“Ah. Damn.” Jack pulled out a thin shard of metal from his foot. Again. Thankfully, unless the metal was jagged and pointed upward, or if it was a particularly-sharp shard of bone that he stepped on at just the wrong angle, it wouldn’t pierce through his Endurance thickened skin. He didn’t even know that was a thing but he was thankful for it.
Huh. The more you know.
“I’m picking up something ahead.”
Jack looked over at Jonah who was studying something on his portable. Jack mentally forgave him. He had been thinking that Jonah was screwing around on there. To be fair, most of the time it really seemed like he was.
“How far ahead?”
“Somewhat far and unclear, I don’t think it’s a straight path.”
Jack flipped his Affinity on then off again nearly as quickly. Thankfully he had picked up plenty of experience over the last few… well whatever it had been since he woke out of Cryo. He was used looking through his Affinity and navigating his way through the Cryo-Core had acclimated him pretty well to interpreting the somewhat unconventional sight with it, even with the brief moment. Though…
Dammit.
Jack had been right to avoid turning on his Affinity.
Normally, his natural electrical generation was pretty decent up to half-capacity or so. Below half capacity it was still unlikely to be a fast generation rate, objectively speaking, especially compared to Yuma’s, but that ‘decent’ generation rate exponentially slowed once he reached the halfway point.
That brought him to the problem of using his Affinity right now. It wasn’t a ton of electricity but it was enough to run his Affinity near constantly if he wanted. Normally, he wouldn’t have thought twice about regularly switching between it, its small drain was easy to offset even with his rate at a high charge, but now he really couldn't afford any additional drain if it could be helped.
He noticed a magnified effect on the cocoon from using any amount of his charge. It seemed like an imprecise thing so he couldn't really guess at what level that cocoon would become ineffective. Experience led him to believe that as his overall charge lowered, his body would start reacting more and more as he approached whatever the cocoon's limit was. Even that tiny speck of charge he had just used felt magnified.
Besides, he was already having a bit of a drain problem, not a big one, but he’d already had to heal the bottom of his feet several times. Thank God for small mercies, only a few drops of blood had dripped from the various small wounds. It had been too dim to see exactly what was going on but Jonah had clearly caught something he had missed and asked to collect a sample.
"Sample of what?"
Jonah looked at Jack like he was an idiot, "Your blood, of course."
He heard a sizzle and something boiling in whatever tube Jonah had caught his blood in.
“We take a right up here, then an immediate left. The tunnel should curve until we get to a larger room.”
Jack set off after giving the directions and Tule paced slightly behind him. Leanne, missing a set of toes, and Jonah were somewhat caught off guard but hurried after them at a much slower pace. After the first turn sounds started to come through, sounds of battle. Jack and Tule each cut a sharp left, now pacing next to each other.
The tunneled curved and stretched, the sounds of combat grew as they closed the distance.
Tule took the lead, then Jack, then Tule again, then they matched their pace once again.
Shoulder to shoulder they burst through the arched doorway into the room, it was some sort of factory, or factorum, of some sort. Lines of complex and almost tacked-together machinery which made a mess of general visibility.
Swarms of crabs and RatMen fought each other in brutal close-range combat. Writhing masses of small rats fought against the swarming crabs. The small rats had a slight advantage in numbers but from a quick glance it seemed like each crab was capable of fighting against three or four rats.
Then, Jack saw them, the ManRats or RatMen or whatever they were called. Short, very short and hunched, their eyes were beady and quick-twitching but still, even over the short distance, even with the brief look. Some deep instinct of his, he could tell they were clearly of Human stock. Some of them fired, or tried to fire, strange rifles with spiraling energetic projectiles with limited success. It seemed like they didn’t want to accidentally hit the machinery. When they did strike their targets the odd momentum of the rounds sank deep, ripping furrows through multiple crabs.
The ones involved in melee combat were much less risk-adverse, they flung themselves into darting, whirling, flipping movements as they launched themselves into swarms of crabs, daggers held in each hand-paw as they spun in dangerous angles. The RatMen carried a variety of melee weapons, pikes or spears seemed common too.
Jack punched Tule in the side, hard, knocking him into the wall and snarled, “You’re still Human right? You want to see Korl and Yuma again, yeah? We kill the crabs, don't forget it.”
Tule pulled himself off the wall and stood stock still, his Toothpick dropping down to his side as Jack charged off into the melee.
I… I'm still Human... Wasn’t he? That wasn’t what had stopped him from running in, he had fought through existential crises before. The RatMen were still, essentially, Human but that hadn’t stopped him before either, he had killed Humans before, enough to last him lifetimes.
Neither was it Jack’s blow to his side. He could tell that Jack’s strike hadn’t been meant to hurt him, not really. It wasn’t any of that. It was that Jack had been right, Tule would have started attacking the RatMen if he had run in there. Tule shivered minutely and scratched at his hard chitinous skin. He slowly walked into the room as the footsteps behind him busily caught up.
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Jack started with his clawblade and opened with a horizontal swipe through the mouth of a crab, he carried the crab on his blade into the mouth of another then hefted up the mass with both hands and planted it into the ground through a third. A crab leapt at his face and Jack caught it in the mouth as it tried to swallow his Gauntlet’d hand.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Not so easy this time, eh?” He laughed as he plunged his other fingers into the base of its eye-stalks. He ripped it apart with a crack and a shower of gore. The crabs were now paying attention to the new threat as the small rats scurried back to observe, unsure of who the stranger was but gladly taking the opportunity to lick their wounds or press the temporary advantage into other fights.
One smallish rat, with a fine silvery-gold pelt and unsettlingly intelligent eyes, squeaked to its surrounding companions before they scurried off. It squeezed itself in between two bits of a machine and observed the newcomer, the Man.
The crab nearest him was a big one, nearly topping his knee in size. It turned to face him as it finished off all five of the rats that were against it.
Jack grinned, he knew exactly what it was getting ready to do. Not if he moved first. His IQ kicked in to bring up one of his oldest memories and over-layered over his present, it was what happened when a crab sunk down low as it faced you. He stepped forward in a rapid one, two then cocked back his leg and fired it forward.
Jack's smile widened as he felt his Strength and Agility Allocation perfectly meld as his foot rocketed forward and the oversized crab suddenly felt an oddly-uncrablike emotion, fear. It chittered and brought up its pincer to block as Jack’s foot crushed into its defensive claw and continued on to snap the blade claw that was reinforcing it from behind.
Jack's foot wasn't done moving though and the crab’s arms ripped off from the pressure of his kick. It rocketed up and bounched off the ceiling. At that moment one of the vorpal looking projectiles from a RatMan ripped into its opened, pained mouth, blowing out a smear of guts and dropping the body into another ongoing fight somewhere out of Jack’s sight.
“Oh. Damn.” Jack looked down, his foot was inside of a pincer claw, literally. He pulled his foot out and saw the broken mangled mess of his toes. He sighed in dissapointment as he put pressure down on the foot and grimaced, he sent a burst of electricity into his foot and watched as they started to reform. He snatched up the clawblade the crab had ‘left behind' and looked around for another fight.
Electric man fight-kill all or only true-enemy? The small rat had no way to know for sure. She knew that trying to fight him was pointless, it would take far too many rats to do that.
The man’s nearly-manic gaze found the little rat hiding in her hidey-hole.
How Man see-find?!?
She froze in place, a soft vibration moving the fine machinery around her body as she started to shake. Her shaking vibrated something metallic in the contraption. The man flashed his teeth wide in a not-quite-mildly threatening gesture and made another with his fist, gripping his fingers together with the thumb pointed upwards. He picked up the crab’s claw and ran off.
Man... ally-friend of Rat?
The small creature squeezed its way out of its spot to follow Man. Before running off it kicked the machine with a small paw. Useless hidey-hole.
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Leanne finally entered the room and paused like Jack and Tule had done before her. What the 9-hells of the ship was going on here? The first thing that caught her eye were several crabs in various states of dismemberment that were being flung into the air and then splattered by an unknown type of projectile.
She saw the outline of some of the machines reflected on the ceiling in jagged quick flashes of light, somehow she knew that that whirlwind of chaos was Jack’s doing. She saw a harsher flash, that idiot is using his electricity.
She saw Tule near the edge of the fighting and nearly called out to him but stopped short as she saw him half-heartedly walk into fighting crabs and rats and start to take lazy swings. The Toothpick's properties made up for his lack of enthusiasm as it easily sliced wherever it found itself. The rats tried to attack him but Tule threw most of those away from him without killing. Most of the time.
Jonah skidded to a stop next to her, “Fascinating. The carvings were true.” His mind wandered at the possibilities. Leanne had taken in what she needed, she felt more comfortable now, “Focus Jonah, I’m not going to babysit you.” She had some stress she needed to work out, the idea of killing crabs seemed like a good fit, almost nostalgic in its own way.
She fired a shot into the open mouth of a crab and watched as the ball of plasma cored it from the inside out. Her other hand wasn’t idle as the water-pressure pistol found purchase in the smaller crabs and the larger one's softpoints. Eyes popped one after another. The water beads were incredibly difficult to see, from their perspective it must have looked like their eyes were exploding from nothing at all.
Jonah harrumphed and put away his portable. Science later, killing now. An old grizzly smile peeked on his face as he lashed a hydrophilic beam through one crab, it dropped to the floor as an dust shelled husk, and then anti-life through another, the crabs eyes turned milky white as it chittered and its movements slowed before seeming to just, give up. Interesting data. There’s no universal law that says you can’t do science and murder.
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Jack let a bigger crab pinch onto his Gauntlet, he nearly winced in pain. He felt pain through the Gauntlet, he smiled. His bare hand wouldn’t have stopped that for a fraction of a second. Apparently the crab had just reached the same concept. He used his greater mass to leverage it upwards and throw it in the air above his head.
A precise shot blew through the center of it and he slammed the crab's corpse back down on top of another then he crushed both below his foot. Those rats were pretty good shots, so far he was liking the RatMen. He ripped off another clawblade from his fresh kill. He grinned, the only redeeming factor of a crab, it had nice claws that were excellent at killing crabs.
There. He cocked his arm back and threw the clawblade forward. It lacked the precision or power he had used against the hybrids at the entrance to the Cryo-Core but in the cramped area it still worked as its off-kilter rotation sliced through two crabs outright and wounded another before planting itself into a machine. He let the wounded crab run away. He enjoyed the brief fantasy of chasing down a wounded, terrified crab back to its little crab-home maybe with its little crab-family protecting little crab-eggs and... and…
Jack looked around, landed his eyes on the small, silvery-gold pelted rat. Was that the same rat from before?
“Enjoying the show?”
He looked around, the rats seemed to all be heading in the same direction. Pulling back? Or maybe they were running toward something, he couldn’t tell.
“Hey Rat.” He whirled on the little rat who squeaked loudly and dug further into its little nook, “I’m not going to kill you, just tell me where are the crabs? What’s going on here?”
The rat squeaked at him.
I’m an idiot. It’s a rat.
Still, it seemed to have an odd intelligence in its eyes. He moved his head side to side, the way its gaze tracked him. It somewhat reminded him of looking into the eyes of a hybrid crab, like a ‘smart’ crab, but obviously less likely to be murdered by him because, well, it wasn’t a crab.
“Me friend. Rat-Friend. I want to…. Me,” he pointed to himself, "kill crab.” Jack pulled his thumb across his throat to emphasis the point. For some reason the little rat freaked out at that, mashing its body deeper into the hole.
“Oh for fu… Ok.” Jack pointed the way the rats had come from. “That way? Crabs?” It made sense, the smaller rats were running away from the crabs. It shook its little head side to side.
Jack pointed in the direction the rats had run toward. The little rat nodded. Jack paused then held out his oversized middle finger covered by his Gauntlet.
The Rat squeaked then slowly placed a paw on the glove, it rippled and Jack felt a sense of curiosity that came from… his hand? The Rat squeaked then sniffed his Gauntlet. Jack saw a RatMan flung, broken across a machine. A couple rows over and down quite a bit. He took off.
The little rat squeaked in indignation at Jack’s sudden withdrawal of his hand. She had been about to climb on but this was all quite terrifying. Really, she just needed a few more seconds. That glove he wore, that was more interesting than scary. Still scary though. It seemed as curious about her as she was about it. She hoped she wasn’t wrong about sending him toward her kin.