Chapter 30: Chapter 30: Strike
Guardian
a Worm/Destiny Crossover
Chapter 30: Strike
She was getting closer. She knew it.
For one, it was getting warmer. Until this point, the tunnels had been cool, almost cold. Now a wet heat suffused the air. The crowded-elevator warmth generated by an abundance of living things. If that alone wasn't enough, she could hear them. The padding rumble of dozens of footsteps. Walking quietly worked, but there was only so much that could be done to hide a large number, and it was clear to her that this close to the – the source of the infestation they weren't even trying to hide. And, perhaps worst of all, she could smell them. She had thought the stench had been bad before, up by the surface or the cistern where Reaper had abandoned her to hare off to who-knows-where.
No.
It had been perfume, up there. This was so much worse. Because now it had the stench of death and decay and good old fashioned rot on top of everything else. "Tails," she murmured, so quietly it almost didn't count as vocalizing. "I'm getting close to the center."
No response.
"Tails? Do you hear me?"
Nothing. Maybe they were out of range?
No. That was ridiculous. These were Tinker made, PRT standard issue radio earbuds. They didn't have an 'out of range'. She could talk to Lisa from Antarctica as clear as day with no problems, so there was no reason that Taylor should lose contact. Yet she had. It was impossible, but here she was.
Know what? Fuck it.
Taylor dropped all efforts at stealth.
"Tails, I'm going to assume you can hear me, but can't respond. As of...whatever time it is, I'm within distance of the center of the infection. Still no sign of Reaper, or the missing people. Unless of course, the monsters are the missing people, but I'm not thinking about that right now. Also, for the record: It seems like the closer you get to the center, the more – the more intelligent or – or sophisticated the monsters become. They can set traps, plan ambushes, and understand the idea of friendly fire. They don't care, but they know what it is. Um. What else? Fuck, I'm stalling. All right. Guardian out."
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This one was bigger than the others.
Where the screamers were slightly shorter than her, and the shooters around her height, this one towered over her. Easily ten feet tall. Thick muscle bulged like cancerous growths, covered by raw, glistening red flesh. Its head was massive, resembling a shooter's, only with two eyes and many more teeth. One of its arms ended in what looked like a sword, a length of sharp looking bone protruding from a stumpy wrist. The other had three thick, gnarled talons. It possessed a basso, bellowing war cry that was identical to what had sent Reaper off earlier. Its sword-arm had the right shape for the cut in the cistern walls and, if memory served, matched at least one of Reaper's wounds. An unsettling point of familiarity.
It also resisted bullets remarkably well, for something that looked like its skin was exposed. She'd expected to be able to empty a whole magazine from the rifle into it before it reached her, yet was surprised once more by the sheer amount of speed it was capable of. Instead, she only managed half before the thing was upon her, its bone blade humming through the air and trying its damnedest to take her head off. She ducked, pushing to one side and slamming her shoulder into the tunnel wall. The rifle snapped up and she put two bullets in the joint where the blade met the rest of the arm. It swung again, spraying sparks as it cut a groove down the rock.
Taylor rolled, avoiding the blow that would have split her down the middle. Then, from her crouch, shot him in the ankle. Unlike with the joint, this showed results. The high powered bullets tore through the comparatively fragile joint with explosive force, almost severing its foot and sending the thing stumbling. As it fell it lashed out, the flat wall of the blade catching her off guard and just below her shoulder, in turn.
Pain flared, hot and dull, as she went flying down the tunnel from the force of the blow. She spun as she hit the ground, the rifle barrel catching and wrenching her grip in exactly the wrong way. With a horrifyingly loud snap, Taylor broke her wrist. The pain from the thing's blow vanished entirely, washed away by this new agony. She heard the wet, thumping slide of the thing making its way towards her, and knew she could not lie there and cry. No matter how much she wanted to.
She abandoned the rifle. Rolled onto her back and reached across herself to draw her pistol with her free hand. She remembered, as the thing lumbered towards her, that it had been gummed up by the blood of the shooters she'd killed before. She could go for her knife, but right then she wasn't willing to close with the thing if she could help it. So instead she took her pain, her fear, and her rage and she called upon her Light.
It came.
Fire spiraled down her arm, reaching her pistol and scouring it. But it didn't stop there. No, her Light then suffused the gun, made it more. She saw that there was one bullet in the wheel. Don't miss, she told herself.
She pulled the trigger. Sunfire roared across the distance, a thin lance of celestial fury.
Slowly, agonizingly, the monster's headless body toppled. Crumbled to the ground, first falling to its knees, then slumping backwards to pool its foul smelling blood on the ground behind it. Panting, Taylor let her arm drop. Then she groaned her way back to her feet, fumbled another loader into the pistol, kicked the rifle spitefully, and headed onward.
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She could hear a heartbeat. A heart that, from the volume of it, was the size of a school bus.
Th – thump, went the heart.
She dropped into a shadowed alcove and became still as what could only be described as a patrol passed her. A quartet of screamers, followed by two shooters, and one big guy behind them all. Its thick head swiveled on its neck, searching for...well, her, probably. With luck, they wouldn't find her. Their hearing was acute, beyond anything Taylor could fathom. But she was quiet and still, and their sense of smell did not seem to be as good. So they should pass her by. If not, she could always kill them. She was hurt, she wasn't crippled.
They passed, and she waited until the sound of the heart drowned out the sound of their feet before moving on. The noise, the increased intelligence of the monsters, and the increasing presence of the crystals all told her she was heading in the right direction. On top of those things, there was something coating the walls. A strange, silver substance, smooth to the eye and – presumably – to the touch. Again, there was no way in hell she was touching that.
Th – thump, went the heart.
She moved on, following a winding tunnel that sloped gently downward, through turns left and right and a smaller cavern. As she kept descending she couldn't shake the image of a vast, underground lake beneath her feet. Silent and still, black water teeming with the unknown. There was no telling how far beneath her it was. Funny thing was, that unnerved her more than the monsters that had made and inhabited these tunnels.
She came to a corridor, for it was too well made to be anything but. For the first time since the cistern, the floor was even. Not smooth, necessarily, but flat. The walls, too, were more...designed, less of a rough curve and more...angular.
Constructed. That was the word. This corridor, and the bright, light-obscured opening at its end, had been built. The difference between this and the tunnels she'd come through was jarring, to put it lightly. Th – thump, went the heart, and the sheer sound rumbled through the particulate-filled air. She could feel it in her bones. Narrowing her eyes, she tried to pierce the veil the shining light created and was partially successful. Enough to see a vast, pulsing shape and the bare hint of something more. A faster movement. The pale light cast an arc on the ground, making the rock look like bone. Taylor twitched the fingers of her broken wrist, testing it, probing it like a recently lost tooth.
Test result: don't do that. The pain wasn't excruciating, but it was close enough. She cradled that hand to her belly, anticipating a great deal of movement soon and not wishing to smack it on anything. She checked her pistol, making sure it was loaded and the mechanisms were clean, or at least clear. She took a deep, slow breath. Then she took another.
Ready?
I feel ready .
She walked into the light and finally, finally saw the source of everything.
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It brought to mind the bud of a flower. That, and a bunch of other things. Where it touched the ground was a thick, slimy pad of some pebbled bruise-green flesh. Spaced haphazardly along the side were pustules the color of rotted milk. They...moved...bulging and rippling as if they held something inside of them. Above them was a belt of spines, somewhere between a porcupine's and those of a rose. They glistened, secreting some vile fluid that hissed and bubbled when it dripped to the stone floor, plumes of bilious steam billowing and turning the bottom six inches of the cavern into a fog bank. Walls of some green-black substance folded over each other, rising up at least twenty feet to taper to a thick circle brushing the thirty foot ceiling.
To say nothing of the smell. Taylor could not find a set of words to describe it. Not. One. Her horror at the stench was overridden by the sound of something tearing. Something thick and wet. Horror, and the contents of her stomach, rose as one of the pustules ruptured. Split from within by a thin, familiar length of bone-pale material. Fluid poured from the breach, carrying with it a spindly ball of a figure. As it was, covered in some thick, viscous substance, she nearly didn't recognize it as a screamer. Well, she thought with a sick kind of satisfaction, now we know how they're made. She wanted to throw up. It burned in her throat, demanding she open her mouth.
Instead, she drew her pistol, aimed, and shot the newborn screamer in the head. The sound, the sharp bellow of a gun firing echoing around the rounded walls. It was followed by a bellow, coming from within the folded walls. Solar flame whirled down her arm into her pistol as the massive, fleshy petals began to fall, dropping like the curtains revealing the next act in some great play.
The falling petals revealed an Endbringer.
Twenty-five feet tall, hunchbacked. Its massive, pendulous head hung low. The mouth reminded of a shark, mixed with a lion by way of a lamprey. A drooling, gaping maw of rot-black teeth, broken and jagged. It had a pile of pink, weeping eyes just above that. Its shoulders, arms, and chest were were one continuous shape. At the end of each arm was a wide, three-taloned hand. Each talon was as long as her arm, curved, and shone in the light from the reflection of some fluid that coated each wicked arc of sharpened and shaped bone. Its legs were broadly set, and thick, with no knees she could see. A being, she surmised, of great power and vicious strength, but one that looked to lack agility. Which was troubling, given that every form she'd encountered to that point had no such weakness. It roared at her, this titan, spreading its arms wide and flexing its taloned hands.
Such thoughts were for later. Now was for action. She lifted her pistol and fired, imbuing each bullet with as much flaming Light as it could take. Three lances from the heart of the sun itself carved through the empty air between them. It was in this manner that she, Taylor, roared back.
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Each bullet did a punishing amount of damage that didn't seem to affect the titan at all. The first hit in the upper shoulder, furrowing a line of scorched flesh the width and depth of a garbage can. The second hit it in the middle of the chest, drilled a foot-wide crater that simmered and sizzled, and then stopped. As the titan was turned by the impact of the first shot, the third one hit – it punched through everything to shatter an arm bone as thick as her torso, an action that sounded like a cannon firing. She hoped that meant the arm was rendered useless. If not, at least diminished. Keenly aware of the disparity between the power she could bring to bear and what it would take to kill this thing, she would take any boon she could get.
That said, she did have a plan. Her pistol went back into its holster, and the palm of her good hand began to flicker with violet light. The titan took a thundering, ground-shaking step forward. She paced it backwards, then to her left. It followed her, turning clumsily to keep her in front of it. Then it lowered its massive head, presenting a thick, bony ridge, and charged. Its arms were close enough to the ground that it could add to its speed by digging its hands into the ground and pushing itself forward. Great divots of shattered stone fountained out behind as the titan accelerated to an incredible speed, especially given the short distance. The cavern shook from its motion, and if she were hit, they would not find enough of her to bury.
She held her ground, waiting until the last moment not out of some sense of drama, but to prevent the titan from changing course. She tamped down her feet, her tensed leg muscles twitched, and she hurtled off to the side as the twenty-five foot monstrosity stampeded into the wall behind her. Her boots failed to gain any significant traction on the slime-coated floors. She slid across the stone, falling to a knee and leveraging a turnabout with a twist of her hips. Then she drew her bow, holding it perpendicular to herself and with a grimace, used her other hand to draw an arrow. Still sliding, she loosed an arrow and followed it quickly with another.
The titan hit the wall a few seconds before the arrows hit it. The sound and fury of the former impact entirely drowned out any noise the latter might have made. Tufts of stone fell from the ceiling, detonating in sprays of jagged shards as the arrows passed harmlessly through the titan to hook into the stone wall beyond it. Then half a dozen chains of voidlight, ended in barbed hooks, erupted from the points of impact and dug themselves into the monster's flesh. It bellowed, a sound of rage and pain, and attempted to pull itself free.
It would succeed, she knew, but not in time to avoid her blade. She scrambled to her feet, charging forward as she drew the lightning down the sharp edge of her steel. It crackled into violent blue life and she ran. The knife rose, and she planned to take the titan's leg at the knee and then stay out of reach as it bled to death. If it could bleed to death. She reached her target, the heaving slab of muscle that smelled unbelievably foul, and slashed. Which was when the impossible happened.
Her knife bounced.
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A keen, infuriated offense filled her. How dare this, this pile of drool and lizardskin, be the first thing she'd ever encountered that resisted her blade? It was – it was an outrage! An impossibility! Instead of bouncing off like her momentum wanted her to, she doubled down on her efforts. Boots scrabbled for purchase, and she leaned more of her weight onto the blade. She screamed in pain as she wrapped her injured hand around the handle and sawed her burning knife into the titan's thick leg.
The hide split, a gash as long as her arm opening and revealing spoiled-meat colored muscle glistening in the open air. Thick tendons flexed and bulged as the titan tried to escape its voidlight bonds. She cut deeper, pushing the the knife further in and watching the muscle tense in response. It took her entire strength to cut through the muscle and the stringy, ropelike tendons but as the chains winked out of existence, she succeeded.
She tore free and away, moving to put distance between herself and the titan. One of the tendons she cut turned out to be a blood vessel of some kind because thick, clotted black ichor spewed into the air with the same thickness and intensity as a fire-hose. That leg, now no longer able to support the incredible weight above it, buckled. Its knee cracked a circle of spiderwebs into the stone floor and sent a miniature earthquake vibrating through the cavern. She stumbled, but kept her feet, turning back to see the titan doing the same. Its eyes had no pupils, nor lids to speak of, yet there was an emotion in them, and that emotion was hate.
It was a mutual sentiment.
Taylor took that hate and her fury and her desperate desire to not die and poured it into her Light. Her blade flared, the lightning obscuring the entire length of steel, progressing beyond it, turning her six inch knife into something of a machete made entirely of a storm's raging heart.
She had made the titan immobile, and so must go to it. She would have to overcome its defenses. Avoid its arms, and claws and gaping jaws. She wondered how thick its skull was. Thicker than her knife, probably. A moment's pause. Then she grinned. "I know how to kill you." she told the titan. It roared back. A mutual sentiment.
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A moment of stillness as Light spread throughout her. Then she blurred forward, jumping ten feet forward in a single stride. In the next she jumped up, letting the blur carry her towards the very top of the titan's head. As she did, she realized that momentum would take her over the top of the titan's head. So she did something – digging her knife into the face of her enemy and letting it drag her to a stop, dangling from the titan's back. Blood sprayed from the vertical through its face as it trumpeted its pain. She grinned in satisfaction, twisting to plant her feet in the thick, pebbled flesh. As she did she felt the tip of her blade scrape against the titan's skull.
Muscle flexed beneath her feet, arms as thick as trees flailed in an attempt to dislodge her. The titan began to fall, taken off center by its own efforts and the impact of Taylor's charge. She growled and pushed the blade as far into the skull as she could before its lightning flickered out. Embedded to the hilt, she figured, would be good enough. Then she twisted, widening the hole as much as she could as the titan – thrown off balance by its own motions and surprise trepanation – began to fall. She rode it down, pulling her knife free and throwing it to the side as she leaped up.
Solar Light poured through her, followed by a wave of intense exhaustion. She'd been a Guardian for almost a year, and she'd never drawn this much Light. Instinct told her that one way or the other, this would end soon. She reached across her waist for her pistol, the motion turning her leap into a spin. Momentum carried her through half a turn before she could aim.
Her target was the width of a quarter, sandwiched in a half-inch valley of jiggling, pulsing muscle and fatty tissue. She was tired and aching and fifteen feet in the air and, in case that wasn't enough, spinning like a top.
Don't miss , she thought, as she closed an eye.
She fired.
The titan's head jerked.
Fire billowed from the hole, followed by foul smoke.
She landed, legs flexing to absorb the impact. Her Light faded. She walked to the lying mass of the titan and stopped by its head. Rather like a lit jack-o-lantern, she could see fire flickering through the membranous eyes. The ones she hadn't ruptured or destroyed, anyway.
Taylor watched the titan's skull dissolve to ash and wondered how the hell she was going to destroy the nest. At that moment – that exact moment – her earpiece came back to life.
"...following her trail. Gotta say, boss, I sure am glad she's on our side."
"Roger that, Velocity. Thermal scans have a bloom thirty yards east and down from your position. Intel says that's where she'll be. Dauntless, what's the word on Reaper?"
"...found him, sir."
"Dauntless?"
"...the parts they didn't like, anyway." Followed by sounds of someone throwing up.
Moments later, there was a man in a red spandex suit standing in the cavern with her. He gaped first at the cavern, then at her. He made a noise, best described as I don't – what the – in a single sound.
Taylor waved tiredly. "Hey. You missed all the fun."
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Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone