The Dzhaggernaut full fight

His first attack came so fast I didn’t even see it. The flashlight beam was high-powered, but narrow. I blinked and he unleashed a second incredible leap, this time sideways, and vanished into the darkness. I jerked the flashlight, desperate to find him, and caught a nine-and-three-quarter-inch serrated blade in the stomach. The force of the blow pitched me backward. I stumbled and slammed into the steel ladder, glanced off, spinning, and fell to the stone floor. The flashlight flew from my fingertips and clattered across the ground, throwing out a dizzying swirl of blinding light before slamming into something hard and blinking out.

I was on the ground, in complete darkness. With him.

At that moment, my adrenaline detonated like Tsar Bomba.

In a blink I was up, grasping blindly through the darkness, fingers searching desperately for the steel ladder, finding it, clutching it before me like a shield. The floor had solidified beneath my feet. I couldn’t see, but my other four senses snapped into starling focus. The metallic taste of blood. The smooth coldness of fingered steel. The icy waft of stale air. Quite suddenly, I realized that seeing didn’t matter. The Dzhaggernaut was too quick to keep in the flashlight beam anyway, and holding onto the damn thing eliminated the use of one of my hands.

Besides, something had just occurred to me.

Dzhaggernaut was bigger, faster, and harder than me.

But was he any better at being quiet?

I closed my eyes and listened. I had two hands on the ladder directly in front of me, knees slightly bent, weight on the balls of my feet. Dzhaggernaut was fighting in broad daylight. And he knew I couldn’t see him. I played the scared blind guy and waited for him to pick his shot. In the end, he stabbed straight at my heart. I never saw it coming.

But I didn’t have to.

I heard it from a mile away. His elbow joint flexed and his wrist torqued and the blade shot forward. I had aeons to yank myself to the side. I heard the clang and clatter of his elbow joint locking straight as he stabbed the air where I’d just been.

And I realized The Dzhaggernaut had just fucked up.

In his overzealousness to land the killing blow, he’d stabbed through the rungs of the ladder to get at my heart. Before he could retract his arm I let go of the steel bars and grabbed the thick steel plate of what must have been his forearm and yanked sideways. Metal clanged into metal and I spun and locked his extended elbow joint across the hardened steel ladder. Full arm bar. He roared and flexed his massive bicep and pulled against me. He was incredibly strong, his suit of armor even stronger, but I had my feet planted on stone and my hip braced against steel and an enormous mechanical advantage. I yanked for all I was worth. And I was worth a lot. Something gave with the sound of an axle breaking. The Dzhaggernaut bellowed and I heard the giant knife clatter to the stone floor.

One weapon down.

I kept hold of his buckled arm and waited to see what he would do next. He went for the warhammer. I heard the movement clearly. The unsnapping of the sheath, the articulation of his shoulder, elbow and wrist as he raised the hammer high and whooshed it down. I waited until the last moment then torqued his broken elbow and absorbed the hit on his own steel-plated forearm. He screamed and staggered and I felt through the darkness and got a hand on the head of the hammer and twisted it from his fingers and threw it aside.

Two weapons down.

Then, out of the darkness, the menacing 'sllllliiing' of the fifty-inch Odachi blade exiting its scabbard. A samurai sword is the deadliest martial arts weapon ever created. Light, fast, strong, and deathly sharp. A good one can cut through damn near anything. Even hardened steel.

I ducked just in time. The blade thwanged over my head and I heard the grinding squeal of severing iron and then a beat of silence and I realized the blade had hacked into the thick steel ladder above my head and gotten stuck. I stood and reached through the darkness and found Dzhaggernaut’s left hand still trying to pry the blade loose. I gripped his thumb and torqued his wrist and his hand came away from the blade and I pivoted, turning my back to him, and yanked his left arm over my shoulder until his armored chest slammed against my back. I levered my shoulder beneath his armpit and flipped his enormous mass over top of me. He bellowed with rage as he slammed to the stone floor with the sound of a cement truck hitting a wall at a hundred miles an hour. I let go of his arm and dropped on top of him and fumbled through the darkness, searching for a weapon. I found the Desert Eagle on his right hip, but should have gone for the shotgun on his thigh. Both weapons unsheathed in the same moment and I heard him articulate his elbow and raise the 4-gauge barrel and I let go of the hand gun and dropped to his chest not a moment too soon.

The gigantic shotgun went off with the sound of a billion megatons of TNT, amplified and reverberated by the towering stone walls. He’d missed. And I wasn’t sure he could rack another shell with his broken arm. In the darkness I found the shotgun and wrenched it backward and he yelped and it was mine. I leapt to my feet and racked a shell and leaned in. A 4-gauge shotgun blast is enough to decapitate a rhinoceros. I squeezed the trigger and blasted The Dzhaggernaut in center mass from point blank range.

“Eat that *bleep*!” I roared, as the enormous gun bucked in my hand.

I stood there, triumphant, ears ringing from the second still-reverberating concussion. Which is why I never heard it coming.

The Kick.

At least I think it was a kick. Either that or a *beep* freight train. Something large and heavy moving very fast slammed into my chest and then I was flying backward into complete darkness. The 4-gauge shotgun blast from point blank range hadn’t done shit. That was some serious fucking armor. I hit the ground on my butt and tumbled over my shoulder and came up on my feet but the world swam and I staggered and fell back down. I lay there in the darkness breathing hard, ears still ringing, trying to listen for him but hearing nothing. Then, from the darkness, I felt deep, rumbling laughter.

...


“Let me see if I can fix that,” he said. Then he turned on his headlamp and showed me what he had strapped to his back.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I breathed. He chuckled some more. “What’s the ROF on that thing?” I said. “A million?”

“What the *bleep* is ROF?” boomed Dzhaggernaut. My blood went cold. Just like that, I knew who it was. But . . . it couldn’t be. Something must have crossed my face, because he laughed again. “About fucking time,” he said. I stared at him through the harsh headlamp beam. It wasn’t possible.


...

Then he pulled the trigger.

Ever seen Predator? Remember the scene where Jesse the Body mows down an entire forrest? Well, I was the forrest. The General Dynamics GAU-19/B six-barrel gatling gun fires .50 calibre NATO rounds at a rate of 1500 per minute. That’s twenty-five bullets, each the length of your hand, every second.

I remember the first couple.

The swarm of death hit me high in the chest, spinning me around and lifting me off my feet. Then I was flying through the air, propelled by gun fire, floating on bullets like a kite in a hurricane. I hit the ground hard and there came a moment of respite and then the storm hit again, tumbling me violently across the stone floor like a twig in a leaf blower. I remember ramming something hard, most likely the far wall, and tumbling and turning and slamming against it for a while.

Then the onslaught ceased.

Somehow I was still conscious.

I couldn’t see. I couldn’t tell which way was up. Something wet was in my eyes. Blood. Cascading from beneath my balaclava. Filling my eyes, coursing down the bridge of my nose, onto my cheeks. I could feel it freezing in its tracks on my neck.

Booming footsteps approached through darkness. Then The Dzhaggernaut’s enormous boots shook the ground next to my head. His headlamp blazed down on me. The world went red through my blood-drowned eyes.

“You’re still not dead?” he boomed. It took me a time to find my mouth.

“*bleep*,” I said. “You.”

He chuckled. “Always the conversationalist.”

I heard the sound of the Desert Eagle .50 cocking.

“Would you look at that,” he said, shaking his metal head. “I finally got you.”

Then he shot me in the forehead.
-Sledge vs. The Labyrinth, pg. 293-300