The great worm slammed itself down in a final, shuddering heap and was still. Unmoving. Clan and Human alike started to appear from behind consoles and the Terminals spread through the room. Still suspicious, Jack approached the last few feet to it, very carefully.
The worm whipped and thrashed in a blur, slammed into Jack and sending him spinning and crashing across the room, to disappear behind a mess of shattered consoles.
On its whip back the other way, it belched a beam of pure violet death across a stretch of the room. Korl, Lee, and Yuma jumped up and above it. Jonah hid behind the Terminal. Others were slower, or less lucky as their physical forms were flayed down to invisible molecular dust in an instant. If they were to have time to scream, their deaths would have had to come much, much slower than they did.
The giant worm continued to gush viscera and a mess of independent worms from its severed backside but the last robed amalgamation merged itself onto the bleeding end and sealed it shut. The smaller bloodworms twisted their way across the floor to hunt new prey as Yuma and the Clan fired at the great worm, but even her light bars popped into static showers before they could plunge beneath its thick hide. They were forced to shift their focus to the smaller worms as they writhed closer.
Korl darted to the side and slashed against it, his blades unable to cut through the interdimensional hide even as they whipped fast enough through the thin air to send a keening wail into the upper range of everyone’s auditory perception.
The Clan Head burst into motion, his white blade exploding and overtaking the sounds of Korl’s blades as it dominated the room like a jet engine. Heat poured off of his blade as he whirled around the wide violet beams and violent thrashing of the worm, as he left charred, cauterized wounds in the great worm’s side. It wasn’t nearly enough.
It slapped itself onto the deck and launched both of them into the air before spinning and slapping them both back across the room with its severed tail.
Screams started sounding out across the room as the worms reached the scattered Human lines.
“Hey. Jonah.”
Jonah nearly jumped from cover behind his severely weathered Terminal. Yuma and Jack had already exchanged non-verbal greetings.
Jack was there, having crawled his way into their position on one functioning hand and two dead legs. Yuma had been starting the healing process by loading levels of electricity into him that made Jonah's teeth and fingers itch just by being near it. The healing first focused on a huge section rib-bone in Jack's chest that was moving opposite of his breathing pattern before it started restoring limb use. Jonah noticed the blood that covered the lower part of his mouth. Internal bleeding, Jonah noticed and moved as far from Jack as possible, just in case any extra blood came sputtering out of him. He didn’t live this long to get accidentally melted because Jack wanted to clear his throat.
“We need a plan.” Jack took a deep breath and hawked a wad of blood and spit over to the side. He didn’t notice but it started smoking immediately as it hit. He was burning through massive amounts of crackling electricity to heal himself this quickly. It would have been impossible with Yuma and the Zappa both plunging a near-constant stream of current into him.
“I can’t damage it from here with either of my guns.” She zapped a big one into Jack.
Jack took in Yuma’s words as he peered around the Terminal, “Do we actually need to kill it? We just need to get to the Bridge Core. Also, how is it still alive after being cut in half?”
“It must possess distributed intelligence, like the-”
“The mushrooms. Why the hell does everything have distributed intelligence?” Shit, he knew he should have selected that upgrade, it was absolutely an unfair advantage and he wanted it, “It’s easier when they just have a skull to crush. Without that, it just takes all the fun out of it.”
Yuma was unprepared for that comment from Jack, he hadn’t quite been so… logically bloodthirsty when they had been traveling through the labs. Still, she had been thinking of that time a lot since Jack and Jonah had returned so she had her own suggestion.
“Nano-Bomb?”
Jack’s face was stricken at the mention of Nano. He used to have Nano. He used to have so much. An entire collection of it! It looked like Jonah also knew about that pain. What he didn't understand was why Jonah was shooting him nasty looks, it’s not like it was his fault that Jonah lost his own Magno-Tubes.
“If I had a few Magno-Tubes I’d be able to make one, but how would that kill it though? Brain-rapists deserve nothing less than death.”
Jack gave him a flat look, “They aren’t mushrooms.”
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“If they can enter and speak in your head, then they have the potential to become brain rapists. Just because they have not done it yet does not mean they will not in the future. It’s better to kill them while they are still future brain-rapists.”
Yuma was still trying to settle the ‘new-Jack’ from ‘her-Jack’ before the mild mannered scientist’s exclamation sent her mind whirling further. She corrected it in her head from ‘her-Jack’ to ‘old-Jack’.
“Jonah, seriously. Who cares? It, and everything on here, including us, is going to die if we don’t get inside the Bridge Core. Who says we have to be the ones to kill it?”
“Whatever we do, I still need full Magno-Tubes to do it.”
They both turned expectant looks to Yuma.
“What? Why are you both looking at me?” She clutched her Nano instinctively. Some habits of the Labs died hard. Nano was life. Or at least granted the ability to preserve your own.
“Hand em over, Yuma.”
“Yeah meat, stop hoarding.”
She wanted to refuse, but looking in Jack and Jonah’s hard eyes left her with only two choices. The SI’s red glowing eyes weren’t helping much either. It really came down to two choices; leave their position and ruin her relationship with them… or… turn over her Magno-Tubes. She could see their eyes flickering to where she kept her own Tubes. How did they… oh no. She had shown them where they were when she protectively clutched at them.
She looked back at Jack’s eyes, there was lust, greed, loss, anger, longing, and… more, many more expressions. She handed them over and decided not to not ever share the part of her story about the entire ocean’s worth of Nano that she’d come across in the Cargo Bay; they'd probably abandon this entire section of the ship to run there the instant she told them.
----------------------------------------
Jack hefted the softball-sized ball in his hand, “What’s this supposed to do?”
Yuma pretended not to care about the conversation and refused to look at either of them. Jonah had kept looting Magno-Tube after Magno-Tube from her until she only had one left and even that one he had tried to take! She would have rather died than given it up. He wisely didn’t push the issue beyond some typical Jonah-tier grumbling.
“See that dial on the top?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well stop tossing it-” Jack deployed his shield and they huddled tight behind it and the remains of the Terminal as a violet beam swept over their position, “If you’d stop tossing it around like some toy for a ship-damned second,” he pointed, “there, on the side. That lever-”
“What about it?”
Jonah mastered himself as the SI cackled from Jack’s shoulder.
“See how it is turned now? Don’t answer! Just look and listen smoothbrai-”
Jack looked annoyed and the SI’s laughter redoubled until it wheezed. Yuma wondered if it was actually forced to breathe and then settled on the fact that SI were just insane. Even the ‘good’ ones. which she still wasn’t convinced that this one was.
“One setting will turn the Nano into a cloud of molecular shredding and the other will block energies from piercing through it.”
“Why not one or the other?”
“If you can get the bomb into its mouth, then use the shredding one, but the other one will cover us from that bea-”
“Okay, which way is which?”
“If you’d just listen properly you wouldn’t be asking me that!”
A purple beam interrupted Jack’s immediate retort.
Jack was flipping the dial back and forth.
"Electro-stupid-meat! Stop that!"
Until it got stuck. He applied more and more force to the dial to move again until Jonah slapped his hands away from it, “What are you doing? Don’t be an oaf, you’ll break it.”
“I was familiarizing myself with it. It’s, uhhh, stuck.”
Jonah flipped up his goggles to give Jack a proper glare that was matched by the SI carving a laser path into the side of Jack’s skull, “Well, it looks like you’re getting close to its mouth.”
Jack hadn’t met many things that could overpower him so far… except the giant crab. And the Cryo-SI. And the crab-master. And probably Rattigan. And Tule, even though he eventually did kick his ass, kind of. And the mushroom bois, maybe. And also… Okay, so maybe a lot of horrors on this ship were stronger than him, but he could also block them somewhat, the giant worm though? He did not want to get close to the giant worm. He was trying to be casual about it, but even blocking that, its hit had hurt a lot. He could feel his freshly-rejuvenated internal organs still whining from the impact.
Jack grabbed Yuma’s hands and put the AI Disk into it. She had been surprised when he grabbed her hands but then was distracted by his words.
“If it flashes super hot then you’re either heading in the right direction or about to die.”
The look she gave him expressed her internal thoughts so clearly that even Jack could understand them clearly without relying on his Electro-Affinity to decipher them.
“Yeah yeah, I know. Not super intuitive. I bet there’s some panel at the base of the Bridge Core that will need it to open it.”
She didn’t know that for sure, and while Jack couldn’t read a room if everyone inside it was carrying a sign, he was also pretty smart about this stuff. Now that she was thinking more about it, he also hadn’t been wrong about… well anything as far as she could tell. Yuma didn’t know if Jack had made bad calls while they were separated, but he hadn’t while they were together and she knew some of what he had gone through to make it to the Bridge. Good enough for her.
"When I go, make your way to the Bridge Core with Jonah and make sure it doesn't have some long process it needs to do to unlock it."
He read her confusion through his Affinity this time, "By the time that I get there, we probably won't have a lot of time."
She nodded and started to vibrate before ripping a crackling zapp into him to a satisfied smile that she returned. He took a long breath in and out, then jumped up, deployed his shield, and started his sprint in a long looping path to draw the great worm's focus away from the route that she and Jonah would have to take to the Core. The SI on Jack's shoulder was madly laughing and shooting lasers into the great worm's side, actually appearing to do some damage.