The Utonium Trials

Chapter 26:

Mortal Combat

There Him was. The monster that haunted her dreams.

Bubbles thought she was prepared to fight him. But she did nothing. She fought desperately for control of her own body. She tried desperately to move.

Instead all she could see was Him, in slow motion, turning his mad grin away from her and towards the judges. He leaped fifteen feet, up and above the Judge stand, about to come down on the three people who had come to Citiesville to cast judgement on the Powerpuff Girls. And Bubbles was still frozen. She was instantly ashamed. She was supposed to be a hero, and those people were going to be slaughtered.

Suddenly, everything sped up, and she heard Buttercup's cry, "Bubblesgetthemoutofhere!" and green blur of light intercepted Him, driving him down into the hard granite of the courtroom in a blast of gravel.

Bubbles blinked, then rose to the air. Buttercup could hold Him for a moment, and there were so many people screaming and scrambling for the exit. At this rate, they might all make it out in five minutes.

It wasn't quick enough. She could hear gunfire behind her, as the GREM soldiers fired into the wrestling forms of Buttercup and HIM. Bubbles scanned the walls, penetrating the shallow plaster with her X-Ray vision. She found a few gaps in the plaster where there weren't any support beams, and where no one was on the other side.

She made a fist and felt energy crackle down her arm, when she had enough, she thrust her hand forward. An orb of light exploded the plaster and wall outward, revealing the hallway beyond. Two more blasts and there were two more holes.

Her daddy got it immediately, and he herded the people behind the defense table out the nearest hole. She was about to start guiding the media people towards them when there was a huge cracking noise and sudden white blinding pain.

Something viciously powerful hit her in the back the head so hard her glasses flew off fifty feet into the crowd of panicked reporters. She fell to the ground, stunned. She heard the sound of cracked plastic and shattered glass.

Gritting her teeth, she pushed herself to her feet, despite the ache in her skull. She turned her head around to see the indistinct, but obvious form of a soldier not ten feet away, aiming his gun at her.

Okay, now Bubbles was mad. She flitted up, faster than he could react, right to his face. "What the heck are you doing? I am trying to save people!"

This close to his face, bare inches away, she could see his terror and confusion. "We were... HQ ordered us to-" Bubbles put her hand over his mouth, and he froze white with fear.

She listened to the radio in his ear. It was hard to hear over the screams in the courtroom but she managed. The chatter over the GREM radio lines was chaotic, but someone was shouting over it all, "Fire on the Girls! They are the monsters! They are trying to escape! Him is their ally! They need to die! Especially the red-eyed demon girl!"

Bubbles listened in horror, but she had wasted enough time. "Stop being dumb and focus!" She hissed commands at the man, "There are civilians everywhere! You are soldiers! Save them! We can handle Him!"

He was still frightened. He glanced back towards the fight between Buttercup and Him, which was a blur of motion and bone-sickening impact noises. Bubbles couldn't see it, but she could hear that Buttercup was taking the brunt of the hits, trying to keep Him pinned to one spot. Not only that, but the soldiers were still firing on both of them. At least one GREM soldier had gotten too close and it looked like he lost a leg from something very sharp. His buddies pulled him back, but he was losing blood fast.

The man made a snap decision and looked back to Bubbles, "Yes, sir!"

The soldier started shouting orders into his own radio, running to the crowd and waving a few people towards the openings that Bubbles had made.

Already the other soldiers were looking towards the man Bubbles had berated, their shooting slowed.

Bubbles didn't have time to figure out if the soldiers were going to figure it out. She shot towards the sound of Buttercup and Him fighting, and intercepted a claw about to snip off her ear.

Buttercup took the moment to lay one last quick jab on Him's jaw, before backing off. The instant she did, Him was on his feet. Grinning merrily he looked no worse for wear. Buttercup, on the other hand, looked in bad shape. Panting heavily, she had lost some of her hair, and she seemed to be holding her right fist against her chest. She was bleeding from innumerable cuts and one eye was swollen.

Bubbles spoke calmly, staring at the blurry Him. "Buttercup. Go save Blossom. She is in danger." Bubbles didn't take her eyes off of Him.

Buttercup glanced at Bubbles "What?"

Bubbles spoke calmly, "I got Him. You save Blossom. There is some fighting going on inside the GREM group. Someone is trying to kill us. She needs your help." She said again, as Him began laughing at her words, "I got Him. Go!"

Buttercup opened her mouth to argue, then nodded once, flying straight up, through the roof in a crash. Him and her were left alone in the center of the courtroom, between the Judges' stand and the audience. Him just kept laughing.

Blossom watched the verdict come down with silent horror. The cameras didn't quite catch the details, but suddenly, Him was there. In the courtroom. "Oh, no."

The camera suddenly jerked aside and fell to the ground. All that could be seen were feet desperately trying to move past the screen.

That monster was there, in the courtroom, with her sisters. Blossom hated herself then more than anything else in the world. She had to be the show off. She had to develop a stupid ego and try to show up G.R.E.M. And now she was trapped, strapped to a table and listening to the chaos as Him wrought destruction.

The pandemonium on the camera cleared for a moment, showing a soldier pointing a gun at Bubbles, who was falling to the ground. The television went black, but Blossom could process images like a machine. She even had a good enough photographic memory to watch the scene again and again in her head.

Blossom sat in depressed silence. There was nothing for her to do but wait this all out.

The door to her cell slowly opened, and in stepped General Grimaldi. He looked angry and foreboding. Blossom's hope withered. "I promise, I didn't do anything," she pleaded, hoping he wasn't blaming her for all the destruction. He had seemed to be a reasonable person before, but right now all she could see was rage and disappointment.

He stepped inside without a word, and someone followed him in. Even in her relatively poor state, Blossom had no trouble remembering the name of the man behind Grimaldi.

"Private Anderson? Why do you have a gun pointed at the General?"

The gleaming pistol was jammed into the general's side. The Global Regiment for Extrahuman Management doesn't do lightweight equipment. At this range, Anderson could kill the general by shooting him nearly anywhere with that large caliber weapon. It would not be pretty.

The door closed behind the private. His face was even, calm and cold, "Shut up. If I want to give you permission to talk, I will. There is a change of leadership within the organization."

Blossom could barely see the pair of them, straining her eyes to see the man. "Why are you doing this?" She was still not at full strength since her drug overdose.

She was starting to wonder if she had actually been correct about her captors being schizophrenic. There must be a faction within GREM that didn't like how things were run and Anderson was one of them. How pedantically dramatic.

Blossom wondered idly if she were getting jaded.

Private Anderson looked like he was about to point the gun at her, but thought twice about it. Blossom could read people well enough to know the General had been ready to pounce if he had the chance.

"You should know better than anyone, thing." He spat, "You already think you are a monster, you just won't admit it to yourself. You even pretend to be a person."

She blinked, "Did I do something personal to you? Or are you just that full of crazy?"

He was probably right. Blossom bet he read her psychological evaluations. Not that psychology could ever diagnose the true measure of a person, but it could give a good outline. Blossom surely didn't think she was quite human, in spite of the blood evidence presented in court.

Regardless, this man was clearly going to kill her. She wasn't going to be able to do anything about it, but she could try to delay the inevitable by goading him into a rant. Obsessed zealots tended to like to speak about their beliefs.

He glared back into her pink eyes, "You are just another thing that needs to be put down. You are a monster. The modern age has forgotten what it is like to be huddling in their little yurt, making offerings to the monsters of the night, praying they would be passed over one last time. The monsters are everywhere now, and the night doesn't contain them. I won't let you destroy our cities, I won't let forces us back into huts." He paused, for emphasis, "Me and my men won't ever pay fealty to your kind."

Blossom ignored the poor grammar, trying to figure out what is going on. "I like cities myself. Which city did you see destroyed?" This was more than just some crazy who has infiltrated the GREM infrastructure. He had other troops with him. Were they part of the same group before they joined? Blossom wished she had researched monster attacks across the globe better. Mexico City and Prague were decimated by attacks. So was Athens. And of course, there was…

The grip on the pistol tightened, and she was worried that he might pull the trigger and kill the General. "When I joined the navy, I was stationed at Atsugi." He took a breath to steady himself, "Just thirty miles out of Tokyo."

Buttercup shot straight up, through the roof. It didn't hurt nearly as much as her fight with Him left her.

Like Blossom told her, their strength was related to momentum, and Buttercup had been so fixed on keeping Him pinned to the ground that she was stuck herself. If she tried to do the same thing a year ago, she would have been dead, from lack of experience alone.

If she hadn't pinned him and fought like a trapped animal to keep him focused on her, he might have remembered to just teleport away, or blast her with his eyes, or something worse. She did not escape unscathed, even just fighting him hand-to-hand.

Even now, as she crested the top of the tallest building in Citiesville, she was still a little woozy. She knew she needed to move fast. She also knew that being reckless would put Blossom in as much or more danger.

A quick catalog of damage said she was bleeding from many cuts on her head, arms and side. Her skull hurt from headbutting Him, and her right eye was swollen. She didn't it would swell shut though, which was good. And she was going to bruise all over from the bullets she got hit by. Overall, it wasn't the worst pain she had dealt with, but it was close.

Buttercup was definitely the best fighter of her sisters, but Him was something else. He must have been holding back when they were younger, or maybe he just got better as well. Buttercup had a moment of doubt, thinking she should head back to help Bubbles. She changed her mind quickly though.

Bubbles trusted her to save Blossom. She had to trust Bubbles. That meant she had to focus.

That meant she had to look at her hand.

Buttercup had lost the three smallest fingers on her right hand, just past the first knuckle.

She had lost them when she caught Him's claw heading for her neck. She hadn't been quick enough and her fingers were caught between both pincers. He clamped down. There had been a moment of resistance, but his claws were sharper than her fingers were strong. Even Him had been shocked into momentary stillness, which Buttercup used to

It was where most of her blood loss was from, and it wasn't stopping. Buttercup made a snap decision, and closed her right eye completely.

Heat and fire in the form of a laser shot lanced towards her hand. She gritted her teeth and grunted from the pain. It it took three quick blasts and she was finished. It burned like hell.

She wondered if they could reattach the fingers later, but it was an idle thought. She didn't have time to worry about that. Already, she was feeling a little less woozy.

Buttercup oriented herself, and shot towards the east, where the secret Gremlin base was supposed to be.

She hadn't gotten more than a couple miles out of the city before she noticed the sounds of jet engines coming in from behind.

She looked back.

Flanking her, there was a machine on her left and on her right. They looked like a cross between a giant robot and jet fighter planes, silver and with the Gremlin logo on them. They had missiles and cannons mounted on them. She could see that they both had swivel mounted turrets that were orienting on her.

She sighed. Nothing was ever easy.