Once again, dear readers, I feel I must apologize to you all for my laziness. A combination of real-world issues and procrastination has kept me from giving you a second August post, as I said I would. With college and banking issues diverting my attention, it should still not be an excuse to deprive my readers of that which was promised to you. I will do my best to push through this dry spell and continue providing quality writing.
I have been working on two new posts for the future, one being a new chapter of "Blue Jeans Samurai" (not the same as the chapter in this very post), and the other a new "Disney Villain Rater" article. Hopefully, I'll have nothing to keep me from writing and posting them, and you'll all have the content you deserve.
Thank you all for reading!
Blue Jeans Samurai
#10 – Escape from the Archives! A Friend's Sacrifice!
アーカイブからの脱出！友人の犠牲！
For a moment, time seemed distended, weighty,
almost suffocating. Until now, Blue
Jeans had not known loss since his own parents.
Now, with Cashmere lying dead on the floor, the severity of the
situation was made frighteningly clear.
Before, he thought that, with this group of like-minded warriors,
FIRENIGHT would fall easily. Now, it was
all a fantasy, and cold, murderous reality had struck them hard enough to draw
blood.
Cashmere's blood.
The assassin, a tall, blonde man in a flawless
black suit, dangled from a rope outside the window and smiled as he pointed his
arm at the remaining group. Poking out
from beneath his sleeve was the barrel of a machine gun of some kind. His grin widened as he spoke in a soft,
lightly-pitched voice, “One.”
He then proceeded to fire his hidden weapon again,
and Blue Jeans, Pleats and Twang raced for cover behind the desks. The computer they used was torn to shreds by
the bullet fire, and the precious DataPane, the vessel of their long-sought
information, was torn apart along with it.
Blue Jeans' heart raced, but he kept as cool as he
could, and reached for his sword. When
his hand clutched air, his heart raced even faster, and he cursed himself for
forgetting that Velvet was holding onto it, along with all of their
weapons. They were trapped, unarmed, and
whittled down to three. And no one knew
how much longer it would be before this new assassin finished them all.
“Damn it!” Pleats cursed as the bullets ceased for
a moment. “I just hope the others don't
give away their positions coming for us.”
She then grabbed Blue Jeans by the front of his uniform. “This was all your fault, you bastard! If you
had left when I'd ordered, we wouldn't be in this mess, and Cashmere would
still be alive! My sister and comrade is dead!! She's dead!! And it's all
because of you!!”
Blue Jeans couldn't respond, and for a moment, he
believed it was because of their dire circumstances. But he knew better. Pleats was absolutely right. He had let his desire, his obsession, take
him over. He had even lashed out at his
friends, something he'd never consider doing any other time. He didn't know what had come over him, but it
was as irreversible as the death in their group resulting from it.
For a moment, the gunfire stopped, and the glass
shattered on the other side of the room.
A few seconds later, a THUMP sounded off from that direction. No one knew whether it was the assassin, or
Pleats' ninja, or anyone else, and no one dared move to find out. Footsteps drew close to them from the broken
window, crushing shards of glass beneath them, and finally, there was
movement. Instead of gunfire, though,
something long and thin flew in their direction.
It was Blue Jeans' sword.
Blue Jeans felt instinct fire up, and grabbed the
sheath out of the air just as two more swords appeared in the same manner. As Pleats grabbed them both, Velvet jumped
behind the desks with them, handing Twang his bow and quiver.
“Velvet!” Pleats called, relieved. “You're alive! Tell me, where are our sisters?
Did they make it?”
Velvet suddenly looked crestfallen, crossed her
wrists in front of her, swept the air with one arm, and made a hand sign with
both hands, tenting her fingertips together and spacing them out.
Pleats matched her subordinate's crestfallen look.
“No . . .” She supplied the translation for Blue Jeans
and Twang, “Tented fingertips means something related to Taffeta. They . . .
they took her . . . .”
Blue Jeans felt his heart evaporate, and on their
far side, Twang's voice broke, “No . . . .”
Velvet looked around the area they remained in,
and made another hand sign, the same tented fingertips signal, but with both
middle fingers bent inward and the knuckles of them pressed together.
“I'm sorry, Velvet, but . . . .” Pleats tried to
say, but couldn't. Obviously, this hand
sign asked about Cashmere, for Pleats then pointed up over the desk. Velvet raised her head slightly over the desk,
and must have seen Cashmere's body; she audibly gasped, the first true noise
her voice ever made since Blue Jeans met her.
She slipped back behind the desk, her hands pressed to her mouth and her
eyes wide and slowly building a mist.
“I know, sister, I know,” Pleats comforted Velvet
with a hand to her shoulder, while flashing Blue Jeans a deadly look, “but we
mustn't mourn now. We can still escape, but we have to work fast and stay
together.”
BANG!
The door to the records room was broken in, and
one by one, a platoon of fifty Pistol troops barged in, aiming their weapons in
every direction and shouting orders: “You are trespassing on government
property! This is a Sigma-Red offense! Come out slowly, unarmed, with your
hands in the air, or we will open fire!”
The group froze, having no view from their hiding
place except row upon row of armed stormtroopers, each aiming their weapons and
preparing to keep their ultimatum. The
sound of cocking firearms filled the air, and the front row of Pistols dropped
to one knee, keeping their aim on their targets. As soon as one trigger was about to be
pulled, a Pistol's gun started firing behind the group, and several Pistols
farther up cried out in pain before dropping to the ground.
“NOW!” Blue Jeans called out, and he, Pleats,
Velvet and Twang retaliated. Twang
remained in his place for cover, firing off a flurry of arrows that picked off
more Pistols. Velvet leaped across the
room, parallel to Twang's position, and fired a series of kunai at the
distracted and destabilized platoon. The
ones that didn't fall to gunfire, arrows, or knives were cut down by Blue
Jeans' and Pleats' blades.
After a swift confrontation ending with the dead
bodies of forty-nine Pistols, the last Pistol remaining tossed away her spent
weapon and eyed Blue Jeans and Twang furiously. “All right! Which one of you danglers screwed
up this mission?!”
“We have no time to sling blame, Damask!” Pleats
yelled back. “We must find Hal and our
other sisters before they are captured as well, or worse!”
“I did.”
Blue Jeans said it softly, almost absently, as if
he wasn't really in control of his words.
The others turned to him with different reactions, but with the same
general feeling of confusion. “I ruined
the mission,” he repeated in the same toneless voice, “it's my fault . . .
Cashmere died because of me . . . .”
Damask's eyes widened. “What?!” she bellowed. “Cashmere is dead?! How can that—” she
stopped, seeming to see the evidence on the floor of the room. She saw her—Cashmere's corpse draining blood
on the ground—and her rage was unbound.
She flew at Blue Jeans, pinning him to the wall behind him with one hand
and pulling out a kunai with the other, pressing the point to his throat. Blue Jeans had almost no strength left in
him; finally admitting to this grave mistake had drained the will from him
completely.
“FILTH!!” Damask screeched, almost piercing flesh
with her blade. “Degenerate slime! I
knew we shouldn't have trusted you! I'll kill you for what you did to my
sister! I'LL KILL YOU!!” The knife
pushed deeper against Blue Jeans' throat, but neither he in his guilty stupor,
nor anyone in their sudden shock, stopped her from keeping her promise.
Except for Twang: “Let him go.”
His voice was a low growl, and his bow was drawn
back all the way, the arrow in it pressed directly into the side of Damask's
head. Her kunai frozen where it was,
Damask could do little more than turn her eyes toward Twang. “You . . . .” she began, her fury almost
muting her entirely, “. . . . you dare to point that at me—”
“Don't think I won't do it if you don't back off!”
Twang roared, pulling the arrow back a little more. “I said let him go, goddamn it! NOW!”
Damask continued to stare daggers at Twang, then
switched her piercing glare back to Blue Jeans.
“You got her killed,” Damask growled, tightening her grip. “First chance I get, I will end you.” She then pulled him forward by his uniform
and slammed him back against the wall, releasing him. Blue Jeans could understand Damask's need to
threaten him, but even in his degenerating mental state, he could see that
Damask's threats were a front. As she
turned away, she brushed back a lock of her dirty blond hair—a cover for her
thumb brushing away a loose tear from her eye.
Twang lessened the tension on his bow and slid the
arrow back into his quiver. “All right,
BJ,” he said, turning to Blue Jeans as the latter leaned against the wall, “we
gotta get our shit together, man. We got in, we can get out, but we gotta keep
it together and focus. You in there, bro? BJ?!”
Blue Jeans wasn't listening. He felt as if his failure was resounding so
painfully throughout his mind that he could hear nothing, could react to
nothing.
He snapped back to himself when he felt Twang's
hand slap him across the face. “HEY! Get
a grip, motherfucker! You led us in, you lead us out! You got that?!”
Finally gathering his unbalanced thoughts, Blue
Jeans shook his head vigorously and set his mind to work. “All right,” he began, “we stick to the plan,
for now. Once we're back together, we stay that way. We're down in numbers, but
if we keep our remaining forces, we can still fight our way out. Velvet still
needs to gather the others, but we need to be sure they haven't been captured.”
“Velvet,” Pleats ordered, “make your way to the
second floor, warn Angora and Hal, and get them to the first floor as quickly
as possible. We'll join you when we can.”
Velvet nodded, handed Damask a grappling hook,
then hooked her own grapple line on the frame of the broken window. She sailed out the window, staying attached
to her grapple line, lowering herself down to the second floor.
Pleats turned to her infiltrator. “Damask, you make your way down to the same
floor in case Velvet can't get there in time. Mark the elevator that works,
bring it up for us, and scale down the other side of the building. We need to
move quickly, but we also need to keep watch over our own.”
Damask glared at Blue Jeans once she'd received
her orders. “Only our own,” she
growled before heading out the door.
“All right,” Blue Jeans concluded, “let's move! There
will be reinforcements arriving any second now!” Sure enough, the rumble of footsteps sounded
off outside the doorway, growing in volume as it bore the Pistols closer.
Pleats brought out another smoke bomb and threw it
at the doorway, sending up another dark cloud as their cover. Immediately, before the troops could walk in,
there were sounds of coughing and agitated yelling. The remaining warriors raced into the fray,
Blue Jeans and Pleats swinging their blades and Twang launching arrows. Out of the twenty-five Pistol troops that
tried to make their way in, four-fifths of them were killed or incapacitated
before they knew what was happening. The
remaining five saw Blue Jeans, Pleats and Twang escape around a corner, and
raced after them down the corridor. They
turned the corner and saw an elevator door close (the door had a shuriken stuck
in the metal surface), so they quickly made their way to another elevator.
It would be a good few minutes before they
realized that the only working elevator had taken the escapees to the first
floor.
* * *
* *
Damask broke through the glass and landed on the
second floor. Having seen the Pistols
casing the floor before breaking through, she marked their positions in her
head and slipped out of their aim just before they could fire, and took off
around a corner. She saw more Pistols
coming at her down the corridor, and fired a series of kunai at them before
they could ready their guns. The ones
that didn't scream in pain and drop their guns instead dropped their lifeless
bodies to the floor.
This wouldn't work for much longer, and Damask
knew it. She could hear the Pistols she
evaded coming fast after her, their footsteps and the cocking of their weapons
sounding closer by the second. But
suddenly, another sound filled the air: more sounds of screaming. Damask turned back and saw that the Pistols
had tripped over something that had caused them extreme pain. Five of them were on the ground, flailing and
struggling to get back up, and another three were bleeding heavily from their
feet or legs.
A door against the wall close to them opened, and
Angora and Halberd came through it, both looking nervous. “I didn't think that would work!” Hal
admitted in a shaky voice. “What were
those things called? Makibishi? Ingenious!”
“No celebrating until we're on that train,” Angora
commanded as the Pistols attempted to climb over the collapsible ground spikes
that she'd set to spring up in front of the troops. “Damask is here, and—look, Velvet!” At the other end of the corridor, Velvet had
struck the glass and broken in, casting her grapple line down to the ground.
“Let's move!!” Damask commanded, and Angora and
Hal followed her down the hall, turning into the next corridor just as the
Pistols had assembled themselves and began firing. Once inside, Velvet handed Hal the head of
his enormous axe, and he quickly extended the telescopic metal handle to its
full length, now battle-ready.
Velvet handed Angora her chain weapons, then
started helping Hal's large frame out the window. Just as Hal swung out on the line, more
Pistols came down the corridor they had turned into, coming straight for them
with their weapons aimed. At the same
time, the Pistols had moved the makibishi out of the hall from which they'd
escaped, and were coming at them from the other way, as well.
“Damn,” Angora moaned, “there are too many! We
won't escape quickly enough!”
“Come on!” Hal called out, now dangling two
stories above the grass. “You can make
it! Jump and grab the line!”
“No, they'll catch us before we hit ground!”
Angora yelled back.
“Can't you just use a smoke bomb?!”
“Not here! There's not enough room to move, and we
don't have the element of surprise!”
“We have to do something!” shouted Damask. “I won't let them capture more of us! I'd
rather die than be their prisoner!”
“Don't be a fool, Damask!” Angora hissed back,
“Being a prisoner means being alive, and that means being able to escape! We
can't now, but we can if we plan first!”
Angora backed her position by laying her weapons down. “We can plan in prison. Not in graves!”
Velvet glanced between Hal and the Pistols just as
they arrived with the command to surrender.
“Please!” Hal yelled from outside as he attempted to climb back in and
grab Velvet. “Don't do this, please! We
can get out together! All of us!”
Velvet stared longingly at Hal while Damask
reluctantly set down her weapons, as well.
She seemed to know that only one of them was going to make it out. What happened next before her forced
surrender was quick and shocking to Hal—she stepped up to him and kissed him
firmly on the lips, as if this would be the last and only opportunity for her
to do it.
Seconds later, the rope began to snap, no longer
able to support Hal's weight. The thin
rope broke, sending him plummeting to the ground below. Hal could only watch helplessly as the sight
of Velvet being roughly pulled away from the window grew smaller and smaller as
he fell away from her.
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”
* * *
* *
Twang prepped his arrows as soon as the elevator
door opened, and once he, Blue Jeans and Pleats stepped out, Pleats' last smoke
bomb was cast, covering their movements and once again allowing them to fight
their way out.
Blue Jeans carved a path to the door by slicing
into any Pistol he saw along his way. He
could easily slip into their blind spots while under the cover of the smoke,
and before he reached the exit, six Pistols had been cut down by his steel. Pleats was not nearly as selective; she
killed any and every living thing that was unfortunate enough to find itself
remotely close to her, putting down the same number of Pistols in half the
time. Twang moved in slowly behind them,
spotting any movement that Blue Jeans and Pleats couldn't see and picking off
more troops with his arrows. Once he'd
brought down three of them, he looked back and saw that he was running out of
arrows, and warned his comrades, “Yo, man, I think we gon' have to speed this
up!”
“Relax, Twang,” Blue Jeans replied, stepping up to
the door and pulling out his security pass, “we're almost out!” He scanned his card, but the security system
emitted a harsh buzz, denying their exit.
Blue Jeans scanned the card again, but it yielded the same result. “Damn it!!”
“Oh, get out of the way!!” Pleats ordered and
pushed him away from the door, taking out her own security pass. Blue Jeans was relieved when he remembered
that Pleats' pass had a higher level of clearance, but when the door gave the
denial warning a third time, his relief was extinguished.
“No!” Pleats pounded on the door. “They've locked down the building!! We can't
get out!!”
“Impossible! Angora would have disabled the
security by n—” Blue Jeans stopped when the only explanation occurred to him:
Angora had been taken, too. That meant
that finding Hal fell on Velvet and Damask's shoulders, but Angora had been
with Hal—this could easily mean he had been taken, as well.
“Hey, we got company, y'all!” Twang alerted, taking
two of the last of his arrows. “And I
don't think they're ours!” He stepped
off to the side of the elevator door, and Pleats rushed up to the other side as
they both awaited the opening of the elevator.
Blue Jeans took cover behind the side desk, and when the elevator door
opened, seven Pistols filed out. When they
were all out, Twang released his arrows and Pleats' steel flew, and seven
bodies hit the floor.
“We can't keep this up forever!” Pleats bellowed. “They'll reach us eventually! Even if we kill
every Pistol in this building, they can still come in through the back
entrance!”
Blue Jeans combed his mind for an answer, but the
longer he thought, the more he realized that he and his remaining friends were
doomed. The blank hopelessness he'd felt
earlier after Cashmere's death was beginning to settle back in, amplified by
the feeling of panic, helplessness, and chaos.
CLAAANG!
Blue Jeans backed quickly away from the door as
something heavy struck it hard from the other side. When it struck again, a faint indentation
appeared where the object struck. The sound
went off a third time, and the mark grew deeper when Blue Jeans realized it was
in the shape of an axe.
The weapon slashed through the crevice in the door
and pried it apart, creating space in the middle to pass. From the other side, Hal's panic-stricken
voice issued forth, “Go! Go! Go!”
Blue Jeans whistled to his cohorts just as the
elevator went back up, at the same time clearance was granted for the back
entrance to the building. Shots rang
out, and Blue Jeans stayed low as he slipped through the door. Seconds after he came out into the open,
Pleats slipped out behind him, and Twang came out last. Hal pulled his axe from the door, closing it
the rest of the way, and the four were reunited.
“Where are they?!” Pleats yelled at Hal, grabbing
him by his broad shoulders, “Where are my sisters?! They were supposed to come
back with you!”
“I . . . .” Hal struggled to explain, “I couldn't
. . . I tried . . . Miss Velvet . . . they took her . . . .”
Pleats released Hal and backed away, stunned. Twang wore a pained look and hung his
head. Blue Jeans tried to glean some
hope, “But . . . Damask and Angora? Surely, they . . .” he trailed off when he
saw Hal shake his head. It was true, and
the truth was worse than anticipated; not only had Angora been taken, as was
wordlessly speculated mere moments ago, but Damask was now a prisoner, as
well. This left the four of them, and
with Cashmere dead, the only remaining ninja yet to be captured was Pleats.
Pleats’ fists shook at her sides, her fingers
digging furiously into her own skin. “You . . . damn you to Hell, you worthless . .
. .” she could say no more, her teeth grinding together and her eyes watering,
and her rage built up to a scream as she dropped to her knees. She punched the grass hard with a grunt, a
combined noise of pain and anger, and she shuddered while trying to hold back
her tears.
“Damn, I think that mighta given us away,” Twang
noted. “I say we get the hell up outta
here while we can!”
“Twang is right,” Blue Jeans agreed, “we have
about ten minutes before the train passes Ship Argo. If we catch it, we can
escape, and we'll be able to make plans to save our own.”
Pleats slowly stood up, her eyes still glistening
with tears, and turned up to Hal. “Make
no mistake,” she growled, “you will pay for this.” She then rounded onto Blue Jeans, “You, too.
But not—” she stopped when she saw movement above their heads, and shouted,
“MOVE, NOW!”
RAT-A-TAT-A-TAT-A-TAT!! The same gunfire that killed Cashmere sounded
off, and Blue Jeans, Pleats, Twang and Hal scattered, avoiding the bullets in
the nick of time. They all looked up to
see the smartly-dressed assassin rappelling down the side of the building,
aiming his sleeve machine guns at them and smiling. Once he was only a few feet from the ground,
he pushed off from the side of the building and dropped down, landing a perfect
roll across the grass. He eyed his
targets with a deadly gleam in his eyes and swept the area with his bullets.
No longer able to run for any cover on the open
grounds, Blue Jeans, Twang, Pleats and Hal continued to spread out thin,
heading for the perimeter wall. In an
effort to stall him, Pleats threw a set of shuriken at their attacker. Without the searchlights on, it was a bit
more difficult to aim, but aim or not, the sounds of the projectiles clinking
off the sides of the hitman's gun barrels signaled failure. Twang was next to try to stall him, and took
up one arrow to fire. It flew through
the dark, but was responded to by another volley of bullets. Twang rolled away before it started, and when
it stopped, he could see splintered pieces of wood fall into the grass,
shredded right out of the air before the arrow could land.
“Don't even try it, DDZ slime,” the assassin spoke
in his light voice. “Best to just die
right now. Save yourselves the trouble.”
He aimed his sleeve guns at Hal, the easiest target to see, and prepared
to fire . . .
CLANG!
He quickly raised one barrel to block Blue Jeans'
sword as it came down to almost slice his shoulder. “No one else will die, tonight!” he vowed,
“And you will pay for murdering Cashmere!!”
Despite the proximity of his opponent, the
assassin grinned maliciously. “Now, how
will you do that without killing me?” he asked smugly. He quickly swung the other barrel at Blue
Jeans' head, and he ducked, allowing the assassin to kick Blue Jeans away and
put distance between them. “Not that a
wretch like you has a chance to do so,” he continued his distasteful smugness,
“not without a gun, of course.”
Blue Jeans studied his opponent, sword at the
ready and prepared to evade the hitman's bullets when they fired. “I don't need a gun to avenge my friends,” he
retorted.
“If you hope to be worth anything, you do. And yet
here you are, swinging a sword like the mindless caveman you are. Pathetic.”
“Dude, let's go!!” Twang yelled across the grass;
he, Pleats and Hal had reached the perimeter wall, and Pleats was readying a
grappling hook to scale it.
“Go!” Blue Jeans yelled back. “I'll
draw him back! Get out of here, now!”
“Idiot!” Pleats shrieked. “Don't think being a hero now excuses you from
what you've done!”
“I SAID GO!!”
The assassin's hands flew, and Blue Jeans ducked
the string of bullets, closing the distance on him before the volley could hit
him. The assassin guarded with his gun's
barrels again, blocking the sword with one and swinging at Blue Jeans with the
other. Blue Jeans ducked again, and was
able to predict the same tactic from before; he blocked the hitman's kick with
one arm, pushed his foot away, and swung his blade hard. The assassin blocked again, but this time,
the barrel was pointed at Blue Jeans' head, and the swordsman had to sidestep
the following blast of rounds. He turned
this sidestep into a spinning horizontal slash, which the assassin caught
between his crossed sleeve barrels.
Then, before Blue Jeans could guard, the assassin brought his foot up
into a horizontal kick, swatting away Blue Jeans' sword. He took advantage of the moment of shock—Blue
Jeans hadn't been disarmed since he was an inexperienced child—to carry his
momentum into a powerful roundhouse kick that sent Blue Jeans flying backwards
into the side of the building.
Snapping out of his shock too late, Blue Jeans
made to retrieve his blade, but the assassin rushed at him and pressed his arm
into the swordsman's neck, pinning him to the building. “Defeated,” he whispered, his smug grin
showing the slightest hint of boredom. “Honestly, I don't know what Hiltov sees in
you. You're not half as dangerous as the rest of the DDZ trash.” He raised his free arm, aiming its sleeve gun
directly between Blue Jeans' eyes, “All the more reason for you to die.” He slowly bent his hand back, readying to
fire . . .
And he shifted to one side.
From their left, an arrow had sailed between the
heads of the battlers, struck through the assassin's sleeve just as it moved to
where his head had been, pinning it, arm and all, to the side of the
building. Finally gathering himself,
Blue Jeans took advantage of the distraction, grabbed the arm that pressed
against him, and pulled himself out from under it. He slipped behind his foe, pressing that arm
against his back, and pushed his body against the steel structure.
“I got four left!” Twang bellowed from a distance,
having come in closer to fire. “And you
ain't gettin' another one! Now MOVE YOUR ASS!!”
Blue Jeans nodded, released the assassin, and
rushed away, quickly collecting his sword as he ran for the wall. As he ran, he heard the assassin call out,
“Change of plans! Converge and obstruct! Now! Converge and obstru—” his words
were cut off when he shifted again, and Blue Jeans turned to see another arrow
pinning his other sleeve to the building instead of hitting a vital spot of his
body.
Twang groaned as Blue Jeans caught up with him. “I guess you do get another one,” he grumbled.
“Make that three left.” They both heard shouts and footsteps
approaching, and began to panic. “Damn!”
Twang cursed. “He was callin' the shots
the whole time! He's gettin' the rest of the Pistols on us!”
Blue Jeans was confused at this; if the assassin
had command over the Pistols, then why try to kill them himself? Due to his attire, he couldn't be a Pistol,
but his presence and motives made him a government official of some kind. Was he hired to kill them, and only decided
to alert the Pistols as a last resort?
It would explain why there had been no action from them up until that
point, but was this hitman powerful enough to keep them at bay for this long? And why make them stand down in the first
place? It was all Blue Jeans could
consider, and he counted himself lucky to be so lucid in his position.
“Thank you, my friend,” Blue Jeans spoke up,
re-sheathing his sword and his thoughts, “you've saved me once again. Even now
that I owe you so much already—”
“Later, man!” Twang advised. “We ain't got time to kill him, so just keep
movin'!” The Pistols now spotted the
escapees and opened fire, but the grounds were still dark without the
searchlights, and the foursome were able to evade the bullet fire. Pleats had already scaled the line she'd
cast, and was on top of the wall using the last of her own projectiles to thin
the horde, while Blue Jeans and Twang reached the wall and climbed the line in
little time. By the time Blue Jeans and
Twang had reached the top of the ten-foot wall, Hal was running full speed at
the wall; once at a full run, he took a flying leap at it, extended his axe,
and jammed it deep into the surface. He
was halfway from the top just from doing this.
“Faster, oaf!” Pleats urged, “They're still on
us!”
Blue Jeans and Twang reached down to grab Hal's
hand; as they took it, Hal used his free hand to wrench his axe from the
wall. “Move!” he yelled, and they did so
immediately. Just before falling, Hal
swung his axe into the wall again, hooking it over the edge and able to pull
himself up to the top of the wall.
A split-second after this, he cried out and
grabbed his arm—evidence that shots were still ringing out at them in the
darkness.
“No!” Blue Jeans yelled, prepared to take up his
sword again. “Hal! Are you all right?”
Hal collapsed the handle of his axe and put it
away. “I'm fine,” he gave a pained
reply. “We have to move, now!” And all four of them descended the wall,
outside the grounds, just in time to dodge another wave of machine gun fire.
* *
* * *
It didn't take the group long to reach the
rendezvous point—the repulsor train line thirty feet above the city—and the
search was on for the train. It was
almost oh-two-hundred-thirty hours, and the train was due to pass any second
now. The rendezvous point was located
close to a northern border to the Wokegan DDZ (the group could see a sign
beyond the border fence saying “Spatula Street”), and as such, the area was
largely deserted. Much of it was only
empty streets and abandoned buildings, but it was far better cover than what
they were given at the archives building.
“Where is it?!” Pleats shrieked, looking up and
down at the track overhead. “We depended
on this train for our escape!” She then
glanced at Blue Jeans and scowled. “More
reliance wasted!”
“Pleats, please,” Blue Jeans approached her, placing
his hands on her shoulders. “We're still
not far enough away to discuss this. You have every right to be angry with me,
but—”
“Angry? Angry!?!
Your plan got us in there! Your refusal to cooperate got Cashmere killed! And
your botched escape got my sisters captured! 'Angry' is a laughably unworthy
word!!”
“Don't you think I know that?” Blue Jeans
desperately argued. “Cashmere's death
will forever haunt me! You have to know that! I made a mistake, and I wish with
all my heart that I could take it back—”
“THAT'S NOT ENOUGH!!” Pleats' fury was unbound,
and she once again grabbed Blue Jeans by the front of his uniform, “YOU THINK
FEELING BAD IS ENOUGH RECOMPENSE FOR WHAT YOU'VE DONE!?! I WILL NEVER SEE MY
SISTERS AGAIN BECAUSE OF YOU!! YOU WILL NEVER HAVE FORGIVENESS FOR THIS!! DO
YOU HEAR ME?! NEVER!!”
“Please!!” Hal begged as he pulled them apart and
stepped between them. “No more fighting.
Look, the train is coming right now.” He
pointed at the far end of the track above, and surely enough, the repulsor line
zoomed down the length of track towards them, its front light powering through
the darkness from over a dozen miles away.
“We can get them back,” Hal continued, his voice shaky. “I know if we work together, we can find our
friends and save them. But we can't fight amongst ourselves, or they'll be lost
forever.”
Pleats stared daggers at Hal as she snapped back,
“They already are, you lumbering fool. Your sad sentiment for my sister Velvet
is as useless as you are.”
“Wait a minute!” Blue Jeans confronted her. “You cannot expect to harass Halberd just to
make yourself feel better—” he cut himself off when Pleats pulled her sword and
aimed the tip at Blue Jeans' throat. The
look in her eyes matched her earlier words—'anger' was just not enough.
Blue Jeans eyed the sword, shocked that Pleats
would stoop to this low, but still continued, “That sword doesn't make Hal
wrong. And it doesn't make you right.”
“But it does make us dead!” Twang alerted, “if we
don't find some cover!” The others
looked around, and approaching from all sides was the whine of sirens, the
roaring of engines, and the stomping of running boots on pavement. The Pistols were still coming.
Blue Jeans strained to hear the sounds, and found
that they were coming from any and all roads leading back into the city. “It's too late,” he answered, “they must have
heard us.” He looked around the street
they were on, and saw that a nearby building sat close to the track. “We need to get closer to the train! This
way!”
He led the group to the building, and they
followed him in. They trudged up two
flights of stairs, one of which was behind a door that Hal easily broke down
with his sheer girth. Soon, Hal repeated
this action on the door straight to the roof, and he, Blue Jeans, Twang and
Pleats were on top of the building and looking down on the single bar of metal
that served as the repulsor train's track.
The train rushed ever closer, Twang readied their
grapple line, and they all prepared their breathing masks, when they all
started hearing a new sound. The first
thought was that it was the train, but repulsor lines made far less sound than
that. It grew in volume, and the group
looked around for the source, only seeing it just as a searchlight struck them
all.
“YOU ARE IN VIOLATION OF FIRENIGHT LAW!!” boomed a
voice from the direction of the light and sound. “PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPONS AND SURRENDER
IMMEDIATELY, OR WE WILL OPEN FIRE!!”
Both voice and light came from a massive Pistol-sanctioned helicopter, hanging
from the door of which was a high-ranked officer with a megaphone. Behind him was a crew of more Pistols,
weapons drawn and ready to follow through with their threats.
No words were spoken amongst the valiant
group. The unspoken truth seemed to be
on all their minds already. Their every
trick was expended. They had no
remaining plans. The Pistols on the
streets were gathering around the building below and rushing inside to corner
them on the roof. It was over, and they
all knew it.
Except for Twang.
With the train only a few yards away, Twang
unmasked himself and sent his grapple arrow flying, and it struck the side of
the vehicle just before the lead car reached them. “Now, I don't want nobody screamin' at me,”
he said firmly. “Don't nobody try to
stop me or talk me out of it. Y'all need to get out more than I do.”
“What?!” Blue Jeans tried to argue. “But surely you—”
“What did I say?! Don't try it, man, and don't you
even try to go all deep on me. You need to save Taffeta and the girls. You need
to avenge your mama and daddy. So you need to live. You feel me?” Not waiting for an answer, Twang pulled one
more arrow, one that looked far different than the others; it seemed to have a
small, thin canister of some kind attached to it, “I been savin' this little
baby.”
“But what about you?!” Blue Jeans kept arguing. “You're one of us! You have to—”
“Shut up, man! You already got to play hero
tonight! Now it's my turn!”
Twang loaded up his bow and fired the special
arrow up at the helicopter. At the same
time, Pleats and Hal grabbed the line, with Hal seizing a stunned Blue Jeans
just as the line's anchor point passed them.
Twang raced away, and the others were pulled off of the building by the
racing train. The Pistols aboard the
chopper began to fire, but missed, and for more than one reason; the arrow
they'd received from Twang began shooting sparks from one end of the attached
canister. The same end also spewed
smoke, and it filled the cockpit almost immediately.
“No!” Blue Jeans struggled against Hal's grip, not
caring that he now dangled thirty feet above the streets of Ship Argo, “Twang,
you can't do this! Twang! Please, come with us, before it's too late! Twang!!”
The chopper above started bucking and waving in
midair. Control over the massive vehicle
had been lost, and it swiveled close to the top of the building, prepared to
destroy the whole thing.
“Twang!! Get out of there! Twang! TWANG!!”
Too late.
The helicopter finally gave out and crashed into the top of the building,
creating an ear-shattering explosion and making the entire structure
crumble. The Pistols in the street
backed away in terror as the propellers' blades raked into the stone and brick,
sending dangerous shards of it all up and down the empty street. The building sunk, floor-by-floor, to the
ground, sending up clouds of dust and hunks of debris, and bringing the
wrecked, fiery helicopter—and the courageous archer—with it.
“TWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANG!!!!”
--------------------------------------------------------* * * * *--------------------------------------------------------
"Their first defeat . . . .
Their formidable force cut down to a mere three, Blue Jeans and company must recuperate, both mentally and physically, from the losses they suffered in Ship Argo. Hiding out in a small DDZ in the Second Sector, the trio suffer from dissent in the ranks almost immediately; Blue Jeans is wracked with guilt over their failed mission, Hal longs to be reunited with his friends, and Pleats' wrath hides an insecure feeling she has thus far shown no one. And all the while, they are unaware of their deadly new enemy waiting to strike again . . . .
NEXT TIME! Blue Jeans Samurai #11:
Revenge Battle! BJ vs. Cuff Link!
Don't miss it!"
