Red coughed as he lay there. Exhaustion immediately began to seep into his bones. Too much had happened in the last few hours for him to handle. First, the failed explosion. Then the bomb planting. Lastly, another fight for his life on the line.
It was too much.
He glanced over at the two fallen pirates. The one had been taken out in the initial gunfight. His body was slumped across the jungle floor where he had been attempting to rise. The man's gun lay a few feet away from his outstretched hand. He was alive, but clearly unconscious.
The latter, though…Red's gaze paused on the fallen man. He tensed and quickly rose to his feet. A stream of smoke was rising from the man's chest. Red glanced down at his own gun and cursed.
The sudden attack had caught him off guard. He never had the chance to change his gun's settings. They were still set on high power mode. He would likely need to repair this gun after this fight as well. At the moment, there was a far more pressing concern than his gun's current well-being.
Red rushed over to the side of the fallen pirate and nearly gagged. An overpowering stench filled the air. He felt bile rise in his throat, and it took all his willpower to keep from spewing his last meal on the jungle floor. He had to step back before it completely overpowered him.
He tightened the grip on his shockblaster hard enough that he feared it would break. It didn't take a genius to realize what had happened. Red didn't want to believe it, but he knew now that there was a high possibility…a high possibility of the man being dead.
Human bodies operated much differently than the gearborns' metal shells. With Gearborn, a shot from a shockblaster would be enough to seriously injure, if not outright kill, the blasted robots. The power would overwhelm their rigid systems and without a way to compensate for the additional electricity, their strange hearts would fry, leaving them debilitated and unable to move.
Humans, on the other hand, react far differently to shockblaster fire. Human hearts functioned in a way that enabled them to handle excess energy. This allowed a person to hold far more mist within their bodies than their hearts could. It was dangerous and would be very easy to lose control, but it was possible.
Due to this key difference between gearborn and humans, a human could survive a basic shot from a shockblaster. The power fired from these weapons was very similar to mist, and a human body could handle it as a result. Not a lot of it, granted, that was why it usually messed with a person's nerves and muscle function after being hit.
However, a more powerful shot didn't care about a person's ability to adapt. The strength of these blasts would simply overpower a person's normal balancing mechanisms. The sea heart would be overwhelmed, and when that happened…well, it would be like getting burned by overpowering electricity… if one's heart didn't shatter first.
Following this line of thinking, Red realized what the horrid acrid stench was. It wasn't the smell of burning clothes. It also wasn't the smell of his shockblaster overheating.
It was the smell of burning human flesh.
Red could no longer hold back the rising bile. He disgorged the remains of his last meal.
He sat on his knees for a moment, catching his breath. Luckily, the smell had begun to fade, and he was able to control himself. The taste of bile felt heavy in his mouth as he staggered to his feet. There was nothing he could do about it anyway. Taking a deep breath of the jungle air, Red moved closer to the fallen pirate.
The remaining smoke began to fade away at his approach. Still, Red pulled his shirt over his nose and mouth. He paused a few feet away from the fallen pirate. His mistblade had clearly vanished from his recent attack. His clothes were a bit worse for wear from their tumble down the ravine.
Red's eyes moved up the length of the man's prone body and glided past the smoking spot on his chest. Instead, he looked at the man's face. He was young, likely only a few years older than Derrin. Red had not had a chance to properly identify the man during their initial confrontation. His blonde hair was cut very short, but still glinted with the familiar sandy brown.
The man's eyes remained open and unmoving. That was enough to confirm his suspicions, despite his continued refusal to acknowledge it. The man was dead; his eyes still staring up accusingly. Grimacing, Red finally forced himself to look at the injury on the man's chest. It was the same shot that had killed him.
There was a melted hole in the pirate's shirt. It had burned away under the sheer power of the blow and seemed to be gruesomely melted to the man's chest. At the center of the hole was… Red couldn't even describe it. He backed away and almost hurled again. The gruesomeness of the injury was beyond anything he had experienced.
He dropped back to the ground a few feet from the dead pirate. Red didn't need to describe the horrid scene. It was burrowed into his mind well enough. He didn't think he would ever forget it, even if he tried. It was, after all, his shot that had done it to the man.
"I'm alive, right? I'm alive. They attacked me. I knew this would happen. I knew it. I knew it…"
Red knew he was spiraling. The man had tried to kill him; there was no other way to put it. He had only been defending himself. If he hadn't fought back, it would have been his corpse lying in the grass beneath the jungle canopy. However, convincing himself was a far trickier task than he had anticipated.
It didn't matter what his reasoning was. He had still killed a person with his own hands. It hadn't been a clean kill either. The shot from his pistol had likely cooked the man's entire chest with all its internal organs as well.
It was horrid.
It was disgusting.
It was…
It was…
It was death… and exactly what he had expected it to be.