Max Arena (56 page)

Staring the
beast down, thirty metres distant, Max locked his mental cross
hairs onto the creature’s chest. In a flurry, he charged forward
two steps and unleashed the javelin. Soundlessly, the missile drove
through the air, its deadly point glittering. The creature did not
react and the javelin smashed into its chest, the point digging
into the insipid, folded skin, forming ripples like a pebble
falling into a pond.

The beast did
not flinch. In fact it did not move at all and immediately Max knew
why. The moment the javelin’s point hit its skin, the weapon
bounced back and away, failing to penetrate. The attack had been
futile. The alien’s skin was its armour and no blade or missile was
getting through it.

Max
subconsciously turned the sword in his left hand and then passing
it unlooking into his right hand, he cast it away towards the
weapons portal from where the javelin had come. It would be useless
in this bout.

‘What do you
want?’ Kris asked.

‘Don’t know
yet,’ he replied. ‘I’ll have to test this thing first to
find...’

A blur of
movement from the creature’s chest suddenly cut Max’s reply short.
Like a panther, he dived to the right, rolled and came up on his
toes to look again at the creature. A flabby gash had opened up on
the giant’s chest, but there was no sign of what had apparently
just shot out of it towards him.

‘What the hell
was that, Kris?’ he asked.

‘It shot
something out of its chest,’ she replied. ‘Like green golf balls.
Hang on! What’s that, where the things landed?’

‘You tell me.
I’m not taking my eyes off this thing in case it does it
again.’

‘The balls,
they’re smoking on the grass.’

Max was now
moving slowly in a gradual arc towards the weapons portal, his
steps fluid as he shifted his weight and balance from foot to foot.
He would not be taken by surprise again.

‘What do you
mean they’re smoking?’ he asked. ‘Are they on fire?’

‘No,’ Kris
said back vaguely. ‘I think they’re melting, like they’re made of
acid or something.’

‘Must be
corrosive,’ Max said as he came closer to the weapons portal, his
eyes still locked on the slowly turning monster, watching him move.
‘Toss me out a big shield, a little shield and a knife.’

‘You heard
him!’ Kris called out.

A few seconds
later, three items slid through the portal to drop to the grass
below. Max sidestepped a little further and without breaking his
focus on the beast, leaned down and first picked up the knife.

The blade was
a standard combat knife that was also perfectly weighted for
throwing. It was sheathed and Max slapped the weapon against his
right hip, the material shrouding the sheath sticking to the fabric
of his combat suit. Another piece of engineering brilliance from
Abdullah’s engineering think tank.

Then Max
reached down and grabbed a shield with each of his hands. The
smaller shield was a perfect disc, just over half a metre in
diameter and light weight, making it perfect for easy
manoeuvrability and close quarter combat with a sword. Its front
surface was as smooth as pressed metal and shone like polished
silver, flashing under the overhead lights like a mirror in the
sun.

The second
shield was massive. A full two metres in height and a metre wide,
it was thick, but completely see through, allowing its bearer to
hide fully behind it, but retain full sight of any opponent. It was
also relatively lightweight considering its bulk.

Max hefted the
straps of the big shield onto his left arm and the bindings of the
smaller shield onto his right arm. Testing the weight and feel of
both shields with his own balance, Max satisfied himself he was
ready and then stepped off towards the giant.

With careful
paces, he began closing the gap between them. With no clear plan of
how to attack this alien, Max remained on his toes and alert, both
shields raised. To discover this being’s weakness, he would need to
provoke it into attack, which would either provide a path to
victory or get himself killed.

Then it
happened. Max saw the creature’s chest sharply convulse and the
gash spat out a short stream of apple sized missiles directly at
him. Chancing the strength of the big shield, Max jammed it into
the ground and braced himself behind it.

The missiles
smacked into the clear guard like machine gun bullets. Max’s orange
shoes slid slightly backwards on the turf as he tried to hold his
ground against the barrage. Then he noticed that the missiles had
not bounced off and instead had stuck to the shield and were now
smoking. Max could also hear a slight sizzle and see the clear
material of the shield beginning to bubble where the missiles had
lodged.

They
were
corrosive. Not much, but enough. The shield could take
a lot more punishment yet, but under a big enough onslaught it
would eventually fall apart. As for what it could do to human skin,
that was not an attractive thought.

The barrage
stopped, so Max straightened up and eyed off the creature through
the top half of the shield. He also tossed the small shield aside.
It would be useless here. He needed more protection than it could
afford.

Max began
moving again, but this time changed his path to move diagonally
forwards to the creature’s left. He still needed to find a
weakness. Now only ten metres away, the creature shuffled its
massive legs to keep Max in its wide line of sight. The movement
caught Max’s eye. It was ungainly. Awkward even, like the alien was
only just mobile and preferred to not move if it could avoid
it.

Then before
Max could formulate a plan, its chest convulsed again and another
round of missiles shot out. Max quickly brought the shield up again
and dug his toes in against the force of the impacts. Instantly the
front surface of the shield began to blister and hiss. Then
something else happened.

Without moving
its feet, the creature twisted its torso and flicked its left arm
out in front. In a blur, a tentacle erupted from the end of the arm
to bridge the distance to Max and smack into the shield, disrupting
Max’s balance. The creature twisted the other way and its right arm
shot round and out came another tentacle to bash into Max’s shield.
This second blow caught Max well off guard and sent him flying
backwards to land and slide on his back to a halt, the huge shield
lying over him like a cover.

Then Max felt
the ground shake and knew what that meant. Snapping to his feet,
the shield up in front again, Max found the alien loping towards
him, its massive, flabby bulk, sloughing like a dough ball. Its
pace was very slow, but it was mobile and now Max knew it had two
whipping tentacles in its armoury as well as the corrosive balls
and impenetrable skin. This just got a whole lot harder.

Max lifted his
shield and doing his best to hold it out to his right side for
protection, he started to run. Directing his path in a wide arc
around to the alien’s right, he tried to get around to its back
side. The alien halted its loping and attempted to continue turning
to keep Max in front, but Max accelerated. A volley of bullets
suddenly shot out from the creature’s chest, only one of which
connected with the shield, the rest shooting past behind Max.

As Max ran
further, he kept his focus on the alien’s one, over-sized eye,
trying to get outside of its field of vision. Then, as he ran
further around to the back of the creature, he found something odd
and stopped in his tracks. The creature did in fact have two eyes.
On the back of its bald skull, there was a second, identical eye,
stretched across and staring. It literally had an eye in the back
of its head. Getting in behind the alien’s field of vision was
impossible. Max needed another plan.

Suddenly,
another sharp burst of corrosive balls sprayed at him. Max easily
side stepped them, but failed to see the ploy. As he stepped left,
Max stepped straight into the ambush of the nearest tentacle arm
shooting out and knocking him backwards off his feet again. The
force of this blow was lessened by the shield, but still it stunned
him.

The world
monetarily disappeared behind a black veil and Max’s centre of
gravity went missing. Knowing he was flying uncontrollably through
the air, Max came to his senses just in time to feel the full force
of the ground pummel him as he rolled to a stop, ten metres behind
where he had been standing.

Again Max felt
the earth tremoring beneath him. The creature was coming. Max
lifted his head and found himself to be still a shade groggy and
with very little time to get clear. Rising to his feet, Max lifted
the shield just in time as another barrage of balls fired forth
from the loping alien’s chest. Max dug the shield in and absorbed
the hail of balls, but the acidic effects of the previous bursts
had weekend the shield.

The see
through material buckled inwards and Max shied back. Then the
shield smashed completely through as a tentacle crashed into it and
without the protection of the shield, impacted Max’s chest to send
him flying backwards again, this time like a rag doll.

High up in
their family private booth, Elsa gasped, her hand whipping up to
her gaping mouth. Millie squealed and Jason cowered. Elsa’s wide,
glassy eyes took in the full scene, her pupils dilated open and
sucking it all in. She watched as her husband’s feet lifted off the
ground. She watched as Max’s body flailed uncontrollably. She
watched as her hero slammed into the turf and rolled to a halt,
unmoving.

The crowd sat
stunned. The joy of the first victory now lay buried beneath the
brutal reality of this second duel’s awful twist. Their champion
was down, beaten senseless by a brute of a monster. Disaster rose
up from the floor of the arena and fear clenched at the hearts and
throats of all watching.

Abdullah’s
fist clutched his prayer beads as he muttered a prayer. Joe placed
his hand against the glass of his booth, sending his own prayer out
across the space. Kris gaped, her hands balled up on her head.

Meanwhile, the
creature continued to bear down on Max, the grass beneath its bulk
being trampled and broken as it blundered ahead. Kris’ eyes goggled
as she watched the horror unfold. Max was out cold and about to
die.

‘Get up, Max,’
she whispered. ‘Get up.’

And then he
moved. First Max’s hands snapped open as though they were feeling
the grass beneath them. Then Max’s head shot up, his eyes instantly
locking onto the lumbering beast bearing down on him and finally,
he was up.

In one single
powerful motion, Max drove himself upwards with his arms and then
continued the drive with his legs, propelling him high into the air
and into a flawless backward somersault.

The creature
shot out a tentacle, but as Max’s feet approached the ground to
land, he twisted and the tentacle snapped past his side. Now on the
ground, Max sprang sideways and was instantly at full sprint,
legging it in a wide arc outside of the reach of the alien’s
assault armoury and towards where he had discarded the small
shield.

‘Toss out some
javelins,’ Max rasped as he sprinted, ‘and a broadsword.’

‘Done,’ Kris
replied, almost breathless as she struggled to react to how quickly
Max had gone from out cold to full action.

Max ran to the
small, silver shield and scooped it up, turning as he did and just
in time too as another stream of acid balls shot out of the alien’s
chest. This time, without a big shield to hide behind, Max had to
wield his smaller shield about to deflect all of the missiles. Two
bounced off to smoke on the grass, but two stuck to the shield and
instantly it began to pit and steam.

The creature
was too far away to strike out with its tentacles, so while it
reloaded its chest cavity with more acid balls, Max looked behind
him and found the broadsword and a pile of retracted javelins lying
behind him against the wall and below a weapons portal.

Dropping the
still smoking shield to the grass, Max picked up the broadsword and
drove the big heavy blade point first into the ground next to him,
so its hilt was close and easy to grab. He then picked up a javelin
and pressed the button to loose the telescopic extensions. Max then
stuck the javelin into the turf next to the broadsword and finally
recollected the small shield. A quick inspection of the front face
of the shield revealed it would probably only be good for one more
barrage of corrosive balls. That would have to do.

Looking back
up, Max found the beast slowly waddling towards him, trying to get
its tentacles in range of a strike. Max braced himself and waited
for his foe to come closer. He had a plan, but it was far from well
thought out.

Inside his
mind, Max was calm. The world again faded behind a white fog and he
was alone with his senses. His Nar’gellan instincts were firing his
thoughts and actions, but his human composure kept him focused. Max
could feel the electricity in the air, tingling through the light
sweat on his skin. He could feel the slight sea breeze stirring the
hairs on his arms. He could feel the humidity, sticky and thick
around him. Max could also feel his heartbeat, steady and strong,
slightly elevated, but slowing as he focused.

Max was in
control, his entire being poised to strike, but he needed the beast
to strike first. His success depended on it. His
everything
depended on it and then it happened, the speed of it all a blur to
the crowd, but to Max, a languid slow motion.

The beast’s
chest twitched and four more acid balls shot out, directly at Max’s
head. He saw them coming and held his stance as he watched them
grow larger and larger in front of him. Then at the last minute,
Max ducked and all of the missiles sailed overhead. Now came the
next part.