Chapter Five

NMR (Platinum Mix)

"I should have figured this would happen eventually."

Raiden and Travis began to circle each other, the latter tracing lazy shapes in the air with the glow of his beam katana as he continued to speak with manufactured wistfulness. "You know," he began, "these last fifty ranked battles have been some of the best I've had. Every one of them unique, every one of them exciting. I defused an atom bomb with one stroke of my sword. I had a fivesome with Scandanavian swimsuit models. I had to cook ramen for the Prime Minister of Australia under penalty of rocket powered death."

Raiden's expression remained stony, as he waited for the inevitable ambush. "Sounds like a blast," he replied.

"Oh, it was." Travis looked slightly to the right of where Raiden was circling, in the direction of the camera. "I can't help but feel a little bit sorry for all the readers out there who are going to have to miss out, since this fanfic starts in medias res."

"Wait. Readers? Fanfic?"

Travis ignored Raiden's raised eyebrow and continued on. "And after fifty of the things, I had gotten all but convinced they weren't going to do it again. They wouldn't be so predictable to start pulling the anticlimax, 'let's let Travis think there's a cool boss fight coming, but have that boss be killed off at the last second by some random new character who's going to be a pain in his ass for the rest of the game' thing for a third time in a row."

Raiden could see the exit door pass Travis's shoulder. A hundred and eighty more degrees... "Listen," the cyborg said, "I'm not a hundred percent sure what you're talking about here..."

Travis stopped and pointed his katana at the cyborg. "You're not going to turn out to be my long-lost brother, too, are you?"

"What?"

"Never mind. It was stupid the first time."

Raiden had to stare, despite himself, before he managed to regain his composure. "You're Touchdown, right? I'm just looking for answers..." He managed to get the words "so whatever" out in the time it took for Travis to cross the distance of the dance floor and take a swipe, forcing Raiden to stop reasoning for just long enough to jump and roll to the side. "Dammit, listen to me!" Raiden shouted.

"No can do." Travis went back to swinging his sword randomly in the air and pacing, as though his little burst of energy didn't happen. "See, I don't know how it works in your neck of the woods, but I've never had a lot of patience for long, boring talk. You let that take over, and all of a sudden you've got people holding up the action to have long, repetitive talks on the phone or random scenes of... I dunno, little girls cooking eggs."

While all this was going on, the feed from Raiden's AR display was finally starting to pull up information. Or, more accurately, a lack thereof. He wasn't finding any evidence of cyber-augmentation, and there weren't any hits on the XIFF telling him who this man was supposed to be; either somebody in the black market had finally managed to figure out how to get the resources and infrastructure to mimic SOP, or... "Listen," Raiden surpressed the urge to curse his luck. Of all the times to run into an unaugmented civilian... "This is your only warning. Drop your weapon and vacate the premesis or I will be for..."

He saw the angry assassin's muscles tense, in just the way he was worried they were going to tense, and hopped once again to the right before he could be introduced to the glowing blue sword that came flying his way. Another swing came at him, diagonally up and to the right. Acting on brute instinct, Raiden threw his sword up for a parry, realizing about a quarter of the way into the motion the danger invited. Thinking at a pace normally reserved for people with enhanced cybernetic reflexes, he tried his best to begin a spin, feeling the heat from the blade as it scraped against his back with the sound of a hollow electric impact.

Raiden fell low, tucked, and rolled, coming up to one knee and holding up his sword. Or at least, half of his sword. He stared dumbly at the broken blade, the end still glowing red hot from where the beam katana cut a diagonal chunk from it. And then he felt the assassin coming in close, again.

Raiden fell to the side, rolling onto his shoulders, and as Touchdown ran past, he flexed his cybernetic muscles with perfect coordination, wheeling around on his shoulderblades and sending a foot hooking into the back of his opponent's knee. While Travis flew off his feet and onto his back, Raiden stood on one hand and tossed his broken katana up, letting it snap into one of his heel arches, and brought it down like an ax.

And that was when his sword was cut into three pieces, falling out of his arch completely useless.

Thinking quickly, Raiden performed a handspring back onto his feet, just in time to see Travis surging up off the ground, his beam katana cutting erratic figures in the air. The cyborg shifted his body left, right, left, right, each time coming within scant millimeters from hot, lasery death. He arched his back, almost impossibly far, pulling his head back with it. He could feel the sparks fly as the beam katana just barely kissed the edge of his chrome chin.

He came back up, as Travis followed through and ran past. He reached into his improbably spacious tactical pouch, grabbing something that seemed to grab him back. He whipped it out and forward, where it snaked out as a long, heavy black cord of something. Travis grunted as it snapped around his chest and upper arms, staring down for a second to try and make sense of it. It seemed to be a series of robotic arms, alternately holding hands or joined at the shoulder socket. At the end was a knife, whose owner's hand held it dutifully to the assassin's throat.

Raiden yanked, tossing the assassin around and up into the air. The arms released their hold on Travis, unwinding him so that he spun in the air like a top. "Bull's-eye!" Raiden felt the world slow down, as he set his electrolytes to overclock his system. He was a blur of motion, swinging the mass of arms around like a double-ended pole arm, the arms bending and wrapping around his body, whenever they weren't busy cutting whistling arcs straight for the assassin.

And that was when Raiden's weapon broke into more pieces than he really cared to count, at the time.

Even so, Travis fell to the ground, cut and smacked around, his beam katana only putting up a modest defense of his vitals. Raiden stared at L'etranger, at this point little more than the two arms joined in the center, and at the pieces of arms and hands languishing on the floor in simulated pain. He tossed it aside, reaching into his tactical pouch for something else to use. "Had enough?" he shouted.

Travis laughed, a harsh, barking noise, as he pulled himself to his feet. "You kidding?" he taunted. "I've fought old ladies, who hit harder than you."

Raiden's face screwed up, in mingled frustration and anger. He tossed something out, a crackling blue line of energy stretching from his hand, to an ornate metal sai. The weapon hooked into Travis's jacket, creating a link between the two fighters. A link that was quickly severed when Raiden came flying in, rockets blasting, with a dropkick to the chest.

Or, at least, that's how it usually goes. What he wasn't expecting was for Travis to see the kick coming, and to skirt to the side at the last possible moment.

The world seemed to slow down, as Travis pretty much did what came naturally to him. He slashed like a madman, filling the air with a cacophony of electric hums and crashes, watching the sparks of blue lightning fly from the cyborg with every swing as the assassin ran after Raiden. With his opponent reeling, he brought himself down low, tensed his muscles, and swung up with all his might.

His sword caught itself in one of the prongs of Raiden's sai. Or at least, in the area of crackling plasma that surrounded Raiden's sai. Raiden grit his teeth, mechanical structures in his body whining in protest as he forced the beam katana away from his already charred body. The two of them paused, for just a moment, to stare at their locked weapons, the both of them realizing in unison that this weapon didn't seem like it was in any danger of being cut into pieces by Travis's sword.

Raiden couldn't help a grin of boyish triumph.

Suddenly, the fight was cut short by the sound of a coach's whistle. The two turned their heads away from the fight and at the entrance to the dance floor, where a young, blonde woman stood, with said whistle in one laboriously manicured hand and the other coquetteishly resting on her hip.

"Zat ees enough," she said, with the sort of potent French accent that the author finds a bit hard to transcribe, sometimes, to the point where he's tempted to not bother. "The fight is over. Travis, you are now Rank Fifty."

"Oh, come on, Sylvia!" Travis shouted, driving his point home with an added push against Raiden's sai. "Is this just gonna be the running gag? You know the gamers get pissed whenever we steal boss fights from them!"

"What the hell are you talking about?" Raiden gruffed, returning the push and adding one of his own.

The woman named Sylvia put her whistle in a handbag that probably cost about as much as Raiden's cybernetic implants from the chest up, combined. She huffed. "Oh, quit taking it like a bitch," she said, with a tone that was just a little too "French maid in a skeezy eighties porno" to be in any way congruous with her words. "You should know the rules, by now. This is not the first sequel, after all."

"Sequel?" Raiden looked from one crazy talking person to the next, bemused. "Sequel to what?"

Travis snarled, shoving himself out of their deadlock with an air that just screamed "Fine!" He paced for a few seconds, muttering dark little oaths to himself about how characters in obscure, ultraviolent OVAs never had to take any of this kind of shit, before pointing his beam katana at Raiden. "This isn't over, old man," he promised. "If I find out you're taking over my spot as the main character, you're going down." He turned and started storming out, exhaling through his nose. Raiden caught him muttering "...unbeleivable..." as he left.

"Wait!" Raiden called. "What's going on? Main character for what?" He thought for a second, blinked, and snarled at the doorway. "And who are you calling 'old man?!'"

"Well, now," Sylvia let the assassin blow past him and started to cross the dance floor. "That just leaves the question of what to do with you, then."

"What does that mean?" Raiden asked. "Are you with the UAA?"

Sylvia didn't seem to hear him, or care, overly much. "You seem to be pretty skilled, Mister..."

"Uh, Raiden." The cyborg leaned back a bit, when the little French girl started getting a bit too close.

"I see..." Sylvia stared Raiden up and down, with the sort of casual, disapproving air one would normally give of a man dressed like somebody's dumpy, unfuckable uncle. "Perhaps you should try your hand at aiming for the top, like your new friend, Travis." She turned from him, reaching into her bag for a lipstick in a shade of pink that was almost impossibly bright. "There is always room for one more assassin in the game, you know."

Raiden shook his head. "Sorry. Not interested. I'm here for SOP, not whatever blood sport you've got going on."

Sylvia put her lipstick away, still not really affected as she dug around for something else. "Suit yourself. But, you should know, since you've defeated the fiftieth ranked assassin, that means you are now part of the system."

"The system?" Raiden was about to ask her to explain, when a bright flash caused him to flinch.

Sylvia had a camera in her hands, which she lowered just enough to give the cyborg a half-lidded smirk. "We'll be considering you number fifty-one, in Travis's place. It is a dangerous title to have; those below you will be constantly after your place in the rankings. You'll need to be on your guard at all times."

No hits on the XIFF. Raiden finally let his face plate open up and settle on either side of his face. She was another unaugmented civilian. "So, what," he asked, "is that supposed to be a threat?" He flinched, when the camera flashed a second time.

"Not a threat. Just business." Sylvia started to walk away, making a clearly purposeful attempt to stick as much seduction into her walk as she could. "If you want to know about SOP, perhaps you will find your answers further up the ranks. I'm sure you can find us, again, if you change your mind."

Raiden thought about going after her, but something told him he wasn't going to get much more information out of her, anyway. Besides, when he looked down at himself, seeing the charred muscle fiber and pockmarks from errant bullets, he realized that it might very well have been time for a tactical retreat.

As he moved to recover his equipment, and see if he couldn't find some nanopaste stored away in Jerry Preacher's prosthetics, the two remaining robotic arms that comprised Raiden's former pole-arm began the slow, mournful process of gathering up its other pieces, scooping up bits of arms and fingers and pulling them in, like a mother comforting its hurting child.