Predator - Chapter 25

They were everywhere, pouring in from side passages as they swarmed into the gaps in the air.  On his run toward the trap hallway, the mites had been like rivers and streams, complete with flow and currents as they rushed toward him.  Now, they were like an ocean surging toward Bruce.  A force as inexorable as the tide itself.

Bruce could feel the energy draining from his armor and shield with each impact from the mites.  Without having to focus on his hammer, the power loss wasn’t threatening to overwhelm him immediately, but it was clear that he only had maybe a minute or two before the monsters sucked him dry.

With a grunt, he jumped backward, rotating in the air so that his shield was facing the ground.  Every muscle in his body tensed as he touched down.

The floor exploded as Bruce’s shield and armor triggered the trap.  Billowing clouds of flame surrounded him, burning the exposed shins, hands, and face of his psychic avatar, really anywhere that wasn’t covered by his shield or regalia.

Around him, mites died by the hundreds, cooked by the unrestrained blast of energy.  For a moment, the air around Bruce was clear of everything but the lingering heat and flame from the trap.

Then, more monsters flowed in to fill the gap.  At the far edges of Bruce’s vision he spotted the ends of the attacking swarm.  The passages leading up to the trap room were still full of glowing assailants, but at least their numbers weren’t limitless.

The corridor exploded again.  Through Eyes of the Void, Bruce could see the aura coming from the trapped floor dim slightly as the second pulse of flames wiped out even more mites.

He pulled his arms and legs close to himself, trying to minimize the amount of his body that was exposed to the fire.  Another wave of flames rushed past him, most of its potency absorbed by Bruce’s shield.  He could feel cracks forming in the psychic construct.  It was strong, but he hadn’t had the chance to upgrade the shield yet so there was only so much abuse it could take.

A fourth blast of flame cleared the air once again.  Bruce’s hands and legs ached.  Even with the protection from the shield, the exposed portions of his body were taking a beating from the traps.  Still, the fire was doing the trick.

The mites swarmed toward Bruce and the burning traps like, well, small bugs toward a flame.  Despite the pain and stress of the moment, Bruce felt a half smile blossom on his face.

Hundreds of the monster bugs died each second, roasted by the massive bursts of fire that had turned the hallway into a furnace, but also, in some small sense, possibly due to the potent irony of the situation.

Mites were still rushing toward him, a waterfall of malevolent light as he watched them through Eyes of the Void, but for once the situation looked like it was under control.  Bruce could manage the pain from the fire that slipped around his defenses, and as the aura from the trap dimmed, he could feel the actual damage caused by the pulses of flame.  The inferno was still more than enough to destroy the weak mites on contact, but with each passing second, he could only feel his prospects getting better.

Underneath his feet, the shield shattered, sending a spike of pain into Bruce’s skull from the backlash.  His glowing armor crackled as suddenly it had to bear the brunt of the fire without any intervening protection.

Another wall of mites rushed toward him.  Bruce shook his head, focusing on the screaming pain from his uncovered hands and lower legs to help snap him out of the disorientation caused by his shield’s failure.

Rather than standing still, he began running for the other end of the corridor.  Luckily, the entire floor was a trap, rather than multiple individual traps with independent power sources.  The flames followed him, guttering out behind Bruce as he sprinted down the hallway.

Mites flew unmolested over the now dormant chunks of the floor, only dying when they swooped in to attack him despite the weakening blasts of flame that surrounded Bruce.  It felt like his hands, face and legs were seared to the bone.  The pain almost blanked Bruce’s brain.  Unlike normal burns where the fire would kill nerves, his psychic projection didn’t have nerves to destroy.

The pain didn’t deaden or diminish.  Rather, it built to an unbearable level, crowding out any other thoughts.  It took everything in Bruce to put one leg in front of the other as he sprinted for the sliver of ordinary gray ground on the far end of the traps, a wake of flame and destruction racing after him.

Thousands of mites were dying.  The unending wave of glowing balls had fully caught up with him, filling the entire trapped pathway from the ceiling to the floor.  Balls of light crackled and disappeared, their psychic energy scattered by the fire.

Realistically, a small part of Bruce said that he should slow down a bit, give the traps enough time to finish off the swarm as he ran through them, but he couldn’t make himself listen to his own advice.  The fire hurt, and there was no promise that he would survive long enough for the traps to fully eliminate the mites.

He staggered as he ran.  As much as Bruce’s legs hurt, the lack of a real body was a small blessing.  There were no muscles, tendons, or bones for the fire to destroy.  No matter the damage that was slipping through his armor, Bruce was still in full control of his body.

One foot in front of the other, that was all he could think of, focusing on the sensation of his feet hitting the floor and trying to blot out the diminishing rushes of fire as the trap pulsed twice a second.  The end of the trap, a line where the dull red turned into blessed gray, was growing closer with each step, but it still seemed so far away.

Bruce couldn’t even think of the mites.  They were dying, that was secondary to pushing himself to the finish.  Fifty feet left.  Thirty.

Then his armor shattered.

The pain from before tripled.

It was like a supernova had ignited inside Bruce’s head except the supernova sounded like someone screaming and it smelled like burnt pork.  He couldn’t see anything through the shrieking agony, but somehow, he was able to grab hold of his faltering body and force it to run the last few steps.

His feet hit cool not-stone, and it was one of the most blessed moments of Bruce’s life.  Behind him, the fire still raged, burning dozens and dozens of the energy mites, but for the first time in what felt like an eternity, the flames weren’t raging around him and clawing at his skin.

The pain was still there, and he would be lying if he tried to classify it as manageable, but whatever the psychic equivalent of adrenaline was, it kept his focus together, barely.

Bruce tried not to look at his arms and legs as he spun drunkenly around and summoned his hammer.  There weren’t burns, but his body was faded, partially translucent with occasional gaps that he could see clear through.

As the fires faded, mites rushed toward him, but the huge river of monsters that had chased him across the floor was almost entirely dead.

He swung his hammer.  The attack felt sluggish, without any real power or speed behind it, but the mites weren’t terribly intelligent.  The monster didn’t even bother to dodge, popping like a water balloon.

Another two surged past it, and Bruce was able to get his weapon up in time to kill one of them, twisting his body to the side in order to let the other pass by him.  Four more mites floated through the smoking trap corridor and out into the open.

Bruce swore under his breath, turning and charging toward the mite that had missed him.  His arms screamed in agony as a double handed swing shattered the energy globe.

He took off into a run, opening some distance up between himself and the fading trickle of mites slithering toward him.  Almost all of them were dead, leaving only about a dozen of the monsters, but without his armor, fighting them all at once was a terrible idea regardless of the state of his body.

Pausing, Bruce spun around, swinging his hammer in a wide arc that swatted another mite from the air.  He tried to twist the weapon mid attack in order to change its directory and target another monster, but he just didn’t have the strength or control to pull the move off.

His backswing wobbled past the mite, almost grazing the sphere of energy but ultimately letting it pass.  It darted toward his chest, leaving Bruce no choice but to fall on his back to avoid the attack.

Silently he cursed himself for not picking up Shockwave or Solar Flare.  Literally any attack that could hit multiple enemies at once would have been a godsend as the wisps of light began to mob him.

Bruce thrust upward with his handle, shoving a mite upward as he rolled to the side.  Two of the flying monsters slammed into the floor sizzling with electric malice after they bounced off of the floor.

Healing Factor was doing its work.  The holes in Bruce’s arms were slowly but surely filling in, but that didn’t mean that his battered body could take another hit.

He swiped his hammer along the ground, shattering both of the mites before they could recover.  Bruce jumped to his feet, wobbling slightly and barely getting the hammer up in time to deflect another mite.

The last dregs from the trap hallway were bobbing through the air toward him, moving deceptively quickly despite their seemingly unhurried nature.  Bruce backpedaled, swinging his hammer again to break one of the mites as it drew close.

A sanctuary room popped into the edges of his perception, and it took everything in Bruce to not let out a sigh of relief.  He would need to finish off the last of the monsters, otherwise they’d follow him into the shelter, but he was only a couple minutes away from safety.

He stopped for a moment, squaring his shoulders and throwing his hammer at the approaching mites.  None of them even tried to dodge, but at the same time, Bruce didn’t really have any experience throwing anything other than a football or a baseball.  The maul managed to wing one of his assailants, more a matter of luck than skill, killing the fragile creature instantly.

Psychic potential pulsed, and the hammer froze in the air before flickering back toward Bruce.  His energy stores were running low after absorbing so much damage from the fire traps, but there was enough left for him to pummel a second mite with a thrown attack.

The remaining mites weren’t all that much of a threat.  Bruce kept himself moving steadily backward, biting his lip to focus through the pain as he kept half an eye out for reinforcements or traps.  Help for the monsters never arrived.

One by one, Bruce knocked them out of the air.  By the time he was done, the worst of the burns had healed, leaving him exhausted and in pain, but able to think.  Hissing slightly with each step Bruce limped his way to the sanctuary before collapsing against one of its walls.

He couldn’t bring a drink into the labyrinth, and it’s not like his fake body could even accept any liquid if he managed to drag one into the depths with him, but more than anything, Bruce needed a beer.  Not anything fancy or special.  Just something ice cold, a light drink that barely qualified as a beer and that  would make the Germans he’d met at the company academy angry just by existing.

“Kassar,” he croaked.  “That sucked way more than I thought it was going to, and the minute I jumped into that hallway, I knew it was going to suck.”

“Sometimes all options suck as you say,” the alien rumbled back.  “That was a bit closer of a call than I’d like, but you handled it like a true warrior.”

Bruce closed his eyes, shifting his back slightly against the wall.  His body still ached from the burns, and even if he was only a psychic construct it hurt to press his sensitive and still healing ‘skin’ against the fake stone of the labyrinth.

“That’s it?”  He asked once he was marginally more comfortable.  “I thought I was going to get a lecture about how inefficient my fighting style was or how reckless I was to throw myself into the traps.”

“Reckless?”  Kassar asked slowly, as if trying the word on for size.  “I wouldn’t say that.  What you did was unorthodox, but from my perspective, you were out of options.  You didn’t have any area of effect patterns, and you were beyond outnumbered.  Maybe if you used a more agile weapon you could have fought them off with skill alone, but that encounter seemed custom designed to break you.  Using the trap to thin the mites’ numbers was a smart but gutsy call.  Bet it hurt more than dipping your arms into acid though.”

Bruce groaned, clenching his hands into fists as they tingled in sympathy.  “I’ve never stuck my hands into acid, and I’d prefer to avoid that, but I’m not going to lie.  That’s the most pain I’ve ever been in and I’ve been in some pretty nasty dust ups.”

“God,” he continued, eyes still closed.  “I can barely unclench my jaw from the stress and my entire body aches.  Even with my Healing Factor running full speed it still feels like I ran naked through a blazing hot sandstorm.”

His reply was the slurp of a straw trying to draw the last dregs of a drink out of a glass followed a second later by the clink of ice cubes.

Bruce paused, finally opening his eyes.

“Kassar, are you drinking right now?”  The question felt like an accusation, but between the exhaustion and constant pain from his slowly healing limbs, it was hard not to snap at the alien.

“There wasn’t any real point in distracting you,” the alien replied with a guilty cough.  “Even if I had any advice beyond ‘good job, now run away,’ it would only pull your attention away from what you were doing.  It just seemed like my best course of action was to distract myself while you did all of the hard and painful bits.”

“That sounds about right,” Bruce said with a sigh.  “Say, Kassar.  My body hurts like hell.  Will that carry over if I head over to your island and spend some time with you?  The Healing Factor was definitely worth the energy I spent on it, but this recuperation period is miserable.”

“No,” Kassar responded cheerfully, his previous guilt completely gone.  “Inner worlds are good for two things, developing and practicing your powers and keeping yourself from going insane when you’re stuck somewhere for a long period of time.  Just prop your body up somewhere in the sanctuary and drift away.  You’ve been too worked up anyway.  It’ll do you some good to blow off steam.”

Bruce grunted, pushing off of the wall and sliding away from it so he could lock his hands behind his head and lay flat on the floor.

“Sounds better than suffering,” he replied.  “Plus, I’m sure that I’ve earned a lot of EXP.  I must’ve killed a couple thousand of the energy mites.”

Kassar didn’t respond.  The moment stretched for a couple of seconds before the ghost coughed awkwardly.

“I wouldn’t say that YOU killed a couple thousand energy mites.  Most of them were done in by the traps.  You just happened to be there.”

Bruce went stiff, a groan frozen in his throat.

“How much EXP did I earn?”  The words felt like they were being torn from his throat as he finally glanced at the numbers in the corner of his vision.

Sixty eight EXP.  He’d entered the floor with thirty two.  That meant that all of his suffering wasn’t even enough to go on a proper shopping spree.

“Come on,” Kassar replied.  “It’s not all bad.  You’re still very much alive, and you get to spend the next hour or so on a beautiful beach playing shuffleboard.  I can even get a drink started.  I’ll have it ready by the time you materialize.”

He sighed, closing his eyes as he began to sink inward.  There really wasn’t any purpose in whining or kicking his feet.  After all, Kassar was right, despite everything he’d managed to survive.

“Have that drink ready,” he said, defeated.  “Make sure it’s something extra ridiculous with pineapple, mangos, and crushed ice.  I feel like I've earned it.”

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