092 - Carrion Concourse
The blast doors parted grudgingly, metal teeth rasping past one another until the gap stood wide enough for Blake to slip through. He kept Verdict low, finger clear of the trigger, senses keyed for the next ambush.
The open space he'd expected wasn't there.
A corridor waited, thirty meters long. Narrow feeders spoked off left and right at set intervals. Blake crossed the threshold. The deck plating flexed under his weight, thinner, unsure of itself. A hum bled through his boots, the low purr of machinery nudging awake after a long sleep.
He reached the first junction. The side passages appeared utilitarian, maintenance runs serving the machinery mounted overhead. Removable panels studded the walls, crawl spaces for techs who once kept the beast alive. From the right came a familiar click, then the rush of a compressor kicking on—air-conditioning or something like it. He could feel the air beginning to stir through his [Aura of Detection], the phantom sensation of touch still somewhat alien to him. At least the aura didn't translate smell or taste yet.
At the far end of each side hall, a small, circular window broke the gray monotony of the metal. Odd placement for a view. At the terminus of the main corridor, a much larger observation window dominated the wall. He started toward it, curious to get a better lay of the land. He holstered Verdict as he walked, conscious of the tight confines. Instead, he drew Fang.
Blake passed the third set of side passages. He knew what was coming. His aura felt them before he saw them. Two masses, dense with bone and muscle, tucked into the crawl spaces above. They weren't breathing, not in any way he recognized, but their presence was a spike of wrongness in the otherwise sterile corridor. Close. Too close.
The attack came from both sides at once.
Two creatures dropped from the ceiling hatches. A tangle of limbs and teeth and bone spikes. Fused torsos, maybe two or three smaller bodies twisted into one. Each was the size of a large dog.
One swung down from the ceiling, lunging for his throat. The other dove, going low, aiming to hamstring him.
Blake was already moving. He dropped forward, bracing himself with his left arm, letting the higher creature's momentum carry it over him. Still supporting his weight one-handed, Blake kicked out with his back leg, a low, sweeping motion. The side of his boot connected with the second creature's lead legs. A crack of bone, and it was sent reeling. It stumbled, its lunge ruined. Overhead, the first creature's claws scraped sparks from the metal of the machine casing that was acting as the far wall. It landed with a wet smack on the deck plating, claws scrabbling for purchase. No finesse. Just gravity and hate.
Blake pushed off the ground, springing back up, still brandishing Fang in his main hand.
He didn't give them time to regroup. The creature he'd kicked was still trying to find its footing, its misshapen limbs working against each other. Blake closed the distance in two steps, his own body a coiled spring of intent. He didn't aim for a head, because he wasn't sure which one was in control. There was one on each end of the torso, both snapping uselessly. He aimed for the center mass instead, the knotted point where spines and ribs had been forced together.
Blake drove Fang home. A wet grind of bone and cartilage. The creature shrieked, two gurgling sounds, not one. It thrashed, limbs flailing. It sounded like it was in agony. Blake twisted the blade and severed what passed for a spine. The creature went limp. Dead weight on the deck.
The second one was almost on him. It had launched itself up from the floor, a blur of claws and fury. Blake yanked Fang free and pivoted on his heel, letting the creature's charge carry it past him. He slammed the flat of his free hand against its flank as it passed, a hard shove that sent it careening into the wall at the end of the maintenance passage.
It hit the wall hard, stunned for a fraction of a second. It was all Blake needed. He was charging in behind it before it had even hit the wall. Before it could recover, Blake manifested a small panel of force from his left hand and pinned it against the wall. The creature snapped at him, its jaws clacking uselessly.
Blake focused his Intent on his [Telekinesis] construct. He visualized spikes. Long, sharp, brutal. A dozen of them. A trickle of mana, a thread of mental energy, fed into the construct, and the flat plane began to warp. Small points pushed outward, growing, sharpening.
The creature thrashed, a desperate, animal panic in its movements. It bucked against the pressure, its fused limbs finding purchase on the metal wall. But Blake leaned into it, his own weight adding to the force. He pushed. The spikes lengthened.
The first one punched through. A wet, tearing sound. Then another. And another. The creature's shrieks became choked, liquid things. In seconds, it was impaled through and through, pinned to the wall by a dozen lances of pure force.
Blake held it there, watching it twitch. He waited until the last tremor faded, until the thing was just meat hanging on a wall. Then he let the construct dissolve. The body slumped to the deck with a heavy, final thud.
His knife was caked in ichor. Again.
A scan of the maintenance corridor turned up a shop rag wadded by a hatch. He smiled. It was important to savor the small victories. He grabbed it, wiped the blade clean, and sheathed it. He tucked the rag into an empty ammo pouch. It wasn't completely soiled, yet, and Blake was certain he'd need to clean Fang again soon.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
He stepped back into the main hall, leaving the two bodies behind. The way forward was clear, straight to the large observation window at the end of the corridor. What he saw caught him completely off guard.
Below sprawled the remains of what looked to be an honest-to-goodness mall—two full levels of kiosks, eateries, play spaces, all left abandoned as the Leviathan fell. It wasn't particularly massive, as shopping malls went, but it was absolutely mind-boggling considering it was in the belly of a starship.
Storefronts gaped like broken teeth. Cartons and holographic billboards lay smashed across terrazzo flooring. Scattered around the walkways were planter boxes that overflowed with vines thick as firehoses and leaves a slick emerald that glistened in the ... sunlight?
Looking straight out the window, instead of down, Blake identified massive panels of something he would probably call an LED, despite the fact that they were almost certainly a technology he was unaware of. The panel produced a prodigious amount of incredibly natural-looking sunlight, much closer to the sun back on Earth than the one on this planet, anyway. He had missed them at first because, despite how well they illuminated the two-story structure below, they didn't appear particularly bright when looked at directly. Whether that was tech or magic, Blake was impressed.
He looked down again, taking a mental note of how many planters and decorative green spaces were present. His side throbbed at the sight. The plants in this place tended to be of an aggressive sort.
Sighing, he focused on the figures shuffling across the open floor. They would be worse. From his vantage point, he saw dozens of the desiccated husks he had faced earlier, skin welded to scorched plating and twitching wires. A few were visibly the same "model," with the flamethrowers built into their forearms, but there were other variants he hadn't encountered as well. Zombie sentries keeping watch over the corpse of a mall.
And, because the fun never ended, there were "wet" variants as well. Vile amalgamations of rotting flesh, naked muscle, and exposed bone littered the concourse. This was probably the Outsider's idea of art—deliberate, stomach-turning, wrong. Corpses, sometimes multiple fused together, remodeled into weapons. He glanced back over his shoulder, observing the gory remains of his ambushers. It was definitely the same work.
Blake counted twelve of the bastards from his current angle. He began to classify them.
The first type he tagged as "cutters". They were going to be a close-quarters problem. Their designation came from the fact that their arms now ended in sharp blades of bone, elongated and flattened into something like the blade of a garden scythe. The blades grew straight through their hands, splitting them in half at the wrist to flop, twitching and writhing uncomfortably on either side of the implement.
They retained relatively humanoid torsos but now sported two prehensile-looking tentacles that erupted from their lower ribs. Blake imagined they'd be strong enough to help hold slippery targets in place.
It would be okay if they were slow, but unfortunately, they weren't. They moved with an unnerving fluidity: fast, twitchy bursts of motion that belied their mangled forms. They'd be hard to pin down in a scramble, and those blades would come from unexpected angles.
As he watched, one paused, its head tilting, testing the air with deep, shuddering inhales through what little remained of its nose. He desperately hoped that the things weren't somehow reacting to his presence; that would make flanking or ambushing much more difficult.
A dozen meters south, beside a shattered fountain, a hulking variant crouched over another mangled corpse. Yellowed bone plates overlapped its shoulders and spine, forming a crude carapace. The plates looked dense, and they were curved enough that Blake expected anything he fired from Verdict would skip off uselessly.
The creature's hands were something else: the fingers had fused together, making the thing's closed fists into blunt mallets—ossified meat packed so tight each one was its battering ram—definitely not something Blake wanted to take head-on. A good hit would probably splinter his ribs like cheap plywood.
The plates weren't all-encompassing, though. And they had to make the damned thing slower. If he could take the legs, keep moving laterally, he'd be able to finish with a Displacer Round once it hit the dirt.
Movement drew his eye to the north again, this time to the wall that ringed the second story. Three of the dog-sized spider-like things that had ambushed him skittered op and over the barrier, slipping out of sight, clinging to the underside of the second floor—or rather, the ceiling of the first floor. Good to know there were more of those bastards to keep an eye out for.
A flicker of movement below broke his cataloging. A pack of the fleshy ones, maybe six or seven strong, had cornered one of the drier, more technologically augmented husks—the kind with a flamethrower arm. Before the husk could fire, one of the fleshy creatures leaped onto its back, tearing at the fuel lines with overgrown claws. Fuel sprayed everywhere.
Another of the fleshy things, its chest cavity a gaping maw of teeth and bone, lunged forward and bit down on the husk's head. A sickening crunch, and the husk went rigid. Then, a spark.
The resulting fireball engulfed them all, a sudden, violent bloom of orange and black that lit the concourse for a searing moment. The flames died down as quickly as they had erupted, leaving behind a circle of blackened, smoldering bodies.
Blake watched the last of the embers fade.
They were fighting each other.
That was interesting. And potentially useful.
He scanned the area again, this time with a more tactical eye. He noted the choke points, the areas of cover, and the potential ambush sites. The overgrown planters could provide concealment, but they were also likely home to more of those vine-like creatures. The smashed kiosks and overturned carts could serve as makeshift barricades. The upper level offered a good vantage point, but it was also exposed.
He needed a plan. The sub-core was most likely on the ground level, but getting there wasn't going to be straightforward. Going in loud was an option, but with so many of them down there, he'd be quickly overwhelmed. Stealth was better. Pick them off one by one, use their infighting to his advantage. Create distractions. Sow chaos.
It was a familiar playbook—one he'd used a hundred times before. But the enemy was different this time. Hell, Blake wasn't even sure they could be distracted. Were they mindless? Were they hive-minded? He needed intel badly, and the only way to get it was to get down into the thick of things and do field tests. And he was alone. No Kitt to watch his back, no team to coordinate with. Just him, his wits, and a growing sense of unease that he couldn't quite shake.