Vol.4 Ch.13 – Field Test
Chapter 13: Field Test
Between herself and Jeanne Elaine was certain they could have killed that monster within ten seconds but that was not the point of the trip.
She wanted to find out how Aurora and Mare acted in a combat situation. Of course Aurora was still Level 1 and didn't have any abilities but even so it would be interesting to see how she handled this. And with Mare Elaine was just curious to see how she fought, period. Jeanne seemed to consider her reliable and Elaine was looking forward to seeing how she had earned the angel's respect.
And so when the beast turned to face them she stood back. She was perfectly willing to bail the two women out if they couldn't handle it but first she wanted to observe them.
Aurora caught on to what Elaine was doing right away and dashed off, putting distance between herself and the others and finding cover within one of the ruined buildings. As she ran she fired her little handgun, aiming her shots around what passed for the beast's sternum.
Mare, on the other hand, stood her ground. It wasn't that she was dreamy and languid like usual. She was completely aware, her feet planted, her assault rifle in both hands. She aimed at the creature and then, with perfect trigger discipline, began laying three round bursts into the beasts, spacing them out just long enough to recenter her aim after each burst, continuing until the beast had almost reached her.
Elaine was about to jump in and save her, thinking Mare had been too focused on firing to take into account the giant Giger dinosaur crashing into her, when Mare stopped firing, drew Winds to herself, spun in a little pirouette, and then grazed the charging creature with the tips of her fingers. And immediately something strange happened.
The creature came to a sudden and complete stop, its momentum canceled out entirely. The beast had been charging at Mare, doing the closest thing to galloping that its awkward frame allowed, and so it went sprawling. By the time it got back up Mare had vanished in a flash of light and appeared again on top of a building fifty feet behind the creature.
The creature tried to attack Elaine and Jeanne but before it could even raise one of its winged talons Mare had resumed firing, causing the creature to spin around in irritation.
It crouched down, paused for a moment, and then launched itself forward, trying to catch Mare with a flying tackle, attempting to skewer her with its beak.
Mare, once again, kept firing rounds into it until it was almost too late, dropped the gun and summoned forth the Winds again. This time she didn't simply stop the thing cold with a touch. This time she summoned forth a blast of force that hit with an impact similar to a shotgun, but magnified.
The thing was blasted out of the air and plummeted to the ground, where Aurora kept peppering it with pistol bullets.
Aurora wasn't doing anywhere near as much damage but clearly she knew where the creature was most vulnerable. Mare caught on and so, while the creature was still on its back and struggling to get its limbs back under it, she decided to finish things.
“Elaine,” she called, “don't freak out, okay?”
Before Elaine could even ask what she shouldn't be freaking out about she felt the most unnerving pulling sensation, like that time one of her squad members had to pull a crossbow bolt out of her side but without the accompanying pain, and then suddenly Mare was holding Areadbhar.
This spear belonged to Alexis, one of her M-skills, the magical spear of Lugh that could pierce anything. Elaine had access to a slightly weaker version of the spear and, apparently, so did Mare.
She twirled the spear in one hand, instantly familiar with it the way any user of an M-skill was, and then jumped high up into the air with it.
When she came back down again she crashed into the monster, burying the spear – the entire spear, not just the tip – into the beast's sternum, in exactly the spot Aurora had kept peppering with bullets.
The beast let out a godawful sound, strangled but still earthshaking, and then went limp.
“That was incredible,” Elaine said as Mare jumped off of the body and joined them again.
“It really was,” Aurora said, awed but also slightly withdrawn.
“I wouldn't have known where to hit if it wasn't for you,” Mare said.
“You don't have to cheer me up,” Aurora said quietly. “I was useless there.”
“You're Level 1 and have no abilities,” Elaine said. “I didn't expect you to do much here.”
“So you wanted me to be useless?”
“I wanted to see how you'd act,” Elaine said. “And you did amazing. You didn't panic. You knew your limits. You kept yourself safe. And despite all of that you still managed to harass it and point out its weakness to someone who could actually kill it. Once we get you some levels you'll be amazing.”
Aurora looked away in embarrassment, a light blush creeping over her cheeks.
Elaine turned to Mare and said: “And you, I don't even know what to say to. I knew you'd be good but... Half the things you did I don't even know how you did them.”
“Thank you,” Mare said, then explained: “The first was Null magic.”
“Oh,” Elaine said, “that makes sense.”
“Null magic?” Aurora asked.
“It's a really weird branch of magic,” Elaine explained. “It lets you null things, anything, whatever you can think of. In this case she nullified its momentum while it was charging at her, causing it to stumble.”
“I see,” Aurora said.
“The spell after was a teleport,” Elaine said, turning back to Mare. “But I couldn't tell if it was space or light elemental.”
“Light,” Mare said. “I picked the memory up when your team was practicing in the training hall a while ago. The cute blonde of yours. Alexis, right?”
“That's right,” Elaine said. “The spear is also hers. How did you do that?”
“I can activate my Awakener's M-skills,” Mare said. “It's one of my M-skills. Alejandro never liked it when I did that.”
“It feels weird,” Elaine said. “But if it helps, I can endure it.”
“Thank you.”
“And what about that... shotgun blast I guess?”
“That was a shotgun blast,” Mare explained. “The memory of a shotgun blast, technically. Much stronger than the real thing because memories are subjective. It's memory magic.”
Elaine considered: “Could you use that to copy the explosion we used to kill Caulder's second wave?”
“The one your cute redhead dropped from the Gospel?” Mare asked. “No. I tried it and almost blacked out just visualizing it.”
“Shame,” Elaine said.
“Ladies,” Jeanne interrupted, “aren't you all forgetting something?”
Elaine frowned at her, then it dawned on her. “Oh fuck.”
“What's wrong?” Aurora asked.
“We didn't get an experience pop-up when Mare killed that thing,” Elaine said.
“What does that mean?”
“That means it's not dead yet,” Elaine said and just as she turned to face the beast it exploded.
Its belly, grotesquely swollen as it had been, ruptured and the insides were...
Kangaroos are fairly charming creatures, at least when they aren't attacking anyone but the insides of their pouches look like something out of a horror movie, a visceral life support system of pink flesh and a single teat that looks more like a feeding tube. That was what Elaine was reminded of.
The inside of the creature consisted of pink flesh, so warm it was steaming, with five things that Caulder had probably called seats but were clearly assembled from the bodies of people, hollowed out so they could hold people in place while the creature flew. The ribs, covered in pink flesh, were there to hold the person in place, what was left of the skull had been turned into a helmet that would lay over a person's head to keep them fixed in place and the legs and pelvic bones had been fashioned into a seat. And somehow, that was not the horrifying part.
Aurora had said that the thing's purpose had been to collect bodies before returning to Caulder and it had clearly done just that. Except there hadn't been any living bodies left in Carlton. No dead bodies, either.
Project Seedbed it had apparently been called, the concerted effort to overrun these small towns with just enough Outsider hybrids to eat their fill, go into hibernation and then hatch into more awful creatures. Elaine herself had found one of those fleshy cocoons on a trip with Cassie and Abigail. She'd cut it out before it could hatch and then dumped it onto the Professor's workbench.
And this monster had clearly found the same kinds of fleshy cocoons and had decided to harvest them for Caulder. Except something about the warm, visceral environment had accelerated their growth and the shock of Mare killing their newfound brood mother had caused them to hatch early.
Visceral horrors, most of the way along the transformation from Thrall to Wendigo, crawled out of the creature's stomach, stumbling and disoriented but also already sniffing the air in search of fresh meat.
A Thrall of Shub-Niggurath was a human corrupted by a Dark Young, pink cancerous flesh, goat parts and tentacles haphazardly grown over their body until their reason was buried. A Wendigo was a pale creature, skin stretched so tight over bone that the creature looked not just malnourished but desiccated, their heads stretched into something more resembling the skull of a deer than the head of a human, with antlers and tiny orange eyes set deep into black sockets, their limbs elongated grotesquely and their hands ending in foot-long talons. And these creatures looked like godawful hybrids of those two.
Their flesh was pink and moist, as if they were missing their skin and their bare meat was laid bare for all to see. Cancerous growths still covered them but they had shrunk, tentacles and hooves and eyes all over them but no longer bulging outward. Their hands had already turned into claws but they were weak, fleshy things. And their heads, good God their heads.
The heads were halfway through the transformation from human to bovine, each slightly, disgustingly different. One had a distinctly human skull with a grotesquely elongated lower jaw, one had an elongated bovine skull with a distressingly human set of teeth, one had the antlers still covered in a layer of pink flesh.
Elaine was stunned by sheer visceral horror and Mare and Jeanne, likewise, were too disgusted to act. She knew she should move, should kill them before they found out if these things already had the blistering speed that wendigo were known for but the image in front of her was too grotesque. It was all she could do to keep her breakfast down.
Which was why Elaine was more than a little shocked when Aurora calmly advanced on the creatures and, completely unbothered by the horrid sight, double-tapped each of them with two perfectly placed shots to the head.