II.
Escape from Water World.
HUNK saw an iron pipe flying towards his face and dodged it, watching it scatter while moving away from the ladder and the mob of villagers with their clubs and axes climbing up said ladder. He cocked his head at the sound of helicopter rotors looking to the sky to see a sleek, black helicopter, circling the rooftop of the building across the one he stood on.
The situation followed: he had to make his way back to the other roof to get up to the chopper. The agent went further and stopped at the sight of archers, ganados with crossbows, aiming at him from atop highly-structured wooden platforms, peering through their scopes at his visage. His shooting arm jolted at the impact of one of the black arrows. He grunted in pain and yanked the sliver out of his damaged arm.
HUNK responded by shooting at them; one hit one kill, tagging five in precisely five seconds, not wasting a single bullet, aiming carefully. He nodded to himself— grounds for improvement— especially since the agent could still aim moderately well, despite his injured arm. He took a hurried brief moment to reach into his med-pack and leashed a tight tourniquet around his arm to arrest the bleeding; gritting his teeth at the searing pain that shot up his arm— far too long since he felt exquisite pain such as this.
Agent HUNK found himself halfway across the platforms when he heard the front door of the shack he just left break into pieces. He turned to see a hulking monstrosity of a villager leering eagerly out at him. The man had a burlap sack fastened over his head and a dirty flannel shirt stretched across his barrel chest; his arms the size of HUNK's waist, flexing as he held a gigantic, filthy yellow chainsaw with two spinning blades placed adjacent to each other, jutting from the machine in their buzzing frenzy.
The sight of the oversized serial lumberjack made HUNK feel, only briefly, as if he stumbled into a bad slasher flick; a feeling that only got worse when the giant's eyes locked gaze with his red lenses. The crazed lumberjack deftly yanked a cord on his chainsaw, revving it faster and faster as he swept the massive blades in wide deadly arcs telegraphing precision slicing unexpected from a big, heavy machine. HUNK noticed thick clouds of smoke chugging out the chainsaw, shrouding the big man, rendering it impossible to see the blade swipes until it seemed too late.
He climbed the same ladder again, resisting the urge to contemplate on the irony of returning to the same place he just left, and basked in the welcome thrums of the helicopter rotors. When he hoisted himself over the edge, everything turned wrong, almost to the point of stopping him entirely and forcing him to take a few precious seconds to mull the situation over.
The chainsaw-wielding giant should've been miles back behind him but HUNK sighted him on the rooftop he just got on, chasing away the big helicopter. A surreal sight since the giant lumberjack looked like he could take down the entire chopper with just one punch. The chopper veered away from the crazed lumberjack and HUNK switched on his radio, catching the frantic feed with erratic bursts of static:
"—can't evac on L— huge maniac's not letting us get one— get to the top of the tower— the tower— can't follow you up there, get to the top of the tower—"
Tower? Ah, there. Hard to miss the tall wood scaffolding with three platforms, connected by three ladders leading all the way up to their respective platforms. Looked like a long climb but the lumberjack couldn't possibly make the distance, no matter how fast he appeared to be.
Then HUNK stopped and blinked at the sight of the rampaging lumberjack. No flannel shirt. Only a plaid smock with a bloody apron. Thick bandages covered his face, not a burlap sack. It dawned on him as soon as the initial flannel-clad chainsaw maniac landed on the rooftop after jumping the ladder distance behind him.
Two of them.
HUNK found himself sandwiched between both chainsaw-wielders, noticing that the chainsaw of the apron wearer didn't look as heavily used as the yellow revving machine of the other. The mere existence of these two boggled his mind, and the mental trap HUNK feared would seize him during a particularly confusing scene took brutal hold of him, freezing him in a mental frenzy to figure out the situation.
"—get to the top of the fucking tower—"
As soon as his squawking radio shook him out of his brief haze, he recognized his situation: Two big chainsaw-wielders on both sides ready to kill him and that's all he needed to know. HUNK moved, dashing past the second chainsaw man with the bandages wrapped on his face, and made a run for the same scaffold he used to leave the same building. He felt stuck running in circles, but to leave the L rooftop, he had to use the fastest way; the scaffold and its pulley.
He could feel the heat of the chainsaw behind his back. The loud buzzing seemed to be everywhere, even inside his head through the gas mask. HUNK didn't dare look back at the two behemoths roaring after him with their growling instruments promising painful death, pitting all of his focus at the pulley.
With a hard leap, he yanked the handles and risked a look backwards; realizing that the chainsaw men had been nipping behind his heels the entire time, close enough to touch. They bellowed with bloody fury as their slippery prey stayed one step ahead of the deadly bite of their chainsaws, maddingly close and yet so far, escaping further and further into the distance. HUNK looked forward and saw a villager on the edge of the small shack the pulley lead down to.
He let go of the pulley when it jerked to a stop, using his body momentum to ram into the villager, launching him clear over the rooftop floor and crashing through the wooden fence, sending him flailing to the sea below. HUNK took no time to admire his handiwork; he turned to find himself teetering over the edge, staring down the top of the ladder at the mob of villagers, soon to be joined with both of their fearsome brethren. Soon enough, one of the chainsaw giants, the one with the bandaged face, stomped down to their location eager to get another shot at the agent.
When he did all this, his radio had been screaming at him to hurry his bloody ass up the entire time:
"—the tower—"
Irritated, HUNK shut off the radio to focus on his situation, he didn't need radio gabbing at his ear like a school girl while he tried not to die. The unrelenting mob now started to climb the ladder, one after another, like ants racing across their own dead to get at a dying spider. Reaching into the bag, he grabbed the last grenade, pitching it directly at the chainsaw giant amongst the midst of villagers. Only too late did they notice the frag grenade clinking to a stop. One ganado tried to voice out a warning but the grenade beat him to it, blasting shards of metal in every which way.
Ducking to avoid the exploding debris, he looked down to see most of the mob, including the chainsaw giant, decimated to bloody husks. Another glance at the second chainsaw giant, the one wearing flannel and a burlap sack, leaping down from the L-shaped building confirmed that this particular giant could care less what happened to his comrades. The demented lumberjack sighted HUNK running across the other building and started to run, but at the sight of HUNK leaping off the building and grabbing onto the ladder leading up to the top of the tower, he changed direction.
The mercenary scrambled up to the ladder at a blazing pace, his hands and feet whipping to grasp each creaking rung. Close enough to hear the pilots' frantic shrieking over the deafening thumps of the rotor blade; he turned on the radio to hear them:
"—he's coming here— that big bastard with the chainsaw's jumping the damn platform—"
HUNK climbed even faster, feeling the palm of his gloves digging in his skin as he raced the giant to the top of the tower. When he vaulted over the top, he had a moment to see the lumberjack on the second platform below, staring up at him with a sick fervent look in his beady red-rimmed eyes. The chopper hovered next to the tower, inching away with each second, the skids parallel to the top platform. HUNK felt the platform shudder with the sudden added weight of his persistent foe, his flannel-clad back to the agent, who instantly brought his TMP to bear and rattled out a good steady stream of bullets into the back of the giant's head.
The giant reared with the pummeling blows, but didn't fall, turning instead to face his elusive prey. He shook off machine gun bullets to the head, giving no notice to the slugs punching in the burlap sack, and stepped forward to give the agent a deadly sort of good bye message. HUNK would have none of it, he shot out one of the giant's eyes and as the giant hollered and stomped in pain, HUNK grasped the chopper's right skid, propelling himself up to the waiting cabin. The giant lumberjack desperately lurched after him as the chopper put some distance between them, but HUNK knew his enemy could leap the distance.
He leveled the TMP and took careful aim at the giant. Before the giant could get one foot off the air, HUNK held his breath and slipped into a strange sort of state… he could see every stitch, every ridge of that ugly burlap sack, and so he shot out the giant's other eye. The crazed lumberjack went screaming all the way down. HUNK didn't give him a second glance, and went back inside the cabin, taking a seat.
"My God, Mr. Death…"
HUNK looked at the pilots, one white, one black, staring back at him with apparent fear and respect in their faces. The first pilot looked younger than him, babbling things like, "You killed that thing, Mr. Death, I've heard about you, but I've never seen you in action, holy crap, you got him with one shot." HUNK shrugged off the compliment by field-stripping his TMP. The pilot, getting the point, went back to doing his job. The second pilot stared at him with a grim frown. Only when the mercenary stopped to regard him did he speak:
"How many have you survived, Mr. Death? Or do you even wish to survive? From what I see, in the face of your demise with time breathing down your neck, you beg it to kill you. You beg and you stall, and when the death gets close, you kill it instead. You, agent HUNK, you love to cheat death, don't you?"
HUNK spoke.
"No", he said, choosing to humor the second pilot for now. "Death and I are just fine. I make my due payments. There is no peace without war. There is no war without death. That's where I come in. Nothing about cheating death or begging it. I don't beg. Understood?"
The second pilot only stared at him before retreating back to the cockpit, but not before saying, "Even killers get tired of the battlefield, yet you do not tire. You must be more than a killer."
HUNK took the words, mulling it over in his mind. He didn't reply. He just sat in silence and thought.
FIN
NOTES:
Well now, isn't that nice? A finished story, how quaint!
My apologies. You see, I particularly get this way when I finish a story, I get this feeling of pride and happiness, just looking at the FIN.
Man, I need to do that more.
Anyway, nothing special other than HUNK is really badass and it's seriously fun to play as him. Yes, this was my run, and even though I embellished a few parts (Like ramming a ganado from the building, or the chopper itself), this was basically my run all the way through. I didn't kill very many ganados because I was busy stringing up a storyline and saying, "WHY IS HUNK HERE! OH YEAH, BECAUSE BECAUSE BECAUSE" and so on.
Well, now you know. If you're wondering why this shit is so short, it's cuz I got so much stuff in my life I gotta take care of.
I just hammered this down on the fly.
Now it's time for you to tell me what you think! BR loev teh review.
- BR