Timeline: Future

Point of View: Unknown

Location: Earth

They stood on scorched Earth, surrounded by wood beams and steel sheets that were once homes. They walked on cracked asphalt, the concrete underneath broken by impact and shifted from the weight of stampeding giants and a repeated bombardment of man-made weaponry.

They stepped over dead bodies: older men and women that had been unable to run, children run over by the more fit adults escaping in frenzy. These bodies had died not by the conquering giants, but by the natural state of things, and as such, their bodies were generally preserved. They were beginning to turn a sickly yellow, the remaining skin becoming vacuum-sealed to bone as bacteria and worms fed on the organic material underneath. Blood from open wounds had long since dried and was crumbling into a red powder in the wind.

The group of eight humans had traveled a long way to get here, and had killed many of the creatures on their path to reach this spot. Now, they stopped once they reached the tall structure, staring up as it disappeared into the sky. What they sought was buried somewhere inside this structure. It was a tower of organic material: blood and bone of human and animal victims alike, crushed and combined into a paste that wrapped around tall pillars of collected steel and wood. The smell of rot was overbearing, and this was why the tower was built as it was. It was a message. All who enter this area were walking into death, the death of their friends and family, the death of humanity, and their own impending death.

The group, led by a woman, was not fearful of this sickening castle, towering hundreds of feet into the sky. This was one of many her group had already destroyed, and this was to be the last. The woman was certain it was the last. It had to be, because this war had to end.

She waited, and the people behind her waited with her.

There was a screech from inside the flesh castle and they prepared themselves for battle. They held no weapons but their own hands, but still they prepared. They prepared their minds and they honed their senses. They did as the woman had taught them so many months ago. But death was always near and none of them wanted to die. They’d seen many of their friends die already.

The woman, however, had no fear.

She had grown to lust battle, and she desired it now. She curled her fingers in and out of a fist. Inside her boots, she curled her toes, feeling the muscles in her calves flex and release as she did. Her blood was flowing freely, and mixed within it, strength and power unfathomable to the common man. She was one of a slim majority, she was the strongest among them, and she was going to wretch the Earth back from these creatures.

There was a screech again. It seemed to shake the disgusting compost of the walls before them, and chunks of the wall fell from the sky and landed with a splat before their feet.

“Can you see them beyond the wall?,” she asked to the man on her right.

His eyes glowed red as he scanned the walls, then returned to his normal blues. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Either there is nothing inside for a couple hundred yards, or these walls are masking them.”

The woman nodded. Yes, they had to be masking themselves somehow. The cries were coming from inside. Or they were baiting them to come in. The giants were brutish fighters when in the middle of battle, but before the start of battle, they fought with their mind. The woman wasn’t any different. She lusted for battle, to watch the eyes of the giants, all fade out as the hive monster’s life force faded. She was eager to feel that power leeching from their bodies, up her arms, into her skin and commingling with her blood. She was a magnet, and she lusted for more power.

“You two,” she said to a pair on her left. They were nothing but bodies to her, but she only had eight of them left, and she didn’t want to waste them if she could. They stepped forward. “Go look overhead, see if you can find any openings from around and above.”

The pair nodded their heads. In a brief second one of the two, a small girl about the age of ten, vanished from sight in a red mist. The other, an older man, had a firm hold of the girl so as to not lose sight of her. As his hands held firm onto the little girl’s sides, he too disappeared from sight.

The woman could still see them, and the man on her right could, but the rest of the group could not, as their abilities didn’t give them sight in this way. The woman saw their power with her mind, the blood in the veins pumping from their heart, a flaming center in their chest, throughout their body. Then, in an instant, they were in the air, the man having bent down and leapt upward. She saw the power fold out like wings from the man’s back as the invisible duo climbed up the wall of the dead tower.

“I don’t mean to question you,” said the man to her right, “but should we instead take the girl with us into the building?”

“No,” she said, “They are waiting for us in there. Even if we cannot be seen, they’ll know we are there and they know we are coming. The girl is safer up there.”

“Okay,” he said. “Shall we wait, then?”

The woman said nothing as she thought through her next steps. She didn’t like that they were sitting ducks, waiting for the inevitable battle outside these walls. Typically the giants were more aggressive than this. They played mind games, but never so timidly. Maybe she had managed to sap away some of their confidence. Maybe they were being more careful with this final portal. Or, perhaps, they were sneaking up on them at this very second.

“Is there anything moving around us right now?” She asked the man.

He spun around. “No,” he said, “Do you think they’ve found a way to mask themselves from me?”

The woman gave no indication to her thoughts because she didn’t know.

“Take me to the red planet,” she told the man. “You all, stay here and be ready for anything. Protect his body while we’re there. Tell the others where we’ve gone when they return.”

The remaining four members of her crew nodded their heads. She saw worry on some of their faces, eagerness on others. This was the lightest number of soldiers she’d taken to one of the towers to date. Could she defeat it, with so few numbers? Yes, but it was likely they would all die.

But there was no choice. They knew this, and she knew this.

She took the man’s hand. In a brief moment, she felt herself ripped from Earth and placed once more back on the red planet. It felt like nothing, this instant travel, as if it were teleportation. The Earth folded in on itself to reveal its red counterpart.

She’d been to this place so many times now that it seemed to her more like home than Earth did. It made sense, really, because she was of the red planet now. She was birthed on Earth, but the red planet had awakened her. Her strength, her innate power. Earth was a reminder of her old weakness.

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So why should she save Earth? She could abandon it. She was strong enough to survive on her own, would control it. She could roam both planets, conquering the weak, finding all pylons of power, reaching her ultimate potential.

She shook the thoughts from her head. The energy that fueled her blood was power, but it, too, was weakness. She craved it. It made her violent. She could not fall victim to it. Earth had nearly lost it’s last remnants of humanity, and she knew that if she also did, then all was lost. Her kind would be nothing more than a blip on the radar of time, lost to these creatures from the red planet who would dominate their home.

Once they were on the red planet, she saw that they'd landed inside the city. The man beside her was hazy, as he phased in and out from the other side. She stared up at the tall walls of the curious material surrounding her. These walls were a maze of tall material, and she’d never been able to navigate them.

She knew the portal, the other side of it, was close. She stuck her hand through the wall, felt herself sucked into it, the material fighting to obtain her power as she fought to obtain its. It was a weak material, containing little of anything useful. The giants, though... each kill brought her closer to a new level of power, new innate abilities unlocked as the power recoded her DNA.

“Do you see them,” she asked, as she played with the wall, dripping around her fingers. “Please tell me you see something.”

“I do,” the man said. “Follow me.”

“I don’t want to wonder too far from this spot, or we’ll lose the others. Can you tell where in the building back on Earth they are located?”

“It would be only guess work. You know this. It’s best to get closer from here, and then phase back.”

“It’s unsafe for you. You’re not here…”

“I can be. It’ll just take more of my essence.”

“Then you’ll be tired for battle and useless to me.”

“Do you have any better options?” The man asked.

She did not. She waited as the man’s form solidified beside her. When he was done, he collapsed to the floor and threw up.

“You need more power. One shift like this shouldn’t weaken you so much.”

“I don’t disagree,” he said, wiping his mouth.

They began to walk down the corridors of maze-like walls. The material seemed to ascend endlessly into the sky, higher than they could see. She wished that she, too, had the ability to fly. Alas, it was not amongst her abilities. That was, as far as she knew. She could discover it yet. The accumulation of more power always unlocked new abilities. Maybe it was on the horizon.

“Wait,” the man said, “Up ahead. I see a handful of them.”

“Can you see what they are doing?”

“No, they seem to be standing. Waiting.”

“Are we still by the entrance to the tower?” She asked.

“You know I can’t answer that. I’m no longer there.”

She nodded. “Either way,” she said, “We haven’t been walking long. It’s possible they are beside the portal defending it.”

“Only a few of them?”

“There are only eight of us remaining. Who’s to say we haven’t dwindled down their counts, too?” But she knew that wasn’t true even as she spoke it. There were likely hundreds of the giants still remaining, and the end goal was only to isolate them back to their planet. It was more than likely many others were still on Earth while these waited here. Scouts.

However, with them so close, all she wanted was to feel the eyes of their bodies, those hundreds of little cores that made up the hive mind, popping one by one like grapes in her hands. “Point in their direction,” she said.

“I don’t think…” The man said.

“Fucking point in their direction,” she demanded, and so he did. She began to sprint, keeping the angle he’d provided in mind as she danced around the maze. She didn’t worry about him getting lost, because he could see her. How jealous she was of him, that he could see both human and monster alike, when she could only see the power once it was inside a human body.

She could hear them, their footsteps sending subtle ripples through the floor, the impact like a bass boom in her ears. Their voices hummed and screeched as they spoke to each other. One of the others back on Earth would be able to translate what they said, and she was irritated with herself that she hadn’t brought the woman with. It didn’t matter, though. Death stood before her, death and power.

She collided with one of the walls and felt herself sucked through its odd structure. She opened her mind and absorbed the tic tac-sized power that the wall provided, and it crumbled in her wake. She used the power it had offered her and brought her hands together, open-palmed. The giant closest to her then felt that power leave her palms and run along its back.

These giants weren’t actually giants, but were the construct of thousands of tiny creatures, each with its own tiny mind. Their small bodies were almost entirely comprised of a single eye. Each eye moved independently of the others, but spoke to the others to share its knowledge, and together the eyes formed a collective hive mind that made the decisions for it’s collective creature.

When the woman’s hands landed on the back of this combined creature, standing at 3 times her own height, a third of those small eye creatures exploded into pus and rained down around her, caking her in gore. The impacted giant screeched, this time loudly and painfully, it’s sound vibrating her bones, and it collapsed to the ground. The woman wasted no time, and jumped up its damaged body, squeezing eyes as she went. When she reached its head, she wrapped its massive neck in her arms and fell forward to the ground, using momentum to pull the creature forward. She landed painfully (but oh, she enjoyed that coursing pain), and the eyes that were joined to create the neck popped from place. She picked up the head, larger than a beach ball, and forced essence through her hands and into the collective head, which erupted in gore.

The head of these creatures housed the oldest creatures of the hive mind, so when the woman broke that connection, the remaining eyes fell like water from the broken body. With the hive mind severed, she closed her eyes and focused her power, sending it from her hands into her mind. She wasn’t strong enough to use this ability on a collective hive mind, but the individual creatures themselves were like ants. She felt the pus bathe her from her closed eyes as thousands of the creatures turned into a showering rain.

She opened her eyes again to see several of the giants coming her way. She put her hands to the ground, the secretions of those eyes at her fingertips, and felt the blood from the creatures flow up into her fingers as if from a straw. Her mind grew frenzied, her thoughts overrun by the saturation of it all, and she began to laugh.

She met the closest giant head on as it swung a fist down at her body. She ducked the blow with ease and slid underneath it’s impressive stature. As she passed, she put both hands together again and brought them upward underneath the creature. The bottom half of the giant instantaneously burst into jelly. She came to a stop and rolled away before the top half of the creature could fall onto her.

Two of the giants were on top of her now, but she dodged each of their slow attacks. She could see the individual small creatures focused on her, the hive mind communicating, anticipating her movements, but she was faster and smarter now from the collected essence, coalescing around her mind and in her muscles.

The giant on the left brought its hands together, meaning to squish her between them, but she flipped backwards away from harm. She spun around and kicked the creatures hands aside, and the creatures that had formed those hands burst into a red mist. She finished the kick and came around with her hands together, meeting the other giants fist. The fist was no more. She leapt onto the giant on the right, as the one on the left was migrating its remaining eyes to create new hands, and in two long leaps was at its head. She grabbed the neck and spun in a circle three times. The head fell away. As the giant on the right melted away, the one on the left soon met a similar fate as she shifted the flow of essence from the dying giant into the other like a solar flare.

She knelt in the pool that remained of the two giants.

“Help!” the man, her partner, screamed.

When she spun around to look at her partner, she saw that two giants had managed to pin the man. He was too weak to defend himself. He'd already spent all of his own power.

No, she thought, and she took in the remaining power around her from the corpses of the hive minds. She reached out with her mind, meaning to tear apart one of the giants to gain the man some time, but she wasn’t yet strong enough to kill it in a single blow from such a distance. She watched as the giant’s hands reached into the man’s gut as he screamed out in pain. It split the man clean in half. His insides spilled forth and his head fell. He became silent.

The group was now down to seven.

The woman spared no time to mourn the loss as she watched four more giants approach from her peripheral. She stood, turned around, and ran deeper into the maze, searching for the final blood portal. This time she was direction-less.

The final portal she had to destroy was now her last possible passage back to Earth.