Chapter 8: Killer Instinct

“So do we have any idea what happened to the Jackrabbits after that uplifting vid of yours?” Coppertop asked Acid, as they bolted out of Carrotus Castle.
“None whatsoever. The only clue we have is that they were taken to the Rockius Mountains, and Mount Whitespire in particular. After that, we draw a blank.”
“The Rockius Mountains? Isn’t that where they were trying to go in the first place?”
“Well, yes and no. While they did indeed get there, they were taken there by force. Devan’s going to try to resolve his past mistakes. He’s not going to risk anything.”
“And this means...?”
“Devan will do anything and everything to give himself the advantage over the Jackrabbits, even if it’s completely arbitrary. I’ll bet my coffee maker that he made sure they had been disarmed first.”
Coppertop made no response, but instead concentrated on where she was running. None of the three said anything as they sped along the Carrotan flatlands.
Before long, the looming, jagged monstrosity of the Rockius Mountains cast its enormous shadow upon the three runners. Canadian looked upwards, in an attempt to find the pinnacles of the towering stone spires, but they were lost in the clouds above, the greyish-white clouds themselves making the already tall mountains look even more enormous than they actually were. The three rabbits were headed directly at the tallest mountain, and closing fast. At the rate at which they were moving, they could make it from the base of the mountain to its peak in less than fifteen minutes, if they had started at the base of the mountain.
Without warning, an explosion erupted from the side of the mountain facing them, propelling rock and debris outwards from the cliff face above. Acid signaled to the other two rabbits to stop as the flames licked outwards, like a small volcano venting its molten innards out through the mountain’s surface.
From out of the fire came Lori, flying out of the farthest reaches of the heated tongues of flame. She flew outwards, for a split second seeming to defy gravity, and then came plummeting downward again. She hit the ground running, and raced toward the foot of the mountain at an incredible speed.
The fiery explosion had finally died off, and from the cloud of smoke and dust came a brilliant blue beam of energy. It tore down the mountainside, leaving a rut a foot wide and two feet deep streaking down the rock face. Lori immediately dodged away from the blue energy beam as it sliced by her, and it disappeared not long past her.
As if the blue beam wasn’t enough, the unique and unmistakeable sound of a multi-shot gauss gun reported repeatedly from the dust cloud. Explosions left craters in the stone surface, and Lori started to zigzag down the slope, in an attempt to throw off the user’s aim. It seemed to work; Lori had already made it halfway down the mountain without an injury, other than some slightly charred fur from the original explosion.
The dust cloud began to clear. It was then that Acid, Coppertop, and Canadian could see the two gunners, armed with their weapons. Acid gasped in surprise as he realized that he recognized the two almost immediately.
It was Jazz and Spaz Jackrabbit, Lori’s own siblings – or was it? Outwardly, they looked like the two famous Jackrabbit brothers, excepting one major detail; their fur colours had all gone to greyscale. Jazz’s normally green-hued fur had become as black as pitch, and Spaz’s crimson fur, interrupted on his chest by a tone of brilliant gold, had turned to deep grey and lighter silver, respectively. Jazz was armed with a shoulder-mounted beam cannon, and Spaz attacked with, as previously assumed, a four-barreled, gauss-gatling weapon. They seemed uninterested in the three rabbits at the base of the mountain, but instead concentrated their hail of weapon fire on the rapidly descending Lori.
Then it happened. As Lori dodged around another blue beam razing down the mountain at her, one of the multitude of gauss shells exploded too close to her. It sent her flying off the face of the mountain in a crazed headfirst dive, topping 75 kilometers per hour. Iam Canadian immediately put himself into action, running headlong towards the falling rabbit.
Fortunately, Canadian made it to Lori before the ground did, catching her with outstretched arms. He nearly toppled over backward as Lori’s body slammed into his own, but managed to keep his balance,
backstepping once or twice.
Lori looked at him. “Nice catch.”
Canadian chuckled. “Thanks.”
“You can put me down now.”
“Okay.”
As soon as Lori’s feet touched the rock surface of the mountain, another blue beam sliced into the thick stone, and began to advance towards them at an alarmingly rapid rate. Both of them dodged out of the way as the beam razed past them, and Lori raised Jazz’s blaster up towards her two brothers, sending a quick volley of bullets upwards. Spaz quickly responded with a hail of gauss blasts ripping into the mountain’s surface, but Lori and Canadian were already long gone.
Coppertop provided cover fire for them as they continued their hasty descent down the mountainside, and Acid had stood his crimson missile launcher on its end to drop one of its infamous RaCO rockets into the barrel. Quickly checking the depth of the rocket into the barrel, he swung the massive red missile launcher up onto his shoulder, and aimed at the two gunners.
There was a roar as the missile was blasted out of the barrel of Acid’s rocket launcher. It began to pick up speed as soon as it left the barrel, and left a trail of smoke along the sky as it sped toward Jazz and Spaz. Acid immediately realized what he had just done: by sending such a powerful missile at them, he had essentially killed the two Jackrabbit brothers even before the missile exploded. He could only watch in slackjawed horror as the missile continued to accelerate toward the two gray-furred gun-rabbits.
But just before the missile made contact with the stone surface of the mountain, causing it to explode in a giant shockwave, the two Jackrabbits simply disappeared from view. They hadn’t run, but merely disappeared.
The missile, however, continued onward, and it crashed into the side of the mountain, setting off its massive payload. The resulting explosion blew an enormous hole into the side of the mountain, sending large chunks of stone both back into the hole from which Lori had made her leap of faith, and outwards into space, only to be pulled back down again by the force of gravity.
Acid had to dodge out of the way as one particularly large rock crashed into the ground where he had stood. Rocks came flying from the sky like giant hailstones, and the four rabbits at the base of the mountain scurried out of the way of falling rocks as jagged-edged pieces of precipitation embedded themselves into the ground like giant, irregular gravestones. Canadian and Coppertop ran headfirst into each other as they dodged showers of pebbles from the air. Lori quickly made for the limit of the range of the torrential storm of stone, and successfully dodged projectiles as she dashed away from the mountain.
By the time the rocks had ceased falling, no one was injured, save for a few bumps to the three who, as Lori had done unthinkingly, had not made haste for the outer boundary of the rockfall. Lori made long, ardent strides back to the group, who were still dusting themselves off from the various debris that had fallen on them.
Acid sneezed, and a cloud of dust floated outward from his fur. For a few seconds, the dust lingered like an aura around the amused rabbit; then, as it settled on the ground, Acid chuckled. “Wow. I must have had a beach in my fur.”
Coppertop flicked her small tail idly. A similar cloud of dust arose, then slowly floated back to the ground. “Mount Whitespire is made of igneous rock, not sedimentary... Where the heck is all this dust coming from?”
“Beats me,” Canadian replied, with a shrug. He happened to glance upwards at the enormous hole that Acid’s missile left in the mountain. “Well, would you look at that.”
“What?” Lori asked, looking up to match Canadian’s gaze.
“Not only did Acid manage to take a good quarter of the mountain out, but he also got us a pretty wide way in to Devan’s base.”
Acid squinted up at the large hole he had put into the mountain. “Well, so I did. That was convenient.”
“So… are we going to go in, or not?” Lori asked, with a hint of impatience in her voice. “I mean, what better time than the present to go whip Devan’s slimy butt and get Jazz and Spaz back?”
“You mean those two were your brothers?”
Lori hung her head. “Unfortunately, yes. I even had to watch them become… like that.” She paused. “It was horrible. They looked like they were in so much pain… like their bodies were being pulled apart…”
Suddenly, she vented on no one in particular. “Dammit! If only I had been just a little bit faster! Then none of this would have happened!”
“Lori, it’s okay!” Coppertop tried frenetically to calm the suddenly enraged Jackrabbit down, but she didn’t appear to be making progress. “You did the best you could. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, because that’s the truth. But now… Lori, your brothers are counting on us to get them back. So let’s not keep them waiting, huh?”
With an awkward smile, Lori turned to Coppertop. “You’re right, Copper. I’m sorry, guys, I shouldn’t have over-reacted like that. It’s just that… well, you know how close me and my brothers are.”
“It’s alright, Lori. I’m sure Jazz or Spaz would do the same for you any day.”
Acid grinned. “Well, now that we have that all cleared up, what say we head for Devan’s base?”
“I’m ready.”
“Good idea.”
“I’m all for it.”
“Well then, let’s make haste, shall we?”
Without another word, the four departed, with Lori at the forefront. She knew that if anyone was going to save her brothers from whatever Devan had done to them… she was the one to do it.