A Visitor to the Future - 116 - Full Tilt
Watching the rest of the fight later, it became obvious just how great the difference was between myself, Tungsten, and Gatecrash.
Tungsten fought with precision, not strength. Blows were calculated, delivered with intent, swipes made at the most vulnerable points of the enemy's design. He'd made that obvious enough with his assault on the centaur. He'd never do something so careless as charge his opponent and leave himself open to retribution. Only truly unexpected strikes and moves were enough to break his stride.
But Gatecrash? Gatecrash was on a whole other level to the both of us - a titan among the weeds. I suddenly realized just how much the vibrant-haired CI had been holding back in our training sessions.
Where Tungsten was accurate and restrained, Gatecrash fought with all the momentum and destructive force of a tornado. Arms never stopped moving, from parry to strike, to dodge. Armour plates were positioned to deflect those blows weak enough to pose no risk. Enemy attacks were baited to present new openings for the defender - a glancing blow was repaid with a full-force kick or swipe. It was hypnotic to watch as Gatecrash battled one wolf aside as the second came in for another strike, used the rocks as cover to avoid being attacked from multiple directions, and on one occasion even caused the two wolves to collide mid-leap.
So when the battle had turned into a two-against-two fight, I was fairly confident that the rest of the team could handle it.
Except, for all the skill in the world, Gatecrash had been fighting two-against-one for nearly two minutes. Some blows had inevitably hit home, components had been stressed, and, even as tireless as CIs seemed to be, some lapses in focus were inevitable.
It was mere moments after I sailed past that a crippling strike finally came, not in the form of a punch, or tail-strike from a wolf - no, instead it was far simpler. The first wolf pounced at Gatecrash's back, and the second barged at their ankles.
It was enough for the overstretched CI to lose their balance and fall forwards, face first to the ground.
The ground was wolf territory.
Toughened beast-like forearms pried at Gatecrash's right shoulder joint from behind and found purchase, dexterous hindlegs moving up to rip out vital components. There was a flash of light as electronics died, and the wolf's arm pulled away with the remnants of synthetic muscle fibres and joint casings. The second wolf went straight for Gatecrash's left leg, going for the rear of the knee-joint - Gatecrash tried to kick it off but the full weight and four limbs were more than a match for a single limb not suited to bend in that direction.
Tungsten arrived, striking the leg-hitting wolf with a kick and shunting it off Gatecrash. He followed-up with an overarm strike, pummelling the wolf into the ground, shattering an armour plate.
And still, the arena floor continued to tip, now at a thirty-five degree angle, and rapidly increasing.
Gatecrash assessed the situation quickly from the ground, red visor scanning the ground in front and tactile sensors providing information about the wolf behind. One arm crippled, slope quickly steepening, a judgement call had to be made.
Gatecrash began to roll over to the right, which had the potential to pin the latched-on wolf to the ground. The wolf, not wanting to risk it, began to leap off - but Gatecrash's left hand came around fast and seized one of its forelimbs, caught tight in an iron grip. Momentarily caught off guard, the wolf was unable to resist as Gatecrash wrapped their legs around its body, now fully grappling the wolf from behind. The wolf, unable to reach behind itself to shake its attacker, or gain leverage on a heavier foe, thrashed uselessly in Gatecrash's grip.
Forty degrees. There was a deep grinding sound from somewhere in the arena.
Tungsten harried the second wolf, hampered by how much lower to the ground it was - he'd been fortunate with the surprise punch but not was restricted to kicks. The second wolf began to bound out of his reach, utilizing its superior speed to increase distance on him.
Forty-five degrees! The source of the scraping became clear as some of the larger asteroids began to move - not all of them were as secured to the floor, and those that weren't were set to become rolling, sliding obstacles in the immediate future!
With the incline as steep as it was, Gatecrash and the grappled wolf began to slide down the slope, slowly at first, but then quicker and quicker as they bounced off the secured and moving rocks alike. Gatecrash tightened their grip, damaged elbow joint finally seizing up from the damage it had taken. They spun round and round across the floor, a pirouette of inevitability for both as they grew closer to the edge, before the floor ran out and the tumbled through the open air towards the water below.
Tungsten was losing grip as he pursued his quarry uphill, the wolf having an advantage in both speed and traction. The realization came to him that his opponent was no longer just trying to get out of his reach - but to let the incline do the work of disposing of him! The wolf could then safely grab onto one of the secured rocks and wait out the rest of the round.
Fifty-five degrees. Tungsten was losing traction now on the smooth surface, despite his atypical clawed feet design. He stopped, swinging his left forearm out - with a satisfying crumbling noise, his deployed climbing claw found stable purchase on a nearby stationary rock.
His right arm reached out to grab a hand-sized boulder, one of the last rolling down the incline.
"I've never looked after a dog," said Tungsten aloud.
Sixty degrees.
"But I should like to teach this one to fetch!" he said, and threw the boulder uphill with as much force as he could spare.
It bounced oddly off the surface of the sloped surface, the spin having been precisely calculated to curve at precisely the right angle. And for the second time today, a rock found its way into precisely the wrong position for continued motion, knocking the wolf's left foreleg out from under it as it was mid-bound. With no grip, the wolf faceplanted into the sloped surface, and its forward momentum quickly halted as it impacted the sixty-five degree surface and began to tumble back down the slope towards Tungsten. It tried to find a grip on the surface, limbs flailing like an animal trying to move quickly across a polished floor - but it was too late. It had missed its chance to leap to the safety of one of the rocks, the angle now having reached seventy degrees. Tungsten, still safely secured to the asteroid nearby, watched as it passed him.
Suddenly, the wolf's movements changed. It stopped trying to find a purchase on the arena floor, and focused all efforts on stabilizing itself, looking straight up the arena slope at Tungsten as it fell, optic firmly fixed on the face of the one who had defeated it. It stared intently right up until it sailed over the edge of the arena, and into the water below.
Too late, Tungsten realized that it wasn't just him it was looking at.
A Proxy is mostly unaffected by certain wounds that would impair a human or CI. You could destroy a Proxy's head, tear off its limbs, or deprive it of sensory input, and it would still be effective.
Specifically, a blinded Proxy is not a defeated Proxy - provided that something exists to guide it.
The blinded centaur, left uphill of us in the earlier struggle, and guided by the vision of its falling teammate, finished using its strength to shove an anchored asteroid loose. It fell directly towards Tungsten's affixed, stationary Proxy.
"Ah," said Tungsten, as the rock hit his Proxy head-on, shattering its head-casing and sandwiching it between two asteroids with a note of quite literal steel-crushing finality. Tungsten nodded to himself in astonishment as he stood from his chair, "It would seem that I, in fact, am the one who still needs to learn a few tricks."
With that, we were out of the tournament, the elimination round resulting in our defeat. I looked at my teammates for any signs of disappointment but found only a warm smile on Gatecrash's face, with a note of pride in the expression.
"Really good try, both!" said Gatecrash, "Nice cannonball, too. Let's go back and see the others."