Jack finished his loop away from Jonah and Yuma’s position and cut an approach toward the giant worm. At a violet burst, he wrapped himself behind his shield and managed to only take surface flays before pushing off the ground and continuing to close the distance.
He locked eyes with Mr. Lee, the Clan Head, who had appeared and was making his own sprint toward the great worm, white sword burning hot and too bright to look at.
Jack then looked at Korl and shook his head. He wasn’t exactly sure why he did that, whether it was because he didn’t want help from Tule’s protegee or that the kid would probably get himself killed.
He dove to the side to dodge a beam then pushed up with arms and legs when the it didn't fade and swept to the side, he barely touched the ground before continuing to close the distance. Lee got in first and cut a long burning stretch before continuing to carve through it in a flip to the other side of its oversized body.
He closed the final distance in a burst of speed before turning to throw the Nano-bomb into its mouth. The purple glow had him hunker tight behind his shield at the last moment. His surroundings faded into a harsh violet as the beam swept over him. Jack got a close range look at his energy shield shedding molecular layers one after another, some base intelligence in its design had layered ultra-thin layers of energy atop one another that protected against the flaying energies.
It stopped and Jack launched up to slam the Nano-bomb home through its mouth.
A sea of small worms vomited from the worm's mouth to drown him before sending him flying still stuck the writhing mass. The worms were unsuccessful in invading his body, but they did provide a cushion between himself and steel.
“How am I supposed to get this thing inside of it?”
“Meat, meat, meat… Just cut a hole in it. Also secure that damned bomb or you’re going to lose it.”
He squashed some of the remaining worms before looking at Trash in surprise.
“Yeah, good point.” Electric stores at near-half now, he took a beat to secure the bomb in his webbing of belts and charged back in.
It went the same as before, dodging, twisting, and blocking. Not as agile as Lee or Korl, so he was forced to burn some electricity to get around to its back side. He burned another burst of current to boost his backwards held sword and have it puncture deep to slice into its backside. It drove deep as it pierced the thick hide of the great worm before the big thing swung and spun him around the hilt of his blade, landing him on top of its ‘tail’.
It didn’t matter if he was on the ground or riding it, he continued to slice the hole deeper and wider-
“Stupid Meat! Put it in!”
Jack had been too focused on cutting it apart. He scrabbled his hand toward his belt loop, then felt a moment of weightlessness, before the tail slammed into the ground and sent him a dozen feet into the air. The follow up whipping strike of its tail sent him spiraling up, far toward the ceiling.
Shit. It was high up, worse yet, he was going to hit it. Hard.
The impact came and a burning pain from his hand arrived at the same moment. His head stopped spinning a few moments later and he followed the pulling feeling of gravity on his arm, then saw his left hand… melted into the steel of the ceiling.
“Lucky meat, I can’t believe that your shitty AI only gave me 0.49%.”
“Trash, did you do this?”
“Of course, otherwise you’d have been looney tuned dead from the impact.”
“Can you carve me another grip? Also, what the hell is ‘looney tuned’?”
Trash rolled his mad-eyes and then charged them up for a few seconds before carving a new hole that Jack pushed his singular Gauntlet finger into. Now that he wasn’t just hanging by a flesh-steel fuzed bit of flesh, he took a moment to think.
He felt bad. “Where’s Yuma?” Trash charged a laser shot into his eyes, but didn’t fire, Jack followed where the SI was looking. Oh shit. Wait, he was actually on the ceiling. That was far down, maybe 200 hundred feet. He was high up enough to make it dizzying. He focused on looking at the battlefield; the Clan alternating between firing, hiding, and changing positions for better angles on the worm, more Humans streaming into the Bridge… It wasn't a good sign that most seemed glad to enter the death-zone of the great worm. Like they were running from something.
Lee and Korl were still engaged in shifting close combat but looked a lot slower than they did before. He thought it might have been the new perspective that changed his perception of their speed, their fate wasn't important though. The Bridge Core. Halfway down the room from the ceiling was about 100 feet, he felt confident that he could drop right down on top of it and could survive that. Probably.
“Can you cut handholds for me to swing toward the Core?” He’d need maybe 50 or so handholds to get close enough to swing his way close enough to drop onto it. Probably less now that he was actually thinking about it.
“Each handhold takes too long. We’re out of time, meat. You need another way down.” Trash sounded distracted like the SI was desperately calculating… something.
I gotcha boy. Hand ‘er over.
Jack didn’t want to, but if the other guy had a solution… Well, alright, but he needed more electricity to do that. He was basically tapped after healing from the impact of landing up here and too dizzy to stop it before it drained him.
“Trash. Signal Yuma, I need a charge.”
"Can't you already communicate with the other electro-meat?"
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
“Can’t signal her, no current.”
Trash lazered a slightly vibrating beam that cut in front of a tiny figure that was approaching the Core. A few, then more and more lightbars came flashing up to sink inside of him.
“Have her keep sending…”
Now able to easily afford the cost of keeping the connection between them open, Jack abandoned his request and continued to send her his need for more, more!
More light bars shot upward in a staccato wave. Yuma had stopped moving toward the Core and retreated behind a Terminal to keep sending lightbars into him.
Jack cracked his neck as he started to get hot at the quantities of electricity that were starting to flow through him. It was growing uncomfortable but he kept it all inside. He started to shift and twitch, he bit his lip until it bled then healed then started bleeding again, then he bit a chunk off and it regrew. His molars cracked and his mouth spasmed open to gulp great breaths of air. Trash started to twitch as stray current involuntarily pumped into the SI before it stepped away from its perch on Jack's shoulder, clattering its crab-legs directly onto the ceiling.
He didn’t notice as more and more lightbars continued to pump into him, they were reduced in number and were slowing. Since there wasn’t enough pain and immediate threat, he needed a lot of current to bridge the g… There was a shift that sent Trash moving along the wall to stay behind Jack, out of sight.
"Haaaaa," I finally was able to breathe.
----------------------------------------
“Yuma, what’s going on?”
She had spent everything that she had saved up and more; her nerves and muscles still errantly twitched as she laid on the floor. The continual movement she had forced on her body had been frantic and exhausting, all to build more and more charge. Then, over the wire they shared, she felt the shift and finally understood Jack on a much deeper level than before, what had been going on with him. It wasn't that Jack was unstable, though it objectively was; right now, Jack wasn’t Jack.
“What is that fool doing?” Jonah was twisting his goggles back and forth and clicking buttons on their side.
“What’d he do?”
“He just threw away the Nano-Bomb!”
Yuma squinted far above, details only possible through her level of Perception. Then, she didn’t have to squint anymore as small electrical novas pumped outward from where Jack was hanging.
“Yuma, get up, we have to get to the Core.”
She wanted to resist, and she could have as Jonah found himself lightly-electrocuted as he tried to pull her up by the arm. She took over his futile efforts and pulled herself to her feet as they started to resume their journey. They were close, very.
A expanding literal wave of electricity burst out from a point on the ceiling as Jack launched himself toward the great worm below. At the same moment, a powerful red laser shot down from the ceiling ahead of him to a point on the worm’s hide along his trajectory.
The air boomed as Jack led with his Gauntleted-fist first and plunged through the laser-softened flesh of the worm. Everyone paused for a long, stunned second before the fight resumed as it had been in the prior second. The worm attacking and being attacked.
Though, after being knocked away, the Clan Head and Korl did not reapproach the worm.
Yuma stumbled in shock before Jonah pulled at her, or tried to as he picked up a hot spark of electricity from her.
“Damned girl, will you just get a move on already?”
“Jack… is he… he’s-”
“Obviously he’s not dead, he’s tried harder than that to kill himself before.”
Yuma looked and could tell that, despite his words, Jonah wasn’t entirely sure. Their building concern proved unfounded as the connection between the two electro-meats thrummed and a gout of electricity and writhing flesh pushed out of the great worm before a hand grabbed Jack’s black rat-sword from its hide and ripped it back into the great worm’s body.
Punctures and slices started to appear from inside as near-liquid electricity poured out from the internal wounds. As she moved, Yuma pumped near-every extra shot into the gaps in its flesh. Some of the lightbars dissipated over intact portions of its hide, but enough others made it inside, presumably to help Jack.
Korl and Clan Head Lee still chose to stay away.
She noticed that the far Door, the one they had first entered the Bridge through, had been closing. Who had started that process?
The massive Door panels blew open to either side as she saw the reason why- before they made it around the pillar and she put the AI Disk on the top of the HandPad.
----------------------------------------
The doors spun and crashed through the room as they wiped out entire groupings and sent everyone else scrambling to deeper cover. Some were able to see the laser grid appear on the worm’s hide before a flash of intensity cut squared lines deep into its alien hide. The great worm continued to thrash and sent a violet beam toward the source of its newest pain. A whine was heard before multiple layers of blue-shielding popped up and the beam only managed to strip a few of them away before it cut off.
The laser grid flashed again and a third time in quick succession as the great worm was cut deeper, then finally, was cubed into heaping chunks of flesh. Heat vents opened up on the newcomer's back that rippled and warped the air.
The holder of the Clan’s last thermoelectric missile had been waiting on-edge, long enough and had already sent the missile streaking toward the newest threat. The succession of overpowered laser-grid fire required to dice the worm and the necessary overshielding to block its final beam attack overheated the capacitors. Backup defense-net projectile constructs spooled up to intercept the missile and kill the attacker and they succeeded at ensuring the originator of the missile was turned into thick, chunky jelly, but the missile had gotten far too close before it was stopped and a bloom of electrically-stimulated absolute-cold spread from the missile's last location. As the absolute cold reached the looming figure and its currently venting ports, the capacitors cracked and blew apart under the strain of the sudden temperature change. The electrical explosions and deep chill of the air did not cause the figure to so much as stumble.
Its voice boomed through the room, deafening the closest that were somehow still alive after its defensive constructs had spooled down.
“Conventional weapons then... Reconfiguring Loadout, Prerequisite Notification of Enforcement… I am the Head of Security. You are all in violation of ship-board protocols. Mutinous Crew Detected. Malicious Alien Lifeforms Detected. Local Security Personnel forces Detected. Failure of Security Personnel to repress Mutinous Crew while still maintaining Current Operational Status of ‘Active and Alive’ is deemed... Unacceptable. Current Survival Status of Security Personnel is Failure. Failure is death.”
Those that weren’t deafened at this point could hear the glee pick up in the layered mechanical voice, “Ship Original Mission has passed requisite failure metrics. Mathematical Constraints for Ship-Wide Purge have reached the threshold. Loadout... Reconfigured.”
Something far above started to drop.
“Purge Initiat-”
“Oi! Who the fuck are you?”
Jack, covered in one open-looking wound, started to crackle with electricity, and the Head of Security, a 15-foot tall cyborg covered in weapons and made in the uncanniest valley of the least-human-looking configuration possible, stared at each other across a stretch of room.
“Run idiot-meat!”
The HoS’s arm cannon launched something the equivalent size of a tank shell at booming speed as red laser fire temporarily blinded the cyborg in the same moment. The oversized tank-round and an oversized falling head impacted into each other at an angle, the head bouncing off into the distance of the room while redirecting the round into the floor at Jack’s feet instead of through his body.
The explosion sent Jack flying and skipping across the room bleeding excess electricity as his body used it up to heal him between impacts.
The room exploded into a renewal of chaos.