Aloha from Hell

I toss a starburst into his face. It starts as a fist-size ball of plasma that explodes into a thousand burning pieces of shrapnel. Crab Man raises his shield to block the hex and I slide in underneath, thrusting the na’at at his gut, going for a kill shot.

The fireballs chew up his face, but he protects his one working eye and brings his shield down at me like a guillotine. I get the na’at into his gut a few inches, but not far enough to finish him. He swings the shield at my head, but I duck it. He raises it high and brings it straight down on the na’at, snapping it in half. That’s not supposed to happen. When a na’at is hit like that, it goes limp and bends in the middle like rubber. Mine shatters like glass. The break is clean and bright like someone’s taken a hacksaw to the thing and cut partway through it. I look at Crab Man. The na’at was rigged and he knew it. In the second it takes me to understand that, he gets my left arm in the Vernalis and closes the pincers. There’s a single white convulsion of pain as he crushes my arm and snaps it off a few inches below my shoulder. It’s a race between the arm and me to see who can hit the ground first. I win.

The crowd is going completely apeshit. For a second, the mad screaming and stomping sounds like I’m back in the real arena. I relax. I don’t want to croak in a backwater Hooverville soccer-mom park, but being back in the real arena, I can die happy.

Crab Man is bowing all the way around the stadium. Me, I just lie there and bleed. I’m done and he knows it. I want to go to sleep and stay that way. The angel in my head starts shouting. He reminds me that if I go out, I’ll die and so will Alice.

I let my mind float away and the pain takes me over completely. The agony of crushed muscles and bones revs my engines nicely. I bark a Hellion combat spell to slow the bleeding and another to suck the blood into the dirt so no one will notice it’s human.

Crab Man is soaking up the love. A few more bows and he’ll come back and finish me.

John Wayne wouldn’t shoot a man in the back, but that’s my favorite target.

I manifest the Gladius and drag myself up. I’m not what you’d call steady on my feet, but I’m close enough that I don’t have to be. I raise the Gladius as high as I can and slice off Crab Man’s Vernalis arm. The crowd goes silent. Crab Man stares at his stump. I take off one of his legs next. He falls on his face, balancing on one arm and one leg. He’s trying to move around to face me so he can attack. He swings his shield blindly, hoping I get too close and he can crush me. I let him close the distance before taking that arm, too. I keep waiting for the armed guards to open up with the shotguns, but they’re watching, as stunned as the drunks in the stands. I stagger around in front of Crab Man. I want him to see this.

He’s got one leg left and I slice that off at the knee. I want him to look in my eyes. I want the crowd to soak up every minute of this. I’m killing all of them. Every portion of pain I bring on Crab Man I’m bringing down on them. Genocide is evil and evil tastes good right now.

I slash Crab Man from right to left, through his chest. Before he comes apart, I swing the Gladius up and over, slicing him neatly from skull to ass. He falls apart in four big cauterized chunks of honey-baked ham.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call showmanship, with love from Sandman Slim.

The stadium is still quiet, like all the air has been sucked out of the place. But all it takes is for someone to drop a bottle and the sound sets everyone off at once. You didn’t see that coming, did you? Some ugly half-dead Hellion foot soldier that could pull out a Gladius. Sleep tight wondering what other secret things us infantry grunts can do.

My left arm has stopped bleeding, but it’s still a big open wound. I bark a pain spell, hold the Gladius to my arm, and burn the wound closed. Then I fall over and drift into a comforting blackness.

I feel a couple of guards drag me back to the holding pens. I don’t go back into the pen with the other prisoners. They toss me incoly toss to one of the blacked-out RVs alone. Even through the half-dead haze I can see they’re scared shitless. Maybe I’m a spy or an officer from Pandemonium come to check up on them and they just tossed me into a death pit with a roid-rage moron. The smell of my burned skin is making me nauseous. Damn I could go for a cigarette right now.

I feel around for the Maledictions. This really is Hell. One cigarette left and it was crushed beyond all recognition in the fight. I toss the pack into the dark. The angel is trying to remind me of something. I reach back into the pocket and find Muninn’s hoodoo healing egg. I bite into it and something soothing and sweet flows down my throat. In a few seconds my head is clear. I’m still weak, but the pain is gone and the world feels firm under my ass.