V A Collision of Savage Opposites

King Ghidorah

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I do not know how long I kneel upon the damp concrete floor listening to the crackle and spark of the flickering overhead lights and the shattered consoles, the monotonous drip of the exhausted overhead sprinklers; counting the corpses, smelling the blood, and wondering at how Jewels managed to warn these rodents of my coming.

Long enough, certainly, for my lesser injuries to heal: for the shattered scales and riven flesh on my arms and chest to regrow and my strength to begin to return. Long enough to imagine a truly horrific fate for Jewels, and for the corpulent coward who, sensibly, fled from my wrath while I was yet unable to pursue.

Long enough to ponder why, as I rest crippled, in a room full of broken machinery with only one exit, there has been no further attempt to subdue me - and to conclude that it does not matter.

These scheming simians have lost their opportunity, and it will never come again.

Stray arcs of astral charge crackle across the blackened pit in my midsection as I stand. The injury burns as I move, flakes of charred flesh breaking off and falling to the floor, and a growl rumbles deep in my throat. My healing abilities are accelerating, growing in time with my burgeoning astral furnace, but I can still feel the itch of the scars upon my glorious countenance, the aches within my peerless flesh. And of course, my gut-wound still gapes: a singularity of pain, a hideous blot upon a field of effulgent gold.

As I shift my weight, testing my balance, my talons clack and scrape on the battle-scarred floor. Water continues to drip from the ceiling. I flex my clawed hands, feeling the crisp tightness of the freshly-knitted flesh, and I stalk towards the door.

It is a matter of moments to climb the stairs (a contrivance which I have never in all my eons of life had to personally bother with before), scant seconds more to cross the strange, empty room at the top, obliterate the lonely piece of furniture it holds with a shrieking bolt of cosmic power, and step through the empty frames of the front doors, shattered glass crunching harmlessly beneath my talons.

I emerge beneath an overcast sky, framed by the looming rim of a volcanic crater. The air is cold, filled with the acid smell of old concrete and a tang that I cannot identify. The street, save for a few dark stains, is empty.

A moment of dissociation washes over me: I have only ever previously experienced a city from this perspective when gazing through another’s eyes, reaching telepathically across light-years to puppeteer the body of some lesser creature in preparation for my grand, apocalyptic arrival. Being here in person, looking up at a row of featureless concrete buildings considerably less than fifty stories high, is a novel experience.

I sneer; Not entirely featureless. The inhabitants, it seems, have decorated their pitiful hive. The street-level facades of nearly every looming tenement are enrobed in graven images, bright colors washed to faded hues by weather, dirt and the sun. Some of them are even labeled in a more traditional sense, although many of the technological gimmicks, flickering holograms and neon strips, do not seem to be functioning well. From my accustomed stature, such details would pass entirely unnoticed.

Curious, I stalk up and down the boulevard, taking in the murals. I study them carefully, the way the one picture flows into the other, layers upon layers, as interconnected as the lives that produced them - and then I begin raking the walls with crackling blasts of golden lightning. The sense of satisfaction as the artwork is erased forever from the face of universe, reduced to meaningless entropy and concrete shrapnel, is almost enough to make me forget the pain in my gut, to take my thoughts the growing puzzlement in the back of my mind.

Where are all the people? The group of sad, dead gunmen that I left in the ruined basement cannot have been the entire population of this place.

As much as I am enjoying the opportunity to indulge myself, it just isn’t quite the same without a fleeing populace. It lacks context; more than that, it suggests that there is something else present in this settlement (it is not really large enough to call it a city) that is of greater concern than me.
 

King Ghidorah

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Overcome with curiosity, I proceed to the nearest door. The automated gateway, a metal frame set with tinted glass, is recessed into the façade of an upright, concrete box several stories in height: practically interchangeable in design with almost every other building on the street.

When the portal refuses to show me the proper courtesy, remaining stubbornly closed in spite of my undeniable proximity, I simply punch my hands through the tinted pain, grab hold of the frame and, digging my talons into the tarmac, rip the entire disappointing affair out of the wall, hurling it into the street. Concrete fragments and broken glass fill the air, scattering across the pavement. The pain in my midsection flares at the exertion, but it is drowned out by a wave of satisfaction at the exercise.

Satisfied but still feeling inquisitive, I stride into building, hunching slightly to avoid catching my regal horns on the splintered edge of the entry as I pass.

Whatever the original intention for this space, it has evidently been serving as a tavern: a concept that exists within nearly every civilization I have encountered but for which I have never found any use other than kindling (and occasionally, should my preparatory telepathic prying have revealed an establishment to have some particular attachment for a small subset of my victims, a punctuation mark upon the destruction of a particular prefecture. When seeking to truly appreciate a society attention to the personal details can be just as important, if not moreso, than the broader experience).

The room, which appears to occupy much of this building’s ground floor, is strewn with prefabricated metal stools constructed of molded plastic – many of them toppled, as though abandoned without care or caution. Upon the plaster-clad walls, the color of old bones, pictures, tools, and seemingly random bits of garbage serve as decoration: a broken helmet, a piece of a wilted plant, a scrap of cloth - presumably some indecipherable exercise in sentiment. A long countertop constructed of particle-board separates a small section abbuting the back wall from the rest of the room, including a metal shelving rack filled floor to ceiling with unlabeled glass bottles. Plastic packing-crates serve as tables, many with half-full glasses, food and other sundries still resting upon them. There is an open door beside the bar, leading to a stairwell; and another, behind the bar, which is closed.

The most interesting thing about this room, however, is that the floor is entirely covered with a shallow of pool of the crimson fluid which serves the local simians as blood. It squelches as I proceed across the room to the bar, wet and still slightly warm between my toes. It drips from the ceiling as well, spattered in lazy arcs across the lighting strips, granting the tableau a ruddy tinge. The smell isn’t quite right, but my senses remain too dulled for me say with any confidence what is wrong.

I look around carefully, taking in the scene and lamenting for the thousandth time the dormancy of my brother-minds. Another two pairs of eyes would be very helpful just now. It occurs to me that there are no bodies – only the occasional, very small lump of unidentifiable viscera, half-concealed by the puddle on the floor.

Interesting…

A sudden clatter intrudes upon my attention, as of metal, dropped from a height, bouncing upon a hard surface. It echoes in the stillness, leaving only silence in its wake. I narrow my eyes at the door behind the countertop, the apparent source of the sound – and something incredibly sharp strikes me in the back of the neck with tremendous force, impacting my unyielding golden hide with a resounding crack!

My head aching, my midsection burning, my talons sliding on the blood-slick floor, I round on my attacker, a coiling arc of amber gravitic lightning screaming forth from my open jaws. It traces a boiling golden line across wall, scatters twisted, melting bar-stools, tears a repurposed packing-crate apart in a flash of flame and blackened plastic shards - at which point something large and powerful drops from the ceiling, clicking and chittering. Out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of a glassy black carapace as the creature lands hard upon my back.
 

King Ghidorah

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The impact fails to knock me to the ground outright, but in my injured state I am unable to fully brace against the shock. I twist, stumbling as my gut-wound protests, and bring our full weight, both mine and my assailant’s, down on the edge of the unvarnished bartop. The flimsy material is unable to withstand us: It shatters, splintering in a puff of sawdust and a clatter of particle-board fragments, sending me sprawling across the broken barrier and face-first onto the gore-covered tile beyond.

The beast upon my back, undaunted and agile, rides me down – I can see its clawed fingers in my peripheral vision, sable and segmented, ending in glittering silver needles that scrape gratingly against the impenetrable flesh of my upper arms as it attempts to pin me to the floor. The sound they make, the abrasive squeal of chromed metallic talons against armored golden scales is one of the worst things, across untold eons, that I have ever heard.

I do not give my unknown foe time to take advantage of their position. I reach back with my right hand, my fingers contacting something cool, curved and smooth. Power surges forth from my astral well, and, in an eruption of arcing golden energy, I blast the thing at point blank range!

The grasping black hands disappear, as does the weight upon my back. The air is abruptly filled with a high-pitched screech, as of an insect in pain, accompanied by the smell of scorched glass. From behind me there arises the sound of complicated impact , of something larger than myself crashing to the floor, thrashing amidst blood and debris. My lips curl back in a savage snarl and astral charge crackles across my teeth. Pushing off the gore-flooded floor with my hands, rising to my feet, I turn to face my attacker - and I stare, enraptured.

It is, I think, the only appropriate response to the sight before me.

The thing is, from my current, laughable point of reference, enormous: almost a head taller than myself, and equipped with a tapered, sinuous, segmented tail that is almost half again the length of my entire body. The appendage is tipped with a shining metallic blade, wickedly curved and so sharp it practically hums as it cuts the air, propelled by the creature’s flailing. The rest of its physiology is, for the most part, familiar in overall shape. It swipes at the air with two distended arms, ending in the needle-clawed hands to which I was subjected mere moments ago, emerging from shoulders framed by pauldrons of black exoskeletal armor; two lithe legs, similar in construction to my own, their musculature clearly outlined between segments of chitin and bone, drum at the ground, splashing crimson viscera too and fro. The thing’s torso is emaciated, its ribbed endoskeleton well in evidence, but wrapped in cables of powerful musculature, every tendon of which is clearly visible, shifting beneath a gleaming black dermis that seems as much chitin as flesh. A collection of several rigid semi-cylindrical tubes, their function arcane, emerge from its shoulder-blades.

It is the thing’s head, however, which gives me pause. It is eyeless, long and cylindrical, its length oriented parallel to the ground, as though some mad god had mounted an onyx railroad car upon its shoulders. Swiveling from its center-point atop a wide neck wrapped in powerful tendons, it is as long as the creature’s torso, rounded at both ends, encased in a smooth chitinous shell so deeply black that it presents a mirror-like shine. A line of obsidian spines, almost putting me in mind of vertebrae, run in a line up either side of it.

And then there is the jaws. They are relatively small, compared to the size of the head, a shallow bifurcation of the skull at the leading end, but lined with tightly-packed rows of metallic needles as long as my fingers.

Black, oily smoke is pouring from a blasted wound in the thing’s side, product of my irresistible golden lightning. As the creature flails and screams, it drips caustic green fluid which sizzles and smokes where it hits the floor.

It is, I think, the most perfect example I have seen of an ambush predator, its every aspect designed to hunt, to stalk and to kill (though I do wonder about the head). Despite the rapidly-fading sting in my neck where its initial strike landed, failing to pierce my glorious golden scales, despite the affront to my dignity that it would presume to mark me as prey, I cannot help but feel a moment of delicious anticipation.

To end such a consummate hunter will be nothing short of exquisite.

I open wide my gleaming jaws, the aurelian glow of my astral furnace flaring in the back of my throat.

Explosively, twisting in a way I would not have thought possible and faster than I would have believed, the thing stabs its tail into the ceiling, punching through the panels and finding purchase in something more substantial. It uses the powerful appendage to yank itself out of the path of my blast which, roiling and sparking, erupts from my jaws and tears clear through the front wall of the building, raising a cloud of smoke and pulverized concrete. My enemy inverts and contorts as it evades doom by inches, its movements bionic in their efficiency, instantly pulling it’s limbs under itself and reorienting so that it ends up clinging to the ceiling with all fours. Opening its mouth wider than I would have thought it capable of, exposing membranes and musculature almost mechanical in their elegance, it reveals a second, smaller set of jaws within its throat, and releases an ear-splitting scream.

No matter. It may posture all it likes.

Without a moment’s hesitation I raise my hands, and power crackles across my arms - and it is at that point that the second beast bursts through the door from whence came the clatter that first attracted my attention, kicks off the wall, and barrels into me sidelong before I can react, its jaws open and claws raised to strike.
 

King Ghidorah

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Sparks fly as our forms collide, razor-edged needles raking shrieking trails across my brilliant body as hydraulic jaws seek purchase on my throat. This creature is smaller than the first, however, less developed and less powerful, lacking the bladed tail and the armored skeletal outgrowths; We are equal in stature, and in terms of sheer bulk it is I who has the advantage. As such, the hunter’s sudden assault causes me to backstep, sliding across the blood-drenched floor and nearly tripping over one of the improvised tables, sending abandoned glassware tumbling to the ground. It gives me a moments pause, but ultimately fails to knock me from my feet. I turn my head and, taking hold of the lesser hunter’s wrists, scream a solar-bright astral flare directly into the beasts face!

It's elongated head explodes, the phallic obsidian carapace bursting like overheated glass beneath the fury of my power unleashed. Gore splashes across the side of my face, traces starbursts across my upper-body, a mixture of oily black fluid and caustic green ichor. I sneer and release my grip, letting the thing fall twitching to the floor in a heap of shining blades and bristling onyx flesh. The fluids leaking from the stump of its neck mix with the existing sanguine pool, which instantly begins to sizzle and smoke.

And so, for that matter, do I.

The hunter’s blood burns. Little grey chemical wisps are rising form my face and chest. The foul burnt-metallic scent of my own bubbling scales stings my nostrils as they soften and melt, turning from burnished gold to an off-green slurry. The pain is tremendous, a clinging, piercing sensation as though ten thousand miniscule needles are burrowing into my flesh, penetrating my face and skittering across my sternum to carve channels in the glittering expanse of my pectorals. With a keening wail rising in my throat I stagger, stumble back, dumbfounded and gaping until my back meets the wall beside the stairwell door. I rest my weight against it with such uncontrolled suddenness that the plaster caves in.

I can feel my glorious golden body fighting back, repairing itself, a furious electric churning beneath the lancing fire of the acid as my material form is reconstructed from pure astral energy. The two phenomena seem to be in equilibrium for the moment, my scales regenerating as fast as the caustic contamination can dissolve them. The vile fluid is not going to kill me…but it does make me vulnerable.

The is a point that is driven brutally home by my remaining enemy. The hunter slinks silently forward in my moment of horrified distraction, ponderous but undeterred. Still clinging to the ceiling, chittering in a way that almost suggests smugness, it whip-cracks its tail: The knobby, segmented exoskeleton flows with a macabre, almost liquid fluidity as the lethal appendage arcs downward like sable thunder and buries its bladed terminus to the hilt in my smoking and tarnished golden breast.
 

King Ghidorah

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For the second time today my own gleaming ichor fills my throat. A metallic spray escapes from between my teeth in a hacking cough, blessing the crimson sea in which I stand with an archipelago of golden islands. The wound is not mortal; The scope of my existence is far too vast to be struck down by a mere punctured organ, and even were such a thing possible it could not kill me so quickly that my healing abilities would not intercede.

And in any case, it presents an opportunity. The hunter’s tail is stuck.

It attempts to withdraw for another blow, to jerk the weapon free as quickly as it struck, but though its attack neatly threaded the space between two of my ribs the curved blade is now stuck within the still-un-compromised and tectonically dense muscle which lies beneath my acid-ravaged scales. The hunter’s efforts serve only to jerk me away from the wall, very nearly lifting me off the ground – and to give me an idea.

I grab hold of the offending appendage with one hand – the blade in my chest prevents me from raising both arms – and, curling my toes and settling my stance, I sink my talons into the floor. Then, my midsection screaming, sizzling with golden energy once again as the blackened wound cracks and begins to leak mercurial silver pus, I heave with all my strength!

With a rising squeal of surprise the hunter is pulled free of its perch on the ceiling. The beast is agile enough to twist as it falls, attempting to execute an acrobatic landing and spring to the attack, but there is simply not enough space. It touches down upon a cluster of bar stools, which grant it no stable footing nor room to tumble. Unbalanced in spite of its impressive contortions, it crashes to the floor in a heap.

I part my blood-drenched jaws, and I express my displeasure.

An actinic torrent of astral charge bursts forth, not only from my throat but from the puncture in my chest, vaporizing the end of the thing’s tail, shattering the blade which so troubles me. Stray arcs ripple from the wound, gossamer thin and shining like the sun. They dance and crawl across my upper body, burning away much of the acid which so troubles me.

The creature contorts again, attempting with unnatural quickness to rise even as I launch my attack, and is struck full in the midsection. With a shower of bursting chitin and a resounding crack it is blown back through the hole in exterior wall, sent bouncing and sliding into the middle of street. Acrid smoke rises in plumes from the crater in its chest, from the trench in its side and the truncated end of its tail. Caustic green blood flows freely, raising plumes of vapor as it eats holes in the pavement.

I stride across the room, allowing the barest trickle of astral charge to dance across my fingers as I run them along the side of my face, across my shoulders and neck, neutralizing the remaining acid by dint of applied heat. The wound in my breast is already sealing itself, the lancing pain of internal damage fading to a dull ache.

As I approach the yawning cleft in the building’s facade, the creature rights itself with insectoid grace, attempts to rise, clicking softly. It falters, its legs visibly weak, collapses to the smoking tarmac before trying again.

I am struck by a moment of apprehension, a sickening sensation of being observed by something unseen. I look over my shoulder. I check the ceiling. I glance at the opening to the stairwell, to the formerly closed door behind the bar, now hanging off its hinges. The room is filled with the sour tang of acid and sweet stink of ozone.

I wonder how many of these beasts it takes to empty a settlement of this size? They are devastatingly fast, powerful (as far as the beings with whom I am currently forced to share a scale of existence judge such things), and the larger variety, at least, is very hard to kill. Individually they are no match for me, even diminished as I am. But in numbers?

My attention returns to my crippled foe – only to find that it has disappeared. The only trace that remains is a smoking hole in the middle of street, the edge tinged with steaming green slime.

This could very well be a serious problem.
 

King Ghidorah

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I am faced, then, with a choice. There is no incentive to remain in this place, and, saving the simple fact that it is still standing, every reason to leave – but I know nothing of this planet, of where I should go next or what I might find. So should I bend my every effort towards escape, that I may return when I am stronger and torch this settlement to the bedrock without concern for what feral predators may be lurking around the corner, or should I make a more thorough search of this infested mammalian hive in hope of gleaning some further insight and knowledge?

Neither option is satisfying. What I truly want, my most earnest desire in this moment, is to find the wounded hunter and to finish it off with brutal efficiency: to watch as its mighty onyx frame twitches and grows still and it begins to dissolve in a spreading pool of its own caustic fluids. There was a time in ages past when I would have followed that impulse, when I would have set off in frenzied search with only blood and golden thunder on my mind. I have barreled headlong and heedless into enough doomed ambushes, however (two of them just today, even) to recognize the tactics of a pack hunter when they are being used against me; And as infuriating as the notion may be, I am not so indestructible now as I once was.

As I mull my course of action, I proceed cautiously out into the center of the street. The chill in the air has grown more intense, and little crystals of ice drift lazily beneath the overcast sky oval of visible sky, framed by the crater walls. Out in the open, at least, these creatures cannot hide from my lightning, cannot drop from the ceiling or erupt from behind a nearby door.

Just in case, however, I take the headless body of the lesser hunter with me, holding it loosely by the ankle and dragging it in my wake, leaving a smoking trail of caustic corruption. While this is a more effective statement when performed with a hero or a leader, I have observed that any corpse will do for most species, so long as it is one of their own.

Not that I have had much opportunity to try it, historically. In the past, for my brother-minds and I, merely showing our sneering golden faces was usually enough to achieve the desired effect. Also, there was frequently a problem of disparate scale. The finest art, however (and what I do is art) is not only an exercise in aesthetic revelation but also a form of communication - and so, since the auspicious day I first discovered language, I have made it my business to always know how to make myself understood.

With that thought in mind, and a somewhat satisfied spring in my regal step as I proceed slowly down the deserted avenue, I take further stock of my options. I categorically refuse to enter the looming tenements on either side of this avenue, any of which could conceal any number of those vicious amalgamations of glittering blade and obsidian bone; that leaves two options within my line of sight. One is a low-slung complex, secreted behind a set of high stone walls, and at the other end of the street –

I pause, a low rumble of satisfaction building in my throat as the solution to my dilemma presents itself.

At the other end of the street, atop an expansive elevated platform hosting a number of large prefabricated domes which I recognize as single-craft hangars, a spacecraft is arriving.
 

King Ghidorah

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***​

The boxy, matte-grey trans-orbital dropship descended silently on turbofan repulsor jets, touching down on the spacedock with barely a sound. The interior of the vehicle was surprisingly roomy; One didn’t typically think of short-hop transports as having legroom, let alone genuine leather seats, maroon carpeting and real wooden paneling imported at great expense from Cevanti. One didn’t expect them to smell of cedar and fine alcohol. But then, this wasn’t a normal dropship. Anyone who knew anything in the Crossroads could tell, simply by the black corporate watermark painted on each side, just above the registration number, upon which was embossed the word 'Legal'. On the vanishingly rare occasions when the Kaalakiota Corporation sent representatives to speak in person with business-people who chose, bafflingly, to operate from the surface of Inverxe, no expense was spared. It was important, after all, to establish from the word ‘go’ who it was these people were dealing with.

Uncrossing his wiry legs and checking the pleats in his trousers, Raph Hannigan stood up and glanced at his watch – an affectation, of course. Both the action and the bauble itself were unnecessary. Raph always knew what time it was, courtesy of the HUD implanted in his right eye, but an understated chunk of platinum clockwork on one’s wrist was all part of the job, as were the two large, red, hairless humanoids in immaculately tailored black suits and fashionable black ties, seated on either side of him; As was the equally fashionable black EX-fletchette sub-machine pistol concealed in the tailored folds of his twenty-thousand-credit graphene-re-enforced sport-jacket.

As he waited for the engines to finish spinning down, Raph frowned, drew his gun, and manually checked it while simultaneously pinging its status via its wireless connection to his internal display. He had a very bad feeling about how the next couple of minutes would unfold, and even though he knew his cortical backup was safe back on the Hub, he’d prefer not to have to take the pay-dock he’d get hit with if the company actually had to clone him.

Besides, he’d had it on good authority that dying could hurt.

“Guns out, gentleman,” he said. “Keep it casual, though. This could still go smoothly.”

Behind him, his bodyguards rose from their seats, utterly impassive. One of them rolled his shoulder, working out a kink. They weren't androids, or cultivars: they were twins. But they took their work very seriously. From their tailored sleeves there came the moving-sand hiss of small, complicated machinery: wearable weapons systems being brought online.

Technically, Raph wasn’t here to do violence. Raph was a lawyer: He was here to be persuasive, and courteous, and charming: to make a small man who owned a small mining concern feel important so that he would accept the obscenely large (but, really, nowhere near large enough considering what was at stake) offer that the Corporation was going to make him in order to buy out the mineral rights claim he’d filed mere hours ago.

Failing that, Raph was here to be threatening, and courteous, and charming, and to a make a small man who ran a small mining concern feel scared enough to accept the table-scraps he was being offered.

Failing that, Raph was here to make Ted Koenigsburg-Heath disappear. But that wouldn’t be violence: that would be housecleaning.

The problem was that nobody had been able to raise anyone at Fortress-Polity 428A, let alone Deeptide Mineral Extraction LLC., for at least ninety minutes. Up on the Hub, this wasn’t completely inexplicable. A lot of systems were unreliable since the Unmade had attacked, and reclamation efforts, let alone repairs, were still ongoing.

However, Raph’s shuttle should have been able to raise the space-dock on approach. The automatic pilot had received nothing but static from the ground, and the corporate liaison had been forced to give it a verbal over-ride command in order to begin landing procedures: almost certainly a bad sign.

On the other hand, the FP series of ground-level mining-hubs were decades old, and had largely been a failure even back then. Counting this one, only four or five were still operational. Any number of things could have taken communications offline, many of them completely benign.

Raph smirked. ‘Benign’. He had never once come down to the icy surface of this forsaken moon and encountered anything benign – and that included the people. He’d have put good money on the entire settlement having turned aggressively cannibal.

It had happened before, after all.

When the engines were completely silent the automatic pilot spoke, an aggressively chipper female voice seeming to come from everywhere at once.

“It’s now safe to disembark, Mr. Hannigan! I’m not picking up any biological signatures, which is very odd, but I sure hope everything goes well! And just a friendly reminder, the Corporation wants either a positive result or a confirmed kill: otherwise, the usual fees apply!”

Raph let his breath escape his through his teeth. “Got it. Keep the engines on standby though, alright? I really don’t like the look of this one.”

“Sure will! Keep warm!”

The door slid open, filling the cabin with a blast of arctic air. Adjusting their jackets, which while comfortable, armored and fashionable were little use against the cold, Raph and his entourage stepped out on onto the tarmac.
 

King Ghidorah

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***​

As I watch the new arrival disappear from my sight beyond the lip of the distant elevated platform, I am abruptly confronted with the true scope of my predicament. On either side of the avenue, from alleys and broken windows, shaded doorways and the roofs of featureless buildings, chitinous black shadows begin to move. They scuttle across the walls, propel themselves silently from one side of the street to the other in great arcing leaps without ever touching the ground, and disappear again amidst the stark and deserted urban landscape. There is movement far above as well, upon the lip of the crater in which this settlement is built: distant obsidian shapes scuttling beneath catwalks. They reposition in a matter of seconds, re-dispersing in response to the new arrival, and then it is as though they were never there at all.

In that brief moment I count at least twenty of the creatures, both greater and lesser, and those are just the ones I can see. Once again on-edge, I glance furtively over my shoulder, feeling much less secure than I did mere moments ago.

There is nothing I can identify for certain, but I would swear upon my own former glory that there are shadows behind me where there were none before.

It is a revelatory moment. I know now beyond doubt that I am still being hunted, and the realization is both crushing and vexing beyond words. I feel a chill that has nothing to do with the increasingly frigid temperature, a frission of impending doom that I have not encountered since the first time the Balefire Knight bested me – the first time I suspected that I was facing an enemy of a caliber wholly outside my experience. Seemingly responding to my discomfort, the wound in my belly throbs.

I am stronger than they are individually – this I know beyond doubt. But if all of them were to come at me at once? If they were to co-ordinate, to restrain me and strike at my wound, perhaps. And that is not to mention the vile possibilities of their acidic fluids - an attribute which in numbers they could easily make impossible to avoid...

I grind my serrated teeth, faced with a reality that offends the very core of my being but which I am forced to acknowledge by hard-won wisdom: This may not be a fight I can win.

Dragging my grim trophy, alert to every sight and sound, I jog softly towards the elevated platform which I now think must be a sort of miniature space-port, my talons clacking softly and rhythmically against the tarmac. I will retreat for now, as disgusting an admission of inadequacy as that may be – I do not see any other choice. Unfortunately, seeing as I currently lack wings and don’t know how to fly a shuttlecraft, in order to do that I must reach the new arrivals before they are slaughtered like livestock and dragged off to whatever grim use these apex predators have the rest of this settlement’s fragile population.

The universe has put me in a strange position: I am going to save someone, something I have assuredly never done before and will hopefully never be forced to do again.

It will, of course, be a temporary state of affairs - together we may escape the eyeless hunters, but escaping from me is another matter entirely.
 

King Ghidorah

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***
Panning his gaze across the space-dock, Raph knew immediately that his suspicions were correct. The elevated platform, a green plasticrete tarmac the size of a professional sports-field, was dotted with white hemispherical hangars, bright red maintenance scaffolding and, at the edges, a system of catwalks and a small terminal - barely more than a shed attached to a freight elevator and a set of stairs. On a typical day this place wouldn’t be as busy or well-equipped as the settlement’s bulk-transport mineral depot, located about ninety degrees ‘round the rim of the crater, but there should have been some activity. At the very least the lights in the terminal window should have been shining a deceptive, welcoming glow.

Raph gestured for his two hulking bodyguards to cover him, holstered his weapon, and withdraw a pair of sued leather gloves from the inside pocket of his jacket, frowning up at the increasingly overcast sky as he pulled them on.

It shouldn’t have been so cold either. The fortress-polity’s artificial climate was clearly offline.

The lawyer sighed, drawing his weapon once again, his breath misting in the frigid air. “Alright. Off we go. Shout if you see anyone, and unless they’re baying for our blood try not to shoot any miners.”

The trio proceeded across the tarmac to the terminal, which proved to locked. Raph stood aside while one of his bodyguards – he never could tell them apart, and had never bothered to learn their names – kicked it open, shattering the heavy magnetic lock with a single precise blow. The two ruddy giants proceeded inside and, with silent, well-practiced professionalism, swept the room.

When a couple of seconds passed without any cries of alarm or sudden weapons-fire, Raph followed them inside. The darkened building contained only a cheap faux-cherrywood desk, a retractable steel grating barring access to the freight-elevator, and a single potted plant, just now beginning to wilt in the cold. There was a stairwell in one corner, a restroom beside it, and a door labeled ‘office’ behind the desk. Raph walked with casual precision over to the lonely piece of furniture, his calf-leather shoes silent on the cheap all-weather carpeting, and inspected its lone adornment: a mug of coffee resting on a modular heating plate. The mug bore the legend: ‘You’ll eventually go crazy. Why not work here?’

“Still slightly warm,” he muttered, and headed for the stairs. His bodyguards trailed behind him, their features stony, heads swiveling like radar-dishes.

They made it almost half-way down the rickety switch-back staircase, open to the air and supported by a scaffold of metal piping, before everything went catastrophically wrong.

A black shape, glittering like volcanic glass in the shade, dropped silently from the underside of the terminal. It impacted the landing directly in front of them, a sinuous, segmented ribbon of knobbly vertebral exoskeleton flexing and twisting in its wake.

Raph did something he hadn’t done in years: He froze.

The lawyer was no stranger to combat, trained and experienced in the kind of messy work that a person might encounter when pursuing the legal profession on behalf of a sprawling mega-corporation operating in an untamed backwater. This, however, was one of the ultimate horrors of the Crossroads: something glimpsed in grainy surveillance footage retrieved from abandoned settlements and derelict spacecraft, whispered of in military taverns and fraught tactical briefings. They moved like shadows, they killed without mercy - and for every one you saw, there were two approaching from an angle you hadn't even considered.

Endoparasitoid Alien: Hive-building Species XX121.

A Xenomorph.


One of Raph’s bodyguards grabbed him by the collar and, grimacing furiously, bum-rushed him back up the stairs in a furious clatter of expensive footwear on cheap metal, shielding the lawyer with his bulk. The other giant raised his hand, fingers spread. There was a hiss and a blue flash as the weapon built into his custom suit-jacket engaged, a geometrically perfect pencil-thin ray of brilliant azure light lancing out from a node in his enormous palm – and striking nothing but empty space.

A chittering rush of graceful movement, shadow on shadows, the breathy whisper of something incredibly sharp moving quickly through the air – and the huge man fell to his knees with a ringing clang, gurgling softly and desperately clutching at the rapidly-diminishing crimson waterfall which pulsed where his throat used to be.

Raph had almost gotten his shit together as his remaining bodyguard rushed him out of the terminal, enough for his brain to start rapidly making connections: If this settlement had fallen to a xenomorph infestation then this whole job was fucked. Ted Koenigsberg-Heath was either dead or plastered to a maintenance-tunnel wall with one of those monsters growing in his chest. Either way, Raph considered the mission complete. If the Corporation wanted visual confirmation, they could send in a properly equipped strike team to contend with these things– though they probably wouldn’t.

Everyone knew how that story went.

As the pair rushed across the landing-field a sudden commotion erupted behind them. A chittering hiss and a warbling, almost musical scream. There was a sudden explosion of golden light, shining from somewhere behind the fleeing corporate duo, stretching their shadows out in front of them as they ran. It was followed closely by a resounding, meaty crunch and the chaotic ringing of breaking glass, leading directly to the chitinous clatter something big, hard and complicated hitting the tarmac.

Neither Raph nor his remaining bodyguard turned to look. They were less than ten meters from the transport and, detecting their approach, the rear cabin doors had already begun to slide silently open.

“Hi Mister Hannigan!” said the automatic pilot, its cheery voice echoing from the external speakers. “Done already? Wow, you’re good at this! Well, before we get going, just so you knooooooow… there’s something on my roof.”

Both men looked up, raising their eyes and their weapons with, it seemed to them, terrifying slowness.

An eyeless, elongated obsidian head stared back at them, grinning with a mouthful of crowded steel-needle teeth. Its clawed sable hands clutched the edge of the transport and its long, segmented tail flexed behind it, moving and twisting as though with its own sinister, predatory intent. The thing erupted in a blur of motion -

And then it disappeared.

Three bolts of yellow lightning, so bright they were almost white, sizzled through the air. Two of them missed: One scored a blackened, hissing rut in the side of the transport, blistering the paint and ripping a jagged gash in the outer hull; the other struck the lawyer’s remaining bodyguard, whose chest burst apart in a shower of sparks, expensive fabric and carbonized flesh, armored jacket be damned. The third, however hit the xenomorph full in the face as it moved to decapitate Raph, blowing it bodily off the top of the shuttle in a vile shower of glittering chitin and green gore.

"Oh fuck!" said the autopilot. "That, uh.... that burns. Yeesh. That's going to be a problem later. If you're planning on leaving, Mister Hannigan then sooner is probably best!"

Slowly, Raph turned around. He still had a gun in his hand, and he didn’t want to provoke whatever grizzled miners or burnt-out mercs were standing behind him with overcharged plasma-cannons.

It turned out to be neither of those things. He locked eyes with his savior. He stared.

“Oh-kay” said the lawyer, breathing harder than he would have preferred. “You’re… not what I was expecting.”

The shining dragon-beast ran a clawed hand along one arm, crackling energy dancing at its fingertips, burning away a sizzling green slurry that appeared to be eating away at its scales. A wound in its thigh, and another on its face leaked mercury-tinged golden blood. The injuries made a wet sucking sound as they repaired themselves before Raph’s eyes. The beast glanced behind it, crimson eyes scanning the environment for threats, clearly on-edge; Its voice, silky smooth and brutally intense, echoed in Raph’s mind.

What you were expecting does not matter – nothing about you does save for this: You will provide me transport from this infested hive, or I will crush your bones and leave you, still living, to the mercies of these skulking vermin.’

Raph straightened up, holstered his weapon and adjusted his tie. Yes, it was another alien of some sort, and circumstances suggested an incredibly dangerous one. Clearly something more complicated than just a xenomorph infestation had befallen FP-428A; But at least this monster could talk, which meant, presumably, it could be reasoned with. He would take that over the xenomorphs with an honest-to-gods smile on his face.

Cautiously, not quite daring to touch the thing’s shoulder but making a gesture that suggested it, the lawyer stepped over the smoking remains of his bodyguard and ushered his new acquaintance into the transport, eyes darting nervously all the while.

“As luck would have it, my expensive-looking friend, I was just leaving.”
 

King Ghidorah

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As the spacecraft rises into the air, arcing up and away from the doomed settlement below, there is an unaccustomed sensation of second-hand motion, abruptly cut off. I contemplate the novel sensation of sitting in a finely crafted leather chair, and fight my rising desire to destroy the vehicle from within; I am surrounded by the smells and accoutrements of luxury, and the scrawny simian across from me reeks of privilege and undeserved authority.

We are both silent for several minutes. As I study him, silently condemning his weakness and evident lack of substance, I can see him studying me, trying to decide who and what he is dealing with.

He is obviously about to speak; Having determined that he is not truly necessary for the operation of this vehicle, I am about to tear his head from his shoulders and, laughing, drink the blood as it drains from his skull. However, we are both interrupted by a sudden, violent jolt. It shakes the cabin, very nearly spilling us both onto the carpeted floor. The upholstery of my chair pops beneath my claws.

A voice come from out of the air, speaking quickly and with a cheerfulness that positively grinds against my aural canals.

“Mister Hannigan? Uh, we have a bit of a problem. Well, two problems really. I can’t actually leave the atmosphere. There’s too much damage to my hull, and we’d definitely explode. I mean, I’d probably be fine in the long run: once you peel the shuttle away, I’m a crystal-lattice neural network inside of a vibranium-doped tungsten-polycarbide –“

The over-dressed mammal cuts her of with a tired wave of his hand. “I understand, pilot. Emergency landing at the nearest inhabited settlement, that should be right enough. What is the other problem?”

“Oh! Right. So, there’s another one of those monsters crawling around in between my inner and outer pressure-hull, and it’s reallllly wreck-k-k-k-k -*zwip*

I stare over the end of my regal muzzle at ‘Mister Hannigan’, flaring my nostrils in disdain. His expression has gone from deliberately thoughtful to the glassy expression of a prey-animal caught off-gaurd in a matter of moments. The cabin rocks again, and this time the shaking doesn’t entirely stop. A new voice speaks, this one hollow and lacking in character.

“This is your emergency piloting system. Your autopilot, cortical upload template designation – Mabel! – has been disconnected from the shuttlecraft. We will be touching down at the nearest-t-t-t-t-t-t*zwip*

Hannigan begins to stand as our transport quakes harder, a horrible juddering drone that resonates in the depths of my bones, but is immediately knocked from his feet. I can feel my weight lessen oh-so-slightly, and I know that we are beginning to plunge from the sky.

I cross my legs, and I rub the bottom of my chin with my hand, two refreshingly imperious gestures which I have never before had both the occasion and ability to properly employ.

I am not afraid of our failing transport. I am not afraid of the beast within the walls. What I am, at the moment, is interested. My erstwhile companion attempts again to rise and I use my taloned foot to press his head back down to the carpet. He will not survive, and I want him out of the way while I contemplate this experience.

For all the times I have blasted them out of the sky, I have never before had the opportunity to witness what happens inside one of these vehicles when they crash.

That's act 2 done with! Tune in for my next thread: Ghidorah thinks Darkseid is a talentless hack!
(it won't actually be called that)
 
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