirring cloak against shadow. Arriving at the peak, Alita landed in a crouch, one hand out to block, the other holding the knife carefully at ready. The Killer had already flown from this perch to another pinnacle a stone's throw away, just tantalizingly beyond easy reach. The spectacle of the ruined factory presented itself now as it would to an airborne creature, precipices and pinnacles, worn and withered, stretched in every direction where there had once been a dense collection of buildings. Down in the chasmic expanse below, Ido and the Vassal had both just begun to consider following.

Intent on her enemy, Alita started forward, then stopped at noticing a trip wire that had appeared in a glint of reflected Tipharean light. She skipped easily over the wire when mounds that had been set innocuously to either side erupted with a shower of pencil thin cables. Lost in the confusion of flying objects, the form of the Killer was momentarily obscured. Alita would have been ensnared were it not for the strength and speed of the Berzerker. With shrug, she shed the trappings and sailed into the air with an effortless bound toward where she'd last spotted her enemy. The cloaked killer regarded her from another pinnacle in lieu of the one where Alita had aimed herself.

Landing at her initial destination, Alita immediately reoriented herself on the killer and took again to the air. Luck was with her accelerated reaction time now, since the ledge where she had momentarily lighted exploded into a gut-jarring fireball at her passing.

The Killer, who had obviously anticipated Alita escaping the first trap, also seemed to have anticipated her escaping the second, since he too was in the process of vacating the spot where Alita would soon land. That voluminous, dimensionless black cloak whirled and stretched through the air toward another ledge fifteen meters away as though carried by a powerful wind. For an instant, it seemed that the killer was in two places at once. Extended an incredible distance across the sky between the two pinnacles, the leading end of the cloak locked into a cyclonic spin that coalesced as if by magic into a dark figure. Alita's target ledge was suddenly empty as the trailing edge of the cloak swept across the gulf into orbit around the Killer. As if completing a neat pirouette, the killer was again facing Alita with perfect nonchalance.

Having never previously seen anything like this display, Alita was suddenly canny to the fact that the Killer had probably managed to boobytrap the ledge on which she was about to land. Making a last second adjustment in her center of rotation, she pulled her feet up, just barely missing a landing in the middle of target ledge. Instead, she nicked the edge of the pinnacle with the balls of her feet and thrust herself into an unstable arch toward a nearby perch. Performing a midair flip, she touched down with tactful smoothness.

"Slow, hunter," came the gristled taunt, "took you longer than I expected to figure out that tactic." The shadowy form seemed not to move.

"Why all the tricks?!" Alita demanded, carefully keeping the knife where it could quickly come the bear. She scrutinized the figure closely, but could not see anything more than an immaterial silhouette. "Why kill so many hunters? Somebody will get you eventually."

"Perhaps," was the growled reply, "but before then, all hunters will regret every folly they've ever committed."

"But Why?" Alita persisted.

"Who punishes the Punisher? Huh, Hunter? Answer me that."

"The factory of course."

"If you believe that," he answered with a metallic scoff, "then you're more foolish than I thought. Remind yourself where we are."

Alita was transfixed with the words when she heard the whooshing thud of a burst of compressed gas. It took her a half heart beat to realize that the Killer had raised a nondescript arm to point at her. Instinct drove her Berzerker enhanced hands up before her face. Hissing like a serpent, the first bolt flashed in sparks as it deflected off the flat of her raised knife, its shell exploding well away from her, nearly disturbing her balance. The killer continued to fire twice more. Arms weaving in a circle, Alita's left hand snatched across with a will of its own, snagging the second bolt between thumb and forefinger. The third bolt was then magically between her ring and middle finger, still quivering from its halted flight.

"Should be fun taking apart that wonderful cybernetic body you obviously have!" the killer laughed upon seeing that Alita was still standing. Flinging the magnificent cloak, the Killer once again displaced from one ledge to flow seamlessly to another. Alita didn't need to see any more to understand that, by using the shapeless shadow he wore, the killer could keep well ahead of her no matter how fast her body was. -Dammit- she thought to herself, -I haven't fought anything like this before.-

Carrying the two bolts in her left hand and the knife in her right, Alita took off after the killer, her feet carrying her almost as fast as the Berzerker could move. Driven more by instinct than inspiration, she angled her approach across the killer's retreating right flank. The killer saw her make the move, dodging immediately to the left in a flurry of motion. Crossing paths back and forth, soaring from ledge to ledge at nearly the speed of sound, Alita and the killer jockeyed for position. Leaping from peak to peak, decaying ledges crumbled to pieces as they passed, flecks of rust sprayed through the air.

Vault and counter retreat carried them directly on, rapidly closing range on the towering mass of the Ghetto with each pulse onward through the heights of rugged scrapiron landscape. Every movement she made, Alita could hear echoing taunts reflected off of precipices and sheer walls, drawing her on like a beacon. She sensed that she was being tempted forward, most likely to a trap of which she was unaware. Yet she didn't dare break pursuit. Not a chance. She couldn't risk letting the Killer have the element of surprise again. She did not like it. Not a bit.

Restoring her knife to its pocket during her landing in order to free up a hand, Alita dug her fingers in and ripped loose a large, almost boulder sized chunk of concrete run through with rebar shafts. Swinging with her entire body, she launched the fragment high into the air in the direction of the Killer. In avoidance, the killer moved to another pinnacle.

"Do YOU really believe you're hunting ME?" Came the jeering laugh.

Intent on her target, Alita ignored the comment; she had lunged into the air the instant the killer had settled to taunt. Traveling fast enough that she had a shallow arch, Alita's chosen path carried her into line with the descending scrap of limestone and metal. High in the air, with no intended landing zone in sight, Alita came into conjunction with the fragment, which was easily half the size of her own body. Words, unremembered in origin bubbled into her mouth, their form twisting into sounds that echoed a technique she hadn't realized she knew, "HERTZA HAEON!!" she screamed, her outstretched arms catching the air like wings. A pulse of blinding energy surged from her abdomen, up through the electromagnetically driven muscles in her side, then out through the reinforced endoskeleton of her right arm. Each actuator in her body contributed a little to the coalescing pulse, channeling the wave into a point at her palm. Leaving a vacuum of sensation in her hand, the shockwave of psychological red crossed into the steel boulder, dispersing almost without a sign. Instantly, the side of fragment opposite her exploded outward in a hail of rusty shards and knife-like stone flecks.

Caught by surprise, the killer wrapped the cloak more tightly around his form in an effort to ward off the rain of steel. Seeing exactly where the killer's body was, Alita knew she'd been waiting for that very instant. Her airborne arch beginning to die, she sighted on the center of the body with one of the explosive tipped bolts the killer had fired at her. A flick of the wrist sent it on its way. The bolt whipped through the air with the weighted accuracy of a throwing needle, leaving only a glimmer to betray its passage. With a wet thump, it imbedded into the center of a target that was still laughing. Falling beyond sight, the last Alita saw was a brilliant, thunderous flash. She would later swear that she'd seen a limb spiraling one way while a body went the other, until an instant later. She slammed into something solid, clear memory stolen away.

"Wait a minute!" hung in the air that one ephemeral, infinite second.

Alita had taken off, leaving Ido and the Vassal stunned. They both sprawled backward away from the bomblet attack when she rescued them. The Vassal, mostly cybernetic and decidedly not possessing human flexibility was left writhing on the ground in a futile attempt to get up. "Damn you girl!" he cried in impotent rage.

Ido, with greater presence of mind, stayed where Alita had thrust him. Laying in a fetal position with his hands covering his ears, he protected his head against the staccato of explosives. Chips of debris clattered down on him even as the firecracker shots went quiet. Glancing upward, Ido saw his surrogate daughter sailing through the heavens in blatant defiance of gravity. She surmounted the crevasse between the buildings more quickly than Ido could draw a breath, disappearing over the crest in an instant.

Scrambling to his feet, Ido immediately began to look for a way to give Alita a hand. He had to help, he couldn't let that demon do her injury. "Alita!" he cried after her. The Vassal too was on his feet, a look of absolute fury fixed on his ugly features.

"Foolish little girl!" he cried, turning to the cliff. In the Vassals hand's there appeared a nasty looking, chainsaw augmented klave fixed to a telescoping shaft, "I'll show you how this is done!"

"Wait," Ido shouted, his rocket hammer held at ready. Heart thundering in his ears, pulse tickling in his neck, Ido gasped from breath. Adrenaline roared into his veins only now, some tart sense of hidden danger whispering to him that something was desperately wrong.

"To hell with you Doc, that damned little girl thinks she can out do ME!"

From the moment of pause, a well tempered breath was exhaled, "Spare me. You might do as Doctor Ido suggests," an androgynous voice insinuated, "it would cause you far less injury..."

They both jumped in surprise, whirling to look at the voice's source. Standing behind them, just at the edge of the cliff-corner where the ill-maintained road became a small mine field, a nondescript black shadow seemed to have separated from the wall. It moved toward them in a flowing motion.

"Damn you, Killer!" the Vassal raised his Klave in both hands and charged.

The shadow itself suddenly shot through the air, lengthening into a long, sharp edge. If Ido was singly shocked when the Vassal's head disconnected from his body, he was doubly so when the man's legs and arms fell free as well. "Not that I have any use for you in particular," the shadowy figure concluded in a weary sigh.

"The Hunter Killer!" Ido said aloud, realization dawning.

"Perhaps," the figure acknowledged noncommittally as it stooped at the Vassal's remains. Ido saw a tentative hand poke out from the protective cape, rapidly disconnecting valuable parts from the body. He considered making his attack, but could not decide what part of the fluid form would be most vulnerable.

Realizing that the figure was unconcerned with him for the moment, Ido began to pick his path away. Better to fight on the terms of his own choosing than to fall into an assured trap. His left foot poised to take the first step, he didn't quite set it back down when the dim figure spoke again, "Do not test me Dr. Ido; I may have no need for the foolish one, but I have no reservations about killing you if I must."

"Then why me?" Ido asked.

"A Tipharean's cybernetics are really quite useless to anyone but a Tipharean. Usually only the owner. A wonder you were even registrable as a Hunter Warrior."

"Huh?"

"Not that you realize this," the shadow hastily continued, "I have need of you to combat the Berzerker. This extra hunter was a free variable, his death is as favorable now as later. Better I have his parts should the need arise later. The Berzerker though..."

"What was Alita chasing?" Ido began to notice that the Killer spoke in a moderate voice, totally contrary to what Lazarus had described. More, in fact, like Marrel had mentioned in his story. Cool and quietly collected.

"Not your concern." was the nearly whispered response.

"It is my concern. It matters to me who gets killed!"

"A Will O' the Wisp," it answered thoughtfully.

"A decoy?" Ido supplied, fingering the button on his rocket hammer.

"Not if it kills her," was the opaque reply, "If she dies, my task becomes one of recovery rather than of direct conflict."

"Your task?"

"I will kill every hunter before I am done," the words were spoken coldly, auspiciously. A factual prediction rather than a heart felt desire. In the content of the nondescript voice, there was a gravitation of sincerity colored with a righteous confidence as dark as the shadowy cloak. The thing he originally assumed to be the Killer was not as chilling as what stood before him now.

"Not if I have anything to say about it!" Biting the inside of his cheek, Ido thumbed the switch on his rocket hammer. With a blast of noise, it came alive in his hands, peeling through the air followed by a trail of fire. Muscling the thing around with all of his strength, Ido angled toward where the shadow had been, intent on ending this grisly matter before it went any further.

"tut, tut," came the unconcerned response.

But the shadow was not there. Alone on the ground before him was the corpse of the Vassal and nothing else. It was gone, utterly and completely gone. Rotating the handle of the hammer between his hands, Ido shifted the path of the weapon so that it would propel him around backward. When he rotating half way, a wedge of black whipped toward him from nowhere, nipping the shaft of the rocket just above his hands. The handle split cleanly in two, cut by a weapon far sharper than the sharpest razor. Free from all constraints, the rocket motor spun in a crazy spiral path until it finally met the cliff wall with a shuddering crash.

Ido, unarmed but for the useless handle of the broken hammer, stood facing the dusky menace again.

"I have no time for such nonsense," The shadow told him in a deceptively quiet tone. Ido could contemplate no further resistance when a void colored wave of limbo shot toward him. It enveloped him in its subdued blackness, swirling around him with the strength of an ocean current. For an instant, just before the nothingness swept him away, he thought he heard a pleasant voice saying, "we have so much else to do."

-Is this my death?- Ido asked as he fell away from reality.

-The sky is so bright here- was the first thought that returned to her. In the stillness that had settled around her, she stared at the timeless matte of blue black that was tainted with a light source from beneath. There were no stars.

She squinted, trying to pin-point the momentary feeling of weirdness. Was it that the sky was bluish black? She could not tell, or even see the stars her heart told her had to be there. Where was the charge of deepening red that had always accompanied the sunset, making her think of a large pool of blood against the salamander orange of day? Straining her eyes, she could see a white crescent that marked a huge moon which seemed nearly close enough to touch. Her heart told her the moon was wrong. It was supposed to be two...Fear and Terror, Phobos and Deimos. The two sons of...

Mars?

Then her eyes crossed along the edge of that gigantic disk that was editing out so much of the empty night sky. Tiphares. She was on Earth.

More specifically, she was laying on Earth. Laying with one leg twisted beneath her and one arm hanging downward over an edge whose crest pressed against her shoulder. Then memories of the chase over deserted lands, the killer continually beyond her reach, rushed into her mind. She remembered falling and striking her head, an experience that was becoming quite a habit lately. Too bad there was no youthful face gazing down at her this time, patronizing her in a playful manner. Not that she never chastised herself for such carelessness.

Alita sat up, gradually untangling her limbs. For the time being, she was thankful that the Berzerker body was less than prone to breakage. Now if she could just get rid of the slight wave of nausea that warned her of a possible concussion.

At the end of her graceful flight, she had crash-landed on a jutting ledge about half the distance between the ground and the apex of the ruins. Feeling a moment of anxiety, she ran a weapon check. Brushing her front pocket, she discovered the comforting form of her knife. On the other hand, the second dart she was carrying had been lost, probably from when she hit the ledge. Glancing toward the ground, she could see no sign of the explosive barb.

Standing up and dusting off, she looked upward toward where the killer had perched. Did he survive?

Alita jumped from the ledge with a shot of electromagnetic power surging downward through her legs. One skip off the canyon wall midway up enabled her light on the pinnacle last occupied by the Hunter Killer. Darkened by a blast of heat that had since died, the precipice cracked under her Berzerker body's weight. Of the killer himself, there was no direct sign. Crouching to one knee, Alita gazed over the edge of the precipice in the direction she thought she'd seen the Killer fall. Far below, the distance of a mid-sized building, a tiny human figure sprawled across the sludge laden ground.

As she stepped off into nothing, the floor of the former factory raced toward her. To slow down, she kicked a foot out behind her, propelling herself away from one side of the canyon and across toward the other. She flicked a hand out when the other side came within arm's reach, driving her nearly indestructible fingers into the wall. Continuing to fall, she pulled herself in, then deployed her feet against the vertical surface. Her feet and hands sputtered and sparked against the rusty wall as she used them like skid brakes to slow her rapid descent. Fragments of metal broke free at her passing, rattling against the wall as they fell below her. At about five meters up, she let go of the wall, dropping easily to a semi-firm patch of ground. She landed in a deep crouch to absorb the impact without giving her already unstable head anything else to complain about. Rusted debris clattered and splashed as they hit the polluted marsh.

Pulling her knife, Alita waded toward the broken form laying half in, half out of a brackish chemical pool between buildings. Creeping forward, she regarded the shape for any signs of life.

Impaled on a fragment of broken I-beam, the figure was perfectly still. One arm missing and the other gone suspiciously at the elbow, the torso was nearly intact, except that it appeared shredded, as though it had been wrapped in a twining of razor wire. There was no sign of the huge black cloak, only that the human form was covered in a patchy garb of black that appeared frayed and ill-fitting.

Moving closer, Alita saw that only the side with the missing arm had received burns from the explosion. Dangling from the I-beam, the rest of the torso with its nearly connected legs actually appeared to have been flayed by the contraction of the black fibers that she'd first mistaken for clothing. As if the cloak had shrunk down until it had cut into the wearer.

Then she realized that she knew the man's face. What little of it there was left for recognition.

"Lazarus!"

With one dull eye rolled back into his skull, the other obscured by blood and all the recognizable features wrapped in the tight black material, his lax face did not respond. Not that she'd expected him to.

"Lazarus was the Hunter Killer?!" It hardly made sense. She crouched at the body, not certain what she should've expected from the old man. Checking for a pulse, she already knew that he was dead.

Then the face jerked, the one intact eye lolled around until it pointed at her and focused behind a sheen of pink.

"He was not!" the jaw moved, splitting open gashes in the chin against the cutting black fibers.

Alita jumped back in surprise, "What the... You're already dead, Killer!"

"You are more effective than I first anticipated," the voice, definitely not Lazarus', dulled to a soft, almost amicable level.

"Then you're still hiding behind tricks!"

"Considerably more than tricks, I assure you. I would take a moment to commend you for completing a portion of my work for me, but I must request that you meet me at the highest point of the Ghetto before the larynx of this corpse well and truly expires. If you cannot find the way, watch for my sign posts."

"Why you...!"

"As additional invocation, know that I have, in my grasp, one for whom you care. He would greatly benefit from your arrival and subsequent rescue attempt. Regardless of how futile such an effort will prove to be."

"...Ido." Alita's face twitched as she realized that she had fallen into a trap the instant she'd chased after the decoy that now lay dead at her feet.

"Until then." The lips on the corpse tried to smile, pulling the face taut. Then the fibers of the ruined cloak contracted powerfully, forcing flesh through with a slurp to form pulpy red mash, like whey pressed through cheese cloth. A soft cracking arose as the fibers constricted around the full body, cutting clear to the bone, then pulverizing even that.

Alita turned away, not wanting to see the gruesome spectacle. The veiled threat was much clearer than the quietly uttered words.

"I have to follow," she told herself under her breath, "to save Daisuke."

Dystopia. A place so pathetic, so meager, where existence is so poor that death would be preferable. A place where dreams are meant to die, where substance is forbidden. Where happiness is devoid.

If such a place existed, it lay in the middle of Factory 17, on top a pile of rubbish, among a huddling mass of skin and bone. Poverty's thready heart beat alive, threatening every moment. A ghetto so vast that it cared not of ethnicity, only of pain and suffering.

She hurried as quickly as she could, among the winding pathways of a secret realm separate from the rest of reality. Alita chose her footing hastily, avoiding the barren eyes at every corner, the empty gazes that followed her lifelessly. The thickness of the maze was measured not by its size, but by the absolute poverty of its destitute inhabitants. They gathered around pits of smoldering refuse, ill dressed, ill fed, ill conceived, moving so slowly that they might keel over at any second.

Their voices carried in slurs, lips taut over teeth that were falling out. Their words were hollow, meaningless, quiet agony fashioned to fill the last few hours of a life that never seemed to end. Their eyes, sunken back into sockets of bone, shadowed emotionlessly by jagged brows, watched the stranger go past. They knew nothing, they said nothing even when she stopped and asked. They didn't care whether a man would die depending on if they helped or not. Who had ever helped them?

Alita struggled on, climbing a mountain that seemed to unfold into a larger and larger entity. It was as if the further she got, the more the hideous the place grew, swelling upward like churned froth on water at a sewage plant. The trail itself was difficult to follow, obscured by skeletons, both living and not. So powerful was the stench of urine that it made her eyes water, stepping over and around barely moving bodies in varying stages of decay. A child cried weakly on the side of the path, its skinny asexual form palsied and afflicted with a harsh rash. The mother lay back against a wall of garbage, sallow face unmoving, eyes following Alita accusingly.

It was then that Alita reached the Killer's first sign post. A hunter, with a pike pinned through his forehead, was suspended three meters off the ground from a shelf of wreckage. One eye turned back into his skull, blood ran from the post hole in his head clear to his feet. His arm stuck straight out from his side, finger pointing the way.

"Delcamer," Alita murmured to herself in recognition, knowing one of the many hunters that had followed Lazarus.

A whisper touched her left ear, "Have you enjoyed the tour, Hunter?"

Jumping half a meter in the air, Alita spun around leading with the heel of her left foot. The hook kick snapped through nothingness. Dim shadows, a blanket of ephemeral movement, had already retreated beyond her reach. Now acutely aware that she was being observed not only by those too weak to be threatening, she glanced around nervously, searching for a threat among the filth. If only her enemy were not so masterful at disappearing.

"Why do you hide?!" she bellowed to the night.

"Your path has been made clear to you," was the only response, fluttering down on the grace of the wind.

Litter, rubble, shelter where there was none. Each and every shadow armed with a blade. Alita hurried along, biting her lip in an effort not to look, hear or smell. Standing on an outcropping, an older child stood watching her, matchstick legs barely supporting the bulbous head. The girl -labeled so by her parts- held something to her mouth, which she chewed dully. With Alita's approach, the girl crouched down and covered her prize, warding away prying eyes. Not that Alita didn't notice the clawing fingers that protruded from the hard won morsel hidden by the girl's pathetic little body.

Soft laughter nipped at her from the shadows, again reminding Alita to continue on. Despite herself, she ran.

Another sign post was placed using the body of another dead hunter, pointing the way deeper into hell. Another hunter she knew, this time disemboweled. Alita struggled further along the path, staggering deeper into a nightmare come true.

Uncaring of the world, a skinny middle aged man defecated in the middle of the trail. Alita cut wide around him, trying not to step on the bodies that rested along the sides. Going about his business with a soft, constipated grunt, the man paid her no heed if he even knew she was there.

Repelled, she tried to leave the grostequely transfixing sight, her dinner at the brink of her throat in contemplation of a return flight. Stumbling up along the trail, she almost tripped the instant something suddenly grabbed her. When she caught sight of the skinny hand locked around her ankle, pure will was all that prevented her from taking off at a dead run, "Something to eat," croaked a female voice at her feet, "please help..." A skeletal face stared up at her, blue eyes blood shot and sunken, the pleading mouth containing no teeth at all behind non-existent lips. Wispy hair was worn off by a hideous mange that ate the paper thin scalp. The voice croaked an agonized sob, as if already resigned to the answer.

Alita pulled her foot free, worried she would take the woman's arm out of its knobby socket in the process, "I... I'm sorry. I have nothing."

"Of course you have nothing for them, Hunter," hissed the shadows softly, "this world was your gift."

Turning her back, Alita didn't reply to her tormentor. "Must save Daisuke," she reminded herself in a quivering voice. She repeated the statement several times, then breathed deeply, ignoring the gagging odors. Steeled and focused, she at last unreined her feet, seeking where the path would take her. Determined, even in revulsion, to reach the center of this horrific gauntlet.

The Ghetto swept past in a numbing blur, each new spectacle something worse than the last. Pawing hands, insensate but suffering. Broken voices that pled only in whispers. Death and disease, unspeakable misery, heaped upon a mound that stretched ever upward, the path marked by obedient corpses. For every junk pile ridge that Alita managed to clear in her hike to the top of the Ghetto, two more lay along the trail, each one successively further away. It was as if she'd entered some terrifying mobius constructed out of bodies and illness, scrap thrown in just for good measure. In the shadows, minute by minute stretching out into unfathomed hours, a quiet voice patiently explained each new horror.

When the trail began switchback turns, taking her ever higher into the sky, the Scrapyard -in all its nighttime brilliance- opened out below. Each narrow street crossed the plain as a thread of light, converging in places to form plazas. A spider web of radiance straddled by the predatory bane of Tiphares. The huge pipes sailing skyward from the factory complexes could be clearly heard, their moon-wrought moaning a perfect complement to the quiet complaints of the Ghetto's inhabitants. Despite the unending climb, Tiphares' golden underside never seemed any closer. Perhaps it was a reminder that this one locale, a single place separate from all others, was also the furthest existence from that promising world hovering just above the clouds.

Reduced to an empty minded trudge, her focus inward away from the freakshow to which she bore witness, Alita didn't notice when she finally arrived at the summit. She walked clear across the simple flat plateau before she understood that the edges only lead onto descending paths. Looking down the far side, Alita's feet stopped walking, refusing to go any further. Hiking could take her no higher.

To her left, from a particularly large wash of shadow, somehow blacker than the rest of the night, there arose the sound of hands clapping, "Bravo, Hunter, you impress me with the magnitude of your perseverance," the voice was cool and quiet, modulated as neither man nor woman, "Even after the path I picked for your ascent, you manage to navigate your way here. Your heart is not so fragile as calculations would intimate. One might question how a Hunter Warrior of your caliber gained such a conscience. Or don't you subscribe to kicking rubbish out of your way?"

Turning slowly to face the dusky form, Alita squared her shoulders, trying to ease her mind over the dreadful world through which she'd so recently passed, "Please, let Ido go. Let's just finish this, you and I."

There was a quiet chuckle, "Release a prize such as this." The shadow expanded, bleeding out into a puddle in the middle of the plateau. Visibly rooting into loose rubble, the sheen of darkness contorted like a plant rendered in time lapse photography. Its surface rippled, pushing a shoot upward into the night sky which narrowed and lengthened into a tall stalk. Pooling at the end, an enormous drop of dew mistaken in the direction of gravity welled into a giant bud. Huge petals pulled back, unveiling a black flower that contained a person as the stamen. Ido, blinking confusedly, lulled out as the centerpiece.

"Alita!" he cried, trying to say more until a tendril of obsidian wound itself across his face, holding him silent.

"What have you done to him!" Alita demanded, her tiredness abruptly forgotten.

"I'm uncertain why this beast of a man means so much to you," the night cloaked figure walked around the enormous black flower it had spawned, "Ironic the arrangement don't you think? A Hunter Warrior fighting the whim of the Scrapyard for an impotent Tipharean suspended in the sky."

"Nice that somebody finds this entertaining," Alita spouted angrily, moving toward her shady enemy, "'Cause I sure as hell don't! I'm going to pay you back for all the good hunters you've killed!"

"Ah, but you killed one yourself," the figure said, tut-tuting, "and this night is still very young. I will have my justice yet."

"If the only justice you know is murder," Alita spat, recalling her hand in Lazarus' demise, "then you will pay dearly at the hands of Alita!" With that, she lunged at the shadow.

"Hmm," the cape of black swirled out of Alita's way, lingering like an intelligent fog. Alita's flashing knife swiped at thin air, catching nothing on the way through.

"So rash," the shadow commented sadly, "an attack that failed to envision consequence. Shall we see just how well your magnificent fighting skills will favor you?" Spinning into a cyclonic motion, the shadowy form gave way to twin tornadoes, "Shall we see how sharp your eyes are?"

"Damn You!" Alita screamed, lunging again, the intensity of the berzerker's full strength driving her forward almost faster than eyes could follow. Her shining dagger split clean through one of the forms, which yielded with the consistency of cotton. Again the shadows had divided, leaving not two, but four midnight figures dancing around the width of the plateau.

"Deceiver!" Alita was furious, seeing her enemy weaving yet another trick around her, "fight me yourself if you have the guts."

"Would I ever?" the voice came from nowhere and everywhere. The four had separated into eight distinct forms. Wherever Alita looked, cyclonic black flowed across the darkness, the attacker disappearing in plain sight.

"If I can't take you directly," Alita promised the torrent, "I'll take you one piece at a time." With that she delved into the flood, the motions of Panzer Kunst taking shape instinctively. In response, bladelike edges materialized out of the swarm, biting at her body as she waded through. Each notion of movement summoned from her actions that went unlabeled. Her arm swept up in front of her face at an unseen threat. She didn't flinch when sparks sputtered off her forearm from a glancing blow. An unexpected shot to her hip sent her reeling sideways, her balance reforming as she managed to catch her feet beneath her. Each blow slammed through her body, slashing grooves in her clothing and leaving furrows in the berzerker's armor. She felt the first attackable opening before she ever saw it. Ducking aside a ridge of black that materialized almost out of nowhere, her leg extended itself out of the spiraling rotation of her body, clearing up and through a gulf of open space that had not existed a moment prior. The movement extended fully into a swooping roundhouse kick that reached its snap directly into the face of an attacker. When the head fell free, Alita was already on the far side, evading further flickering edges of sharpened cloth. Spinning off out of her way, the form bounced heavily to the ground where it lay finally unmoving.

"When I get my hands on you!" she shouted.

"If you get your hands on me," was the opaque reply.

Her blade darted in and out of the shadows, a hungry snake seeking flesh to bite. A lucky blow dipped her through the folds of the resilient black fabric, finding something soft underneath. Warmth of bloody spray wetted her weaving arm, putting a taint of satisfaction in her heart as another body fell under her assault. The berzerker's strength propelled her foot into an abdomen that happened to close at the wrong time. Bursting like a balloon under her raw force, yet another body dropped, its pieces scattered an unnatural distance apart. Body fluids splattered, soaking what little clothing she still wore as she crashed head long through the biting sheets. Time blurred jarringly, only snapping into pure focus when she realized that the ground was littered with the fragments of her opponents.

Visceral joy swept through her in a suffuse wave.

One dark form still stood, applauding softly from a safe distance, "My, that marvelous body of yours is unequivocally impressive. Imagine that it is capable of such a job given so little time to act."

"Coward," Alita growled, "face me!"

"My concern is only my task, what care I for personal disputes when I have such an incredible tool in hand?"

"What do you mean?" Alita asked warily.

"Look around you Hunter. Your hands are almost as stained as mine. Nine to your name thus far!"

Black fabric had already begun to contract around the fallen forms, shredding the bodies further. One lay on its back, the cloak cowling pulled away from its bloody face.

Alita gasped, "Fagan," she whispered, knowing a name for a face seen so often in New Kansas bar. In her heart, she knew immediately that all the others were Hunter Warriors as well, each one dead at her hand. She had been tricked once again.

Her armored body almost naked from the slashing cloaks, Alita sank to her knees. No feeling but shock came to mind as she gazed upon her metallic hands; her arms soaked clear to the shoulder in friendly blood. Weapons of mass destruction, tools masterfully manipulated by the most skillful surgeon. She let her knife fall to the ground, bewildered beyond all action.

Ido struggled to make himself heard, "Alita, NO...murph." He was silenced again immediately by his vegetative bindings.

"Why?" Alita asked, sinking to her haunches. Desperately, she searched for a way to beat this strange opponent, who seemed happy to stand eternally outside her reach. -How do you fight someone who stands back and pushes buttons?- she wondered in panic, -if I attack again, what if I'm tricked into killing Daisuke in the process?-

"My mission is none but justice," the serene voice repeated.

"But this is murder," Alita surveyed the plateau for any tool she could use, looking for anything at all that could be perverted into a weapon.

"Easy to commit, don't you think?" the shadowy cloak circled patiently around her.

"I wouldn't know."

"Oh, but you would," the monster told her softly, "You just committed it nine times in a row. Not that I could say how many lives you've taken before tonight, especially innocent. Foolish Hunter, paid to harvest innocent souls. Paid to create hells."

"You tricked me."

"You cannot deceive one who is not willing to take part in a deception. Had you not raised your fists, not a body would have died." the dark form came within several steps.

"Right up until one manages to kill me," Alita replied, gathering her feet smoothly beneath her, -one step closer, come on,- "I have every right to defend myself."

"If you only were protecting yourself; you came here to rescue this, did you not?" the figure gestured accusingly toward Ido, who struggled against his bonds.

"He's innocent in this," Alita said, waiting and wishing for the next step her enemy would take.

"Is he, my Berzerker augmented friend?" the form looked closely at her, "Have you ever once asked him why he hunts?" there was a sarcastic snort, "never was a Tipharean so noble. He's more deserving of my treatment than even you!"

"LAIR!" sizzling plasma scorched through the conduit of her body, squeezed and concentrated by electromagnetic fields until it burst in a hyper velocity stream from the tip of her finger. Alita's hand jumped off the ground propelled by a brilliant blue jet. The stream cut a narrow ditch across the plateau, until it sprayed up into the sky with all the force of an uncontrolled fire hose. Caught in momentary surprise by Alita's sudden outburst, the killer was still in the process of dodging when a pencil thin knife of blue fire raked over one side of the billowing cloak. A tatter of black substance fluttered free, its edge still steaming in the cool night atmosphere.

"Clever," was the patient response. Whipping laterally away from the path of Alita's attack, the darkened form coursing through the sky like tangible wind.

Driven by the powerful blast, Alita maneuvered for her next cut. Momentum generated by the thrust of superheated plasma spun her body like a dervish. She rotated around the pivot of one leg, the other coming off the ground to balance her. Driven by the rocket in her finger, her leg swept high into a counterweight position, hooking just over her opponent's ducking head in a wide capoeira style kick. While the pendular kick fell, the orbit of her arm raised, the next pass bring the plasma torch straight into line with the killer's midriff.

Suddenly much sharper than the shadows Alita had so recently defeated, the killer arrived in position just before she did. One singing edge lashed out, a flicking nip that seemed to touch her for a fraction of a moment. The curving cut left in its wake a slash clean through the biceps of the berzerker's propulsive arm. Alita looked on in dissociated shock as her limb hinged in a location where it normally didn't. Unbottled plasma erupted concussively through the gap, blinding Alita with its electric blue corona. What was left of the arm went one way, while she went the other.

Her head spinning from the dizzying shock, Alita tumbled head over heel. Gravity proved in no way to be her friend as it dashed her several times against a ground she was far too dazzled to see. When she finally came to a stop, she spat out the choking fluid that filled her mouth and tried to roll onto her knees. For a moment, her brain failed to gauge the absence the arm she'd just lost.

"Spectacular demonstration of the Berzerker body's tenacity, but I'm afraid my schedule begins to run short. Shall we see if it will do what I think it will?"

"Huh?" she asked in a daze, staggering as she pulled her feet beneath her.

Punctuated by a popping hiss, another brilliant explosion threw Alita onto her chest.

-ouch,- she wanted to say, suddenly unable to speak or breath. Clasping at her throat she tried to cough up the terrible tasting phlegm that collected in the back of her mouth. Her head continued to tell her she was tumbling before she realized exactly what position her body occupied. Deploying her legs and remaining arm, Alita managed to roll herself onto her back. Blinking away the tears that were in her eyes, she abortively tried to sit up.

"Maybe it isn't what I thought it was," speculated an annoyingly calm voice, so close that the breath could almost be smelled.

Finally straining to lift her head slightly off the ground, Alita managed to assign dimension to her surroundings. Brimstone odor burned her nose. Through the flickering spots that were beginning to pile up over her vision, she realized that her chest was missing. Tendrils of smoke wound upward away from the new born body cavity. Searing panic clenched her.

-I'm dying!-

Kneeling close over her, casting a shadow with Tiphares' golden light, was the shape of a robe. Words descended on a quiet voice, "It would seem that I'll now need to change my plans, the Berzerker isn't all that legend..."

A spark of adrenaline shocked through Alita, changing the world a pallor of red. Screaming a silent scream, the scream of one who had nothing left to lose, one of her legs flashed up. Her teeth tightly clenched, she planted her most powerful kick right into the dead center of the crouching shadow. Then she could see Tiphares again, the grunt of her enemy echoing through her ears.

Instead of trying to sit up, Alita kipped straight to her feet with the immense strength of her legs. Her enemy was sprawled some distance away, the form of a body plainly visible under the rippled black cloth. Alita tried to barrel forward, but couldn't maintain her balance. She fell into a boneless heap, still struggling to drive her body forward.

A booming echo reverberated through her skull, -SELF REPAIR MODE ACTIVATED, RESTORING LIFE SUPPORT FUNCTION.- Suddenly, Alita could breathe again. Dropping to her knees and resting her forehead momentarily against the ground, she gulped down breath after delicious breath. Once she'd recovered sufficiently to stabilize her vision, a downward glance revealed that the chest of the Berzerker body alive with activity. Probing pseudopods formed of some combination of biological and mechanical components ripped into the ground beneath her. They spread and engulfed fragments of metal, extracting rebar from chunks of broken concrete, spontaneously looping and reforming, transforming into solid cybernetic mechanisms that reinserted themselves into her chest cavity. Even as she watched, in stunned silence, the organs withdrew, metamorphosing to the familiar armoring of her chest.

Alita sat back in surprised wonderment.

"So," came the voice of her cloaked enemy, observing from some distance away, "it is what I thought after all. Perfect."

-RESTORING CHASSIS,- the berzerker's voice boomed through Alita's mind. The flat cleavage where her arm had been amputated suddenly boiled to life. Runners of silvery substance pulsed out, lacing together to form mechanical substructures. The arachnid infrastructure rapidly wove itself into muscles and bone, quickly restoring the arm's armored covering to its original condition. Alita found herself flexing new fingers less than half a minute later. -RETURNING TO STANDBY MODE,- the Berzerker announced before going silent.

"It would seem," Alita stood, flicking her black hair out of her eyes. Satisfaction beginning to settle over her, she turned to face the ebony figure that was just now climbing to its feet, "that I'm not so easy to kill afterall."

"If I were trying to kill you," came the response, "rest assured that you would be as dead as the rest of your comrades."

"So you say," Alita hissed, trying to gain a feel for her current environment. Where she stood now was on a slope of the massive junk pile. Apparently she had fallen from the summit during the last attack. She did not recognize the specific place.

"Why would I destroy a wondrous piece of equipment that would enable me to complete my mission that much faster?" asked the shadow, stretching out an evanescent arm. A harsh pop-hiss telegraphed the flight of another bolt.

Her hand springing up from her side, Alita snatched the projectile out of the air before it ever came close, "You've tried this before, killer. You're running out of clever tricks."

"So you seem to believe," the killer answered.

Writhing suddenly in her grip, the projectile bit her, "What!?" between her clenched fingers, the shaft contorted, melting like so much metallic ice. Minute threads projected from the glob, enabling it to permeate the tough Berzerker armor. In a matter of moments, it melded straight through into Alita's hand. The back side, behind her knuckles, rippled under internal forces, suddenly festering open into a mass of biomechanical tendrils that started to wind their way back down her arm. It was a horde of cybernetic maggots threatening to eat her alive!

-WARNING,- echoed through her mind, -BERZERKER MODE SEAL UNSTABLE. AUTOMATIC RELEASE IMMINENT.-

"Now, shall we see what that body can do?" the killer was saying, a barely contained excitement leaking out from beneath that robe, "Shall we see just how much of the night that wonderful body can eat?!"

Alita didn't think to answer. Instead, she summoned up the balance of her electromagnetic might in an angry energetic sparkle that surrounded her in a halo of lightning arcs. Blowing air through her body, she generated a stream of plasma from the finger tip of her other hand. Rather than waste it attacking the Killer, she turned the blue fire on herself. Like a warm knife through butter, she severed her own arm at the elbow. She cleaved through in a blast of searing, all-to-real agony that left behind ghostly emptiness.

-SEAL INTEGRITY RESTORED.-

Weight on her arm suddenly slackened, her shoulder recoiling from the abrupt shift of mass through the body. Freed from its attachment, like a diseased tooth wrenched out by a competent dentist, it dropping to the ground at her feet with a relieving thump. Boiling with the fury of an over heated blob of mercury, the object before her bore no resemblance to what she'd just cut from her arm.

The thing, a machine that had somewhere purloined itself a facsimile life, raged in desperate, undirected activity. Tentacle structures burst out of the organoform blob, sculpting circuitry conduits that clawed their way into the junkyard ground. Growing from the size of a human forearm, the thing quickly swelled until it was bigger than a huge melon. And yet, it didn't stop growing. Gathering itself, it shot upward, expanding until it was larger than an oak tree. Squirming appendages fanned out in all directions.

For the first time that Alita could remember, the genuine Hunter Warrior Killer was laughing.

Alita sprang away, trying to find a safe distance from this new threat. Its tendrils probing the ground in all directions, the thing spread desperately outward, ripping up huge chunks of refuse that it pulverized into bite sized components. Reaching an astonishing mass, like that of a small home, all of the searching appendages suddenly dropped what they were doing and reached straight up into the night sky. It gave a ground trembling shudder before falling flat with an enormous crash. At last, it moved no more, simulating to perfection the appearance of death.

There was a sigh, "Ah well, As I thought..." the shadowy menace said from behind Alita, "without energy, it dies quickly. Quite beneficial, it would seem, that I at least have the entire body to work with."

"What?.." Alita recovered herself, remembering exactly who her enemy was. Without even thinking, she dove to the side, avoiding narrowly the tip of an incoming dart. Her hair flipping across before her vision as she snapped her eyes about, but her opponent had chosen not to be found. The ebony section of belligerent night was nowhere and everywhere, its haunting voice arising from no direction in particular.

"How long can you hold out before I finally accomplish my mission?"

Further flichettes whistled through the air, their passage shimmering in the golden Tipharean light. Alita danced out of the way, once again using the berzerker's terrific power. Where she had stood an instant before, gouts of dust dislodged from the ground with the impacting projectiles. Hissing furiously, further shots were on the way in, fired by an unseen weapon.

Not a second to lose, Alita broke into a full out run, a lioness chased by invisible hunters. Wind whipped past her face, the berzerker's legs carrying her ten meters a bound. Each fall of her feet broke loose a plume of dust, belying the strength of her body. She ran a zig-zagging course, projectiles smacking into the ground around her despite her incredible speed. -There has to be a way. If I could just disable that damned cloak.-

It was then that a half conceived course of action blossomed in her mind, -...if I had that. Where'd it fall to?- Alita rushed head long back up the slope, searching for the summit. With a single bound, she cleared a jutting frame of steel girders. A piling of concrete slabs passed below her like an ant hill. Huddles of ghetto folk watched her streak past, their sunken eyes visibly wide in amazement. How far had she tumbled down the hill after the killer had taken her arm? Where was the summit?

Tingling at her side, the Berzerker reawakened long enough to repair her most recent, self-inflicted injury. Alita's jumping balance was fully restored as the body reoriented its internal mass to craft for her a new forearm. In her mad dash up the hill, she hardly noticed when her running became more steady by the reacquisition of an arm.

Then she saw Ido, trapped in the blossom of a huge flower composed of shadows. It was the summit. She leapt over the crest onto the plateau, -now, where was I?- Dashing over the roughly flat ground, she oriented herself, -Oh yes, I was over there when that bastard took my arm the first time. So it must've fallen... that way.- she glanced off down the opposing slope, stopping then to take a short glance at Ido. Ido's face displayed shock at seeing her again in one piece. Had Ido known the nature of the Berzerker when he'd given it to her? She couldn't tell at a glance.

More darts whizzed past Alita's head, reminding her of the phantom killer that was hot on her heels. She dove in one leap over the far side of the summit, her eyes scouring the grounds below, -Where did it fall to? Where?-

"You are certainly working hard to protract this engagement," the killer called from behind her, "Does the great Alita so fear what exists on the other side?"

"I've been there already," Alita answered vaguely, she landed in the middle of a particular pile, scrabbling hastily through the volumes of miscellaneous junk until projectiles from the killer forced her into the air again, -Where is it? Just one second of luck, please!- "I really don't remember what it was like."

"It won't be so bad," came the androgynous voice again, "At least you'll be incomparably famous before you go. For a hunter, you must admit that such a prospect is really very good. The dark Angel incarnate: the killer of Worlds!"

"I don't want to know," Alita called, scraping as quickly as she could through the junk of another pile. -Please God,- she plead silently, beginning to run through her other options, -where is it?-

For one timeless moment, she considered amputating herself again in order to get what she needed. A second of coherent pain to buy a lifetime back, wasn't that a fair trade? What if the killer guessed what she was attempting and devised a strategy around it? If she followed the path of amputating herself, her enemy would certainly know what she had in mind.

Then her eyes fell on it.

Half hidden from vantage points up the hill, caught in a nook between two massive slabs of concrete wreckage, clenched as if ready to deliver a killing blow, was a hand. It was Alita's hand, a remainder of the arm the killer had severed during her plasma jet attack. The weapon she'd been searching for.

Weaving with her body to avoid incoming darts, she sprang across the gulf separating her from the lifesaving prize. She bashed a man-sized piece of rusty piping out of her way, folding into a forward roll at the last second. Deftly she snatched up the disconnected limb on the way past, pulling it in close to her body so that her opponent wouldn't see what she'd just picked up. A one armed handspring drove her high into the air, enabling her to spiral her body around into a covering position as she landed.

Alita dashed further down the slope, searching for a steep grade that would put her opponent high above her. One glance over her shoulder confirmed that the lighting conditions were still wrong to afford her visibility. In the process, she almost earned a bolt in the forehead for her effort. -Must find a steeper slope.- she told herself, careening through a rusted frame of I-beams. The clamoring crash sent her head over heels before she skillfully managed to put her feet back beneath her. Not that the Berzerker body felt any damage.

An instant later she jumped from a particularly sheer drop-off. With feline deftness, Alita spun her body all the way around. Landing so that she faced the lip above her, she skidded backward down the slope. The crest of the ridge towering over her cut a sharp line of contrast across Tiphares' brilliant face. Alita strained her eyes, waiting for the moment of truth.

Wavering in a state of almost half-being, a darkened shadow welled up along the ledge above her. The figure cast an almost perfect silhouette against the sky city's golden light. As punctually as Alita had hoped, the killer fired bolt in her direction. Infused with the scorching Berzerker speed and exquisite Panzer Kunst reflexes, Alita willfully transposed the disconnect appendage between the oncoming dart and her body. With a sparking clank, the projectile slammed home in the dead center of the piece of makeshift armor. Like clockwork, the unattached fragment of shed Berzerker came alive in her hand.

Gathering herself like a professional baseball pitcher, Alita coiled back and sighted. With all of her force, every iota of the berzerker's strength, she threw her body forward. Motion leapt from leg to hips then up through her shoulder, flinging her arm forward at terrific velocity, making it appear as if in four places at once. Her hand went supersonic as it passed her ear, releasing the writhing fragment of pseudo-Berzerker at the apex of the forward thrust. Turned suddenly into a projectile, the asymmetrical chuck of renegade technology left a vapor plume behind it, kicking up a trail of dust in its faster-than-sound wake.

Caught unexpectedly where Alita could easily aim by Tiphares' damning light, the killer barely saw the retaliation in enough time to react. Even then, the shady nemesis nearly managed to make it out of the path of the thrown projectile. The berserk berzerker's hand, transformed into a flying mesh of squirming tentacles, sunk its starving teeth into the tail of the magnificent, black, billowing cloak on the way through. It took hold and began to feed.

A fast flying mass suddenly catching in the swirling cloak acted, bola-like, to pinwheel the killer's form. Serpentine circuits branched out along the billowing garb, burrowing violently through as the weapon frantically devoured what material it could in its desperate search for energy. Just barely managing stay afoot, the killer gave an infuriated scream before casting the dissolving cloak aside. Alita saw the silhouette of a human form retreating back over the hill crest, running frantically in the opposite direction.

Cutting a wide path around the spasming mass of cybernetics that had consumed the killer's awesome cloak, Alita gave chase. Upon clearing the junkyard hillock, she immediately caught sight of a slender person making hasty headway up the slope of the uneven hill. The figure carried a monstrous weapon that looked like a cross between a Tommy gun and a crossbow in one arm, and a bulging pack that seemed almost ready to burst in the other. So burdened, he wasn't making fast headway.

In a single leap, Alita landed square on the Killer's back, sending the huge weapon skittering out of reach. With a crash, they landed in a dusty pile. Instinct taking hold, Alita quickly wrestled the killer into an unbreakable choke. With her free arm, she pinned one of the killer's arms across the surprisingly narrow back.

"Let me go, you Beast!" demanded a shrill young female voice.

"What..?" Alita asked in silent shock. For the first time, she dared to look at the killer's face.

Furious ice blue eyes stared back up at her from beneath a flood of mussy blond hair. No older than fifteen, the girl struggled against her immovable grip, the youthful face twisted in a look of insurmountable loathing. A face scarred with worry lines far before its time, so many frowns where there should have been smiles. Those eyes deep beyond the conception of twelve dozen years, red from an eternity of crying. Tears of hate streaked the dust on still soft cheeks, touching the corners of a mouth that always spent its time down turned.

"Is this another trick?" Alita demanded in the child's ear, "Where's the real killer?" Ceasing her struggle, the girl began to laugh softly, humorlessly, "I'm sorry the truth fails to meet your distinguished standard, Hunter. I never was enough to impress even the most impressionable," When the girl's free hand came up holding one of the deadly bolts, all doubt left Alita's mind. One knee slammed into the skinny side forced the child to drop the bolt.

Alita twisted the girl onto her back and pinned her bodily, "Why, why have you done this? Why are you killing people?"

The little girl spat in her face, beginning again to struggle with all her might. Those hate filled blue eyes contained a hint of genuine fear laying masked beneath unfathomable purpose. Trapped under Alita's immobile mass, the tiny arms and legs squirmed with strength no greater than that of an infant.

"Why...?" Alita could only ask, still struggling to comprehend this defenseless creature she held so easily in her arms.

At that, the child stopped squirming. She gathered herself, bracing as if for the inevitable. As directly as any adult, she stared straight through Alita's gaze, "This is the second you've been waiting for," the spiteful little voice growled, "That moment you hunters always desire. Looking your helpless prey straight in the face."

"What are you talking about..."

"Get it over with! I'm ready!" the girl interrupted, "Do your job and pop my little insectoid head off! Sell my skull to a faceless computer and get payed to make yet another notch in the belt of hell!"

"Why are you saying this?" Alita asked bewildered.

"I may not have a body that can bring Armageddon to this scrappy world, but I will continue my mission if you let me go, I promise you. Even without the greatest of tools, I Kill you people, you arrogant Hunters... so get it over with already!"

"But...Why... ?" Alita asked, her breath coming in tiny gasps, "I don't understand."

"Make it end. Bring Apocalypse or bring an End. Burn the stage or kill the actor. I don't care which anymore." she sank back in Alita's grasp, looking away.

Alita shook the child, bringing further tears to the girl's eyes, "Enough riddles! I want to know why you made me Kill nine people for you!"

"If I could kill like a Hunter and destroy like a Berzerker, the wiles of Karma would never hold me. But, this path is good enough," a soft smile broke the shadowed face, barely able to contend with the ages of harshness. It was an unaccustomed look, but it came with a degree of tenderness, "I'm content to wait."

Something in the girl's face made Alita glance down over the length of the skinny prostrate body. There were pockets everywhere, filled with all manner of odd end. A bandoleer lay across the middle of the thin chest, accentuating the girl's practically non-existent figure. The thick belt at the girl's waist caught Alita's attention. A small digital display in the buckle was counting backward.

The girl took note of Alita's shock, "Fissile material, stolen from the nuclear train stockpile. Wired to a deadman switch and an anti-tampering device. It won't be painful; the explosive wave travels faster than a nerve impulse. My own design, I built it all myself..."

"Why?" Alita asked in quiet disbelief.

"I will finish my mission!" was the whispered explanation, "maybe not so big, but I'm going to do it..."

"What...?"

"Kill all the Hunters I can. You, your wannabe father... and me."

Truth was in those ice tone eyes. A core of pure, unadulterated truth, showing out from that sad face, headlights on a cracked desert highway. Icy eyes, ready to die, waiting to die. On top of a nuclear bomb.

To hold on meant death to everyone dear. Death to Ido. So Alita dropped the girl and ran, not turning back to acknowledge the whimsical laughter.

"You can never run far enough," echoed the little voice off the scrap all around her, "not even if you run all the way across the whole Scrapyard. They always get you in the end..."

The Earth had broken open, Tartarus reached up from below. One last translation brought hell above the surface with a fire that slew all shadows. Damnation cleansed a world already lost beneath the depths. A spherical mark of freedom bitten through the junky facade, bringing death to all who waited, casting terrifying reality into a shade of nothing more than flashbulb silhouettes. God's fist, or perhaps the Devil's, was unleashed from a tiny Pandora's box. Godly might in man's hands perverted until it turned back on itself in filthy nemesis.

First running, then flying, Alita saw the darker void. Divine retribution unleashed into the world with a physical body so primitive that it went back to humanity's roots, but so powerful that its name would be remembered in eternal infamy.

Tossed about by a hand of infinite strength, the Ghetto unhinged itself in a wave of brilliance. Fragments, parts, torn past, tattered shreds of every reality were caught up in a hungry gale. The ship dissolved from around her in insubstantial threads only to unfold space's black abyss far into the sparkling distance. Into void's cool embrace she was flung as the bodies of fellow crew flew past, an arm here, a head there. Blue limb of light, the enemy in pride and soul, gravity beckoned with a too weak tug. Her body was cut from her by blades sharper than broken glass. Spinning, tumbling, forever falling where no downward direction could ever catch her. The enemy had won on that last spinning strike. Truth lunging out with flesh meant to destroy.

When she was birthed again, it was into the limbo of scrap, that place which had caught her one time so long before. Where gentle hands had returned her body, replacing her memory with one that was new. A Loving touch that smoothed away all ills.

Reality wavered slowly into view. Night was still, but flame was everywhere. Burned pieces of flesh, charred remains, skeletal bodies given their last peace in a place where they had been waiting for death. Acrid odor, tart tastes, waft of silence where no voice spoke any longer. But the mountain of rubble remained still, expecting the soon return of its lonely inhabitants.

Alita, wobbling on feet that barely felt connected, gradually brought herself to stand. The sky above was a dim overcast, back lit by Tipharean gold, stirred only by convections rising from the ground. Monster shadows, cast from the fingers of a disturbed puppeteer, glanced through the fetid tufts of fallout haze. But all else was nothing more than a half forgotten reminder.

Clouds began to settle already. Orienting on the gravity of uphill and down, Alita began the slow trek back toward the Ghetto peak. If he still lived, one person demanded her rescue.

Warm flecks of gray snow drifted from above. Through the shadows cast by lingering nuclear flames the flurry fell, settling on all exposed surfaces the sky could reach. Hot breeze fluttered past her face, volcanic breath a light kiss of apathy, daring her to continue. But reality could sink no lower and the newly swaddled heights beckoned. Though she hurt, she could not admit to weariness. Though lost, she knew her feet would find the way. Each successive step left impregnated in the hot powder showed slow progress upward.

At last she could climb no higher.

Standing tall, eight dead hunters at its roots, the black flower stood menacing still. With its ebony stalk as hard as stone, it held its billowing bud high in unquestionable pride, dominant against the onslaught of nuclear charged winter. Caked in hellish snow, Ido moaned softly in the shade of the enormous petals. His face was visibly burned by the tremendous flash of nearby power.

Alita had to struggle to bring her poor mentor down, hearing his pained, half cognizant grunts when she finally wrenched him free.

"Why..?" she asked one last time to the monster plant. Ido coughed weakly in her grasp, his body shivering, cold despite the blazing heat of night.

As if in reply, the Demon plant regrew, standing up higher than it had before. Challenging her to do her worst, its fronds clasping toward Tiphares in the jaundiced light.

"If that's your answer," she returned in a shaky voice, drawing herself up as well as she could, "I'll be waiting..."

fin

Copyright 1999 Gregory P. Smith

--Author's note: Thanks to Dan Snyder and Mark Engels for their suggestions and assistance at keeping me writing this. This story started as an experiment in objectively trying to focus an inanimate environment as one of the characters in the story... I don't know how successful I was, but it does have an interesting effect. The Hunter Warrior Killer was crafted from one of my many nightmares and took on a pretty daunting form. For those who have a weak heart and stomach, I do not suggest reading this story... certain parts are violent and bloody in the extreme, with some fairly graphic imagery derived from my own impressions of holocaust material.

Lastly, thanks to Yukito Kishiro for crafting the magnificent Gunnm universe. All the major characters are his except for the Hunter Warrior Killer who is of my own design.

This tale takes place during the dead space in the second graphic novel... prior to Ido admitting that he is a Tipharean. It can be assumed that the Hunter Killer is making a mark on the Hunter Warriors during the course of this graphic novel, but in the background of the main story. An interesting question... how do you suppose that Ido got registered as a Hunter Warrior (number etched on his brain) when he has the uniquely Tipharean handicap?