Sarah 5
The dull, green blade in her gut sliced upwards into her heart and twisted. In its trail, it left a smoking line of ghostly vapors, which exploded in an array of ghastly lime-green light that overwhelmed the emergency lights that flared with the blaring klaxons.
As the blade made its way through her flesh, many of her redundant organs shrieked in painful submission—those very cells' psionic connection to her body nullified. Sarah gasped, as if suddenly cut off from the air and thrown into a vacuum, trying as hard as she could to push this man who looked and sounded exactly like Jim away from her. His grip felt too strong on her throat and as hard as she slapped against his armor, she was ineffectual.
Once the blade jammed into her hearts, Sarah felt the pain too great and her concentration broke—over her control of her psionic powers and of her connection to her Zerg. Jim's face was so wrong when it smiled down at her. "Sorry, Darlin', but I ain't Jim," He whispered to her, his face intimately close to her.
"Then... who... are... you?" She reached up with both hands and took the opportunity before her. Her fingers clawed at him but grabbed hold of both sides of his head. The pain was too great for her to bring focus to her power, but never let it be said Sarah Kerrigan could not unleash unadulterated hatred in its unfiltered form.
Psionic fire burst form her palms and burned both her and the bastard who held her, yet she only strengthened her grip. This pain was self-inflicted, but it lent her a focus.
Within her mind, a crude mantra repeated itself. "Through pain, I gain strength."
"AAAHH!!" The being recoiled at last. Unable to pry Kerrigan off of its head, this doppelganger of Jim Raynor summoned its awesome might to fling Sarah aside.
As the fires faded, his face shifted, unrecognizable for one moment and then next, never stopping on one shape.
Sarah's back slammed against the neoplastic walls. It strange how the Zerg ability to heal had not already closed the wound on her torso. She could feel the air reach in and caress her still beating heart. The pain was blinding, though no longer unbearable. Though her enemy's face kept changing to all the different forms it had taken before, Sarah took pleasure in the way its lips twisted downwards. The feeling of skin caught in her nails never felt so satisfying. Even the burns on her hands were... exhilarating.
The being stood once more, his features settling on an ebony face, complete with a red beret and a cleanly shaven goatee. For a moment, he pulsed with green energy, and for once, he was no longer amused. "Ah, that's better. Wipe that grin off your face, Sarah Kerrigan. You are already too late."
She picked herself up, only to be slammed down against the floor by an overwhelming force of nullifying energy. Her muscles—those powerful engines she had refined over many generations of Zerg—loosened and gave in immediately. Sarah ground her teeth together, not wanting to give this mad man the satisfaction of seeing her scream. From gritted teeth, she hissed, "... Samir Duran." Her eyes narrowed into a glare. She seethed. "What are you?"
"I wonder..." His form shrunk into that of the Ghost who had stirred up so much shit. The powered armor shrank into him and the excess melted off of him into non-existence. Yet the silhouette of something ghastly grew behind him, the shadow of something monstrous. He rubbed his head as if actually affected by her wild assault. "What did that misbehaving boy feed you?"
Seeing that he had intention to answer her, she summoned up the will to fight again. She would not go down, not to someone like him. Debris scattered around the wrecked chamber began to shake.
She began to push back against the oppressive green aura.
The air was electric. Shocking, clashing power could be tasted on the tip of the tongue... on the skin, raising goosebumps. In the background, the facility shook, as explosions became more frequent.
Sounds of gunfire echoed through the halls, but for the first time, Sarah heard sounds of things more... primal.
Suddenly, the clues added up, and the fragmented memories clicked into place. She pulsed with light—white, electric-blue, but not orange—from the deepest depths of her mind, from the places she still could not reach yet somehow answered her call. "You... the whispers from my shadows... the whispering in the stars..."
Samir Duran perked up and for a moment, the shadow of the beast paused in its expansion. "Oh? You understand, dear girl, that you cannot win."
"I understand just fine," She hissed.
"It seems I must become the teacher once more," Duran sighed theatrically while shaking his head.
"Teacher? No... you are just the servant," She replied. The wound still reverberated within her, but she blocked it out of her mind; she stood defiant and took a step sideways, studying the monstrosity's countenance—reactive to its body language.
Duran paused in his advance, watching Sarah in return with a keen gaze.
"You aren't a leader. You are barely a follower. Just a pawn, a servant who can't even act openly. And where is your master?" She circled him.
"Destiny is... Destiny of the cosmic order is beyond your comprehension, Kerrigan." He replied. His feet floated centimeters off the ground, and a great husk of a being became visible around him. It was a many-tendriled creature, with elongated claws and a misshapen head sunken into its many spiked torso. "The inevitable approaches."
"Perhaps," She replied with the confidence she might have once had, without the power she once had. Even the escaped creatures were outside of her purview... and yet, she lashed out—not with a psionic strike, but with a sweeping kick.
Duran hopped back, dismissing her attempt with a snort.
"Perhaps, because the inevitable always approaches. Nothing can stop what is to come." She echoed those sentiments she once felt. Using her weight as counterbalance, she spun sideways and kicked out again, slapping Duran's face before he could duck. "I had resigned myself to that fate."
"And yet you struggle. How infantile." Duran growled as he grabbed her by the ankle as her third kick was less than a centimeter away from impacting against his head again.
Using his hold as leverage, Sarah spun in the air. She hooked her heel around and slammed it into the back of Duran's head with the force of a burst of psionic power imbued into the impact.
His grip immediately loosened, but he howled and a shockwave of green energy burst from his body.
Sarah flew back, but she held her balance. She skidded back on her toes with one hand leaving a series of claw marks into the floor almost an inch deep. Then she harrumphed and tilted her head, predicting where her opponent was to strike.
A flash of the null zone burst over her shoulder.
The energy rent a scar into the neoplastic, then into the neosteel underneath for as far as the eye could see and further still. Around the edges, the melted material glowed orange with heat and green with residual power.
"I struggle. That is the way of the universe... Either dominate or embrace oblivion." She slugged back a burst of psionic power in the form of lightning, shredding local space asunder but missing Duran by inches as the psionic shielding around him flared into life and deflected the blast.
The research console behind him exploded in a shower of shrapnel and sparks. The aftershock of her attack echoed through the room, upturning machinery and furniture, and leaving glowing, jagged marks all over the neosteel plating. Even as the blast passed, pieces of metal broke and fell away.
"Then embrace oblivion!" Duran's patience with her seemed to be at an end, and he leaped and flew at her.
She rolled aside, barely escape the artillery-like shell that Duran's form had become.
Even after rolling, she leaped back almost with the walls to her back and eyeing the many exits and openings in the chamber that formed in their scuffle.
The location where she had occupied had become like a crater. The floor, which was thick enough to support the largest of the Zerg land units, had sunken downward into what appeared to be an abyss. Duran floated above it, supported by illuminant, translucent limbs that looked like monstrously sized spider legs attached to his torso.
Without giving Sarah a break, he clasped his wrists together, and a green sun lit up in his palms. Its beam of ghostly light shot at her, burning into and through her side before she was able to escape clear of the blow.
It had kept going, cutting through what might well have been the rest of the facility.
Sarah touched her side; it seemed like only a grazing shot, but it burned into her from within... eating at her psionic power with an attribute that seemed to silence her mind locally. Well... two could play at that game.
Having experienced the attack multiple times intimately—once right to the heart, in fact—Sarah knew enough of the properties of the substance. It was obviously an armament of psionic roots... and she was nothing if not creative with her ways of the mind. An orange ball of power formed in her hand.
She did not even know what it would do... other than perhaps, they could counter each other out?
They shot at each other for the fraction of a second, and from the surface thoughts that she scraped from Duran's closed and guarded mind (since when could she do that?), she felt a hint of surprise when their powers met and collided. In that fraction of time, she saw herself forced back, but once they moved and their beams of light were cut off, it was enough that she had held him off.
Then they clashed again... and again. Each time the beams grew brighter, larger, and were sustained longer.
Sarah knew she could not defeat Duran through attrition.
She was exhausted. She could barley see out of her one of her eyes without a blur. The concept of human stamina that she had forced out of her body so long ago had returned with a vengeance. Even if she could, she could not—he was more powerful than her.
And she had a hole in her chest directly to her heart.
She looked down and blinked.
Yeah, she needed to get that checked, probably.
As they clashed again, a burst of gunfire sounded out with resounding fervor behind her, making a splattering of flares on Duran's psionic shielding. Sarah looked over her shoulder; Nova Terra had picked herself up, though she too was bleeding out of the side of her head and it looked like a piece of shrapnel had buried itself in her thigh.
Nova's cold glare told her to turn back to the fight, but she acknowledged Sarah nevertheless with a nod.
Sarah wanted to laugh. Even a year ago, if she had told herself, this was probably going to be her last stand, she would have laughed. And then she would have cried. She had expected to go in a blaze, Sarah mused. That might never come.
Holding back the laughter felt strange... She almost did not know why she wanted to chuckle. In the end, as both backed off just for a second's reprieve, she did, albeit tiredly. "Duran... Your master's arrival can't be stopped? Alright. Alright... fine. But you know why I'm laughing now?"
"More insolence, Kerrigan?" Power welled from within him, surging forth like a wave of malevolent... hatred. It was a sort of insane hatred of all life—the sort of insanity that would drive the universe to extinguish the stars.
"Oh, you delusional maggot." Kerrigan smirked, her eyes gleaming with that same insane rage. "I will face that day when it comes. But you? You won't be there for that."
Foeyay?
