GFP 018: Kobayashi

Maru threw his arms down, stiff-straight by his side and psi-blades flared out.

He looked up. Above him, the gargantuan mass of uplifted black soil and tangled rooted underside of Singh’s floating citadel darkened the sky. Squinting, Maru spied the distant seemingly miniscule spires, belfries and parapets peeking over.

Black dots swarmed out and began their descent upon Maru. They were his dead cousins, nephews and tribesmen reanimated as Singh’s perverted Necro infantry.

Gritting his shoulders and biceps, Maru thrust himself upward, skyward towards his dead family, towards Singh, towards vengeance.

“SINNNNNNNNNGGGHHHH!!!” He screamed out in desperate vain, fists above his head like a two-headed arrow. Clouds whipped by him, the rush of wind travelling at the speed of sound deafened him.

Halfway up, Maru collided into Jarku, his ten-year-old nephew, blade first into his midsection slicing the boy apart. Jarku’s eyes bugged out, his mouth agape. It was a brief instant of returned sanity before he died a second time, his corpse forever desecrated and ruined.

Maru felt the impact at a cellular level. Tears welled up inside of him, suffocating him. He shook it off.

A cluster of his family, (necromen now, he had to remind himself), stopped short midair and hung there, held up by their antigrav-packs. They aimed their six-barrel M134 Gatling guns at Maru.

A thick, dense shower of brass 7.62mms hailed down.

Maru turned 180˚, went into the fetal position. Bullets smacked into his carbon nanotube fiber suit, scrunched up and slid off. Pellet after pellet after pellet.

He had sold the remaining controlling interest in his family’s intergalactic corporation to commission the construction of this suit. It didn’t matter now, he had no sons nor brothers nor wives to inherit his fortune anymore. They were all dead. Singh killed them all.

Revenge has no price tag.

When the necromen had emptied their drums, Maru pirouetted on an axis and shot forward again. He spread his arms, elbows bent ninety degrees. Psi-blades met the dried, shrunken throats of Ajanu and Garrun, two cousins who sat with him during the leveraged buy out of Dayna-tek. They had celebrated afterwards with Innisfil ambrosia and eight-limbed whores from Pyrrhus.

Their heads uncorked and spurting Lazarus blood sluiced Maru’s face. Some ended up in his mouth. The foul, black zombie concoction Singh had injected into his dead family. He spat out the acrid liquid.

“SINNNNNNNNNGGGHHHH!!! Come out!” Maru roared. “Come and face me!!!”

Big, loyal Hesperos who saved him from drowning once, his childhood playmate Europa who always beat him in chess, mean-spirited Philipos who cared deeply in his own way… Maru cut them all to pieces before they could reload their guns.

Arms and legs and torsos and heads spiraled down to the earth below.

Maru soldiered on until he reached the edge of Singh’s floating citadel. He threw himself over the cusp, his heavy platinum boots stomping into the tessellated road, creating concentric cracks.

Before him, the front gates to Singh’s citadel loomed seven stories high. Titanium plated, seven-feet thick darksteel covered in sharp Zopyros rivets. Menacing, metallic gargoyles guarded each of the seven towers.

Their scarlet eyes scanned and locked onto the intruder.

Maru tore a sphere from his bandolier and whipped it up in the air. It exploded and spread into a laser-lattice wall just as the gargoyles’ beams came. Superheated light crackled against each other. Mini sonic booms thundered.

“SINNNNNNNNNGGGHHHH!!! You bastard!” Maru called again as he drew his pistol. He jammed a spin battery pack into the magazine well and immediately began firing. One by one, the gargoyles burst into twisted, melted metal.

The entire foundation of Singh’s island rumbled. A turret erupted in a ball of flame, dust and smoke and a figure zoomed out in a straight line towards Maru.

It was Singh. Scrawny, wiry and naked, his limp phallus flapping in the wind. His sinuous muscles made him look like tight bundle of rope. His sweating brown skin gleaming under the Vijayawadan sun.

“WHAT?!” Singh blared, his voice a 100 decibels. Maru’s helmet filtered the sound down.

Their eyes met.

“Singh!”

“I was fucking a vestal virgin! What do you want?”

“You murdered my family. I’ve come to avenge them.”

Singh furrowed his brow, squinted his eyes and stared at Maru.

“Who the fuck are…”

Maru leapt at him, psi-blades burning. ☣