Guardian
a Worm/Destiny Crossover
Chapter 41: What The F*ck Was That?
The booming echoes of the fucking words bounced off the smooth, stone walls. As one, the entire enemy force turned to face Taylor and her team. The sound faded, and nothing rose to replace it. Which was odd. By now, she expected to be halfway to deaf from the sound of screamers earning their name. They did not. They were completely, utterly, eerily silent. All of them. Which wasn't to say there was complete silence. The sound of that many bodies, that many claws scraping against stone, the impact of four giant pairs of feet – the thunderous rasp of their presence filled the space their screams would have occupied. It was at this moment that she felt, in comparison, she preferred the screams.
"What the fuck was that?" Foil's sunken eyes were pits of shadow in the dim light. "They – it talks now?"
"Let's talk about that after we don't get killed." Grace, rather sensibly, was focused on the matter at hand. The smaller enemy forms began to move, flowing around the legs of the giants like river water around stones. Glimmers of purple light began to appear as the shooters, both big and small, began to charge up their arms. "Speaking of. Guardian. We have a plan?"
Taylor, her mind teeming, scanned the room as fast as she could. Her eyes flickering from one cropping of rock to another. Then back to the tunnel from whence they came. "Fall back. Use the tunnel to our advantage. Force them to cram in, backing up a few feet at a time. Then, assuming we're not all horribly killed, break through and deal with the giants."
"Another tunnel crawl." Grace shrugged. "Why not? They've worked so far."
After a deep breath, Taylor ignited her knife. The enemy broke into a run, closing the distance at a rapid pace. Beside her, Foil took a shaky breath and drew a pair of her knives. The blades shone, infused from within by the black glow of her power. Grace slung her arm over Taylor's shoulder, taking most of the weight off her maimed leg.
"Go!" Taylor turned and half-carried her wounded team member back into the tunnel. They moved into the confined space, Foil throwing blades as she retreated. The ones she killed died in silence, crumbling to the ground with the same dissonant quiet they'd done everything else.
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"This was a great plan, Guardian!" Foil's screams were bordering on hysterical. High pitched and thin. A very fragile thread, holding her back from plummeting over the edge into...something. Her blade was glowing, glimmering black, and scything through the charging scree of enemy with little effort. Truth be told, she was doing more than enough damage to hold her side of the tunnel. Grace, who was doing something to fist sized rocks that propelled them forward loud enough to break the sound barrier, looked almost superfluous by comparison. "A great fucking plan!"
Taylor's decision whether or not to reply was made for her by a pair of screamers throwing themselves onto her in an attempt to bear her to the ground. The first went belly-first into her blade and writhed as it dissolved into ash. The second drove straight into her, sinking wicked talons through her shirt and into her ribs. They scraped along the bone and drew an agonized scream from her. She pushed her knife arm through the block of ash containing it, stuck her blade in her attacker's waist, and cut it in half. She pulled its arms from her flesh, which felt excruciating, so that the wounds could begin to heal, and then took her position again.
It was honestly the worst part of this fight. Well. One of them, maybe. It wasn't until she was prohibited from doing it that she realized how important movement was to her style of fighting. She was at her best when given room to move, when she could dodge and run like she was supposed to. This...was not that. This was stand-your-ground, butcher's chopping block fighting. More like extermination than anything else. Exterminating things that wanted to and could kill the exterminator, so maybe the metaphor fell a bit flat, but it was the best her tired, aching brain could come up with.
She killed another six screamers before she realized their position was starting to become more trouble than it was worth. Her kills were creating clouds of ashen dust faster than they could disperse. Grace and Foil's kills were lumping together on the ground in a hard-to-navigate pitfall mound that was just begging for someone to step in and fall. Not to mention the slick of ichor that was covering most every surface. The point was, they needed to move, and soon.
But how? If they let up, if they moved back, if they gave ground in any way...it would be bad. Taylor wasn't gifted enough in the English language to describe how much, but it would likely end with them all dying and Las Vegas being overrun. So.
Bad.
What they needed, she decided, was time. A space wherein the enemy wasn't constantly attacking them so that they could retreat, set up, and be ready for when combat resumed. The riddle lay in creating that time. Luckily for her continued existence, she had an idea. Like all the best plans, it involved a sword. "Listen up!" Her throat was raw from screaming, but she was forced to so she could be heard. "Here's the plan!"
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"Now!" Taylor screamed. After that, several things occurred, one right after the other. The first was that she planted her feet and plowed, knife leading, into the center of the tunnel. She used wide, sweeping strikes to clear her path and create enough room for the second thing. Foil dropped back, decapitating a pair of screamers with a flick of her wrist before tossing her sword forward. Then she wrapped an arm around Grace's waist and hauled ass further back towards the spiral path. Taylor caught the sword, spinning it was ease as the enemy plowed through the break she'd created.
Then, something strange happened. She could feel the Light of the storm traveling from her soul, down her arm, and into her knife. She was used to that sensation, the rush of wind that accompanied it every time. She could feel the void, black and endless and bright. She knew what it felt like, when she drew upon it to create her bow. She even knew the Light of the sun. What it felt like when she channeled that into her pistol. To be fair, what she felt as the sword's hilt slapped into her palm wasn't all that different. She just never thought to try and use solar Light on anything other than a gun.
As it spun, the sword's blade caught fire. Bright, blue-orange flame licked down the sharp, ichor-stained metal, burning the thick black liquid away into a foul steam. The fury of the sun rushed through her, twining with the rage of the storm as she stood, a knife made of lightning in one hand and a sword wrought in flames in the other.
Time slowed for a moment. The faces of screamers distended weirdly, their toothy maws gaping in silent screams or efforts to bite her to pieces. Violet plasma flickered in the arm cannons of shooters. The green eyes of the big blades flared. Then, Taylor stopped waiting and struck .
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This was how she was meant to fight. She darted to the right, under the swiping arm of a big blade, and ran up the curve of the tunnel wall. One, two, three steps, and she pushed herself into a flip, arching her back to tumble over the second strike. She brought her feet in and landed in a crouch, swiping out with her new sword to take the big blade's legs off at its thick, segmented knees. As it fell she brought her knife around to carve through what passed for its neck. It collapsed to ash, burned by both the fire of the sun and the fury of the storm. She bulled through the drifting cloud, heralded by burning blades, and carved through another four shooters and a pair of screamers. More poured through the gap she created.
Instead of pushing forward, like every instinct screamed at her to, she fell back. Threw herself blindly back down the tunnel. It was an awkward, ungainly maneuver. Her boots slid on treads made slick by effluvia and grime before finding purchase on cleaner, clearer stone. She bent her knees against her own impact, leaning forward to keep her balance centered. When her speed ran out, she looked up from her crouch to see that she was no more than a few feet from the rest of her team.
Grace was pale, sweating, glassy-eyed. Her bandage had bled through again. Her form kept...flickering...like she was trying to use her power in some way and failing. She was slumped against an outcropping of rock and though she gave a shaky-handed thumbs up when she saw Taylor, it was clear: she wasn't going anywhere. Foil was, by comparison, in better shape. There was still that shadow in her eyes, that something that had thus far escaped definition. Her injuries were minor, mostly bruises and scrapes, but at some point in the last half hour or so she'd acquired a long, nasty slash down her cheek that wept blood unchecked. She just looked at Taylor and said, keeping her face as still as possible, "Why is my sword on fire?"
"No time!" Taylor tossed the blade over to its owner. The moment the hilt left her hand, the blade extinguished. She returned her knife to its proper place in her right hand and set herself. "They're right behind me!"
As it turned out, they were a bit closer than 'right behind', which they proved by having a screamer headbutt her in the face while trying to tackle her to the ground and tear her stomach out. She snarled at the wash of pain and gutted the thing for its trouble, splitting it right up the middle with a wrench of her her knife's crackling, electric blade. She followed up by putting it through the face of a shooter that got a little too close for its own good and then crushing the throat of another screamer with a quick punch. A gleaming black sword flickered past and took its head off a second later.
Taylor felt a surge of energy. A rush of we can do this. She ducked and moved to the side as the sword came back overhead, separating another three screamers from their lives with contemptuous ease. The numbers were thinning. She could see the back of the horde. Just a little longer.
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Well , she thought as the last screamer dissolved to ash beneath her knife, that's that part done. If only there weren't four giants waiting for them on the other side of the tunnel. Compounding the issue – issues – was the injury Foil had taken from a big blade just before the battle ended: her ankle had been broken. Which, by itself, didn't sound like a bad thing and wasn't. Given time to heal and a proper brace to set everything right, there would be no problems whatsoever. Right then and right there was a different story.
Grace had taken no further wounds, which was good. The ones she had were bad enough. Worsening by the moment, too. She'd stopped that strange flickering thing and had started to shake. She was pale and glassy-eyed. Taylor wasn't an expert by any means, but she was pretty sure that Grace was either going or had gone into shock. Her team had effectively been gutted, with two of the three members out of commission.
She looked to Foil, sunken-faced and grimacing in pain. "Do you have any more knives?"
Foil blinked for a moment before the question seemed to register. She shook her head, stopped, patted her vest and pants, then shook her head again. After licking her lips and clearing her throat, she replied, "No, I must have used them all."
"Okay." Taylor chewed her lip. "Okay." She touched the radio in her ear. "Vanguard-1 to Vanguard-Prime. Vanguard-1 to Vanguard-Prime. Do you hear me?"
No response. It figured. A ball of ice formed in her gut. That pretty well put paid to that idea. Which just left the absolute worst idea she had ever come up with. She sighed. It must have been a very communicative sigh, because Foil immediately set to protesting. "No. Guard – no. That is suicide!"
Taylor shrugged. "What other options do we have? Retreat? There's nowhere else to go. Vegas is falling. Call for help?" She paused. "Actually...okay. Here's what you're going to do: get Grace and get back up to the roof. Call for help and a ride out. I'm going to finish the mission and meet you up there. Got it?"
Foil shook her head. "That still ends up with you fighting four of those fucking giant things. Alone ."
"I'm the only one of us who can."
"I can't... let you do this."
"You're not. I'm ordering you to."
There was more discussion, and it ended with Taylor walking down the tunnel alone. In one hand she carried a stormlit knife, and the other a sword on fire. Her tattered cloak swirled behind her and, though she couldn't see it, Light shone from behind her eyes.
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