Arc VIII: Gratuitous Fanservice Island

BOSS BATTLE FYVVE

Music: Scream Aim Fire – Bullet For My Valentine


Fyvve reached for the mystery gun on his hip and took aim at Rena in the blink of an eye. The yellow vixen dove for the ground and rolled over, coming to a stop behind one of seven concrete columns inside the bridge's lower level. Miyu followed her lead and ducked behind a pillar twenty feet to Rena's left.

Both women armed their submachine guns and waited for the opportunity to strike. Meanwhile, Fyvve pelted Rena's column with bullets, methodically firing off three round bursts to pin her down while conserving ammo.

In spite of her fear of Fyvve and the volume of the blaring speakers inside the room, Miyu knew what to do. While the dark fox kept his eyes on Rena, Miyu poked her head out from behind her cover and opened fire on Fyvve. Several of the rounds hit, but to her dismay, they seemed to have no effect whatsoever. Only the slightest of scratch marks appeared on Fyvve's power armor as the bullets plinked off it and hit the floor.

Fyvve noticed and laughed. Knowing the capabilities of his armor, he made no attempt at hiding behind cover and continued firing. This time, he took aim at Miyu, giving Rena an opportunity to peer out from behind cover and fire on him. The yellow vixen bared her teeth and let a barrage of bullets fly.

Only for them to do the exact same thing that Miyu's did.

"What kind of armor is that?" Miyu screamed.

Rena yelled back, "I don't know! It looks like the kind in the blueprint I swiped from Andross's lab, but it's different somehow! It's making him completely invulnerable! Wait a minute…"

A second later, Fyvve emptied his mag and stopped shooting to reload. His deft hands swept a new magazine out of his utility belt and clipped it into his gun's housing as the spent mag dropped to the ground, but the split second lapse allowed Rena to leap out and charge him. She drew her sword while sprinting and swung it when she came to within six feet of the supersoldier. She knew that no matter how bullet-resistant his armor was, it would not survive a clean slash from her absurdly sharp blade.

Fyvve holstered his mystery gun and whipped his black knife out of its holder on his chest. When Rena wound up and swung her katana at him, he parried the significantly longer blade with his knife. Rena refused to let him take the offensive, even though his ability to rapidly react to her left-handed swordplay stunned her. She turned the blade over and swung from her right, only to clang off the knife's surface yet again.

Anticipating that Fyvve would find an opportunity to strike back, she kicked him in the chest immediately after hitting his knife. The attack did next to nothing. The armored fox moved back approximately one centimeter.

Then, Fyvve uppercut her extended leg with his left hand, causing her to crash land on her back. He thrust his knife downwards to stab Rena, but she thrashed at it with her sword and deflected it before performing a backwards somersault and rising to her feet in one motion.

The two foes stared each other down, while Miyu looked on helplessly, her bullets unable to do anything against the armored vulpine.

Then, Fyvve laughed and said, "You tried so hard and got so far, but in the end, it doesn't even matter."

Vindictive thoughts of unspeakable violence raced through Rena's mind. "Un-farking-believable. Every word he says is a song lyric."

She narrowed her eyes and lunged towards Fyvve again, but her foe was ready. In a flash, he vanished from her sight, simultaneously tossing down a small, cylindrical object that began emitting smoke the instant it hit the floor. The gray cloud rose and filled over half the room, obscuring Rena's vision and clogging her nostrils with noxious fumes.

Somewhere else in the room, Fyvve yelled, "Come on, get down with the sickness!"

While Rena struggled to regain her bearings amidst the smoke, Miyu perceived a 'doubling' effect in Fyvve's words—in other words, his voice came through not only the speakers, but also through the air itself. This clued her into the fact that he was close by. Trusting her ears, she fired off a volley of shots in the direction she believed Fyvve had gone. A series of plinking noises rose above the din of the music being blasted through the speakers, and Fyvve reappeared.

The dark fox appeared to be frantically swapping out components on his gun while using his active camouflage to buy him time to do so. However, despite his armor being invulnerable to bullets, his invisibility went down the instant Miyu shot him. Within seconds, though, he aimed at Miyu with his mystery weapon, which he had somehow converted from an SMG to a combat shotgun.

"Whoa!" Miyu shrieked, sprinting away from the column that she had been hiding behind and running towards another one. Unfortunately, this required heading into the edge of the smoke. She darted behind another pillar, only for Rena to have the exact same idea and plow into her.

Before Miyu could react, Rena gut-punched her three times and karate chopped her in the neck.

"Whoa, stop! It's me!" the lynx yelled.

Rena paused for a moment, realizing her error. "Fark. Sorry. My reflexes made me do it."

"What do you mean by…"

From the other side of the room, Fyvve fired his newly created shotgun at the pillar, which was not large enough to conceal both Rena and Miyu. Several of the pellets clipped Rena in the shoulder, but she felt nothing and figured that the metallic shoulder pauldrons built into her armor had managed to absorb the shots.

The yellow fox leaped for the nearest pillar, while Miyu stayed in place. At that point, the smoke from Fyvve's grenade began to dissipate. Fyvve shot at Miyu again, but the pillar took the brunt of the attack and protected her.

While the armored attacker advanced on Miyu—and her, in a way—Rena's mind shifted into overdrive, burning through ideas of how to deal with the seemingly invincible mercenary leader. Then, one idea stuck out to her. She mentally kicked herself for not thinking of it sooner, as she knew that out of all her options, this one had the strongest chance of succeeding and killing Fyvve with a single hit.

Rena reached for her belt and pulled out her pizza wheel. Pressing the button on the handle, she waited for the blade to spin up to full speed. Then, she leaned out from behind her column, yelled, "Pizahoīru kōgeki!" and hurled it at Fyvve with as much force as possible. The throw was impeccable. The implement sliced through the air, heading for the armored fox's chest. Rena knew that the blade would slice straight through him if she aimed it correctly, and she had aimed it perfectly.

She waited an agonizing half second for the pizza cutter to claim its victim and slice a gaping hole through Fyvve's chest, but something happened that left her in a state of shock so intense that instead of derailing, her train of thought exploded on the tracks.

As the pizza wheel sped towards Fyvve, he casually took his left hand off his shotgun, reached out, and grabbed the spinning pizza wheel out of midair. He timed the catch so perfectly that he caught it by the handle and pulled it in as if he had merely pulled it out of a kitchen drawer. He examined the implement for a second, then chuckled and hurled it back at Rena with herculean force.

She went bug-eyed and hit the deck to avoid the flying weapon, which she thought the Doppler Effect may have applied to. The pizza wheel shredded through the concrete pillar, cleaving it in half before exploding through the back wall and leaving a tiny hole as evidence that it actually had broken through two layers of concrete.

Rena stood up, brushed off her combat suit, and stared at Fyvve with a slack jaw before he aimed his shotgun at her and fired.

"Shit!" she yelled, diving into a roll and sprinting for the nearest pillar. This one placed her near the back wall, painfully close to the loudspeakers in the front left corner of the room. The shotgun pellets bounced off the floor mere inches away from her legs, which, while mostly armored, had several vulnerable points where her joints intersected.

Behind her back, Miyu leaned out from behind her pillar and opened fire on Fyvve with her SMG. This time, she scrapped her idea of aiming for the "high percentage" shot and took aim at the supersoldier's head. Having been focused on Rena, Fyvve spun on his heels, faced Miyu, and covered his face with his arms. Every one of her bullets bounced off his armor. When Miyu ran out of ammo and stopped to reload, Fyvve lowered his arms and bared his teeth.

A single 9mm round rested between his canines. Grinning from ear to ear, he spat out the bullet and laughed, "You're waking the demon!"

However, the focus being placed on Miyu gave Rena the chance to think of another tactic.

"This Fyvve…thing…can't be mortal. He must be another one of those freakish things that Lucas turned into. He farking caught my pizza wheel. That's categorically impossible. How am I supposed to deal with him? I could throw a grenade or a flashbang, but it would hurt me and Miyu too. No, I can't do that. Think, Miyoshi, think! Argh—damn this farking music! I can't take it anymore! I just want to shoot those farking speakers and… Oh, that's it right there! I've got it! The music—it's the source of his power. If I take it away…"

Rena poked her head out and yelled, "Miyu, draw his fire. Don't stop shooting!"

"But my bullets aren't doing anything!" the feline yelped, as Fyvve pelted her column with another shotgun blast.

"I'm feeling invincible tonight—I'm alive, take a look into my eyes!"

Trying to ignore Fyvve's song lyric plague, Rena insisted, "Just keep firing! I only need a few seconds!"

Miyu gave no response, but Rena knew that it was now or never for her plan. With Fyvve's back turned to her, she sprinted towards the short staircase on the right side of the room and bounded up the stairs. She skidded to a stop in front of Fyvve's music player and crouched. Even though the yellow railing that marked the three foot drop to the main floor offered her no protection from bullets, she felt safer by crouching behind it.

While Miyu leaned out from behind her pillar and bounced more bullets off Fyvve's armor, Rena looked at the device Fyvve had rigged up to play his music—his phone. To her delight, it was the exact same model that she used, which meant that the special proprietary cable required to transmit a signal to the speakers would work with her phone. An evil, satisfied grin crossed her lips as she opened her music library and racked her brain for the most brutal, unlistenable song—a composition so abrasive, so harsh, so unforgiving that it would induce an instant migraine into anyone unfortunate enough to be exposed to it. At least, someone who was not "initiated" like she was.

She opened a playlist titled "Mathcore Favs," yanked the cable out of Fyvve's phone, and plugged it into hers. Then, she pressed play. Fyvve's music came to an abrupt stop that lasted a full second before sounds straight from the bowels of Hell burst forth from the speakers. To increase their effect, Rena cranked the volume control up as loud as it would go.


Music: Yippie-kay-yay Mother!#$%^ — The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza


The sound of grinding, low-tuned guitars, guttural, tortured vocals, and thrashing drums rocked the room. Rena looked over her shoulder in time to see Fyvve stumble and drop his shotgun. The vulpine covered his ears, but because they were already covered by metallic slits with built-in audio receptors, he failed to drown out the noise that threatened to break the 120-decibel threshold.

Rena hoped that Miyu would take the opportunity to shoot Fyvve in the head while he was distracted, but to her dismay (but not to her surprise), the lynx curled up in a fetal position behind a concrete pillar with her eyes closed, her teeth gritted, and her hands covering her ears. She whimpered in pain, but could not be heard over the sonic explosion that rattled the entire ship's bridge.

In contrast, Fyvve howled as the sound waves assaulted his brain. Clutching his head, he shouted, "If the pain goes on, I'm not gonna make it! I push my fingers into my eyes!" He stumbled around, bumping into the half-column that he had destroyed with Rena's pizza wheel minutes earlier. Virtually every inclination he had to keep fighting left his body.

To add insult to injury, a pause occurred in the song Rena selected, only for it to enter a breakdown defined by guitar chugs interspersed by dissonant riffing that sounded something like a swarm of cybernetic mosquitoes attempting to interbreed with an industrial rotary saw. All the while, the vocalist continued screaming out lyrics declaring himself as a "terrorist lyricist" intent on burning the popular music scene to the ground.

For half a minute, Rena felt content to lean against the wall and watch Fyvve wail and clutch at his face. However, when she looked at Miyu and saw the pain written all over her facial features, she rolled her eyes and decided to bring the fight to a definitive end. Leaping over the yellow railing, she let her knees buckle and somersaulted back into a running position.

She sprinted towards Fyvve and unleashed a flurry of rapid-fire punches to his face, throat, and stomach. The larger fox made a vain attempt at fighting back, but every hit weakened his resolve even further than before. Whereas the music raped Fyvve's ears and all but immobilized him, it drove Rena to hit harder. It fueled her rage, which she stoked even further by dwelling on the hatred she felt towards herself after what she did to Lucas the previous night.

Pinning Fyvve against the back wall, she pummeled him in the chest, then brought her knee up to crush his abdomen before she finished with a violent uppercut that sent one of her foe's teeth flying towards the ceiling. Fyvve all but crumpled against the wall. Only by the smallest iota of strength did he remain standing.

While Rena backed up and reached behind her back, Fyvve wobbled forward and begged, "Will you swear on your life that no one will cry at my funeral?"

"That's a given," Rena replied, her voice grim and angry.

Sliding her sword out of its sheath on her back, Rena marched towards Fyvve and closed her eyes for a second. Then, she gave into the rage that she held back from the rest of the world and swung her katana. One slash was not enough. The sensation of her blade slicing through armor, flesh, and bone—it felt euphoric and demanded to be repeated. She swung her blade back and forth at nearly every angle imaginable, tearing through her enemy countless times. Gradually, her physical senses began to numb, and a film of red covered her field of vision until it became opaque.

Finally, she stopped attacking and took a deep, gasping breath. The red faded from her vision as the reality of her actions set in. Taking a wobbly step back, she stared at the ground in front of her. Nothing remained of Fyvve other than a sprawling puddle of blood and bone splinters. His helmet rested in the center of the red pool, its visor chipped and cracked.

Rena clutched at her chest and took several heavy breaths to calm herself. With no one left to fight, her adrenaline began wearing off, and with it, her sadistic combat high. Limping—out of tiredness, not injury—towards the stairs near the right wall, she climbed them and unplugged her phone from the sound system. The pummeling music came to an end, replaced by an eerie silence. She slid her phone back into its holder on her hip. Then, she walked down the stairs and approached Miyu, who looked shaken up, to say the least.

The lynx wandered out from behind her cover as Rena walked up to her. "Well, Fyvve is dead, and the islands are saved. Thanks for your help."

Miyu said not a word. Instead, she stared wide-eyed at Rena for three seconds before she passed out and collapsed on the ground.

Rena raised an eyebrow and wondered what could have prompted her to black out. That is, until she looked down and realized that nearly every inch of her body was covered in blood. "That explains that," she mumbled to herself.

As her hearing returned following the sonic bombardment her ears had endured minutes ago, she perceived a loud knocking sound at the door she and Miyu had used to enter the room. She walked towards the door, and as she neared it, she noticed a button on the same wall. Giving it a press, she let out a relieved sigh when the deadbolt keeping the door latched unlocked itself.

Rena walked up to the door and pulled it open. The image of Fox and Scarlet standing outside greeted her.

As soon as he laid eyes on Rena, Fox covered his mouth and gasped, "Whoa. What happened in there?"

Drops of blood trickled down Rena's hair and splattered against the ground. "I killed Fyvve. You're welcome."

"I…I'm not really sure how to say this, but…" Fox paused, struggling to maintain his concentration while blood literally dripped off of his teammate. "…Um, you know that Fyvve had over two hundred kills to his name, right?"

"Irrelevant," said Rena.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Fox replied, "Well, I'm glad he's gone. I'm sure the islanders will be thrilled."

"Say," Scarlet suggested with a grin, "You might actually qualify as the Great Yellow One now."

Previously, Rena would have snarled and lashed out after hearing such a comment, but after her experiences on the islands, she thought differently. "Yeah, maybe."

"You're not very yellow right now, though," said Fox, stating the obvious. "You should jump in the ocean or something."

Placing her hands on her hips, Rena barked, "Are you farking retarded, Senpai? The sharks will go ballistic!"

Fox scratched the back of his head. "Yeah, I guess I should have thought of that. Oh well. Is Miyu okay?"

"She's fine. She blacked out after I killed Fyvve, though. Do we need to wake her up?"

"I'd say so. We've taken care of all the other mercenaries on the boat, so unless there's someone in the control room, we're in the clear. We need to check that area to see if we can find out who hired these guys to raid the islands."

"I can save you the trouble," said Rena, leaning against the doorway. "East Fortuna hired them. Desmond knew about the Fields of Life, and by extension, so does Rafa. Dr. Reige told me that Andross and Desmond came to these islands awhile ago and picked up that information from him."

"About the Fields?" asked Fox, his eyes widening. "Did he tell you what they do?"

"Yep. He told me everything. But, he also told me not to let the secret leave the islands."

Expectation in her eyes, Scarlet replied, "I can keep a secret."

"All right. There's a certain kind of weird flower that grows on these islands that can make you live for three hundred years if you prepare it the right way. It also makes you look and feel young forever, apparently."

Scarlet's jaw dropped. "Oh, I need that soooo badly. Just think—I'd never need to get plastic surgery. Can you imagine? I'd be able to keep this body until I'm ninety!"

While Rena rolled her eyes and stamped her foot in frustration, Fox admitted, "I was going to say that sounds really shallow, but yeah, that would be pretty amazing."

"I know, right?"

"Unfortunately for you, you're not touching it," Rena replied. "The Cerinians will kill you if you try."

"Party poopers," Scarlet grumbled, lowering her head.

Fox cocked his head and asked, "Well then, how did this Doctor guy get his hands on it?"

"He married into the clan," Rena explained.

Fox let out a frustrated groan. "You know, now I kind of wish you hadn't told me what the Fields of Life are all about. Now I'm going to go the rest of my life wondering what would have happened if I could have gotten my hands on some of those flowers."

Rena narrowed her eyes and lowered her voice. "Don't tell anyone I said this, but there might be some in the shipping crates on this boat."

Fox opened his mouth to reply, but the report of approaching footsteps distracted him. Turning around, he watched as Falco and Slippy jogged towards him, Scarlet, and Rena.

"Dude! You're not gonna believe what we found at the back of the boat!"

Placing his hands on his hips, Fox narrowed his eyes and asked, "What did you find, Falco?"

"We found, like, ten friggin' kegs of booze! Aw man, we are going to have a party when we get back to shore!"

Rena hung her head in dismay. "Fark me."


AUTHOR'S NOTE(S):

Well, that was graphic.

All song lyrics are copyright © of their respective owners, used exclusively for entertainment purposes. No profit or monetary gain from their use is intended, and any such gain will not be accepted.