The Second Chance (Round One: The Fitzpatrick Center)

The Fitzpatrick Centre’s branch of Pebblebrooks was in a prime spot. Located on the second floor it was at the top of the escalators, in front of the shop there was a small seating area with benches and planters filled with soil (though sadly no longer any plants). It might not be a prime spot in terms of attracting customers (very low footfall, nobody wants to read books any more nowadays), but it was a prime spot in terms of tactical value. Whoever held the Pebblebrooks held the second floor. It was for this reason that the seating area was now lined with sandbags and upturned bookshelves. Soldiers in Pebblebrooks logoed camo jackets were bunkered down enjoying a Meatles Ecstasy Meal, when suddenly from behind them there was a crash of glass, and the Pebblebrooks proprietor was flung out of his shop in an explosion of books and glass. Standing framed in the shattered doorway was a hulking grey man with huge leather gauntlets and a strange look upon his face.

“Who wants a piece of Greyve?” He yelled, slamming his fists down into the ground, cracking the laminate floor beneath him. The assembled soldiers quickly grabbed their Meatles logo-emblazoned weaponry and opened fire on the Half Oni. His heart was pounding against his chest, his blood was pumping hard. The chemical began to flow.

THIS WAS MORE LIKE IT.

Fireworks smashed into endless tracts of leather, colourful explosions but oh so far away. Scarlet roses dripping water drip after drop along the thin mountain. Unending neon sun beat down over plastic valley. One had already ended, his remains drifting away before Greyve’s eyes, dust in the wind. They made such pretty patterns. Greyve danced. The trees they danced with him, stubborn and stable unwilling to move to his beat but wanting in on the grim tango regardless. Greyve was a lumberjack. His twin axes cleaving red sap from detached branches. And he was laughing, prancing through the cornfield on a sunny summer’s day. The corn ducked and weaved, and dust exploded where he laid his hands. And all the corn fled away from him, their spores leaving spinning trails in the air as they spiralled past him. Into the dead forest, into the babbling brook, Greyve followed.

“What the fuck was that?” Corporal Chang demanded, as they took shelter at the back of Pebblebrooks. Though they had seen what he had seen the rest of his squadron didn’t have an answer. The creature’s eyes had glazed over, turning as grey as his skin, and he had attacked. His movements were slick and unpredictable. Bullets were effortlessly deflected by his gauntlets, physical assault was as effective as punching a stone wall. The creature had been moving less like he was attacking, more like he was dancing, but with each dance step inadvertently causing harm to those around him. Hall lay dead, his chest sporting a hole where Greyve’s fist had slammed right through it.

“He’s coming!” yelled Simmons. “Oh fuck we are so screwed!” And the squadron opened fire again.

Water trickled underfoot, splashing merrily across smooth stones. Around Greyve the trunks of dead trees surrounded him, pressing down upon him. They were a fog, and this place was cut off from the sun. Dark and dingy, funguses dripped from decayed branches, splaying their leaves out upon the riverbed beneath him. Bickering goblins heard off in the distance, their words no more than cracks and pops, the noise of angry static snaking through the decomposing woods. The grey knight raised his hammers and threw them into the husks of felled behemoths. Splinters of wood circled overhead as the rotting forest collapsed around him. Swarms of grotesque green imps, chattering away. Greyve was the wave that washed them away, a foam of red staining the flow of the river beneath. Bleaching the cavern walls maroon, fists slammed into puckish physique, blow after blow after blow. He emerged from the cavern no longer grey but a knight ensanguined.