“Perry! Get up, Perry! Get up!” I groaned, my body bruised and battered, the world buried under a wall of pain.

“Wassat?” I muttered, trying to rub at my eyes but my arms felt heavy, the act of lifting them an exertion I didn’t want to commit. Or maybe I couldn’t commit to. They felt leaden, bound in the heaviest of weights.

“We can’t just stay still. It might attack again,” the voice said, coughing in-between words. I felt a splatter of blood on my face, warm to the touch. I didn’t want to open my eyes, but I had to. I had to see what was going on.

My eyelids gingerly opened and I groaned at the sight of Mia above me, shaking me. Her body was covered in cuts and scrapes, skin looking terribly bruised. “We can’t just sit for the next shock wave, Perry,” she screamed, trying to pull me to my feet, her words ringing in my ears.

I was far too heavy and we were both too wounded for her own effort to be enough alone. But my hands reached out to hers and I clasped her small palms, feeling the resolute strength behind it, my body falling into some form of order as I rose from the ground.

“Well fuck,” I muttered, trying to dust myself off of the debris. “What happened?”

“The spike feeder slammed the ground and that just let out a wave of force. We got slammed into a wall— evidently you got hit worse than I did.” Her eyes looked at the blood on my chest, tracing the pattern of the splatter.

“I uh, I think that’s yours, Mia.”

“Hush,” she cautioned, holding a finger to my lips, refusing to hear my argument. “Save your strength you big idiot. From what I can tell, everyone’s been dispersed. I drew us around a corner out the path the beast was taking. I don’t know if that would meaningfully help, but everything adds up in situations like this, you know?”

I nodded, swallowing the copper streams trailing down my throat, the thin current descending from my battered nose congealing behind my lips.

“Who was hit by it?”

“Honestly? I think everyone,” she muttered, stumbling as she stepped towards the corner of the mostly destroyed building. What was intact was the lowest level, the parts closest to the foundation. Evidently being tethered to the ground was a boon for structural integrity.

“Shit, I think it’s about to attack again. Brace for impact,” she shouted, furiously looking for a place to shelter behind. Surviving one of the mere aftermaths of its movement was a fluke. Trying to repeat that action would all but guarantee a loop of death and devastation that one couldn't escape from. Chance was fickle, and not to be tested. You accepted your luck and moved back into battle-tested skill if you wanted to survive.

“Here, to me,” I said, trying to draw her into my arms. She stared at me, confusion in her eyes that quickly melted into resolution, unable to spend any time thinking about the implications of my words. She nodded and ran over to me, putting her life in my hands.

“This should hopefully work,” I hoped aloud, pulling her up against my chest as I activated my Swollen Fur.

The matted hair expanded from my midsection, parting around the extra passenger on my person, just in time for the second impact to release from the beast’s movements, the impact slamming us into the nearby wall. With a lesser distance to travel, the impact felt mostly mitigated by my technique; I dismissed the hair as soon as it seemed like the movement was concluded, the beast’s third head pausing in its motions, seemingly studying the city.

That didn’t mean the repercussions of its attack had concluded, as a body splattered into a wall further down the street, body split on impact, blood painted all throughout the alleyway. “Oh no,” I gasped, clasping my hands to my mouth. “It can’t be.”

The form was all too familiar, the presence of the scout who had been tasked with spreading information throughout the city. His careful form was now shredded, any cohesion to his body lost, the force of the spike feeder’s casual exertion flinging him evidently across the city. He must have been too close to the monster and directly in its line of sight, eating the brunt of the attack.

“Fuck,” Mia spat, dropping on the ground. “Is that’s what going to happen to us?”

“No, it’s not. And we can’t stop now, Mia.” I pointed to the sky, where we could see the first face’s trunk churning once more, hints of water starting to leak out of the bulbous tube.

“But giving up would be so easy,” she groaned.

“Let’s save that thought for when we’re dead,” I grunted back. “We need to shut the door to the tunnel. I don’t think we’re getting anyone else down there, and if the water floods down there again I don’t know how many of them might get swept away.”

“Shit, you’re right.” She activated her Two Heartbeats and sprinted down the alleyway back towards where we had started, my battered body struggling to keep up with her augmented speed.

“Why is it so hard to move this?” she screamed, pulling at the door. The path to the tunnel was strewn with bodies in various states of disarray. Some bloated, the water soaked deep into their skin, as though if one would prick them they would burst with water. Their appendages were swollen like sausages, faces filled with closed eyes, any panic having vanished into the depths of the waters in their drowned states.

Others were reminiscent of our fellow deceased guard, bodies strewn across the street. The luckier ones were heavily battered and bruised but still intact, at least, for the moment. Perhaps they were alive, but there was no way I could save them further. It would be more humane to end their potential misery, wouldn’t it? Prevent them from suffering further as the heavens parted and water filtered in, their wounded forms unable to fight against the rising currents, their deaths purely misfortune due to their delay in departing for Old Titan City.

No. No matter how humane it may have been, there wasn’t time for such acts of charity. I leaped ahead, forcing my body to act under my will, refusing to let my wounds weigh me down further. We had to save what we could, however we could. These people were lost. If there were to be saved, it would be a miracle, but not by my hands. I was just a man.

I buried my thoughts about turning on my electroreception to scan for signs of life and made it to the door, wrenching the other side shut with Mia, hoping fervently that those below would find a way to endure whatever else spilled down from the other entrances throughout the city. We were merely stemming the tides, trying to staunch the wounds the city had suffered with one seal, but we could do nothing less.

Of course, no good deed goes unpunished. I grunted in shock as I felt claws rake me from behind, tearing away loose strips of skin. No noises but the fluttering of translucent wings attached to a sickly parasite lingering behind me, its arms reaching to enclose my body up against its bony ribcage.

Untiling to take a trip with it into the sky, let alone endure more suffering at the parasite’s hands, I summoned a Direct Current, letting loose the thrum of electricity, the body convulsing up against me as it burned deeper and deeper.

“Perry,” Mia exclaimed, “are you alright?”

“I will be,” I muttered, pushing the corpse away from me. “I will be.”

The adrenaline ebbed down, my cognitive prowess ebbing away in my no-longer suppressed lightheaded state. The duress of battle had stifled my body’s crying out for relief, but the last attack refused to give me room to breathe, which ironically was met with a wave of water flowing overhead, pushing me against the now-shut tunnel door.

I looked over at Mia, seeing her fillet a parasite under the water, blood trickling out of her wounds into the water, little ribbons of life fleeing their former host. She shoved away her corpse and started kicking towards the surface, myself following shortly thereafter. All of the other debris from the devastation had formed a makeshift damn, raising the water level far above, making the ascent even more difficult in our wounded states.

With a fervor and rage we broke the surface of the water, scrambling into an succumbed rooftop, staring at the destruction the beast had wrought.

The city was in ruins. Perhaps half of it was outright destroyed. Even if the spike feeder was to suck back up the water, another wide swath had been devastated by pure force alone. It didn’t matter which head was attacking. It was just a matter of time until the destruction spread to the next part of the city, one way or another. The only parameters that seemed to contribute to the intactness of the city was a reflection of how far that part was from the spike feeder’s path of destruction.

From this high up, it was easier to get a sense for the monster’s full form amongst the obliterated remains of the city. The guards attacking it looked to be making a valiant effort, their bodies swarming one of the legs. From such a distance it was hard to make out their exact forms, but Javier’s lilac tongue was distinct enough to even make out at this range, and hopefully it followed that the others were near, mostly intact.

“Perhaps they’re trying to knock it over so they can go for the throat or other softer parts?” Mia thought aloud.

“Maybe. Is that worth the effort?”

“I don’t know, Perry. Maybe they’re struggling to reach the head.”

It was easy to make assumptions from this distance, far away from the body. They were in direct combat with the beast. We were just trying to survive its indirect attacks, the beast carelessly spewing destruction across the city. Who knew what drove it? Instinct? Rage? Hunger? It was hopefully no longer a signal, given our recent campaign to put an end to the emission in the old city, but perhaps it had been active long enough to summon the spike feeder. Perhaps we would never know, if we lost enough of our researchers. Maybe they had their own escape plans for purposes like these. I certainly didn’t know.

Perhaps their efforts were starting to bear fruit, as ichor looked as though it was leaking out of the beast, their attacks piercing through the skin. Maybe we had a chance after all. Maybe hope wasn’t too far of a dream after all.

The beast roared in rage, shaking its leg at the attackers, sludge leaking from the wounds. The congealed blood pooled onto the ground, the area near it looking like it was warping, suggesting a hazardous nature to its blood, but that was a concern for those closer to it.

The assembled fighters jumped away, but they weren’t alone in being beset with new danger, more parasites fleeing from the back of the beast towards our direction. They trailed across the sky, their caved-in faces a grimace of suffering, gossamer wings fluttering rapidly. Their bodies strafed towards us, our forms standing above the others as clear threats or perhaps prey. It didn’t matter the cause of their attack, just that we had to fend them off. Business as usual, really.

“Get ready, Perry,” Mia said, also noticing our impending invaders. She shook the last remnants of the water off and swung at the closet parasites, slicing them with ease. A few of the ones closer to me I locked down with an Electromute, watching them plummet into the congealed water, wondering if they could drown or if they would submerge later, dragging across the floor with their soggy wings not suited for flight. Either was sufficient for my needs for the moment. It was easier to not spend all that effort attacking the beasts. Perhaps without their host they would die.

I stared at the trajectory of the next set of parasites, watching their graceless descent into the not nearly-as-deep-as-I-remembered waters. They had to be higher up not not that long ago. We needed them to be high to have gotten on the rooftops, right?

Unless, well shit. It was starting to suck up the water again, wasn’t it.

I turned and stared at the next waves of parasites, flying back into the beast’s trunk, resigned to my own body’s parting from the rooftop, the cool air whizzing by my face as I started to be pulled into the giant monster’s path.