Slumdog Hero

Fii reacted instinctively, creating a gravity well that should have pinned the creature to the floor. Instead, her power slipped around it like oil on water—catching only in patches, warping but not stopping its charge.

Pain exploded behind her eyes, a hot needle driving into her brain.

"Shit!" she stumbled back, disoriented.

Luke stepped forward, palm outstretched as the creature leaped. His fist connected with its thorax—except it didn't. His arm passed clean through the creature's body, throwing him off-balance.

The creature's blade-arm slashed across his chest, tearing through the undersuit. He grunted, barely twisting away from a lethal blow.

"The hell? I hit it!" Luke shouted, regaining his footing.

Serena formed a hard-light shield just as the creature lunged again. This time, it slammed into the golden barrier, very solid and very real. The impact knocked her backward, but the shield held.

"It's solid now!" she yelled.

But when Luke threw a punch, his fist passed through air again. The creature had become transparent, ghost-like.

"It's blinking!" Fii shouted, her gravity sense registering the creature's wild mass fluctuations. "In and out, like—"

Before she could finish, two more creatures pushed through the laboratory door. Their movements were eerily coordinated, spreading out to surround the humans.

Luke backed up, blood seeping from the gash in his undersuit. "We need a plan. Fast."

Fii gritted her teeth against the pain still pulsing behind her eyes. She tried another gravity pull when one creature seemed more solid.

It worked—partially. The creature's rear half crashed to the floor while its front half continued moving, as if cut in half by an invisible barrier.

"They can be half and half," she panted. "Part here, part... somewhere else."

Serena hurled a hard-light projectile that passed harmlessly through her target. "Damn it! How do we hit these things?"

"Watch them," Luke said, his Guardian training evident in his forced calm. "There's a pattern."

Fii focused through the pain, tracking the strange weight shifts. The creatures didn't just appear and disappear—they pulsed, like hearts beating.

Here, gone, half-here, gone, here again. But erratically, each following its own rhythm.

One lunged at Serena, becoming fully solid mid-leap. Luke saw the shift and drove his shoulder into its side, connecting this time. The creature skidded across the floor, chattering furiously.

"They can't stay ghost-like forever," he said. "When they turn solid—"

"Hit them!" Fii finished, grabbing a piece of broken equipment with her gravity. She waited, watching her target flicker, and hurled the metal shard when the creature solidified. The makeshift projectile embedded in its carapace. The creature shrieked, a sound like metal tearing.

Serena caught on, forming multiple hard-light darts. "Tell me when!"

They fell into a desperate rhythm of observation and attack. Sometimes connecting, often missing as the creatures phased in and out of solidity. It wasn't coordinated—Serena's timing was off, Luke swung at empty air half the time, and Fii's gravity pulls kept slipping around their targets when they shifted phase.

"Behind you!" Luke shouted as one creature skittered up the wall behind Fii.

She spun, trying to track it with her gravity sense, but its mass kept flickering in and out. She pushed anyway, throwing all her concentration into a gravity burst. The creature briefly pinned against the wall, then phased through her power again—but not before the momentary pressure cracked part of its exoskeleton.

The pain hit her like a sledgehammer. Warm wetness trickled from her nose, the taste of copper filling her mouth. Her gravity sense wavered, the whole room swimming in her vision.

"Fii's hurt!" Serena called, noticing the blood.

"Just keep fighting!" Fii gasped, wiping her nose.

One creature charged Luke, blade-arms raised. He timed his counterattack perfectly, absorbing the momentum of its strike and driving his fist into its head when it solidified. The exoskeleton shattered with a sickening crunch.

"Got one!" he shouted.

But the victory was short-lived as three more creatures pushed through the still-rippling laboratory door.

"We can't keep this up," Serena panted, her hard-light constructs flickering with her fatigue. "They just keep coming."

Fii's gaze fixed on the door. "The door... that's it. We need to stop them at the source."

"How?" Luke demanded, ducking a blade-swipe.

"I..." Fii's thoughts raced. "Serena, your light. Can you make it solid? Like, really solid?"

"Yes, but what—"

"The door!" Fii pointed. "Fill in the cracks when it ripples. Make it so they can't phase through!"

Serena's eyes widened. "I can try."

"Luke and I will keep them busy," Fii said. "Go!"

As Serena ran toward the laboratory door, the remaining creatures attacked with renewed frenzy. Luke grappled with one that had solidified, using his kinetic abilities to strengthen his blows. The creature's exoskeleton cracked under the assault, but it kept fighting.

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Fii faced another creature, trying a different approach. Rather than creating a simple gravity well, she focused on the space around the creature, watching for the moment it phased into solidity.

When it did, she twisted gravity in multiple directions simultaneously—not to pull or push, but to create conflicting forces. The creature's exoskeleton couldn't withstand the strain, fracturing along its seams with a sound like splintering ice.

The effort made her vision tunnel, throat constricting as if gravity itself was crushing her windpipe. She dropped to one knee, blood now flowing freely from her nose.

"Almost there!" Serena called, hands outstretched toward the door. Golden light flowed between her fingers, forming an intricate lattice along the door's edges. But her constructs faltered each time the door rippled, breaking the pattern.

"It's not working!" she cried in frustration. "I can't get it to stick!"

Another creature emerged halfway through the door, caught between worlds. Fii looked up through the haze of pain and saw their opportunity.

"Now!" she shouted to Serena. "While it's stuck!"

Serena understood, pouring energy into her constructs. Hard-light flowed around the half-materialized creature, encasing the door's edges. The creature shrieked, trying to retreat, but Serena's light had created a solid barrier where the door's matter fluctuated.

"It's working!" Serena's voice strained with effort. "But I can't hold it for long!"

Luke sprinted to her side, hands pressing against the hard-light frame. "Tell me where to strengthen it!"

"Everywhere it's dim," Serena gasped. "I'm losing it there."

Luke channeled kinetic energy into the weak points, compressing Serena's light into a denser barrier. The trapped creature thrashed wildly, then went still as the door solidified around it, cutting it cleanly in half. Its hindquarters dropped to the floor, leaking iridescent fluid.

The door stopped rippling, sealed by the hard-light framework and the dead creature jammed in its phase space.

"Holy shit," Serena breathed, hands shaking. "That actually worked."

The remaining creatures in the command module backed away from the now-solid door, mandibles clicking rapidly. They seemed confused, disoriented by the sudden change in their environment.

Luke wasted no time, attacking the nearest one with a series of precise strikes. Now that he'd learned their pattern, he timed his blows to connect when the creature phased into solidity. It collapsed with a final shriek, legs curling inward.

Fii managed to stand, gravity wavering around her as she faced the last creature. It darted sideways, trying to flank her, but she tracked its mass with her gravity sense. When it solidified for a crucial moment, she didn't try to crush or lift it—she simply increased gravity directly above it, like dropping an invisible anvil.

The creature flattened against the floor, its exoskeleton cracking under the pressure.

Silence fell over the command module, broken only by their heavy breathing.

"Anyone hurt?" Luke asked, pressing a hand to the gash on his chest.

"Just...dizzy," Fii mumbled, sinking to the floor. The headache had expanded to fill her entire skull, throbbing in time with her heartbeat.

Serena released the energy she'd been maintaining, the hard-light barrier remaining solid even without her concentration. "It'll hold," she said, looking exhausted. "At least for a while."

"What the hell were those things?" Fii asked, wiping blood from her chin.

"No idea," Luke replied, examining one of the dead creatures cautiously. "Never seen anything like them."

"Wait," Serena walked to the console where Fii had played the audio log. "That scientist mentioned something. What was it?" She tapped at the keyboard, rewinding the recording. "Here."

The woman's voice played again: "—netherlings are getting smarter, finding the weak points in our security measures."

"Netherlings," Serena repeated. "She called them netherlings."

"Fitting," Luke muttered, prodding one of the corpses with his boot. "They're definitely not from around here."

Fii stared at the dead creature, her gravity sense still registering strange fluctuations even in death. "They mess with gravity somehow. When I tried to use my power on them, it felt...wrong. Like trying to grab smoke."

"They were phasing," Luke said, his voice clinical despite the blood seeping through his undersuit. "In and out of...somewhere. Another dimension, maybe."

"Great," Serena groaned. "Just what I needed to hear. Dimension-hopping monster bugs."

Fii pressed her palms against her eyes, trying to alleviate the pounding in her head. "We should block that door better. More of them might come through."

Luke nodded, already moving furniture to barricade the laboratory entrance. "Serena, can you reinforce the hard-light barrier? Make it thicker?"

"Yeah, just...give me a minute to catch my breath." She slumped against the wall, looking as drained as Fii felt.

They worked in silence for the next hour, strengthening their defenses while keeping wary eyes on the laboratory door. The barrier held, though occasionally they heard scratching and chittering from the other side.

The storm outside gradually subsided as dawn approached. None of them slept well, taking turns keeping watch. By the time the sun rose, all three were exhausted but alive.

When they finally ventured outside, the landscape had transformed. The storm had reshaped the basin, burying equipment and uncovering new horrors.

"Holy shit," Serena whispered, pointing toward the basin's far edge.

The storm had uncovered something massive—a partial skeleton half-embedded in the stone outcropping. Vertebrae the size of dinner plates curved upward from the sand, connected to a skull larger than any of the expedition's vehicles. The bone was neither white nor yellowed with age, but had a strange, iridescent quality that caught the morning light.

"What the hell is that?" Fii asked, voice barely audible.

Luke shook his head slowly. "Nothing I've ever seen before. Nothing anyone's seen before, I'd bet."

They approached the remains cautiously. Up close, the skeleton's alien nature became even more apparent. The skull housed three distinct eye sockets arranged in a triangle. The jaw contained multiple rows of teeth that spiraled inward like a drill bit.

Most disturbing were the limbs—too many for any earthly creature, jointed in impossible ways.

"You think this is what they were studying?" Serena asked, keeping a safe distance from the bones.

"Maybe," Luke replied. "Or maybe what was in these bones is what killed them all."

Fii stared at the massive remains, that familiar wrongness tugging at her gravitational sense.

Even dead and fossilized, the creature's mass didn't sit right in reality—too heavy one moment, nearly weightless the next, like trying to judge the weight of something underwater when waves keep lifting and dropping it.

"We need to keep moving," she said finally. "Find somewhere safe."

They gathered their scavenged supplies and charted a course away from the basin, using the rising sun to orient themselves. As they climbed the dune that would take them out of the corporate graveyard, Fii glanced back one last time.

In the early morning light, with sand still settling from the storm, she could have sworn she saw movement among the exposed bones—a shimmer of something not quite solid, not quite real. Then it was gone, leaving her to wonder if it had been there at all.

"You okay?" Serena asked, noticing Fii's grimace.

Fii wiped away the thin trickle of blood that had started from her nostril. "Fine," she lied, the throbbing behind her eyes intensifying with each step away from the basin.

As they crested the dune, the vast expanse of the Wastes stretched before them, the horizon wavering in places like heat rising from hot pavement. Except it wasn't heat—the air itself seemed to fold and bend, patches of desert that didn't look quite right.

"We need to find high ground," Luke said, pointing to a distant ridge. "Get our bearings."

Fii nodded, but the movement sent another spike of pain through her skull. She'd used her powers a thousand times before, manipulated gravity in ways that should have been impossible. But something was different now.

Wrong.

Her powers had never hurt like this before, not even when she trained from dawn until dusk.

And judging by the shimmer in the air ahead, the weirdness was just getting started.