Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 116: Metal On Metal

Solid ground smacked against the bound soles of Kelly's feet. The deep of night was made deeper by the Doomdust, the thicket of chaos within more chaotic. Her Minutemen were wild for blood and vengeance, wilder even than her. Under ripe conditions, they were all reduced to the primitive animal side that was always lurking behind the elaborate curtains of the human mind.

When Danse ploughed into the suit of power armor and dislodged the gatling laser, Kelly struck for the right arm with her blade, severing the freshly drawn plasma defender from the metal hand. Disarmed, the man in the suit repelled Danse with a heavy blow to the chestplate, then whirled in attempt to catch Kelly by the skull.

She anticipated his reach and rolled around his arm, lashing backwards with her blade and grinding metal over the plates on his back. He threw an arm back at her. She dodged low and grated across his knee, trying to strike between the joints, but knew it would be down to a slim chance and a synth-sharp eye. By then, Danse was back and full of vengeance, grasping the man away from Kelly by the shoulder to punch him dead in the face of his helmet. The sound was thunder and rage. Danse didn't stop to admire the tilt in his opponent's stance. His rage found an outlet through his fist, over and over and over. Boom, boom, boom.

Kelly stood back to appreciate the scene, her heavy breath fogging up her gasmask. She wanted nothing more than to take the biggest kill for herself to nourish the demon in her, but she could feel that Danse needed this blowout too.

After landing an uppercut to the man's torso, he complimented it with a downward thrust of his plated elbow, right at the pressure point between neck and shoulder. The man was staggered down to a knee, wavering on one hand, ready to die. To Kelly's surprise, Danse stepped back, chest out and fists balled, but he nodded for her to make the kill. There was no time to spend quarrelling over who loved who the most by offering up the kill, so she seized the opportunity to nestle her blade into the joint of their foe's helmet seal, right through the spine.

As she placed a foot up on his back and raised her blade high, the man broke from his bluff and surged his arm behind at her, grabbing a hold of her leg. Off balance, Kelly failed to slash at his arm before he yanked her around and tossed her bodily into Danse. The ex-Paladin had been cautious enough not to open fire, but now she found herself pinned sidelong between his chestplate and the chestplate of the other man as he bulled into them both.

Not the most compromising position she had ever gotten herself into, but still...

As the men got into a power struggle, Kelly pulled her gun and pounded bullets out at point blank, feeling the shocking vibrations punch through her bones and seeing crisp lights from the muzzle report behind the skin of her eyelids. She could feel Danse trying to reassert his leverage of the man in order to give her some wiggle room to slip out, but with each slight adjustment in their wrestle-match he made, the other man met or made progress in getting the advantage, going for Danse's throat. Kelly began to fear that one of her limbs would get in the way of one of their giant hands and be compressed into a human meat mat, or failing that, she would just be crushed altogether.

When she managed to wedge her gun between multiple arms and chests and angle her barrel up toward the other man's helmet, she fired off the last rounds in her magazine, aiming for the visor holes and cracking the bulletproof material. Blinded, he relented his wrestle with Danse to crunch his hand around her pistol. She gave a muted scream inside her gasmask as her trigger finger was crushed with the gun, then screamed in protest as she saw a hand encase her gasmask, an attempt to expose her to the Doomdust.

She saw Danse shoot a hand out to stop him, holding him by the wrist to keep him from pulling the mask free, but the other man's grasp on her visor cinched tighter and cracked the screen instead. She was a distraction, pestering him from focusing on the real threat in Danse. He was intent on killing her one way or another.