59. Reagan vs Lincoln IV: Scorpion's Sting

“Abolition!” Lincoln shouted, teleporting himself to the other side of the arena. Lincoln waved his hand across his arm, removing the hole in his pierced hand.

“There’s no time for breaks!” Reagan shouted. “The camera’s still rolling!”

The lights making Reagan’s scorpion form gathered into her hands, reshaping themselves into the form of a starry bow.

“Star Wars; Sagittarius!”

Reagan plucked the bow, firing an arrow of light towards her opponent.

“Abolition!” Lincoln screeched, teleporting across the battlefield and away from the projectile.

Lincoln hovered a hand across his left side, erasing the wounds from Reagan’s claws. Reagan fired another shot. Lincoln teleported away, healing the wounds on his right side. Lincoln just about finished when Reagan shot another bolt in his direction.

“Of all the…” Lincoln frowned. “You realize you’re never going to hit me with—”

Lincoln teetered forward as another rush of nausea washed over him. He glanced up as his body stumbled over, eyeing the starry arrow hurtling towards him.

“This might be a slip…” Lincoln muttered, stomping onto the ground and taking back his balance, “but it’s not a fall!”

Lincoln swung up with his axe, deflecting the arrow just before impact. Lincoln gave a sigh of relief and propped himself on his axe. He breathed heavily, then coughed into his hand. He looked down, spotting specks of blood splattered across his fingertips.

“I’m…ill…?”

He looked to Reagan, studying her starry weapon with greater care.

“Of course,” Lincoln mumbled. “That scorpion form you had before…it’s poisonous!”

The crowd gave a series of murmurs at Lincoln’s declaration.

“Poison, huh?” Truman remarked, scratching his chin as he eyed Lincoln’s haggard face. “I guess that does explain Lincoln’s odd behavior, but what’s the big deal? Can’t Lincoln just get rid of it like he did with all his other wounds?”

Reagan gave a wide smirk below.

“That’s where you’re wrong, Truman.”

She dissolved the starry bow and walked towards Lincoln.

“Your Executive Power: Abolition,” Reagan explained, “is an EP which allows you to delete anything: the distance between you and your opponent, the windups of your swings; even the wounds on your body! However, the ability has its limits. In particular, you can only delete wounds if you can identify their exact spot! And that means,” Reagan spoke with a menacing smile, “you have no way of vanquishing the poison that’s already spread throughout your body!”

Lincoln stood still, his face twisted into a scowl.

This doesn’t make sense, he thought. When she blocked my Bull Run Strike at the start, I had assumed that either Johnson or Davis leaked the details of my fighting style to Reagan. But no one, not even Grant, knows this much about the specifics of my EP.

“What’s the matter?” Reagan asked innocently. “Are you—"

Reagan stopped speaking as Lincoln appeared directly before her.

“Executive Power,” he spoke, drawing back his axe, “Abolition!”

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Scorpion’s Sting. The chapter title references a strategy proposed by abolitionists to end slavery by surrounding slave states with free states, with the hope being that this would lead to slavery self-destructing like a scorpion stinging itself to death.

Exact Spot. The fact that Gabe Lincoln’s EP only works when he knows the exact spot of his injury is a loose reference to Abraham Lincoln’s “spot resolutions” where he demanded President James Polk to identify the exact spot where American blood had been spilled (since James was using the pretense that such blood had been spilled on American soil in order to justify going to war with Mexico). After introducing these resolutions, Abraham was mockingly referred to as “Spotty Lincoln.”