Jack pocketed his Zappa, the disgust at the crabs warring with the focus required to keep the overcharged electricity from jumping into whatever was closest. For some reason, his excess electricity wouldn’t jump into the ground. Each of his cells felt bloated, like they were about to pop.
He moved to hold a bladeclaw between his middle finger and the palm of his right hand. He briefly noticed that his middle finger was huge. It looked like it took up the space for both of his middle fingers now. Not the time. He drew his second bladeclaw from his belt.
The two crabs approaching him were saying something, he didn’t hear over the noise of the other's fights. The whispers of their chittering Human-speak quickly pushed his annoyance into a building, familiar heat. It sounded wrong, it was wrong. If these crab's weren't just animals couldn't they understand that he had things he needed to do? Everyone and everything was dead if he let himself stop here.
He wasn’t sure where we was supposed to stare amongst the 12 eyes but he held his gaze. The biggest one was huge and misshapen, each side of its chest and shoulders had two oversized pincers coming out from it. It wore only pants and he could see the bulging, misshapen skin spread across its chest. It looked thick, the balance between chitin and skin failed to balance as it leaned heavily towards its crab half.
The crab to his right was lean, still in scraps of a Lab jumpsuit. Its torso was that of a Humans, it had breasts still, hanging nakedly. Its skin looked mostly of flesh but with a crab’s shell on its back. It had the widest grin of all the crab-men, or crab-people, he wasn't sure anymore.
Two claw-blades, one on each side, they were much larger than the one he held in his hand. Idly he thought about how he wouldn’t mind an upgrade. He saw its third hand, a small shriveled pincer tucked tight against its body.
Something neither of the crabs shared were Human hands. What they did share were Human-like faces, with crab-like teeth and small claws on either side of their wide mouths. They also had Human eyes, even if there were 6 of them on each. There were other thoughts that tried to make their way through the hot and building sea in his mind.
If he was asked why he had such hate towards the crabs he could have recalled a half dozen reasons. If he was pressed further still he would admit that he didn't know why. But then, no one had asked.
They got within a dozen feet of each other and Jack took a cue from Kala, it was fresh in his mind.
Before anything else could be said or done he sprinted to the crabs and fired off a Bash into the bladed one. His Bash was augmented by the electricity already directed towards his Shield as well as going on to drain the rest of the electricity in his arm. The lean crab barely reacted in time by turning its body to the side and trying to cover its chest with its deformed pincer. Despite its last ditch move it was launched back into the group of crabs behind it.
Jack tried to move the electricity to his left shoulder to boost his Hack but the transfer was too slow, his body’s current was still trying to recharge the drained electricity in his right arm. He swung a normal Hack down, the point of the bladeclaw aiming for the side of the big crab’s head.
The crab was quicker than it looked; without the electricity able to boost Jack’s Hack, the crab brought its pincer up to redirect the bladeclaw into its heavily shelled shoulder. The bladeclaw hit square and was stopped, a centimeter inside of the chitin. The crab moved its lower pincer towards his body and Jack fired off another Hack with the rebounded energy. The delay with this hack allowed the electricity to catch up and augment his strike. It tore through the crabs shoulder, taking out the top pincer and lodging itself deep into the hybrid's shoulder.
The crab tried to snap its bottom claw but, with the damage, only managed to slap Jack away with the blunt side of its claw. It's top pincer was on the ground, softly twitching open and closed. Jack’s blade remained locked in its shoulder, punched deep.
He switched the other blade to his main hand and the big crab’s voice cut through Jack's heat and annoyance and satisfaction for the the pain it was in, “Ah shit man that really hurt.” The shock of hearing it talk made him pause, it sounded entirely too… Human. He shivered in revulsion, how much was crab and how much was Man?
Only the lean crab’s furious chittering and zigzagging movement let him bring up his shield and block its claw-blade as it rejoined the fight. Its left blade hung limp and broken, its small pincer looked mangled too.
He swept his blade horizontally across the crab’s face and it pulled back. The lean crab was replaced by big boy charging at him. Jack regained his footing and it took a split second to adjust muscles and Nano-reinforcement as No, YOU Move activated, his shield flared out again and ate the hit head on.
He was holding the crab back. Still the pressure and the ichor under his feet meant he was slowly losing ground. Jack swung his bladeclaw around his Shield at its head but the attack failed as the lean crab reappeared, having circled around him, and planted its blade into the back of his shoulder. The lean crab pulled.
The pain blossomed from a point armward of his shoulder-blade. It flooded next to and mixed into the potent biological and chemical cocktail involved in life or death combat. The annoyance and disgust that had already been building helped accelerate the mixture's combination. There was fear there too, great buckets of it; it was increasingly difficult for me to connect with.
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Kala’s gasped and continued to feed her life-force into HeLbert.
The high-speed beads clattered and plinked against the defensive pincer claws. She bounced the stream into any exposed crab-flesh. There was a lot of pincers shielding the horde from her fire but being standing bipeds, there was a lot more body that they couldn’t block.
The rest of her boys laid out their own fire. The useless guy showed some talent when they found out that some of the hybrids could leap like oversized crabs.
Her fire slowed the grouping of crabs and tightened them into a ball, tighter and tighter. Their shielding forms were restricted by their need to defend, slowing them down. She wound down the stream of hard-light and the group of crabs expanded outwards again and closed the distance.
Kala coughed out something, probably blood; she grit her teeth and laid it back on.
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They were circling around him now, fast strafing seemingly an inborn crab trait. A third crab had hopped into Jack’s fight and the remaining 12 formed a fast cycle around Korl, trapping him in the middle.
A crab swiped at Korl and he took off its claw with a backswing, Tiger Crouching in Grass, a good defensive counter from bad angles. Another reached out towards his head and also lost its claw for its efforts. He picked up a wound on the exchange but that encouraged the third and fourth crabs to overextend and they both lost claws, both cut cleanly. Apparently the crabs didn’t like the trades they were getting as the rotating circle opened back up.
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Korl switched to offense and tried to push through the circle. He almost received a deep shave starting at and continuing through the side of his throat. His second push ended in a fighting retreat after taking a long slash through his thigh and having to deflect and block a blade, claw, blade, claw, and two more blades that followed in retaliation.
He managed to take off the claw of the last crab that overreached. So they were just going to hold him here.
Dammit. He pushed again, the crabs were learning his movements and compensating for each other, he took another slice on the outside of his thigh, this one was deep.
He slowly turned counterclockwise to the crabs’ circling maneuvers and waited for the right moment.
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Shit, something hit into his side and broke his stalemate with the pincer claw. He was thrown off-balance by the painful muscular-feedback from his Stance being forcefully broken. The jarring feeling sent him to the floor and the interrupting third crab spiraled away from the exchange.
Big boy wasn't ready for the sudden shift and its charge ended spilling itself onto the floor nearby. Jack rolled and scrambled across the floor to desperately bring his last blade through the back of the big guys head. Jack couldn’t withdraw his blade fast enough so he let it go and scrambled to his feet. Or that was his plan before a blade punched into his gut and trapped him against the floor. He lashed out with a weak left handed punch and hit one of the crab’s eyes. He flared out his Shield as the third crab tried to attach his head to the ground in turn.
The lance of heat in his gut threw new waves of pain as the crippled lean crab tried to pull the claw-blade out of both his stomach and the floor. He grabbed the top of the claw-blade to just get the fucking thing to stop rocking back and forth. Fresh waves of pain helped tighten his muscles, keeping his hand locked onto the joint of the crab's blade in a death-firm grip.
The crab scrabbling around his shield started really pushing. A blade flashed and caught the edge of his head, not stabbing into him but the concussion of the hit knocking his head badly.
That's enough of out of you. I Bashed it right in its fucking face. It spun away. Not my problem anymore.
The lean crab on top of me had given up on pulling out it’s blade, content to spread pain as it rocked it back and forth in my gut as it moved its undersized pincer towards my throat to finish me. Fucking sneaky shit.
It’s soft underbelly was right there, how had I missed that?
I punched my right finger into its chest. That was easy. It screamed in pain. I smiled and punched into its body again. And again, like a sewing machine my finger punched in and out of my body. Was I laying in crab? My back was drenched.
“Oh? Now you try and run? Didn’t I warn you to do that before?”
I repositioned my grip on its trapped claw-blade inside me and pulled back my feet. Placing both of them at the base of its claw I started to push.
It ripped and tore with an ear-splitting screetch, I grinned as I felt the delicious vibration of things coming apart under my fingers. I felt something big tear inside of it and laughed.
“Losing limbs sucks you crab fuck.”
With a wet messy squelch the crab was launched far and back, minus its last blade that was now mine.
I looked around, the Bashed crab was picking itself off the floor, trying to recover while scurrying to keep distance from the circling crabs trapping the sword lad in a rotating circle. He looked like he was having trouble, I could help him or I could put him out of his misery. He had already removed some of their claws.
On one hand I would get all the crabs to myself, on the other hand, there would be more crabs to hurt. It seemed like a good plan.
In a split-second-process Jack's mind digested and highlighted details about the surrounding crabs, the boy’s details fading and difficult for him to keep his focus on the kid.
He looked like he maybe had picked up some wounds, I don’t know, I don’t know, it was hard to keep the kid in focus.
Whatever, the crabs were easy enough to focus on. I sat up a bit, driving the blade further through me. My teeth grit into a bigger, tighter smile. I caught a flash of something that wasn’t a crab. Probably that girl, Yu, I can feel her somewhere nearby, she was slippery though.
The third crab had recovered.
Get up.
I held the blade as best I could at arms length and pushed myself up. It pushed deeper into me as I took my feet.
Once I was up the blade released easily enough, a pool of wet slopped to the ground.
The recovered crab charged and I met it, a normal Hack enough to split in down the middle almost to its waist.
I roughly yanked it out splashing blood colored ichor to join the growing pool of slop around me.
There was that circle again, so many targets. It took a few seconds as I pulled together as much of the electricity inside me as I could and cocked my arm back, to the side.
I paused at the end as the electricity finished priming itself and sent the oversized blade-claw blurring forwards.
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Korl had caught the moment, he had also caught plenty of wounds for doing so, but the point was that he had placated that worm of regret he had for hesitating and being put on the backfoot.
He should have done what Kala and Jack had done, struck first. Because he hadn’t, he had been trapped.
Between the moving wall of crab flesh he had seen Jack trapped on the ground with a pincer in him. He had still waited. He had been rewarded for his patience when a crab had been knocked away, close to the circling ring of crabs. He pushed out trying to trip up the circle on their stunned cousin. He took a few wounds for his efforts but continued his push towards it in bursts, hopefully it bought time for Jack to 'do or die'.
He heard a terrified chittering then caught a spinning flash between the moving wall of chitin-flesh, the crab he had been trying to push into was bisected, nearly in half.
Sweet sword that took some strength.
His eyes widened as a giant bladeclaw spiraled through the back of the circle, it sliced three or four crabs in half and Korl dropped to the floor. It ended its path buried to the hilt in the chest of a crab on the opposite side of the circle. That could have been him. He jumped to his feet and took advantage.
He threw his blade towards his right arm and it floated serenly around his severed arm. He drew the second blade. His blade in his left hand flashed through stances and flowing cuts while his floating blade punched opportunistically at the crabs' eyes and provided a floating distracting defense. It felt good, it felt natural to do.
Korl saw Jack join his fight and the crabs finished falling apart. Korl’s surgical slicing and Jack’s sheer fucking brutality. He tried not to cuss like a lowborn but didn’t know how else to phrase it when someone rips off a crab's arm and beats two others to chitinous paste with the same limb.
His body involuntarily froze as he felt Jack’s eyes pass over him, size him up, then dismiss him to launch at another crab. The man still had a claw-blade driven through his leg. He saw Jack rip it out through the meat of his thigh and cut in it in a blur at a crab’s pincer.
The swing was completely blocked and the crab responded with its claw-blade aimed towards the right side of his chest. Korl saw the muscles in Jack’s shoulder ripple and tense back up, cord tight, then, a spark of electricity and he cut through the pincer. He left the blade sticking from the crab’s cored chest.
Korl wanted to keep staring as Jack screamed “More” and acrid blood that smelled of ozone slopped out from his gut but a crab took the opportunity to clip Korl's shoulder from behind. Korl's agility and experience fighting had allowed him to redirect it from clipping off his entire chest to only getting the shoulder muscles on his crippled arm so he considered it a win.
He spun and brought his hand, and the sword hilt to his chest. He pushed inside of the crabs guard, with the added stability and mass his body provided, slammed his blade through its throat.
Korl felt a moment of panic as he turned his back to Jack. He found him again and maneuvered his floating blade to maintain itself between the two of them.
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I tried to bring the electricity up to activate my Shield. Burnt too much, too slow. I had to lean into the clawed punch before it had a chance to clamp me. The impact snapped my head back and, for a second, the world spun. I reached out and felt something wet. Wet meant insides. It was sharp. I jerked my hand opposite the direction I assumed it was meant to go and was rewarded by the glorious cracking of chitin and another confirmation as a gurgled scream ripped out of the abomination in front of me.
My world started to settle as a coldness started to seep through the edge of my ocean of heat and hate.
I groaned, “No, no no, not yet. More to kill.”
I looked around for a weapon, I reached for my belt and there wasn’t anything there. Didn’t I leave a blade there? I felt something in my pocket and pulled it out. This fucking thing, this glorious piece of shit. I grunted as I jabbed it into the wound in my chest and pressed the button.