IN: SAME OLD SONG AND DANCE; PART ONE
C A S T L E V E R T I G O / V L A T A V A:
May 18th, 2019 - 2:37 AM | Castle Vertigo Exterior - Vlatava
Vlatava was an old country, drenched in the blood of generations. It had worn so many flags that it all became an endless stream of meaningless colors. The last occupation of note was the Soviets -- they’d taken up residence in what they called Zamok Yastreb, Castle Hawk, and spent the next twelve weeks shoring up the defenses. They got the spend the next three weeks after that getting pounded by local artillery, and the next thirty seconds after that getting annihilated by The Spectre.
You could be forgiven for thinking that Vlatava couldn’t walk away from a purge by a God. The Vlatvian people were like roaches -- festering in their own shit and sin, and damn near unkillable. They’d grown used to subjugation. Holy Romans, Polish-Lithuanians, Austro-Hungarians, Soviets, and most recently, a jackass in a green costume. Vlatava may have survived a God’s wrath, but they hadn’t met the motherfucking Midnighter.
Vertigo’s Castle reached up into the sky like black fingers strangling the stars. It was a blight on the countryside, a jutting monolith of gothic architecture in a backdrop of rolling green hills and dopey farm animals that had wandered from home. It’s poison seeped into the land itself, dead grass spread out in a ring from the perimeter of the Castle’s walls. The Lord Regent’s soldiers dotted the parapets. They were dug in at machine gun encampments, three men to a GShG-7.62 and surrounded by a nest of sandbags. The first of many impudent attempts on Midnighter’s life, to be sure.
Midnighter lay prone in the tall grass, tuning out the steady drone of the crickets and focusing on the turrets. There were three turrets on the Castle’s north side, situated atop their own Bastions. One of them was turned the opposite direction, prepared to unleash .50 caliber death on any idiot that tried to waltz in through the front gate and into the courtyard. The remaining duo swept the local area, keeping eyes up for any hostiles. The only thing they hadn’t prepared for was death from above.
The pole vault was never Midnighter’s favorite Olympic Event, but damned if it wasn’t one of his best. He jammed his bo staff six inches into Vlatvian soil and bedrock and heaved his weight over the titanium staff. Carbon fiber muscles launched him towards the middle gun emplacement like a missle.
“What the fuck is tha-” Midnighter’s knees collapsed the first soldier’s left lung on impact after the bullet of his body blasted through the heavy machine gun. He pinned the gurgling man to the ground and his left hand had already knifed through the second guard’s kneecaps before any of the trio could react. The third man struggled to bring his weapon to bear, but Midnighter stabbed him through the bottom of the jaw with two fingers, shattering all of his teeth. A tap of the man’s temple and he was out cold.
He dropped the unconscious body. The other two convulsed on the ground from their injuries, and the other turrets were just starting to turn their weapons. Midnighter cracked a wry little smile. Those poor, poor, goddamn fools. Midnighter kicked a dropped handgun and it shot through the air, exploding across the chest of a guard on the other side of the castle.
The combat computer wired into his brain surged, calculating millions of probabilities at once -- Wind speeds, bullet trajectories, even factoring in the brain waves of all the soldiers within range. Suddenly, a variable Midnighter hadn't considered, a glint in the corner of his eye. He sidestepped and the spot where he had just stood exploded into a cloud of concrete chips. His eyes traced the smoke trail in the distance -- on the highest peak of the Castle was a man in green and black. Gunhawk. A low rent merc that Batman had beaten the shit out of a few times. Apparently not thoroughly enough. And where there is a Gunhawk, a Gunbunny is soon to follow.
Midnighter concluded that the tactical situation was deteriorating, and elbow dropped the wall below him. He blew through the concrete and into the rotting wooden flooring below him, the interior of the steel reinforced concrete walls. The sides were lined with crates of spare ammunition and rations, as well as a few boxes of spare weapons. The plink of sniper fire against the walls buzzed against Midnighter’s ears. They wouldn’t penetrate, but eventually the snipers would come to flush him out -- they wouldn’t get the chance. Midnighter grabbed a crate of MG ammo and hurled it at the top of the walls interior. The crate punched through the concrete like wet tissue paper, and a tangle of Vlatvavan soldiers tumbled through the opening, colliding into the assembled crates with fleshy smacks.
By now the sirens had started to blare across the Castle. How embarrassing, it took them ten seconds to actually raise the alarm. Midnighter hurled another box to fully disable the North sector of the wall as he considered his options. It’d take the gun-toting spandex fetishist and his sidekick a minute to get down from their perch and actually get eyes on him, and the soldiers were too green to actually draw a bead on him. A run across the courtyard it is.
In that instant, a man slid through the opposite wall like a knife through butter and cracked into Midnighter’s chest with a golden-armored shoulder.
“Hrrk-” Midnighter staggered and sized up his opponent. He was floating on two discs, and encased in a wreath of golden armor. Deadline. Just a few months ago he’d been assigned to assassinate a few Atlantean dignitaries, and got away before the League was on the scene. Now he was here on a literally golden platter.
“I guess it’s my birthday today.” Midnighter dove forward, and the assassin went intangible. So predictable. Sliding through an intangible person doesn’t feel
good. You’re both there and not. Every one of your atoms gets a tickle, like feeling little fingers worm through your insides and molest your organs. Midnighter crashed into a pile of boxes as he landed, and tossed one of his escrima sticks back through Deadline. It didn’t take millions of calculations per second to get the rhythm of when an intangible idiot would shift back and forth.
“Oh, oh, God!” Deadline shuddered on his hover disks, wrenching at the escrima stick now fused with his stomach. It was a wonder he didn’t pass out from the pain.
“On your left.” Deadline’s head shot to the left, searching for the attack, but Midnighter’s palm strike slammed into the right side, detonating the assassin’s golden helmet into a million pieces. Classic. Midnighter yanked the killer’s plasma pistol from Deadline’s holster and jammed it into his belt. Could come in handy.
On the faintest reaches of his sense, Midnighter detected a rumble in the wall. A microsecond ago, someone had started plowing through it. The sound of flesh and bone grinding through steel and concrete, coming to pulverize his costumed head. The frustration of the combat computer was that at times his body could barely keep up with it’s raw processing speed. This was hit he’d have to take.
Two gargantuan arms as thick around as tree trunks plowed through the walls and hauled him through six inches of pain. Midnighter could barely make out a demon mask in the dusk of the concrete before he was shot putted across the courtyard.
Midnighter spit out a mouthful of blood onto the freshly mowed grass. Apparently the lawnkeeping was a little better on the inside. He pushed himself to his knees from his heap on the ground to see his attacker sauntering towards him.
NKVDemon was a slab of muscle that had more in common with a silverback gorilla than a man. He was a full head taller than Midnighter, wearing a kevlar weave bodysuit adorned with red ceramic armoring. His belt still wore the old Soviet Hammer and Sickle. He cracked his knuckles, it sounded like a gunshot.
“I vill snap your bones like twigs, Mydnyter.” His accent was almost as thick as his skull. Midnighter drew to his feet. All around them, the turrets were locked on his position, but the guns lay still. Gunhawk was still at his perch, sights locked on Midnighter’s masked head. Apparently the Demon would have something to prove.
“I don’t hurt pussies wearing Daddy’s underwear. Is KGBeast coming, or do I have to disembowel you first?” Midnighter pulled his other escrima stick.
“You Americans. You love to talk.” NKVDemon still marched forward at the same cadence. Apparently he thought his dick was so big that a few million calculations per second wouldn’t change how this fight went.
“I don’t even need this to fuck you up six ways to Sunday. I’m going to staple your testicles to your head and beat you like a pinata.” He snapped his escrima stick in half and discarded the pieces to either side.
With a smile, the russian dropped his elbow and charged. First mistake. Midnighter sidestepped as he past, and thrust down with his elbow. His opponent ate dirt and rolled, coming up in a crouching position a foot away. He swept out with his leg but Midnighter bunny hopped backwards, falling into a boxer’s stance.
Something a lot of civilians don’t understand about Superhero fights is the strength levels involved. You put two equally superstrong guys in a box and they start hitting each other, it isn’t what you see on cartoons. People aren’t sending each other flying, combatants aren’t knocking one another into the stratosphere. It’s just history of violence. Two guys just
hitting each other.
NKVDemon got back to his feet and launched a flurry of punches. They were random, disorganized. Midnighter avoided each one, pushing them aside or outright dodging them as they came.
“You know something special about me, Demon? I can detect the electrical activity in your brain.” NKVDemon went for a right side haymaker, Midnighter stepped backwards.
“I know what moves you’re preparing to make. I’ve fought this fight already, in a million different ways. I can hit you without you even seeing me. I’m what soldiers dream of growing into.” Midnighter ducked under another haymaker from the left. NKVDemon brought both of his hands up, preparing to bring them down like a cudgel. Midnighter’s hands shot upwards, stabbing into the pressure points inside of his exposed armpits. NKVDemon’s arms fell to his sides like wet noodles.
“I’m what children see when they first imagine death. I’m Midnighter.” Midnighter grabbed Demon’s face thrust up with his knee. He felt the crunch of the killer’s nose and cheekbones against him. It felt good.
Midnighter fell to his back, pulling the unconscious form of NKVDemon over him. The gunners would hesitate to shoot their own man, if only for a second. He ignored the weight of the supersoldier pressing down on his lungs, and grabbed his broken escrima stick from the ground. He pitched them through the air, annihilating two more gun turrets and the pieces impacted like bombs. Six down, six to go.
Midnighter pushed the body off and rolled as the dirt around him began exploding into machine gun and sniper fire. Things were
definitely too hot out here. The castle proper lay a few dozen yards in front of him. Huge oaken doors, intricately carved with ancient Vlatvian history represented his sanctuary. He sprinted forward, his boots tearing out chunks of lawn as he went. Bullets whizzed by, mere micrometers away. But it was enough.
A grenade landed at his feet. Midnighter rolled, scooped it up, and flung it high over the Castle. Gunhawk’s screams as he got a facefull of shrapnel were nearly drowned out by the chugging of the gunfire.
Midnighter smashed through the doors, obliterating what was certainly a centuries long chapter of Vlatvian history. He dove to the side as machine gun fire annihilated anything that was left of the carvings. The masonry would protect him from any more shots, but soon he’d have a cadre of soldiers coming in after him. That just wouldn’t stand. He pulled the plasma gun from his waistband and pulled the charge pack. He closed his eyes and waited for the perfect moment, for the probabilities in his head to perfectly align…
Now.
Midnighter tossed the plasma pack into the open doorway and jumped as far into the entry hall as his legs would take him. A bullet sliced through the pack. A blossom of fire rushed from the hole and enveloped the doorway, the sound alone set Midnighter’s bones to rattling as the Castle itself groaned in protest. The doorway shuddered and collapsed, piling a miniature mountain of stonework over the entryway.
“Try shooting through that.” Finally a moment to breathe. The Castle’s layout hadn’t changed much since Midnighter was last here. They’d made a tokenistic effort to patch the hole in the roof of the Entrance Hall that Superman made busting inside, covered with an assembly of shipping palettes. The brickwork and the Vlatvian banners were still in tatters after their scuffle. Apparently The Count wasn’t much concerned about keeping a tidy home. The place was labyrinthine, six different hallways splayed out in different directions. Maybe Midnighter would know which way to go if the fucking Kryptonian hadn’t stopped him last time. It didn’t help that any singage that was present was certainly slagged by that last fight. If that meant he had to kill -- er, savagely beat -- an entire Castle to get to Vertigo, then so be it.
He set down the middle path first, listening for anything -- Voices, footsteps. He could hear the subtle creak of the Castle, stones shifting and settling still, after hundreds of years. The scurry of rats… There, at the edge of his range. The pitter-patter of a heartbeat.
“You idiots do realize that when you take these jobs, you’re accepting a paycheck in return for getting permanently crippled, right?” Midnighter’s voice boomed down the hallway,
“and that’s if you’re fighting the Bat. I like to play with my food more.” He rounded a corner to see a woman in a red and black number, aiming down a rifle’s sights. She did her best to cover the as much of the narrow hallway as she could with her thin frame.
“You don’t scare me.” Midnighter could see her muscles tense and coil underneath the suit’s spandex. She pulled the gun closer to her face, framing it’s ironsight in her blue hair. Her heart beat faster, and Midnighter could already taste the sweat rolling down her forehead. Apparently Gunbunny was even less without her Gunhawk.
“I don’t want to hurt you. Well, that’s a lie, I really want to hurt you, but I get paid to say I don’t. Make my day.” His grin grew wider. Gunbunny was about to make a very stupid decision.
Midnighter was already moving before the first shot cracked out of the barrel. His right hand cleaved a hunk out of the wall and heaved it at Gunbunny. The assassin held up her rifle to block and the gunmetal crumpled instantly, absorbing the impact. Then Midnighter was unpon her. He grabbed her face in one hand and squeezed, starting to feel the gentle facturing of her skull -- He felt a handgun pressed in his ribcage.
“You want to bet you can pull that trigger faster than I can crush your brain?” Midnighter locked eyes with Gunbunny. Tears were streaming down her face -- He couldn’t tell if it was from pain or terror. The gun clattered to the ground.
“Smart girl.” Midnighter’s other hand slapped against her temple and she crumpled to the floor. It was a lie, but maybe it’d make her feel better about all the reconstructive surgery she’d need.
The room ahead had a door wreathed in gold. It was ornately decorated, with tie visages of kings and conquerors of Vlatvian past. In the center was a new addition, crudely carved by novice hand -- A simplistic and huge V, jutting out of the woodwork and slicing through the images of countless other leaders. This had to be the throne room.
Midnighter kicked open the door, scattering woodchips down the center carpet of the long hall. Vertigo sat in the end, in a throne with a back many times taller than him. A tawdry golden crown was askew on his head; it clashed with the green of the cape that lay ruffled around him. It was almost too easy. But his combat computer
was clean… The only threat was Vertigo’s ‘effect’ as he called it, but it’s power dropped off at range, and the hall was long enough. Child's’ play.
“I’ve been waiting a long time for this.” Midnighter cracked his knuckles. He could imagine Vertigo’s blood running down them; the crunch of his form beneath Midnighter’s knuckles… This would be glorious.
“As have I.” Vertigo smiled deeply, not moving from his chair. Maybe he wanted to accept his beating like a man, instead of kicking and screaming like an impudent whelp.
In that moment Midnighter’s world exploded into color. His vestibular fluid felt like it was trying to escape his head, and his brain pounded like bad nightclub music. The feeling seemed to sear across his mind and body, his [i]soul[/] everything that Midnighter was. He wanted to crumple to his knees, but any sense of direction left him.
Everything was up, down, left, and right. The world had been swallowed up and vomited back out in the wrong order. As massive arms closed around him in a headlock, Midnighter could hear a voice, floating all around him. It had a familiar Vlatvian accent.
“Excellent work, Abracadabra. You’ve earned that bonus. Hold him still, KGBeast. I get the first shot.”
