Well, here's my first fanfiction work. Chapter 2 will come...eventually...and it'll focus on Darth Vader's apprentice. They'll very likely meet in chapter 3. As a note, if you haven't played either the game Prototype I or The Force Unleashed I, there will likely be a few spoilers below. If you haven't played them, but don't want to, I tried to make it so that you could still enjoy it.
As for the ratings, I'm still a little new to that. I tried "T", because I avoid foul language and too much gore, but we're talking about the game "Prototype" here. That game is like God of War combined with Mortal Kombat.
Alex Mercer, or the creature that once consumed him, assimilating his DNA, memories, and personality, sat on the corner of a towering building in New York City. On the ground far below, hundreds of infected and mutated shells of humans stumbled around, trying to find something – or someone – to kill and consume, and only the gravest wounds could slow them. Overhead, two helicopters buzzed, on their way to some secret mission or other. Alex shook his head sullenly. A part of him would be appalled at what had become of New York – what he'd caused, acting in fear and cowardice and selfishness. But he didn't care anymore. The thousand voices in his head – people he'd killed and consumed – never stopped shouting, striving to be heard, to control him and regain their lost life.
But they couldn't. Alex Mercer was the first one consumed by Blacklight, and he was all the stronger for it. The virus, the disease that even now, threatened to destroy all of New York (and if it could, the whole world), enabled him to shapeshift completely or partially, forming anything, from weapons to armor to disguises, without harming himself at all. Of course, being able to survive gunshots and decapitation was quite the up-side.
He stood and stretched, looking down at the streets below. The drop was dizzying; anyone else's body would effectively turn to putty once they hit the bottom.
But not Alex Mercer.
He took a careless step forward and let himself fall, the ground rushing up to meet him. Instinctively, he braced himself for impact, hardening his entire skeleton like no ordinary human could. The impact still jarred him, but it also shattered the concrete, set off two different car alarms, crushed one hapless mutant, and sent at least three more flying across the street. Not even a full second later, he walked cockily out of the cloud of dust he'd created, brushing asphalt off of his shoulder.
It didn't take long for the Infected to react.
They rushed at him, sorely underestimating their opponent. Alex sent the first attacker across the street in a heap with just a palm hit to his chest. His chest was caved in; he didn't even stir.
"Don't do it," Alex muttered without stopping his walk, knowing that they wouldn't listen even if they could understand him. They continued their attack with only a minor hesitation, their minds apparently ravaged by the disease, making them unable to gauge their opponent's strength. Alex saw a mutant leap at him, her short, dull claws bared.
"Cute," he said with a smirk, thrusting a hand toward her. Black tendrils shot out from his torso and began to coat his arm, morphing and stretching it into something else entirely. By the time it touched her, sharp, two-foot-long claws had replaced his fingers, and she had no time to react. Neither did any of the others surrounding Alex, for that matter. In a blur of red and black, Alex's claws found their way into at least seven bodies, leaving behind more than twice as many pieces. He picked up the one that had been lucky (or unlucky) enough to trip over a jutting piece of rubble, and held him high. The creature emitted a series of guttural growls, before he too, was rent asunder. A series of tendrils reached out to his body, dismantling his biomass to fuel Mercer's strength. A few moments later, and a surprising amount of the carnage had been cleaned up.
But the Infected weren't smart enough to leave him be.
"Okay, I think that's enough," he said to no one in particular, morphing his arms to accommodate the crowd. Rather than claws on both arms, one arm was now black and snakelike, with three triangular blades on its tip. More than one voice in the back of his mind had taken to calling this weapon the "whipfist". He stretched this weapon, though not nearly as far as he could, and swept it horizontally across the crowd, sending a spray of red into the air and effectively cutting everyone visible in half. After bringing his arm back to its normal length, he looked around, but nothing else on this street moved.
Satisfied, he leapt to the building across the street and sprinted up the side of it, carelessly smashing brick and glass as he did so. He reached the top of the building and stopped, wondering for a moment where to go next, and what to do. But before he could decide, he heard a strange rumble from nearby. Now, what could that be? Alex wondered, looking around as it steadily grew louder. A second later, the source of the noise caught his eye, a water tower, now coated in a reddish muck. He didn't have time to curse before it suddenly blew apart, revealing the hunter within. At eight feet tall, weighing in at nearly a ton, these things were more than a match for the average tank or helicopter.
But then, so was Alex Mercer. In less than two seconds, he had covered himself with a nearly-bulletproof shell, at the cost of some mobility, and transformed his right arm into an enormous blade, easily capable of cutting this ugly creature in half.
But he didn't get the chance, which genuinely upset him. A stream of bullets tore out of the sky, but only one hit anything living. The .50 caliber round punched a hole in his armor and his shoulder, and he looked behind him at the spatter of biomass that the bullet had taken from him. With a glance at the hunter, who was apparently divided between attacking the armed and armored man or the armed and armored helicopter, he absorbed his own armor back into his body and began putting extra strength into his legs.
That was all that both the hunter and the blackwatch soldiers within helicopter could have wanted. The hunter dove at him with all the agility of a mountain lion, and the helicopter let off a pair of heat-seeking missiles. Couldn't have gone any better, Alex thought as he leaped toward the helicopter. He had to leap again, jumping off of his own biomass, to dodge the missiles, but after he did that, they decimated the hunter, and he landed on the cockpit of the helicopter. The two men inside began to make panicked calls to their base, which would never send reinforcements in time.
Putting extra strength and biomass into his arms, he effortlessly tore off the entire door of the helicopter, and then proceeded to throw the nearest man out of it. The other pilot scrambled, whether to eject from the helicopter, find a weapon, or escape, Alex didn't know. The man's face met the windshield with surprising force, and his body slumped down in the corner.
"Now then," Alex said, cleaning off the windshield and molding his body to look just like one of the Blackwatch soldiers', "let's see what the military is up to today."