A thick cloud of exhaust billowed out from the missile now lodged in Michael's body. It screamed as it bored into him, a high pitched banshee wail that flyers like Gull heard in their nightmares. His momentary shock and subsequent stumble backwards had saved his life but also put him in a terrible position. When he’d staggered, he’d changed the angle of the VLAD’s shot to have it wedge between his bottom two ribs where his chest became his side, allowing the 1.5 meter long, rocket propelled harpoon to bowl him over and force him down onto his flank to land with a *wumf.* The pain and suddenness of the attack overrode his better judgement, and he found himself curling into a ball as the barbed steel did its best to impale his torso, subsequently making it even more painful as the harpoon’s tip detonated inside of him. Binding white agony shot through his body.
The world dissolved in that moment, Gull’s conscious mind fleeing from a situation too traumatic to process. His time insensate must have been less than a handful of seconds, because when he came back to reality, the rockets were still screaming as the tail of the harpoon still bucked and waggled above him, scraping on his rib bones. The force was slowly pushing his body across the floor, leaving a thick smear of blood in its wake.
He shakily reached out with his arm to try and arrest the steel shaft of the harpoon if only to stop it from moving like it did. The motion was fast and unpredictable, and his fingers felt clumsy and slow. However, after a painful miss, he was able to grab the thing just as the rockets expended all of their energy, sputtering and dying with a final *pop* of improperly mixed fuel.
For a quiet, blissful moment Michael just laid there, basking in the sensation of not being actively impaled, his brain adjusting to its new ‘normal’ it had to work with, but it didn’t take long for the urgency of the situation to catch up to him.
A soft, almost innocent whirring sound brushed against his senses, a little thing that one might not recognize as significant if not for the steel rod sticking out of one's torso and the fact that the rod had been fired from a VLAD. He raised his head slightly, finally getting his first good look at the damage the missile had done. It was a grisly scene. Michael’s flank and the half-buried tip of the harpoon were covered in blood. The thing that surprised him most was the splatter pattern that reached all the way up to the tip of the shaft of steel, and, upon further inspection, along a lot of the floor as well.
The floor… there was something there. A thin cable, something easily missed in the long blood trail, slithered out from the metal shipping container all the way to the back of Gull's harpoon, and the slack in said cable was slowly being taken in. Suddenly, the gentle whirring seemed a lot more urgent to Gull. The super imagined a small but powerful motor slowly reeling in the cable in like a winch. Probably exactly like a winch.
Dragging himself back through his blood trail, he took the cable in both hands and tested its strength, stretching it until his muscles strained and the wound in his side forced him to stop. The material was strong, probably not ordinary steel.
He needed to move now. To do something unexpected.
Gull was stronger and more durable than he let on. Very few people knew that. In fact, he was still alive precisely because he played up the flashier parts of his powers so that when the heroes came for him, he had a hidden card to play. It was a strategy that had saved him a few times in the past, and having to reveal the extent of his power now meant he couldn't just fly away once he was free. He would need to find those responsible for wounding him and kill them before he left Las Almas.
What he was about to do would probably send lesser supers into shock or outright kill them, but he was confident that he could take it.
Reaching down with his right hand, he gripped the harpoon tightly on one of the drier parts of the shaft and braced himself. He closed his eyes, sucked in a breath through his teeth, and pulled.
Pain. Shock. The corners of his vision darkened. His shallow breaths bordered oh hyperventilation. Something primitive inside of him screamed and gibbered at what he was doing to himself, at how unnatural it was.
Then the sensation changed. When Michael looked down again, the harpoon was free of his flesh, the end with the cable now resting on the floor.
Wait. No. The shaft and the barbed part were free, but tens of tiny, fibrous wires still connected Michael's body to the weapon, running from a hollow in the harpoon's tip into his flesh. He winced as he gave the it a gentle, experimental tug. As he did so, the maddening sensation of his guts being forcibly rearranged nearly sent him into an agonized panic. The detonation after he'd been impaled must have done this. He didn't want to, but he couldn't help imagining hundreds of tiny treble hooks inside of him, attached to his stomach, his liver, his lungs...
Blood dribbled from the open hole in his side, the unnatural metal fibers giving the already terrible wound a horrific, otherworldly new dimension.
That sent his survival instincts into overdrive. He was caught. A fish on a hook. Or lots of hooks. He needed to get airborne, outside. He pushed his way to his feet, panting, clutching the harpoon in a death grip as he did so, a grunt his only acknowledgement of the pain though his body screamed at him. Then he summoned his wings, fully extended, and rocketed toward the open warehouse doors, banking on his inertia and considerable strength to snap the cable where it met the shaft. Then he would be free, outside with a bird’s eye view of the situation and a messy death to deliver.
Only that didn’t happen. A half second of acceleration was all he got, then he collided, face first, into something hard. His body crumpled as the inertia of his flight carried him forward, and the pain from the wound in his side eclipsed all other sensations. On the ground, he shook his head. Adrenaline coursed through his system now, dulling his pain receptors and giving him strength, which allowed him to get back to his feet almost instantaneously, panting and blinking rapidly as he stared accusingly at the doorway. What looked like empty space before now contained a barrier that rippled and glowed blue very briefly before fading back to near-perfect translucence.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
A forcefield then. Gull’s assessment of his attackers just went up a notch. They had tech or a super on their side. The situation just went from bad to worse.
Again, he had to rely on his enemies not knowing just how strong he was. While the door might have been blocked, the building itself was made of thin, corrugated tin, the only true solidity coming from steel beams that acted as support for the structure's weight. He could rip through that, the tin parts at least. He took off again, this time vertically to try the louder, messier exit of bursting through the roof.
This time he didn’t meet a force field. Instead, as he passed between the steel support rafters, an explosion ripped through the air on his right, and a crushing blow slammed into his hip, sending him spiraling back to the ground on his back. A smoking, deformed hunk of metal the size of his head clattered to the floor next to him, spinning several times on its edge before coming to a rest. His ears rang, and his hip felt like it’d just been run over by a truck.
He had to get out. This place was a death trap. A death trap made specifically for him.
The harpoon still sticking out of Michael's side shifted subtly, changing its angle even as he held it, and when he looked down, he realized he was almost out of cable. While he'd been trying to snap the thing, the VLAD had been reeling him in. He grabbed the line in both hands, planted his feet, and pulled, his muscles straining and his wings flapping furiously at his back to lend more power to the effort. The cable held fast. What’s more, he no longer had enough slack to get up to speed with his wings.
The trap was slowly strangling him to death. Not physically, but moment by moment it limited his options. Soon Michael would have no other choice but to be at the mercy of whatever the trap maker had planned for him.
No. No. Gull was not prey. He would not be at anyone's mercy. He needed to attack. He needed to stop the machine before it had him. He dashed forward, once again, into the container. Papa's dead stare and the warbling whirs of the VLAD's winch motor mocked Michael's desperation, but that was alright. He was on the offensive now.
When he gave the VLAD an experimental shove, it barely moved. Michaels attacker had anchored it well with bolts that likely went way down into the building’s foundations. The whirring sound of the motor was coming from the back of the machine, he found, and the path of the cable confirmed as much. Shoving aside Papa’s corpse like it was a broken toy, Michael climbed up and over the metal tube that had originally housed the VLAD's payload, an awkward prospect since he had to hold onto the harpoon still attached to his side. Letting it dangle was probably survivable if extremely painful, but he didn't feel up to giving it a try, even in as desperate a moment as this. Gull would make his attacker eat his fucking harpoon before the day was done.
There. A boxy protrusion welded to the side of the VLAD’s base. The sound was coming from there. Gull bent down and seized the armor plating they’d used to protect the motor, flexing his fingers, his adrenaline fueled madness lending him strength. The tendons in his hands popped. The muscles in his forearms burned. Blood fountained out of his wound. More dripped down into his eye.
The weapon was built to last. The welds held. Desperation clawed at Gull’s mind, and soon he was screaming wordlessly, eyes shut tight with the effort.
There! The steel started to give way beneath his fingers, not in the welds but in the middle of the plates. An insane, bubbling laugh escaped Gull's lips. This was it! The failure point of the trap! Once the material started to fail, it was only a matter of time. His fingers dug into the now weakened metal like clay, and the structure collapsed, allowing Gull to slowly crush the armored box like a beer can until metallic screeching poured from the motor housing and smoke began to billow from the cracks that had formed while he'd torn at the machine.
When Gull finally stood again, his breaths came heavily, and his vision was tainted red. That was one problem down. Now he could-
*BOOM*
An explosion rocked the shipping container, sending Gull staggering. Simultaneously, the side of the container practically dissolved as hundreds of projectiles zipped past, tearing through the walls like tissue paper. In the split second it took to bring his wings around to shield himself, Gull felt the metallic missiles pulverize his chest, his abdomen, and his legs with meaty *thwacks*.
*BOOM*
Another explosion, this time from behind. The air filled with shredded metal, and even within the protective embrace of his wings, Gull was forced to tense his body and close his eyes to protect himself from tiny bits of shrapnel as the shipping container disintegrated.
More explosions buffeted him, each from a different angle, knocking him from side to side, down onto the floor to flip and roll across the container like a ragdoll. Papa’s corpse practically vaporized, filling the immediate area with the stink of old blood and viscera.
Gull was strong and durable, but physics had the upper hand in this situation. The kinetic energy of the explosives combined with the inertia of hundreds of tiny, dense missiles slammed into him over and over again as he was flung through the air and slammed to the ground again and again until he finally came to a stop, lying limply on the floor, battered, bleeding, and partially deaf.
His wings were tattered hunks of flesh and crooked bone, and their feathers laid about the scorched, concrete floor like sad, wet confetti. A marble sized steel ball lazily rolled past his face to come to a stop in a neat, rectangular gouge in the foundation a few feet away. Michael's wings folded back into his body slowly, having done what they could for now.
As Michael laid face down on the concrete, his old friend, the harpoon, still hung by its hooks in his side, shaft now bent at a 90 degree angle. Sometime during the onslaught, the cable attaching him to the VLAD had snapped, leaving only a six inch, ragged brush of steel attached to the shaft. At least he had that going for him.
Michael spit out a mouthful of blood that had pooled in his cheek, then, more forcefully, expelled the shattered remnants of a molar with his tongue.
His body felt like tenderized meat.
Light from an unexpected angle caught his attention. One of the corners of the building seemed to peel open to allow the figure of a tall, well muscled man to step through the opening. He was dressed in black, military style gear with pouches and pockets all over his chest, though he wore no weapons that Michael could see. On his face, the man wore super tech goggles over a black full face mask. A ghostly white handprint on the man's face was the only distinguishing marking on his entire outfit, but that was all Michael needed to identify the super who’d hunted him down.
Bravo One’s hands smoldered at his sides as he drew close.
An icy rope coiled itself around Gull’s heart.