Greg Vs Raid 9-40A: Dying Sparks (Patreon)

“-uckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckf-!”Concrete was a blur under him, yellow soles racing over the cracked gray smear of the Brockton Bay pavement. 

Tearing down back and side streets fast enough to keep pace with any car in a school zone, he was thankful for the yellow goggles strapped tight over his eyes. His ears didn’t have the same protection, though, the wind a hurricane roar right into his ears, his hoodie down and hair flying back.

It had only been a month.

One full month and some change since he could reach the top of a rusty-red train car with a single jump, clear a ten-foot chain link fence, and kick hard enough off a brick wall to make it high enough to hit the fire escape.

He’d been getting even better at it, too.

Day after day, and even his dad had been hyping him up like he was ten and still into track and gymnastics. He might not have done either of those in six years but the muscle memory was still there as long as he grabbed the wheel and floored the gas.“-uckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckf-!”Still just one stupid month, though.

Normally, a month was a lot of time.

Not enough to learn how to outrun a goddamn slasher movie, though.

“—uckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuuuuck!”

The clicking kept coming, even as Sparky vaulted the hood of a car, feet hammering down on asphalt as he threw himself as fast as he could down the street. He couldn’t ignore it, the sound pressing down on him even under all the screams and explosions and sirens across the city.He had good ears now, and good meant real good at making out the absolute horror of whatever the hell was on his ass. The scrape of ceramic on brick, odd little mechanical hisses and an off-beat clakk-clakk-clakk that wouldn’t go away no matter how hard and how fast Sparky pumped his arms.

Thirty-something miles an hour down a blown-out backstreet covered with glass shards and he was no closer to getting to safety than when he started a few minutes back.What does it even want, man? Past his fucking head on a stick, Sparky didn’t know and he wasn’t gonna pretend like he had any other guesses. He’d never been a cape geek and he regretted that every day since he’d woken up with all his senses screaming at him. Even still, he didn’t need to be the type of guy to check the wiki every day to know exactly who the nine-foot-tall porcelain freak behind him was. “FUCK! What do you want, man?!”Mannequin didn’t answer.

He didn’t do a lot of things, actually.

Like running.

The guy also didn’t run either; not normally. There was no jogging or sprinting or anything you’d expect from anything with two or four legs; nothing that made biological sense. He’d seen the way Mannequin moved enough to never want to see it again; the way the bastard just folded himself over a flipped delivery truck and landed with the other end already rotating a full one-eighty, upright before a chain-linked limb fired off into the brick wall around it and whipped around the corner of an alley without slowing a single mile-per-hour.

No breathing. No grunting. Nothing but a constant clicking as it chased down Sparky.“...okay.” Sparky’s breath came a little distorted through the yellow grille of his mouth mask, a laugh almost slipping out. “Little creepy.”Just a little, yeah.A hard right took him down another side street, Sparky already up in the air as he cleared an abandoned bike. He kicked off a mailbox, angle changed hard without losing speed and cut another quick left. The buzzing in his chest was as loud as his heartbeat, blood rushing in his ears as he put everything he had into simply moving.

Sparky jerked left on instinct, a flash of polished white catching his eye. Fu-! It whispered past his cheek as he moved before his brain caught up, gold eyes narrowing for a second as he caught the sight of steel. 

The blade had gone by close enough for the wind to touch the skin above his mask, strands of hair falling down behind him as Sparky refused to even look back. Rubber smoked against asphalt, sneakers screeching as he forced himself out of the path of the second blade coming the other way. Sparky’s soles planted on the bumper of a blown-out car and jumped, hands on the roof as he pushed himself even higher to dodge a third blade on a length of thick chain.

Feet smacked the pavement hard, momentum forcing Sparky to catch himself on one gloved hand before flipping another direction and scrambling forward again.A couple streets later, the same thing happened again — the same pattern even; a blade from the right, another from the left and one swinging out wide from the bottom. This time, though, all those three were followed immediately by a cable of heavy steel dropping down in front of the route Sparky had been aiming to take.He had to skid, heels digging in as he nearly went to the ground with a heaving chest. Shoulder slamming into an alley wall, Sparky pushed off with a grunt and kept going.It didn’t take him long before he figured it out, the math finally clicking. “Oh, you gotta be—!”Mannequin wasn’t missing at all.

Fucker’s herding me. A hard twist sent him to the left again, Sparky twisting down another alley without wasting a second. PRT! PRT! Where’s the PRT? He could spot the HQ all the way from here, poking up over shorter buildings; the top three floors still with smoke coming off the front of it.

Unfortunately — “Motherf-!” — he only made it halfway down the alley before a segmented arm cut across from him, a white arm gripping the red of the brick and the chain reeling Mannequin forward.

Sparky ducked hard and landed rolling as something sliced over his skullcap, head snapping back up to look at the thing standing across from him. Across the alley, that smooth white eggshell tilted to the side, Mannequin perfectly still.“Wh-” Chest heaving like a blown out kick drum, one gold eye twitched behind his goggles. “The fuck do you even want?”Another hand rose, two fingers held up; a bright white and with too many joints.

Both fingers curled Sparky’s way.

Once.

Twice.

“Oh…oh…” The laugh Sparky let out was thin as hell and raspy as any he’d ever made. “Oh fuck you.”

The kid in black-and-yellow turned and ran anyway, because one, he wasn’t a psycho, and two, fuck that.

A kick against a wall and flip over a pile of garbage piled high took him down another side path out of many as he kept booking it further and faster; looking for wherever else he could turn into.

It didn’t take all that long before that winning strategy bit him in the fucking ass.

One more alleyway pulled him in, brick on both sides, maybe eight feet across. A dumpster shoved against one wall, some busted wood pallets stacked next to it and rusted pipes ran up the brick and at the far end…Fuck. A dead end with a wall at least three solid stories high. 

Straight up herded again, a sheep right into the… the fucking slaughterhouse, I swear… His eye twitched again, another stupid non-laugh sliding right out of him as he realized he’d been so busy running he let a knife robot walk him into a box.He got two sounds out before the clicking sounded off again, Sparky already spinning as a blade came in low and from the right. The second he ducked the first sweep, Mannequin launched into the alley, flying forward on a chain arm anchored to the brickwork.Sparky darted back again, the teenager bouncing on his heels as Mannequin tore right past him one more time an— “Aaahhh!”

And something else opened up the back of his left thigh, Sparky fighting down a scream as a blade retracted back into Mannequin’s elbow — a weapon popping out from somewhere Sparky didn’t even know the guy kept weapons.

Not deep enough to cripple him, even as he felt the blood.

But it was deep enough to fuck him up.

And fuck him up it did.

Fuckfuckfuck… Sparky’s momentum kept him going, his body crashing sideways into the dumpster hard enough to cave its side in with a decently Sparky-shaped dent. Bouncing off the metal with another sound like a car crash, he forced himself upright and glared back at the white mecha-monster. “Fine…”Totally fine. His leg took his weight, still throbbing and trembling under him, but it took his weight. “What, you surgically remove your balls too?” He scoffed back at Mannequin, fear forced down under every bit of pissed-off-ness he could muster up. “Cut me then, bitch.”Probably the wrong thing to say, because Mannequin came apart all at one, and Sparky found out how much he actually didn’t know about fighting.