Amelia, Ch 314- Sabah
"Clotho, I need your help," Lily spoke through the com while rushing over to my position with my team.
I hesitated for a second. There were so many things I wanted to say, that I couldn't decide on any of them. It's a battlefield, Sabah, everything else can wait. If she needs help, it's as a team member. You swore to Crystal that the job comes before personal issues, time to prove it. "Okay," I agreed. She wouldn't ask if it wasn't important. "What are we doing?"
"I think I know what the Endbringer plans to do," she informed. "I've already told Lisa and she agreed that it's likely. I want to help, but I'm not fast enough to get there in time."
"I... okay, I can do that," I responded. I glanced over at Crystal.
"Go," she ordered. Of course she'd already be aware. Either told by Lisa, or by listening in on our coms. One of those advantages team leaders got was an override that let them access their team's com systems at any time.
I wrapped three of Tapestry's remaining ribbons around Lily, as information blinked onto my HUD. Oh. Oh fuck. I took off at top speed, an experience that wasn't fun for either of us. I was sure we would have some ugly bruises in the morning thanks to that. Tapestry had some incredible acceleration potential, capped off for the sole purpose of keeping me from accidentally knocking myself out with the G-forces.
I heard Lily grunt as she was pulled along by the ribbons that held her by both wings and around her waist. She'd be pulled in 'flying' position, it was less painful on the human body this way, my training instructions insisted. We found our spot after a couple minutes, underneath the park near the Eiffel Tower. I'd seen it before, when I toured Europe with Lily and Faultline's crew. It was far more romantic then than now.
The building was still standing, although a couple of others nearby weren't. A handful of zerg had already gotten here, and was guarding the grounds. And by the apparent damage done, they'd already been doing that.
Not to protect the landmarks, I was certain. I knew my bosses better than that. It was the Endbringer shelter beneath the park that needed defending. In every Endbringer conflict, that was a given. Khepri always placed her guards surrounding the shelters. Scenery be damned, the lives were her priority. She'd rip down the pyramids if it meant saving one more person.
I felt the ebb and flow of power as Lily carefully adjusted my ribbons with her power. There were dozens of properties she could grant to the material she was touching, and Tapestry's ribbons were specifically designed to be especially compatible with that. Something of a happy coincidence that the 'nanofiber mesh' was both incredibly durable and responded very well to my power.
"Straight down," Lily instructed.
Relationship issues aside, we had a lot of practice working as a team, training to be as effective as possible together in situations just like this one. I trusted her completely as I dropped, my ribbons forming like a giant arrow beneath us. The earth below didn't stand a chance. Nor did the tinker reinforced superstructure that was the shelter itself. We punched through like we were walking through the wall of a bubble.
People shouted and backed away as we dropped into the center room. This shelter looked more like a subway terminal without the tracks, with a long series of concrete and steel reinforced rooms inside. Smart design, people could take shelter in pocket rooms and seal themselves off, rather than all be sitting ducks out in the open if anything got through the blast door.
<Don't be afraid,> Lily shouted in French. Was she using the translator, or did she get that language permanently installed? I was using the translator. <We're here to keep you safe. Just stay calm.>
They didn't seem too convinced, but at least the officials took our words at face value, continuing to usher people into rooms to keep them as safe as one could hope under the circumstances. "Are they really going to attack here?" I asked Lily.
"They keep saying the Endbringers are here to hurt us, fuck with our heads," Lily replied. "Adapting to the tactics used against them so whatever we used to kill their predecessors will never work again. This one's out of reach, untouchable in a way that resembles how Taylor and Amelia fight. We keep killing them, so naturally the new ones are meant to fight us. Can you imagine a better way to attack Taylor than to drop an Endbringer right into the center of the shelter?"
I paused for a second. "No, I really can't," I admitted. "You're sure?"
"If I wasn't, the giant spider made of human blood would have convinced me," Lily replied. "Surprised it wasn't holding a 'hey, Taylia, fuck you' sign. Then there was the flying one with ice blasts, which I'm guessing was Crystal. Not sure who the harpy represented, but somewhere in my heart I'll always pretend it was Lisa."
The way she said it made it all sound so obvious, and I felt a little ashamed I didn't think of it myself. "But there are a bunch of them out there, they can't all be weird insults to us, can they?"
"Maybe not," she admitted. "Maybe just the first few, maybe there can be multiple monsters for each of us. Maybe the only one that was there to send a personal message was the blood spider, and all the rest are just random horrors. All I can tell you is that I saw how Taylor fought Leviathan, monsters appearing out of nowhere to flank the Endbringer at every opportunity, cutting off his retreat like a pack of wolves going after a deer. That's what we're watching. When they're ready to go for the throat, they'll come here. Symbolic reenactment of Leviathan's death."
I forgot how confident she could be. "It makes a sick sort of sense," I agreed. "But... is that enough?"
She looked at me. "I don't know," she admitted. "Let's hope so."
We got our answer too quickly, as our monster shunted over. It was a solid black centipede like creature, and lashed out with its jaws immediately, impaling one of the help personnel, and started charging people.
My ribbons reacted to my thoughts, before my conscious mind could realize what I was doing, slamming into the monster and trying to force it to the ground, pin it down for Lily to kill. It was viscous, not entirely solid. Made of tar, like its spider cousin was made of blood. A few of Lily's bolts struck the thing's face, doing little notable damage. It started oozing around my ribbons, and I started twisting them around to hold it back. Then it started trailing up the ribbons themselves. Lily grabbed my armor and again I felt the nature of my armor change to her power's whim.
The centipede dissolved where it touched my armor, completely erased from our reality. Lisa's best guess is that it was banished to whatever Nowhere we saw before Elle set a portal into a given reality.
The half destroyed creature collapsed to the ground, and then it started to spread out like a puddle. The fuck? Thousands of tiny place centipedes spread from the corpse of their mother, or however that worked, and began rushing toward the screams of the civilians.
Lily started taking shots with her armor, and each one was a kill. She dropped into the path, letting her armor itself destroy countless others, but she couldn't protect more than a fraction of the massive hallways and all the people in them.
I added what I could, bringing my ribbons down on them with enough force to crack the concrete. There was just too many of them. Too many to count, let alone kill with our mostly single target weapons. In desperation, I fired my TK gun into the mix, hoping that controlling the ground would be enough to combat their push forward. It was a disappointment, but not a surprise, that I failed. People fell screaming under the mass of insect sized Endbringer spawn.
I quickly turned off my translator. It was painful enough just hearing the screaming, I would have trouble enough sleeping without knowing the words they were saying. Everyone was dying and there wasn't a thing we could do for them.
An explosion rocked the shelter. They must still be fighting up above. Right, this is a war between armies. One failure doesn't mean the battle is completely lost. I hit the com.
"Some of them can break down into smaller monsters and will attack as a swarm," I informed. We failed, the least we can do is warn others. "Try to contain them behind forcefields before you kill them, if possible."
It's the best I can do, let the others know that we failed, how we failed. Maybe that way they'll be able to do better. The screaming was starting to die down as the centipedes ran out of victims. How many people were in here? Thousands? Tens of thousands? I didn't know, but gathering everyone in one place just made this that much easier for the Endbringer.
What I wasn't prepared for was when the dead started to stand. Black ichor leaked from their mouths, and the look of horror was still in their eyes. They were still screaming, even. One of them leapt at Lily, destroying himself utterly. Others piled forward, picking up the dismembered limbs and trying to attack her. Shoes and other bits of debris were thrown at me by the enraged, what, zombies? Is that what these were?
No, they weren't. Every bit of tech on this suit insisted they were still alive. Heartbeat, brain activity, the whole nine yards. They were puppets controlled by the centipedes, but they were still alive and conscious under that control.
They started rushing for the exit to the building, in a mindless stampede. Some would trip and be trampled by the others. No sense of coordination between them. One leapt toward me with enough speed that he actually caught my leg, despite my position about twenty feet above their heads. I kicked away, but the man, still screaming in horror, had grown claws sharp enough to cut into the armor. Alarms flashed throughout my suit, but I didn't need them. I felt the pain.
A shot from Lily puncture the man's skull, and he dropped, no longer attacking, but his claws were embedded in my leg so he didn't fall. I kept screaming, only held in the air by my suit's autopilot failsafes.
"I can feel it inside me!" I screamed. "It's climbing up inside my leg!"
Lily didn't even hesitate, her wing cleaving through my armor. The dead man, and my limb, fell to the floor below. It was amazing how little pain I felt at that. Alerts flashed in my HUD, telling me of damage I already knew about. I felt pressure around the wound, and a strange sensation as the medical functions took effect.
Lily caught me. "I'm sorry, I had no choice," she insisted. I sobbed against her. The loss of the limb wasn't that bad, really. It didn't hurt that much, and was something I knew could be fixed. But the look on the man's face as he tried to kill me. He was honestly sorry for what he was doing.
"Alert," Dragon's voice was shockingly calm over the coms. "Endbringer is displaying ability to infect and control humans. Infected display increased physical abilities and other mutations. This appears to be contagious from physical contact with the infected. Tactics have changed from defense to quarantine."
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A/N- So, does this count as suitably horrible?
