More laughter from above, and despite himself, Ryan felt his blood start to sing in his ears at the string of insults. Obviously, in addition to the numerous repairs and replacement parts to this rusting unit, someone had decided it would be a laugh riot to give their pet techno-assassin a voice.
“Chicken-shit,” the android announced to even more guffaws from the rim of the pit.
Ryan held his anger. Even the blackest of humorists would be amused at a sentient being growing angry at the prerecorded insults from a collection of circuit boards and killing metal. This thing wasn’t alive. All the android was to Ryan was an obstacle, a hunk of junk dropped in his way, a mass of metal he had to remove so he could go about his business, earn his reward, get J.B. his spectacles and forget he’d ever been inside this shrine to the long dead concept of consumerism.
Now that he was closer, Ryan could hear the loud, strained whining of gears and servo motors attempting to keep the droid on both feet. The sounds told him a crucial fact. As he had hoped from his first impression, the internal clockwork of his foe wasn’t meshing properly. The hunter could be toppled.
Ryan took a deep breath and examined his options. He knew from previous battles with the droids that even if he’d been well heeled with a blaster, the armor was still a deterrent. The thing was programmed to be lightning fast, but a man would have the edge in maneuverability. Plus, he could see this hunter was well along in years and use, and he’d heard Lucas say that the champion had been beaten before.
Ryan slid the panga from the oiled leather sheath and took an offensive stance, balancing himself on the balls of his booted feet.
“Come on, you coldhearted tin can. Bring it on,” he said.
“Make me,” the bot replied.
Ryan squatted, still keeping his back straight and his eye on the android as he moved around the arena floor. After a second or two of feeling around with his free hand, he found what he was searching for.
“Heads up, clanky,” Ryan said, and threw the ball tossed down earlier to start the match. The ball hurtled toward the bot, thrown with all of Ryan’s might. The rubber sphere whizzed through the air and impacted high on the clear dome of the sec droid’s head, hitting with a bonk before bouncing up wildly into the air.
Interestingly enough, the droid had made no effort to dodge the lobbed ball.
Ryan was starting to feel even more confident.
Until the modified sec hunter hopped up like a frog, bounding once, twice, three times before almost landing right on top of his unprotected skull.
Ryan dodged and slashed out with the panga, aiming at an exposed metal cable in the bot’s hip joint. The blade gave out a clang, but otherwise had about as much effect on stopping the sec hunter as the thrown rubber ball.
The android responded to the knife jab by swinging its monkey arms high, right where Ryan’s head would have been if he hadn’t already decided to go low.
Ryan stayed in motion and swung his leg to let the sec droid taste boot leather, feeling two of the toes on his right foot shatter in protest against the force of the impact from the desperate roundhouse kick. The only good the blow did was to leave a black smear across the clear dome of the opponent’s observation bubble.
“No good, shitface,” the machine said, the tone still inflectionless. Before Ryan could give a retort, his foe chose to undertake another of the rabbitlike leaps, straight up into the air. But this time when it landed, the one-eyed man was on the receiving end, pinned down hard.
“Fireblast!” Ryan wheezed as he struggled to breathe from the droid’s terrible weight. “Get off my gut.”
Gritting his teeth, Ryan pushed back with his left forearm while jamming the panga into one of the small cracks in the repaired areas on the droid’s chest. He worked the blade back and forth, striving to find an in. The bot whirred and clicked as servo motors gave back as good as they got. The small onboard comp analyzed the stress the android was currently enduring and chose yet another programmed quip from the select file of profane insults. Sensing a possible victory, the hunter droid came up with a classic.