Nineteen

Four lights speared through the utter darkness of the abandoned facility, highlighting the horrors of the death that had been painted with gratuitous violence. Kon was glad of the filters in his helmet that kept the stench from invading his nose. There had been enough of that when he had been on Crucible.

The grip of his mace creaked as he tightened his hand on it, eyes sweeping back and forth even as he pushed his senses as far as he could. There was so little rift energy left in his body his nodes hardly stirred, every breath bringing the thinnest trickle into his processing node to be sent out to his others. Every breath reinforced his bones infinitesimally, heightened his senses a degree further, and healed the minor microtears in his muscles.

"They're close," Kon whispered, his comms picking up and transmitting to Diur without allowing any noise to leak out into the still environment. They were close, pressure building on his budding energy sense as the creatures closed the gap. Kon looked up at the ceiling and saw the gaping wounds, the torn metal gaping open where even his powerful headlamps couldn't pierce.

The rasp of steel being drawn was muted, a sword glinting in the light as they separated, giving each other room to fight. Claws clanked on metal, the pounding of flesh coming a second later as his more mundane senses finally detected the horde. Kon licked his lips as his heart began to beat faster, each beat sending a new spike of excitement through him.

The ground beneath him disappeared, something strong and wiry wrapping around his legs up to his waist. Kon cursed as he was jerked down, smacking his face into the floor as he was ragdolled and dragged beneath the floor. Diur's cry of alarm was loud in his ear, but the screech of monsters overwhelmed it, battle joined a moment later.

"Still alive," Kon grunted out as he fell, slamming hard into something hard but yielding. Instincts had him rolling before the creature could react, landing on his feet with his mace still in hand as the sound of slamming tentacles echoed out. His two headlamps showed him a writhing mass of twisting tentacles, each of them lean and muscular, smooth and dexterous.

Kon jerked to the side, dodging as the whiplike appendages slashed at where he had been. Shoulder rolling to his feet, he charged the beast, following the tentacles to the body of the beast. It was a small creature, hardly three feet tall and half as wide, leathery muscular body covered in scores of the thin tentacles that kept it off the ground, letting it move around silently.

Black eyes glinted with malevolence as its mouth opened to reveal a mouth full of dagger teeth. Two of the smaller tentacles uncurled, slapping into Kon's chest, the creak of metal loud as he was picked up and thrown across the room. Air whooshed out of his lungs as he skidded till he hit the back of the room, his head bouncing off of the base of the wall.

"Ow," Kon groaned as he got to his feet. The distance between him and the monster allowed the flashlights to spread, giving him a full look at the monster. It had eight long tentacles emerging from its back, thrashing as they charged toward him. Emerging from its chest was a mass of writhing smaller tentacles that it used to move, the smaller limbs pushing it forward even as the longer tentacles flew for his neck.

"Gross," Kon muttered to himself as he charged. He lashed out with his mace, the sturdy head of the weapon smacking away the first questing limb as he closed the distance. Kon sent another quiet thanks to Alice for all the running he'd done, his insane burst of speed taking the monster off guard as he slammed into the main body with his free, gauntleted fist.

Flesh pulped as ridged steel bit deep, green blood coating his hand as the monster was thrown backward, much lighter than Kon had expected. It flew to slam into the far wall, nearly twenty meters away. Its smaller limbs had cushioned the landing, but Kon's blow had stripped flesh to bone and blood poured out of the massive tear on its cheek.

A piercing shriek shrilled through the thin atmosphere of the station as the monster's maw widened into comically large proportions before it surged forth. Kon met it, charging forth with his own echoing warcry, tanking the heavy stinging blows of the tentacles as he sprinted too fast to be bogged down.

Panic flared in the monster's black eyes as Kon's mace came hurtling toward it. Gray tentacles came up, weaving together to form a wall between the descending mace and its face. Kon hit it with a grunt and powered straight through it, driving the tentacle wall into the creature's skull. He felt the crunch of bone through the handle of the mace as the monster went limp, collapsing to the ground with a series of meaty thwacks.

Kon caught his breath, chest heaving as he looked around the room he'd been dragged into. There was a small hallway that the creature had come from, but otherwise the room looked abandoned. A few broken crates indicated it had been a large storage room, but for what?

A monster shriek took his attention and he looked back toward the ripped apart flooring he'd been dragged through. He could see the weakening from here, thick corrosive strands that etched across the ceiling which would be impossible to see when Kon and Diur had been walking.

"Still alive?" Diur asked a second later as Kon looked up at the hole, trying to figure how to get back up. A body came tumbling through the hole to splat at his feet. It was some type of chitinous horror, covered in multi-segmented legs and too many eyes, impossible to say what it had been since it had been cleaved in half.

"Yeah, some tentacle monster. Squishy if you can close the distance," Kon reported.

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"Good. There were too many of the beasts, they forced me down the hall away from the Puca. Do you see the stairwell?" Diur asked, sounding unconcerned even though he could hear her increased breathing and quick cut off screams of monsters.

Kon hurriedly looked through the map on his HUD and found the stairwell she was talking about. It wasn't far from him, no more than a five minute jog to reach it.

"Yeah I see it," Kon said.

"I was just pushed past it. There are a lot of these creatures and they're rather sturdy but brittle. I would appreciate your crude fighting style," Diur said.

Kon turned and started to run. Within three steps he quickly changed his mind how fast he'd reach the stairwell. His increased growth and the weak gravity had him realizing he'd be there in under a minute. Hallways turned into blurs as he flew through the dark, not caring about the numerous screeches of waking monsters as they stirred in his passing.

"I'm closing in on the stairwell. How close are you to it?" Kon asked as he came up to the metal stairwell. It was wedged against a wall with more of the rust orange corrosion around it, several of the steps visibly sagging or dissolved.

"I found a place to hold them at bay not far from there."

"Good, cause I'm pretty sure I woke up the whole facility. Got a bunch of the bastards behind me," Kon said as he leapt three stairs at a time, shoving off hard enough that the weakened metal groaned behind him. It took only a few seconds to climb the stairs back to the original level he'd been on.

The stairs continued up, but he left them to enter a battle scarred hallway. More of the insect monsters were laying in scattered pieces, their many eyes reflecting the light from his headlamps. Kon ran over them, their bodies crunching under his weight even in the reduced gravity.

A flash of blue aura ahead told him where Diur was, even if the monsters weren't busy screaming in rage and agony as they met the edge of her blade. Flash after flash of aura flared down the hallway as he got closer to where he thought she was, passing over the many already slain beasts.

He turned a corner and froze. The entire scene was a nightmare of chitinous flesh, crawling over the top of one another in chittering horde. Only the edges of the hall were free, where Diur's aura leaked from.

"I'm here. Seems you have a lot of company," Kon said as he took a deep breath, instantly recovering from the sprint.

"They're weak but numerous," Diur said. There was a note of pain in her voice now that hadn't been there moments before. Kon looked at the closest group of the monsters, all scrambling forward to get toward his friend, so lost in their own frenzy they hadn't noticed him behind them.

Kon fell upon them, wrath incarnate. The mace was a whirlwind of death, each blow shattering the brittle chitin and obliterating the soft flesh beneath. Creatures screamed and tried to turn, but they were so interwoven with each other that they couldn't break apart quickly. Kon fell into a rhythm, killing with every strike, striking every second.

Each strike came faster, the burn in his muscles rearing in agony only to be partially soothed a moment later as he painted the walls with monster blood. Diur's ragged gasping breaths echoed in his ears as he battered his way closer to her, soon lashing out with his free hand, gauntlet crushing bugs with nearly as much ease as the mace.

Seconds turned to three minutes and then the horde yielded, turned to paste beneath his onslaught as he came staggering forward to see Diur standing in a sea of waste. Where he had pulverized each of the monsters, overwhelming them with his strength, she had struck with more and more precision.

Kon could see the evolution of the fight as he walked toward her. Wide gashing wounds becoming slimmer, angled perfectly to take limbs or heads with the least amount of effort. She was pressed against the end of the hall, against a sealed door, breathing hard as her blood drenched sword wavered.

"Tired?" Kon asked, slightly out of breath himself as he walked toward her. She snorted, shaking her head back and forth as Kon stood in front of her, both of them liberally covered in monster remnants.

"Poor match up for me. It was luck that they were so weak, any stronger and it could have become a challenge," Diur said. She whipped her sword to the side, blood sliding free of it unnaturally well, before resheathing her sword and drawing the long knives used to butcher.

"Where are all your beasts?" she asked, peering around Kon's shoulder and back into the dark hall.

"Don't think they followed me up. Those stairs aren't very sound."

"Which means we will have to go down for them. Let us harvest then return to the Puca and replace the canisters and filters in our helmets. I don't trust this air here," Diur said, bending down and grabbing the closest of the beasts. Kon sighed and tried to imitate to wrist movement to clean his macce, but all it did was smear the bloody viscera around a bit. He sighed and drew his own knife before hunching over to reach into the battered corpses of the monsters.

A few minutes passed in relative silence, only the soft sounds of effort and steel parting flesh filling the hallways. Kon had pulled a series of the cores out, draining them rather than storing them. Each one of the F-Grade cores helped alleviate some of the burning in his muscles, as his nodes greedily ate every iota of energy he sent them.

"I think you're supposed to be saving these for your next node, not consuming them now," Diur said after he absorbed the fourth core in a row. Kon just grunted as he kept going, prying open the insect monsters to find the small cores. After a while the energy stopped being consumed by the nodes, instead flowing out of his processing node and filling his depleted body.

Kon sighed in relief as an ache he hadn't realized began to relax. It was like a full body cramp that had gone on so long he'd grown accustomed to it, had finally relaxed. He sped up, cutting apart the monsters and absorbing the cores until his body seemed full.

"That's better. I'm ready to go now," Kon said with a smile, cracking his neck side to side as his body was bursting with energy for the first time in weeks. Diur stared at him for a few minutes before shaking her head slowly.

"It's unfair. I have to spend weeks slowly meditating to regain what I've used and you do it in a few minutes. Truly the heavens have favorites," Diur said. Kon laughed at her but sped up his harvesting efforts. He was anxious to go face that nest of tentacle monsters again now that he was topped up.

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