Spaceships and Magic, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Vadton didn't come to join the rest of us who were sitting on the bean bags, instead, he stood stoically away from the group to observe the next fights. Suffice it to say, Vadton was a bit of an edge lord. 

"I must admit, it seems that I underestimated Vadton's abilities," Akash replied to my jibe. "I had thought that the moment he became trapped in Xylla's manna cage he would be done for. However, the strategy and strength he displayed to pierce through the barrier was quite ingenious." 

"If there's one thing I've learned, you should never count your chickens before they've hatched," I said cheerily, forgetting I was in a room filled with aliens who had probably never even heard of a chicken before. 

"What is a chick-ken?" Yr'Arl asked, struggling with the new human word. Clearly that wasn't translated very well by whatever had been translating everything into English for me. 

"Oh, uh, just a small Earth bird that we'd eat that came from an egg, but not all eggs would actually hatch, so the saying goes that you should never count your chickens based on how many eggs you have because you don't really know until they've all hatched," I explained. 

The blank looks I was getting from both Akash and Yr'Arl told me that they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. 

Luckily, our conversation was interrupted by the announcement for the next battle. 

"Our next two contenders didn't get the chance to be announced in the main lineup, so for the first time, allow me to introduce Ke'Zuc and Klatissi!" Belana called out. "Ke'Zuc is a member of the Sanket, an incredibly dangerous species that are biologically inclined to be incredible fighters, while Klatissi is a member of the Delpha, a race who transferred their bodies to technological constructs many centuries ago!"

The first of the two aliens, Ke'Zuc, looked like something out of a Lovecraftian novel. Its main body was a writhing mass of tentacles, which were constantly winding and shifting over a central point that had an ominous purple glow to it. I couldn't see a mouth, or eyes, or anything else other than the tentacles and the glow. Looking at the thing made me feel inherently uneasy, and the fact I'd been sharing a room with it until moments ago only made that feeling of unease worse. 

The Delphan Klatissi wasn't much better. Protruding from its back were six tentacle-like limbs. Four of them were being used to hold its spherical body aloft in the air, while the other two hung at its side like arms. It was very clear that Klatissi was a mechanical being of some sort, its arms and central sphere glinted silver in the light of the day.

I shuddered. I didn't really like squids or octopuses on the best of days, and these two both looked like horrifying versions of those creatures. 

"Now, let the battle commence!" Belana shouted to roars of approval. 

At first, neither of the two aliens made a move toward the other, the tentacle creatures just stood there, swaying on their strange appendages. That was until the mechanoid made its move first. 

The two tentacles that hadn't been acting as supports wound together, interlocking and merging to become one, raised up above Klatissi's spherical body. If I wasn't mistaken, the structure that it ended up making looked a lot like a futuristic high tech cannon of some kind, 

<You're not mistaken at all,> BB said. <The Delphan can manipulate their mechanical bodies into all sorts of different shapes and forms, they can get up close and personal with their attacks or they can send out powerful beams by constructing cannons out of their own mecha-biology just like this.>

As BB came to the end of his explanation, the Delphan let loose with its first attack. The weapon it had constructed out of its mechanical tentacles fired a wide acrid green laser, which streaked across the battlefield and ploughed straight into Ke'Zuc. 

But the Lovecraftian horror didn't seem to mind. At the last possible moment, its tentacles parted to reveal a churning ball of purple energy housed within a constantly rotating circle of teeth. The beam passed through the circle and straight into the energy cloud, where it was seemingly being absorbed without any repercussions at all. 

This clearly annoyed Klatissi, as the attack only increased in its intensity, the beam becoming so bright and powerful that it was sizzling in the air. But Ke'Zuc didn't care. Its shifting mass of fleshy tentacles began rolling it over the ground, inching closer and closer to the mechanical Delphan. 

In a flash the alien launched some of its tentacles outward, latching onto the spherical ball that made up Klatissi's body. In one swift move, Ke'Zuc was on the mechanical alien, its tentacles wrapped around it in a grapple as it devoured more and more of the energy that Klatissi was pouring out through its constructed weapon. 

"Ke'Zuc seems to be absorbing Klatissi's energy-based attack," Yr'Arl said, "so I must wonder why the mechanical does not simply turn off the weapon to stop giving its opponent more power to work with." 

I was wondering the same thing, even as Ke'Zuc wrapped itself around Klatissi further and further. Surely, if Klatissi was absorbing all of that energy, it had to be somehow converting it into its own power and surely Klatissi knew that, so why would it simply keep firing into the creature's gaping chasm of a mouth?

The energy beam finally shut off, and the metallic tentacles that made up the weapon separated from one another. But Ke'Zuc had now grappled onto the mechanical alien's spherical body completely, so I was hard-pressed to figure out what it could actually do to stop the Lovecraftian creature's onslaught. 

What it ended up doing was not something I ever could have expected. 

In a single move, Klatissi sprung up into the air and melded all four of its lower tentacles together, creating a pointed structure that I could only say reminded me of the Beyblades I used to play with when I was a kid. Just like those spinning top toys, when the mechanical came back down to the ground it started to spin. 

The mechanical's two free arms wrapped themselves around Ke'Zuc's strange tentacled body, securing it to its own mechanical form, and ramped up its speed so far that we could hear the wind caused by the rotation battering against the window of the observation room. 

Klatissi sprung up into the air again, only this time it rotated onto its side so that instead of landing back down on the point it would land straight onto Ke'Zuc. 

The impact was devastating. Klatissi ploughed Ke'Zuc into the floor of the fighting ring and continued to grind him down, almost using the tentacled mass as a tire. It didn't take long for the friction between Ke'Zuc's body and the ground to slow Klatissi's rotation, and as they spun down to a stop Klatissi allowed the Lovecraftian creature to disengage. 

The organic was clearly injured, it hobbled back from the mechanical on shaky tentacles, but it wasn't beaten yet. 

The purple glow in the centre of Ke'Zuc's body had reached a level that it was almost difficult to look at, burning as brightly as a sun. In an instant, the tentacles fell away from the creature's mouth again and blasted back an ungodly amount of purple energy. 

While I had thought Klatissi's original energy beam had been strong, this made it look like a water pistol. Clearly the energy that Ke'Zuc had absorbed had also been multiplied somehow within its own body. While Klatissi had put up a good fight, the mechanical didn't stand a chance against this onslaught. 

The raw power pushed the mechanical sphere back through the air, until it was pushed up against the manna-resistant wall that made up the arena, though even that seemed to tremble and shudder at the obscene amounts of energy that were running through it. 

After what felt like a painful eternity the energy beam from Ke'Zuc shut off, and Klatissi fell unmoving to the ground, sparks coming from a segment where one of its mechanical tentacles had been shorn right off. 

"Is Klatissi… dead?" I asked out loud, unsure if a mechanical like that could have even really been considered alive in the first place, though those moral concepts were way beyond me. 

"If they are, then Ke'Zuc should surely be disqualified," Yr'Arl said, equally uncertain as to whether the mechanical had perished in the fight. 

<Technically yes and no,> BB explained, <I'm pretty sure that synthetic is dead, but Klatissi would have had a neural backup somewhere, so the actual uploaded consciousness that is Klatissi is still alive in a server farm in Prespian city somewhere. That doesn't stop what Ke'Zuc did from being incredibly shady, though.>

It made me feel uncomfortable either way. If I ended up fighting against Ke'Zuc, I'd need to be careful.