The First Rule of Coffee Club is Don’t Interfere with Coffee Club

Declan sailed through the air as a burst of energy erupted from the palm of Poe’s hand. He hadn’t felt anything except for his forced repulsion from his prone foe, and he didn’t feel anything when his spine impacted on the steel wall of the Coffee Lounge despite the fact that he created a two-inch deep dent in its surface when he struck it. The fact was that he wasn’t even aware when he placed his hands against the walls and shoved himself back to the ground. His hands clenched involuntarily as he landed, seeking to wrap themselves around Poe’s boney neck once more. His eyes scanned the room and they locked onto his skeletal prey. Poe, or as his now maddened mind perceived him, the enemy was still trying to get his footing; the Horseman was staggering more than Declan would have expected but he was still on his feet. That bastard was tough. That was good, he reflected, that meant that he was able to give the son of a bitch even more of a beating than he’d hoped.

Declan crouched and then charged forward. He did not notice that his jacket, tie and shirt had been burned away by Poe’s blast, or that the last remaining smoldering remnants of his clothing fell away as he ran. He vision swirled so that all he could see was the Horseman. In contrast, his movements were so fast that Poe could barely see where he was coming from, and only just manage to step aside as Declan dove by him as he had tried to tackle the robed skeleton. His momentum was such that even though he missed Poe completely the Horseman was still spun around like a top that had just about lost all of its momenta.

Poe managed to recover his senses just as Mason crashed into a plush chair and landed in a display of cookies. The horseman reached out his left arm and with a flash and a clap of thunder, a scythe-like weapon appeared in his hand crackling with a malicious energy. His scythe, he knew, was so sharp that it could cut between atoms. It carried an edge so fine that it even allowed him to cut pathways in-between dimensions. This was his up close and personal weapon of choice.

He had played with Declan Mason long enough. It had been his hope to bring him over to work with him, but he could see now that the man could not be reasoned with. He just wished that he had waited a little longer before he had come to parlay. He was still weakened from the time travel, and he could not defend himself like he would have been able to if he were at full strength. All that was left for him now was to kill this man, then his women, and try to stop the Invigilator on his own. He spun his scythe in a great sweeping arc and began to edge towards Mason. This fight was going to end now.

Declan stood up. Poe could see him clearly now, for the first time since he had initiated his attack and what he saw scared him. Mason’s upper body only had a small circular burn on his chest from when he had been struck by Poe’s point-blank power blast. That energy burst had been three times hotter than the sun’s core temperature. The result looked like little more than a light sunburn on Mason. This unnerved the Horseman, as he had used that ability many times in order to burn through to a planet’s core in mere seconds. Mason had hardly taken any damage. As far as wasted efforts went, Poe might as well have been hitting him with spitballs.

Declan rose and brushed a chocolate chip cookie from his shoulder. The Revelator’s eyes crackled with red energy and his muscles coursed with raw power. He looked like Atlas free of the world’s burden from his shoulders, and it was obvious to the Horseman that he had actually increased in muscle mass in the seconds it took him to crash into the couch.

Poe advanced a step, but his opponent did not move. The whirling of the scythe was merely a whisper in the air but Mason looked unconcerned. He stared into Poe’s cavernous eye sockets and breathed harder. Poe’s arm was utterly useless, but he didn’t need it to deal with Mason. He would heal in due time, at the moment he was focused on killing the man before him.

He took another step and then another, and still, Declan did not move. The Horseman watched as the man’s rate of breathing increased and foam began dribbling from his lips. His red eyes smoldered now, with an energy that seared into the depth of Poe’s soul.

Finally, the horseman had had enough and leapt the distance between them. He brought his weapon down in a crescent moon arc and was met with Mason’s blocking X-crossed arms. The blade that could cut through anything shattered on the impact with Declan’s skin. A small scratch appeared on his arm, and a faint trickle of blood trailed to his elbow, but that was all that happened. The man was otherwise unhurt.

Poe had landed in a kneeling position, with only half of his scythe’s handle left in his hand. He looked up in confusion. What had just happened was impossible. He had seen that blade cut the Invigilator when the great being had forged it for him when he’d become his new minion. To even consider the possibility that this man’s skin was so powerful was simply unthinkable to him.

“Inconceivable,” he whispered.

Declan didn’t acknowledge Poe’s words and did not hesitate to strike. His hand shot forth and poked two fingers into the Poe’s empty eye sockets and lifted him from the floor with the ease of lifting a balloon into the air. Mason began to shake the Horseman like a postpartum depressed mother taking all of her anger out a screaming baby.

“No one threatens my Sarahs. No one harms them! And no one,” he bellowed, “Tells me that they will hurt MY Sarah!” His voice started clear but became less coherent as he went. “I will protect the Sarahs!” Finally, he ended with a primal roar and snapped Poe’s neck with a sound like kindling crackling on a fire. “Aaaaarrggghh!” The roar escaped his lips primally, his mental state now more animalistic than man, and in that one moment, he was closer to Crowe than he would ever be again. Had he eyelids, the Horseman would have blinked in disbelief. He was stunned and could not move due to the pain that coursed throughout every inch of his body. Pain became his world, and agony his wife. It was the realization that he was utterly helpless before this man that chilled his soul. As the Horseman, he had killed numbers so endless that it was impossible to begin conceiving of, but at this moment he was nothing more than a helpless babe caught in the maw of a starving wolf.

The Revelator dropped the reaper to the ground and kept screaming in spite of his foe’s apparent destruction. Energy poured from his eyes cascading down his body like glowing water. Mason foamed at the mouth like a rabid dog that had attacked a tube of toothpaste. In his unfettered and maddened mental state, Declan began to smash everything around him caught up as he was in his uncontrollable fury. He grabbed at the thing nearest to him and found a plush chair that he used to mercilessly pummel Poe with it until all of its stuffing was left floating in the air like lazy snowflakes. Soon he had ripped a coffee maker from the wall and pounded Poe’s body with the device until it fell to pieces in his hands.

The girls huddled into a corner and were all collectively holding their breath. They were stunned to see Declan in a full-on berserker mode. They had never seen him truly angry before. He had shown them fear and concern and even love, but they had never laid eyes upon the blind rage that now festered in his soul. Declan’s countenance was a truly horrifying thing to behold. The smile he bore was warped; it was something less than a sneer and more than a snarl. It was obvious to them that he was out of control and could not find his way back to them. Their man was lost.

Countess stepped away from the group and was about to try to talk him down, but before she could say anything the imposter grim reaper rose from the floor. He shrugged off the fluff and the coffee grounds that covered his body and began to glow a dark greenish color, and before she could even shout a warning to Declan the doppelgänger of death fired a huge blast of caustic energy into Declan’s back. The energy flared for a full minute eating away at the very fabric of space that held Declan before finally stopping; exhausted the skeletal warrior fell back to his knees. He had just given everything that he had. That was the very energy that he used to pull apart the strands that held the universes together. Nothing could withstand its force. It was the most caustic power known in any universe.

“Ah’ve done it,” he cackled. “Ah’ve killed you. You were far more than a worthy opponent, Declan Mason, but nothing can stop the Horseman.” He stayed on his knees because he was too weak to stand. He was too drained to move. With his energies depleted he knew that the flying car, Mother, and a squadron of battlemechs would be heading his way shortly, but he could not force himself to stand. He had not been this weak since he had been a simple human. Thankfully, Mason was dead or was in serious medical distress.

A challenge issued from behind him by means of a roar. All he could make out was the word, “Mmmmmaaaaaaaccccce,” before he was clubbed in the back of the head by a vicious blow. His assailant was a half-naked girl with a Mohawk. She was holding a heavy looking plasma pistol in her hand, and he assumed that was what she had used to strike him with; regardless he would deal with her, and then the others. He began to try to get to his feet when he was struck from behind for a second time. He felt large clawed feet shredding his back, and damned if it didn’t hurt. His reserves were all but gone, and he was more vulnerable now than he had been in centuries. With a sudden revelation, he realized that these girls were more of a threat than he had originally realized.

The topless girl shoved her gun into his nare and fired. Normally, something like a plasma bolt wouldn’t pose a threat to him, but in his current condition and the extreme proximity of the gun meant that he had been seriously hurt. A strange sensation overcame him as it felt like his sinuses were draining and that a great ball of pressure had vanished from behind his eye sockets. Black ichor poured from the gaping hole that had been his nose and covered him to his feet.

He threw the annoying rabbit girl who had been dancing on his spine like a prima ballerina across the room. Poe watched as the half-naked bunny girl sailed over the head of what looked like a mime. The girl stopped in front of him, pretended to slowly draw a sword from her side, he got the impression that it was a katana rather than a broad sword, and then proceed to twirl it around her body. Then, the white-faced girl slashed down in an arc that swept across his chest, and he felt her cutaway ribs. She was not holding an imaginary sword. The weapon that she held was real, and it was powerful enough to slice through his bones. He turned to go back to the hallway as he smacked the mime in the face. The blow knocked her down in a heap, so he stepped over her and headed for the hallway, as he still had to retrieve his encapsulated Sarah and then get to his hoverbike to escape. Poe would come back for the women later. He just had to make it to the hallway.

What he got instead was a hoof in the face. Sarahtaur had joined the row with the rabbit girl on her back. She had reared back, intending to stomp on the skeleton’s skull, but when he had stood up he’d just presented too easy of a target for her front leg to kick. The blow sent him reeling and as he spun he came face to face with Essea.

“We do not appreciate you interrupting our coffee time,” she said mechanically. She lifted her hands; hands that were crackling with raw electricity. The energy sputtered and sparked, and for a moment Poe thought she was only going to warn him; to threaten him into leaving, he couldn’t have been more wrong. He thought that right up until she unleashed far more than 1.21 gigawatts of energy on him, but it was definitely enough to make him go back and rethink his future. He sailed into the hallway, robes smoldering, and a scream ripping from his lipless jawline. Countess followed him into the corridor; she was carrying one of Crowe’s guns and she looked rather pissed.

The vampire grabbed him by his robes and slammed him into the wall of the corridor. Poe’s head rebounded like a punching bag as Countess pummeled him with a barrage of jabs and uppercuts. She had knocked out two of his teeth before he managed to get a hand up to block her attacks. “You are so lucky that you don’t have any blood vessels, you wretched man!” Her fangs flashed and snapped as she switched from throwing punches to slashing at him with her blade-like claws. “If you did,” she hissed, “I would rip your frigging throat out!”

Rah’s right foot connected with the left side of the Horseman’s face just as Countess cut a ragged gash in the Horseman’s robes across his chest. The impact drove him back into the coffee lounge and right into Essea’s reinforced steel fist. She struck him solidly in his thoracic area, and she heard more of his ribs snap. One dropped to the floor and she nonchalantly kicked it out of the way. Her eyes flashed and an intense beam pierced his chest leaving a hole three inches in diameter behind.

Poe struck out frantically and managed to knock the cybernetic female away from him, but before he could take advantage of his minor success Sarahtaur’s rear legs drove him into the air and across the room. Crowe watched him land right where the centaur said she would send him and tossed a scalding pot of coffee in the boney face of her foe.

Poe could not understand what was happening. He was being manhandled by a roomful of average women. On any other given day they would not be able to touch him let alone issue one point of damage, but right now he was at their mercy and it seemed that they had none to spare. He went to pull his gun, but the instant it was drawn the mohawked girl ripped it from his hand. He shuddered. That was no ordinary weapon. Aside from his now destroyed scythe, it was probably the only thing that could kill him outright aside from the Invigilator himself.

Crowe looked at the handgun and smiled. She had a hard time understanding a lot of things, but pistols were not one of them. She whipped the weapon around in her hand and pointed it at his right foot. Before he could move she had fired and every bit of him below his knee shattered in a hail of atoms. The pain was unimaginable, unfortunately for him, he didn’t have to imagine it; he had the pleasure of experiencing it firsthand.

Before he could scream she had fired another round into his other leg doubling his displeasure and his forlornness. His vision, so blurred by pain, allowed him to only perceive light and dark and minimal motion. He wanted to clench his teeth and bear with it all, but his endless screaming would not let him do so. Had he a throat it would have been raw and he would have been vomiting gouts of blood. In a panic Machiavelli did the only thing he could think of; he did not have the energy for it, and so he was going to suffer even more pain and was going to be weakened for days as he recuperated from this fiasco. He used his remaining life energy and went immaterial. He forced his body to ignore gravity’s call and fly towards the hallway. His vision was so bad that he had to rely on the light of the corridor to guide him back to where he had left his hoverbike. He had no idea how he would escape this dimension, but he could use it to get him far enough away that he could figure that part out later.

As he soared past the women Crowe pursued him, as did the Countess. They raced after keeping pace as he tried to outdistance them. His cries of agony echoed throughout the building. Even Sarah the Vegan could hear him from her room on the other side of the citadel. Sarah the mime cocked her head and placed a hand to her ear as she tried to decipher what was causing the noise. She had just awakened and was confused, she had no idea of where the fleshless fiend had gone.

The girls returned four minutes later and relayed what had happened. Poe, they said, had run into Declan’s room and vanished. He had scrabbled around on the floor around searching for something until Crowe shot at his head twice before he had jumped through one of Declan’s walls and vanished into the cold expanses of space. She looked to see if there was anything in the room that he might have dropped, but neither she nor Tess had found a thing. They then returned to check in on Declan and the others.

The rest of them looked ashamed, they had been so worried that the reaper man was going to come back that they hadn’t checked on Declan. They had been far too preoccupied with the fight. Rah began to bounce over to his body, but just before she got to him he picked himself up off the ground.

Declan stared at the girls. He had no idea of how he had gotten into the lounge or why it was so trashed. He recalled talking to Machiavelli until the man had said something to upset him. After that, it was all a blur. He was sure they’d fought, but he had no memory of anything after the Horseman had shown him . . . something. His head was still swirling. He needed a few minutes to catch his breath.

“Are you girls all right,” he asked worry straining his voice. Each of them came to him and embraced him in a group hug. They all began crying, even Essea, and Declan just hugged them back reassuringly.

“WTF is going on,” came Second Sarah’s voice.

“We just had one hell of a fight, but everyone is OK,” Declan said to her, a tired smile tracing his lips.

“Yeah,” she asked. “That doesn’t explain why you are naked,” she pointed at him, “Or what the hell this is.” She held up the chain that ended with the miniaturized Sarah Prime in the clear capsule. She was frozen in place, looking like an action figure behind the plastic bubble. She seemed unharmed but exhibited no outward signs of life. For all intents and purposes, she may as well have been a toy figurine.

Forgetting his nudity, Mason gently broke away from the group hug and stepped towards Second Sarah. She averted her gaze upward as he approached, slightly embarrassed by not only his nudity but reverent look in his eyes. They practically glowed with love. To her surprise, however, he reached out not to her, but to the pendant that held her image. He pulled it gently from her hand, the chain dragging along like a silver snake from her palm until it leapt from her fingertips.

Declan had dropped to his knees and was holding the odd piece of jewelry as if it were a holy relic. “I have you back,” he whispered, “And I’m never letting you go again.” His fingers reflexively wrapped around the immobile figure before he passed out.