Worlds War One

xxxix [Ji]

Ji's mother wasn't a genius like her successful husband or her prodigy daughters. She was an ordinary woman with average intelligence. Ji could see, remembering back through the lens of maturity, a look on her face when he was young, and his father had been lecturing him on getting a B on some test. The look had been a little self-loathe-y. Maybe she'd thought that it was her fault Ji had inherited her limited IQ.

Now, Ji knew that he'd never had a chance at inheriting Joo-won Choi's intellect. His birth father was an Angel. Probably not a very smart one.

It sounded like a supernatural soap opera. Soap operas were a guilty pleasure of his mother's. Ji had found that out one day when he was in middle school and had stayed home with a cold. Mother had tried to get him to sleep away the afternoon, but Ji had insisted instead on sitting on the sofa under a big blanket with a bowl of soup. Before she'd turned on the television, she had sworn Ji to secrecy. "You can never tell your father about this." Then she'd turned on Days of Our Lives. She knew every plot, every character, every romance, every impossible turn of events. There had seemed to be an overuse of evil twins. Ji remembered thinking it was outlandish.

Ji's outlandish evil twin started walking toward him. The doppelgänger sported a sinister smirk, an expression Ji himself had never attempted. Otherwise, the entity was a perfect copy of Seaman Ji-Sung Choi, right down to his freshly acquired Magi arms and a Ghost eye. The real Ji has lost his left eye, but this evil twin had a Ghostly right eye. Exactly like gazing into a three-dimensional mirror. Through the looking glass, this was what was on the other side. Not exactly a wonderland.

"Get ready," Lieutenant Robinson commanded. "These don't look like friendlies."

"I don't know that anyyyything heeere is friendlyyyy," Penina said.

"Gonna hurtttt you," hissed the Golem who looked like Penina, limping closer but with the other leg lame.

"Airman Fox," the lieutenant ordered. "Put a bullet in her leg."

Fox already had his SIG-Sauer drawn and aimed. He pulled the trigger, striking the Forsaken creature in the thigh. The doppelgänger Golem looked down at the hole in her marble thigh, snarling like a dog who'd found its leg ensnared in a trap. Ji noted the cracks in the stone limb, but the Golem kept coming. The bullet had only slowed it momentarily.

"The blades of the Bowie knives won't work on these creatures," Saanvi said. "The weapons' power comes from being from the First World, having supremacy over entities that came after. But the Forsaken Land is of the First World. The blades will have the same effect on a victim here as any normal blade would have on any of us."

"Let's see how Seaman Choi's twin likes the taste of bullets," Lieutenant Robinson growled, raising her pistol and firing three shots at the mirror image of Ji.

Ji knew he wasn't looking at himself, but he still flinched as the shots should have hit his doppelgänger square in the chest. But the mirror image of Ji waved a hand as magical as the original Ji's, and the slugs dissipated into golden glitter that twinkled briefly before fading in the red light of the blood sky. The creepy grin more appropriate for a killer clown never faltered. Ji had chills down his nephilim spine.

"Bullets are no good. Blades are no good," Ji said. "I guess we do this fists to faces."

"Defensive positions," Lieutenant Robinson barked. "Let them come to us."

The soldiers made a circle, back-to-back, with the three civvies positioned between them. Penina was on Ji's left, between him and Quest, and Autumn on his right. Saanvi was at his back while Ji faced his doppelgänger and the double of the Golem.

The doppleGolem got to Penina first, stone fist aiming for marble face. "Grind you intttto gravel." Quest shoved Penina aside right before rock struck rock. The Army Private rolled in one smooth motion and brought his pistol around, using the handle like a hammer, cracking the doppleGolem upside the head. He chipped out a sliver of stone the size of a tooth, a white shard bouncing off into the alien vegetation surrounding the spot on the trail.

Fox raked his Bowie blade across the doppleGolem's torso, scratching a deep groove in the stone abdomen. Penina's evil twin swiped her fist at the soldiers, but both Fox and Quest avoided the swing of her stone mallets. Ji had to leave his fellow soldiers to the alternate version of Golem because his own mirrored enemy had arrived. Ji looked at himself, eye to eye.

"You were never good enough," the doppelgänger insulted. "You're still not good enough."

"That's one characteristic where I'll make sure we're exactly the same," Ji countered. "You're not gonna be good enough."

He'd learned hand-to-hand combat in basic training, but as a Seaman, he'd focused on floating boats as much as throwing punches. Yet nothing could have prepared him for this fight. The doppelgänger attacked with a swing aimed right at Ji's face. The soldier ducked as his leg donated by Penina grew shorter by inches automatically, instinctively aiding the avoidance of being punched in the head.

"It's a challenge to replicate your systematic failures and yet still succeed in defeating you," the evil twin taunted.

"Yeah, it ain't easy being me," Ji quipped.

Spheres of blue energy appeared in the palms of both hands, each the size of a tennis ball and rotating like tiny planets. Sparks sizzled on the surface of these orbs of electricity, manifestations of Ji's Magi abilities. He pushed out with his mind, and the spheres obeyed, launching like twin baseballs shot out of a pneumatic shaft. His evil twin manifested a flat disc that resembled a ping pong paddle made of the same blue energy and deflected Ji's assault.

Ji punched out, his fist missing his mirror image's face. The doppelgänger retaliated and connected as knuckles found Ji's jaw. The contact was like a sledgehammer on concrete, a thick and solid sound that echoed across this alien landscape.

The evil twin could mimic appearance, abilities, and aptitude. But could it copy strategy?

"Your father was right. You're a fool," the doppelgänger said.

"Your mama said the same thing about you, twinsie," Ji jibed.

Ji's Ghost eye took the measure of his foe. The First World copycat might look exactly like the mirror image of Ji-Sung Choi, but only when he saw it with his Human eye. The Ghost eye revealed a pattern of light and color that was nothing like his own. Strands like triple-woven DNA snaked through a vaguely humanoid shape with three arms and three legs. The essence of this creature was very different from its substance.

Ji created another blue sphere of Magi power, this one a single construct the size of a soccer ball. Instead of aiming it at a torso as slender as his own, he aimed for the invisible third leg Ji could only see with his Ghost eye. Contact. His evil twin howled as the energy exploded against the incorporeal appendage, sparks crackling along the length of the third leg. Copycat Ji wobbled and went over, toppling off the pathway and into the strange lawn along the route.

Lieutenant Robinson had been adamant that the squad stay right on the spongy/stone pathway through the Forsaken Land. The lawn of lichens with weird suction-cup shapes seemed ominous, eager for someone to stray off the path. As the doppelgänger dropped onto a field of the little sucker-faced plant-things, Ji appreciated the lieutenant's caution. Like a chunk of chum in a tank of piranhas, the lichen-lawn devoured the doppelgänger. The copycat disintegrated faster than a bundle of branches tossed into a woodchipper. The sound was even like a saw grinding something into nothing.

Then there was one Ji left.