Jumping At Shadows

Jack gripped his assault rifle till his knuckles turned white. He could hear that hunter drone stomping around the warehouse floor, occasionally stopping to smash a few crates aside in search of him. He had ducked into the warehouse to try and lose it's attention, but unfortunately, he wasn't nearly as sneaky as he thought, and the machine had spotted him and followed him in.

After his last head-on encounter with the armored behemoth, he realized that his current weapon just wasn't going to make the cut, he had the still open bullet wounds to remind him of that. Since a direct approach wasn't going to work, (short of miraculously finding a heavy munitions stockpile among the numerous boxes that filled the warehouse) he had opted to try a more subtle approach.

Subtly was far from Jack's preferred method of fighting. He hadn't taken the moniker of "The Ripper" for nothing. His preferred method of fighting was to kick the door in and hold down the trigger until all enemy soldiers were fused with the wallpaper, but here it would only get him torn to shreds. He leaned slightly to the left, peaking out from behind the wall where he was taking cover. From up in the supervisor's booth he could see almost the entirety of the warehouse floor, including the twelve foot tall killing machine that currently stalked him. It continued to peruse the various stacks of crates with all the delicacy of a drunken bear. Though it's search continued to bare no fruit, the machine was unrelenting, and Jack knew that it would eventually move from the warehouse floor to the other areas of the building. He couldn't hide in the supervisor's booth forever.

After several minutes of watching and waiting, the drone turned it's back, and Jack saw his chance. It didn't hear him vault out of the window, much to his relief, allowing him to slide behind cover and out of sight. Every time it turned it's back he would sneak a little closer, gradually closing the distance between him and his pursuer. He eventually ended up hiding behind a pile of crates roughly six feet away, close enough to hear it's servos whirring. "Okay", he thought to himself, "Now or never", as he pulled the pin on his last grenade, giving it a light underhand toss, landing it right between the drone's legs, where it detonated after a few seconds.

The high explosive device shook the building to it's foundation, creating a fissure in the concrete floor, and blasting the drone's legs into molten slag. Jack followed up by leaping out from behind his cover and firing a few rounds into the bolted monstrosity's chassis, just enough to grab it's attention.

The drone was doing surprisingly well for a something that had just lost it's legs, and was now walking around on it's arms. This restricted the use of it's gatling gun, but it made up for this disadvantage by deploying it's shoulder mounted missile pod.

"MASSIVE DAMAGE SUSTAINED. RE-ROUTING POWER. HUNTER UNIT STILL OPERATIONAL" The drone blared, it's voice deep and heavily computerized.

"Well HO-LY Shit!" Jack shouted "What does it take to convince you fuckers to stay down?"

"TARGET ACQUIRED" was the only response he received. That's the trouble with fighting robots, they never have any comebacks.

The drone fired a barrage of missiles that Jack barely managed to dodge, but not without getting peppered by shrapnel, including a particularly large chunk of wood from a crate which embedded itself in his rib cage, puncturing his left lung. The pain was intense, but he had to keep going. He had to keep making insults, just in case someone was remotely piloting that thing.

"Another thing, just who's idea was it to give these things a voice? It serves no logical purpose, other than to broadcast it's exact location!"

"TARGET ACQUIRED" Another pile of crates reduced to splinters.

"And whats up that voice anyway? These things have the deepest, most stereotypical evil robot voice I've ever heard! Did some project manager come in when you were designing it and say 'well it's combat capabilities are fine, but it isn't intimidated enough. give it a scary voice' ?"

"TARGET ACQUIRED" A hole blasted through the wall.

The insults were having no visible effect, so Jack instead put all his concentration into dodging rockets and looking for a gap in the drone's defense, and it was then that he received his golden opportunity. The drone began preparing it's missile pod for yet another salvo, and that's where he spotted an opening. It had lifted itself higher in order to get a better shot, allowing Jack charge forward and slid underneath it's upraised torso.

The drone couldn't react fast enough, and was helpless to stop him as he leaped onto it's back. The hunter thrashed about violently trying to dislodge it's new found passenger, but to no avail, Jack was stuck fast. After trying to shake him off failed, the drone tried to use it's manipulator arm to reach back and grab Jack, which is when he sprung into action. His assault rifle had been long since discarded to allow him to use both hands, leaving only one weapon left in his arsenal: a large, heavily customized magnum he always carried as a sidearm. He used this momentary stillness to his advantage, drawing his pistol, leaping out of the reach of the manipulator arm, and onto the drone's head

His keen eyes immediately spotted a structural weakness. One of the armor plates on the back of the robot's head was of a significantly lower quality than the others, most likely owing to the fact that the creation of this hunter had been a bit of a rush job. A fiendish grin spread across Jack's usually dour expression as he pressed the muzzle of his gun against plate and fired repeatedly. The high caliber rounds cut through the weak metal like scissors through paper, penetrating deep inside the metal skull, blasting major computing systems and combat algorithms to bits.

The hunter gave a slight spasm and collapsed to the floor, little more than a giant metal carcass, leaving Jack standing over it, looking rather satisfied

"That's what you get" He stated matter-of-factly.

He had just turned to leave, when the voice came back on.

"MU-MU-MU-MAJOR SYSTEMS OFFLINE. C-C-COMPUTATIONAL CENTERS UNResponsive. unable to coMPLETE MAIN OBJECTIVE. FINAL PROTOCOL ACTI-ACTIVATED. SELF DESTRuct initiated."

'Well now, how did I forget about that?" He mused, before the drone gave a last hurrah, and violently exploded in his face.

Jack was lucky, this time. He had already begun to leave when the self destruct went off, gaining just enough distance that the shock-wave alone didn't tear him limb from limb. It did however send him careening through the air and into a brick wall. A most of his skeleton was in splinters, jagged chunks of metal and wood were impaled into almost every part of his body, his eardrums had been blown out, he had a brutal concussion, and though he couldn't move to check, he was pretty sure his hair was on fire. The infamous "Ripper" had been reduced to a pulpy mass of gore. He was covered in grievous, gaping wounds. His intestines were hanging out. He was practically squirting liquidized organs out of his tear ducts. Yet despite all this, he was strangely at peace. When you've spent your whole life getting shot, poisoned, stabbed, electrocuted, immolated, and blown up, well..... pain starts to lose it's novelty.

For felt like an eternity, Jack just lay there in the rubble, letting his wounds mend and enjoying the silence. Much as he loved a good fight, sometimes he just felt tired, and with injuries this severe, he couldn't afford to be moving around. Simple gunshot wounds usually took an hour or two to fully heal, but to recover from being torn apart like this could take a full week.

Eventually the eternity passed and Jack found the wherewithal to move again, without fearing that his intestines would come sloshing out when he did.. He lifted himself out of the pile of bricks he had spent the last few hours lying in, and began limping toward the back exit. Making up for lost time, his brain began firing at maximum speed, wondering when the next attack would come, how the next hunter would be improved. This last model had slightly better reflexes, not that it mattered much. This had been the second attack in a week, that certainly explained why the why it's upgrades had been so meager, and why the whole thing stunk of a rush job. The Corporation wanted him gone, and they would achieve their goal no matter the cost, even if that meant cutting corners.

He had finally reached the exit, pushing the door open with his shoulder, and stepping out into the alley behind the warehouse. He looked around for any sign of soldiers, or god forbid another hunter, but fate, for once, had been merciful, or so it seemed. As he walked through the alley, using the wall for support, when something caught his attention. He could feel something behind him, some kind of explainable presence. As quickly as he could in his current state, he drew his sidearm and turned to face his assailant, but ended up wobbling to the side and stepping on his bad, or rather worse, leg a little to hard, causing a previously mending break to fracture again.

"Shit" He muttered before turning his attention to the unseen stalker "Alright, whoever you are, show yourself!"

No response. Jack was about to call out again when he saw something strange. A small flash, coming from seemingly nowhere, just tiny pinprick of light piercing the darkness.

"No tricks, I'm not in the mood for your bullshit, or anyone else's for that matter!" He growled into the darkness.

Again, no response, just another flash, and this time Jack could have sworn it looked as though it was closer.

"I swear to God, Allah, and Cthulhu, if you don't show you fucking face in the next ten seconds, I simply can't be held accountable for what I'm going to do to you!" Jack was seething with rage at this point. He had just spent the night getting kicked around by the metal boot of a hunter drone, and now some little shit was toying with him. If things kept up this way he was liable to black out and wake up with someone else's blood in his teeth. Again.

"Ten!"

"Nine!"

"Eight!"

"Seven!"

"Six!"

"Five!"

"Fou-"

Jack never got to finish counting down because at that moment the flash appeared again, this time directly in front of his face. That set him off. He growled various obscenities and fired off a shot in the general direction of the it, but didn't get any further than that, because this time instead disappearing, the light remained, hovering right over his nose. Before he could do anything else, it grew, expanding till it engulfed him, then it deflated, disappearing just as quickly as it had come, leaving no trace that Jack the Ripper had ever been there. Well, aside from the destroyed warehouse, various blood spatters, bullet casings, and not to mention.... never mind, you get the idea.

Hiss wild ride down the rabbit hole has only just begun