Mardock Scramble

“I’m delighted too, for the same reasons,” continued Boiled.

The air in the room went from cold to freezing. The oppressive air threatened to rob Balot of all her senses. But Balot was prepared for this. She felt a moment’s opening within the rhythm that she had been keeping, and she knew she had to take it. She knew that Boiled would be ready too. She had to bet everything on that fearful moment. She steadied her gun.

Balot realized all too well that she was hoping against hope for the jackpot. Boiled’s jackpot—she had to wait for him to make the first move. After all, she could fire as many bullets as she liked at him, thousands, but they’d all be deflected.

Her only choice was to aim for the instant that Boiled couldn’t generate his PseudoGravitational Float. The instant that he fired his own gun.

With those thoughts running through her head, Balot started firing. Over and over. Aiming for his gun hand.

The fateful bullets should have flown straight toward Boiled, blowing his own bullets off course along the way.

But Balot realized that something had gone wrong. It wasn’t only the air that felt as cold as ice—now the cold was encroaching on her heart.

Boiled hadn’t fired. She’d fallen for his feint. A circle opened up in the door, a circumference of bullet holes. The bullets that Balot had fired that were supposed to converge on one single point. Balot immediately crossed her arms to protect her face. A moment later she felt the impact.

Boiled’s bullet slammed into her crossed arms.

She flew backward.

The shock pummeled her very consciousness just as much as it did her flesh.

The door flew open and Boiled piled into the room.

Balot was numb, but the impact of the giant figure entering her territory brought her abruptly back to her senses.

She fell onto her back and rolled backward farther still to absorb the shock, then stood right back up again. She moved like a prima ballerina, leaving everything to her body’s instincts and to the suit that covered her. She stopped thinking with her mind and went with the flow.

She checked that both arms were still working fine, which they were. She had been far enough away.

Oeufcoque was just strong enough to protect Balot from bullets fired from a distance. It would have been a different story at point-blank range.

Boiled moved in to close that distance. Balot’s eyes filled with the giant man advancing on her with murderous intent.

Balot suppressed the fear and scowled. She snarced Boiled with all her might, as if she were baring her teeth. He noticed just in time.

Boiled’s whole body jumped up, like a football, and he fell to the ceiling. He twisted his body around so that he was just out of range of Balot’s snarc. On the ceiling. Only a few meters away.

Still, he was too far for her to try and penetrate his gravity shield and snarc the technology inside him.

At the same time, though, Boiled was too far away to be able to pierce Balot’s bodysuit with his gun. It was a deadly standoff, and whichever one of them could get just in range in order to fire the fatal blow just in time would emerge victorious.

Again Balot unloaded the contents of her gun at Boiled. He ran across the ceiling and hid himself behind a pillar.

Balot fired at the pillar in a reflex reaction. No sooner had she done so did she realize that this was Boiled’s second feint. He had already started running down the pillar, and he extended his arm and a cacophonous roar exploded.

She may have been able to sense his location, but she couldn’t predict which way he would move in his three-dimensional space.

Balot’s mind went blank as she sprang to the side.

The artillery-shell-like bullet grazed her shoulder. A small corner of her suit tore off and burst into yellow flame. But Boiled’s bullet had still missed her actual body.

Balot rolled away to a safe distance, but as she did so Boiled kicked against the pillar he was climbing down and flew sideways across the room. Or rather, he fell sideways, toward one of the walls.

Balot simply couldn’t tell what was coming next, and she hastily battled down the growing, treacherous feelings of inadequacy that were about to erupt inside her. Immediately she reached out and grasped the situation in the room, as if to convince herself to believe in her own abilities again.

Her opponent could move as he liked. The important thing to Balot was that she knew where she was.

Balot’s mind flipped through all the places in the room that were likely to put her at the greatest advantage. In barely a second she had determined her spot, and she ran for it.

A battle of life and death was essentially a battle of will. If your will was taken away from you, so was your ability to move. That’s how you became so pathetically incapable of even lifting a finger. Well, Balot wasn’t about to let that happen to her a second time.