The Perfect Run

Ryan thought his life was a role-playing game.
“Kill them all!” a druggie shouted from atop a roof, hitting Ryan's car with a
submachine gun, the bullets unable to pierce the shielding. Everywhere, the
courier heard the sound of bullets flying. “Kill them all!”
But somewhere along the line, it had turned into a FPS.
Hiding behind his car with an earplug in his right ear, Ryan reloaded his pistol
while mourning the Plymouth Fury’s paint job; at his side, Fortuna fired over her
shoulder with a pistol with one hand, and texted on a phone with the other. She
didn’t even aim, and her bullets always resulted in a headshot. At least she had
taken to wearing a white, streamlined armor to protect herself.
Seriously, one bad haircut, and suddenly the world wasn't safe anymore?
In total, twelve people, Ryan and Fortuna included, hid behind the cover of half a
dozen cars and SUVs. Most were henchmen wearing riot gear and carrying
powerful firearms, with one exception: a woman in a suit of heavy, red padded
advanced armor whose design reminded Ryan of steampunk comics. That
Genome had drunk the Firebrand knock-off Elixir, and as promised by Vulcan,
her armor boosted her pyrokinesis. Sometimes, she looked over her cover to
throw a car-sized fireball at the enemy.
“You know texting while fighting is the first cause of bullet accidents?” Ryan
asked Fortuna, as one of his car's windows exploded, shattered by a 20mm
round.
“I'm texting my brother,” she replied dismissively, barely paying attention to the
battle. The lucky Genome didn’t even bother to protect herself, the snipers
having a clear line of fire to hit her head. Yet so far, every bullet had narrowly
missed her helmet.
“Felix the Atom Cat?"
“You know that?” Fortuna groaned. “I'm in the middle of a firefight and he won't
answer his big sister!”
Having reloaded, Ryan froze time for ten seconds and peeked over his car.
Beyond the protective vehicle line, the welcoming committee had taken refuge
inside two half-demolished apartment buildings, surrounding the main road
leading to the Junkyard. Most of the walls had fallen, but the remains provided
snipers with enough protection. As for the road itself, the Meta’s men had
blocked it with a trash barricade, leaving only small openings to allow their
machine guns to fire through. The Augusti's Firebrand Genome had managed to
set the road on fire though, forcing the defenders to flee or die in the flames.
However, it didn't look like the snipers would run out of ammo anytime soon.
Ryan shot two of them, before taking cover as time unfroze. Far in the distance,
west of his position, he noticed crimson beams piercing through Rust Town's
polluted clouds. Sparrow's doing, probably.
In total, Vulcan had deployed three hundred soldiers to retake Rust Town, divided
in groups all across the district. Most of them were non-superhuman paramilitary.
Others were Genomes having drunk a knock-off Elixir; people like Ryan or the
Killer Seven, with original powers, were a minority in the squad.
The Private Security had watched the squadron move inside Rust Town without
reacting, perhaps hoping the Augusti and Meta would slaughter one another.
Vulcan then deployed her forces all around the Junkyard, where the Meta had
established their headquarters.
Unfortunately, as soon as Ryan's group approached the area's outskirts, they
found themselves welcomed by armed men.
“Vulcan here,” Ryan heard through his earplug. “How's the situation?”
“It's a camper contest here,” the courier replied. “It's the bad days of Quake all
over again! But my car is alright!”
“Yes, that's the important thing,” Fortuna replied with a sassy tone. “If someone
could help us, that would be great. I've got a date tonight.”
“You will wait,” Vulcan replied, although she sounded quite blase. “Cancel and
Sparrow are busy dealing with Gemini and Sarin, and I'm fully occupied dealing
with cannon fodder. It's such a drag, pursuing them house to house.”
“No sign of Acid Rain or Adam?” the courier asked. The Meta’s leader was their
main target, as Vulcan believed he alone held his group together; if he died, the
Psychos would splinter and become manageable.
“Scared?” Fortuna taunted him, putting her cell phone back into one of her
armor’s pockets.
“Frankly, I could do without Acid Rain,” Ryan replied, being in no hurry to die to
her again. “Our powers interfere with one another. She can predict my shifts and
counter them.”
“Then Fortuna will stay with you,” Vulcan declared. Wise choice. No matter how
powerful she was, Acid Rain needed guns, knives, and weapons to kill. And
Fortuna’s cheat code of a superpower allowed her to neutralize them. “And no,
no sign of either yet. Nor of any of the big guns, oddly.”
“Why do I have to stay with that maniac?” Fortuna complained, as their fire
Genome set a building floor on fire with a well-placed fireball. “Can't you send me
with Greta?”
“You will stay with Quicksave because I say so, brat.”
“I'm older than you!”
“Don't waste my patience, Fortuna. Clearing out the outskirts is already more
exhausting than I expected, so I'm not in the mood to hear your whining.”
Clearly, Vulcan didn't think the battle would last for so long. The Meta had a lot
more foot soldiers than anticipated.
Ryan briefly froze time and glanced over his cover to survey the situation. Much
to his horror, a new, scrawny sniper had appeared inside the left building,
rejoining two other men with what appeared to be an archaic rocket launcher.
“Uh, oh, rocket launcher to the left!” Ryan shouted a warning as time resumed.
How did the Meta-Gang recruit so many mooks?!
“On it,” a voice echoed through the earplug.
Mortimer suddenly phased through a wall behind the sniper nest in the left
building, taking them by surprise. Mortimer was the only member of his hit squad
who went into the field without armor, perhaps because it interfered with his
power. From what Ryan had seen, the killer could phase through surfaces, from
cinder block walls to the earthly ground.
In any case, Mortimer slaughtered the mooks with a submachine gun, then
phased through the ground within the blink of an eye. The man with the rocket
launcher fell through a destroyed wall, falling on the ground below.
“Thirteen,” Mortimer gloated through the earplug. “I'm leading.”
“Not for long, Morty!”
Fortuna fired one bullet.
Two snipers fell from the right building's roof.
Ryan was about to participate in the kill contest when the reality of the situation
hit him like a deer in a headlight.
She... killed two people with one bullet.
She killed two people with one bullet.
“How did it work?” Ryan asked. “How did it work?”
“I don’t know,” Fortuna replied with a shrug, amused by his confusion. “The world
simply bends to my whims.”
Ryan stopped time and spent the entire ten seconds looking at the scene and
trying to puzzle it out. Did the bullet bounce back on one sniper’s skull and killed
a second? When he realized he had no logical explanation, he turned toward
Fortuna as time resumed. “Can I cut off your foot?"
“What? Why?"
“Because if it's anything like a rabbit's, I want some of that sweet luck!”
“As a matter of fact, go BLEEP yourself, you crazy... homeless... you crazy
homeless.”
Ryan looked on at her pitiful attempt at improvisation, shaking his head. “You're
such a disappointment.”
Fortuna let out an angry snarl, rose up from behind the car, and unleashed a
volley of bullets at the defenders. When she emptied her magazine, the fighting
suddenly came to an abrupt halt.
Ryan peeked over the car, as did the rest of the Augusti. They only faced corpses
with holes in their skull.
“Eighteen,” Fortuna declared, smoke coming out of her gun's barrel. “I win.”
“I call hax,” Mortimer complained. “You cheat.”
Their group had probably killed fifty people in total, and lost only one henchman,
shot at the beginning of the firefight. Such was the gap between normal human
beings and Genomes.
“Stay here and secure the area until I give new instructions,” Vulcan ordered. “I'll
be done in a minute.”
The Augusti spread over the perimeter, but Ryan didn't join them. Instead, he
focused on what truly mattered to him.
His Plymouth Fury.
“My car is alright,” Ryan let out a sigh of blissful relief after he reviewed the
engine and key parts. The protective alloys had held against the gunfire. “I will
have to repair the windows, but none of the vitals have been hit.”
“The vitals?” Vulcan mused through the intercom. “Does your car have a heart,
on top of the brain?”
“All cars have a heart, but not everyone can hear it.”
“Poetic.” Ryan heard an explosion on Vulcan's side, and then nothing. She must
have gone Michael B. on her enemies. “Alright, all clear on my end. Cancel,
Sparrow?”
“Sarin and Gemini retreated,” Sparrow replied, ever the professional. “We have
control over the main roads.”
“And they're mighty sore losers about it,” Mortimer said, his voice turning raspy
as he cleared his throat. “Look at the skies.”
Ryan did so, noticing acidic clouds spread above the Junkyard, and extending
towards the outskirts.
Acid Rain.
Thankfully for him, the clouds moved to the west, so she was Sparrow and
Cancels problem this time.
“They sent weaklings to delay us until they could mount a counterattack with their
heavy hitters,” Vulcan guessed. “But I wonder how they recruited so much
manpower to draw upon. I miscalculated.”
“That's trash mobs for you,” Ryan replied. The courier was quite optimistic
though. If the Meta struggled to mount a defense, it meant the attack took them
by surprise. He could always refine the plan in a future loop, make it into a
blitzkrieg.
“I don't understand Adam's plan,” Vulcan muttered. “Now that we have control
over the roads, he won't be able to resupply and we'll call in reinforcements. How
does he expect to break the siege?”
“He's a camper,” Ryan said. “It's not about winning, it's about getting off on our
tears of frustration.”
“Chief, I only see mountains of trash from my rookery,” Mortimer said. “It looks
like they're shifting though.”
“Do we advance?” Sparrow asked. “We could take them in a pincer attack.”
Vulcan shot the idea down. “I'll fly by and do some recon first. Hold the road,
there's definitely something fishy going on.”
Given an official order to laze off, Ryan whistled to himself, waltzing through the
battlefield with his gun. Mortimer stood on the left building's roof, watching the
road like a hawk, while Fortuna had again begun to text on her phone. The
courier checked the dead mooks’ weapons, in case he found one badass enough
to add to his collection.
As he examined the various firearms, Ryan couldn't help but notice the Dynamis
logo on quite a few. It made sense since the company was the main weapon
manufacturer in the area, but... suspicious.
As for the archaic rocket launcher, the courier found it oddly familiar. As if
someone had pointed it at him not so long ago.
A doubt crossed the courier’s mind, as he turned the dead sniper’s body on his
back, to get a good look at his face. His balding, familiar face.
“Paulie?” Ryan said, astonished.
“Who?” Fortuna asked, looking away from her cell phone.
“A Rust Town mechanic,” the courier replied. “But that makes no sense, he hated
the Meta-Gang!”
“They must have press-ganged him into their service,” the pompous woman
replied, her voice softening. “My condolences. You were close?”
“Once, I threatened to throw a plushie at him.”
Fortuna immediately returned to her texting and did her best to ignore Ryan's
existence.
“What the—" Vulcan's voice turned from surprised to panicked. “All units, retreat!”
“What?” Fortuna asked, putting her cell phone away. “But we're winning!”
"Retreat! They have Mechron tec—"
Ryan heard the sound of an explosion, both in the distance and through the
earplug.
Then, without warning, the atmosphere turned oppressive.
Ryan couldn't quite put a word on it, but he felt no longer welcome in Rust Town.
He sensed hundreds, thousands of invisible eyes gazing at him in judgment; the
courier’s body entered a fight-or-flight response, his muscles tensing in alarm. He
had entered the den of a mighty predator and now had its full attention.
The psychic attack seemed to spread among the Augusti, Fortuna dropping her
phone and suddenly collapsing to her knees. A cloud of yellow energy flared
around her body, an ethereal field surrounding her. An invisible force pushed it
back inside the Genome, compressing the halo.
Immediately afterward, tremors shook the ground, before escalating into a full-
blown quake. Ryan struggled to stand on his feet, as some of the henchmen
tripped and the road broke up into large rifts.
“It's the Land!” Mortimer warned through the intercom. Before he could say more,
the building he stood on collapsed due to the earthquake, the hitman phasing
through the falling cinder blocks and vanishing amidst a cloud of dust.
Ryan had learned about her during the attack’s debriefing. That Psycho could
fuse with an area, melding her body into it and gaining psychic control over a
certain territory. Add geokinesis on top of that, and you had a truly deadly
combination.
But apparently, their intel had miscalculated her powers’ range. The tremors
spread all over Rust Town, collapsing every building in sight in a catastrophic
domino effect and blowing dust across the district.
Fortuna shouted a warning as the buildings collapsed, debris raining on them.
The Augusti ran in all directions, Ryan included, but some of the henchmen were
soon buried alive under cinder blocks anyway.
“W-what's happening?” Fortuna panicked, as the golden cloud around her started
getting thinner and thinner, threatening to disappear entirely. Debris that passed
through the yellow aura miraculously missed the Genome, but those that avoided
it hit her armor just fine.
“I can’t get hit!” Fortuna panicked, finally getting the memo that her life was in
danger. “Nothing can hit me!”
“Get into my car!” Ryan shouted a warning, rushing to his Plymouth. Above,
advanced rockets pierced through the pollution clouds, falling down upon them
like a rain of arrows. Ryan counted dozens, if not hundreds of them.
While the courier reached his car's hood, Fortuna’s field short-circuited and she
tripped on debris. Before Ryan could even react, she was buried beneath a rain
of stone and dust. She would probably survive with her armor on, but she would
need help to escape.
Whatever invisible force had taken over the area, it interfered with her luck.
Ryan stopped time, and to his immense relief, found that his power hadn't been
affected. It must have been a case of Yellow interfering with another Yellow,
instead of something as threatening as Cancel's negation.
However, even as he fired bullets at the missiles in an attempt to detonate them
before they hit the ground, Ryan could only do so much in ten seconds. Most of
the projectiles landed when time resumed, the courier thrown backward by a
massive explosion.
Everything went white and silent for a moment, Ryan taking several seconds to
regain consciousness. The left half of his body burnt, the flesh seared to the
bone, and dust seeped inside his mask.
“We need reinforcements!” Sparrow shouted through the intercom, Acid Rain's
manic laughter echoing in the background. “Vulcan?!”
“I'm trying!” Vulcan snapped back, her voice almost covered by the noise of
gunfire. “Ryan?! Fortuna?! Answer, damn it!"
Everywhere, Ryan could only see burning craters, corpses, and shattered
stones. Clouds of smoke filled Rust Town's polluted skies, turning the area into a
vision of Hell. The bombardment had savaged the entire warzone.
And worse, his car, his beloved car, was a smoking wreck.
“Not again!”
What did the Meta have against his Plymouth?
Visit Novelxo.org to read full content.
As far as he could see, Ryan was the
5 7
only survivor. The Augusti's men had
been blasted into burning body parts.
even the armgred ore(Moftiner may
By SsivRd if he had phased
: )
through the ground, but he didn't
answer through the intercom. The
courier heard explosions both west
and east, the Meta launching a
counterattack. The content is on
Novelxo.org! Read the latest
chapter there!
“Vulcan?” Ryan called through the intercom but received no answer. “Must I call
Wyvern for help?”
He only received a static noise for an answer. Something interfered with their
communications.
And then, emerging from the ruins and towering over the debris, the source of
the attack showed up to finish him off.
Visit Novelxo.org to read full content.
It was a colossal dark blue machine,
twelve meters long and four meters
wide. Six metal legs carried its body,
while a scorpion-like taiflung at He
=
back, tHeltip placed with some kind
of laser cannon. Missile launchers
’ A
covered the warmech'’s back, while
two flamethrowers and turrets
“ ) :
formed the “head.’ Wire tentacles
wriggled through small cracks in the
shielding. The content is on
Novelxo.org! Read the latest
chapter there!
Asilver gear with a stylized “M’ at the center was painted at the front.
Mechron’s symbol.
Visit Novelxo.org to read full content.
The enormous mech was clearly one
of his robots, repurposed by the Meta
into a weapon Fhe
HES eesti ng through the
cracks, Ryan guessed that Psyshock
piloted it from within, using his
peculiar biology to hijack the
: ,
machine's command centers. The
content is on Novelxo.org! Read
the latest chapter there!
But the robot wasn’t scavenged. It looked pristine, and straight out of storage.
“Little Cesare.” Psyshock’s voice came out of the warmech, startling the courier.
“What a surprise.”
“I come with a gift box,” Ryan deadpanned, struggling against the pain.
“Where is Ghoul?” the Psycho replied, wires coming out of a thin crack in the
mech’s shielding, while its cannon aimed at Quicksave. “What did you do with the
body?”
“I gave him to dogs, to play fetch with.”
Psyshock responded to the joke by opening fire, the cannon unleashing a
massive, crimson beam straight at the courier.
Having outlived his car and seeing no point in continuing after such a slaughter,
Ryan made a dramatic pose and embraced the light.
It was May 8th 2020 for... the ninth time?
Ryan didn’t remember and didn't care all that much. He guessed the previous
loop hadn't been his Perfect Run in the end, and there was clearly still room to
improve. Vulcan's attack had gone terribly wrong, and now he had to consider
what to do about it.
He also now knew where Len was, and how to contact her without owing a favor
to either the Carnival or the Augusti. A connection he had overlooked, and now
seemed so obvious to him.
The Meta subverting Rust Town's denizens, and having one of Mechron
warmechs in reserve, was cause for alarm. They also clearly had access to
Dynamis-made weapons, and the supply of Elixirs implied a connection of some
sort between the two organizations.
Wait.
The Meta that Ryan had captured in the previous loops said robots protected the
bunker they wanted to access. Machines powerful enough to fight a gang of
Psychos.
And Mechron was infamous for his robot army.
“I've got a bad feeling about this,” Ryan muttered to himself. The Meta wrecked
his car, killed him multiple times, and finally erased the loop when he had finally
managed to confront Len.
Now?
Now was the time for war.