Chapter Sixty-Nine - Nice

“You don’t want to see us letting loose, uwu.
We stop the buck!”

“You don’t want that to happen to you, desu!
We’ll fuck you up!”

--Hyper Cutie Zoom Ranger Sparkle Girl Bubble-chan! And Neon Girl Happy-Chan! In a 2040 joint interview.

***

“This was a mistake!” I shouted as I ran.

Behind me, aliens were pouring out of a crack in the wall. Smaller ones, because that’s all that could fit, but enough of them to give me pause. Little Model Ones, all sleek and bat-like and hard to spot in the cavern, even with my ears, and Model Threes that looked slimmer than usual. Plenty of others too, but I wasn’t going to sit down and observe them all when the entire hive looked like it was out for blood.

Charging down the bend in the corridor, I slid to a stop the moment I saw Gomorrah’s outline ahead of me, then I turned around and raised my Icarus.

The grenade launcher had an eighteen round magazine. I’d fired one already.

The next five thumped out and arced over to the bend just as the horde started coming around.

With a quick flick of my eye, I switched over from HE to fragmentation, then launched the next two rounds before I continued to run towards Gomorrah. “Turn off notifications for a bit,” I said. “And I’ll need ammo soon!” My counter was down to ten rounds already.

“What?” Gomorrah asked.

“Pissed off aliens,” I said.

My mecha cats, all three of them currently surrounding Gomorrah, tensed, guns unfolding from their back and eyes glowing red as they focused on the end of the tunnel.

“Does your helmet filter the air?” Gomorrah asked.

“What? Uh, I think?”

It does.

“Good.”

Aliens started pouring out from the end of the mineshaft, and despite that, Gomorrah didn’t slow down her slow, steady walk.

I jogged up and kept pace beside her, my shoulder-mounted guns deploying even as more aliens started running our way.

I fired up and over the front lines of the aliens, each blast going off behind them taking out three or four of them.

Then the mecha cats opened fire. They seemed to mostly focus on the Model Ones above, their backs arching like a pissed off cat’s as the air filled with zipping tracers that skewered fliers across the breadth of the tunnel.

I clicked on empty with my Icarus and fell to one knee. “Reloading,” I said. My railgun fired, punching a thin hole all the way through the horde, then my plasma caster started to spit fire into the approaching aliens. They were getting closer than I’d like.

“I got this,” Gomorrah replied.

I pressed the tab on my launcher’s side to eject the magazine within, then caught a fresh one out of the air as it materialized next to me and slid it in under my gun. There was a bit of fumbling there, even with the correct buttons glowing a bit to help, but I figured I’d get used to it.

Then Gomorrah started speaking in Latin and she levelled her flamethrower ahead of her.

I hissed as a white beam shot out of the end of her oversized gun. The heat was palpable, like standing right up against the door to an oven. The white beam broke up a few metres away, splitting apart and spreading liquid fire onto anything it touched.

The aliens melted.

It was weird to see. Almost disturbing. So much flesh bubbling and going liquid a moment before sloughing off of bones. Eyes popped and lungs emptied with little squeaks. Not all of them died right away. Some fell to the side, still on fire, wriggling and fighting to move even as their fur and skin burned.

Gomorrah waved the flamethrower left and right, spreading the fire around in a curtain ahead of us.

For some reason, the worst part was the lack of screams. The aliens had to be in pain, but they were silent, dying without much of a fight.

Gomorrah paused in her chanting. “They’re going around.”

Around? I eyed the burning conflagration ahead of me for a moment before I saw what she meant. The aliens ahead were dead, but in dying they created a sort of barrier that Gomorrah’s flamethrower had to burn through. The horde was splitting apart, rushing at us from both sides.

“Two cats, focus left, one focus the air,” I ordered. The mecha cats immediately shifted, the two on Gomorrah’s left aiming down and ripping into any Antithesis that tried to sneak around, and the one behind us a little continued to fire into the air, striking at the Model Ones zipping by.

I turned, flicked on HE and burst mode, then fired two three-round busts into the pile of burning aliens ahead of us before I switched back to fragmentation and let loose on the right flank.

The HE rounds tore the wall of bodies apart, scattering flaming plant-meat around and opening up some room for Gomorrah to spray the aliens further back.

I felt my cheeks straining as I launched round after round of fragmentation grenades into the aliens pouncing around our flaming barrier. Sometimes, the little shields built into my jacket would flicker on, stopping some of the frag from hitting me and Gomorrah behind me.

My rails twitched up and took out a pair of fliers with one burst, and my plasma caster kept switching targets, leaving burning lines in the dark that ended in the middle of the chest of dozens of fliers.

“Bigger ones!” Gomorrah shouted.

I emptied the last of my magazine, dropped it, and caught a fresh one from Myalis without having to ask. It gave me a little moment to look ahead.

Gomorrah was right, bigger aliens were coming. Model Fours and Fives. The latter would be a problem, they were tankier.

“Let’s move right,” I said. “We need a wall on one side.”

“Got it,” Gomorrah said.

She started sidestepping even as her habit shifted and a pair of back-mounted guns poked out over her head. The two new flamethrowers glowed a violent red for a moment before adding their own fire to the conflagration ahead of us.

I was sweating, armour sticking to me, and yet I couldn’t help but want to laugh as I slapped a new magazine in and continued firing ahead.

I left it on HE. There was no going wrong with HE.

“Can’t take out the big ones,” Gomorrah said.

I squinted ahead. One of the Model Fives had fallen, burning and dead. So that wasn’t entirely true.

The problem was likely the quantity of fire Gomorrah had to use to take it out; she’d focused on it, which thinned out our flaming barricade a little, even with her two back-mounted guns adding to the blaze.

“Down to thirty percent,” Gomorrah said. “I’ll need to reload.”

“Got it,” I said. I pulled my trigger faster, forgoing aim to put more dents in the number of aliens coming. “Mylis, next magazine, I want those monofilament bombs.”

Understood.

It wouldn’t do that much to hurt the really big guys, but it would create pockets that the smaller ones couldn’t pass through. I glanced at my ammo counts. Only halfway with my plasma caster, and my railgun still had over ninety percent. The mecha cats were nearing the halfway mark with their main guns and had switched from full-auto to picking off targets more carefully.

I clicked empty, dropped my magazine, and picked a new one that Myalis dropped right into my open hand. It was a bit heavier, but that wasn’t an issue.

“Going to set up some traps,” I shouted. “Then I’m switching to something with more boom, reload on ‘Go.’”

“Got it,” Gomorrah said.

I fiddled with the controls on my launcher, then aimed way, way up, a parabolic arc showing up in my augs that would be dropping the next explosives past the front rows of aliens.

Our little bit of cover was growing smaller as Antithesis jumped over their burning comrades and launched themselves at us.

I fired, starting from the left, and firing again every few centimetres as I turned. It left a racking arc of smoke lines in the air that crashed somewhere out of sight.

Then the blending started as the monofilament grenades went off and started whipping super-thin strands of some protector-tech wire around. I saw a few aliens being torn apart from the ankle-up and grinned.

“Black holes,” I said.

Are you certain?

“Set them to only go off with us outside their range.”

Understood.

“Go!” I shouted.

Gomorrah stepped back, her flamethrower smoking, its barrel and entire front half red as a stove-top. I saw her drop to one knee behind me and tear open a panel on the side of her gun.

I stopped paying attention as I tore the used mag out of my Icarus and picked up a fresh one from Myalis.

Only six rounds.

“Got it,” I said. As I clicked the magazine in place.

Without Gomorrah’s constant fire, the Antithesis were getting a lot closer.

I aimed for somewhere in the middle and fired, spacing out the shots in another arc.

The wall of corpses ahead of us exploded and a running Model Five charged across the no-alien’s-land between.

Then the black hole grenades behind it went off.

I dropped Icarus, letting it dangle by my side from its strap as I whipped out my Trench Maker and sighted it at the Model Five.

It wasn’t necessary.

The wind picked up, whipping past me and tugging me forwards. The fire roared and shifted, flames dancing up towards the six black points hovering in the air just over the wall of fire.

Aliens started to be picked up and crushed into each other, and the Model Five before me slowed, then stopped, huge claws gripping at the ground even as it started to be pulled back.

I fell to one knee, lessening the pull of the wind.

The Model Five dug in, lowering its head even as the muscles in its legs flexed and it dragged itself forward.

So I shot it in the leg a few times.

It flopped backwards soundlessly and crashed into the other aliens being sucked into the burning singularity.

The monofilament grenades behind them came loose and flew into the mess, still spinning and turning everything into a meaty blender.

Then it stopped and for a moment everything was quiet and dark as hundreds of kilos of compressed alien meat flopped to the ground.

Gomorrah slapped the side of her still-glowing gun closed. “Reloaded,” she said.

“Neat,” I said as I tucked my handgun away. “Let’s keep at it, then.”

***