New Human

Nemesis is close to Olympus now, maybe fifty miles from its great heavy composite doors, which to her knowledge only open when she comes and goes. No one else leaves Olympus, especially the citizens. She knows what the welcome will be when she arrives and she dreads it. All those young faces cheering and chanting her name like she’s some hero, but that’s not how she feels. She can’t say she’s like them, because she isn’t in many ways, but that’s how she feels as she continues forward, her boots sinking into the deep soft blackened dust. She drinks in the radiation soaked air. It burns her lungs but her nanotech augments take care of that as she contemplates how long she should stay this time. Each visit has been getter shorter and shorter. Maybe, she wonders, that is why Ares and the others treat her differently now. Maybe they’re angry that she’s avoiding her duties of helping humanity to survive. But somehow that doesn’t seem right. They aren’t mad. They’re…worried, concerned…maybe even fearful. This is useless she tells herself as she casts her train of thought aside. It’s getting her nowhere she knows. Then suddenly she feels the ground rumble. Nemesis stops and looks all around her, sure that she will find a firestorm right on top of her. She curses herself for not paying proper attention to her surroundings. But she finds nothing. There is no firestorm or dust storm. There are only her footprints in the dust, but still the ground rumbles. It can’t be an earthquake, she tells herself as her brow furrows and she listens carefully. Her enhanced hearing picks up a skittering sound like something is digging, but she knows there is nothing alive out here, except her that is. The radiation levels are too high for anything to survive except her. Then she hears what she is sure is a groan. She shakes her head sure she is going mad. A groan? How can there be a groan? She asks herself as she listens and tries to search for sounds, but the sounds are gone and there is only silence. She’ll have to get Hecate to check her over when she gets back to Olympus, she decides as she begins walking again.

But Nemesis manages to cover only a couple metres before she hears the noises again, closer now. In fact, she realises the noises are coming from below her just moments before nine columns of dust erupt into the air.

Nemesis closes her hands to activate the liquid metal which spills from the pours in her palms and forms into twin blades that run near parallel up the length of her arms and just as the drones come into view.

Nemesis sneers in disgust at the creatures which had clearly once been human. She wonders what did this to them. The drones lunge at Nemesis with clawed hands, the blades sharp enough to cleave through steel like a hot knife through butter. Nemesis dodges the first swipe, blocks the seconds and third with the blade in her left hand before she spins and then blocks a fourth swipe with the blade in her right hand. The faces of the drones are twisted, mangled and fused with cybernetics. Whoever did this, Nemesis thinks as she somersaults out of the ring of enemies around her, is a monster. She lands on her feet with ease in the moments before she drops into a fighting stance.

This isn’t Apocalypse she tells herself as she prepares for battle. The AI had never used humans. They were the weak link, the disease and that AI is long dead. So who? Nemesis wonders before quickly concluding that she could at least try Athena’s approach of diplomacy.

“Who are you?” Nemesis asks, but she gets no answer as the drones lumber toward her. She notes that they seem slower now, almost as though they are struggling, but she can’t decide if it’s a ruse or the dust.

“How did this happen to you? Nemesis continues to question.

“Who did this?”

But all of Nemesis’ questions are met with silence. There goes diplomacy, she thinks as one of the drones breaks into a sprint. Definitely a ruse, Nemesis concludes as she raises her arms and crosses her hands so that her blades cross to create a guard. The drone slams its claws into the crossed blades. The thing is staggered by the impact, which gives Nemesis the opportunity to jump at the target with her knee raised high. Her knee slams into the base of the drones’ jaw, which detonates into a mass of gore, rotten and putrid, as the body topples backward. The stench makes Nemesis heave for a second before the nanotech in her body suppresses the urge and dulls her sense of smell. She is pleased to no longer be able to smell that stench as the downed body twitches, while the other attackers keep their distance and watch.

“This can’t be good.” Nemesis says to herself as the twitching of the downed body becomes more severe until finally four jointed legs erupt from the sides of the attackers torso. Nemesis knows that if she could smell the smell she would have just vomited as the long legs push the body back up onto its feet. She realises the four new legs protruding from the torso are metal. It doesn’t surprise her seeing as these men are clearly cybernetically enhanced, but it does reveal they are dead. Not because she will kill them, but because they are in fact already dead. She doesn’t understand how or why, but the congealed blood and decomposing tissue are all the proof she needs, on top of the revolting smell that she had caught a brief whiff of.

“Come on then. I don’t have all day.” Nemesis taunts, but she doesn’t know why. These attackers don’t understand her, they can’t, they’re dead. Though, she still wonders why they are here. Is this attack random? Or are they being controlled? She doesn’t know and concludes it doesn’t matter as the mutilated drone leaps toward her.

Nemesis throws herself into a spin, her arms bent at the elbows so the blades point outward. The drone in caught by one of the blades which slices clean through the rotten head before the next comes round to skewer through the temple of the skull and tear it clean from its crooked neck. The skewered lower half of the skull flies off the blade as Nemesis completes her spin and it is sent hurling across the dust. But the target isn’t down as the body stays upright and reaches for Nemesis who snarls, raises her blades and then brings them down. They cut through the torso to about mid way before she turns the blades ninety degrees and pulls them away from one another. The torso is cut into three. Each section drops to the floor with a semi-wet thud, and this time the body doesn’t twitch or move or even sprout new limbs. This time the body of the drone stays down, the cybernetics now as dead as the flesh.

Nemesis sighs and shakes her head as stands ready for the next attack, which she knows will come sooner rather than later, just as all eight of the remaining attackers rush her. She knew this was coming. The first had been to test her, asses her skills and movements. This is the real attack, but Nemesis has managed to make assessments of her own. The only way to put these things down and them stay down is to cleave them apart and she can do that. She was made to do that, she thinks, as she smiles.

Two of the drones reach Nemesis first, who throws her weight forward out of her defensive stance, raising and bending her arms as she goes so that the blades slice through both of the attackers. The pair of drones are cleaved from navel to head in a single clean cut. The vertical slices of the two drones flop to the dust covered ground as Nemesis spins away. But one of the claws catches the rear of her shoulder and she howls in pain as the alloy cuts her to the bone. Her left shoulder goes limp and the nanoblade disappears back into her left palm. The tiny machines in her body release pain suppressants and then busily fix the damage as she drops into a defensive stance just in time to deflect another swipe. Nemesis leans into the incoming swipe as she blocks, which knocks the drone off balance as another throws itself at her, only to be impaled through the chest by the horizontal thrust of her blade. But the impaled drone is not out, as it thrashes and hauls itself along the length of her nanoblade until she extends her arm away from her chest fully. The blade slices from between the rib cage and clear across the drones’ chest just in time for the blade in her left hand to return and block two more drone swipes.

Nemesis drops into a backward roll to put some distance between her and the attackers, but they immediately race toward her. Nemesis cocks her head left and then right, both movements result in satisfying cracks as her eyes burrow deep into the attackers’ forms.

“”Let’s see how you handle this.” Nemesis roars as she puts the flat ends of her twin blades hilts together. The nanotech moulds them into a single double-bladed weapon. She spins and then clasps the weapon in her right hand as she drops into a defensive stance, one blade jutting outward in front of her, while the other juts out behind her from under her armpit.

The drones pay no mind to the change in tactic however as they launch themselves at Nemesis who jabs her blade forward piercing one of the cybernetic attackers before withdrawing the blade and then spinning it furiously as two more go to swipe at her. The speed of her spinning weapon slices the claws from their owners’ reanimated bodies, but they don’t howl in pain. The drones feel no pain as they throw themselves into the fray, desperately. Only for Nemesis to cut them to rotten ribbons and then block as the stabbed drone leaps high over her head, claws raised ready to slash brutally. Nemesis however, simply rolls backward and then leaps into the air, delivering a mid-air spin kick that snaps the drones’ neck, its body slamming to the ground. Nemesis lands, with her foot on its head, crushing the skull and cybernetics within as she detaches the blades so they are twin weapons once more.

One blade she slices across the width of the chest cleaving the upper torso from the lower section of the body as she prepares for the last two attackers. But they don’t fall on her for a melee brawl as they raise a single arm each. It takes Nemesis a moment to grasp what she’s seeing. It dawns on her just in time for her to dive into a roll as the plasma discharges of their arm cannons splash at the space she had been stood in moments earlier.

Nemesis snarls and growls as she pushes the twin blades, that are parallel to each other, together. The nanotech liquid metal shifting and changing as they begin to join into a single weapon, but Nemesis has to dodge again before the act is complete. But as she finishes her roll and returns to her feet she is hit in the gut by a force. It’s not a plasma shot, she knows that much, but the mass slams her back into the dust. The impact breaks several of her ribs as she screams in pain. But the pain only lasts for a few seconds as the damage is suppressed and repaired.

Nemesis looks up to see one of the drones straddling her, its plasma cannon arm raised above its head ready to be used like a club. But Nemesis throws her weight suddenly and violently. The act takes the drone by surprise as it is tossed clear allowing her to roll aside just in time to evade the plasma blast that lashes and vaporises the dust. It is at that moment that she realises the drones have no care for one another. She doesn’t know why it is such a surprise to her, but it is. However, that is unimportant now, she tells herself as she leaps back to her feet only to see another plasma blast lancing straight for her. She pulls the blade in her left hand back and then with a roar of effort and all her weight she throws her arm forward, her knuckles white as he squeezes the hilt. The blade slams into and cuts through the plasma which harmlessly passes her by as the cleaved halves of the plasma slam into the drone that had been pinning her down. The plasma burns through flesh and metal leaving large voids through the torso and opposite shoulder. Nemesis retracts the nanoblade in her left hand having seen the damage it has sustained. Her weapons were never meant to survive such a thing, but somehow the blade had. She knows Hecate will need to fix it when she gets back to Olympus.

Nemesis gathers all her energy and then explodes into a sprint.  She moves so fast the drone cannot track her as she zips left and then right, zigzagging closer and closer. The drone fires plasma shots desperately, but every shot is too slow. The drone can’t compensate for her speed or her erratic changes in direction before Nemesis strikes. Her blade slices the drone across the waistline. The plasma shots halt as the drone looks to Nemesis just as she delivers a second slice to the final attackers’ neck and then spins kicks the head clear of its body. The torso and legs topple to the floor spilling the vile rotting innards and congealing blood as Nemesis walks away.