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Best of Intentions: Ring of Fire (ch. 9)
🕑 Added 2024-08-19 14:55:09 +0000 UTCIt wasn't often that I locked up. When it came to fight or flight, I leaned pretty unilaterally ‘fight’ in most circumstances. The last time I froze like a deer in headlights was when I first arrived in this world. Initially, I thought I had been kidnapped or something and it was only when I went to the hospital to make sure that I still had all of my internal organs that I saw the Umbrella logo. It wasn't that I was afraid of Umbrella exactly, but more that the terrifying implications and the memories of a horrific future slammed into me like a brick.
Seeing Mr. X approaching me with a steady confident gait was terrifying. I knew about the creature mostly through the ‘X gonna give it to you’ meme, a clip of future Leon Kennedy going to fight three of them with a knife, and… other forms of media. I wasn't sure where exactly he ranked up against Nemesis, but as far as monsters go… if this was a game of DnD, I'd be giving the DM some serious stink eye for being so trigger happy with high CR monsters.
Then, I took a breath and my mind shifted into the highest gear that it had. “Jill! Get away from him! He's big but slow!” I called out, and it was as if I became hyper aware of my surroundings in that moment. I could feel my back getting pressed into a corner, and I didn't like it. But, as inconvenient as it was, this wasn't unexpected. It was only a matter of time before Umbrella sent something or someone after me.
For all of my efforts of spreading awareness, I hadn't really convinced anyone of the incoming apocalypse. The information I leaked, while alarming, wouldn't have any real impact on Umbrella. What I expected was to eventually be picked up by a black ops squad to get interrogated about how I knew what I did. From there, I would have used the opportunity to try to convince Umbrella’s mouth breathing higher ups to not fuck around or they were going to be spending the next ten to twenty years trapped in underground bunkers while the virus burned itself out.
But, no black ops ever came. But now that I was running around with claims of access to nanomachines, a little robot, and the vaccine… it seemed that Umbrella had finally decided to put me in their crosshairs. And they'd brought out the big guns to make sure the job got done.
Mr. X strode towards me while Jill backed off, taking shots with her shotgun that Mr. X just ate them like they were a summer's breeze. He very well might be more durable than Nemesis, which was a whole problem. But he wasn't the only one.
I made a snap decision, “Jill! The vaccine! Grab it,” I instructed before I took two steps back and slid down the ladder back into the criscen. “Activate a purge!” I added, a plan rapidly coming together as I changed my ammo load out to slugs. Popping one into the side of Mr. X's head was enough to convince him into what I wanted him to do. Mr. X was like a machine made out of meat. There might be some intelligence in there, but it was animalistic at best.
So, without little prompting, Mr. X jumped into the pool area with me. I felt a vibration travel up my feet, and my heart really started to pound at my ribs when he rose to his full height. He utterly towered over me and, without pause, he started to march forward.
“Rude!” Jill called out from above, getting out the grenade launcher. I held her off with a hand, prioritizing as I slowly gave up ground while Mr. X marched forward with a determined unstoppable gait.
“I'll be fine. Get everything started and I'll be right up,” I said, firing at Mr. X and he really just took the slugs like they were nothing. One slammed against his forehead, knocking his hat off, but beyond snapping his head back ever so slightly, he was undaunted. His pace was slow, but with his massive legs, he crossed the distance terrifyingly quick. I could tell Jill was pissed, but she did what I asked.
Without Mr. X in the way, she managed to run into the control area to grab the vaccine before I saw her looking over the controls. I backed off slowly, tempted to bring out Dakka, but I didn't want to burn a spell slot. I had to remind myself that while Mr. X was terrifying in appearance, he was far more manageable than Nemesis. Slow. Predictable. It'd be a problem if I got in his reach or was cornered, but so long as I kept my cool… that shouldn't happen.
Then, almost as if to disagree with me, I heard something echoing down tunnel. At first, I thought it was Jill doing something, but when the sound was accompanied by a low hiss and the crunching of concrete, I managed to tear my eyes away from Mr. X to look down the tunnel itself.
Just in time to see two glimmering beady eyes looking back at me in the distance. A split second before the creature's maw opened so large it practically filled the tunnel itself and it raced forward to swallow me whole.
“Oh, fu-” I cursed, throwing myself to the side just in time as the monster erupted from the tunnel, sending a shower of dust and rubble over me. I was quick to roll to my feet and the fact the monster was between me and Mr. X was a cold comfort. The monster was massive, easily twenty to thirty feet in length, covered in albino white scales. The shape of it, however, made it clear what the monster was. “That's a fucking alligator?!” I couldn't stop myself from exclaiming.
Oh my god. I came down here as a level 1.
And what the hell, Umbrella?! How many science experiments are you going to unleash in this city?!
In hindsight, shouting in the presence of a predator that reached the peak of its evolution some ten million years ago before getting super enhanced by a couple of mad scientists wasn't my wisest decision. And the fact that it wasn't my dumbest really made me start to rethink my life a bit, but there wasn't any time to because the titanic Alligator swirled around to face me, tail smacking into Mr. X hard enough that he went flying.
And, worse, the tail raked against the far wall where the ladder was and the feeble iron didn't stand a chance. It was half ripped out of the wall, along with chunks of concrete.
Okay.
Alright.
I might die here.
Might as well go down swinging.
A hand dipped into my bag of holding even as I activated Dakka in her shoulder mount mode. The Alligator lunged at me, and this close, it felt like a semi-truck was out to isekai me again. However, a belch of flames from Dakka managed to dissuade the massive monster, at least temporarily. Enough to jerk it's head to the side enough that I could jump to the side, even as I tossed in my drum of explosive ammo. The creature rushed past me, carried by its own momentum until it slammed into the wall.
There wasn't any time to stand idle, however, as Mr. X was marching towards me as I rolled to my feet.
Dakka fired a shot that struck him square on the chest, knocking him on the back foot. A second later, a grenade struck him and exploded, knocking him onto his back. Above, I saw Jill with the grenade launcher. She fired another shot at the Alligator and I heard a hiss that turned my legs to jelly. “You need to get out of there before it floods!” She reminded me and, as if to agree with her, the water began to pump into the pit that I was trapped inside of with two monsters.
The Alligator’s size worked against it ever so slightly, I noticed. The cistern was large enough for it to turn around and get comfortable, but it was just small enough that making tight turns was a pain. Not enough to stop it, but enough to make it slow. As it did so, wheeling around, I glanced up at the railing above it. The gap was there. If I was a NBA athlete, maybe I could make that jump, but…
“Try to shut off the purge! I don't want to taint the water,” I said, watching as Mr. X got up, and man, he really was built like a tank.
“Rude-” Jill started this, but I gave her a thumbs up and a grin that was only mostly faked.
“I'm good. I have a plan,” I said, watching both the alligator and Mr. X. Between the two, I was far more worried about the alligator. But, Mr. X was adding pressure that I really didn't need. If it was just one of them, I'm pretty sure that I could out maneuver them and escape. Both? That was a tall order.
So, I had to remove one from play. And I had just the thing.
I'm pretty sure that Jill didn't believe me, but she decided to have a little trust. The water started flowing over my ankles as I took a low steadying breath, slowly shifting myself in position. The alligator finished turning itself around, while Mr. X was taking freakishly huge strides towards me. I only had one shot at this, so I had to make it count. I couldn't afford to play conservatively.
I cast Expeditious Retreat upon myself, essentially doubling my speed when I was hauling ass. Dakka took aim, ready to make some adjustments if needed.
The alligator seemed to sense some kind of change in me, but it was an animal. A predator. And I'm guessing it was pissed off that I wrecked it's home. So, with a low hiss, it launched itself forward, and I took a moment to note that I still saw the explosive drum wedged between two teeth. But, that's not what my goal was.
Mr. X closed in, a hand reached out to me and I also noticed that his hand was large enough to crush my skull in his palm. The alligator closed in from behind, a gaping maw so large that it could swallow Mr. X whole.
And that was exactly the plan.
Dakka fired, stumbling Mr. X while I used my daily use of Misty Step. My vision turned a silvery white as I felt a pull in my gut. Teleportation was weird, I decided, only taking a single step yet I traveled a good thirty feet behind the charging alligator. Mr. X just barely missed me, and he was too late to react to the Alligator attacking him from behind. The alligator, however, only knew that it had bitten into someone and started chowing down. It spasmed a bit, and I took that as a sign that Mr. X wasn't content with being a meal, but none of that was my problem.
I dashed forward, sprinting towards the back of the Alligator as it thrashed. If I thought about what I was doing, I'd probably screw it up. So, for that reason, I only realized how stupid this was when I was sprinting up the length of the alligator, and it threw its head back, feeling me there. Which made its head a perfect ramp to jump to the railing.
Sailing through the air, a hole opened up in my gut when I realized I was going to be short a couple of inches. At least, until Jill's hand caught my wrist, banging me against the railing, before starting to pull me up with a heave. I scrambled up the railing, glancing down to see a very pissed off Alligator that had already eaten Mr. X by the looks of things. “Move! Move!” I shouted, realizing what it was about to do the moment that Jill pulled me up.
Without so much as a thought, I cast Expeditious Retreat on Jill, and even with it, it was a close save when the Alligator lunged up, its maw clamping down on the railing and pulling as it stood on its back legs.
“I opened something up with the controls! This way!” Jill decided, and I realized she was right and we both made a mad dash away from the alligator. A wall that had previously been there wasn't. I spotted an immediate issue that it was a wide open space on the other side, but given that there was a dinosaur behind us I wasn't in the mood to complain. We sprinted across the threshold, the railing wobbling while the Alligator gave chase.
The hidden space concealed a railcar that descended into a hole in the ground. It was pitch black at the bottom, making it impossible to tell how far down it went.
My mind leapt to a conclusion. “This leads down to the Hive,” I said, pulling ahead to the railcar. The door was closed, an icon flashing red before a computerized voice said, “ID wristband required.”
The wristbands, I thought, reached into the bag of holding to pull out one of the wristbands I had looted from a corpse. I had no idea what they were, but I thought that they seemed important.
“Uhh… Rude…!” Jill exclaimed a split second before there was an ear piercing sound of metal rending. I looked over, completely missing the railcar accepting the ID wristband because I was too busy picking up my jaw upon seeing the alligator climbing up into the hole we escaped through and was forcing itself through it.
It snapped its jaws in our direction and I hastily grabbed Jill, pulling her into the railcar and rushing to the controls. Slamming the crank forward as far as it would go, I felt the railcar start to move and carry us down to the Hive. Where, honestly, we probably had more problems waiting for us. This wasn't how I wanted to get into the Hive.
I foolishly believed we got away, right up until the railcar shook as something massive slammed into it. I was slammed into the wall, while Jill managed to grab hold of a handrail. The sound of tearing metal echoed out even before the back end of the railcar started to crumple inward. The railcar surged forward, the few extra tons of the Alligator causing it to get knocked off the rails and we were left skiddinding down the way.
“Today is just not my day,” I decided, switching Dakka to health mode because I got the feeling the temp HP would be needed. At the same time, I reached out to Jill while the Alligator tore a chunk out of the railcar and spat it out by flinging it to the side. “Take my hand!”
Jill didn't hesitate. She leapt forward just as the railcar began to shift to the side, metal squealing in showers of sparks that we left in our wake. She flew through the air before I caught her hand, bringing her in close while I considered our next move with the precious seconds we had left before we met an abrupt crash landing. I had two spell slots left, which was enough for something. Expeditious Retreat was still active too.
The real issue was the Alligator that was clinging to the railcar, determined to force its maw inside to snack on the two of us. It was then that I knew what we had to do.
“Jill! Upper right side in the back!” I exclaimed, holding on for dear life and we were lucky that's all I needed to say for Jill to understand what the plan was. She hefted the grenade launcher, taking aim as the Alligator surged closer, treating steel like it was soft aluminum. The grenade sailed forth at the Alligator's back teeth, precisely where my explosive drum magazine was wedged. The grenade went off, causing a chain reaction and the next thing I knew, there was an explosion of gore.
I didn't stay to see it because, as the railcar started to flip without the Alligator acting as a counterbalance, I sprinted forth and cast Feather Fall on the both of us, burning my last two spell slots, as we jumped from the railcar. Jill was shouting in panic as we fell, letting loose a spew of curses, right up until we were about to hit the ground. Then, we inexplicably slowed down, hovering off the ground for a short second, before touching down just as the corpse of the Alligator and the railcar slammed into the welcome area of the Hive.
The ground rumbled a bit, shaking from the collision, but…
“Would you look at that? We lived. Gotta say, I didn't see that coming,” I admitted, the adrenaline starting to leave my veins as I let go of Jill. We stood on the incline that the rail traveled down, and I thankfully saw a service ladder to climb up to where we should have gotten off.
“What did you do to piss that thing off that much?” Jill breathed, taking a seat on the incline as she caught her breath.
“You mean what did we do,” I corrected, “And we destroyed its crib.” To that, Jill just snorted, shaking her head.
“You also teleported. And we flew,” she noted, glancing up at me and, to that, I could only grimace.
“That's a one time thing, I'm afraid. I've officially run out of tricks up my sleeve.” I had hoped that killing the Alligator might be enough for a level, but no such luck. That revealed the downside of an exp based leveling system because that was 100% a milestone level right there. Instead, I was about a third of my way to level 7. So, the Alligator had a challenge rating of around CR 6, netting me 2,700 exp for a single kill. Not bad considering I would have had to kill 54 zombies for the same amount of exp.
I expected more questions from Jill. I really did. Some of what I was doing was pretty far outside of the realm of what nanobots were feasibly capable of. So, either Jill had fully bought the nanobot excuse and decided not to bother thinking about it any further -- doubtful, on account of that whole ‘elite police officer’ thing. Or, she was just taking me on faith. And that was a little humbling, if I was being honest.
“No more miracles out of your ass then. We'll just have to make do,” she decided, standing up and checking her ammo for her shotgun. “Don't suppose you know anything about this place?”
I glanced at the wreckage of the railcar and the corpse of the Alligator. They did both more and less damage than I expected to see. Less in the sense the platform was mostly intact. More in the sense of… well, the place had just gotten a new paint job in the form of a crimson red. “Not as much as I would like,” I admitted. “I knew it existed, and that Umbrella was doing moronic experiments down here. But, that's about it.”
There were a couple of things I was hoping to find down here, however -- the railgun, more vaccines, and Alice. Between the three of those things, we would be golden.
“Didn't know this was here, though. The entrance I did know about was underneath the hospital,” I added and Jill cocked an eyebrow in my direction while we started heading into the Hive. “Secret door that only Umbrella personnel could enter. Dead give away.”
That got Jill to roll her eyes with exasperation because she couldn't even doubt me at this point. Climbing up onto the platform, I tried not to slip as everything was covered in a layer of gore. The front door, however, was still intact and putting the ID wristband on my wrist, the same synthetic voice greeted me. “Welcome, Dr. Kendall.”
I was really hoping I wasn't going to be dealing with a schizo murderous loli AI, I thought as the doors slid open to find that things down in the Hive were every bit as fucked as they had been up top. Bloodstains on the wall, busted out light, and the noise of the door opening attracted a zombie that stumbled out of a receptionist area. Dakka fired a shot, blasting the head open.
“We should be able to find vaccines down here. We get them up top, and I might be able to work my magic to produce more.” I said as we started to clear the area. Either this place would have the chemicals necessary to make a vaccine, or failing that, I could make more Alchemy Jugs. “Might be best to grab what data we can while we're down here too. Even if it doesn't have something related to a vaccine, I'm sure it'll be useful in the court dates to come.”
“Smart,” Jill acknowledged. “And we're clear,” she said. Meaning this lobby area was as safe as we were going to get. She glanced my way as we went up to the next door and shared a nod. I approached with my shotgun raised and Dakka on my shoulder, making the door slide open to reveal a long hallway that was dark except for some emergency lights lining the floor and walls.
Activating my headlamp, the area was washed in more light, showing an absolute bloodbath had happened here. And, from the sounds of it, there was still a feast going on in the cafeteria. Turning off my headlamp before it gave us away, we approached silently towards the nearest door. Peeking inside revealed an odd dozen zombies that were snacking on a few corpses. I glanced at Jill, who nodded.
Shifting Dakka to full body mode, I had her remain behind on vigilance mode to make sure that nothing got the drop on us from behind. With our backs covered, the two of us went in and started blasting, dropping the corpses with what was becoming practiced ease.
It only took a short minute for the cafeteria to be cleared and, once it was, I found myself eyeing a vending machine.
Fishing some cash out of one of the zombies wallets, I fed a ten into the vending machine. “How do you take your coffee?” I asked her, and I could feel Jill's disbelieving stare on my back.
Didn't stop her from answering though, “Black, no sugar.”
“Gross,” I remarked, a paper cup dropping down before piping hot black coffee filled it. Once it was full, I passed it to Jill, who took a deep sip despite the heat and let out a shuddering breath of pure relief.
“That's exactly what I needed,” Jill sighed before shooting me a look. “A double sweet mint mocha latte?” She questioned and I smiled unrepentantly.
“Life is short and bitter, Jill. Coffee should at least be sweet,” I replied and Jill snorted into her cup while mine was topped up. I needed to make one of these things-- it even had whip cream. Once it was done, I took a sip and licked off the whip cream stache that it left behind. “Hmm… that's good coffee.”
“I'm not even sure you can call that coffee. It's caffeinated sugar and milk.”
“It's delicious caffeinated sugar and milk. Now, stop judging my taste, or I'll start judging your sad bean juice,” I warned and that got a small laugh out of her. Then another more genuine one as she shook her head.
“You're something else, Rude,” she said, catching my attention. “We're trapped beneath the city in an underground lab filled with undead, we just about got eaten by a giant monster, Umbrella sent another monster after you, and we're in a race against the clock to stop the world from ending. And now you're standing there calling coffee sad bean juice. Does none of this shit get under your skin?” She asked, and I felt like that was a genuine, earnest question.
I pursed my lips and shrugged, “Honestly, it's mostly that I'm beating out most of my expectations. I figured I'd be dead by now,” I admitted, taking a sip from my latte. “Probably because of Umbrella sending a hit squad after me, or something. Instead, we managed to secure a base of operations, we have a vaccine for the T-Virus, and we're in their house about to ransack it for everything it's worth. So… the secret to my chipper is to keep your expectations low, so you'll always be pleasantly surprised.”
Jill held my gaze for a long searching second before she let out a small huff of amusement before polishing off her coffee and tossing it into a trashcan. “Something to keep in mind, I guess,” she acknowledged.
The moment came to an abrupt end, however, when I heard a crackling from the intercom. A woman's voice, but unlike the others, it wasn't artificial. “You two, in the cafeteria,” she began, sounding almost breathless. I glanced at the intercom in the corner of the cafeteria before finding a security camera near it. “If either of you want to live… then you need to do exactly what I say.”
“Any idea who that is?” Jill asked, and just like that, the tension returned in full force.
I frowned at the camera, “Dunno. Let's go find out.”
Comments
Alex Graham
Not sure how closely you want to stick to dnd rules but feather fall effects multiple creatures, so it would only take one spell slot to save both of them.
