Chapter XXIV
Shattered
Chapter XXIV
The thing impaling him dragged the obstinate human all the way to some godforsaken room. There, it roughly slammed him onto a rusty table, which the course grainy texture rubbed painfully against his back inflaming the tender flesh "step one, remembrance!" The monster intoned, bringing its smaller vestigial arms to Alex's cranium. "You once had the understanding in your mind, and I will draw it back out." It growled to him in its buzzing guttural voice. Why it wanted to talk, Alex did not know. He still had no fucking clue why he was where he was. Last thing he remembered was falling asleep, pleasantly he might add, alongside the warm fuzzy collie woman, Fay. Next thing he knew he was in some twisted hellish place with this monstrous asshole.
Alex struggled against the flimsy biological restraints attached to his head, but was so weak he could not tear himself free. "LET. ME. GO!" He snarled
steadily and desperately, trying to get away.
The thing did not appreciate his efforts and smashed his face with one of its shoulder spear things and roared. "SILENCE!" Then it raised the struggling human's head to look into its eyes. He gazed into the corrupted orbs and saw inside, a red and black pulsing obelisk, replacing its pupils. He wanted to look away but it forced his eyes open and kept his head unflinchingly on its hypnotic gaze.
Soon he was sucked into its depths, and once inside, began to remember. But the process would he interrupted, promising salvation and his memories, all due to a brave soul that ventured in after her loved one.
Krystal beheld a terrible sight, Alex, her love and hero, lay upon a bloody rusty slab of steel. He was battered and broken, having been so by his captor. The captor was some horrifying corpse like creature, one of those necropmorphs that she had seen before. It was circling the restrained human and snarling something she could not understand, as it closed in and grabbed his head with its disgusting little arm things, no doubt to inflict some tremendously horrible wound upon her beloved, the usually innocent, harmless, and kind vixen became a blazing outlet of all her repressed fear, rage, sorrow, and anguish. This monster and whatever else had decided to screw with Alex would pay...dearly.
She though of her staff and brought it to herself, imagining it here with her. She elongated the deadly Cerinina weapon and swung the crystal topped amethyst, cerulean, and gold gilded pole in the direction of the necromorph. From the jewel atop it, a flaming sphere shot out and impacted against the turned back of the beast. The orb hit, smashing it away from Alex. The flames spread across its form, the fire bitting deep into necrotic tissue. It let out an unearthly squeal and fell to the mushy ground. Soon, the crackling flames began to spread, eagerly consuming the growth covering the floor.
With the threat neutralized, Krystal ran in, dodging the dying flames and went to the side of the nearly delirious Alex. He was laying still laying, unmoving, upon rusted nightmarish gurney. "ALEX!" She shouted, shaking him with her paws, trying to make him lucid. Within seconds, he began to stir, awoken by the sound if her voice. "K-Krystal?" He mumbled, his golden eyes suddenly flying open. Alex jolted up from the table, sending the vixen stumbling backwards, her balance retained thanks to her tail.
He turned to her, puzzled. "What's going on? Where are we? Where is everyone?" He asked worriedly. He seemed to he entirely lucid, as if all that had happened had never transpired.
"Alex?...you remember me?" She whispered, close to tears.
He stared at her in confusion. "Of course I do, why wouldn't I?" He asked. Sure his mind was still a little fuzzy, but the last thing he remembered was landing outside that research facility disguised under the airfield on venom. Maybe he was still there? But then, why was Krystal here as well? It didn't matter, for now something was wrong whith her and he needed to fix it. "Is something wrong?" He demanded, Krystal had began to quaver and tear up. Were they still in that place?
The blue and white tattooed vixen flung herself at him, surprising the human. "NO! Something is right!" She churred, enveloping him in a bone powdering embrace.
Alex, spluttering with blue hairs in his mouth tied to restrain her, but could not for the life of him seem to to do it. Trying to figure out why, he looked to his arms, and his unknowingly newly recovered mind drew a blank.
Where the fuck was his left arm?
He cried out in shock and fell backwards to the spongy floor, cartwheeling his stump and normal arm for balance but, ultimately failed. Luckily for him, the fires had died down to soft cracking embers so it did not spread. Krystal peered over the side at him, ears twitching in confusion. "What?" She asked, the vixen was so happy she forgot that he was still, even with his regained memory, unaware of his current location and disfigurement.
"Where...is...my...arm." He started to gasp, slowly, each word antagonizing his hysteria, he was beginning to seriously flip the fuck out. He sat there on his tattered suited ass, and stared at what should be a perfectly functioning and healthy limb. Instead, it was an ugly mass of scar tissue that ended just before the elbow "wha..wha...I...uh." He began to whisper hoarsely, staring at the painfully unsymmetrical comparison of his two arms. "No...." He muttered quietly, and with a dreadful finality.
Krystal echoed his sorrow, she dearly wished with all her heart that he still possessed his uninjured limb. She could continue to cry, or she could comfort him. The vixen walked over to the huddled shivering from of her human lover and crouched down. "Shhh." She whispered softly, wrapping his trembling form in her loving furred grip and nuzzling his head affectionately. "It's going to be alright, your back now, and we will get through this together." She sat with him for a long time in the dark mindscape, doing what she could to help.forst things first, they had to scalpel this cancerous infection in his brain so that it could not manifest itself again. The problem, she had no idea how to do it.
How would one go about removing a alien mental illness from ones mind effectively? It had never been done before so she had no preconception to go off. This would have to be a first for them. "Let's go." Krystal commanded softly, helping the traumatized Alex to his feet, taking care not to exasperate the broken leg. If they wanted to do anything they would first have to get moving. She helped him our of the room, stepping over the charred wreckage of the beat that had tried to claim him, and they walked back down the corridor they had both from, but at different times. They did not see the body behind them fade away like dust in breeze.
"So....I take it I have missed out on allot?" Alex inquired as they walked, leaning in each other, while he limped, she had taken the time to fill the human in on the dire situation. He was doing his best to remain cheerful and calm, ignoring the fact he was minus one limb. Krystal admired his strength and determination.
"Not really, the team has been waiting for you to get better before we acted in any way." Krystal replied as they exited the first corridor. She was focused on his conversation but she was also basking in the fact that he was back to his old, although battered, self. She was unconsciously rubbing against him, almost as if she lost contact, he would float way never to be seen again.
"I hope I haven't ruined anything." He chuckled, just glad to be with someone he loved. "I would hate to have to deal with Falco's whining."
Krystal giggled and bopped him on the head with her bushy blue and white tipped tail. "Silly human, Falco always whines." The two laughed heartily, the darkness becoming slightly less unbearable. And somewhere outside, in the real world, a certain avian had a bad feeling that people were talking about him...and they weren't praising his awesomeness.
Soon they arrived at the room that Alex awoke in, although neither of them knew that. "I...need...a...little break." He gasped, the many wounds and deep seeded exhaustion finally laying the determined human low. Krystal seceded to his request and loaded him to the floor outside the hallway she had come from her first time around. Then, quite tired herself, Krystal sat down beside him. "You know." He mumbled tiredly, "you are one hell of a woman, covered in fur or not." She was leaning against his shoulder and hummed in response. "I mean, here we are, in this terrible place." He thought it was ironic that this place was of his own design...technically. "And the strongest one here, is you." He finished, leaning his head on hers. "You have been too good to this tired soul. He added, stroking the place in-between her long vixen ears, making her murr in content. They sat there, supporting each other, until he recuperated enough to continue.
She helped him up and they continued their journey, that is until they heard a deafening guttural roar. It was so intense that they lost their balance and fell in a heap, the wounded human crying out in pain. Krystal helped Alex back up and they quickly vied to locate the source. It was Krystal who found it, she felt everything that was wrong in his mind slide into one direction, creating a sickeningly powerful aura that originated from the place they were heading to. It seemed that the evil in his mind was attempting one last blitzkrieg to seize it all back. She could feel the anger brewing inside the entity approaching, it had put far too much effort in its host to let it go without a titanic fight. "Something's coming." Krystal warned him.
"You think?" He deadpanned sarcastically, causing him to receive another tail swipe to the face.
"Ass." She muttered loud enough for him to hear. A thunderous beat of a quadrupedal beast echoed down the fleshy hallway before them, Krystal hurriedly ushered Alex out if the way, but it was too late as the huge beast finally arrived, she had no clue as to what it was, she had never seen its like before in any of his videos or the few times he talked about necromorphs.
Alex was quick to rectify that. "SHIT, BRUTE!" He shouted, throwing the caught of guard vixen away from the charging beast. It bellowed in rage, more deafening then a starship engine and brought a lumbering necrotic fist to slam into the human sending him flying, like a rocket through the air.
Krystal saw him smash into the far wall and fall into a slumped pile of shattered bones. She froze as she stared at the unmoving heap of humanity. Then, she turned to the triumphantly roaring brute, a dark rage pooling inside as she watched the creature gloat over Alex's corpse. With a terrifying snarl she leaped at it, calling upon her staff and slammed it down on its head.
The force of the attack stunned the giant adversary, giving her a chance to stuff the jeweled section of her weapon in its maw, she called on the elements of winter and fired a freezing blast into the abomination. It let out an unearthly howl and flung her away to land in a pile of limbs near the unmoving human's location. The ice attack had greatly wounded, but not killed, the monster. It would take more then that to slay the evil that had been festering in Alex's brain.
Krystal picked herself up off the floor and saw the pained creature stumble drunkenly, trying to right itself. She picked her staff up of the floor a few feet to her left and aimed it at the thing's legs. She fired a small burst of smaller ice shards, watching in satisfaction as they covered her opponent's legs. Krystal ran towards it and swung her staff vertically, fracturing the stumpy legs supporting the large beast. It snarled and tried to hit, only dooming itself as she dodged fluidly, the monster's own momentum breaking the already damaged legs.
Now legless, it fell to the floor and Krystal moved to finish it off, thinking it was down. She misjudged how much fight it had left as it smashed her to the ground, where she felt her chest shift painfully. Mewling in pain, she rolled to the left, avoiding a lethal finishing slam, bursting the fleshy ground around her and denting the metal floor. She crawled to a kneeling position and fired off another burst of ice spikes, these cutting off one of the necromorphs's plagued arms. Now only a torso connected to a head and arm, she wheezed over to the creature. Every breath hurt, she must have damaged a rib. She stopped in front of its head, staring into its many stolen eyes, out of reach of its remaining limb. Both enemies eyed each other, the only common attribute being the undisguised rage in their flaming orbs.
With a howl, Krystal drove her staff into the beast's head, through rotten bone and putrid flesh. Activating the most powerful fire blast she could, the vixen blew the monsters's head and upper body to pieces, showering organic shrapnel to the four winds. With her vile foe defeated, Krystal shrunk to the floor, tired and emotionally drained. She turned to the human, who still had no moved, and crawled to him. Without energy, it took her a few minutes to accomplish the mundane task. She gazed upon the peaceful unmoving face of her lover, and began to cry.