On a whim, he asked the Terminal AI to analyze the crab claw-blade for him.
A Claw-Blade, the front leg of a [Non-Standard] Crustacean. This unusual bladed claw’s sharpness is superior on its own and its capacity for lifeform damage is aided by a biological-anticoagulant sheath covering the blade itself.
Almost as useful against Crustaceans as it is against Humans.
Comparative Analysis Unavailable.
He had experience with the anticoagulant properties. Looking at his forearm he was surprised that the wound he took on his arm from the last crab’s claw-blade had stopped bleeding and was surprisingly making good progress to closing itself. Reviewing his Personnel Status and Skill Developments he found what he thought was responsible. With the broken Zappa and the electricity flowing through him to maintain the shield it must have been slowly healing him. A quick body check showed that the places he missed applying Medjel to were well on their way to closing. The holes in his sides had fully closed with brutal electric-looking scarring. His shoulder felt better but was still locked tightly and had limited range of movement with the hardened Medjel. Healing seemed faster with electricity but the wounds healed cleaner with Medjel.
He continued his experiment with the Medjel shell. He flicked the shell over his former thumb and it felt hard as steel. He couldn’t cut through it but as he tried to pry it off the tearing pain that came from his thumb made him stop. Thinking for a second longer he took out the baby tote, the shield attachment, and the roll of gauze.
A few minutes later, proud of his handiwork, he had carefully sliced a shallow “X” into the back of his right hand and attached the flat disk-like shield attachment to it. The Medjel wouldn’t stick and harden properly if there wasn’t “damage” for the Medjel to stick to it. Without any active wounds, it could be peeled off relatively easily. Relative being, well, relative. It still stuck pretty well. He ended up using some of the gauze and Medjel to attach the Zappa on the inside of his forearm, just below his wrist. He originally was going to cut his palm and stick the Zappa to it but he might need to use the hand, crippled as it was or if potentially he had to repeat the same trick he used against the last crab. He looked at it for a few seconds then looked away from the messy alternating layers of gauze and Medjel holding it there.
Testing it he found he had a lot more flexibility in positioning the shield that emitted from the attachment. It also emitted much closer to his arm than it did to his chest. He figured that it must be because it was originally designed for a gauntlet. The constant need to shake his arm to keep the shield going was probably going to be a problem at some point but like anything else as of late, it was likely good enough to get him through alive, if not uninjured.
He had asked the Terminal about the lights and whether it was because of the size of the creature or if it was bio-locked to Humans. Being a Local Terminal AI, it didn’t have an answer for him. He didn’t feel like the Terminal AI was justified in refusing to answer any other questions after being forced to admit that it didn’t have the answer about the lights but he already had a hunch that the Local AI was what it liked to call [Non-Standard].
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He squeezed out of his room and closed the door. This time he tried the opposite direction, at least until he could see around the bend for a look. Pausing, he strained his hearing to its limits. The sound he picked up sounded like faint white noise. Listening closer he could definitely hear it but in the metal tube of a corridor he couldn’t tell from which direction it was coming.
He reached the corner and looked around it. Down and far, far away, beyond his cone of vision granted by the blue ceiling lights, in the deep dark in the distance he could see a blinking light. It would blink faster and then slower at what seemed random intervals. He strained every ounce of his Senses. The light was getting brighter. No. It WAS getting closer.
The distance and relatively slow speed, whether that was from actual speed or from the sheer distance he couldn’t tell. It gave him a cushion of time to settle his thoughts for a few moments. There were only a few possibilities, it was either; another person, a large crab, or a lot of smaller crabs.
In the next few seconds, he had reasoned it out.
It could be a bunch of little crabs that have enough mass to trip the sensors despite their smaller size.
It could be a new type of crab, a much bigger crab. A crab the size of a person wasn’t a comforting thought. If only it was the size of a person.
The third option was the most unknown and not necessarily a positive. Those lights were blinking pretty quickly, if it was a person they must be going close to a full sprint.
Sprinting, in this place? Why would another Human, in this place, be moving that fast? He had a few guesses and none of them were along the lines of “because they like to run fast.” They were more in line with “running because, and from, a crab-based pursuit.”
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He turned back down the corridor at a steady jog, shield activating and swinging as he slowly pumped his arms. After passing his room and the other Personnel room, he expected to find another doorway. He did not. He eventually had to slow down his loping jog to carefully place footsteps on the progressively slimier ground, as far as he was concerned no change was good change. Slime was not good change. Catching himself for the fourth time in twice as many minutes, on instinct he now looked behind him. Far back, down the hallway he had just walked down, he could just barely make out where the corridor turned.
Wait. He could SEE where it turned, which meant the approaching lights were close to the bend. The white noise coming down his way started to sound awfully familiar. He quickly looked around, ahead got even slimier. He restarted his shuffle down the hallway, trying to pick up speed as he hooked both claw-blades into his belt loop and balanced himself against the left side of the wall.
There. A door. Two doors actually, about 30 feet ahead. The door in front of him, on the left side of the corridor, was larger than the room doors with a handpad immediately to the right of it. The other one was smaller than the room doors with a handpad on its right as well. It looked easily defensible, his shield would basically cover the entire portal. He was forced to slow as he started to cross the middle of the corridor and angled his shuffle towards the door on the right.
Shit, as he reached the handpad next to the door he slipped and fell hard with a clang. It took him a moment to glance back at the now clearly lit hallway some distance behind him. Less than a kilometer away and closing fast he could now make out the situation with the lights flashing one after another in terrible clarity.
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There had been some close calls before but not like this. She had lost people. Two people, two… almost friends. One she knew to be dead. She had seen it herself, the other… the other she didn’t know how they could have survived. She wanted to sob, even to mourn them for just a moment, but that moment would be her last, this she knew.
She thought of her third teammate, if she lived she swore he would get what was coming to him. How could he bail on them like that? Had he known ahead of time? It wasn’t the first time he was the only survivor of a group. “Lucky” her ass, now she knew. The hate kept her arms pumping and her legs moving.
The harsh blue lights lit up one after another, as she beat a frantic pace down the corridor. She had been alternating between a flagging recovery and then sprinting for all she was worth to build back up her lead for who knew how long.
She had already long gone through the process of regretting making her dump stats Grit and Endurance. This was too much. In a small mercy, the effort she had put into her flight had drained most of the initial panic that had been coursing through her.
Thankfully her enhanced Senses came through again as she saw a silhouette light up the corridor far ahead. At the sight as the end of the corridor lit up she had a brief moment of panic at finally catching sight of it.
So, there was The Turn. Allocating her Senses and Agility up to 10 was what had kept her alive so far. She had heard the chittering before everyone else and her usual position near the back of the group it meant she had more time to react than anyone else. She also had a higher Sense than anyone in her group. When it had all turned in an instant she found herself already fleeing, not as fast as that bastard had disappeared though, he was already gone by the time she decided to bail.
With Senses at 10 Allocation her eyesight was enhanced enough that she possessed a very limited form of night-vision. Still, with the lights flashing on and it only reaching roughly 30 feet or so ahead of her, at her current pace she would find the wall with her face before she found it with her eyes and had time to do anything about it. The thought of running face first into a wall had consumed her for long minutes until the fatigue had grown enough that she had no longer cared where it was. But now, now she knew.
Despite her Tier-Maxed Dexterity and Agility, the turn bought her just under a second as she slowed slightly to slide into the right edge of the corridor and then used her feet wedged into the angle of where the wall met the floor to push into a boosted sprint across the hall to the left and past the bend.
She had Allocated a few points in Endurance but she didn’t Allocate Endurance like some of her former teammates did. There was only so much Allocation to go around after all.
Her legs cooperated a bit late but with a deep dig she managed. The fractional delay forced her to duck an especially fast crab that then smacked into the wall with a meaty crunch. She knew it wasn’t down for good. Hearing the chittering rain slam into the wall behind her she continued to push her Agility and her Body, to what she knew, was well beyond its limits. Her lungs burned and her legs stopped following her thoughts. They were a half step behind her commands to move and slowly becoming disconnected from the furious pumping of her arms.
He carefully picked himself up and looked back down the way he had come as he steadied himself on the wall.
So it was a woman. She was relatively pretty, or at least he thought so when he saw her, again not a lot of comparisons; black and tied in a flapping ponytail behind her, eyes that were a little too large for her face that looked almost comical expanded as they were in a panic, and she was in the middle of ripping off what looked like makeshift crab armor over her chest. The cut down her cheek had blood flowing freely from it. Her arms pumped rhythmically and her legs swung back and forth as her feet beat an unstable rhythm. To be honest she looked like she was half dead. She was also waving at him.
Behind her were more crabs than he could have imagined were capable of fitting into the corridor. He didn’t know how many crabs he had expected to fit in it but it definitely wasn’t this many. The giant chittering mass swarmed over and under each other, chittering sideways, forward, and up the sides of the wall as the terrible crab blender churned and roiled down the corridor. At the moment he was frozen and staring at it he swore he saw a crab standing upright and sprinting in the middle of the chittering mass.
Wait, she wasn’t waving at him, she was pointing to the left. He froze his hand a hairbreadth above the handpad. Jack looked back across the hallway to the larger, less defensible door.
“Damn.”