Yuma had been waiting for the moment. The woman who had followed her, Cura, weird name but that was normal for the Labs, was good. The two pistols she had pulled out shot high-speed metal bearings, some sort of low-power railgun, maybe. The bullets were tiny but if you punch enough holes in a thing's head, no matter how tiny, it’ll still die.
Her magazines were large and curved but she was down to her last two. The bullets couldn’t pierce through their pincers, in fact they didn’t perform particularly well unless it was an especially soft spot.
Fortunately for her the crabmen couldn’t help but keep their mouths open; unfortunately for her, they quickly learned to cover their heads and mouths with their pincers unless they were close enough to attack.
She let another crab get close before it moved its arms to attack. She cut loose a full-metal jacketed stream and it punched into the crabs mouth before it dropped, twitching, to the floor.
She looked over the rest of the group as she was undisturbed for the moment. Kala and her group had started close to her, but were falling back as the cyclicly expanding and shrinking horde of man-crabs chased their group across the room. Their group had picked up some wounds and the loud woman with the big gun looked like shit.
She heard “Yu” shouted out, loud. She froze as the memory of the Cryo-Bay rushed back in before hearing the following “fuck!”
She breathed a sigh of relief as she saw Jack busy stomping a pincer closed over the throat of an armless crab, cutting off its head. Sounds of laughter and joy spread across the room throughout it.
She looked at the blood slopping after him, it looked like his blood was desperately fighting against the coursing electricity to leave his body, it sparked and flashed as it hit the ground. She was glad he was alive, but couldn’t he survive less, she didn’t know the word. Less insanely? She continued her visual sweep.
Near him she saw the boy named Korl fighting with two swords, one floating around him as he picked off individual crabs.
At least Jack hadn’t tried to kill him yet. She saw Korl struggle to break through a crab with 3 pincers and he redirected the shelled monstrosity to Jack, who laughed at he jammed his finger into one of its eye sockets from behind and pulled it to the ground. He punched away the pincers as he stomped his foot over and over into its face. He stomped his way through the pincers attempting to ward off his foot.
Still laughing. She blanched a bit as she dragged her eyes away.
Tule was trading blows with three crabs, defensively fighting to protect the man behind him on the floor who was treating his wounds. The corpses of crabs around the duo spoke to their recent success.
She dodged to the side, shot through the inside of another crab’s mouth, rolled to dodge a follow up attack, then saw Kala’s group of crabs start to peel off and reinforce the other crabs. She ran towards the Terminal on the opposite side. The woman read her actions and supported her.
She reached it, swatted away the blue disk on the Terminal, and replaced it with the green-glowing AI disk.
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I grabbed a scrabbling crab by its foot and started to spin, I released it and it flew towards the blue dome. It passed through and it fell lifelessly to the ground. Not bloody, not good.
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The Sentinel
“Up up! On your feet. Reposition next to the Core door!”
The Dome was down and the Monitors were rushing towards the next set of Terminals at the door to the Core. She didn’t think they were responsible for taking down the dome. She wondered if perhaps it was a group on the other side. She dismissed the consideration, she dealt in facts and the fact was that they now needed to breach the Core regardless of who had been responsible.
She looked back to the Clan Head resting with his back against the wall, eyes closed. Surrounding him was a circle of her Sentinels and whatever remained of his personal Guard.
He sat cross legged with his hands together in his lap. In his palms was a mass of Nano-Trace, occasionally, bits of it would light up and pull into his skin. He was trying to aspect raw Nano-Trace. Incredibly inefficient, it was the only choice without a hacked Terminal.
They had already tried to hack the ones on the wall, they had gotten through one of them but apparently they were incapable of modifying Nano.
She scanned the room, nothing seemed ready to go off. She had kept the Monitor from earlier next to her.
“Anything happening in the walls?”
“No, Sentinel. The walls feel dead,” he paused. “There is something coming from inside the Core but there’s a lot of interference. Whatever it is, it’s big.”
“Any idea what it is?”
“Apologies Sentinel, I couldn’t even start to guess.”
She chewed the bottom of her lip, she didn’t like guesses, but she preferred them to vague warnings. In her world, she didn’t like either.
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After the dome went down and fights finished up around the room, the horde after Kala's group started to face concentrated fire as anyone with a ranged weapon opened up into the back of the grouping. The crabs were focused on blocking and closing the gap with Kala’s exhausted group so the additional fire easily pierced through the sides and back of the crabs pincer-shelled defense.
That sent them into a panic and they scattered, some heading towards the, now closed, portals. The SI refused to open them. Another few, their shelled backs protecting them from the fire coming from behind tried to scratch their way through the massive doors to the Core.
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I moved myself in the way of the fire pouring onto the crabs, I lifted my shield to block the fire coming from behind and stared at the Humans that dared to continue. They knew they were wrong, but first, it was time to treat myself. I smiled.
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With a gurgle and a ‘shunk,’ I aimed the bladeclaw in my hand and rammed it under a crab’s back shell and pinned it to the door.
“Why are you running? You looked so confident before!” I reached and pulled back on the pinned crab’s claw-blade and peeled it back until it released its grip on its arm with a comforting snap.
It was a good question, did I prefer the snap or the cry afterwards? I wouldn’t have to leave the question unanswered. That was a nice thought.
I focused on the cry as I snapped off the next blade from a crab. Both, it was definitely both. I moved to the next in line.
The last one saw it coming and turned to attack me. I dodged its flashing bladeclaw.
I snapped a straight left punch into its head and a ring sounded out as its shell hit the wall. I kept punching and Bashing it into the wall. Its body didn’t look like it would hold up that long so I switched my focus, punching the joints connecting its arms to its body.
The crab let a human-like groan escape from its crab mouth and a gush of feel good shot through my head, disturbing the slowly calming sea of hate. I continued.
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Everyone had dragged, hobbled, and walked their way over to the door, giving Jack space as he punched and Bashed the crab into the door over and over again.
“Isn’t he tired yet? I’m beat.”
“Well most the blood over there is his… so maybe?”
“Wait all that fucking blood is his? Shit what’s this guy’s deal?”
“Yeah it’s a little intense.”
A gong sounded out as the crab’s shell hit the door, again. It was followed by a crack as Jack punched off one of its pincer arms and continued to methodically beat bits of the crabs life from its body.
Yuma waited off to the side of the group. All had made it, not uninjured; the man who was with Tule was alive but it looked like his fight was done. Maybe Jack could do something with his Medjel.
She was hesitant to move forward with all the attention directed there but, well, the surrounding conversation was turning less and less positive.
She wasn’t sure if he would turn and try to attack her but she had to try something. She slowly walked from the group and approached from behind him.
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Bah, it was over, the crab had switched to tears, like that’d make a difference it was hilarious seeing it cry. I didn't even know crabs could cry. The only thing I felt was my gut burn in disgust. These fucking crabs think they can just cry and what? I’d let it all go?
I laughed at the absurdity and drove another a straight left into its neck, something snapped and popped.
I sensed someone behind me, an outline of them visible in my mind. Their electricity felt familiar, I could see it pushing out from their heart. A memory rose from beneath the sea…
I tried to fight it off but met resistance and the memory swept through.
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“Hey.”
“Hey what?”
“Are you… ok?” It was followed by a long silence. He was about to say never mind and try again later.
“My Dad, my family… gone.”
He didn’t have the memories or EQ to handle this conversation. “What did happen back there?”
“They’re gone, dead.”
That’s not what he meant, “That’s obv… that’s not what I meant.” He waved his hands around his surroundings, “this, what the fuck is going on here? The crabs, the everything, it’s nuts.”
She had mumbled something in the middle of his rant.
“What?”
“It wasn’t always this bad.”
“Honestly I can’t picture that. So you’ve always lived here?”
“Duh.”
This wasn’t working, another way then.
“So that was where your family lived?”
She started sobbing again at that question. So not that way either.
“Is there any way any of them survived?”
“No. I don’t know, maybe. Probably not.”
“Ok, well I promise we’ll try and find them.”
“Yeah I remember your last promise.”
Jack laughed and he felt her shift her weight away from his back, he guessed she was staring at the back of his head. She turned to rest her back against his again and she felt him shrug his shoulders behind her.
“How was I supposed to know you were gonna cut off your own lips? You’re crazy!”
She zapped him then forestalled his complaints by preemptively shushing him. He humphed and a soft, delicate laugh came from behind him, “and you call ME crazy.”
Jack didn’t know what she was getting at, “What do you mean by that?”
He was distracted from her response as he picked up the excess charge jump from her into him. It was an odd feeling, like he was acting as an overflow sump for her charge.
He could distinguish each beat, or Zapp, of her heart. He wasn’t sure if it beat like a normal heart anymore. He hopped his awareness into a stream of current that flowed through her. He followed the electricity as it swept through her body.
It felt fundamentally different than his electricity. His felt like each cell had a tiny battery inside of it. Anytime he used the stored electricity the current would flow from other unused, high-electrical storage areas to the drained low-electrical pressure until it equalized across his body.
He observed that she received some amount of cellular rejuvenation from cycling electricity, but it was different. Not as potent as his electrical rejuvenation, but her electrical generation rate was way higher than his, the amount running through her at any one time was intense.
It was one thing to know it but now seeing and understanding how the electricity was necessary for her to live, it was fascinating. With this in mind he hopped his awareness into the next beat of electricity as it flowed through.
He followed this beat through to the heart as well as he could, it was a complicated mess of heart flesh and technology, and onwards into the lungs where the electricity propelled the fresh red blood cells to distribute oxygen through her body. It was fascinating how her body used electricity. He flowed his awareness to catch the next beat of her heart to follow it back to the source.
“…have at least a dozen versions of you in there.”
He missed a lot but not the last part, “What? No I don’t.”
“Fine, not a dozen but it’s definitely more than one.”
Her words made him feel uncomfortable and his head hurt as he tried to think about it, so, he didn’t.
He caught a ride upstream back into her body as more of the excess current was dumped into him. She vibrated herself slightly every time she did that, it was like she had to use some of the prior electricity to jump-start her heart after it cycled out of her.
There was something wrong with her heart, there was an outlet that didn’t lead anywhere, it just dumped harsh electricity into a toxic looking pool. He studied it for a few moments as he watched the pool build up. He felt her move some of the excess zapp into his back and the electrical tide receded. So she couldn’t really store extra electricity. Interesting.
He gently tugged at the line leading to the dumping pool and felt a reverberation between her homemade electro-constitution body and his own affinity.
She felt it too as she jumped up. His vision turned white and he fell backwards, onto the floor. After a few moments his vision started to kick back in. Yuma was looking down at him, hands on her hips, shaking slightly, or maybe vibrating. It was hard to tell. She looked him in the eyes.
He hadn’t noticed it before, but she did have pretty eyes. Her eyes were actually blue, but such a dark blue they appeared almost black. In the depths he could see, or sense, tiny motes of electrical light sparking through them. He tried to dive into the electricity swimming in her eyes but his attention was pulled back by her finger now positioned above his forehead.
She was blushing as she sent a shock through her finger.
He spasmed and clutched his forehead, “Ow, what the hell! What did you do that for?”
“I should ask you what you were doing in my body!”
Well, now that he thought about it, it did seem like something you should probably ask someone before you do it.
“Ah yeah, it’s weird,” he sat up eyes closed, “like right now I can tell that you are staring at me. I can even tell that you’re staring at the back of my head. It’s weird.”
He felt her reach her hand toward his back, but he was too slow and she released another zapp into him.
“Well good for you, stop being creepy.”
“Not creepy,” in immediate response she cut in with her own ‘definitely creepy’, “let’s just find the comm relay room.”