Dynamis | Chapter 32 - Burning (Patreon)

Lilibelle slammed her door shut as she stepped into her room. Every emotion she’d been bottling up for the day wanted to explode all at once. She wanted to scream, kick, claw, and shout every obscenity she’d learned. Striking Karl across the face had crossed her mind more than once, her advance stopped only by the punishment that would follow afterward.

Fuck, what’s wrong with me?

Despite everything Boldwin had told them, she couldn’t get her mind off of the fucking squirt. Every time she imagined decking him in the nose, he was on top of her, pressing his chiseled body against hers, drawing rasps and moans out of her throat. Heat rose to her face as the fantasy returned, and her hand slowly traveled down to her pelvis.

Stop it!

She slapped her own hand and spun toward her door, flinging it back open and marching into the hallway. Stay cooped up in her room and she couldn’t know what would happen next. Matters weren’t helped by how placated Daidari had been acting lately. She’d hoped that the ice queen would brush this off like any other event, but even she’d been entangled by the Frame’s web.

She clenched her jaw as she strode through the hallway toward the gym. Maybe working out all of that anger and frustration against a punching bag would do something.

Then she stopped.

Last time that hadn’t helped. In fact, all it had done was make her angrier. Why the hell couldn’t she get her frustration under control? She rubbed her temples, snapped her eyes shut, leaned against the wall. Boldwin claimed that everything happening was normal and that it would soon pass. What a crock of shit. The sensations hadn’t lessened up at all. If anything, they’d gotten worse!

Then a dangerous thought slipped into the folds of her mind.

Is it really so bad to imagine him like that?

She gasped. That was her thought. Nobody had put that there. The Dynamic Frame may have planted the seed, but she allowed it to grow. Or was the seed already there, and the Frame had simply watered it? She shook her head. No, fuck that. This was not what she signed up for. She was a soldier, a pilot, a conductor who was dead set on ending the travesties wrought upon them by the Fiend menage. Live or die, she’d see their end.

She pounded the bottom of her fist against the wall and growled.

“Who pissed in your breakfast?” asked a gruff voice. Slowly, Lilibelle opened her eyes to see Kurtis standing a few paces away, with his hands in his pockets and an amused expression. She glared at him for a moment, tried to picture what it might be like to have sex with him instead. He had a strong build, short blond hair, and tanned skin. He was nearly two heads taller than her as well; a man any woman would find attractive. So why in the fuck couldn’t she placebo him in place of Karl? “Not the first time a woman has looked at me like that,” he laughed.

“What do you want?” Lilibelle growled. “I’m not in the mood to talk.”

“You sure about that? Because I find that anytime I have an issue, being alone is the last thing I need.”

“Not everyone is like you, Ortiz.”

“Aww, she remembers my name,” he said with the fakest smile she’d seen on him so far. “She doesn’t call me by my first name, but we’ll ignore that for now. Does she remember the bet we made, too?”

Of course she’d remembered. But she’d had so many things on her mind, so many tasks to take care of, that she couldn’t have cared less to prove why an old weapon outdid anything fancy he had. She’d foolishly agreed to the bet knowing full well that he was a trained marksman who was about ten years her senior. Fight now and she knew she’d lose.

“Don’t talk about me like I’m not standing in front of you,” Lilibelle said, dragging her hand down her face. She crossed her arms and glared at him like some insect to be squashed. “Yes. I remember. How could I not? You were so full of it that I could smell you from a mile away.”

Kurtis smirked. “Then how about you make good on that bet? Unless, somehow, you’re just not in the right shape today. I can understand. It might be your time of the month.”

Lilibelle balled her hands and gritted her teeth so hard she could hear the enamel squeaking.

“Fine, hot shot. You want to play? Let’s fucking play.”

—

Each practice dummy was modified to take a certain amount of damage in targeted locations. Once the system deemed the target dead or incapable of fighting back, the dummy would retract back into a recess in the floor, and another dummy would appear moments later somewhere randomly in the shooting range.

So intricate was the system that by inputting which weapon each person was using, it could then gauge based on velocity, hole size, and other numerous factors who had dealt the most damage and who had made the killing blow.

The rules for this match were simple: Damage didn’t matter. Killing blows did. Based on information administered by the leading Fiend expert Shea Kuuna, targets depicting various Fiend shapes would rise from the floor. Depending on the weapon and target, some areas of the dummy would be rated differently. Not all Fiends could be killed the same way. Some had protective shelling over their chests and heads, and others were so thin that they were nearly impossible to shoot at accurately. Simply put, knowledge was power.

“Two minutes sound good to you?” Kurtis asked as he ran the final checks on his pistol. For the purposes of their duel, he conceded that using two weapons wouldn’t have been fair. He’d also implied that he wouldn’t need the pistol’s brother. “Don’t want to overwhelm you.”

Lilibelle loaded the ammunition into her weapon and checked the readout on the side. A solid 200. That would be plenty for her needs. “Fine by me.”

Even though she knew he was trying to goad her into making early mistakes and decisions, she couldn’t help but be affected by his confidence. She’d fired the SE-48 for as long as she could remember. Her father had spent nearly every day teaching her how to protect herself and how best to spot a Fiend. When it came down to weapons training, she already knew all of the basics, which was something that couldn’t be said for almost any of the other students, including Karl.

But somehow his voice was digging beneath her skin, laying the foundation for what she feared would be her defeat.

She ran one last check over her gun, clicked the switch on the side, then took aim.

“Best of luck then,” Kurtis said as he put on his earmuffs.

Lilibelle didn’t say a word. She put on her earmuffs and glanced over her shoulder at Jesse Lorwen, Deadeye’s firearms instructor. The thin man was dressed in bulletproof gear and wore a thick red bandana over his messy black hair. He gestured to them, and Lilibelle formed a fist to let him know that she was ready.

Drawing a deep breath, a countdown for ten seconds started at the end of the gallery. She drummed her fingers along the neck of her gun, her heart pounding and her hands clammy with sweat. When the timer hit 0, three dummies emerged from the floor.

Gremlins, soldier-threat levels. Bipedal and sharp teeth and claws. Dwell in the darkness.

Lilibelle flicked the switch on her weapon and took aim at the one on her right. With a press of the trigger, a thick bullet emerged from the bottom barrel of her gun, lodging itself in the target’s chest. She turned to her left and did the same with the middle dummy, which was a few meters farther than her initial target. The bullet left its chamber, and was immediately detonated as a flash of green light soared through it and struck the target to her right.

Lilibelle clicked her teeth just as the rightmost dummy exploded. The dummies retreated into the floor, and out popped five more targets.

These were smaller, standing on six legs, with bodies thin as her hand. They could move like snakes, slithering across the ground and constricting their prey. The arms bore tiny hair-like needles that injected a power cytotoxin. Their heads were bulbous for their size, with long mandicles and antennae.

Soldier-threat level. Monikered assailant. Not an easy target to hit, let alone kill. There were as many redundant organs in its body as there was scrap in the warehouse. The only way to ensure a kill was a bullet to the head. Unfortunately, bulbous as it was, that was only compared to the rest of its body. It would still make for a small target.

Clicking her tongue, Lilibelle flicked the switch on the side of her gun, and unleashed a flurry of controlled shots at the target farthest from her. Reasoning that Kurtis would shoot the side closest to him, she thought taking away his easier targets would increase her odds.

She was wrong.

As soon as she pressed the trigger, the blast of energy emitted from Kurtis’s gun struck first. Lilibelle snapped slightly to her right to catch the target beside it, only for Kurtis to strike that one next. She spun to the rightmost target, and once again, Kurtis struck it first. By the time she took aim at the other three targets, they’d been expertly taken down.

The dummies receded into the floor as Lilibelle gritted her teeth and awaited the next round.

Two targets emerged next, both of them tank-class Fiends. Nicknamed gobblers, they had insatiable appetites for human flesh. They had thick, fatty bodies covered in round pustules. These pustules were filled with flesh-eating acid, disintegrating skin and separating meat from bone within seconds. Worse yet, these pustules would burst at the slightest provocation, which made shooting these creatures so much more terrifying.

This time, she shot the one closest to her, aiming at the tiny head without a neck. She could almost hear the sound of the pustules bursting, singeing the people around it. It stood on two legs, bearing alarmingly human-like hands and hooved feet. With three short bursts, Lilibelle blasted the head clean off the body, forcing the dummy back under the floor. As she turned to shoot the other one, however, it too retreated beneath the floor after Kurtis’s shot.

With only thirty seconds left on the clock, they were presented with what was likely their last round of targets. Twelve Fiends resembling the ones she’d seen when she went to rescue Karl rose out of the floor. They slid on their rails with a whir, their beady eyes bringing Lilibelle back to the moment one of them had nearly speared her in the helicopter.

She fired without mercy. One target, two targets, three targets, all of them were mowed down by her gunfire. Rather than compete with Kurtis, she fell into a mock battle within her mind, carefully analyzing how they would move and hiss and fight. She prioritized them the same way she would if she were in combat, trusting Kurtis to take care of the ones on his end.

When the dust settled and the alarm rang, Lilibelle snapped back to reality. Shaking her head free of the imagery, she looked up with mild disappointment. The score read 13 - 10, which meant she lost by three points.

Unloading the ammunition from her gun, she set them both down, then removed her earmuffs, placing them back on the hook beside her. She stepped away from her partition and waited for Kurtis to finish up.

“Very good shooting,” Instructor Lorwen said.

Lilibelle nodded sullenly. “Thanks.”

Kurtis finished and started toward her. She’d expected to see him with a grin, perhaps laughing to himself. But he wasn’t.

“Where did you learn to shoot like that?” Kurtis stopped a few feet away from her, his brow furrowed. His question caught her off guard. At first, she thought he was mocking her, gloating about his victory. But the tone he’d used earlier when he made fun of her was missing.

Lilibelle returned the frown. “Are you making fun of me?”

He shook his head. “No. It’d be one thing if you’d practiced your whole life—”

“I said I did,” she said defensively, “or were you not fucking listening?”

Kurtis’s frown deepened. “Little lady, I’ve been shooting since I could walk. You’re going to have a hard time finding someone in this facility who can best me. Nobody comes within a few points of my score, and I mean nobody.”

Lilibelle scoffed. “If this is your way of trying to encourage me—”

“It’s not,” he said. “I came here with the full intent of shaming you. But as soon as the first batch of dummies went down, it was clear that holding back would be insulting.”

She rolled her eyes. She hated it when her superiors did this. It was a common tactic, pretending to do worse than you normally would, thrusting the person onto a pedestal and encouraging them to improve an already latent talent of theirs. Frankly, she was sick of hearing it.

“Stop talking me up. The second round you floored me,” she contested. “Don’t pretend you didn’t.”

“Only because I got into your head,” he argued, his signature smirk returning. “You saw what happened, saw that we were even, and reasoned that you could gain the edge by surprising me with my own target. A bold strategy to be sure, but you are much too inexperienced for that kind of play.”

Lilibelle narrowed her gaze. What the fuck was this guy trying to say? He says she’s a good shot and then turns around and says she’s inexperienced?

“Okay, we’re done here,” Lilibelle said as she started for the exit. “I’ll send you the thousand credits tomorrow.”

“Don’t bother. Keep ‘em.”

Lilibelle paused, looked back, then kept walking.

“Keep it up, hot shot! I look forward to trying this again when you’re a bit more experienced!”

“Asshole,” Lilibelle muttered under her breath.