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Vs. The Gamer

This story is nothing but a huge battle between the superheroes my friends and I created and an awesome bad guy character. Sometimes I get sick of writing actual story elements and just need to vent some nonstop action. Here is that exhaust.

“Why are we here? I mean, what’s the story?”

“He’s a bad guy, we’re the good guys, what more of a story do you want?”

“That’s it?”

“That, and we’re gonna beat the shit out of him.” ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The hero named Creature wears a jumpsuit that looks like a black starry sky with open teeth on the front and an elaborate wing design on the back. He is tall and thin but athletic; he has pale skin and long black “wet” hair.

The apartment complex he enters consists of six two story brick buildings. They are sporadically set up about the paved parkway and each one is named a letter from A to F. Their windows are all intact and the structures themselves have yet to see any graffiti growth though they have been abandoned for four months now.

A stray dog approaches the nature loving Creature. The animal accepts a few “good boy” pats and then bites the hand that loves him. The furry mammal holds the hand in its mouth as its eyes shimmer like a bad television signal.

Creature calls on his fantastic ability to fuse an animal’s traits to clutch the dog’s neck with a viper headed hand. The dog hits the ground mid-transformation. It stands as a jumbled cross between man’s best friend and man’s friendly neighborhood bear.

Creature matches the new image with his own newly grown mane and hulking body. His hands are stubbly nubs with massive thick claws, much like a lion. Exactly like a lion. The two man-amils grapple and immediately begin to claw into one another. Creature would have the upper hand if not for the added agility and quickness the canine half brings to the bear. Fur and hair is shorn away with each man-amil’s razor sharp swipe. Claws are sunk deep into flesh and muscle and pull out scarlet fountains of blood, but each man-amil carries on.

At last Creature takes control and lifts his foe overhead, throwing him powerfully into a brick wall.

The bear-dog looks up with the same lost channel flicker in his eyes as before. This animal, normally a man known as The Gamer, accesses a new program. His ability to manifest the traits of the virtual world of video games makes him an immeasurably forceful enemy. He upgrades to a fantasy form; a lizard-man clad in only a loincloth.

Creatures is tossed aside with the reptile’s blunt shoulder. By the time he stands, ready for more, he has taken on the protective skin of a rhinoceros; the altered form comes complete with forehead mounted horn.

The Gamer leaps in with fierce slashing claws. He runs each hand across the impenetrable skin dozens of times. He gnaws with his double rows of teeth, but gets no further. He is punched and brutally knocked around, into a tree, into another wall, and kicked across the asphalt ground only to come back with more useless attacks. Though The Gamer is lightning quick, he is eventually horned. The impalement is followed by an unrealistic geyser of blood.

Creature drops his prey as he returns to his human form.

With only a new rain and oncoming storm as warning, The Gamer uses one of his infinite lives and rebirths himself as a griffon. He claws into Creature’s calf and knee, thigh and hip, stomach and chest, and at last one horrific giant bird talon clutches relentlessly into the throat, leaving a gruesome new airway. The hero’s body is cast away.

A throaty “bark” echoes above the rolling thunder. A high-pitched dry-airway bark that sounds again and again until The Gamer turns and looks up to the roof of a nearby apartment. He is instantly riddled with throwing knives, stars, a Scottish claymore, and a set of steak knives; the latter are still capable of skinning a tomato.

A wily and very in-shape fellow in loose karate gi pants and a tight muscle shirt is cackling. He gives the finger with a “Nyaahh!” proclamation. He has a full head of thick long dark brown hair, braided in the back but with stray strands maniacally hanging everywhere.

The Gamer uses another life and stands already hacked into his swordsman program and armed with an unlikely looking blade in hand. The weapon passes from hand to hand and twirled once by each.

The man on the roof, known simply as Freak, puts on his mirrored hippy glasses while a black ninja mask folds out over his jaw line. He submerges his arm elbow-deep within the plain empty sword sheath he carries and presents a broadsword proportionate in size for the Statue of Liberty to wield. The massive blade pulls Freak off the building and gorges itself into the paved earth.

The Gamer never moves. The Gamer is now two halves buried under vaporizing steel.

Freak celebrates with grunts in sync to his hip thrusts. He stops to note the hardening rain and rolling storm blazing overhead. He also notes blue luminescence buzzing from the trench. He draws a katana too late and is gashed in his right leg by the rising Gamer and his wicked sword.

The parking lot sounds like a productive machine shop with bites of steel filling the air. The pounding rain cuts visibility to a minimum, but still each offensive strike is met with skilled defense. Clash after clash clutter the air and almost drown out the sound of falling rain.

The Gamer’s weapon is nightmarish. It snaps the genuine katana like an old leg bone. It melts through a hardened steel broadsword like noon butter. Freak keeps brandishing blades anew from his enchanted sheath, but each one is immediately destroyed. The remains of swords ruined become nonexistent as they leave his grasp.

The flesh on both men is carelessly filleted and shaven away with only Freak showing any sign of weakening. At last, The Gamer’s sword is cut from hand. It too vanishes in the downpour.

Both men brandish scythes and pause. They eye each other’s weapon but only Freak grins. He digs his hand into his crotch and puts it in The Gamer’s face to smell. His arm is severed at the elbow, then shoulder, and he is run through from head to abdomen. His body is now a convulsing scarecrow perched on The Gamer’s scythe.

The rain stops suddenly and the clouds move off in an unnatural wind. The skies no longer shake under the god’s anger.

The Gamer throws Freak aside, leaving him impaled, and caring just as little of him now as he did Creature earlier.

A man in a black duster that has been cut in vertical ribbons and with a black fedora steps out of a second story doorway, out onto the tiny wooden balcony. He is dressed in black underneath the remains of the coat and his face is half hidden by a tattered scarf covering his nose and mouth. He looks like a bandit, but with glowing green eyes. The gunslinger Rydias ejects handguns, one from each long sleeve, and wastes no time in putting a bullet into The Gamer’s head. As the body topples over, Rydias utilizes his slight control over wind to hover down to the parking lot.

The Gamer jumps up but is dropped again, a shot between the eyes from the left gun. He stands again but takes a fatal chest wound from the right gun. Up, but killed by the left gun. Then the right gun. The left. The right. Now The Gamer stands armed with an AK-47. Two AKs. Thre-fou-fiv-ten. Somehow The Gamer easily hefts all ten automatic rifles and shreds the brick face off of the apartment Rydias retreats to. The guns never give up; The Gamer has already brought up his cheat code for unlimited ammo.

The structure quickly begins failing as cover in a matter of one minute. It shakes and rattles while the walls rip open in a plastery mess. Rydias floats to the ceiling and blasts through the 2nd story floor, an area not yet ruined by war. From here he dives out the window and glides with gravital speed towards The Gamer. His aim, ever true, makes spider eyes wounds in the killer’s head.

Rydias then takes the downed man and floats to the rooftops. He fires a shot into The Gamer’s head at regular intervals, keeping him out of action long enough to impale him on a weathervane. Now, Rydias uses all of his limited wind control to bring back the thunderstorm and confine it all into an aerial area just above the apartment complex.

“I had an old NES with a Game Genie once. Lightning fucked it up pretty bad.” The gunslinger sneers then swan dives from the roof and a nail of electricity. A dozen bolts strike twice and sets The Gamer’s clothing on fire. Jagged electric death cracks down upon the wasted weathervane, melting it inside of The Gamer’s writhing form.

Rydias hits the ground and spins around with guns drawn and aimed at the roof. The Gamer is gone. He has “warped” unseen to the manhole behind the gunslinger. He loads a shotgun into his hands and splinters Rydias’s spine with buckshot. No need to throw this corpse aside, it lies dead on the asphalt already.

Now, a bass-heavy voice threatens in Japanese, a second language to the import fan Gamer. The words rumble with unknown echoes, never closer, never further away, but all around. A teenage-looking male with dead white spiky hair with ink black tips stands behind The Gamer. A flash of blue school uniform is all that is seen of Animan, the hero with all of the stereotypical quirks and abilities of the anime-verse, as he blurs reality’s background and races past his enemy with a razor sharp clothesline attack.

The Gamer falls in two vertical halves.

Animan stomps a puddle of water, splashing himself and turning into a small boy with a ball cap on backwards, baggy sports clothes, and a deck of cards. “Go ahead Turd-breath. Get up and face . . . ROACHAMON!” Anilad lets a single card fly from his deck and stick itself to the whole again, standing again Gamer. The card emanates a glow of neon pink before a giant cockroach appears in its place. Anilad jumps and shouts with joy as Roachamon attacks, gashing open The Gamer with huge pincers and meddling in his guts ugly hairy legs.

But the roach is torn in half. The Gamer slowly approaches as Anilad shakes himself like a dog, drying off and returning to his original state, but this time dressed in a solid metallic white jumpsuit.

Animech leaps into the air with an overly heroic shout and summons his personal mechanized warrior, the RYX-438, a.k.a. Duster. Exciting J-Pop mixed with a Western twang blares out of nowhere as Animech drops into his “cowboy robot” and immediately draws Duster’s massive six-shooters. The Japanese equivalent of “Die Motherfucker!” blasts over the PA and the twin peacemakers soil the air with window-shattering booms.

The Gamer is lucky to be considered so much as a peppering of body chunks. Each time he tries to pull himself together, an excelled targeting system tears him up again. However, what Duster’s targeting program doesn’t pick up is The Gamer respawning at an alternate spawn point, one previously set up. 50 yards away from the 30 ft. tall mech, The Gamer accesses his RPG mode. The sky crackles and ripples into an elaborate CG background. A drawn out scene plays in artificial graphical glory until at last, a massive cyborg dragon spews from a coil of blue energy.

The Duster turns and switches out the two handguns for an equally gigantic sawed-off shotgun. He only fires once before being blasted by a beam of malfunctioning electric glue. The energy melds over Duster and systematically shuts down every system. The mech is attacked physically by the cyborg dragon and is left battle scarred beyond recognition. The pilot, once again Animan in the blue school uniform, flips and drops to the ground, away from the retreating mech.

Animan stiffens up in a crouched over position and as a brilliant light beams around him, he splits into two different people; one is a faceless monk character draped in a cowl and robe, the other is an unbelievably muscular man with three black Mohawks. The monk sets to reviving the fallen heroes. He takes a spectral blade from the air and inserts it into their wounds, healing them fully.

The other, a fighter named Aniku, approaches the once again normal Gamer. His knuckles crack as he cockily flexes his fists. He smirks a bastardly smirk while his eyebrows dip down into an angered expression.

Rydias and Creature join Freak while the monk becomes an apparition. The ghost savior immediately returns to Aniku, bulking him up threefold. The resurrected heroes lock themselves into battle stances, each one ready for vengeance.

“Stand down you morons. You have seen firsthand that you have no chance here. This is my battle. I will finish this.” Aniku’s voice is congested with raspy attitude. He smiles in appreciation as he watches Rydias holster his guns as Freak and Creature also withdraw.

“Ani has the advantage over us against The Gamer.” Says the gunslinger. “But we’ll back him up if push comes to shove.”

Aniku stands face-to-face with the motionless Gamer. “No more tricks. Log out of your RPG mode and take up your martial arts program. We will fight true and to the honorable death should you turn that cheat code off.”

The Gamer’s eyes flicker but his physical appearance does not change. It seems as if he has accepted.

“Good boy.” Aniku taunts him. “Though I should warn you now that I am proficient in over 2,000 forms of martial arts—most of which you will never know of as they’re long lost.” No more words. A foot flies high and catches The Gamer’s temple. A hand has already latched onto his hair and pulls his face into Aniku’s knee. A loud “pop” is heard as The Gamer’s neck is twisted awkwardly during being tossed.

But The Gamer stands, readjusting his whole spine through a series of twists and cracks. He stares at his foe and does the unthinkable. The autistic and seemingly emotionless boy wrongly blessed with his ungodly abilities, shows anger. His face frowns under hateful scrunched eyes.

“Ah-ha-ha-ha!” Aniku tilts his head back and stabs laughter with an oversized mouth. “So! The freak can feel.”

Creature pats Freak on his head and consoles him, “Not you pal, the other freak.”

“Well, come on,” Aniku continues, “Apply that raw emotion to the most human of them all and destroy me!” Ani charges and The Gamer is ready this time. Attacks are caught and countered, blocked and turned around. The variations in prose and form interchange rapidly as each man switches his style in blind hope of throwing off the other’s defenses. It looks so painful the way forearms crunch together, the way shins mash against each other, and the way fists connect with every available bit of facial property.

“What are you doing? You dare to hold back NOW?” Aniku brings his foot straight up in front of him; a steel-toed shoe dislocates The Gamer’s jaw on contact and hurls him backwards. The landing is a solid asphalt candy coated with pain.

The Gamer blares, not from his mouth or any other orifice, but seemingly from a hidden speaker, “Yendoruken!” A blue fireball the size of a beach ball, with an unblemished white core, is projected from his finger-coiled hands.

Aniku bitch slaps it away. A deep belly laugh precedes he newest intimidation, “Oh, so it will be one of those fights.” A brilliance of light swathes the sky as Aniku ascends the heavens. He screams and sends a starburst of energy from his body. He then returns to Earth, pulsating with an aura of power. His hair, still the triple Mohawk, is now metallic silver with gilded tips. He raises one open palm towards his worthy opponent and shouts again. A literal string of fireballs, like a fiery pearl necklace, is freed. It curls around The Gamer and seeps into him. “Burn.” And at Aniku’s request, The Gamer’s skin glows a furious red, leaving his flesh “sun burnt” from the inside out.

The Gamer downloads an acceptable cheat and uses turbo to fight. To the bystanders’s surprise, Aniku has no trouble matching speed. In fact, both men move even more quicker, more so that the men on the sidelines can no longer visually keep up.

Aniku, however, can see just fine the kick that wrecks him through Apt. complex C. In his nigh impervious form, Ani explodes from the rubble and flies forward. He keeps low to the ground, his fist dropped down, nearly dragging, in a pre-uppercut. The well-connected hit buries into The Gamer’s gut, smashing his innards into his ribs. His body is crushed against building B and Aniku refuses to stop. In this form, one of Animan’s darker sides, he aims to kill.

The Gamer, also nearly invulnerable, is beaten beyond mortality. He can only hold up so much like this before he cracks. All cheat codes are brought back. Aniku is hit with an attack that reduces his speed substantially. The effect is known as slowdown. It is taking advantage of all the power that Aniku is generating and turns it around, slowing him down as if the “RAM” cannot handle him. The Gamer uses the immense slowdown to “jump” as the “processor” skips frames, and essentially teleports himself within Aniku. He has successfully spawned himself on his foe. Aniku falls to the ground in malformed pieces.

“He’s cheating! Let’s go! We can’t bring Ani back!” Rydias is already firing upon The Gamer a barrage of rapid shots with a ferocity never seen. Freak brings out two awful looking demon blades and leaps around in his enhanced way, chopping, never slicing. Meanwhile Creature takes on the traits of every poisonous animal he can recall, doing what he can to get in close enough to envenom their enemy.

The Gamer fights simply to keep up with all three. He simultaneously downloads every ready program to cheat, defend against the gunslinger, the swordsman, and the animal. That is when salvation presents itself.

“He can’t lose. He truly thinks he’s playing a game, so determined to win that he would stoop low enough to cheat. So determined, that he’d do anything to win . . . anything and everything.” Rydias shouts pre-victory and directs his friends to use every last bit of every power they have.

Freak crazily belches swords from sheath, handling as many as he can at once and tossing the rest at The Gamer. Beside him, Creature invents a humanoid form marked by the traits of countless animals, each finger is a different kind of claw, every open piece of skin is now a different patch of animal skin and fur. Even his cat whiskers each come from different species. He and Freak know now what Rydias has discovered.

True to the plan, with so many attacks and so many attempts to protect himself—to win—The Gamer begins to slow down. Not from exhaustion, but from the same slowdown that doomed Animan. The “processor” simply cannot acknowledge all that The Gamer is trying to do. Without warning, The Gamer freezes up. In mid-movement the portly lad of 17, dressed in stained khakis and what was once a white T-shirt, is now a motionless shell.

Rydias, Creature, and Freak cautiously cease their attacks; all of them stand ready for Animan’s killer to as much as twitch.

“He’s not gonna move.” Confirms Rydias. “He’s frozen. He’ll have to reboot. Chances are though that he has to have someone else reboot him. Otherwise it may take him quite some time to figure out just how to restart himself.”

“What do we do with him?” Asks Creature.

“Fuck him up! Hang by ballz! Choke with necklace made from hiz toez!” Freak jabbers on other such sickening torture during a series of stationary back flips.

“He’ll be free eventually.” Creature is pessimistic.

“I know. I think I know someplace to dump him where he won’t be getting free. Someplace that will keep him busy for a while.” Rydias takes The Gamer and hoists him over his shoulder. “It’s another dimension we nicknamed ‘The Closet,’ remember?”

“Yeah, I do. It’s a gorge where all of your fears manifest into reality.”

“If his fear is losing at his ‘game,’ he definitely won’t be getting out any time soon.” Rydias settles it. He instructs Creature and Freak of their mission concerning Animan and is off. His destination is a town known as Temont, the Epicenter of Chaos.

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