Chapter 8: Mad Matrix
Copen's hood fluttered as he gazed out over the satellite base. Beneath the rainstorm, the many, wide-rimmed satellite dishes stood like a field of sunflowers desperately searching for the light beyond the thick, dark clouds. One gargantuan satellite stood atop the main control building itself, but at the moment, it was doing little more than catching rainwater. Though Copen understood the function and value of the infrastructure, he couldn't help but see it all as another of humanity's pathetic, profane attempts to communicate with the heavens.
He also observed a pixelated green light glowing from the base of the building: Teseo's digital septima. It seemed he was about to face a tag team of sloth and pride. On the whole, the building and satellite towered like a great, poisonous flower. There was no doubt in Copen's mind; God wouldn't be hearing any of their prayers.
Copen stepped off the building he was standing on and used his hover jets to slow his landing. Preparing to blitz the automated defenses, Copen got a running start, fired his boosters to rocket over the barbed wire topped wall, and bounced off the gate watchtower. He slid off a satellite dish and landed with a heavy clang as he planted his shield and raised his revolver. However, nothing opened fire on him.
"They're…offline?" Lola said.
Copen swept his steady gaze over the courtyard. The automated turrets and combat robots had already been disabled. Keeping his guard up, Copen stood and walked slowly toward the green light at the entrance. Merak and Teseo would have taken over the automated defenses, not destroyed them. He looked closer at one of the turrets. Someone had put a shot straight through its threat sensor.
"Someone beat us here," Copen said.
Still checking his corners, Copen stepped into the lobby, the doors of which had been blown open. A set of digital, green blocks stood like a warp gate behind where the hexapyle had been projected. Copen closed his right eye and used his scanner eye to survey the other signs of combat in the room.
The room was scarred with black marks of explosives residue, and several circular cracks poc marked the bulletproof glass enclosing the security desk. Copen looked closer at the glass. The marks had clearly been made by physical bullets, not energy weapons. He soon found the casings on the floor. Within his scanner's display, they still glowed with a faint septimal signature. Copen stooped down and picked one up.
"5.56 casings," he said. "A kinetic assault rifle."
Though it was once the standard ammunition type for most military assault rifles, Sumeragi had nearly phased out that ammunition type in favor of energy rifles. Civilians in the city were highly unlikely to own any such weapons either.
"Think it could have been a specialist?" Lola said.
"They're an adept for sure," Copen said, "but I doubt Sumeragi sent them."
Rebel, resistance, and terrorist groups had a long history of arming themselves with outdated hardware, and Copen knew of several such insurgents to choose from. He flicked the casing back onto the floor.
"Whoever they are," Copen said, "they're good. Well armed, too. They disabled every security device with a direct hit to a weak point and knocked down the barrier with explosives. Assuming they're still alive, we'll find them in there."
"Think they'll be a problem, boss?" Lola said.
"Maybe," Copen answered. "We'll deal with the devils we know first, but keep your sensors on. Let's go."
Copen approached the digital gate. The blocks separated, opening a portal to him. He readied his shield, charged through, and disappeared in a flash.
. . . . . . . . . .
"We're approaching the LZ now," the VTOL pilot said.
Shiron had squinted his eyes in focus as he interfaced with a holographic screen. Kirin and Cayman watched him.
"Still no good," Shiron said. "The only way I can intrude that system is by literally intruding on it."
Cayman popped his knuckles.
"I like the direct approach anyway," he said.
"Scanners are clean outside the facility," Apollo said. "Even the automated defenses are down."
"Some kind of trap?" Kirin said.
"Probably," Shiron said. "This guy's tricky."
"Nothin' we can't handle!" BB said.
"Right," Kirin said. "Keep it close. Move on my mark."
Shiron nodded.
"Glaive on," he and Cayman both said.
In a flash, they both assumed their armored forms. A deep blue, serpentine tail, like that of an oriental dragon, covered Shiron's legs. He took a deep breath and began to float. It had been some time since he had moved without his feet. He reached toward the container and telekinetically summoned his attack drones to his side where they cloaked and vanished from sight.
Shiron sighed nervously before glancing to his sensei. Cayman, a friendly smile between his square jaws, had his fist extended toward Shiron. Shiron smiled back and reciprocated the fist bump just as Kirin threw the door open.
"Mark!" she said.
Shiron's and Cayman's masks both snapped over their faces, and they all launched over the wall. Shiron hovered and held his drones and orbs in position in front of him as the others rolled, crashed, zipped, and whooshed into formation below him. They stood ready for an attack.
"Clear," Shiron called.
Within the lobby, the group stood staring at the ominous light of the warp gate.
"Signs of a struggle," Apollo pointed out.
"Yeah," Shiron said. "There's someone here other than Teseo."
"Any chance they're on our side?" BB said. "I doubt that Teseo cat has many friends."
"Won't know until we get in there," Shiron said. "I set up a remote access server for us, so if we bypass his firewall from the inside, I should be able to get eyes on the whole system."
"Just show me what to break," Cayman said, "and I'll leave the techno-wizardry to you."
Kirin laid her hand on Shiron's shoulder.
"We've got your back, Shiron," she said. "Everyone ready? Let's do this!"
. . . . . . . . . .
Copen shot down the circuit as a flash of white. The railway of light he was on zig zagged, twisted, and looped before it finally spat him out onto a digital shore. Lola, struggling to reorient herself, tumbled through the air while Copen shook his head and looked around. He found himself within a boundless cyber void.
Everything he could see was composed of neon pixel blocks or streaks of circuitry. Some stray pixels floated like foam-pit blocks in the air, and lines of code occasionally flashed through the ether. In the distance, huge clusters of pixels floated like displaced islands and angular planetoids suspended above a sprawling web of glowing circuitry. Though the patterns suggested a distant floor, in all other directions, the void seemed to stretch into infinity.
"You really went and tracked me down, huh?" Merak's voice echoed. "Talk about no chill."
"Looks like you had some help," Copen said. "Because I know you didn't put in this kind of effort."
"Yeah, but he's otherwise occupied right now," Merak said. "Which, thank God, because he never shuts up. Like, ever."
"Then we'll shut him up, too!" Lola said.
"Look," Merak said, "I really don't want to talk to you, so I'm gonna do what I do best and make someone else deal with it. And, by 'someone else,' I mean this army of killer robots."
A quartet of grenade launcher wielding Eden robots emerged from the floor. Merak cleared his throat.
"Kill that guy," he said.
The robot's eyes flashed, and they immediately unleashed a salvo of explosives on Copen. He raised his shield, and Lola quickly rotated the floating pod orbs like an electron storm around Copen. The explosions rocked the air with a cacophony of concussive shockwaves and raised a thick cloud of smoke.
The robots were scanning the smoke for any confirmation of their kill when a barrage of photons shot from the cloud and perforated one of their spherical heads. With a boost from his jets, Copen dove out of the smoke and blasted out the power systems of another robot before hitting the ground into a backwards roll. The other two robots reacquired their target and took aim, but Copen popped up and pointed the tip of his shield at them. The shield opened, revealing a muzzle which projected an energy arc like a longbow.
"Blaze Ballista!" he said.
A huge, flaming arrow launched from the shield and scorched a hole through both robots before blowing them to pieces with the explosions it left in its wake.
Copen lowered his shield and turned toward the digital obstacle course before him. A little further up, the electronic shore terminated into a sheer drop. Only a pair of parallel walls bridged the gap to the next island. Four Sumeragi mechs, two of the blocky, old generation and two of the sharp, new generation emerged to block Copen's path. He smirked and charged at them.
Each mech had a different weapon on its right arm. One had a chainsaw, one an energy canon, one a blade, and one a shield. The chainsaw mech, being the point of the formation, raised its arm and chopped at Copen. He stepped narrowly to the side, causing the saw teeth to spark off his shield, before he leapt and sprung from the mech's head. While the sword and shield mechs closed in, the mech in the back fired an energy blast at Copen. He twisted in the air, narrowly dodging the speeding plasma, while his shield opened into a different muzzle format.
"Pride Lance!"
Copen pulled the trigger on his revolver, simultaneously sending a salvo of photons back at the mark he had placed on the chainsaw mech and firing a piercing white laser from his shield at the gun mech. The photons burst the saw mech's head into sparks, and the laser detonated the gun mech's engine.
While Copen was still hovering in the air, the sword mech fired its own boosters to slash at him in the air, but Lola launched the Ferrous Fangs and nailed it back to the ground with a rain of metal spikes. Copen pointed his shield at the final mech blocking his path and activated the Pride Lance's alt fire. The muzzle launched from the EX Gear and spun like a drill which ground its way through the mech's thick, round shield. Copen dropped from his hover and caught the top of the shield's rim. He shoved his gun through the hole the drill had penetrated and loosed five shots through the exposed machine. The mech fell back, and Copen rolled off of it just before it exploded.
Copen's jet pack ejected its emptied bullit cartridges. The armor was moving well, but the added weight was draining the energy packs more quickly. He would have to prioritize a grounded strategy.
A squadron of monowheels appeared between Copen and the parallel walls and rushed with a squeal to run him down. He pumped his legs to pick up speed and raised his shield to meet the attackers. Just before they collided, Copen fired the boost jets on the edges of his shield and rammed the monowheels. The small machines went flying back as Copen, having marked each of them with his shield strike, raised his weapon and fired to detonate each of them one by one.
Copen kept moving and reached the parallel walls, but a set of floating attack drones emerged from the walls and formed a line. Copen decided it was time to test one of his new weapons. He shot the first drone in the line before leaping over their retaliatory burst of energy shots.
"Tangle Nexus!" he said.
A blonde whip sprouted from the end of Copen's shield and latched onto one of the floating drones. The whip snatched Copen toward the drone and surrounded him in one of the same drills created by the Twintail Bunker. Copen pierced straight through the drone and used his momentum to fly into a wall run. He kicked off the wall and used the next drone in line as a stepping stone before latching onto the last drone with the Tangle Nexus. He fired back while the whip pulled him forward, destroying both drones at once. He flipped into a landing on the other side.
Merak, watching a monitor from his floating chair, opened a portal in front of Copen, and zombies came pouring out of it. As Copen engaged them, Merak, exasperated at the slight effort he was having to put forth, sighed in frustration. Just then, Teseo popped back into the room with a digital flash.
"What'd I miss?" he said hyperactively.
"Someone else joined the chat," Merak said.
"Omg, it's dat boi!" Teseo said. "This guy's great. He hates everybody. Watch this."
Teseo turned on his mic.
"Yo, Copen-chan!" he shouted. "It's been awhile. How's your family?"
"More alive than you're about to be," Copen snarled.
Teseo clapped his hands together.
"Told you," he said to Merak. "Problem is, he's actually built different. Like, literally a cyborg, such a pain to kill."
"I noticed," Merak said. "Wait, why are we doing this ourselves? We could totally just get them to kill each other."
"You're a wizard, Merak!" Teseo said. "The viewers are gonna love this!"
Teseo hit a series of keys to send a set of coordinates to Merak and nodded at him. While Copen was focused on the zombies, Merak opened a portal under his feet. Copen sank straight into the trap and vanished.
. . . . . . . . . .
The Dragon Saviors emerged from the circuit and tumbled onto the digital floor. Only Shiron and Apollo kept their balance while even Kirin stood up dizzily. The sight of her surroundings did little to ground her. She was standing on something like a pixelated island suspended on a web of glowing circuits floating over a bottomless sea of flooding numbers. The scale of the black and green labyrinth was beyond what she could fathom.
"Um, Shiron?" she said. "Where are we?"
At the edge of the circular platform, another warp gate stood connected to a split circuit path and a terminal. Shiron was already interfacing with it.
"This is as close as I could get us to root access," Shiron answered. "If we reach that, I can take back control and find Teseo."
"Greetings, programs!" Teseo shouted the instant his name was mentioned. "You really thought you were gonna slide into my DMs without me noticing?"
"Teseo!" Kirin answered. "We're here to take back what's ours. Your fate was sealed the moment you crossed us."
"No, u," Teseo said. "You come into my original stage (do not steal), and you think you can tell me what to do? Lmao."
A ring of beam turrets spawned around the group.
"Now, in case this doesn't kill you, brb," Teseo said.
[Mad Matrix- Shadow the Hedgehog ost]
The turrets charged and fired, but everyone leapt to avoid the beams and prepared their own counterattacks. However, before any of the others could retaliate, Shiron shot his refraction orbs to the center of the circle. The beams all converged on the spheres and shot back out like strobe lights from a rotating disco ball, obliterating the turrets all at once. Everyone landed safely.
"Baller move, Shiron!" BB said.
Before Shiron could give his thanks, an innumerable swarm of surveillance drones armed with explosives decloaked all around them. The pace of the blinking light on each drone quickened as they slowly closed in.
"Through the gate!" Shiron said.
The whole group leapt into the warp gate and dashed through the circuits just in time to escape the cascading wave of detonations as the drones decimated the digital island and scattered the pixels to the outer edges of the void.
The Dragon Saviors reemerged, a little more steadily this time, from the circuit rail. They had moved closer to the center of the labyrinth. In the place of more circuits, a veritable maelstrom of polygonal pieces, including the one they were on, swirled in rings moving both clockwise and counterclockwise around a towering central light.
"That's the access point," Shiron said. "Get me through the security, and I can handle the rest."
"Allow me," Cayman said.
He stepped to the edge of the belt of polygons, cracked his neck, and focused his energy. As he began to levitate, everyone got ready to move in behind him. Flames engulfed Cayman's armor, and he rocketed, fists forwards, like a comet through the digital debris, smashing them to pieces. Kirin held out her palm and talisman-tagged Shiron's hand with a high five as he and BB flew by. Before more debris could close off the gap, Kirin arc chained to Shiron on the other side and Apollo took a long leap to catch hold of BB's hand and swing to solid ground.
The moment they landed, a cluster of time bombs spawned around them. The next ring was composed of a set of corridors rotating in and out of alignment.
"Split up!" Kirin ordered.
Kirin and Shiron dove into one corridor while BB, Cayman, and Apollo all passed through the next, barely evading the storm of cross-pattern energy blasts. An armada of turrets, drones, and mechs emerged from the walls, floors and ceiling and trained their sensors on Kirin and Shiron. They opened fire.
Kirin threw a talisman at one of the machines and used a series of arc chains to cut through the robots and press her assault. Shiron also dodged with a serpentine motion and employed a cloaking trick to throw off the turrets' sensors. He aligned his attack drones by his sides and set them to firing a barrage of blinding blasts which eviscerated the machines.
While Shiron made his strafing run on the targets below, Kirin arc chained to a turret on the wall, sliced through it, and rode her momentum into a long wall run. A drone flew in close to blast her, but she kicked off the wall at just the right moment and twirled through the air while holding out her blade. She bisected the drone, exposing its circuits and landed back on the floor.
Just as Kirin landed, however, a mech with a high caliber canon took aim at her. It fired a huge round, but Kirin raised her sword and divided the projectile just before it could tear her to pieces. Two blasts erupted behind her. The mech's arm twisted as it loaded another shell.
Shiron took aim to cover Kirin, but before he could fire, an invisible exploding drone appeared behind him. Thinking quickly, as was his specialty, Shiron whipped around the drone and slapped it with his tail, sending the bomb straight into the mech and blowing it to smithereens.
Kirin looked back and gave Shiron a quick thumbs up, but the floor suddenly shifted beneath her. The blocks moved forward and repositioned vertically, turning the floor into a wall and leaving Kirin to plummet. Shiron dove and reached for her, but he noticed something strange. The pit below was like a mirrored mirror, reflecting both Kirin and himself several times over. He looked up. Surely enough, Kirin was falling back in from above him; the floor and ceiling were looped. He adjusted his speed and angle to catch her and passed them both over the wall.
Unable to keep holding her up, Shiron tossed Kirin forward the best he could and fired a shot ahead of her. A blade-armed mech waited below to impale her, but Shiron's shot parried the blade and allowed Kirin to plunge her own sword like a stinger into the machine's shoulder. She slid down by the blade, ripping through the mech's armor, and tore it out to lop off the arm altogether. A turret behind the mech attempted to fire an energy bolt straight through the disabled robot to hit Kirin, but Kirin's Issen Dash phased her through both the machines and the shot together, leaving them to split and fall in her wake.
Kirin rapidly slid her blade back into its scabbard and flicked out a talisman to engage the last line of defenses, but Shiron was already making his move. He drew something like two gun barrels that had been cloaked on his back and slung them just in front of his attack drones. The barrels instantly snapped into place over each drone and pointed toward his refraction orbs. A stream of energy spewed from each drone and passed at a slight angle through the orbs, growing more intense in the process. The lasers swept through the armed barricade and left nothing but burning plasma and melted metal in their path.
The two finally emerged from the corridor and landed on the central platform. They looked back just in time to witness Cayman tackle a mech out of the other corridor as a swarm of BB's geists ripped through the turrets. Apollo swung out of a charging drone's path, stuck it with his knives, and rodeoed it into the mech just as Cayman rolled away. They emerged from the dust of the blast, and the group reunited in front of the central terminal.
"How's my disciple holding out?" Cayman asked.
"Fantastic," Kirin said. "We should bring him more often."
"Thanks guys," Shiron chuckled, "but we're not out of this yet."
A huge, glowing diamond floated at the center of the triangular tower, and light beamed from it into the distant cyberspace. As Shiron typed on the terminal, a red light flashed from the shape.
"Of course," Shiron said in frustration, "he put a multifactor authentication lock on it."
"A multi who what?" Cayman said.
"This is going to take an extra step," Shiron said.
Three circuit lines, one from each side of the tower's base, split through the floor in three different directions.
"We'll have to follow those codestreams to the locks," Shiron said. "Break through them, and I'll be able to get you a shortcut back here."
"Got it," Kirin said. "Cayman, you stay with Shiron. Teseo will probably come after him as soon as he catches on. The rest of us will bring down the locks."
Everyone agreed on the plan and moved to their positions, but Apollo stepped alongside Kirin and walked with her.
"You're certain you should go alone?" he said. "Cayman would be just as glad to make the trip."
"This isn't his kind of environment," Kirin answered, "but Shiron couldn't be in better hands."
She stopped and faced him.
"Look," she continued, "I haven't forgotten what we talked about. I'll be right back. Ok?"
BB was watching Kirin and Apollo to ensure he wouldn't have to intervene again. Apollo nodded and extended his hand. Kirin took it. BB breathed a sigh of relief.
"See you soon," Apollo said.
. . . . . . . . . .
Copen dropped out of the portal and landed with a heavy clang. He climbed back to his feet and looked around. He was in what appeared to be a long, darkened hallway, and a faint light was reaching through a slit in the bottom of the left wall.
"Lola, position report," Copen said.
"No idea, boss," she answered. "GPS doesn't exactly work in cyberspace, you know."
"Hey, is someone over there?" a voice called.
Copen looked to the left wall and noticed a shadow shift under the slit. Before he could answer, a set of lights flashed on all the way down the hall, and Teseo's voice screeched through the speakers.
"And we are live!" he said. "Welcome to Teseo's Day of the Dead Digital Death Race! I'm here in the cyber void with my co host. Merak, any words for the viewers at home desperately trying to distract themselves from the impending zombie apocalypse?"
"Please, don't involve me in this," Merak said.
"I don't like the sound of this," Lola said.
"I don't like the sound of anything out his mouth," Copen added.
"Here's how this works," Teseo said. "Two contestants will race to see who makes it out of the corridor of doom alive."
"And what makes you think I'll play along with your games?" Copen said.
"Excellent question!" Teseo answered. "Allow me to introduce you to my old friend, instant death spikes!"
The back wall erupted with deadly rows of seething plasma spikes.
"Son of a bitch!" the voice beyond the wall exclaimed.
"Make your way through the traps, and hit the buzzer before your opponent, or it's #gameoverman!" Teseo said. "Ready? Go!"
The back wall began to close in, forcing Copen to move forward. A set of mobile mines spawned from the floor and floated like air hockey pucks in his path. Copen fired a shot to detonate one before he reached it, but rather than exploding, the mine rapidly shifted left and passed under the gap in the wall. He heard a shot from the other side, and a mine came sliding back under the wall to Copen's side. His only option was to keep running and pushing the mines out of his path. By the sound of it, his opponent was following right in his footsteps shooting over the mines even more quickly than Copen could. Finally, the mines forced Copen to dive forward, narrowly evading the chain reaction of pressurized blasts.
"C'mon, man," the voice on the other side said. "You know they're not letting either of us win this."
A ticking time bomb spawned in front of Copen. It was a model he knew how to disable, and Lola fired the Stellar Spark in an attempt to do so. The bomb, however, digitized and disappeared. It only took Copen one try to guess where. Surely enough, a shot rang from the other side, and the bomb, still ticking down, reappeared further up Copen's corridor, the wall continuing to pressure him from behind.
"You're not giving me much reason to trust you," Copen shouted back through the wall.
Copen kept running and shooting the bomb, he and his opponent passing it back and forth like a hot potato, ticking further and further down. It came back to Copen's side dangerously close to detonation. He planted his shield in the floor.
"Glacier Wall!"
A wall of thick ice erupted from the EX Gear, forming a defensive barrier in front of Copen. He heard the timer reach its conclusion. The bomb detonated with a blinding flash and flooded the hall with vaporizing heat. The flanks of Copen's ice wall cracked and shattered, sending the ice shards flying back into the spike wall, but the center mass of the shield just barely held out. With the spikes mere inches from shoving him through the ice, Copen rolled over the wall before the spikes pushed through it like a snow plow.
Knowing his opponent had to have gained on him, Copen dashed forward with his thrusters. A holographic target appeared at the end of the hall, just above the buzzer. Copen took aim, but his opponent was an instant quicker. At the sound of the shot, the target disappeared and a trio of rapid-fire laser turrets popped from the walls and ceiling. Copen heard a high pitched whir as they wound up and trained their sights on him. He reacted quickly.
"Crystal Ball!"
A prismatic orb of purple, same as the Prism Break, burst from Copen's shield and hovered in front of him. The turrets unleashed their barrage of intermittent lasers which converged on the crystal Copen was using to shield himself. Upon hitting the prism, the beams deflected through it and scattered to Copen's flanks. He, in turn, fired two photon beams from his side-turned revolver through the ball. They deflected to the left and blew out the wall turret's firing mechanism. Simultaneously, Lola launched a Vantage Raid ring upward, its sticky substance clogging the ceiling turret's barrel and causing it to backfire on itself. Copen launched the crystal at the last turret, overpowering its beams and crushing it with a shattering blast.
Copen heard his opponent's footsteps as the spike wall continued to close in on him. Despite what the man had said about neither of them winning, Copen knew he would be a fool to trust him not to hit the buzzer out of desperation. He boosted toward the buzzer, rolled and raised his shield to fire another EX weapon.
"Lazy Laser!"
Using his recreation of Merak's septima, Copen tore a portal open in front of the wall and blasted a massive laser through it, causing it to gush from another portal on the other side of the wall and block the buzzer with the energy torrent.
"Whoa!" the mystery opponent cried. "You want to play like that? Fine!"
A grenade rolled under the wall and bumped against Copen's foot. With a panicked reflex, Copen kicked against it as he dove back against the other wall. As Lola defended Copen with her orb barrier, the grenade rolled just under the slit in the wall and detonated.
Copen heard a thud from the other side as his opponent slammed against either the wall or the floor. The wall itself had cracked from the explosion but was beginning to restore itself. The deadly spikes were dangerously close.
"Screw this!" Copen said.
Copen switched the firing mode on his revolver and slid a disc of Greed Snatcher bullets into its side. He fired three of the energy devouring rounds in a triangular pattern at the wall, blocking off the recovery systems, before blowing a hole through it with the Blaze Ballista.
"Ok, that is definitely not allowed!" Teseo said.
As the thin smoke and debris cleared, Copen discerned the silhouette on the other side, but more importantly, he saw that his attack had blown a hole through the floor beneath the gap in the wall. A sound like an alarm blared into his ears followed by the revving of the spike wall picking up speed. Copen took his chances and dove through the hole.
As soon as he hit the floor of the open space below, a series of portals dropped a horde of zombies all around him. The moment he raised his gun, he heard the thud of his opponent dropping in behind him, but he was only able to glance back enough to tell that the man was facing the other direction before he had to open fire on the zombies.
The crack of several rifle shots set Copen's ears ringing as they both perforated the zombies on each side with a hail of precision headshots. While they were firing, the two strangers unintentionally circled back-to-back in perfect formation, mowing down the screeching corpses as they rotated. Before it was over, the other man had to drop his assault rifle to his waist and finish the ballistic onslaught with his sidearm.
When the last zombie fell, Copen immediately swiveled to face the gunman. At the same moment, the gunman switched his emptied pistol to his left hand and snatched a revolver from an underarm holster. The last shell casing rattled against the floor as the pair pointed their revolvers at each other's face and gasped for air. Copen's piercing eyes locked with a pair of blue-tinted shooting glasses.
"Who are you?" Copen demanded.
"That's my line," the other said back. "And before you do anything stupid, you oughta know, I don't miss. It's kind of my thing."
Copen ran his glare over the mystery gunman. From his black combat boots up, the man was clad in a blue uniform with all manner of tactical equipment strapped across it. It had been some time since Copen had seen such an outfit, but he recognized it immediately: QUILL. The skin over his clenched jaws was well-tanned, and slicked-back, spiky, auburn hair topped his head.
Copen's eyes widened as he looked closer at the gun in his hand. It couldn't have been, but Copen was all too familiar with the white revolver who's barrel he was staring down. It was the very Border revolver he had lost decades ago, his father's own gun.
"Where the hell did you get that gun?" Copen snapped.
"Kind of touchy subject, pal," the gunman answered. "Involves some dead friends. Oh, I see what you're getting at, though. Matching revolver, crazy-ass shield, lethal gaze; you're the adept slayer, ain'tcha?"
The gunman suddenly shifted his aim and fired, whizzing a bullet just past Copen's hood to blow off the head of a zombie that had suddenly appeared. Seeing another zombie rise from the opposite side, Copen returned the favor and trained his aim right back on the other's forehead. The gunman casually raised his arms and let his handguns dangle from his fingers by the trigger guards.
"Nice shot," he said with a grin. "Name's Zeno, old friend of Gunvolt. It's Copen, right?"
Copen finally lowered his weapon, prompting Zeno to breathe a sigh of relief.
"That gun belongs to me," Copen said. "Give it back."
"No can do, bud," Zeno answered as he holstered the revolver and set about reloading his other weapons. "See, the odds are a little uneven out here, and you don't seem to be lacking firepower yourself. That being said, you probably didn't mean to, but you actually saved my ass back when Zhonda was still screwing around, so I kinda owe you one. If we were to both make it out of here, I might consider parting with it."
"Forget it," Copen scoffed and turned his back. "I'm not working with an adept terrorist."
"I'm not with QUILL anymore," Zeno said. "Yeah, I got the gear still, but it's just for emergencies. Which this clearly is."
"Uh-huh," Copen said incredulously.
"You're the religious type, aren't you?" Zeno said. "C'mon. Us making a miraculous escape with matching guns and common enemies has to be God or fate or something, right?"
Copen sighed in frustration and glanced at Lola.
"It would be nice to have some help, boss," she said.
He turned back to Zeno and looked him in the eye.
"Get in my way or fall too far behind," Copen explained, "and you're dead. Got it?"
Zeno smirked, adjusted his blue glasses, and propped his rifle over his shoulder.
"Whatever you say, chief," he answered.