->>>- Red King, I hate garrison duty, Zm'var'Gaawk thought resignedly as he watched the wind stir whirling devils across the dusty tarmac. He picked idly at a scrap of meat caught in his teeth with a curved claw, and then checked his chronometer. My shift hasn't even properly started and I'm already bored to death. I should have waited a bit before relieving those lucky sods. He leaned across his desk and keyed the gunmetal puck of its in-built communicator. "Where the Hell is Krag'vro'Wargh? Our watch has nearly begun." The shift's lead comissionaire took a moment to reply, his voice tinny thanks to the communicator's low-quality speaker. "Didn't you hear? He commed in sick this morning." We've subjugated the stars for the Skryrn. Ground up whole civilizations and shoveled them like hydrocarbon to stoke the furnace of their Empire's glory, and we can't build a decent speaker that is cheap enough for the spendthrifts at Imperial Procurement to issue to its guards? The wiry Vraaawk swallowed the urge to speak such seditious thoughts over an open channel. "He comms in sick every time he takes more than a single day off. When is his substance problem going to become a dischargeable offense?" "I suspect not until there are no positions in high command filled by soldiers with substance problems of their own, which will be never. Deal with it. It's not like anything ever happens this deep inside the Empire anyway." Zm'var growled before depressing the 'send' stud again. "I dislike being undermanned in the middle of the Contest, you know how agitated the revs get when it is running." "So let them bomb another civilian market or hijack a tithe-carrier. They haven't the gonads to hit hardened targets. Certainly not in the inner sphere." "That is easy for you to say at your padded couch, behind walls of steel and batteries of surveillance equipment." "Quit whining you big whelpling. You have a communicator, if you see something you don't like just use it. That's your entire job." "That's your entire job, blehh," the Vraaawk repeated sarcastically before pressing 'send' again. "Fine. Don't be too heavy-handed with your reprimands should I request the attention of one of the roving sentries." "So long as that means the end of this conversation." He rolled his eyes. "I shall try my best not to burden you any further." Zm'var leaned back in his seat, finshed with the communicator puck. "Bah, go back to watching that stupid contest on your mobile, you old fart." ->>>- Boom Pain. Good Lord the pain. I thought it was bad when I got casually slapped 15 feet through the air by a hand the size and consistency of a barbell plate, but being snatched by a living skyscraper and impaled on its tonguelike web of hooks is much worse. Every time this Godforsaken monster takes a step is a new lesson on how completely my train of thought can be obliterated by agony and panic signals. On the plus side, this thing is so Goddamned massive that I have about 45 seconds of comparative relief in between strides. Celebrate the small victories, as my therapist would tell me. The aforementioned slappy alien died a little while ago. I don't know if it was a sign of admirably brave defiance, or just plain stupidity, but after we were grabbed from that rooftop and deposited on the fall-safety net from Hell it tried to fight Cthulhu's pet dog. I thought it might have been doing OK at first, too, until a tentacle the size of a tree trunk punched a gaping hole in its torso. Tough bastard didn't give up, either. It just kept on tearing at the net, until a different monstrous appendage came and scrambled its insides at high speed. Boom ... Let me just reiterate that the ancestral environment didn't really allow for a context where we experience this sort of pain for this long. I know primitive Homo sapiens died in all sorts of harrowing ways, but being dragged away from your family in the middle of the night by a hungry cat implies a sort of sudden onset of trauma and pain that soon ends in a sharp crescendo of fanged savagery. This cyclical sawtooth-wave of agony is more like being subjected to a Dark Ages torture chamber that eventually wants to eat me rather than simply make an example of me. Sorry, where was I? Ah yes, the tripod alien mercenary. It now dangled limply a few metres above my head. Tantalizingly, there was a little device clipped to what I would call its waist that clinked against its body armour with each of the giant creature's steps. It looked very much like the - presumed - gun that its partner was beginning to point in my direction before I hit it with the beam-shotgun. I was very thoroughly pinned in place. Next time I meet a lepidopterist (technically also the first time I'll have met one) I'm punching them in the face on principle. Without the absurd pain tolerance of a grizzly-sized alien bounty hunter there was no way I was dragging myself up to steal its gun. I was left watching it clink, clink, clink away above me and hoping that one of these strides dislodged it without also hurting me so badly that I'm unable to try and catch it. Low probability, I'll admit, but giving up and waiting to die looked mechanically identical to holding on and waiting for the gun to fall. I'm not brave or stupid enough to try and convince this thing to kill me. Boom I miss Skleex. I was starting to get used to the idea of not dying alone. If I see her again I'm going to kiss her right on her horrifying little mouth for trying to warn me about going into that building. ->>>- Gur'kra'Mzoff lounged contentedly in his crash-couch. The skies were mostly clear, the sun was shining overhead, and he was the best damn pilot stationed in New Vraaawk City. Not that it wasn't great to be any pilot in the home guard. The food was orders of magnitude better than the slop they served the muck-loving infantry, and - unlike the puffed-up self-tuggers in the space navy - air force personnel didn't have to pay for their tail. It's just that, when you were as good as he was, the tail was top quality. He was practically a celebrity, and his roster of dates mostly were celebrities. Or at least datamesh social site influencers. Whatever the gloryhounds might tell you about the joys of wasting pre-FTL primitives and revolutionaries out on the frontiers, flying for the home guard was easy too. Case in point, some office-building-sized bag of guts was giving the poor incompetents that comprised the Arena's so-called army of bounty hunters a tough time. He got to waltz in, copulatory appendage swinging, and blast the thing back to whatever disgusting backwater they plucked it off of. He couldn't have gotten it any easier if he was devising his own assignments. Just set the engines to 'hover' and let the ACs chew it up. Get some. His wingmate's smug voice crackled over his helmet-comm. "Race you there, you coolblood slug." Gur'kra scoffed. "It would only be a race if you had a chance of winning, you chubby whelp. Last one to put a round on target is buying the drinks back at mess." "Hah! I'll drink you so broke you'll have to sign up for the contest next cycle." He cranked the throttle and the acceleration threw him back into his couch, hard. Relaxing was nice, but winning was everything. ->>>- This was interesting. Not in the good way. It was interesting in that it demanded immediate and serious consideration. [18Hz:2.5s-31Hz:1.7s-24Hz:2s] had encountered several circumstances without precedent over the course of the current lightspan, but generally they had been more along the lines of trivial curiousities and annoyances rather than genuine causes for concern. Far off, barely visible even to its vision discs, but approaching faster than soundwaves - unless some strange phenomenon was stilling the noise they made - was a pair of metal hunks. They'd been smoothed and shaped, as though some force had started with molten metal and aspired to mock the artificial beauty of organic systems. It was starting to think it was the preythings' doing. A lot of this curious, mildly-stressful lightspan seemed to be attributable to the little dirtscratchers. It certainly hadn't moved itself here, and it doubted one of its competitors would have either. If they'd caught it napping they'd have simply killed it and consumed the impossibly nutrient-rich selfseed gestating deep within its armoured recesses. Not that it was possible for something as vast as another competitor to ever sneak up on it. At any rate the shining hunks were peculiar for more reasons than simply existing, though it did consider that the root from which the rest of the hunks' mystique proceeded. The myriad beams and fields the speeding metal shells emitted were practically evidence enough to consider them alive. It would certainly be odd for them to so thoroughly taste their environment if there wasn't at least some spark of intelligence behind their odd, glistening faceplates. [18Hz:2.5s-31Hz:1.7s-24Hz:2s] was not very comfortable with the interest they seemed to be showing it, either. It thought of the little metal box that had accompanied the herd it had ambushed earlier, grumbling internally about the annoying dark spot on one of its flank vision discs. If the stings these newcomers carried were proportional to that they'd be able to inflict more than just surface damage. It was growing more sure by the saccade-cycle that this hunch was correct. It had awoken this antezenith within some sort of preything hive, and as it crushed and consumed the hive's chaff-caste drones it was beginning to draw the attention of more fearsome and important caste-morphs. Not an ideal situation. It would have preferred at *least* a few thousand lightspan-darkspans to observe the prey, to devise strategies and tactics for the thorough annihilation of the hive and the consumption of its progenitor-caste. It was rare to get out of such a destruction what one put into it, and thus hive-smashing was rarely its first choice when presented with one. For some of the larger hives it knew of it would be preferable to do battle with a competitor than weather the mindless, suicidal ferocity of legions of assault-caste drones. It hoped dearly that this hive was not so mighty. [18Hz:2.5s-31Hz:1.7s-24Hz:2s] made up its mind. As the course of thought diffused among the practically-independent subnetworks of its neural complex it began to turn its thick anterior armour plates in the direction of the approaching curiousities. Eyestalks devoured its nearby surroundings and whiplimbs sought appropriately-sized hunks of ground and bits of metal. It is time I demonstrated, it thought with a sort of contented malevolence, why we call ourselves the Apex. ->>>- Saviour Mark, must you seek to eternally outdo yourself with each new maw you fall prey to? she thought miserably as she bounded along yet another debris-strewn rooftop. She wasn't sure why she yet followed. It was a near-certainty that the fool being was dead, and anyway there was no way she could could kill a living God to free him. Nonetheless, she felt compelled not to lose track of her unlucky companion. Perhaps she felt that he would do the same, in her position, and felt too guilty to give up on him until she was sure he had perished. Her Kinmother would have called it soft sentimentality, with that special tone of derision she reserved for things that were not the old way and therefore obviously inferior. I'd like to see old Kinmother slay a sky-monster, she thought with just a hint of scandal to tinge the self-vindication. The wound to her hindbody pained her with each bounding step, but she had taken precious time to pluck the spine-fragments and irritating hairs from her injuries after the battle with the alien hunter. As far as she could tell the tender flesh was not getting any worse for the wear she was putting on it. Such a blessing, she mused wryly. She was too injured to glide properly, her fletch-membranes too ravaged by combat to hold her weight without tearing further. That meant climbing each of the great stone edifices that rose peglike out of the alien Arena. It was as though some unfathomably large herbivore had died when the world was new and the sky-monsters' lackeys had used its fossilized mandible for the foundation. She wondered what her intentions were when she did catch up with saviour Mark. Perhaps she would just slay him to save him the trouble of finding some new danger to put them both in. She laughed briefly to herself, but her mood was dampened when she realized that the mercy of death might be all she could offer him. With renewed determination she leapt from a wrought stone corner onto a long, tall building and began another arduous climb to the top. Not far off, another of the vast Godbeing's steps boomed across the Arena grounds. ->>>- Boom I'm not going to play broken record here. It hurts, a lot, but I'm sure we're all getting sick of the 'woe is me I'm stabbed in half a dozen places and slowly bleeding out' pity party. Once I got over horror of being trapped in a living abattoir-cum-charnel-house things got sort of boring. I didn't want to bask in the horror for too long though, as my sanity is starting to fray enough as it is. It offends the sensibilities that I'm surrounded by dead and dying aliens of every shape and size, yes, but this is no worse than what lots of insects and other small critters end up living on a daily basis in the wild. I'll just thank my lucky stars that this thing hasn't tried to lay any eggs in my torso yet. Where I'm situated I don't have much of a view. I'm high up enough on the web that my view of the ground is half obstructed by more of the monster, and if I look up most of the sky is blocked by a vast armoured ridge and a dangling jungle of raveled tentacles and other limbs. It is technically nice and protected from the rest of the world, but it's hard to take comfort when I'm pinned here. Boom The big bastard started to change direction, and then a deafening bellow split the air. Over the ringing in my ears I heard the growing roar of aircraft engines. They're sending fighters after this thing? Damn, I don't feel quite so bad about getting snatched now. If the military is willing to bust out the expensive hardware I bet little ol' me never had a chance. The furious drone of an autocannon spinning up was drowned out by my massive captor growling, a sound I would be quite glad to never experience again. I heard a noise not unlike a car crash, if car crashes occurred at or around the sound barrier, followed by a weighty secondary impact. There goes who knows how many taxpayers' dollars, I thought wryly. Another autocannon roared, and I could see writhing limbs being torn loose from the creature's bulk and tumbling to the ground. The monster bellowed again, and this time it was a primal, sustained phrase. It passed in and out of audible range for me, but the buzzing feeling in my chest never went away. I couldn't help but feel like it was cursing whatever aircraft was still trying to tussle with it. I do not envy the poor bastard in the cockpit. ->>>- Gur'kra'Mzoff took it all back. This thing was not a gimme assignment. It had nearly put him down with a barrage of debris while he and his now-deceased wingmate were on the approach. It had connected, while he was just getting into autocannon range, and by some cruel twist of fate the projectile had torn free the incredibly expensive sensor suite that told his missiles and free-aiming weapons where to point. Angrily-shouted orders had crackled over his headset not to try his weapons unguided when an errant warhead had punched through the apparently-thin skin of the Arena's retaining wall and killed a command centre's worth of administrative staff. Now his bird was constantly fighting him to fly directly into the ground, and only through sheer bad-pater skill and the Vraaawk Prime Heavy Industries mk12 gunship's extremely generous distribution of thrusters was he able to stay aloft at all. The nose AC was still performing admirably, but he could only ever keep it on-target for long enough to drive a quick burst of hi-pen rounds into the beast. Then it was back to wrangling an obstinate flying tank and dodging hurled stones and signposts. He stamped one of the rudder pedals and it slapped rhythmically back against his foot as though in protest. The whole flaming rig of the gunship slid sideways through the air and he cleared a building. The display's crosshair raked across the monster's bulging, lumpen upper dome and he squeezed the AC's trigger savagely. An unfortunate amount of the computerized aim assist features had been damged or destroyed, but from this close he didn't need a glowing line on his HUD to show the cannon's trajectory. Flakes of broken carapace and gouts of dark fluid sprayed out from the creature's vast bulk. "Come on, you gutterfuck ugly bastard, die for me." Dead set on finally causing some appreciable damage to the giant demon-being, he held the gun on-target for longer than was safe or prudent. It did finally chew a satisfying hole in the damn thing, and he was rewarded with a howl of pain that was audible even within the roaring confines of his dying aircraft's cockpit. Gur'kra immediately realized the cost, and fought desperately to peel himself away from the collision course he was set upon. He sent so much power to the thrusters that he could feel one of them blow out as it struggled to keep pace with its siblings. The nose of the stricken gunship finally cleared the titanic shape in front of him, and he whooped as he prepared to shoot straight over the monstrosity's head. Then he lurched forward in his seat as scores of muscled tendrils and sturdy claws seized the limping craft. The wind was driven from his respiratory tract with a grunt when his restraints punched him in the torso. Flecks of spittle dotted the inside of his visor. The pilot closed his eyes reflexively as the impact rippled through his frame, and his blood froze in his veins when he opened them again. "Oh shit." A bulbous, yellowed eye at the end of a spiny tendril peered through the canopy at him, pupil dilating with predatory interest. Yet more hideous tentacles groped blindly across the transparent surface, and he knew that most of the gunship would be covered in the slithering, seeking appendages. He froze, signals in his brain from long before the Vraaawk had vanquished the last of their natural predators shooting across his nervous system in a biochemical fireworks of terror. His flightsuit darkened around his cloaca as he involuntarily prepared to flee on a biological level. Paralyzed with fear, Gur'kra noticed too late the sturdy horned claw rearing back above the rest. He fumbled for his sidearm, and as his digits tightened around its grip the vicious spike punched through the hardened composite of the canopy with contemptuous ease. The fearsome appendage flexed once, twice, and then with a shriek the pilot's protective covering was torn away, tossed to the ground like unwanted fruit rind. He made to draw his weapon and fire into the slitted pupil of the monster's searching eyestalk, and not until he noticed numbing cold in his shoulder and the spurt of blood decorating his instrument panel did he realize the vast being's claw had sheared his arm off. That was when the screaming began. Before long it had stopped again. ->>>- "What do you want, you effete windbag?" "I want you to check up on your gunships so you know what I already do." "What, did they take too long to kill the big, scary monster, and it ate some more of your precious bounty hunters in the interim?" "It fucking killed them, you arrogant, minimizing fool. It knocked one down with a bloody rock, and it plucked the other out of the sky and ate the fucking pilot!." It was unseemly of him to allow the panic to seep into his voice, but this was getting entirely out of control. The announcer hadn't survived and thrived for this long as a subjugate species in the Empire by leaving things to chance. He luxuriated in the sound of the Baron choking on his surprise for a moment before recovering. "Well, erm, so it did. I... didn't expect it to prove so resilient." "I guess you fucking didn't!" "Calm down, you puffed up little serfstock weakling." "I'll pretend you didn't just insinuate that your token puppet nobility supercedes my actual status to remind you what an unrestrained debacle this could all devolve into. This thing taught itself ballistics, Satrap. Our glorious Emperor, long and bloody be his reign, is currently floating gently overtop the Arena in a gold-leafed zeppelin." The Baron snarled in his earpiece. "How dare you insult the Satrap of Vraaawk! Who do you think you are?" "A loyal and beloved servant of the Skryrn Empire who, unlike you, is not liable to be deposed by his own court or assassinated by revolutionaries at the first sign of weakness. Can we please stop pretending it matters and focus on keeping this Gouadforsaken monster from killing the Emperor and earning both of us the Royal Interrogators' most exquisite tortures?" "What do you propose then, oh glorified flesh-balloon of vastly inflated self-importance?" Oh, and you could just tell he thought that one was brilliant. "Open your line to the Imperial Guard and warn them of the danger. Tell them the Royal Academy witheld crucial information about the beast, and that the Emperor's life is now at risk. We'll pay for our failure after all this is over, but the Guard take their job deadly serious. They will task the pair of strike-fighters accompanying the Airship of Imperial Entertainments with ending the beast's life before it makes things even worse. Then we will graciously offer the bounty reward for the megabiota to the two Imperial heroes who brought it down and protected the irreplaceable Lord Pha'Gouad, so that the people will not clamour quite so loudly for our heads when this makes the news." "This is nonsense! I will simply scramble a larger wing from the home guard!" "Do you really want to spend an instant more than is necessary with the Emperor's life in danger? I've heard that death by chemicals, the torture of choice for seditionists and those who would seek to endanger our Lord, is many dozens of times worse than neural scouring. The inquisitors have drugs that slow the perception of time such that you can feel individual neurons dying, Baron. I know you have fewer than I, but neither of us want that fate." "Red King I hate you." "Well, the Empire hates your silly little religion too, Vraaawk. It's a star, not a God. Now call the Guard before you sentence the both of us to the worst death imaginable." "Fine. We know it's a star." "I don't care, don't make me call you again or I will not hesitate to toss you under the keel in the post-disaster inquisition." With a shaking tentacle the announcer closed the comm-channel. He took a deep, deep breath, ballooning to twice his average size for a moment, before settling back into his grav-couch. unmute "Welcome back, Ambling fans! I hope we didn't shed too many viewers during that advertising break but to the ones we did, your loss! We're still marshalling fighters for phase two of the megabiota hunt, and while we wait we're going to go into the weeds with a thrilling best-of-cycle recap to see a selection of the team's favourite kills so far! But first, let's jump live to the fate of Grah'Dounakh, notorious white-collar criminal, as a pair of our hunters close in. This is why we don't try to defraud the Empire, folks!" ->>>- "Acknowledged, wing lead. Beginning my descent." Features set in grim determination, Gho'Louan angled the nose of her craft down towards the textured grey of the Arena. The Emperor was going to be incredibly disappointed in the premature end of the hunt, but if this megabiota could threaten Vraaawk HG craft it was more than dangerous enough to pop Lord Pha'Gouad's party blimp. A series of indicators on her fighter's display tracked the warming plasma and charging mag-capacitors in its array of ordinance chambers, and underslung missiles across the length of the aerofoil unlatched their safety clamps. It was guaranteed to be overkill, but then that was the only variety of kill the Imperial Guard dealt in. Threats to the Emperor more than warranted as much. A warning beeped over her helmet's earpiece as the altimetre registered the potentially-dangerous loss of height, and with a flick of one of her auxiliary manipulators she dismissed it. She knew what she was doing. A secondary display tracked her and her lead's progress across the landscape isometrically, and she noted with satisfaction that both of them were perfectly tracing the flight computer's recommended course. It was almost worth pitying the poor beast. It would have no idea what hit it. Atmospherics were generally less advanced than starfighters, but between the two craft of her wing they carried enough firepower to punch through the bridge plating of a Vraaawk battlecruiser. They didn't have the shielding or built-in redundancies that a space-navy interceptor might, but then it wasn't as though their target had point defences or anti-air batteries growing out of its hide. The first of her ordinance chambers registered as primed, and a predatory look graced Gho's features. Another microcycle and she'd be within firing range, half a microcycle after that her wing lead would be unleashing his load of primal destruction upon the bastard thing too. She realized she was holding her breath in anticipation, and forced herself to exhale. Everything happened as though in slow motion. She flipped the secondary safety off on her flight stick, and then depressed the 'full salvo' stud it had been covering. She could feel the craft rock around her as the full fury of a Skryrn Imperial strike fighter surged ahead of the speeding machine. She was already hauling back on the stick, but the rocking only grew more intense. She immediately noticed her fighter's sluggish response to the command. What the- "Eject, wing second. I repeat, eject NOW-" The urgency in her lead's voice was not lost on her, and reflexively she reached for the safety lever. Bolts blew, the canopy shot away, and the roar of open air greeted her aural membranes, only slightly muffled by her helmet. Then a deafening bellow washed out the rest of the clamor. Well, at least I hit the damn thing, she thought vengefully. She felt her couch's primary chute deploy, the sound of it still utterly drowned out by the pained roar of the megabiote. Then finally something cut through the frightful noise, the sharp roar of another large explosion. My fighter. How good with ballistics is this thing? She shuddered despite herself. I wonder what it hit. She craned about to get a look at the ground. Then she wished she hadn't. Though obviously very badly wounded, the monster below her was still alive. The finest of all the Emperor's troops, the Imperial Guard are trained from the moment of their recruitment to show steel in the face of pain, defiance in the face of fear. As she drifted into the vengeful press of wounded tentacles and many-jointed claw-limbs, she forgot her training very quickly indeed. ->>>- "G-Gro'magh? I mean, Sir?" sigh "Don't worry about military discpline, we're rebels." "Uh, right. You're going to want to see this." The grizzled Vraaawk left his perch to approach the console of the worst soldier - and best systems cracker - he'd ever worked with. "So I um, I noticed they were losing an absurd number of camera drones this broadcast. For the uh, the contest." The veteran general nodded impatiently. "...Right. You knew what I meant. Well I uh, I finally found a way into the mesh server that all their feeds pass through, and well... You're going to want to see this." "What, does this give us a vector to get at other networks? Can we hijack a broadcast?" The pasty little subjugate looked like he'd caught it off-guard. "Uh, probably. I just, look." His console screen switched from dozens of incomprehensible text readouts to playback from a camera drone. It was circling a smoking crash site, of what looked like but couldn't possibly be an Imperial Guard strike fighter. "What did this?" "That's not even the crazy part. See that hole in the retaining wall? That's the command centre." "Did some administrative staff die?" "No, the Command Centre, where the Baron manages the Arena's forces. That's the Arena terminus for their mesh connection to New Vraaawk's Home Guard base." "Fuck me, are you sure?" "Absolutely. Unless they've started decorating the rank-and-file CCs with gold and marble." "Did the Baron die?" "I uh, I don't think so. You can... see the guards inside begin setting up a defensive perimeter around the hole right about... now." "Red King. I've got to find a way to exploit this! Get a readiness signal out to every cell in New Vraaawk City, prep level 3." "Are... are you sure? That might mean exposing some of them if we don't uh, don't follow up on it." "Yes I'm sure. We couldn't engineer an opportunity like this with twenty orbits of lead time! They know what to do if we have to call off the preparations. It will cost us a lot of built up base here, but we can't risk missing our chance to use this." "Of course, Sir. I mean uh, Gro'magh." ->>>- The monster was dying. Whatever number it had done on those other attack craft, it had just pissed off the Empire enough to send more. I almost felt bad for it. Wherever it's from, I'm guessing it's no more advanced in sociocultural development than Skleex, who was at most coming from a stone/bone age hunting-gathering society. When you're that unfathomably massive there's no need to research new technology. It couldn't possibly have predicted the sort of energy an entire military could bring to bear against it. Not that I'm complaining too much. The rate at which it's been plucking people off of the net and eating them has diminished considerably since the last battle, and its steps are only coming about half as often. Things are looking up. I heard a commotion below me. I reflexively shot a dirty look in that direction. Dying or no, this thing pays attention to what's going on down here, and whatever dumbass decided right now was a good time to get antsy was going to get one of us eaten. My jaw slackened wide open when I saw the source. A familiar little thorngrub was winding her way around the spikes and corpses decorating my new home. I watched her climb her way up, and before long she was drawing up to my horrible prison perch. She chittered excitedly as she came face-to-face with me. "My God. Skleex! You absolute bad bitch. How the fuck did you find me? I, I'm-" I started to tear up. I'm not ashamed of it. Displaying emotion is an important part of accepting and processing it, and I had a lot of things to feel. It was just so good to see a friendly face again. Then the face split into four wicked, narrow segments, and vicious fangs snicked into place at the end of her mandibles. "JESUS! Skleex no! Do not bite the monster!" She paused, and I silently thanked her alien Skies that she was astute enough to tell when I was agitated despite the vast gulf in body - and spoken - language between us. "See that?" I said, flicking my gaze up at the dead bounty hunter's gun to punctuate my question. Her eyes tracked mine up to the dangling pistol and she cocked her head at me. I smiled without thinking and before I could strain myself conceiving of a way to ask her to get it she was bounding up towards the limp body. She fiddled with the simple clip and then she was dancing back down to me around the vicious hooks that covered this horrid flesh-net. Bad bitch, I reiterated to myself. I struggled weakly to raise one of my arms, and gave the fingers a practice squeeze. It hurt my everything, especially the all of it on the same side of my body as my arm, but before I could continue my warm up she had deposited the weapon into my numbed fingers. Panic surged through my limbs as I fought not to drop it. I succeeded. Thanks panic. The gun looked straightforward enough. It was clearly not designed for human hands, but it wasn't impossible to hold. It had a dial, and a small screen that showed a beam that grew or shrunk depending on which way I turned said dial. It had one hole, which I prayed to Multivac was where the shots came out of and not the backdraft vent or something. Shooting myself with an alien pistol is probably better than being torn to shreds by an enormous eldritch monster, but now that living seems to be back on the table it's my preference by a massive margin. I looked around. Just pointing this thing at the big beast and firing struck me as a great way to share the fate of the pistol's former owner. There A fleshy, sturdy pink arm grew into one of the upper corners of the hook-net. I guessed that at the other side of the broad carapace panel the net dangles over there would be another. Thickly-muscled, the limb's purpose was raising and lowering the whole apparatus, presumably for grabbing slow-moving food en-masse. I dialed the pistol up to its highest setting, and tried to steady my trembling arm long enough to take a good shot. It wasn't working. I just couldn't get it positioned correctly. With a frustrated huff I switched the gun to my bad hand, and then I noticed Skleex growing agitated. "What is it Skleex?" but I was already looking to where her sharp little head was pointed, and the bottom fell out of my stomach. A scaly tentacle with a fat cluster of staring, lidless eyes was dangling down towards us like a nightmare bunch of grapes, and a companion limb was just beginning to snake out of the hellish snarl overhead. It wove through the air, serrated pincer flexing eagerly. Skleex chittered something to herself. Did she pick that up from me? She did the weird seesaw thing with her head again. Much too slowly, it dawned on me what was happening. "N-" With a screeching battlecry she shot up from her perch, and somehow turned into a little ball of blades mid-leap. Like the retractable fangs in her blender of a mouth, she seemed to just grow spikes from every part of her body. I suddenly felt very sorry for the dangling bundle of eyes. She hit it like a turbine hits a goose, and shredded eldritch eyeball sprayed in all directions. I realized I was doing her a distinct disservice by not contributing. Biting down the mind-blanking pain, I lurched around to aim at the stocky arm holding up the flesh-net. I might not have needed full power, in retrospect. A thick beam of white-hot directed energy lanced out of the projector hole, so bright that it seared a radiant, blinding bar into both of my eyes. I didn't see, so much as hear, the monster's tongue-armpit erupt in a fountain of steam and hot gore that sprayed me and the rest of the poor unfortunates still clinging to life down here. Vision-impaired, it took me a moment to realize I was falling. Then blazing agony from all of my pierced parts backed up my inner ear and with a tortured "Hoohhhhh fffuuuuuucckkk!" I arced through the air as gravity bore us down. I was not the only screaming voice. Some of my fellow foodstuffs were shrieking, or calling out to whatever power offered them comfort. I heard some slip loose from their spiny prisons and tumble towards the park below. Then the monster cried out in pain. It turns out that my perch up on that sloping plate of carapace was designed to protect me from this thing's outdoor voice. My teeth vibrated together so hard they hurt. I could feel blood start to well inside my nostrils. My eyes watered, and my vision blurred, and they burned with the swollen warmth of burst blood vessels. It even seemed like my thoughts clouded briefly as my brain shook in its protected cradle of bone. My ears were so far past ringing it doesn't bear mentioning. Then the vibration stopped. High above me I could still sort of hear Skleex's furious battle with the tentacle nest, angry chittering punctuated by squeaking howls. A length of severed tentacle tumbled through the air to snag on a nest of nearby hooks, and it writhed eerily as though in discomfort for a few moments before it went slack. "Skleex! Fuck yeah!" I was barely coherent with the pain, and I winced as the shouting sent fresh stabs of it through my beleaguered frame. She deserved the encouragement, though. Unable to see very well, I was hesitant to fire the gun again. I turned my head down to the ground. Huh. That's not so far. I wouldn't want to do it on a good day, with fully functional limbs and no prior injuries, but then again a good day would imply that I'm not impaled on the webbed tongue of an alien deity. The big bastard even had the fine manners to park us over a water feature in the dilapidated park. Will the stagnant water give me xeno tetanus? I'll be surprised if it doesn't, but that's a problem for future me to manage. The sounds of Skleex's fight up above had faded. Or my battered ear drums were just finally giving up the ghost. I will pour both halves of a very expensive bottle of liquor out for you, tiny alien warrior princess. Fuck that, I will burn this whole Empire to the ground and rebuild it and name it the Skleex Vrt Krixit Alien Friendship Collective, and there will be a statue of you on every corner. I'll find your home planet and brave the fangs of a billion angry sapient knife-weasels to sing your name in praise. I looked down. I gritted my teeth. I roared in agony and determination and triumph, and I hauled my busted ass up off of the bony hooks that held it. I jumped. I fell. ->>>- TO BE CONCLUDED