Chapter 152: Book 3 Chapter 7.2: Shark Jumping 301

“Alright, here we go,” Harley said. She let everyone into their weapon storage room and then slammed the door shut behind them, to prevent any nazi zombie dinosaur intrusions. “Take a look, take your pick. We got staffs, we got spears, we got maces, we got a metric fuckton of magic swords.”

Harley kicked open the sword locker and sidestepped the avalanche of bladed weaponry that fell out. Samson eyed the pile carefully, but nothing jumped out at him. In the literal or figurative sense. Some of the swords could jump if they wanted to.

“Is there anything better suited for a lightweight? Like a gun?”

Samson didn’t have much for upper body strength, so swinging around a mace or a sword probably wouldn’t end well. The few bows he saw were also out of the question, for the same reasons.

“Ah, you’re in luck,” Lee said. She reached into one of the smaller storage lockers and started digging around. “For a while there the only spare ranged weapon we had was a gun used in a high-profile assassination.”

“Yeesh.”

“Indeed. Luckily, the only thing this particular weapon ever shot is an apple or two,” Lee said. She grabbed a crossbow out of the locker and tossed it to Samson. “That used to belong to William Tell. Some of his famed accuracy has rubbed off on it, so it should serve you well.”

Samson turned the crossbow around in his hands, wound the string back, and grabbed a single bolt from Lee to load the weapon. The mechanics of the weapon were easy enough to understand, but he still had at least one question.

“Who’s William Tell?”

Lee had an entire story to tell about the famed Swiss folk hero, but she never got to say a word of it. Something very large and very heavy slammed into the storage room door.

“The abridged version is that he was very good at shooting,” Lee said. “A trait I hope you share, because we appear to have company.”

The armed loopers took their places and aimed various weapons at the doorway. A room full of weapons was a pretty good place to make a stand, all things considered. The pile of swords alone would probably take out any nazi zombie dinosaur that stumbled into it.

The door rattled again, nearly shaking off its hinges, and then shook once more. The loopers braced themselves and readied their weapons. The door shook one final time, and then, with a thunderous crash, broke off its hinges. Something shot into the room like a cannonball, slamming into the far wall hard enough to crack the masonry and kick up a cloud of dust.

“Hey guys,” Kim mumbled. Her voice crackled with static as she spoke, and the settling dust soon made it clear why. Her face screen had been shattered, her chassis was dented, and one of her arms had been ripped off, exposing the mechanisms and wire underneath. “Turns out some of these dino’s are tougher than-”

One of the fallen metal doors was launched through the air, striking Kim’s head hard enough to shatter it in a way that would’ve been gruesome for anyone with a meat body. Watching Kim’s head break into dozens of shards of screen and circuitry was still upsetting, but slightly less so than watching chunks of brain and skull go flying.

The remaining loopers turned their attention to what was left of the doorway just in time to watch it start crack and crumble. A massive saurian body forced its way through the gap, shattering the wall and the looper’s hopes of using it for a fortified defense.

The collapsing wall crumbled to reveal the form of their attacker. A massive, feathered T-Rex strode through the rubble, with a swastika armband one of its diminutive arms, and a tiny mustache of black feathers just below its nose -on both of its two heads.

“Oh, so that’s the ‘Double’ part,” Harley said, as she looked up at the two heads of Lich T-Rex Double Hitler.

“Greetings, lesser beings,” the two heads said, in perfect goose-stepped synchronicity. “Submit to-”

In different circumstances, Vell might’ve been forced to pick which of the two faces to shoot first, but Vell was blessed with two hands and two guns, so he could shoot them both at once. The bifurcated undead t-rex roared in rage and decided to skip the Nazi approach (monologuing at his enemies) in favor of the dinosaur approach (violently eating his enemies).

Vell narrowly dodged being trampled by the massive T-rex’s stampeding charge, and Lee only avoided getting eaten thanks to a shield of ice that locked the two sets of jaws open long enough for her to flee.

“Got to say, I still think this needs to get reeled in a little,” Harley said. She jumped over the swinging tail of the t-rex and rearmed Botley’s laser weaponry. “If only for convenience’s sake.”

“Lich T-Rex Double Hitler is a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it?” Lee said, as she redirected a few bolts of pure mana towards the aforementioned mouthful of an opponent.

“Yeah, just for like, conversational purposes,” Vell agreed. “We can come up with a shorthand or something.”

“Oh yeah! Samson, you’re the new guy,” Harley said. “You want to do the honors?”

Samson alternated between screaming and firing his crossbow, which Harley took as a no.

“Okay well I’m not- oop,” Harley said, narrowly sidestepping a titanic clawed foot. “My creative process suffers under the immediate threat of being eaten so let’s just call this guy Double Hitler for short.”

“Good enough,” Vell said. He tried to focus his shots towards Double Hitler’s face, to little effect. All of the dino-zombies had been resistant to his bullets, but this lich t-rex was especially so. After backing up a bit, Vell removed his pair of rune-engraved glasses from his pocket and quickly examined Double Hitler as a few of Samson’s crossbow bolts bounced off of him.

“Heads up, Double Hitler’s got a magical shield,” Vell said.

“Oh, that’s good,” Harley said.

“How is it good?’ Samson shouted.

“Because Lee is way better at magic than this random shitheads. Lee! Do a thing!”

A few seconds of intense combat followed, in which Lee did several things, none of them particularly effective.

“Lee!”

“I’m doing all the things I know how to do!”

“You made a whole spell that made the zombies explode earlier,” Harley said. “Can you do it again? Please and thank you?”

“I would need a lot of time to concentrate that Double Hitler does not seem inclined to give me,” Lee said. The undead Fuhrersaur was larger, more aggressive, and more powerful than any dino-nazi before him. Even the best efforts of Lee’s friends wouldn’t give her enough time to cast such a powerful spell.

“Let’s get ourselves some breathing room,” Vell said.

Sharing a small, confined space with a large, aggressive T-Rex was never an ideal situation, and there were a frankly confusing amount of modifying factors making this particular T-Rex encounter even worse.

“That I can do,” Lee said.

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Walls were a lot easier to blow up than magically shielded zombie therapods. A bolt of concentrated magic took a chunk out of the nearest wall, sending a worrying shake through the entire building. Between Double Hitler stampeding his way in, and now Lee blasting her way out, the building was starting to lose a concerning amount of structural integrity. Concerning for those still inside it.

“Samson, hurry up!”

The newest looper hadn’t quite mastered the art of the skedaddle yet, and was dragging his feet as he fled the building. Harley grabbed Samson by the collar of his shirt and dragged him further away. She could tell what Lee was up to, and she wanted to be clear of the all-too literal blast zone.

While Double Hitler tried to stampede his way through yet another wall, Lee focused her magic and broke down the other two. The building stayed suspended for just a second, letting out a loud rumble before it collapsed completely. The two headed T-Rex was silhouetted in the dust and rubble as the otherwise empty storage building collapsed on top of him. Lee wanted to hope that would crush him to death, but knew better than to expect it. If you wanted an undead dinosaur nazi destroyed, you had to be thorough about it.

Lee waved her hands again, this time conjuring a much simpler spell. All it did was make objects move in random directions. The spell usually occupied the niche of “useless party trick” but in the rubble of a room containing dozens of swords, it would prove more useful. The air was filled with a cacophonous metallic clattering as swords, axes, hammers, and maces began to bounce around the rubble.

“That ought to buy us at least forty seconds,” Lee said.

“Only forty seconds?”

“Yes, dear, there’s only so much I can do to-”

The rubble of the building collapsed in on itself, and the surface of the island below it cracked. The thick layers of soil and metal comprising the artificial island broke open, exposing the ocean below.

“I...did not do that,” Lee said. She sure hoped she hadn’t, at least.

“Firstly, fuck you, stop doing dramatic pauses,” Harley said. “Secondly: look over there.”

Harley pointed out two other buildings on campus, the Physics laboratory and the Astronomy building. Cracks and fractures were spreading through the foundation below both buildings, spiderwebbing out to the rest of the island.

“Looks like the Brontosaur’s from Brazil have been busy,” Harley noted.

“Lich T-Rex Double Hitler’s minions must have been up to something while we were fighting him,” Lee said. “But what could they possibly be doing…”

“Executing the final extinction!”

Beating out Lee’s prediction by about thirteen seconds, Lich T-Rex Double Hitler extricated himself from the ruins. His previously spotless nazi uniform was now tattered and covered in dust, his skin was torn, and one of the eyes on his two heads had been gouged out by a magic spear, but he was still alive and still a mish-mash of random chaotic qualities.

“Soon, very soon, my loyal soldiers will pull an asteroid into Earth’s orbit, recreating the extinction of the dinosaurs,” the two-headed dino-nazi explained. “But this time, humanity will be driven extinct, and my undying legions will rule the earth in a Jurassic Reich!”

“Cretaceous.”

“What?”

“Cretaceous Reich,” Vell explained. “You’re a T-Rex. You were alive during the Cretaceous Era.”

“Ah. My mistake.”

“Yeah, Jurassic Park really fucked with people’s perceptions of era’s,” Vell said. “It’s fine.”

“Very well then. My undying legions will rule the earth in a Cretaceous Reich!”

The triumphant declaration was punctuated by a massive chasm splitting the island. The loopers ended up on one side, with T-Rex Double Hitler on the other. Panicked aquatic life began to teem in the depths below. Harley watched a very large shark swim through the open chasm, and then looked back up at the dino-nazi.

“How does breaking the island apart accomplish that whole meteor thingy?”

“Well I’m glad you asked,” Double Hitler said. He removed two sets of glasses from pockets on his uniform and attempted to put them on both his faces, but was unable to due to his tiny t-rex arms. “Why do I even have these things?”

He chucked both pairs of glasses into the sea before continuing his explanation.

“By exploiting the campus Physics’s department graviton concentrator, the mass-shadow generator, and a few jury-rigged particle accelerators, my scientists will soon create a gravitational mass of such power that we will be able to draw an asteroid onto a rapid impact course with Earth!”

“Well, that’s surprisingly technically proficient,” Harley said. “What’s your quantum tunneling solution?”

“My what?”

“Quantum tunneling,” Harley said. “You have to be able to contain the wavelengths to be able to aim the effect in any specific direction.”

Both heads of the twin-headed dino-nazi stared at her blankly.

“If you don’t do that, you’re basically just generating a gravity well with enough strength to crack the planet in half.”

The crack in the island got a little wider.

“Ah. Scheisse.”

With a thunderous crack, the island split fully into two pieces, held aloft only by the gravitational pull of the ever-growing gravitational anomaly at the center of the island. The distortion had grown so strong now that light itself was starting to warp around it.

“You master race morons,” Harley snapped.

“We’ll fix it! The Jur- Cretaceous Reich will rise in spite of this small hiccup!”

In spite of the gap between Double Hitler and the loopers, the undead t-rex had a murderous glint in his eyes. His powerful legs flexed below partially decayed skin. In the gap between the two, a single shark swam through the churning water.

“Don’t do it,” Harley said. “Don’t you fucking do it!”

In spite of Harley’s rage, Lich T-Rex Double Hitler dashed forward and leaped, jumping over the gap -and jumping the shark in the process.

“Son of a bitch!”

The twin-headed lich tyrannosaur landed with a heavy thud on the opposite side of the watery chasm, and was immediately greeted by a hail of lasers, bullets, crossbow bolts, and magic.

“Get off my fucking island!” Harley snapped. “And take your word salad nonsense with you!”

A defiant shout that would have made an excellent lead-in for a final battle, had the gravity well not chosen that exact moment to expand and crush the combatants, and everything within a thirty mile radius, into an atomic pulp.

***

“Well, no,” said the genetics professor. “As long as you move all those spare textbooks on necromancy first, I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t mix those samples of dinosaur DNA with the DNA samplings of a random Austrian man you found in that lab in Argentina.”

“I can think of a few reasons,” Dean Lichman said, as he snatched the vials out of the young, overly ambitious student’s hands. “This school has a very strict anti-Jurassic Park policy.”

“What is the policy on Nazi’s, just out of curiosity?” Harley asked. She had helped direct Dean Lichman to the highly unethical, and just plain inadvisable, experiment before it could spawn any undead dino-nazi’s.

“We are also very firmly against Nazi’s,” Dean Lichman said. “Why do you ask?”

“Just curious,” Harley said. She didn’t bother asking about the school’s policy on undead, seeing as the dean himself was a wight. Leaving the DNA samples that would have otherwise become Lich T-Rex Double Hitler in the Dean’s trustworthy hands, Harley headed back to rendezvous with the rest of the loopers.

“Mission accomplished, gang,” Harley said. “There will be neither dinosaurs nor nazi’s nor both on this lovely Wednesday afternoon.”

“Cool,” Samson said. “Could I still have that crossbow? Just in case?”

“Already getting it set up for you,” Vell said. He was in the midst of carving a spare summoning rune, so that Samson would be able to call the crossbow to his side whenever he wanted.

“Thanks. And, related, can we make a copy of it or something?”

“Not only can we not do that, dear, it would be inadvisable,” Lee said. “Crossbows are two handed weapons.”

“Oh, not for me,” Samson said. “I wanted to give something to Ibrahim, you know, so he can look after himself.”

The veteran loopers shared a quick, awkward look.

“Well...we try not to give any non-loopers weapons, just on principle,” Lee said.

“Why not? They get into all these fights too, sort of.”

“Well, yes, but they don’t really have the psychological preparedness to handle a weapon effectively in such scenarios.”

Attempts to arm non-loopers usually resulted in either self-inflicted injuries or a horrified ally dropping their weapon and running away. Even usually stalwart allies like Cane or Kanya tended to be less than helpful when heavily armed. Thanks to them never remembering any of the fights they were in, non-loopers remained perpetual amateurs with any weapons they were given.

“Also it begs the question of why we’re going around handing out swords to people,” Vell added.

“And the follow-up questions of ‘where did you get all these swords’, ‘why am I not allowed to use the sword’, ‘why does that guy get a sword and I don’t’, ‘can I use the sword as a can opener if I need to’,” Harley said.

Vell tossed the completed rune to Samson, who looked at the carved stone tablet for a moment before tucking it in his pocket, out of sight. He was happy to have something to protect himself with, but still worried about Ibrahim.

“Generally speaking it’s just better to not populate the campus with dangerous magical weapons,” Lee said. “It’d just be irresponsible, frankly.”

“Okay, sure, but this is my brother we’re talking about,” Samson said.

Vell and Lee, who were only children, turned to Hawke and Harley, who actually had siblings. Kim, who was a robot and had no concept of blood relations, continued to have no opinion on this situation.

“We’ll think about it,” Lee said. “We don’t know Ibrahim half as well as you.”

“Well, maybe if we got him a bit more involved,” Samson said.

“Involved with what? You want to explain the shark-jumping motorcycle riding undead dino gestapo to your bro?” Harley said. “You want to give me a pitch of how that goes, you go ahead.”

“I, uh-”

“Well don’t act like that’s our usual routine,” Hawke said. “That shit was weird even for us.”

“And it better fucking stay that way!”