Project Divinity

Chapter 22: Hatching

As it turned out, two dozen mages and two mechs armed with high-powered guns could produce a lot of firepower. Lightning bolts, cutting gales, fireballs and dozens of other offensive spells rained down on the Red Rider even as the two mechs pumped it full of whatever exotic ammunition they had on hand. Elaine took the opportunity to give herself a break, letting go of her Higher form. It wouldn't let her recharge entirely but even a few minutes out of the form would give her time. She was almost certain that, once Prudence was ready with whatever she was cooking up, Elaine would need to fight once again. It wouldn't be as easy as simply letting the mages pelt the Red Rider to death. And indeed it wasn't.

Sergeant Fielder hadn't been wrong. The beast seemed to regenerate faster the more damage it sustained, reaching an equilibrium where nothing could make it past a certain layer of flesh. That was the point where the regeneration became strong enough to match any amount of firepower put into the beast.

Which was abjectly ridiculous. Nothing could sustain that kind of infinite growth. The beast had to run out of steam eventually. Except, if what the Professor had said about the Ouroboros Drive was true then this thing could draw in enough Winds to sustain itself. The only way to stop it would be to destroy the Ouroboros Drive directly, which was precisely the thing the Ouroboros Drive was preventing. It was a pretty fucked-up chicken-and-egg paradox.

On the other hand, the way the beast was right now it wasn't much of a danger. The regeneration kept the entire camp from dealing lethal damage, certainly, but they had reduced the terrifying Red Rider to a messy red lump of flesh. All its extremities had been blasted off and the rider itself was pretty much entirely gone. Not even the horse's head was left. All of it had been shredded beyond recognition. But even so the thing refused to die.

But as she kept looking at the lump of flesh, blackened yet still pulsing, tendrils of meat sticking to the asphalt, Elaine felt a pit opening up in her stomach.

“Doesn't this shape remind anyone of anything?” she asked out loud and only then did she realize that she'd asked it on the common channel.

“It looks like a cocoon, doesn't it?” Jordan, her fellow Awakener and good friend said.

“Fuck,” she swore. She'd hoped she'd been seeing things but apparently she hadn't been the only one.

“So what, will something hatch out of this thing if we keep this up?” Marcus asked.

“I fucking hope not,” Jordan said. “This thing was tough enough without getting a second phase power-up.”

“Let's nip this in the bud,” Elaine said. “Lex?”

“Yeah?” the blonde asked.

“Can you chuck a spear at the center of this thing?” Elaine asked. “I don't want whatever's in there hatching.”

“Understood,” Alexis said.

**

Now that Elaine had said it Alexis could see it as well. The blackened lump of glistening red flesh did look an awful lot like a cocoon and, judging by the way it was pulsing, it was only a matter of time before it would hatch.

But, as Elaine had said, the easiest way of ending this would be if she simply pierced the center of the cocoon. It wasn't as if she still needed Areadbhar to stop the horse from rousing the Oculus. The horse head was long gone, after all. She wondered why she hadn't thought of it before but she supposed it didn't matter much so long as she did it now.

And so once again she drew on all of her powers. She summoned Areadbhar, focused her senses, charged up Single Stroke Finish to its maximum, and threw her spear. She's pierced halfway through the Red Rider last time and now the thing was reduced to an amount of mass small enough that the spear should go clean through it. Areadbhar was a magical spear, capable of piercing any armor. Alexis herself was supernaturally powerful, capable of bending steel with her bare hands, and Single Stroke Finish allowed her to increase the force of her blows by 500%. In fact, when she threw the spear there was a blast of wind from where it broke through the sound barrier.

And so Alexis was, perhaps understandably, shocked beyond belief when her spear struck the lump of flesh that had once been the Red Rider and managed to sink maybe a foot into the beast before getting stuck.

“You have got to be kidding me,” she whispered.

A dozen voices echoed the sentiment. Everyone present had felt how ludicrously powerful that throw had been. If even an attack as powerful as this couldn't pierce the beast's protection, what could?

“Let me try,” an unexpected voice said. Evelyn's.

**

Evelyn had been just as thrown by Alexis' failure to pierce the cocoon but, unlike most of the others present, she hadn't been stunned into disbelieving silence. An uncharitable person would say that stunning Evelyn into silence was unfortunately difficult but Evelyn herself would probably just call herself opinionated.

But right now she had a reason to be. She'd run some quick math. Yes, Alexis could throw that spear with a ludicrous amount of force but as it turned out, Evelyn had ways of hitting even harder.

And so she used abilities she'd only been able to test out once before. First she summoned her Vajra, a metal club that conducted electricity and amplified her lightning magic. And then she cast an aura spell. Aura magic was something that any mage could cast but it required a lot of training to be used safely, training that none of the cadets from Base 15 had. Except Evelyn, because she'd purchased an ability that gave her an intimate understanding of how the technique worked. Aura magic imbued a person's aura with a spell, which ran the risk of accidentally pushing the spell past the aura to run rampant inside the body of the caster but Evelyn knew how to avoid that. And so she imbued herself with lightning, channeling the power of the storm into her aura. It was an odd sensation. It was like the tingling sensation of static electricity but seeming to well up from inside of her. She took an experimental step forward and looked back to see that she'd crossed nearly fifty feet of distance in the blink of an eye. She lifted the hand holding the Vajra and found it crackling with electricity. Yes, this would do.

Berserk Rage was an ability that made her faster and stronger for every enemy she killed, maxing out at a 400% bonus, which she'd long since reached while fighting the thralls and the Yellow Wraiths. The bonus lasted sixty minutes and there was more than enough of that time left for her to land a devastating blow.

Lightning Charge allowed her to harness her momentum, increasing her damage by up to 500% if she hit something after gathering enough steam.

Even at the most conservative estimate all of her abilities combined would make her next blow strike with at least triple the force of Alexis' spear throw. Now, a blunt weapon wouldn't be very useful for striking a soft, squishy target like the one the Red Rider had been reduced to but fortunately for her there was a magical spear still lodged in the target's flesh.

Evelyn supposed it was true what they said: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

**

Caulder felt like cackling again. So the camp defenders had indeed realized that the Red Rider was really just a cocoon, one that was nurturing something far more terrible with all the Eros and Thanatos it had been collecting.

The Ouroboros Drive sat at the heart of the beast, certainly, but he'd developed it far beyond anything his old friend Stollos could have anticipated. It wasn't a mere source of power. It was an entity in its own right, one that was nurtured by pain and death and misery.

This entity wasn't more powerful than the entire Red Rider, per se, but its power was distilled into a far more compact form, a form more able to make use of the enormous font of power Caulder had invested the Red Rider with.

But while they had realized what the Red Rider was in truth, they hadn't yet realized the genius of its design. Because while all the Thanatos in the air had nurtured it until it was ready to hatch, it would take one last burst of death for the creature to truly hatch. A burst of death like, say, being slain before it could be truly born.

And so Caulder sat in his monitoring room, his chin resting on his steepled fingers, and watched Stollos' progeny sealing their own fate.

**

Evelyn rushed forward, fast as lightning, and slammed her Vajra into the pommel of Areadbhar, using the momentum of her attack to hammer a stake into the vile fleshy cocoon before her. Her attack struck, not with the force of a lightning bolt, but with about ten times the force of a bolt of lightning. Not only did it push the entire magical spear into the cocoon, it also sent utterly lethal amounts of voltage into the cocoon, electrocuting whatever semblance of life was forming inside it and, more importantly, disrupting whatever system kept casting the obscenely powerful regeneration spells.

The cocoon shook alarmingly, pulsing and spasming as if in utter agony, and Evelyn used her inhuman speed to jump away again.

“Sergeant Fielder?” she called into the CARD's communication channel, “I think you can finish this now.”

**

Jacob had hoped to hear those words. He hadn't thought he could be the one to finish it after failing so utterly earlier but he wasn't going to question his luck. Of course, in the end it didn't matter who killed the blasted thing so long as it died but he still wanted the glory of being the one to finally bring it down. And so, when the little lightning goddess gave him the go-ahead he urged Eos to give him everything her mana generator could give. He summoned his wings of light and jumped high up into the sky before letting the light magic contained inside the wings loose.

“Ray of Dawn!” he called out.

Dozens and dozens of rays of light shot out of the wings and rained down upon the fleshy cocoon that was no longer pulsing rhythmically but was instead cramping up in an way that looked painful just to watch, and burned dozens of holes into it. The holes didn't instantly heal back the way they'd done before, which gave him hope that this next strike would end it.

He spun Eos through a full turn as gravity caught back up to them both and, as he fell, brought the heel of his mech's foot down on top of the cocoon.

“Break of Dawn!” he shouted as Eos' foot broke through the thing. It broke through easily. Too easily. As if the place he'd broken through had been meant to be broken.

And as he sank the last few feet back down to the ground he saw with growing horror that there was something alive inside that cocoon.

**

Elaine had been observing the Red Rider's final moments from a distance, intending to congratulate Sergeant Fielder the moment he got back. And so she had a front row seat to the horror that unfolded.

The mech's foot broke through the cocoon so easily that it looked like a hammer striking wet, rotted wood. Then, before he could even hit the ground, a thing reached out and lobbed the offending leg off of the mech in a single, blindingly fast slice.

The mech crashed to the ground and the thing jumped onto it and, with a few more quick slashes, took off all of the mech's other limbs. Whatever it used to make those cuts had to be insanely sharp to be able to go through whatever heavenly steel these mechs were made of.

When it was done it rammed an arm into the mech's chassis and pried it open, exposing Sergeant Fielder. It raised its arm once again to deliver the finishing blow when...

**

Everything had gone catastrophically wrong in a matter of seconds and most of Project Divinity could only watch in stunned silence. But not Cassie.

The moment the beast's arm had sunken into the mech's chassis he'd known what it had in mind and he'd known how to stop it. And so, when the thing pried open the chassis to get at the squishy human snack on the inside Cassie used Protector Of The Innocent to teleport himself right in front of Sergeant Fielder, hoping he could fend off the thing's attacks at least long enough for help to arrive.

Cassie almost didn't bother with casting an ice barrier after seeing how little the mech's armor had slowed the monster down but when he looked at the hideous abomination he almost retched at the sight of it but he also saw a sheen of Darklight covering its claws. Darklight he could block with his ice and so he summoned a barrier.

The good news was that the thing's claws did not go straight through his barrier but the bad news was that, unlike proper Darklight, the claws did not bounce off but instead kept coming and, soon enough, cracks formed in the wall of ice. He was already wondering how he would fend off the thing once it breached his barrier when a pool of shadow appeared under his and Sergeant Fielder's feet. Two hands reached out of the pool of shadow, one grabbing the Sergeant and one grabbing Cassie, and yanked them through the shadows.

It was a bizarre sensation, at once like drowning and like being cradled by a loving mother, and when it was over he stood surrounded by the other members of Project Divinity, with Ophelia holding onto his shoulder.

“Thanks for the save,” he told the vampire a moment before a furious roar echoed across the battlefield.

The thing that had hatched from the Red Rider reared back and, for the first time, everyone present could behold the true horror of what they were facing.