First she heard steps as they drew closer. Then, multiple sets of them. She grit her teeth.
She mentally checked her gear; plasma and water pistol, long knife, throwing knives. Ok, she was ready. Both pistols leveled outward. Almost… almost…
“Tule?” Her pistols dropped fractionally, “What’s going on with you? Let’s get out of here.”
He looked up as his feet trudged forward, his eyes were glassy. No, worse than that, they were alien. Wrong.
Behind him walked out two other hybrids. The one that looked kind of like Jack and the other one, the one Jack had called ‘Devin.’ Devin had Tule’s Toothpick in one of his human-hands.
“Tule? Are you going to answer me?”
Tule turned his head toward the side the same distant alien look even more pronounced, “This one is Tule. More than him… now.”
This had definitely been a bad idea. Maybe she should have kept running. No, the double-backing, triple-backing, diversions. She had been lost for a while. There was no way back.
“Listen Tule, I don’t-” She started firing gouts of plasma and tiny hyper-pressurized beads of water toward the trio. Tule swayed out of the plasma but into the path of a water-bead that drove deep into one of his eyes, popping it in a small spurt of viscera. The Tule-shaped hybrid let loose a chittering scream. The plasma partially splashed across Jack’s crab-lookalike. She was moving backward now as she continued to fire, she couldn’t feel the heat build up from the plasma, those nerves were already dead.
Both Devin and Tule charged at her, the third didn’t move after flicking off the sticky flames. Water beads pinged off Devin’s pincer, plasma stuck but looked to be burning slowly. Some damage was better than none. She switched her focus to covering them in plasma, the building whine ignored by the narrowing focus of combat, drowned by the sound of her heartbeat.
Both crabs chittered and screamed then the whining, tinnitus background noise stopped suddenly, her hand was gone. A stump remained, instantly cauterized. It pushed against her pain limiter but it held, shakily. She dove to the side and missed Tule’s wild tackle. She fired her water pistol driving beads into the center of Devin’s skull, it cracked the surface chitin but didn’t make it through.
A swing of the Toothpick and a dodge had her water pistol severed in half but she had already let it go. Devin’s swing and the lack of resistance sent him off balance and she planted her long knife into the back of his knee, where she suspected the chitin was thinner. She was right.
With a twist and a vicious rip she pulled it out and sent him sprawling. He tried to twist and swing at her again but his knee refused to hold weight and she was easily out of his reach.
She faced Tule, “Tule… we can still leave, right now. You have people waiting for you. Korl. Yuma. Let’s leave right now.”
Tule stared at her again, this time she thought she saw something more Human in them. A sort of sadness, a sense of helplessness that seemed incredibly at odds with the man she had briefly known.
The third crab called out from behind her and she flinched, she had forgotten about that one. It’s three words erased the Humanity from his eyes, “Tule! Master’s orders.”
At ‘Master’ Tule started to shake, nearly vibrate. Now Devin was standing up, the both of them looking increasingly feral. Unfortunately his knee didn’t seem to be bothering him as much as it had been seconds ago. She held her knife under her arm and kept her hand free.
Tule leapt at her and she threw a knife that entered his eye socket and knocked his leap into an uncoordinated crash. Devin stalked close, moving slower than the feral Tule. She dropped into a crouch desperately looking for advantage, Tule started to stir in the edges of her vision.
Leanne grit her teeth, if she wasn’t the aggressor… She threw knives at Devin as she closed the gap, a couple were deflected but a few more found purchase as she closed. She weaved around the Toothpick and plunged her knife into the joint of the arm holding it. It stuck fast and deep. She abandoned it there and started punching in and out of the hybridized man with a sharp throwing knife held in hand. He slashed out with jagged fingertips and heavy strikes from his bladeclaw. Her limiter shuddered at each hit. She burned Agility and Dex Nano to keep her edge. It was now a knife-fight.
Something slammed into her side, she screamed in anger as sharp fingers of chitin drove inside of her, but didn’t stop. She continued her assault on Devin, trading blows and strikes, throwing knives no longer being removed but boosted by burnt Str Nano, plunged deep into hardened, crabby flesh. She ignored the fingers ripping into her ribs. She elbowed Tule who was busy ravaging her side and used her crippled hand to deflect a spearing clawblade away from her heart but not entirely as it planted into her chest.
The limiter quailed before shattering and her sight was filled with red, a new scream of rage and hate and pain mixed together, greater than their parts as her Nano-enhanced adrenals flooded her body with twitchy adrenaline. She didn’t stop producing new blades to plant into Devin's body, she twisted and wedged a new knife against her planted long knife and one of his arms flew off in a sickening pop. She hardly felt anything, her vision dangerously narrowed. She slammed a knife into his the spot in his cracked forehead but it slipped and slid across his skin until it found purchase into an eye socket and slammed home. It wouldn’t drive further in the moment she had.
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It was already forgotten as she slammed her elbow into Tule digging into her side and drew another knife. She was driven half-mad by the pain, the fear, the regret. It swelled as she continued to drive knives into her prey. She was the hunter here. Not this crab-filth.
A new, deeper tear into her side, now her chest cavity necessitated response as she wildly swung across her body and finally felt the smallest blessing as her throwing knife plunged past the chitin and into Tule’s neck.
Prepared to rip it she felt clarity sweep through her mind. She looked down and saw that Tule had pulled Devin’s clawblade from the right side of her chest across it and through her heart. Mere Human flesh had offered little resistance to the oversize clawblade. Hot, bright red blood sprayed out as it misted her surroundings in a red tinge. She looked up and saw Tule looking at her through his remaining eye. Blood and ichor spurted in barely restrained squirts from either side of the knife planted in the side of his neck.
“I’m sorry Leanne.”
Her first attempt to speak ended before it began as a gush of blood rushed from between her lips. She looked at him and smiled, a sense of peace coming across her face. He seemed comforted by that gesture. Blood filled her mouth again. She spit it into his face and laughed as her eyes emptied.
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Tule froze. The Human-part of his mind, fragile as it was, cracked even more. The hollowness of his own eye matched Leanne’s.
Her body was thrown to the ground in a slump.
A gurgle, “That fucking bitch.”
Devin crawled up and screamed at the third hybrid who had not joined the battle.
It walked up slowly and stared at the Human, now lying pitifully among the detritus. The smile refused to fade from her face. She was missing a hand, her side spilled open as organs sought to escape. She had a great tear moving at an angle through her chest to her heart where she had died. The smile refused to fade from her lips.
Why did Humans fight like this? It didn’t make sense to the creature. They didn’t feel the Call of the Progenitor. They were alone. They didn’t have a Master. If they had no master, then what purpose drove them? Why did they hate crabs so? Why did Jack hate this one? The crab had long regrown his arms but that last question had remained foremost.
He turned to Devin, “You should have left the fight to Tule.”
“That cripple? He’s no better than a beast most of the time. Look at what that bitch did to me!”
It did see. Devin was entirely missing his right Human arm, down to the base. An eye had been replaced with one of the woman’s small knives and was joined by a dozen others all jammed to various depths around his body. Devin was trying to remove them but was unable to remove some of the deepest. His pincer had been heavily damaged alongside a large crack in his skull, not to mention the various burn marks and cracked chitin that covered the rest of his body. She would have absolutely killed him if Tule hadn’t acted.
Tule was slumped on his knees staring at her body. The mancrab moved to pull him up but stopped itself. Some part of it instinctively knew that Tule needed this moment. It went over to Devin and helped remove the knives from his body. It ignored the constant cursing and the spit that Devin directed toward her body.
A flash of spit crossed Tule vision and he swept up the Toothpick, knocked the third hybrid aside, and brought the quivering blade to Devin’s throat.
He chittered in an unhinged yell right in his face as the Toothpick gently started to vibrate against the chitin.
“Win with honor.”
Devin was a bit scared now that Tule seemed less… empty. He had been near constantly badmouthing Tule to his face, “She spit on you!”
Tule looked back at Leanne’s body, “...she would have been right to do more. And… she is dead.”
Tule gave him a look that clearly communicated that if Devin wanted to spit more he could also do so, at the cost of his life.
The Jack-looking hybrid, that fact was still unsettling to Tule, turned its head somewhere into the distance.
“These ones need to leave.”
“What do y-” Tule paused as he turned his head to hear it too, “You are correct. We need to leave. Now.”
Tule stood up and looked over his charred skin.
“We need to eat her first! To recover.”
Tule did consider that but it was obvious, “It’s not worth it, she has already burnt most of her Nano.” Her blurring strikes and her crumpled form spoke of a lack of Nano as well as compromised body integrity from burning too much Nano. There was little sustenance that would make the act worth the effort or the delay.
Devin debated spitting on Leanne again but noticed the Toothpick was gone. He saw it in Tule’s hands then looked up, ready to demand its return. He stopped when he saw the look in Tule’s eye and settled on retrieving his severed arm. He petulantly took a bite of it.
They departed.
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Yuma and the Clan had found the Cargo-SI. It had been stashed into a storage container deep below the massive piles. Beneath the city of freaks. What a disaster. It had started shortly after meeting the girl… to this. They probably should have just risked the wrath of the Admin-SI and asked her to unlock a different Door.
The Cargo-SI was a pitiful, broken thing. By the time they had carried it back to the Door the best it could, or would, do was manipulate a series of storage containers with the ceiling cranes. At least at night they could rest inside a container well above the floor instead of being forced to fight when the lights went out as the Bay followed its day/night cycle.
Still, it wouldn’t relent on its assigned ‘mission’ of wiping out the creatures, it would only start sobbing incoherently when asked. It didn’t even fight back when they had tried torturing it. There was less than zero hesitation in making that decision. The hardest part was making sure not to kill it in the process and choosing who would do it. Everyone had volunteered.
Not seeing any result from that they had then tried to kill it to invalidate the conditions of the Door but its burst and wrecked scraps had merely sunk into the Nanosteel of the floor. The conditions to exit through the Door had remained unchanged. Kill them all.
The sea of liquid Nano was the key. First, it needed to be drained. Fortunately, they had managed to extricate control of the cranes from the SI before it had ‘died’.
Someone had said, like draining the ocean with a cup. It felt like that.