So, I found this picture on CGunit, and really liked it: y'know, if just kind of popped out at me. And since I have some time on my hands finally, I wrote a short story based on the picture. This relates to my previous post: here. Also, this artist has clearly found his awesome, as the piece is very simply titled Ninja. Again, ask any guy, and Ninjas are awesome.
Anyways. The purpose of this post is to adress fluff. Besides finding your awesome, take into consideration that not everything has to be deep. Not everything has to be meaningful in a work. Some things can just be increadibly fun to write. And this short, was incredibly fun for me to write, and I don't care if anyone thinks it's deep:
Ninja Fighting Robots:
Chaos. All the forethought poured into a warrior’s repose is meant to mitigate the chaos of battle. They’d surrounded him outside of New Tokyo.
Buildings towered above him in the night sky, and rain fell thick and cold. The sharpness of streetlights glinted on the half inch of exposed blades either side of his neck, swords crossed in an ‘x’ on his back. A red scarf was tied about his head, bright blue eyes rheumy with cataracts peered out but the crimson cloth covered the remainder of his head.
There was a sharp snapping, and the soft sound of bare feet on pavement. Djinn could hear the whirring of gears, the quiet screaming of hydraulics and pneumatics. It wasn’t something human, the thing that followed him. It was the same he’d encountered earlier, damaged from the previous confrontation, limping behind him. Its eyes were bloodied and damaged.
It made no attempt to hide itself, shambling painfully behind him. The android looked human and wounded – those who stepped from its path in a swirling torrent of crowds turned heads towards it in pity. Djinn understood it didn’t deserve pity, didn’t understand the looks given it to ease its passing.
Both Djinn, his black robes swirling behind him, and his pursuer barely keeping pace in tattered clothes falling off of shoulders and dripping with blood, walked without stop or change of pace. It took hours, but they reached the outskirts of New Tokyo, passing under the last of the multi-lane highways and out into the dirt of the sub-city. The last rays of sun lanced, perforating the shadows, from the city above. The sunset lent a bright orange glow to the environment, the concrete pillars stood scattered about the desolation, carrying the city above. As Djinn and his lone pursuer left the city, other creatures of metal and sinew joined the shambling creature.
The light that filtered through to the sub-city turned orange, leftovers of richer society’s sunset. The night began to grow dark, the concrete and metal above stealing life from the sky. Djinn turned to face his pursuers. The first stood centered, flanked by greater monstrosities, creatures which had kept hidden in the streets of Tokyo, which wouldn’t have passed as human. Where the first was sympathetic, near-human, the others were strange, strong and monstrous. The first’s right hand man was a towering creation, an industrial construction robot, draped with flayed skin and armed with a steel girder, crushed at one end to make a grip. Through his exoskeleton the second’s inner workings could be seen, armour of corrugated iron bolted over vital apparatuses.
The third was tall and lean, a maintenance drone reworked for combat. Its arms were long, plated with steel fish scales. They were far too long, disproportionate to the creature’s body, and they writhed like snakes, no joints, but rather built like vines. Finally, standing behind, broad about the chest, it’s face split like a grin, stood an assembly drone, a heavy set monstrosity built for lifting, but with fingers on its forelimbs for assembling smaller parts. It stood on four taloned legs which had replaced the standard issue flat-bracers. It had four arms, two with hydraulic fists which grasped a great and wicked scythe, and two with more delicate manipulators, built in saws, scalpels, screwdrivers and laser-welder. It was a machine for making machines, and under its legs which raised it high above its brethren scurried several dozen half-human sized scrap drones, each armed with clumsily forged steel swords.
Djinn waited. There was no advantage to be gained by charging them as a group. He loosened his blades revealing a further half-inch of metal, and then reached within his cloak to pull out a flame lance. At this provocation the drones charged forward as one and the orange of the light slipped through the spectrum to a pale red, and then the entire sub-city was bathed in blood-crimson by the sunset above. It must have been beautiful somewhere up above, but down here in the cloudy rheumatism of Djinn’s sight and the billowing dust of the sub-city, the beauty couldn’t penetrate.
The machines charged as one, except the assembly drone with its scythe and the limping first. Blue flames spiralled from the lance which Djinn fired from the hip as he walked slowly backwards, and the smallish scrap drones burst into flame and melted into slag as they were eaten by the fire. Then the fuel cartridge was spent and Djinn’s twinned blades left their sheaths. There was a blur as the snakelike third dove at Djinn, its pincer tipped armed diving for throat and legs simultaneously, and rebounding harmlessly from blades with a sharp metallic clang. And then the second closed, the stink of dead flesh falling off of it and assaulting Djinn in waves. It’s fists came smashing forward and forced Djinn into a roll, rising to his feet in time to shift his weight and dodge a strike by the snake-armed maintenance drone. Then the scrap drones were on him, coming from every angle. But their blows didn’t hold the strength of their bigger brethren, they were clumsy and ill-used and Djinn turned them aside easily, spinning about to face the most immediate threat as it came.
There was one simple problem Djinn foresaw, deep in thought even as he forced away blow after blow, and intercepted a crushing blow from the construction drone with both blades crossed. His flesh would tire, but there was no reason for the machines to slow the attack. This cold realization sent a flutter of panic through his limbs, adrenaline sparking throughout his body as he shifted in to an attack.
In the distance the first and the fourth, the cripple and the spider had started to move, were approaching the larger melee which Djinn was making an attempt to extract himself from. With a slight shift of motion, careful to conserve his momentum, Djinn flicked his ankle and leapt gently into the air. He stepped upwards, an ungraceful cut sliding under him as he ascended, and placed a crushing blow with his boot into the nearest scrap drone. The step-up gave him more height and he levelled a false-blow against the snaking third which flowed out of the way and gave Djinn an easy angle on the second.
Spinning his sword in hand to stab, Djinn landed with a squelching of rotting flesh on the shoulders of the towering second. Before the construction drone could react Djinn’s blades plunged into its torso at each side of the neck, neatly screeching through connective components between the brain and the rest of the drone. The thing’s death throes tore Djinn’s headscarf from his face so that it fluttered around his neck, and sent the girder it had wieled spinning into the distance. The light above finally faded and the sub-city was plunged into black.
Djinn’s dance resumed, but it was aggressive now. The first kill had been the hardest and Djinn flew like a hurricane after the others. Dragging blades through scrap drones as the snaking third gave pursuit Djinn felt the surge of energy that only victory could bring. The maintenance drone’s limbs continued to fall short and the scrap drones were thinning. Djinn feigned a dive towards the last group, and as they scattered away from the telegraphed blow, he shifted his weight mid-flight, fell into a roll and rose facing the third.
It almost dodged away again, but it wasn’t ready for the sudden assault and as it turned Djinn brought a sword stabbing upwards where the creature's arm met its torso, pinning the lighter drone in place. His other blade came slashing home in a deadly arc, cutting the creature in two. It fell to the ground motionless and Djinn turned to renew his assault on the scrap drones, scarf fluttering a bright red in the dismal night.
The fourth drone, the spider, stepped between Djinn and his quarry. Djinn kept his speed, let his opponent judge his advance, and when the spider began to move he killed his movement. He hit a dead stop and felt the rush of air as the sweep of the creature's scythe slid before his face. Then Djinn was within the weapon’s arc and the scrap drones were helpless, unable to save their father. Djinn fell to his knees as he charged and brought both blades over his head to sever the spider drone’s forelegs. The machine came crashing forwards and Djinn started to roll from the collapse, but too slowly, and found himself pinned beneath the machine. The bones in both legs shattered, his hip collapsed, snapped like a twig, and a searing pain shot through his body. His torso was still free and one of the three remaining scrap drones had been crushed beneath the spider, but the two that remained closed on him with the cripple following behind and the spider still moved, trying to right itself, grinding bones beneath its weight.
The pain was obscene, but Djinn moved quickly, he let loose of one blade, and grasping the other in both hands, drove it repeatedly into the spider. Finally there was a sparking and the machine stopped moving on top of him. It fell still, Djinn trapped beneath. The last two scrap drones raced at him, and each fell as it came within striking distance of Djinn’s blades, but the crippled first remained, out of reach and grievously wounded, it stood above Djinn, blood dripping from lacerations given at their last meeting. Not that the blood was anything but aesthetic for such a machine.
It had been so simple last time, but they had warned him. The cripple was a military intelligence and espionage drone, built to resemble a human, and built to learn from previous encounters. It had been a mistake not finishing it off, killing it where it lay, but Djinn couldn’t. Never had he been asked to spare a drone before. This had been the first. The cripple had wanted to live, and by saying so it had stayed Djinn’s hand. He had not thought it capable of causing any further harm. He had not thought a drone capable of seeking vengeance.
The cripple stood over Djinn, the ninja’s own flame lance in hand. Slowly it removed the fuel cylinder, and replaced it with a full one from a belt looped around its hips. With a grin it pointed the barrel at Djinn and all of the man’s composure fled: “Spare me, as I did you!” The ninja’s calm was flown. Death is always chaos and so he writhed against the weight that pinned him.
The drone raised the lance and pulled the trigger. Blue flame erupted into the air. It expended the fuel without ever searing Djinn, and for a moment the twitching of his heart slowed and Djinn felt himself saved by the mercy of the first.
The cripple knelt and picked up the sword Djinn had discarded, not once did he come within striking distance. He handled the sword no more eloquently then the scrap drones, but the cripple was smarter. He was a machine, and Djinn only human. The cripple attacked with a simple downward slash as if he were chopping wood, and Djinn parried the blow easily, but the cripple swung again, and again. He would never tire, Djinn knew, and again raised his arm to block the blow. Flesh would fail before pneumatics and steel, the blows would not stop coming, and the cripple would never put itself in danger. All Djinn could do was repeatedly raise his blade in defence.
Soon the blows came closer to his face. Soon his arm rose slower to resist each attack. Soon the blade sunk into his shoulder. Soon Djinn lay bloodied and burried under metal. He pleaded for the cripple to stop, and somewhere in the dark of his mind, Djinn had time, beneath the chaos to wonder if machines could seek vengeance, if this was vengeance or if there was another purpose driving the blows.
Soon the sword burried itself in Djinn's face, slicing deep between fogged blue eyes. And then with a simple human voice, a feminine whisper, the first said, “Mercy is a human trait,” but, Djinn thought with his lask flicker of life, so is vengeance. Then there was no chaos, and never would be again.
By: Daniel T. Moore
(Feel free to post the story where ever, just give me credit for writing something about ninjas.)
And that's all for today. Hope you enjoyed my little attempt at awesome.
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