Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (8 page)

She was still bearing down on the lifeless body when a hand suddenly fell on her shoulder.

“Hey, relax,” Jax said. He nodded toward the pulverized snarl of metal, synthetic flesh and circuitry that had been his opponent. “It’s over, Sonya. We beat them.”

She whipped her head around, looking straight at him, something almost feral in her expression. For a moment, he could have sworn she didn’t have the slightest idea who he was. Then her eyes came back from some faraway place – a place Jax really didn’t think anybody in his right mind would want to go with her – and filled with recognition.

She slowly released her grip on the staff.

“You and those stupid arms,” she said, gasping. “I thought I was gonna have to save you again.”

“Again? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Forget it.”

Sonya glanced back down at Mileena’s corpse.

“She was a pretty good replica of a human being, but it looks like we got another cyborg here,” she said, and pointed to the griffon-like tattoo on her shoulder. “That’s exactly the same as the mark we on Cyrax.”

“It’s like a goddamned nightmare,” Jax said, watching the tattoo start to move, its wings flapping as it became three dimensional. “I don’t know how much longer I can take this shit. These suckers–”

He stopped talking.

He looked at Sonya.

She looked back at him.

They both had heard the Extermination Squad pushing through the wooded tangle behind them, and from the sound of things they were coming much too close for comfort.

“We better roll,” Sonya said. “
Pronto
.”

Jax nodded, and a moment later they were dashing off into the mist.

For Liu it began the same way it would eventually end – with the sense that he was dreaming or hallucinating, helpless to control the surreal flow of events into which he had been swept like a leaf in a gale.

His eyes flickering open, he tried to move, discovered that he couldn’t, and then realized that he was buried in sand up to his neck.

This can’t be real
, he thought with a surge of claustrophobic panic.
Can’t be
.

He tilted his chin up off the desert floor. Night was still with him. So was Nightwolf. The young Native American was a few feet away, circling him with a torch.

“Glad you could join us,” he said. “We’ve got a ton of work to do.”

Liu squirmed and felt sand trickle down the back of his shirt, a sensation that heightened his terror to a degree that was almost overwhelming.

“
Let me out!
” he shouted. “
I don’t have time for this!
”

Nightwolf’s scoffing grin made an unwanted comeback.

“Really?” He stood over Liu with his feet planted apart and his arms folded across his chest. “Well, I don’t have time for your ignorance. So if you’ve got a problem, why don’t you do something about it, tough guy?”

“I can’t fight you. I can’t even move.”

“Excellent, some signs of intelligence,” Nightwolf said, his slantwise smile creeping higher up his face. He knelt close to Liu. “You’ve gotta learn to fight with inner strength, dude. Your moves are important, but even the best warrior can be killed. It’s the fire inside you, your everlasting faith in yourself, that can never be defeated.”

Liu’s eyes never left Nightwolf as he walked over to a ten-foot high prickly pear cactus and knocked in half with a forceful kick.

“I know this sounds like a bunch of psychobabble, but it really does work.
If
your soul is pure,” he said.

He lowered his torch to the ground and revealed an army of dark, furry spiders swarming from the broken cactus.

Liu’s eyes widened. “What are you doing?”

“Here’s the deal,” Nightwolf said. “You’ve got three tests to pass before you’re ready for what lies ahead.” He knelt, filling the pouch with spiders until it bulged and jerked from the inside. Then he smiled his crooked smile. “Now the first thing we’re gonna test is your courage... this part should blow your mind.”

Liu moistened his lips. “Why does it have to be spiders?”

“Because you’re scared of them.”

Standing over Liu again, Nightwolf turned the pouch upside down and emptied the spiders onto his head.

Cringing with revulsion as they skittered over his scalp and face, Liu tried to shake them off and yelped in sudden pain.

“The trick here is to overcome your fear.”

“I know! I can feel it!”

“Relax,” Nightwolf said, attenuating the
a
sound. “Their poison won’t kill you, just expand your mind beyond your current boundaries.”

“If you’re so damn smart and brave, why don’t you fight Shao Kahn?” Liu asked furiously.

Nightwolf’s face become serious, the fathoms-deep look Liu had seen before returning to his eyes. “If Kahn dares to attack our sacred land, I will be here to protect my people... as I have for the last two hundred years.”

He stood over Liu for another minute, then began walking away with the torch.

Night poured over Liu like thick molasses.

“Wait!” Liu shouted after him. “Where are you going? You can’t just leave me here like this.”

The words that came back at him from the enveloping darkness were laced with mockery.

“Wanna bet?”

His face pale, his skin beaded with sweat, Liu felt his eyelids grow heavy as the spider venom took hold.

Finally, they dropped shut.

When Liu came to again, he was standing against a field of what he initially believed were stars, thousands of them, twinkling against the night sky like carelessly scattered diamonds. But as his head cleared, he realized to his horror that they were, in fact, tiny, brightly blinking eyes... malevolent, jack-o’-lantern eyes that flashed from white to emerald green before his own enraptured gaze.

Then he heard Nightwolf’s voice. Heard it coming from inside his own head.

“Face your fears, Liu,” it said. “Through them you will find your primal power. Your animal rage.”

“I won Mortal Kombat!” Liu protested in a voice that seemed oddly detached from him. “What do
I
have to fear?”

“You hide your fears with attitude. But here you cannot hide.”

Demonic faces emerged from the darkness, their outlines shifting and phantasmal except for those gemlike green eyes. Liu heard overlapping whoops of frenzied laughter and instinctively assumed a fighting stance.

“You let your brother die,” a voice said from everywhere and nowhere at once.

“You cannot beat Shao Kahn!” whooped another with monstrous elation.

More voices joined in the taunting chorus.

“You are a worthless man!”

“You cannot save the world!”

“You will fail!”

Liu punched and kicked at the wraithlike creatures, but his blows went right through them. They whirled and capered around him, untouchable, their strident, overlapping voices tearing at his composure.

Then, drowning them out in a soundless roar, Nightwolf’s voice pushed back into Liu’s head.

“The past cannot hurt you, Liu,” he said. “Believe in your destiny. Every man has the power to change the future. Find that power within.”

Liu clenched his fists without even knowing he had done so. Then he closed his eyes and stood perfectly still.

“Yes,” he said. “I can feel it.”

Incredibly, greenish-black reptilian scales began to sprout from his arms. Smoke gusted from his nose. His eyes peeled open, glowing like red lightbulbs, their pupils horizontal slits.

The Dragon
, an inner voice that was his, yet not his, shouted.
Loose the Dragon!

His anger rising within him in a scalding fountain, Liu belched out a gout of flame that torched several of the demons and sent them scattering like meteors in some stellar cataclysm. The others flew off as well, their jeering howls of laughter curdling to fearful, defeated shrieks that soon dwindled out of earshot.

Liu teetered between a giddy exhilaration over the newfound power throbbing within him like a chrysalis trying to shed its cocoon, and fear of what would become of him if that happened. For a moment he was tempted to find out, to let that terrifying yet seductive force burst free of restraint and take over completely... but the urge was quickly suppressed. He was terrified that if he did that, if the transformation were to complete itself, there might be no reversing it.

Closing his eyes again, he wrestled down his anger, willing it back into whatever fiery chamber of his soul it had sprung from. Slowly his features grew calm, the plated scales on his arms smoothing and softening as they reverted to human flesh.

Within minutes, a kind of thick, gluey lassitude settled over him and everything went black.

This time when Liu regained his senses, it was after feeling his eyelids flecked by something wet and stingingly cold. He opened his eyes to find it was daylight, and that he was no longer buried in sand, but lying face up in a large ditch. Light snow was falling. Scorched black, the ground around him was already half hidden under a powdery accumulation.

“Nightwolf?” he said, rising on his elbows. “Nightwolf?”

But there was no sign of him, and Liu’s calls were quickly snatched away in a rush of harsh, bitterly cold wind. He got to his feet and surveyed his predicament, shivering violent.

Covered by a skim of snow, the procession of sand dunes surrounding him now resembled immense polar drifts. Snow rippled and swirled in the air, dissolving the world into soft focus.

Where was he? Which way was he supposed to go? The maddening truth was he didn’t have a clue. One direction seemed as good as another.

Miserable and despondent, hugging himself for warmth, Liu started out through the blowing snow.

Liu had walked a great distance since first awakening in the storm but gotten no closer to any sign of life. His strength was fading. Every step he took left him shin-deep in the mounting white drifts. His hair crusted with ice, his face bluing from the cold, he fell to his knees and began to crawl, his fingers clawing at the frozen ground.

Liu was almost unconscious when he noticed the orange gleam of firelight playing across the snow up ahead. The muscles of his neck creaking softly, he raised his head... and blinked. Then blinked again. And again, certain he was looking at another hallucination.

“I am Jade,” the woman standing in front of him said. In her hand was a long wooden staff, the end of which had been dipping in burning pitch to create torchlight. “I have searched the mesa for you, Liu Kang. Nightwolf feared for your life.”

Liu kept looking up at her, momentarily dumbstruck. Whether flesh-and-blood or a figment of his imagination, she was absolutely, stunningly beautiful. Her face was angular and fine-featured with high cheekbones and dark brown eyes that slanted up a little at the corners. Somehow, the bulky animal skins in which she was wrapped only seemed to accentuate the long, seductive, length of her body.

She knelt beside him, her breechcloth riding up over her bare knee. Then she planted the staff in the snow and touched her hands to his shaking chest, sliding them under his shirt, sharing her warmth.

“This snow,” she said, “it falls from desert skies. Do you know why?”

“Yes,” he said. “There’s not much time left – the end of the world is near.”

She nodded. Her fingers were very soft moving over him.

“Of all the horrors darkness holds, to die alone, that it my worst fear,” she said.

One hand withdrew from him, went to a cord fastener on her jacket, opened it. She pulled him into its folds, pressed herself against him.

“With you, Liu Kang,” she said. “I am not afraid.”

He felt his heart racing. His throat was suddenly tight.

Her hands moved over him.

“I don’t even know who you are,” he said huskily.

“All you need to know is that I am here to help you,” she said. She stroked his hair, her breath moist and feathery against his neck. “Take my warmth. Let it give you strength for your battle.”

“You’re almost too good to be true,” he said, letting himself be drawn closer to her.

She moved against him, her lips parting.

“The same could be said about you,” she said, and tilted her head forward, and brushed her mouth against his own. “We can defy the darkness by creating the light of new life.”

His head swimming, Liu started to return her kiss, but suddenly hesitated.

“No,” he rasped. “I... I can’t.”

“Don’t say that.” She snaked her arms around his waist, moving, moving, pressing closer to him. “Together we could melt the snow, Liu Kang.”

Liu pushed away. “Stop–”

“Together we could live our final days–”

“No,” Liu said, struggling against her. Against
himself
. “My heart belongs to another.”

Her eyes lowered as he drew back from her.

Gently, he cupped her chin in his hand, raised her face until their eyes met.

“If you’re really here for me, Jade, help us defeat Shao Kahn.”

She looked at him a while, then smiled and kissed him again – but this time it was a quick, chaste peck on the cheek.

“You are even more pure and faithful than I heard,” she said. “You have passed the test, Liu Kang.”

He looked at her in bewilderment.

“A test? This was all just another of Nightwolf’s tests?”

She took hold of his hand.

“An enjoyable one for me,” she said. “And under different circumstances, I would not have wanted it to end just yet. But we must get to Mount Gaia. The others will be waiting.”

He shook his head. “No. If this was a test, it was only the second. I’m not ready.”

“Not ready to save Kitana? Because I can take you to the prison where she’s kept.”

He looked at her. “You’ve seen her? She’s alive?”

“For now, yes.” Jade fell momentarily silent. The sound of battle horns blared in the distance. “Kahn is near. We must go.”

Liu glanced in the general direction of the clamor, took a deep breath, then rose slowly to his feet and began following her across the icy tundra.