I know it's been an obscenely overlong five months, ish. Just shut up and enjoy it. Like you occasionally hopefully never are consistently told to always do.

Chapter 27: Draw Nigh

Buster stumbled backward two steps, his face an expression of shock. “Wh… You!”
Jack leered viciously, his massive twin machine-guns trained on Buster’s head. “You’re surprised to see me?”
In spite of the monstrous guns, Buster did his best to keep his strongest poker face up, but he couldn’t get any of his strongest words forth. Jack snickered as he watched the turtle’s mouth open and close silently.
“The great Bluster Tank finally runs out of steam. Shame, too, I was expecting to be able to kill you before you had said all you had to say.”
Buster suddenly brandished a powerful blaster, and pointed it at Jack’s face. It was shaking slightly, but Buster still managed to keep a menacing scowl. “All I have to say is that I’m not afraid to pull this trigger and paste your miserable furry face to the opposite wall.”
“Like this?” Jack turned one of his guns to one side, and fired it once. Tokivi grunted quietly, and slumped to the floor, dead from the single shot that had all but severed his lower jaw. There was a fresh bullet hole in the wall behind where the fallen lizard had stood, accompanied by small, but easily visible, crimson stains marking the silvery metal.
Jack turned back to the turtle, sneering darkly, but Buster had taken the opportunity to make good his escape during the second in which Jack was occupied with dispatching the loyal lizard. The rabbit fired three shots at the turtle’s rapidly retreating back, which ricocheted wildly off of the metal surface of his shell. As Buster hastily vacated the room, Jack sighed, rolling his eyes, and mentally counted off a three-second head start before tearing off after his enemy.

The lights flickered once, and an enormous explosion shook the Eschaton to its core. Acid only barely had time to duck as a jet of flame from a half-destroyed fuel canister singed his eartips. “We don’t have enough time to find any seventh generator! This thing’s going to take itself out, and us with it if we don’t get moving now!”
Firefox was not in good shape; having been standing too close to a similar canister when it suddenly exploded, his entire right side was scorched from the fire. “Urrrgh… so what do you suggest, Cap’n Acid? The Corsair’s only under attack, remember? We can’t go back if Phish isn’t waiting for us!”
“That would be a problem, wouldn’t it?” Phish replied. “I’ve just gotten the Corsair redocked. Looks to be Deck 8. Shouldn’t be too hard to find me. Oh sh—!”
“Phish! What happened?!” Acid yelled. “Come on, respond!”
“Yeah…” Phish’s voice returned. It sounded like he had almost had a heart attack. “The Fortuna is covering me. One of her wave lasers came a little too close for comfort. Everything’s still intact, for the moment.”
Another monstrous, reverberating explosion rocked the satellite. Phish said something under his breath that easily could have been a curse in another language. “What are you all waiting for? Get back to the Corsair! Now, if not sooner!”
“Copy,” Firefox grunted through gritted teeth. “But what about Jack?”
“Well, he’d better haul his crazy tail back here too, or it won’t be long until he ends up occupying several orbits around Carrotus!”

Buster panted heavily as he dodged around a corner, and muttered something about how turtles were not built to escape rabbits under his breath. There were a number of loud pings behind him as bullets ricocheted off of the unforgiving metal walls, and he redoubled his efforts to stay as far away from Jack as he could. The rabbit’s roaring echoed back at the runaway turtle from all directions, and he felt a cold tingle run through him as he realized that he would not be able to evade his nemesis forever; he would eventually run himself into a corner, and then…
Buster gritted his teeth tightly. He could not allow himself to be trapped inside his own satellite. He had to find a way out.
The Eschaton rumbled dangerously, and a loud screech of metal on metal rang out from somewhere nearby. The turtle forced his legs to start working again, and ran as fast as he could down the dark corridor. He didn’t know where he was supposed to run; as long as it was far away from the one-rabbit siege on his heels. There was a series of yelps and screams from a distance behind him, as Jack tore through a group of reptiles unwise enough to put themselves in his path.
A sign flew past the turtle as he rounded another corner, but he couldn’t stop to read what it said, not without allowing his arch-enemy that much time to catch up. He pounded a bright red button on the wall as he ran past it, and looked back, sighing in comparative relief, as a thick, metal failsafe door slammed closed behind him. Slowing his frenzied sprint to a slow, controlled run, he quietly snickered to himself as he continued his getaway unhindered, jogging down the corridor with a wide smirk on his face.
After about five seconds, there was a noise that sounded like a body crashing against the sturdy failsafe door. Buster stopped, and turned around, wondering if the bloodthirsty rabbit had, in his rage, unthinkingly smashed himself headlong into the door. There didn’t appear to be any signs of damage on his side of the door, so there couldn’t have been very much…
Then another thought entered his mind, after a few seconds of relative silence. What if the rabbit’s rage had wound up ending him completely? What if he had inadvertently killed his opponent by simply putting a door in the way?
Buster’s snicker turned into a full-out laugh, as he rolled the probability about in his head. He smirked darkly as he turned to depart. “Stupid rabbit.”
However, the turtle’s malicious grin vanished as the reverberating sound rang through the corridor a second time, and then a third, and a fourth. Buster found himself unable to move from his position, as the unyielding failsafe door began to shake visibly with every gradually more powerful crash. The turtle couldn’t imagine anymore what could possibly be happening on the other side of the door; all he knew was that he didn’t want to find out.
Buster finally came out of his trance as a metallic screech brought him back to his senses, and he started to back up, step by step, watching the growing deformation in the once-strong metal. The noises began to become more and more resemblant of explosive detonations, and with each blast the door became further warped. It wasn’t long before a sliver of light, accompanied by a small burst of flame, penetrated the weakened failsafe door. There was one final blast, and the egg-like protrusion exploded outward in a ball of fire and a shower of sparks and jagged shards of paper-thin metal, as well as the top half of what used to be a bomber lizard.
Buster’s jaw dropped as he saw his adversary on the other side of the remnants of the metal door. The rabbit was panting laboriously, and bleeding copiously from a dozen wounds, but the expression on his face was nothing short of a maniacally triumphant leer. In either hand was a pair of lit bombs, whose fuses hissed ominously.
“What do I have to do to kill you?!” Buster shrieked. “Why won’t you die?!”
“Come here and kill me yourself then, you coward!” Jack shouted back, hurling the bombs in his hands at the retreating turtle. The fiery blasts missed Buster by mere inches, as did the fusillade of bullets Jack let loose through the flame and smoke. With a bestial snarl, the rabbit plunged through the clouds of ashen smoke, only to find that the turtle had once again vanished.
“You weakling! Stop running and fight me!” Jack roared, as he took off again, once more on the hunt.

Firefox stumbled, almost falling headlong, into the Corsair, panting as he regained his balance. He supported himself against a nearby metal wall, coughing a few times, and glanced around the cockpit fervently. “Everyone make it back?”
Acid followed the Captain’s example, scanning the cockpit quickly. “Ten heads here, Firefox. How many did we get here with?”
“Twelve,” Wizard responded. “Aside from Blaze, who I regretfully believe is not making the return trip with us…”
“We’re missing one,” Firefox finished, again looking over the faces around him. “Wait a minute, where’s Jack?”
“I don’t think he’s gotten back yet,” Phish replied, giving a quick look to one of the monitors nearby. “Wherever he is, he’d better grow some wings, ‘cause I wouldn’t give the satellite more than six, seven minutes to detonation…”
Firefox caught a glimpse of the same monitor, and started to rapidly lose his composure. “Son of a… Does he even know where we are?”
Without waiting for a response, he raced out the still-open door leading back to the collapsing innards of the dying Eschaton.
“Aw, craaaaap,” Headcheese groaned, sitting heavily in a chair behind her. “I can see this getting really bad, really fast, really soon.”