Game Over

Chapter 41





THE OWL-FACED GOON was squatting in the rice paddy and had some serious alien-tech camouflage going on. But since I was coming down from thirty feet in the air, it wasn’t hard to see him or his wicked-looking weapons.

Of course, I was brilliantly disguised as a teenager taking a superhuman leap over a bullet train, so it wasn’t too hard for him to see me either. His wicked-looking weapons were soon blasting away in my general direction.

I hit the ground and leaped sideways, then—faster than any bullet train—I charged. Getting in low under his spray of weapon fire, I tackled him, then I applied that kansetsu waza joint-locking move that Miyu had used on me. In a moment, I was standing on his armored neck and looking down into his panic-stricken, silver-eyed, noseless face.

“You’re—you’re—” he gasped.

“Yeah,” I said, “your friendly neighborhood Alien Hunter. Now tell me, what are you doing here?”

“The Puh-puh-puh-plee—”

“Pleionid?” I asked.

He nodded and started sputtering again: “Puh-puh-puh-please don’t hurt me. I’ll leave Earth, I promise!”

“Tell me how you tracked it here. The hunt codes weren’t supposed to go out till the hunt started, and that’s not for another half hour.”

“I ha-ha-ha—hacked the system.”

“How does it work?”

“It tracks pleiochromatech emissions. N-n-n-now, will you puh-puh-please let me go?”

“Why would I do that?”

“So you can die, Alien Hunter!”

And, with that, I came to realize that owl-headed goons like that one have certain defense mechanisms I’d failed to anticipate. I won’t give you the blow-by-blow on what happened next, because it gets a little gross, and your parents or teachers might take this book away from you if I spelled it out in too much detail. But let’s just say this particular breed of alien—the Dookian—when under duress, is apt to spray the highly caustic contents of its intestines at its attacker.

The long and the short of it is that this one did it to me, and it was easily the single-most-disgusting experience of my life. Fortunately, however, it wasn’t fatal and didn’t prevent me from karate-chopping him into the next prefecture.

When I was done cleaning his repulsive goo off me—I had to materialize a full case and a half of Handi Wipes to get the job done—I found the tracking unit he’d hacked and quickly determined that the Pleionid had already gotten thirty miles ahead of me, heading east toward Narita Airport.

I took off running at a comfortable two hundred miles per hour (any faster and I usually get a bit of a headache from the concentration it takes not to trip). Soon, I was closing in on my quarry.

But it wasn’t headed quite all the way to Narita Airport. Instead, it stopped in the middle of a beautiful garden in the town of Ushiku. But it wasn’t the plantings that were the most noteworthy feature of the place. That distinction went to a bronze man who happened to be taller than Godzilla.