Game Over

Chapter 27





SCHOOL IS EXHAUSTING. I don’t know how human kids do it. By the time I got back to the suite, I could barely stand up. I wasn’t even going to change out of my dorky sailor-boy seifuku. I was just going to let myself in, unsling my book bag, and sleep on the nearest soft object I could find—a couch, a bed, an area rug, a pile of clothes…

But no sooner had I opened the door and stepped inside than—WHAM!—I was facedown on the bamboo floor with my arm twisted behind my back and the whining sound of a fully charged Opus 24/24 in my ear.

My powerful assailant’s weight shifted, driving a knee into the small of my back.

“You could be dead right now, Daniel,” whispered a voice I knew all too well, a voice I should have known to expect at just a moment such as this.

“Dad, I’ve had a rough day. Can you please let me up?”

“You expect to take on Number 7, Number 8, and Number 1, and you walk blindly into your hotel room without running a security sweep? Have you forgotten everything you’ve been taught?”

“Dad,” I pleaded, “my arm, my—”

Dad let go of my wrist and got up, but he didn’t power down the Opus 24/24.

Opus 24/24s have only one setting—eternal damnation. They contain an illegal molecular resonator that fires a gigawatt pulse that vibrates at the precise frequency of its victim’s neurotransmissions. In the simplest terms, it causes its victims to expire from pure pain. Which is kind of why they’re banned across most of the civilized universe.

Seeing one in my father’s hands was a little jarring to say the least. It was the very same weapon The Prayer had used to kill him and my mother.

“Dad, put that thing down already, okay?”

“Make me,” he commanded in a voice that sent chills down my spine. He was challenging me as part of our ongoing training exercises, but I don’t think he realized how truly exhausted I was.

Just as I was about to tell him he was seconds away from being dematerialized—stored in the lower levels of my consciousness until I needed him again—he grabbed me with one hand and flung me across the room into a Noguchi glass coffee table, which promptly shattered.

“Ouch. What the heck?!”

I struggled to my feet, anger boiling inside me. It was one thing to keep me on my toes, but it was another to take advantage of a tired kid who’d already had a pretty rough day.

“Look, Dad. That wasn’t funny, and—”

“You might want to dive through, Daniel,” he suggested.

“Dive through? What’s that supposed to mean?”

By way of reply, he deftly aimed the Opus 24/24 at me and squeezed the trigger.