Member
Jing
𝕊𝕦𝕟: 𝕊𝕖𝕡𝕥. 𝟚𝟘, 𝟚𝟘𝟚𝟘 / / 𝕎𝕒𝕤𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘𝕥𝕠𝕟, 𝔻.ℂ. / / ℂ𝕚𝕥𝕪 / / ~𝟙𝟛𝟘𝟘
“They’re taking too long,” Director Zhang muttered to herself, eyes narrowing at the stalled dots on her phone’s display. And with every passing minute that she couldn’t get a handle on the situation was the lowering probability that she would be able to fix it, period. There was no time to wait on them.
She cast her gaze around the chaos ringing her where soldiers barked orders and confirmations over their phones and civilians huddled and cried for help, demanding special attention to their loved ones. It was an exodus not unlike the aftermath of China’s devastation, where survivors on the fringe of the destruction had flooded the western European borders searching desperately for refuge and rescue. Lina Zhang had been younger and kinder then, unmarked by the scars of simply living in the hostile new age. An ambassador’s intern at the time in a chancery bordering the Tibetan Highlands of southwestern China, Lina had been solely focused on the task of funneling Western aid towards future development of the region. It was a small role in a nondescript location, but she had harbored plans of taking control once the locale had settled. She had not been—and would not have ever been—ready for the razing that shook the land and grayed out the sky with smoke and ashes. Evacuation was impossible. Flights had either flown or could no longer fly in the darkness. Pandemonium stretched even as far as the fringes of the barren highlands and what had been paperwork, numbers, and endless contracts became a daily struggle to provide the basic necessities for desperate refugees who had gone as far as their legs or gas tanks would allow. Anything to escape what they thought was the world’s end.
The memory aligned perfectly with the scene in front of her eyes, but the Director watched impassively now, concerned only with her goal and little else. People watched her warily, but remained quiet, unwilling to face the ring of soldiers around her to ask for help.
At least for the first few minutes of her presence there.
A man approached tentatively, hope on his sun-tanned face as he addressed the renowned director.
“M-my wife was shopping for groceries and I couldn’t—”
“Not now,” the Director responded, not bothering to even listen. On cue, a soldier raised a hand at the man, in a gesture to step back.
“But you have to help!” The ravenous need to be allotted special consideration lined the man’s words until they thickened with emotion and instead of stepping back he stepped forward. “She’s pregnant! You can’t just leave her—”
Before even the soldiers could point their guns at him, the Director already had.
“Not now,” she repeated, voice gentler. Her finger curved onto the trigger of the Hephaestus weapon.
She watched his pockmarked face break and could almost hear the hopes crashing around him. He stepped back, fighting the tremors of stress and panic across his body and the newly arrived tears welling up in his eyes.
A separate set of soldiers nudged him back towards his group of evacuees, checking over every person for any injuries that weren’t immediately apparent. In the back and separated from the groups of recovering citizens was the unconscious healer, already hooked up to several transfusion bags while paramedics injected his converted blood into the worst of the injured citizens, marveling briefly at every blossom of white, glassy mist that sheathed an affected target’s torso. More trucks commandeered from nearby towns were already on the way to help evacuate citizens, but the wait allowed most of them the time to recover with the magic they scorned so much.
“Send a squad towards their location. Bring them here,” she nodded at one of the soldiers making up her protective ring. He saluted and relayed the order through his phone, selecting a group already close to the subnatural team’s location.
“What about the civilians, ma’am?” he said, turning towards the Director again.
“Pick up convenient ones. Leave the rest.”
“…Yes, ma’am.”
The fury of a dragon, even an injured one, was nothing to trifle with and despite retreating quickly into itself to thicken its density, the slime closest to Chris’s fiery explosion and burning fuel still boiled and bubbled as the dragon raked claws through the material. Unwilling to let the damage spread further, the main body sectioned itself off, withdrawing veins and arteries and leaving behind a semicircular lump of clear ooze. The amount was still nearly five times the size of the attacking dragon, but it cleared the damage away. Nearby, tendrils and growth began devouring the nearby buildings, slowly replenishing the lost and damaged material.
All in vain, and the woman the slime once was realized this too late. Common parlance dubbed the experience “life flashing before one’s eyes,” but to her it was nothing short of hellfire racing across the lines of her nerves.
Gregory’s projectile made contact. Allison’s blade connected. Brent’s gun was faster—so much faster—than the crusher’s reactions.
The bolt of light vaporized the crusher’s head, searing through slime and concrete with equal ease. The weapon dissolved away in Brent's hands, scorching his skin but not long enough to cause permanent damage. Meanwhile, Sander’s wild, unstoppable motions were jolted forward by the sudden surge of free, open air over his upper body as the area of slime surrounding him and the headless crusher retreated, the injury from the heavy damage triggering a reflexive recoil. Human, after all.
Cauterized veins and arteries that had been unable to withdraw in time spasmed where healthy tissue met damaged sectors and the slime began digesting the body of its dead ally, desperately attempting to replenish its form.
All in vain. All in vain.
Allison’s blade made the barest of contact with the slime’s surface, but it was enough. The mass shuddered, the trembling vibration coursing through the ground and into the surrounding buildings. Large segments of its body sloughed off even as Zoe’s rot spread like wildfire along the lines of its organic nervous system leaving behind nothing but putrefying liquid that spread into dollops of black inside the dense liquid. The heart and brain slid quickly away from the encroaching damage, moving well out of range as the slime closest to Zoe lost its steady control and began sliding down.
At the edges of the necrotizing Aberration’s power, the rot stopped, but the damage had been done. The Animus spasmed again, trying to gather back the scattered remnants of its slime flesh, each piece an amorphous, unresponsive blob of clear muck the size of large tractors. The process was slow, Allison’s power severance having reset the process of its growth back to the initial levels and preventing it from controlling the bulk of its body, though the girl’s ability fought a losing battle against the sheer might of what she was truly cutting.
But without the crusher to help ward off Kadabra’s attacks, the decaying, weakened slime had no method of stopping the Precursor.
So Kadabra tried again, wrestling mentally with the recovering Animus for control of its inorganic body. Still in contact with Allison’s blade, the creature lost the fight this time just as the young woman collapsed unconscious, her power flickering away as her body gave in to the strain of what she had just attempted to cut—and not even cleanly. Regardless, she had done her job.
It ended as quickly as it began.
The moment Kadabra felt his magic encompass the creature, he pushed the mass inward, crushing towards an arbitrary center and ignoring the organs’ attempts to rocket around the body. It didn’t matter where they went. All paths led to death. Slime surged again, rippling under the weight of the Precursor’s will, but Allison’s attack had reduced its control to almost nothing and the pain of Zoe’s rot had already scattered its focus to the winds.
The sound was muffled under the slime, like a footstep into thick mud. A bloody paste remained where the heart and brain had been. The body collapsed, tearing down several buildings as the liquid surged outward, engulfing Sander once again and pushing him with its motion, but this time without mind and purpose.
Not ungrateful for the subnaturals that had helped, Kadabra lifted their building away from the flood of muck, bringing it closer to his lofted perch as he scanned the area for any more potential disasters lurking. Their immediate location had been cleared of bystanders. The bodies that remained were only good for funerals.
He shifted the building, dipping it lower until the students’ floor was on the same elevation as his floating platform, still broadly displaying the red lettering of some restaurant’s “Grand Opening!” Dust and debris caked the Precursor’s clothes and in the afternoon light he looked as weary as the students, eyes strained and face drawn from the repeated stress of battle after battle. He watched them in silence for a moment, scattered across the floor of the room from the sudden lift of the building. One was out cold, but that would have to be dealt with later. He was no doctor.
“…Good work. I understand you have never fought Dreamcatcher’s real monsters before, so congratulations. This is what victory looks like.”
The words were clean, washed of emotion as Kadabra turned and looked upon the broken fragments of buildings and people coated in a sheen of now-dead slime. Livelihoods and lives. After the appearance of the ice maiden and Firestarter’s light that had annihilated the frost monster, the skies had slowly cleared and now unfitting sunlight clarified the fine details of slaughter and senseless destruction.
It was different from seeing a desolate wasteland or a small village obliterated. This was a city where bright lights and loud, angry cars had rumbled and honked their ways through the streets crawling with people of all shapes and sizes. It was safety disrupted. An oasis set aflame. Crumbling buildings and geysers of water bursting from broken fire hydrants dotted the ruined cityscape and Kadabra realized only as he began that he was heaving a long, heavy sigh.
“I’ll move you to the evacuation point,” he addressed the students inside the building, making sure to keep the broken edifice level so they could stand easily. A phone slid out from the front pocket of his brown sweatshirt, positioning itself next to his ear and dialing on its own. When he reached the other end, the message was short and sweet: “Targets eliminated. Retrieving USARILN East students. Send coordinates for any more in the area.”
A moment of silence passed in pale imitation of a mourner’s respect and the phone shifted to hover in front of the Precursor’s face. He briefly glanced at the naked, pseudo-vampire and the dragon far below them, but the information the Director had provided gave him a reason to not worry about one of the two. That one, at least, would be fine on his own—-would likely be faster on his own as well, assuming nothing else cropped up. He picked up the bleeding, burning dragon on a large section of concrete instead, shearing away a spacious chunk right below Chris's clawed feet and lifting the injured Arbiter with them.
Without another word Kadabra moved the platforms and the floating building, the motion slow and steady now that there was time to breathe after the storm had passed. Below them, the passing lines of asphalt and intersections broke at random where collapsed buildings, dented cars, and broken people had become morbid decor in the devastation.
These were the victories they had to settle for.
