I haven’t recovered much by the time Saurian’s done explaining the plan and then moved away to begin performing her part. Thankfully, my own role was always going to involve staying back in the ruined monitoring station with Schiz. So little has actually changed except that I’m buried under a mound of blankets and the fan has broken. Stig jailbreaking the thing’s speed far past what any safety features might’ve allowed and so helping me warm up enough to fully appreciate just how cold I actually am.
The downside, besides how it almost started a fire, being that the overclocking required was clearly too much for the fan already overtaxed servos. The nearly air-tight room having quickly filled with a stench that quite literally burns the eyes and lungs. The near unbearable smell having me make a mental note to get a mask with some kind of filter when I can eventually upgrade. As it is, the entire pack of spearmint gum I’m currently chewing on just isn’t cutting muster.
I pull out a scarf from my Pocket to wrap around my mouth as I hunch down lower into the room’s sole surviving swivel chair. The extra fabric won’t do a lot to warm me up any faster but even one more layer between me and this caustic stench is worth the slight flash of cold from retrieving it. The burning sensation on my scalp and other exposed bits of skin making me just as eager as the rest of the crew to see the plan go forward.
Something I’ve got the best seat for given the one and only task I’ve been assigned. The thought having me glance back up to the bank of only somewhat cracked monitors that removing the Verti-bird has revealed. Stig having just finished re-connecting the severed camera feeds as best he’s able while doing what he can to avoid giving a connection to any other part of the monitoring station. Just because the chance of a NewNet supe, or just someone like Amelia, slipping the overrides for the inner door through the cameras is both low and soon not going to be a real issue doesn’t mean we should be careless about it.
Right now, the monitor’s aren’t showing much more than what I’ve already seen through the door’s view hole. The mobile bunker that Ictus is watching us from standing out like a black pimple from the off-white concrete and yellow dyed steel around it. Originally, the cameras had not been part of the plan. Only Saurian’s doubt that I’d be quick enough, after almost freezing myself to death, to act as a more traditional spotter having her tell Stig to try and fix them. He’d seemed genuinely surprised that they’d worked after how the crew’s leader had ‘disconnected’ them. A lucky break I’ll happily take after too many bad rolls the last week or so. There’s no audio, Stig just shrugged it off when I asked if that could be fixed too, but I doubt I’d be able to hear anything over the crashing rapids just barely below the walkway anyway.
“You sure you’re good to shout when you see him?” I nod to Schiz’s question, the girl standing somewhat awkwardly beside me, without taking my eyes from the screens. A long pause stretching as I feel her just continuing to stare at the side of my head before I realise that a nod doesn’t really answer her question.
“Y- yes.” My teeth are still chattering enough that it takes some effort to get the word out but at least my lungs don’t feel like they’re full of ice anymore. I threw that up a few minutes ago along with a worrying splotch of blood that makes me glad for my meta healing rate. The smog banks that occasionally roll through the third circle are bad enough for my lungs as it is. The other girl doesn’t seem fully convinced by my answer as she purses her lips and keeps staring at me from the side. Half opening her mouth to say something before the taste of the air sends her into a coughing fit that makes her think better of it. Just nodding as she hurries over to join her teammates at the soon-to-be-hole. Or maybe tunnel given how thick the walls are. A point which just happens to be almost as far from the sewer hole as she can get. Unfortunately, the monitor bank is almost directly beside it.
‘Just don’t think about it.’
I do just that as I turn around the long way to watch Schiz hurry over to lean up against the door she’s going to be hiding behind for most of the coming fight. Until the moment comes to end it of course. The girl taking a final swig of water to clean out her mouth only to then gag it right back up over her ruined suit. For as bad as the stink is for me, at least I have some kind of face protection. Under the swimming goggles I leant her, Schiz is still red-eyed and blinking where the vapours burnt her eyes. She’d turned down the scarf I’d offered as well for some reason. Probably would have turned down the goggles too if her hole Power didn’t rely on her eyes.
Even Stig seems to have been affected although he’s done his best to hide it. Not gagging or coughing like the two of us but definitely moving faster than before as he works to finish prepping our exit. Something I’m quite glad to have some distance from. The canisters I’d thought were just containers for an explosive powder actually being wireless explosives themselves. The small amounts of silvery powder he’s been so carefully handling, or rather making sure not to handle, a meta-material that he’s removing from each of the otherwise mundane cylinders of plastic boom.
Each one has held only a small amount and he’s tipped in just a few grains to the bore holes Saurian has dug into the concrete. The enhanced senses granted by her transformation, which also makes her the only one not bothered by the sewer stink, letting her find weak points where the metre thick concrete is easiest to blast through.
Her assurance that the hole they intend to make won’t bring part of the roof down is a lot less reassuring than it could’ve been given she also plans to be the first one out. Only the thought that a well-entrenched Concordat hero is waiting on the other side convincing me she’s not just looking to get out of the way in case she’s wrong.
“Done.” Flipside doesn’t seem to share my worries. Stepping back from the rough door shape now outlined into the concrete with det cord and shaped caps. Something to make sure the blast goes into the stone rather than back towards the four of us. Somehow, he sounds almost bored as he lazily flips open the guard for the wireless detonator that came with the crate. Rolling his heels while looking over at Schiz for Saurian’s go ahead.
The crew’s leader unlikely to answer as she’s been crouched in perfect stillness for the last few minutes, far more so than any human could manage. Her body having only just finished its slow transformation into the same state I remember seeing earlier today. Three metres of muscled lizard flesh covered in glinting scales that look tough enough that my piddly ice axe couldn’t so much as scratch them. Absent a lucky shot on a joint or similar, I have doubts about the revolver as well. There is no patch of unarmoured skin on her chest, or anywhere else, just a flowing expanse of scales shifting over sinuous muscles that have no relation to a human’s. Not like dinosaur’s have abbs after all.
She unspools from her crouch like some terrible origami sculpture revealed from within the folds of a children’s book. A German one where all the kids get eaten at the end. Feet shifting back and arms lowering her with liquid smoothness into a sprinter’s start. Her Komodo-like head not more than a handful of metres from the section of wall all set to become a hole in the next few seconds. Claws and talons longer than my fingers clacking onto the concrete floor before, with a full-body flex, she buries them into the ground with a synchronised puff of powdered stone.
Schiz stares at something just off to Saurian’s right as she unfurls herself before, acting on some unseen signal, she nods her head.
Saurian lunges forward at the same moment that the explosives go off. The wall ahead of her cracking into a spiderweb of fractured lines as the powder turns the solid concrete into a tower of rubble and dust held in place only by the pressure of the pieces around them. The blasts near silent as they release only the slightest puff of displaced air but causing a rumble that has my stomach lurching at how it makes the room shake. A rumble that becomes a full-on quake as what must be close to a thousand kilograms of were-dinosaur muscle shoulder tackles the now weakened stone.
The wall explodes outwards away from us as Saurian is hidden under a cascade of broken stone. Schiz ducking away further as I watch her brace against the backwash of dust and debris that flows into the room. Only for a moment though, then Stig leaps through the gap Saurian’s made and suddenly the dust cloud begins falling away instead as the direction of gravity over the area is altered.
Every loose stone and hanging light at the front of the room pulled towards the wall or out of the hole as it suddenly becomes the floor for everything within range. Schiz of course is already pressed up tight enough to the door that she doesn’t need to worry about falling anywhere. Something not quite true for me as the edge of Stig’s Power catches a corner of the sheets I’m bundled in.
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The swivel chair pulled forwards half a foot or so before, between blinks, the cloud of dust and rubble is gone from the newly made hole. Stig becoming just a blur as he falls sideways away from us and takes the area of redirected gravity with him. A roar from ahead of the boy villain, barely audible over the now deafening noise of rushing water, making him kick off the side of the wall to spin up and over the struggling dinosaur shifter ahead of him.
My heart lurches into my throat at the near miss as Stig flies off towards the ceiling and out of sight. Spinning past a few blurry shapes swiping out at him from the wall while taking the majority of the dust cloud with him, but not Saurian. The crew’s leader held in place on the walkway and blocking any further view of the drainage room as she tears and strains against the slick and dented limbs that have trapped her.
Dozens of thickly muscled arms, well defined by the metal they’re made from, reaching up from the shuddering steel of the walkway to wrap around her tail and legs. More, made from badly broken concrete, reaching out from the wall she’s just burst through to paw at her back or try and loop around her neck. She tries to leap after Stig before he can pass out of range, bunching herself low before surging upwards to try and take advantage of the trailing edge of his redirected gravity.
The metal beneath her screams and some of the arms lose their grip but most of them have dug their fingers between scales or even pierced through the membrane on her toes to wrap around bone and muscle directly. They dig in tight and Saurian barely shifts from her spot not two steps past the walls edge.
However, in firming their grip on the shifter, the hands have to pause their attempts to reach higher up her legs. Those that had been about to wrap around her knees and pull her crashing against the floor easily brushed away when Saurian reaches down herself. Her leap revealed as a feint when, instead of throwing her arms into the air to try and follow Stig, she stabs her claws directly into her knee joints and, without hesitation, rips.
The lower halves of her legs come away in a fountain of bright red blood that splashes across her claws and covers the arms as they reach up to grapple her again. Saurian’s jaw splitting open in a hissing smile as she slaps them away just before Stig returns to cover her at the head of a now much reduced dust cloud. A small wave of loose stone rushing through the hole before he reverses his Power’s direction again. The density of debris thin enough for me to catch a flash of gleaming bone as Saurian begins to fall sideways away from us. Using the rapid shifts in direction to flex her tail free and then using her weight and claws to carve directly through the railing ahead of her.
The two fall out of sight just as Schiz, having been caught in the area of Stig’s return and so ‘thrown’ away from the door, goes crashing back against the door turned ceiling turned floor. Now door again as she groans slightly on dropping back to the actual floor when Stig moves out of range. The sound of her smacking into the steel enough to knock me out of my shock to spin around and quickly try and find the pair on the cameras.
I find them at once.
The pair standing, or lying in Saurian’s case, halfway up the side of a pillar almost directly across from the newly made exit Schiz and I are both trying to avoid being seen through. The dust cloud wholly gone and so letting me see them clearly under the harsh glare coming from the lights spaced across the ceiling. Stig standing close enough to the water that his Power churns up the surface as a portion several metres across tries to fall sideways. No one had told me exactly how large the area affected by his Power is, or what shape it takes, but it must be at least three or four metres around him given how far he is standing up the pillar’s side.
However, it’s only a small part of my focus that notes the revealed limit of Stig’s reach. A far greater portion drawn to the rapidly shifting scene playing out across every monitor in front of me. On the far walls and walkways, where the yellow steel is beginning to creak under the added weight. On the starkly lit ceiling, where the white fluorescence of the many inset lights is broken up by a thousand finger puppets playing across the water beneath. And along the sides of near every curve-ended rectangular pillar that I can see through the camera’s spotty coverage. There, in all but a few places hidden from the source, grows a veritable jungle of grasping arms that all reach out towards the blindspot Saurian and Stig are hiding in.
Clearly, Ictus knows where they are.
The only spots I can see that don’t have at least one arm every foot or so being the curved ends of the pillars, like where Stig and Saurian are hiding, and the spots on the ceiling at the very edge of the lights themselves. The illumination likely making it impossible for the hero to see the concrete clearly enough to focus his Power on. Everywhere else though, from the walkway to the walls to the sides of near every pillar I can see, is covered in arms of stone or steel all ready and waiting to strike.
At the least, all but a few of the limbs have become motionless statues the moment they are finished growing. With only the occasional twitch to show they are more than a terrible design choice. The arms closest to the hiding pair being the exception, tightly clumped like those on the walkway just outside my hidey hole and clawing blindly around the curved side of the pillar they’ve grown from. Reaching into the apparent blindspot and carving furrows into the stone with the force of their grip. The dust created falling sideways before leaving the range of Stig’s Power and dropping into the churning rapids below.
“Legally, I have to offer you the chance to surrender. To… give up and… come quietly. Ha.”
The rough voice echoes out across the room from the bunker at its far end. Amplified and warped as it exits from a hidden loudspeaker that clearly took a few bashes in the three days or so its spent underwater. The speaker himself not sounding the least bit amused with his bitten off laugh that I could almost mistake for a cough. The volume loud enough to break through the crash of water as it echoes off the walls of the drainage room and then again through the newly made hole. My shoulder’s flinching me half around to glance towards the arms still covering the walkway just outside. The limbs there slowly crushing the discarded halves of Saurian’s legs and making me gag from at the sight even as I force myself to check the floor behind me. From his position in the bunker, Ictus should be able to see a narrow strip inside of our own hiding spot.
‘Why then, hasn’t he grown any of his arms in here?’
It’s not that I want him to, myself and Schiz are where we are precisely to avoid his sight and make sure that we have no reason to cross the zone of what now might as well be no-man’s land for relatively squishy supes like us. Yet, the second change in the prediction of how Saurian expected this to go, after her losing far more than expected getting past the ambush she’d known would be waiting, has me licking my chapped lips with renewed nerves.
Glancing up, I meet Schiz’s focused eyes where she’s pressing herself even tighter against the door than before. Tense and ready to leap out and shut the hero down with her Power the moment I tell her he’s left the bunker. Or been dragged out of it. The reminder that I’m the only one who can see him having me spin back around to re-focus on his hiding spot before I risk missing him.
“So, will you?”
Despite what I just thought, I can’t help but flick my gaze away from the bunker at Ictus’ gruff question. Back to the pillar’s side where Stig’s helmet is twitching rapidly from one arm outcropping to the next and where Saurian’s missing legs have left a red stain across the concrete. The puddle spreading out across the ‘floor’ and then dripping over the edge before falling sideways for a few metres until it leaves the range of Stig’s Power. There’s a lot of blood but, as I lean closer while swallowing down another gag at the reminder of how the woman had torn her knees apart, I realise that its source has already stopped bleeding.
Saurian had said her Power let her heal faster than normal and I’d taken that to mean regeneration but I can now see that’s not quite the case. The stumps of her legs having just finished sealing over with a patch of the same leathery skin as sits beneath her scales. She won’t be running anytime soon but at least she’s not in danger of just bleeding out either.
Still, the loss of half of each leg doesn’t seem to bother her. The crew’s leader pushing herself up from the ‘floor’ the moment that the spurting blood has ceased and flashing a glance at Stig that has him freezing at once. The boy performing a full body shiver before shoving his hands into his hoody and going still once more. His helmet tilting down as he looks to where Stig is crawling towards him with her eyes closed.
She flicks her head down at something beneath them then up to the ceiling before I see her make a clicking motion with her mouth that must be too quiet to hear over the rushing water ‘falling’ just a few metres below them. My heart pounding louder and louder as I watch what looks like the suggestion for a new plan, one that might not include me, and find myself struggling to breathe clearly.
Saurian’s initial plan had been simple. Direct. It relied on never giving Ictus the breathing room to use the combination of the confined space and his Power against them. Now though, looking at the arms forming a barrier between the two and their target, I can’t imagine how they can possibly pull off the plan as it was.
Without meaning to, I glance back at the dark pit still worryingly close to me. Briefly debating the mad thought of jumping down into the sewers in the case that some of the crew really do decide to give up. Or just leave without me. Saurian has used it to get out before so I know there must be a path back to the surface that’s not impossible to reach…
‘The fuck am I thinking?!’
The only reason the shifter was able to find her way out would’ve been thanks to her enhanced senses letting her find the correct way to go and even then, it took a while to map the ‘best’ route out. Plus, even if I stumbled onto that path by chance, I’d still have no way to deal with the fumes or survive whatever else might be down there. I cannot let myself be arrested but jumping into certain death is an even worse option. Probably.
“Hey, I’m guessing shit’s hitting the fan out there? Don’t worry. Things usually go wrong eventually and we’ve got out of worse than this. The important thing is being ready to adapt.” I take my eyes off the monitor’s entirely to look over to Schiz hiding behind the door. Her freckled face showing a small smile even as she massages the shoulder she landed on earlier.
“Saurian’s good at that? Adapting?” Under the mask and scarf that I’m still half biting; I feel my own lips twitching up into something close to a smile. The irony of a dinosaur being good at adapting to rapid changes putting a little hysteria into my voice before I can stop it.
“Yeah, she-”
Saurian roars. I know it’s her even without turning to look at the monitors because nothing else here could possibly make that deep, clicking, rumbling, crashing bellow of a noise. A noise that has my breath catching in my throat and my muscles tensing tight in preparation to start running to anywhere but here. Instinctively, I recognise the fear is not the artificial swell her attention had brought before but just the natural reaction to being reminded of one’s place in the food chain.
The roar ends quickly though I don’t realise it for several seconds longer as it echoes over and over again before the noise of the water finally melds with and then overpowers it. Returning the room to what now feels almost like silence in comparison. A false silence that is almost immediately broken by the satisfied voice of the hero that roar was meant to answer.
“Ahh, I was hoping you’d say that.”
