GuNNhead

I fly down towards the opening, landing, and begin making my way inside. I try to reach out to my craft, but cannot properly, though I feel its presence. There is something deeply amiss here. There are no guards, nothing to impede me, I continue inwards, towards the head. It looks like this facility has been built around the entire skeleton of the crocodylomorph. The spine centers the ceiling, and the ribcage aligns corridors. A large door stands before me, blocking my view of the skull where my craft has been sitting all these years.

A voice breaks out over an intercom.

“Welcome, to the great Gravity Surge, we weren’t sure if you’d ever return. Shame what you did to my benefactor, but, they were simply a means to an end, and that end has arrived: you. I have done all what I am able to, and have been at am impasse for years. You have a very unique power, and with your compliance, together we’ll be able to uncover the very secrets of the universe.”

“I do not care about the universe. Open this door, and return to me my craft.”

“I’m afraid that’s not so simple of a request, you see-” I begin punching the door, bending its steel at the astragal. The voice pleads with me to stop, but I continue my assault until, exasperated, they open the door. They can no longer open all the way, but at last my ship is revealed to me. Its framework is suspended from the roof, wires and tubes extrude out from its mangled remains.

“As I was saying, your vessel here has been of great use, and is integral to my experiments and research. That spire you recently… repurposed was a long-standing conduit that helped us greatly. It was actually formed from pieces of this derelict spacecraft. Those cables you followed here, they allowed it to power our shield that your friends so unceremoniously shut down, and potentially much more. While we’ve been unable to harness or fully duplicate your powers, I’m sure you can see the benefits of aiding our continued research. You’ve fought the results first-hand, overpowered and impaled them. What do you say?”

“Return to me my craft.”

“… I, uh… I can’t, it had to be completely disassembled, what you are looking at is what remains of it. What we can do, you see, is work together, and–”

“Return to me my craft.”

“Okay, I can see that this will not work, please, feel free to enter your ship, the cockpit is still mostly intact. I’m sure you will find something there most interesting.”

I float up and around my disassembled compatriot, and land in the forward section. I see familiar panels lifted and removed, gutted circuitry and siphoned electronics dispersed. I approach the pilot’s chair, prepared to take the helm, but in my stead there sits atop a tangle of coils and tubes a skull, suspended in a greenish liquid, surrounded by a thicker, immiscible black fluid. It turns to me.

“I believe you two have met. Gravity Surge, meet… Gravity Surge. A crude interface to be sure, but without it I’d have been unable to achieve half of what I have. Your old pal Celrdrrun may not have been impressed with you when he sold it to me, but I was quite dazzled. He was able to preserve this as well as some of that primordial ooze you call a brain for me. I’ve personally witnessed your vertebrae dissolve and return to the ether without a trace, it’s quite a sight to behold. If you’d like to see your craft restored, I would recommend listening to me. It will take me at least three months to reconstruct it, but I will need the gravity spire from the city.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then I simply don’t help you. No doubt you want to destroy me, but at the moment you don’t know where I am. Bring that spire here, or don’t.”

Not wanting to lose a second, I give chase, up and over the neglected buildings, I am rapidly upon the glass buildings past the inner boundary, able to leap the tall buildings in a single bound. My vision does not lose track of my winged target, and before I realize it, I am flying directly towards it. I grab their remaining leg, and perform a front flip, smashing them through the roof back into the penthouse suite of Strutts Square tower. In the same fluid movement, I follow them into the office with a dropkick into their torso, cracking their shining armor. Their wing slashes at me, chasing the slash with a flurry of projectile feathers. A few embed into my armor, but none deter me. The airfoil turbine starts back up, and they return to the air, hovering against the blinding sun. I grab the giant deactivated spire and rush into the air, taking a huge swing with it and hit them right back into the building. Flipping it around, I charge directly at them, impaling them on the huge spiral. I twist it into them and into the floor until the blood and oil stops spraying me, and they finally stop moving.

“Unavoidable demise…” I turn around to face Duun Strutts, cowering behind their desk. The tall and short ones are there as well. They begin to thank me, for my distraction had caused their plan to go smoothly, evacuating most of the guards. I tell them to be silent, for my path of death has not ended. I stand before the Executive, and, feeling a stronger connection to my powers once more, I slowly crush them under a dense pressure. As their eyeballs burst, I breathe in the end of a life. Turning to face the pair of beings, I demand answers as to their discoveries here. Together they reveal that since the executive had discovered my craft, resources were diverted towards building a facility to study it, rather than improve the outer sections. That it was in this place that they developed the spire, using my craft as a sort of power source. There’s not much more information that I directly care about, but they continue on for a few minutes before they reveal that my craft should be exactly where I left it, according to what they’ve found. As they continue with other details, I take off into the sky towards my craft. Burning through the barrier of the dome, following a massive wire coming from beneath the structure, entwined by the overgrown nature of my Loameria.

When I arrive, there is a moderately sized structure in the shape of a polygonal crocodile made of chrome. I can feel my ship still inside, but it is faint, distorted almost. I descend towards it, but large ordinance emerges from the complex, and after a brief moment of quiet, opens fire. Explosions shatter the tranquility and detonate all around me. Dodging the artillery, I cascade across the thunder and flame, bashing each blaster into bits with my bare hands. When I am done, an aperture in the side of the complex opens.

Dust and debris swirl about me in the wind coming from the new opening I just created. As it clears, I see the Executive, Duun Strutts, clad in a gold-threaded suit. Smirking from behind their desk, they start into a speech, bragging of their knowledge of me, when I entered the city, and how I should join them. Importantly, it is revealed that the whereabouts of my craft are well known to them. They continue on about the spire and their control over the city. As they wind down, they reveal a simple remote in their hand with a single button. Should I refuse their offer, they say, a simple press of the button will conjure my unavoidable demise. I rush towards them, taking the remote from their grasp with one hand, and grabbing their forearm with the other, completely shattering both the radius and the ulna. Releasing their arm allows the debilitated hand to droop down, held only by bloody flesh pierced with bone fragments. They fall to their knees from the pain. Staring into eyes awash with terror, I press the button.

“I Refuse.”

As few seconds pass before a loud screech echoes down from above. Then, with a metallic shimmer, what appears to be a gleaming bird of prey descends from they sky. Talons pierce into my body and I am lifted into the air, away from the spire. I am dragged across other skyscrapers, smashing windows and taking chunks off of rooftops, sending debris to the streets below. I try to weigh down my body, but cannot. Something is further interfering with my abilities. We fly through the internal barrier as if it weren’t there, and I am thrown into a dilapidated would-be shopping mall.

With gaping holes in my torso and control over my powers once more, I focus on steeling myself against the next attack. I don’t think I’m fast enough to avoid it. Skylight windows shatter up and down the plaza, I cannot pin down a direction until a slice through the wind cuts into me, then another, and another, finally knocking me off balance with a direct hit to my chest, and I’m sent over the edge of the railing down to the ground below. I am attacked multiple more times on the way down, and crash into a kiosk. The metal assailant dive bombs me, slamming their talons into me, and dragging me through the tiles and cement before rising up high into the sky again. They tear off a piece of my shoulder armor, and throw me back towards the ground. In the distance, the inner shield fades, and I feel invigorated. A barrage of missiles follow me, exploding all around me, slamming me into the ground once more. When I stand, it is no longer under duress. The attacker attempts to bombard me again with quick attacks, but now I can see them, and on the next strafe I grab on to and tear off one of its legs. It pauses in the air, silhouetted against the moon, finally seeing that the inner shield has shut off. I use this moment of distraction to launch a Gravity Sphere at it, but it stops it mid-air, adjusts its single wing, fires it back at me, and takes off towards the tower. I narrowly dodge the volley, but am left in the dust.

While walking these underground pathways, the first two that I met reveal that they have received communications that my presence is already known by those in control. I am apparently already a known fugitive. An imposter to my own name. A ghost who doesn’t really exist, only kills. Only destroys. Soon we arrive at a nondescript section of tunnel and the short one takes out a playback device while the tall one configures a device of some sort. There, we wait.

“Gate’s open!” sets off a sprint to the other side of the hallway, as the device is slammed against the wall, spreading down towards us. As it reaches us, my hand is grabbed and I am ran down the tunnel. Once at the end we turn off and continue our walking pace inside this labyrinthine structure.

Reaching an end, they peek out of a small trap door, and head up. It appears to be the ground floor of the glass and steel buildings, but it is entirely disused. I can see outside of the windows, and my face is placed upon many large monitors calling for my capture and death broadcast in company with generic advertisements for drinks, clothing, and baubles. I am informed that it would be best to find some sort of disguise, as while the voluntary security force may not be the best trained, it doesn’t take much training to activate a destructor rifle and point it in the vicinity of something.

I think to burst out of the front door and beginning to lay waste to the city, firing Gravity Spheres into the monitors that dare say I am a pretender, and crushing the buildings into dust by my will. Then I recall that it would take time and effort to charge just one sufficiently powerful Sphere, and much more than that to level even one city block. Filing the thoughts away, the two beings are currently talking at me. They share things about the city as well as themselves. When they finally reveal a plan to get to the spiral, I motion for them to lead the way.

We walk up the stairs of this building to the roof. They assure me that these turrets are disabled. The safe rooftops that were mapped out now lay before us. With their technology and my powers, we arrive on time. Nightfall. Strutts Square. They have a plan to sneak into an unoccupied floor and slowly work their way up to the penthouse suite to avoid security. From there, they can find more out about my ship and disable the spire. I watch them set up and enter the building according to their plan flawlessly. I then begin to charge a Gravity Sphere, and leap towards the top floor. Blasting a hole into the side of the building mid-air, I land on the inside.

The smell of burning ozone can be tasted on the air, but the two beings once more stand directly in my way in an attempt to block my path. Prepared to slaughter them, I stay my hand as I will not be deferred from my singular task. I push past them and their pleas for reason and planning. Again the invisible wall and I clash. I will not be stopped. With my arms fully forward, I direct every energy I have into breaking through, but am matched and surpassed again with even greater force. I can see a large spire atop the tower glow more and more. Bolts of lightning tear at buildings, the concrete of the streets fractures, opening up, and yet I still can make no forward progress. Water pipes burst and their contents whirl and boil with the competing forces of nature. Then, at my maximum output, I can feel it, I believe I am starting to break through when my arms convulse and implode as another blast sends me careening back into the slums.

I awake surrounded by more of the destitute. Leaking pipes and concrete surround. They have taken me below street level. They explain that their way will be much easier, as there are many ways into the city. There are multiple gates set up around the barrier, but they have extra security. The ideal way into the city is the underground smuggling tunnels. Numerous factions use them. It will be far easier to kill everyone if I accept their help in getting to the center. Choosing the path of least resistance, I allow them to show me the options to get to my objective. I sit up to reform my arms, glowing constellations and planetary pathways outline along nonexistent veins before my armor is outlined and in a flash of light appears fully formed.

Before they go over the routes, they give further explanation of what I have just encountered. It seems that not long after my craft was discovered, the city planners went from everyone trying to cooperate and complete the city to trying to create a hard line of distinction between those who had a right to be there and those who did not. Over the next few years Groundpoints were embedded around the completed parts of the city, abandoning the slums. The powergrid is decentralized, and so they could not shut off their power. Once the Groundpoint project was complete, a great Spire was placed upon the tallest building in the city center, and an impenetrable force field went up, all-but locking out those who were forced to live in the unfinished section. Since then, there has been immense struggle. Normal people are crushed to death should they attempt to cross the boundary outside of one of the few guarded entry points. The assumption is that my craft is being used to power this blockage. Whether or not that is the case, I will obliterate whoever is keeping my craft and my power from me.