KILL RICHARD SIMMONS

Looking out of the airplane cargo hatch, I could feel my stomach tingling with the sensation of anxiety. It was the first time I ever had to paradrop in order to kill a target. In fact, this was my first celebrity assassination mission. Not to imply that Richard Simmons was much of a celebrity.

Although I couldn’t feel the backpack containing my parachute around the hardened power armor, I took trust in the fact that it looked secure enough in the reflection of the steel plane interior. Even if the parachute did fail, the piece of machinery I was wearing could surely take the fall damage from the height I was jumping at.
Everything looked so tiny down below. I already knew something was wrong before I took a step off of the plane. Everyone has SUV’s or Suburbans, I thought as I tripped out of the exit. After I became accustomed to falling inside of a 300-pound suit of power armor, more trucks and sports utility vehicles became visible as I descended into a field of wheat with the parachute deployed.

Twelve of the men around me were yelling at me in Spanish. I brushed past them and took a five minute walk towards my objective indicator. My HUD’s targeting system had located Richard Simmons’ position outside the plantation house. Hundreds of illegal immigrants performed jumping jacks for the afro-haired villain as he pranced around in offensively tight-fitting clothing. I stepped forward and pulled a gun mount from my equipment pack.

It took the workers a few seconds to realize that a man decked out in a 300-pound suit of advanced power armor was deploying a gatling cannon and aiming it straight at the spandex-clad faerie. My time frame was already less than four seconds before Simmons would either flee or engage.

Spanish-screaming laborers fled into corn fields and wooden structures seconds before the sound of shots pierced the air. Besides a deafening blast and the drop of a hollow shell casing, thin wisps of smoke were the only indication that I had placed bullets between me and my target. It wasn’t exactly comforting to see I had already run out of ammunition after firing a burst of three thousand.

Luckily, the Agency warned me Simmons would be difficult to destroy and proposed several alternatives to killing him besides conventionally pelting him with a hail of bullets. I pulled out my combat shotgun and quickly loaded it with slugs. Simmons had engaged, embedding his talons on the ground. He galloped towards me with demonic speed and knocked me on my back, causing me to land on and bend the barrel of my sniper rifle beyond use. I knew that I had to immediately finish him off, now that I could no longer depend on a long ranged weapon had he decided to flee.

I picked myself off the ground as quickly as I could; luckily fast enough to evade the snarling aerobics trainer’s sharp talons. As he roared at his unsuccessful attack, I took advantage of his suspended distance and readied my flamethrower. Only three seconds of napalm spray could douse my target before he took to all fours in flight. Taking leaps of at least twenty feet in the air, the blazing Simmons tried to perform a combination of extinguishing the flames and ripping into his opponent. I didn’t hesitate a second more and opened fire with my shotgun.

Yet again the ferocious Simmons managed to evade the spray of lead. I knew I had to resort to energy and large arms fire to take this one down. On one of the landings from his jumps, Simmons misplaced his foot and tumbled in the grass for several yards, extinguishing the flames entirely. I leveled a plasma rifle in his direction and opened fire, spraying him with globs of superheated energy. Dead and badly burned skin leapt off his body and into the air. He screamed and toiled to escape from the cruel plasma fire.

Seeing that I had weakened him, I ran full speed towards my opponent and wrestled him to the ground. I must have taken him by surprise, since he instantly managed to slither his way out of my grasp and throw me twenty feet across the grass clearing. Unrelenting, I climbed out of the small crater my power armor left in the dirt and took another running leap at the crazed beast of a man.

Instead of tackling him this time, I swung my mechanized arm and clipped a piece of his shoulder with one of the steel retractors on my suit. He howled and hissed at his now deformed collarbone structure. That’s when I landed an iron fist and indented the skull forming the slope of his forehead. I thought it had killed him when his eye loosened from its socket, but he kept fighting. He dug a talon into the torso of my armor and tried to scratch his way through to my flesh. Before he had bored more than an inch into my suit, I was effortlessly plowing a combat knife along the jugular vein in his throat, spraying us both with blood and acidic puss.

I pushed Richard Simmons away, leaving the knife embedded in his neck. I took out a claymore mine and threw it towards him while he was still stunned. He stopped trying to hold back the gushing fluids spewing from his neck and attacked the claymore mine long enough for it to arm itself. Steel ball bearings exploded everywhere, blowing off his left arm, right ear, and the surrounding part of his face. I could already see he was regenerating.

That’s when I decided it was necessary to cut him apart with my sword. It was a special sword crafted by Tacitel, meaning it was forged with a blade edge strong enough to penetrate bricks and most armor. I impaled Simmons a little below where his heart should have been, and used all of my strength to drag it upwards. His eyes bulged even further out now, and he screamed in pitches too high for my HUD to replay. I continued dragging the cruel blade out of the aerobics king in an upwards motion. When it became lodged in a bone near his shoulder, I changed the course of my pulling to an upper-left trajectory. With a great thrust, the blade managed to swiftly cut through something that it was stuck on and cleanly cut upwards through and out from an exit: the top of his head.

I backed away from the black liquids that seeped and sprayed from the ruin of my enemy. His body contorted and shook violently. Surprisingly, he maintained balance on two legs and attempted to continue walking towards me before he finally ran out of energy. The two halves of his head and upper torso separated with a loud popping sound, and the target became idle. Just to make sure he couldn’t regenerate, I placed some explosive charges in the slit I had earlier cut on the left half of his neck.

When it went off, most of the volume of the body separated and flew a great distance into the sky. The largest piece of him that was still intact was the entire left leg (however missing a foot). That landed on and demolished an SUV parked in front of a wooden structure the illegal immigrants were hiding inside of. I used my voice modulator to communicate to them it was safe to come out, and then left the city of Marysville at the closest dustoff site.