Somewhere inside that skin-and-metal exoskeleton, that body which she wore the way others wore clothes and armor, Beth still wondered what it all meant. The 'Red Stars.' And what they had portended, clawing up the beach like a living tsunami, their chitinous knees clicking with greed, their mandibles yawning ravenously. Whether that enemy up there was the enemy—the one Ultima had warned them about all those years ago, the one which had made the girl's recovery, her training, her painstaking grooming all so very necessary.
So many questions. Yet among all those uncertainties had one thing remained clear, a lighthouse standing strong amid the squalls: it was not her destiny to fell this monster. She was not these people's savior. She would, however, aid that person. That much she had known from the beginning—even if she'd thought it would be Cassiel, her craven brother, who rose first and paramount to Landow's aid...
Still, before someone could deal the coup de grâce, someone had to bring low that obscene creature. And before someone could cut it down, someone had to fight her way to it. Fight over the blood-slick sand, through the roiling surf; through the roach-dogs and their hordes uncountable, their bodies even then weighing down her own, hooked and latched about her ankles, her throat, like so many writhing shackles, heavy and still gorging. Glutting. Beth impaled them until her hands were too heavy with their carcasses to hoist, sliced them and hacked them until the blades of her fingers were clogged with their thick, pulpy innards, hiked over the mountains of their dead, and still they came, two arriving to replace each one felled. And through it all, through the futility and the struggle, only one direction remained: past them. Through them.
Wresting her hand from the last thorax she'd plunged it through, she kept pushing. Kept clawing. A stalemate slipping from their fingers stroke by stroke.
Until that changed.
It began with a kind of sandstorm: a flurry of detritus kicking up from a single focal point, shearing pebbles from salient concrete, uncovering and uplifting beach-buried river stones. Steadied, aimed, controlled, this biting wind liquefied the lesser creatures inside their organic armors, shredded the chitinous shells. Another storm also focalized, this one encrusted with a million diamonds of ice, glittering on the gusts, glittering on every surface where grew its stiff, brittle hoars. Where the first sandpaper squall had reclaimed sections of beach, this ice storm calcified over the squirming dead, gave pause to the scuttlings of those yet unharmed. Born from bugs and insects, the roach-things feared the cold most of all. It compelled them to dig. Hibernate. Flee winter's desolation down, down into the heats and slimes of the earth. Still, even this afforded the Inevitable One, and all the other Dominants, but a few feet's reprieve. Only a moment to refresh.
By the time a second behemoth had scraped the heavens with its scaly back, blotting the sky with the stretching of its titanic wings, those down on the beach knew not whether to elate or to shiver. Behind them, from among the huddled refugees had it appeared, but as another defender? If not, then one who had infiltrated—the second of two pincers—one driving their prey into the hunter's jaws, one preventing all escape while the other wreaked hell and havoc.
Much to the relief of the dwarfed onlookers, the invader from the sea appeared rather incensed by the sudden arrival and presence of this second entity (an entity Beth, and all around her, did not recognize; not by name or visage). Their attention drawn, their ire stoked, thus began an exchange of blows which shook the earth, and sent shockwaves pulsing through the spray. Like twenty-inch artillery guns were their swipes and strikes, and yet like those found on two warring battleships were their defenses—leviathan hides and razor-quick claws and the gnashings of skyscraper teeth. Every minute, every second further pulverized poor Landowtown beneath their primordial feet that their stalemate continued, iron striking iron. Even when the commandeered, brainwashed roach-things had scaled the massive back, and reached their destination, and for a moment distracted their erstwhile master with their chewing, even then the second titan could not pierce. Could not penetrate. Even when the first shrieked in pain, and, agitated, began to swipe and scratch at its own feeler-organs, the second could not maneuver its huge claws and fangs to meet soft underbelly, vulnerable throat.
Enraged, it unhinged its jaw, and opened wide its cavernous gullet, wherefrom emerged a growing light. Whitish, pure, the distilled essence of a dying star; the fury in its belly going supernova.
Down on the beach, the smartest were already turned to flee, unsure what hellfire would issue from the portal of this behemoth's mouth except for that it would glass the sands, scour the rest to ash. The survivors ran, and they were easy prey for the roach-things not caught in the radii of Titan's shredding sandstorm, Shiva's banshee-winds. They ran and so too did the things which devoured them, sensing devastation, yet unable to overcome their unnatural instincts, their hijacked programming.
Beth, of course, had never been one to flee, least of all when cladded in Odin's metallic embrace. The chill which permeated the armor seemed as well each time to seep into her very heart, imbuing it with an alien, detached acceptance. Perhaps the scrawny five-foot-something would have feared, stripped naked of such effects; standing there exposed among the horrors; but not then, peering out through His visor, flexing His gauntleted fingers. Not then...
A few necrotic blasts cleared the way, scattering the roach-things in a linear path, curled and dead before they hit the ground. Sand became shallows became foaming surf, until she waded waist-high among the mutant bugs; live ones teeming and swimming and gnashing about her legs, dead ones bobbing and buoyant. Ere long she waded too among other things; things which towered over her the way she towered over its dutiful legions; the pylons of its legs, its sinews corded like guy wires. She was microscopic compared to these. Small enough to go unnoticed past the massive spur of its metapodia, small enough that there would not even be enough of her left to ooze up between its toes when she was crushed beneath this dance of giants. Even still, Beth did not fear.
She had, after all, reached her target.
The bugs still latching to her armored limbs, the shallows still dragging her this way and that, the behemoths' every step a tsunami, their every exchange a tidal wave, she spent her every drop of strength not being dragged to sea and drowned. Yet still she pushed. Drew. Invoked. Fought and fought with every blow and every plodding, trudging step. Until finally, finally, there she stood amidst the crashing spray, mere feet away from having been mashed, and with a single massive stroke, all her power and will strained behind it, fed into it ...
One moment the monstrous leviathan, born from the hostile sea, ripped and tore into the dragon-Dominant, eager—desperate—to gouge out its breath before the second could unleash Its hellfiery wrath. Lashing and snapping and scouring at its superheated throat. The next, the creature somehow lost its footing. Staggered forward, crumpled with a writhing, a shriek. The blackish ichor coursing from its digitigrade ankle, polluting the pinkish waters, told the story: somehow, by something (someone) too minuscule to see, someone swept away in the churning chaos of the water and the bugs and the bodies, had hamstrung the being; sliced clean through its heelcord, hobbling it.
There was a hurry, then, to capitalize on this vulnerability. Perhaps more sand and stone peppered the felled creature, aiming for the jellies of its eyes, and soft whites beneath its jaw. Perhaps another of Shiva's flurries aimed to blind and frostbite the monster. A hail of bullets and gunpulses clattered across its armored cheeks, its neck. But its killer already stood there, upon its plated brow.
He reached down, and plunged his twin swords from the back of its neck. He looked across the way, where stood Laura Genevieve among the terrified, huddled masses. He bowed.
"Farewell for now, miss," he said, and with a flourish, and a bow, and a sheathing of his swords, a flame erupted at his feet. A flame which crawled quickly up his legs, and dusted him inch by inch into a fine ash, which scattered on the southward breeze.
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