Chapter 190: Book 3 Chapter 29.5: Asymmetrical Warfare

“Alright, round two, baby,” Zee said. She took a look at the senior dorms, and did a quick double check for any incoming spiders or land-boats. Nothing appeared. “We need to get in there and get whatever their secret weapon is before the power comes back on.”

“I shall take the lead,” Akira said.

“Please do,” Zee agreed. For all she knew, there was some weird ambush waiting for them just on the other side of the door. She wanted her own weirdo leading the charge.

“Hey!”

Lee rounded the corner just as Akira was taking his first few steps towards the dorms. She caught her breath and tried to stabilize her spinning head. Doing magic right now was already hard, and she was barely on her feet.

“Fight me, Samurai Jack!”

Akira rolled his eyes, and looked to Zee for confirmation.

“I do not want to get caught between her and whatever’s in there,” Zee said, pointing to Lee and then towards the dorms. “We deal with her first.”

Lee tried to contain her smile as Akira grabbed his sword and started walking her way. She kept her back to the ocean and slowly twisted her fingertips in circles. It took every bit of magical focus she had to keep from fainting, but every moment that passed made the returning magic stronger.

“Hello, Mr. Samurai, I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced,” Lee said. She still needed to do a little stalling. “I’m Lee.”

“I’ve been told,” Akira said. “I am Akira Kurosawa.”

“Oh really? Are you-”

“No relation,” Akira insisted, with no small amount of frustration in his voice.

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine, I get that a lot,” Akira said. “Are you recovered?”

“A moment to catch my breath would not go amiss,” Lee said. And a moment longer to execute her plan.

Far behind Akira, Zee cautiously eyed her doppelganger, and then checked over her shoulder. Even though the EMMP was still technically in effect, they were cutting it close. Zee grabbed her phone and called a friend across the campus.

“Hey, Lou, you got eyes on any reinforcements coming our way?”

“Well, I have eyes on people, but not exactly reinforcements,” Lou said.

“What’s that mean, babe?”

“It means I just watched like two-hundred people throw as many guns as they could carry in the ocean,” Lou said.

“In the ocea-”

Zee froze, and locked eyes on Lee again. She was wobbling unsteadily from exhaustion -and twirling a fingertip that glowed faintly with hydrokinetic magic.

“Akira, take her out, now!”

The samurai, drew his sword, creating a slightly less-than-dramatic scrape of plastic against the scabbard. Lee clenched her fist, creating a quite suitably dramatic crash in the ocean behind her.

The water behind Lee surged upward in a crashing wave, until the churning tide towered above her like a tidal wave. The rising tsunami froze in place as soon as it crested, and the bubbling waters parted to reveal hundreds of paintball guns. Half the campus, even many of those who’d been eliminated, had tossed their guns into the sea, and Lee had magically pushed the waves to gather them all in one place faster than their owner’s feet could’ve carried them. She continued to manipulate the water to aim every single one of the hundreds of guns in one direction. Akira looked up at the wall of seawater and paintballs that was about to crash down on him, and dashed forward.

The wall of water behind Lee was matched by a wall of color ahead of her. Paint in every shade splattered around Akira in a technicolor explosion as he dodged and weaved in every direction, trying to stay ahead of Lee’s torrential downpour of paint. He managed to stay mere centimeters ahead, and paint splashed at his heels as he dashed towards Lee, sword raised to strike. Lee’s vision started to blur as she focused on manipulating the water to aim and fire every gun at once.

With a deep breath, Lee closed her eyes and focused on the magic running through her and into the water she controlled. She heard the soft thud of paintballs against sand, the sound of footsteps getting closer, and the swing of a blade reaching out towards her.

Then she heard a single decisive splat.

Lee opened her eyes and looked up at the paint-covered edge of a sword -and a single droplet of blue paint running down Akira’s face.

“Oh thank god.”

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Lee fell backwards and fainted immediately.

An unknown amount of time later, Lee woke up with a cool icepack on her forehead and Zee staring down at her. Her counterpart breathed a sigh of relief and took a finger off Lee’s neck now that tracking her pulse was no longer necessary.

“Don’t scare me like that,” Zee said. “We thought you gave yourself an aneurysm there, honey.”

“No, I’m fine,” Lee said. “Just hard to manage that much magic on the tail end of an EMMP.”

“God damn impressive though,” Zee said. “You good?”

Zee offered her hand, and Lee took it and stood up. She didn’t wobble in the slightest as she got to her feet. Through the haze of her light head, Lee still found time to look at Zee and wonder why she’d cut her bouncing curls so short.

“Just fine, dear.”

“Good.”

Zee nodded, and Lee got shot in the back with a paintball.

“Sorry about that,” Zee said. “We are still competing, after all.”

“Quite alright, I’ve had you ambushed more than once today,” Lee said. She grabbed her phone and called up Vell. “Hello dear. Yes, all clear. Samurai’s been eliminated.”

Lee hung up and smiled broadly in Akira’s direction as he wiped the paint stain off his forehead. Zee caught the glance and raised an eyebrow.

“All of that was for Akira?”

“Well, you would’ve seen most of it anyway,” Lee said. “We’re a bunch of lunatics here. I just focused the lunacy on your samurai friend.”

“Okay, but why? How is throwing entire armies at a single samurai a good- why do I hear western music?”

The senior dorms were echoing with the whistling, reedy tunes of an Ennio Morricone classic. Another thing Harley had hooked up, along with her defense systems. Zee waved her surviving soldiers behind her as the music got louder, and was joined by the tinny jingling of spurs. The entrance to the dorm clattered open like a pair of dusty saloon doors, and two paintball revolvers clicked as Vell Harlan stepped forth.

“Howdy, y’all.”

“One guy? Your secret weapon was one-”

In exactly zero point zero one seconds, Zee and every single one of her soldiers had a paintball stain dead center in their chests.

“Oh.”

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Exactly twenty-one minutes later, with most of that time being spent walking between his victims, Vell had yeehaw’d his way through an entire campus worth of opponents. He holstered his guns and waited while Dean Lichman prepared the closing ceremonies. As the trophy for the first ever paintball clash got handed over, Luke walked through the crowd and found a few paint-stained Zeus-Stephanides huddled over pieces of paper, calculators, and physics textbooks.

“I know that look,” Luke said. He walked over and gently grabbed the hand of a student holding a calculator. “Put the calculators and physics textbooks down, guys. You’ll never solve this one.”

“No, no no no no,” they protested. “It can’t be possible. He can’t be possible!”

The angry physicist pointed at Vell. Tears were welling up in his eyes.

“The friction of rapid movement alone should’ve destroyed his wrist,” the physicist said. They had put together pages of calculations on the maximum possible speed with which a human could fire a revolver, and Vell had exceeded every single reasonable equation. “Not to mention the air resistance should’ve made projectile speed-”

“Shh,” Luke said. He grabbed the physicist and pulled them in for a hug. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I know it doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s not possible,” they whined. “Every physical law says-”

“Shh,” Luke repeated. “Some things you can’t understand. You just got to accept it.”

The physicist Luke held in his arms started to break down and cry. A lifetime of physics studies, all broken to pieces by a single man in spurs.

Oblivious to the emotional damage his cowboying had caused, Vell walked over to Lee and handed over a golden trophy.

“Here. I think you did more to deserve this than I did.”

“Nonsense,” Lee said. She handed the trophy over to Harley. “You did take a paintball for me.”

Harley held up the trophy and admired her own reflection in it, though the view was somewhat soured by Hawke and Kim’s skeptical glares.

“What? Somebody’s got to hold on to this thing, or we’re just going to pass it around all day.”

Kim’s digital eyes rolled.

“Okay, fine,” Harley said. “Samson, take the trophy. And don’t let those two touch it, they’re being snippy.”

Samson gladly took the impressive golden trophy and held on to it. A few of their fellow Einstein-Odinson students gathered around to congratulate them -as did a few Zeus-Stephanides students.

“That was some of the wildest shit I have ever seen,” Zee said. “You’re crazy, you’re crazy, you’re crazy, and Lee, you are especially crazy.”

Lee smiled at the effusive praise.

“I’m sure you’ll come up with a way to match wits and weirdness next year.”

“I wish.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Lee said. “You’re fully capable.”

“I know. I’m sure Moses and Jay will come up with something, yeah,” Zee said. “But we’re seniors.”

The smile dropped off of Lee’s face.

“There is no next year,” Zee concluded. Samson held the trophy a little closer, even though it didn’t shine quite so bright anymore.

“Oh.”

“Yeah, you guys enjoy the victory party,” Zee said. “Don’t let me sour the mood. You still got plenty of time to do weird shit.”

Zee turned around to rejoin her friends, as most of Lee’s friends started to wander the opposite direction. Lee herself followed her counterpart for a few steps.

“Zee, a moment, actually,” Lee said. “If you don’t mind?”

“Of course, baby,” Zee said. “What do you need?”

“I was, well, actually just curious about your hair,” Lee said.

“Hmm?”

Zee put a hand near her head and then remembered that she had cut it short since Lee had last seen her.

“Oh, right,” Zee said. “Sorry. I cut it weeks ago, it’s not really ‘new’ to me.”

“Of course, naturally,” Lee said. “I was just wondering...why that style? Why the change?”

Zee put a hand on her chin and thought about it for a second. She didn’t usually put much thought into a haircut.

“I guess thinking about all the changes after graduation made me think about a few more changes,” Zee said. “I talked to a guidance counselor, actually, really got me thinking about how I was living my life. Made me think about things to change, you know what I mean?”

“I do, actually,” Lee said. Her revelation had come courtesy of a butterfly-themed time deity rather than a school counselor, but the same principle applied. “It’s just, your hair was fine, right? You liked it, it looked good...”

“More than one way for things to be good, Lee,” Zee said. “Look, if you want a haircut, babe, just get a haircut. It grows back.”

Zee gave Lee an encouraging pat on the shoulder and left to rejoin her friends, leaving Lee behind to toy with a strand of her own hair and look at the horizon.

“It grows back.”