Today was a day of new horrifying firsts.

Once the sphere disappeared, it left a third of the room, one and two-quarters of the giant shrimp, and what I could only assume was a few hundred shrimp spaghettified. It had picked up the little ones and just sucked them in like a hungry maw. The affected area had even reached two of the four giant shrimp, tearing limbs off. It had pulled much of the spindly vine walls of the nest, each of which now seeped the glowing water like sap or blood; I couldn’t test it myself.

They lay there together now, rock and meat and shell and the vines all turned into thin strips. A steaming bowl of nightmare noodles.

The shrimp things, the big ones, turned to see Pinky and me, cold alien eyes staring at us, and then they began to move.

Have you ever seen something big move? And when I say big, I mean a REALLY big living creature, not a building or a vehicle. I hadn’t, but it was something else brand new and horrifying.

Things that big should not move, and just watching them lumber from the pool hurt my brain a little. It was a talent thing; every time it moved, my mind told me, ‘It can’t stand up on that,’ or, ‘It's going to fall over,’ every second like an intrusive thought.

My dad was a smith, and as his daughter, I had inherited the talent of knowing my materials. The imagined weight alone made my brain seethe that it could not be. It was like watching a house stand up if a house stood on tiny legs as big around as my arm.

The being was also asymmetrical and so should fall over, but didn’t care enough to, and on top of it all, a thing that big should not move so fast.

Weight was a force; it was mass times acceleration. Mass had inertia; it did not want to move on its own. Something that big could not be light; the density of bone made up most of a person's mass, and a shell, if it was a shell, was different. A thing's structure was always the heaviest component, and yet this thing, this shrimp-looking alien creature, moved like it wasn’t the size of a house.

It stood, turned, and lumbered toward us like a perfectly normal bus-sized shrimp with tentacles and god knows what.

“Well, it looks like I got off a good first hit,” Pinky said chipperly, as if we were not being moved upon by giant crustaceans. “Time to start frying some monsters.”

“We have no plan, Pinky! What do you mean fry some monsters?” I asked her, “I don’t think I can even kill one of the little ones.”

She looked at me funny but just reached into her shirt and chucked a few vials at me, “then take these and check to see if the thing holding the gate open is in here.”

I caught them, a free hand snaping out in a panic and grabbed them. I nearly dropped one but scooped it in my gun hand before it could fall. The last thing I wanted was one of her vials to break.

It was somewhat horrifying, holding it, but on second glance, it was one of the other ones, the ones that Pinky had used on the machinegun.

I looked at them, eyes wide as dinner plates.

Pinky waved before hopping on her sword and floating up: “I’ll take care of the big ones… And the little ones… And… Well, I guess all of them? Kill what you can. It's time for operation shrimp fried rice!” she called, shouting, whooping in anticipation towards the end.

Before I could get a word out, she jetted off, firing off pink beams, tossing vials and generally bombarding the shit out of things in the room while shouting things like, “Let’s go!” or “Get cooked,” and generally being her hyperactive goofy self.

She had no plan. She had gumption and weapons that did real damage against the enemy, and that was about it. Two of them were bleeding, not blood that spoke to me like the dog had, but where it was a blue that wasn’t blue, theirs was a puss yellow, and Pinky took potshots at them, her pink beams gouging through vulnerable flesh, dealing more damage to the colossal creature than I had on the small dog.

It brought to mind her total disregard for the issue that the machine gun posed and her carefree attitude toward the issue of getting shot.

It occurred to me then, standing there, stuffing vials of lethal foam stuff into a bathrobe pocket, that it occurred to me that Pinky might not just have been being a mindless idiot. She wasn’t just holding back an arsenal the entire fight where we met, but she was fighting people, who did not fight with tooth and claw and who she didn’t particularly want to kill.

If she fought stuff like this on a regular basis and used weapons that could wipe out a city block, she would have been used to fighting with brute force. Suppose she could heal herself or transform into a war form that could tear through concrete. Why would she think a handful of people with guns were a threat compared to a building-sized killer crustacean that fought with greater than apparent but still animalistic intelligence?

The giant shrimp turned to face Pinky, rearing up in a way that made them look even more wrong. It punched at her so fast I couldn’t follow it, but she flew clear, ducking out of range during an unseen windup while I stared on at the nightmare.

Then I shook myself and started moving. This was not a situation where I wanted to sit here, gaping like a tourist. I was here, and Pinky was fighting, so I should at least help out in any way I could.

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I could maybe kill one or two of the shellfish with my gun, and I had three of the tubes, but I wouldn’t make a particularly big dent unless I hit a gathering.

The small ones, the ones that hadn’t been sucking into meat spaghetti, which were still bigger than I was, were clumped, some soaking, some pushed together as they watched their greater kin fight the aerial target, and a hand full of them, the quicker amongst the lot, were facing towards me, scuttling on weird legs like a centipede.

I needed to avoid the groups, many of whom were still around the remains of what were the four pools of sepia-glowing water. Once again, decrying the loss of my blade and how it would have made this far easier, I began to think. The best way would be to get to the destroyed area. It was a depopulated tripping hazard; the big guys were avoiding it, shifting back and forth as pinky buzzed around them like flies, and it would give me height. Perhaps there was a passage I couldn’t see.

Checking the wire-thin strings of the wound, they led to the far-left side of the room.

Taking a deep breath, I nodded to myself and started moving. Aiming toward the path between, I tried to wheel around the incoming shrimplets, but they started to scuttle sideways like crabs, raising their shrimp body off the ground with the help of the tentacle limbs they had.

They were loose, too loose in formation for me to get them all but too tight to easily get around if they mimicked my movement.

If I kept going around, I would run into another group, so I started to move around the other way, and they started scuttling the other way, moving in a wave, pressing the ones next to them.

They clumped up slightly, and a tiny evil thing in my head thunked into it.

We were getting closer to one another, and they were clumping as I moved back and forth.

Clumping up close enough to one another that I could it them with a vial? I hoped and pulled one out and tried to remember how Pinky had used it the artifact crystal glass. I tried to remember the time it had taken to detonate.

It hadn’t been instantaneous, but the exact time wasn’t something I had paid too close attention to. She had pressed the button and tossed the vial; the green stuff inside had bubbled… and we had left.

How long would it take? Could I throw it in front of them? How far ahead would I need to throw?

Either way, I needed to get them clumped up, so I would clump them up.

I chided myself for not including the grenades I had swiped after fleeing the machine gun and for forgetting them in my coat pockets like they were change and lint as I hoped back and forth, the shrimplets following me, rapidly beginning to scuttle side to side, pushing against one another like bricks.

I guided them back and forth as they came closer, and as I did, I focused on how fast they were moving and guessed four feet a second. I could outrun them if any survived, but I would need to run, considering their scuttle was comparable to a quick stride.

I thought again, thinking about how long we had been there, and added a second. Then I estimated the range, my eyes telling me about 20 yards, my best guess aided by a fuck load of time spent shooting.

I guessed the distance and let out a prayer to whatever being called this place its own, and clicked the button, sending a little shock into the green fluid and tossed the vial.

My prayer went unanswered; I had miscalculated, but it got where I threw it. It started to react the moment the tube broke on impact, expanding first slowly but then faster and faster, growing across the ground, creeping out from the point of impact and foaming.

A smokey haze seemed to filter through it, a caustic smell bad enough to make my eyes water and scream, ‘Do not come here. You will die.’

I did not come there; I did not die. The shrimplets did come there, however, and gave me a good look at what Pinky had meant by you don’t want to see it.

In what I found to be a lucky break, the things, uncaring of the foam, walked into it toward me, and the foam began to climb, first slowly, then rapidly began to expand. It frothed heavily, and the things let out a clicking warble as they, too, began to smoke. The green, as it fluffed, became lighter and lighter before turning pink.

The foam started to restrain them as they continued to come through the expanded poofy area, and as they kept pushing, parts of them came off, pulled free by the movement. The plates that covered them. The smell redoubled, and the foam grew, recovering parts of them as they clicked and stumbled, tearing and moving and tearing and moving. They reared up, spreading like a clam, until their bodies were flat, tentacles slipping from a series of pointy bits that could have been a mouth or god knew what else. Whatever the crevice was, it grew into it. Their bodies began to break apart, the smoke thickening.

The area stopped expanding 10 feet from where I stood, and the foam that went pink began to deflate as the things came at me, bodies writhing.

I watched them gobsmacked as they tore their own bodies apart, and then they collapsed. The green foam cleared, evaporating, leaving behind burnt mummified husks, each having a tiny splatter of yellow ichor and a glowing material that looked like the water. The sinew of the nest had been melted to something that was and yet wasn’t stone.

I felt a hum from them, the puddles feeling familiar to the gem I had eaten, but it came with no compulsion. Unappetizing, I turned from it, turned and ran.

I made my way as quickly as possible, both from the bodies and the area, toward the central causeway. I did my best not to look at the big things, which were whirling tendrils around. I tried to smack Pinky while she shouted, “I’m going to krill you!” and cackled like a madwoman to a set of bigger different clicks that were punctuated by Pinky firing off more shots at them.

“Good to see one of us is having the time of their life tonight,” I murmured to myself.

Head down and on a swivel to make sure I wasn’t going to get swarmed as I moved between the two groups, I closed on the land bridge.

Some of the shrimplets were looking around, but they did not move at me, twitching their heads around, tentacles throbbing across the ground. Their lack of attention was confusing, but as I kept moving, I figured it out. As the pools came closer, some of them seemed to spot me; their throbbing tentacles started drifting toward me at first, but then they started to turn their heads toward me.

They were feeling me through the ground.

Worse, they were annoyed at my existence and wanted to chew on my bones.

They began to rise up, tiptoeing out of the water stuff on their little legs and making a scuttle towards me.

They were slow; I could outrun them, and I started to do just that, but the problem with that was twofold. Running made more noise and vibrations, which set off more shrimplets, and the shrimp used a secret weapon, a thing incomprehensible to me.

They made noise.

The pools rumbled with shrimplets faster than you could turn your head to someone shouting fire. They turned their not-so-little forms toward me and, like a hail of arrows, pulled themselves from their primordial soup and scuttled toward me.

The pools were of course, circular, a rising crust of crustacean ringing it, and the bridge was between them.

The clicking that brought them in caused them to pile in on me from both in front and behind.

It was no longer a matter of whether I outrun them; it was a matter of whether I could escape a pending encirclement. I took a sigh, kicked off the stupid slippers, feet getting a better grip on the sinus, and began my mad dash.