CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Power-Up

The sparks of magic spread out around me as I poured a vial of my blood over my head. It shouldn’t have been enough, but thanks to the arcanite in my hand, just this amount of treated blood was all I needed to spread the enchantment across my entire body.

The power to override even the rules of magic… I get it now.

I didn’t wait for the blood to harden over my skin. It was enough that I felt suddenly heavy like I was putting on armor. And with this feeling strengthening my resolve, I rushed forward like a linebacker chasing after the guy carrying the pigskin to the end zone. I was just in time too, because the fiend had lunged for Corporal Allers who had been too busy reloading his rifle to react to its leap.

“Not on my watch!” I yelled.

In that brief second between life and death, I tapped into the power pulsing in my hand and used the arcanite’s energies to boost my blood’s ability to bring more oxygen to my muscles. Power unlike anything I’d ever felt before flooded into me, supercharging my senses so that I could feel every bit of that jolt of lightning rushing through my veins — and it felt amazing.

I’d gotten the idea earlier from Corporal Allers after he’d taken that go pill and told me how it helped to heighten his battle senses. Although my idea of ‘Blood Doping’ worked a little differently from the amphetamine he’d taken. Magically increasing the hemoglobin — an oxygen-carrying protein — in my bloodstream was equivalent to a strength and agility buff that allowed me to bridge the distance between me and my prey at inhuman speed.

“Allers, duck!”

I was moving too fast to notice if he'd listen. But he must have, as I hadn't barreled over him in my haste. I tackled the fiend in mid-air just before its long-nailed fingers could reach the corporal.

The force of my momentum sent us crashing into the wall to the right. And since this makeshift laboratory seemed so ill-maintained, it didn’t surprise me so much that we two monsters broke through the wall’s wooden frame and into the secret room where we’d left Private Jenkins in. What surprised me more though was how I felt almost no pain from that crash. Not even after the fiend latched its powerful jaws around my neck while we wrestled on the white-tiled floor.

“Sorry, I’m a lot sturdier than before!”

Wolf-CQC taught me to always go for the mount after a successful tackle, and that’s exactly what I did despite the fiend clawing at me from below.

“I’m the hammer—”

I pummeled the fiend’s face in with my now blackened fists, and it felt really, really, good.

“—and you’re the nail!”

Boom, boom, boom!

I got a good rhythm of one-two punch combinations in before the fiend managed to slither away from underneath me like the part-lizard it was. The fact that the floor had slightly caved in from my attacks probably helped in its escape. It was also pretty concerning that I'd punched the fiend hard enough to wreck the floor underneath it but it was also healing fast enough to get away from me.

“Hey, we’re not done wrestling!”

I reached for its shoulder with my hand, and the fiend turned around to bite into my outstretched arm. And although there had been just the barest hint of pain, its sharp teeth couldn’t penetrate my iron defense.

“Iron blood,” I grinned.

Remembering how it smacked me in the face earlier, I launched a haymaker right into its lizard-like nose and sent the fiend flying into the back of the room. It was true. Payback really was a bitch.

My elation was quick to vanish though because I remembered who’d been laying there in the back of the room.

“Jenkins!”

I rushed over to where his body lay, and after a second of checking his wrist, the lack of a pulse told me that it was far too late. Private Jenkins was dead, and it was my fault for not saving him immediately after he’d fallen.

“No, damn it!”

There was a hiss on my right, and just as I turned in its direction, the fiend’s fist smacked my cheek for the second time that night. I was blown backward but not as hard as earlier. Although that blow definitely rocked me enough that my vision blurred for a second or two.

Fuck. I guess blunt attacks still work on me…

Sadly, I wasn’t the only one to realize this. The fiend had noticed it too, which meant that there was an intelligence inside that freak of a body. Perhaps even one that could be reasoned with.

I got back on my feet and the war of the monsters resumed. One, two, three, four — we traded blows one after the other with neither of us losing out in power — while I attempted to reason with it.

“We can help you,” and, “You don’t have to live like this anymore,” and, “don’t you want to eat something other than raw meat all the time?” were just some of my lines, but my words fell on deaf ears. At some point, I stopped trying. Jenkins’ cold, lifeless body lay just a few feet away, and although I didn’t know him very well, the thought that he’d been murdered by the thing that was trying hard to murder me too just fueled my anger. That made me careless.

I lunged forward intending to end the fight with one ginormous blow to its noggin, but the fiend, in an act of life-preservation — or just dumb luck — smacked my hand away, forcing me to drop the arcanite shard. It fell to the floor and bounced away from me — and with it went my borrowed strength.

Oh, fuck…

My enchantment began to weaken, which was when I felt great fatigue take hold of me. As if the world itself had fallen on my shoulders and the weight of carrying it strained my body past its limits.

They called it the rebound effect back in my old world. That thing where the body tried to bring itself back into balance after one came down from a drug-high by producing the opposite symptoms from what I experienced while drunk with power. And yes, I kind of expected this reaction, but not this quickly nor this strongly.

“Whoa…”

My head swam and I stumbled forward right into the waiting arms of the fiend who’d noticed my sudden weakness.

“Ugh.”

I gasped as sharp-nailed fingers stabbed me in the side, and it was just pure luck that the enchantment hadn’t receded completely in that part of my body so that the injury that should have been fatal was only a superficial wound.

Instinct drove me to fall sideward so I could scamper after the damn arcanite. Because now that my focus and my strength were hanging by a thread, getting juiced up again was my only hope. But as I crawled toward that slim hope, I felt sharp nails rake against my back, and I screamed.

“I’ve got your back, Wunderkind!”

Corporal Allers must have finally finished providing first-aid to Sergeant Jager because he’d rushed into the backroom with guns blazing.

Cha-ching!

The sound of gunfire was all the distraction I needed to crawl toward that softly glowing blue stone — a glow that was diminishing by the second.

Oh, right… Master did say that arcanite was just a container for natural energy.

Whoever ran this damn lab had probably used that shard of arcanite so often that it didn’t carry much of a charge by the time I found it. Although it didn’t seem that way at first, and now I found myself wondering what a fully charged stone could do for me.

Focus, idiot!

“Over here, you fucking monster!” Allers yelled.

I wasn’t sure he knew it, but Corporal Allers had just saved both our lives. His distraction allowed me to grasp victory by the balls — and with the stone back in my hand, I felt that rush of power flow into me again. And I won't lie, it felt exhilarating to wield.

All-father, I hope I don’t get addicted to this rush…

It would have been just my luck if I caught an arcanite dependency at age eight. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to worry about becoming this world's version of a drug addict. I had one last shot, and it was going to take all of me to achieve a positive ending to this deadly encounter.

As I turned around to face the fiend that was too preoccupied with trying to kill my teammate, I smacked my other palm against the one that held the arcanite. Then, in a motion that mimicked my favorite fighting game, I pulled my arms back to the side and willed the magic to flow into my palms which at that point had been heavily stained in my blood.

“Hold on… for just a little longer, Allers!”

Corporal Allers responded to my plea with more gunfire so that the air was filled with the scent of gunpowder.

Should I yell it like Ryu does?

Natural energy flowed into the blood that caked my palms so that it swelled like a balloon that was filled, not just with magic, but also all the anger I’d stored up during this deadly encounter.

Nah, that would be copyright infringement… even in another world.

I know, I know. My concentration wasn’t exactly operating at a hundred percent at that moment. But the blood loss and the many wounds I'd incurred had gotten to me, and even with the arcanite’s assistance, my body was so fatigued that I was beginning to drift off into unconsciousness.

Now or never…

With all the magic I’d harness drawn into the thick ball of blood floating between my palms, I pushed my arms forward — a little too enthusiastically, I might add — and with my palms shaped like a dragon’s open maw, I fired my spell at the fiend — and it felt awesome!

“Blood Cannon!”

Yeah, I had to yell something out loud. I just had to. And as lame a name as that was, this up-sized version of my ‘Blood Bullet’ was as devastating as an actual cannonball. It smacked against the fiend’s body with incredible force and sent the monster hurtling through the wall and back into the laboratory — and it didn’t stop there. The fiend was blown away so that Corporal Allers and I could see the outside from the hole it had made in the wall on the other side of the lab.

“Whoa, Wunderkind,” Corporal Allers whistled, “You really are something else.”

I appreciated that he didn't pull away from me after seeing what I could do, a reaction that so many of the institute's soldiers seemed to take whenever I exhibited my power like this. Corporal Allers did more than just stay by my side though. He even helped me up so we could both walk over to that hole in the lab and see what had happened to our target.

“By the All-father, that's got to hurt,” Corporal Allers said.

The fiend lay in a crater on the cobbled street of the alleyway between our building and the one beside it. It was a mangled mess covered in what I guessed was a mixture of its blood and mine.

“Is it dead?” I asked as I fell to my knees.

I dropped the arcanite too but that didn’t matter as the stone had lost its glow. It was finally depleted.

“Afraid not,” Allers answered.

Despite how its limbs were bent in an awkward position, we could both see the fiend twitching around as if trying to right itself.

“Is it bad that I want it to be dead?” I asked.

I hadn’t forgotten that it had once been a child like me. It probably was one of my old crib mates, too. And that's why I wanted it to die. I didn't think it could still live in this world being that deformed. Was it wrong of me to want that?

“I think you’re being considerate,” Allers answered. “Can you imagine what the eggheads at the institute would do to a living specimen like it?”

Sadly, I could. This kind of human experimentation would be right up Colonel Heinrich’s alley. I was afraid it might even lead to more abuses down the line, one where kids from my generation and the new batch of babies that had just been born in the institute would be used as material for such ungodly experimentation.

“We can’t let it live,” I sighed.

“Yeah.” Corporal Allers reloaded his rifle. “You ready for round two?”

“Isn’t this round four already?” I tried to get up, but my knees had turned into jelly. “I, uh, think I need a timeout.”

Unfortunately, the fiend wasn’t planning on giving me one. That damn healing factor it had was already helping its bones reset themselves so that the fiend managed to sit up from the small crater my spell had smashed it into.

“Here we go, Wunderkind,” Allers said as he moved closer to the edge of the hole and aimed his rifle down at his target. “Get your weapon ready.”

I reached down to my holster and realized that it was empty. I’d used up my supply of treated blood and my iron sword was lost in a mess of broken lab equipment.

“Damn.” My hand clasped over my necklace’s iron pendant. “I really didn’t want to use this…”

It was such a waste to ruin my nanny’s gift. Luckily, I didn’t have to.

The fiend had gotten up on shaky legs, its human-like eyes trained on me — and I could see the hate clear on its face. It let out a fearsome, monstrous roar that still seemed remarkably child-like to my ears even though the sound of it caused the hairs on the back of my arms to stand on end.

However, this spine-tingling roar was suddenly cut short as a sword made entirely of ice sliced across the fiend’s neck from behind.

“Hey, Wunderkind,” Corporal Allers hefted his rifle over his shoulder, “our boss is kind of cool, isn’t he?”

As I watched the fiend’s head fall to the ground, followed quickly by its limp body, the sight of my master standing behind it with an aura of power radiating out of him — I couldn’t help but nod in agreement. Major Wolf had just stolen my kill, and I was okay with that.