The small airship bucked and twisted in the air as it dodged the armor piercing barbs shot by the enraged stingers. Nigel stood on top of the airplane, one ghostly tentacle reaching down to the open hatch he had just left. The other split in half, and suddenly three tentacles reached out from his body. The second reached around to the other side of the embattled airship, anchoring him in place. And the third curved up from behind his back and over his head, the tip of it moving in sync with Nigel's gaze as he examined his enemies.
The stingers were huge, easily six feet long. And despite their monstrous similarity to wasps, they were capable of keeping up with the high speed maneuvers of the armored transport. Twenty three. Maybe twenty four. It was hard to get an accurate count with the things darting this way and that trying to get to the ship as the gifted pilot made his vehicle turn and twist in ways that were very close to impossible.
Nigel focused on the ones trailing the aircraft first, as they would be the easiest targets. He pulled the large scope of his rifle and watched as it rotated to the side, popping up instead a tactical scope with very little zooming capability. Much better for close to mid-range shooting. The insane wind factors would be challenge enough. He pulled the rifle up to his shoulder, aiming as carefully as he could. The aircraft bobbed up, twisted right, dipped down, then just for a moment, it went level.
A loud crack split the air as Nigel pulled the trigger, and a streaking red charge fled from the barrel of his rifle and struck a stinger on the front of its abdomen. A Ball of fire enveloped it, and it twisted into a flaming ball and started to fall. The other stingers surrounding it ignored their falling comrade, too focused on the sound of the plane. Nigel focused on the next and waited for a second or two of steadiness. His rifle barked out another shot, then another.
Two more stingers fell back to earth, dissolving into shadowy flakes. This wasn't enough. Nigel looked over, noticed several stingers stuck into the engines. If they were hit enough times, or if one of the stingers got lucky, those engines could fail. And then things would be bad.
Inside the plane, Itari was bent over, vomiting her nasty tasting military rations all over the deck of the airship. Even in her sickened state, she wondered that the rations actually tasted better this time. Its like they had taken the best chefs in the world and tortured them until they were hate filled shells of their former selves. And then had them create the rations. Even eating campfire cooked desert rats wasn't as bad.
Slade was sitting across from her, trying to keep his shoes out of her way. There was always one on an airplane. To distract himself, he shouted at the pilot. "How's it going?"
Farin was busy twisting the ship about in the sky, but managed to yell back. "Not good. Your insane friend on the roof has taken down three of them, but I can't keep this up forever. The drain on my aura is immense." Slade nodded, then unbuckled himself and started moving towards the open hatch, always keeping one hand clenched firmly against the overhead rail. He finally inched his way over to the opening, and glanced out. Six foot long insectoid horrors flew all around the beleaguered transport. Slade could hear the crack of a rifle above him, its sound echoing through the armored hull. One of the grimm farther behind erupted in flames, curling up into a ball is it fell. There were plenty to take its place.
Slade pulled his knife and flipped it through its motions until he held a bayonet tipped pistol in his hand, then aimed carefully at one of the nearer stingers. His pistol roared twice, the sound magnified by the enclosed space of the airships passenger compartment. The first shot missed but the second hit the grimm directly in the face, and large shards of ice sprouted out from its head in all directions, as sharp as a razor and deadly cold. The flying terror didn't even have the chance to fall before its shape shattered into a million small flecks of shadow.
Nigel heard the faint explosion from below, but he was far too preoccupied to care. A few of the stingers had taken notice of him and were focusing their fire on him instead of the plane. A needle sharp barb slapped into the surface of the airship, and stuck quivering only inches from his foot.
"Hog's balls!" Nigel shouted at the stinger who had almost gotten him, then snapped off a couple of shots, finally clipping it in a foreleg. A fireball engulfed part of its body, and the flames assaulted its wings, causing it to falter, then fall as it frantically tried to use its now useless wing. He laughed and yelled at the sky. "This isn't working! Time for phase two!"
Nigel flipped his powerful rifle collapsing and rotating the barrel and rapidly switching it into the form of a pistol grip shotgun, then touched a button on his chest-plate. He had to get all of the grimm focused on getting to him instead of attacking the airplane. He needed them close. That was the easy part.
Nigel closed his eyes and reached deep inside himself. He knew he was insane. He knew the madness inside of him better than any man ever knew a lover. He caressed it with is mind. The rage, the hatred, the fear, and the despair. All of those horrible feelings he held deep inside his soul. Each was a monster in and of itself, captured and caged by his mind and his will. He reflected on those cages, the careful suppression of emotion he had built over the years. Then he let them free.
Grimm feed on negative emotion, it makes them strong. Fear and hatred and despair were like drugs and candy and the finest wine to them. It was irresistible.
Inside the bullhead transport vehicle, Farin Greyson was running out of energy. His aura was dimming; he had been using his clairvoyance to see just far enough into the future to predict the attacks of the swarm of terrors menacing his ship and his passengers. Then his mind's eye saw the man on top of his ship shimmer. Evil seemed to radiate out of him like a dark cloud, and every single stinger immediately surged forward, single-minded in their hunger. It almost broke his concentration. It was so much to take in all at once. But he also saw a possibility. With all of the stingers focusing their deadly attention on the man-shaped thing standing on his ship, he could get them all to one side of him. And that meant he could kill them.
Farin's hands danced along the controls of the transport deftly keeping himself alive until his eyes could verify what his mind had shown him. And suddenly, there it was. Every single stinger he could see, both in plain sight of the cockpit and through the rear and side view displays went almost rigid, all of their attention focused at the very top of his battered craft. Then they seemed to leap forward as if pushed ahead by an invisible spring. At that moment Farin pushed forward and dove straight towards the ground.
Nigel felt so damned alive. He wanted to kill everything. "Every freaking thing in the whole damned world! I'll kill everything!" And twenty or thirty things were coming to him at high speed, eager to meet him. The aircraft he was anchored to started to dive straight for the ground. It was like death was everywhere. "This is glorious. I'll kill all of you." He started to laugh as the stingers closed in. It was a high-pitched, hysterical, mocking laugh. It was like listening to the purest form of madness.
Nigel's third tentacle, which had hovered over his head, protecting him from harm stretched outward, splitting into two massive ghostly ropes. A deep violet glow surrounded him, and he pressed a button on his chest. Black dust flowed out into the two twitching tentacles. Filling them with gravitational energy. It was a trick he'd learned a long time ago. He'd used it to kill his own teacher. The black dust interacted with his ghostly tentacles, collapsing them into themselves. The round tentacles became impossibly flat, their edges impossibly sharp. Glowing black blades formed at the far ends of his ghostly ropes, eager to bring forth blood and pain.
Nigel started whipping his dark razors back and forth, cutting through one grimm after another. His shotgun took another in the face as it got close, the force of the blast disintegrating its head. The headless body tumbled away, replaced by two more monsters eager to drink of his hatred. His fear. His absolute rage. "Kill! Everything!" The monsters swarmed at him, and three more went down. Nigel's shotgun evaporated the thorax of another. Then another. Then one of the monsters shot its barbed weapon, shooting forward and impaling his leg to the hull of the aircraft, another caught the edge of his arm. Nigel did not care.
Another dead, then another. His shotgun was empty, but he didn't even bother to try and reload it. Most of the stingers had fallen behind the aircraft, its ever increasing speed outmatching their wings. One was close enough, though. Nigel thrust a black razor through it, pinning it to the top of the ship. Then he began to bash it in the face with his shotgun. "I'll kill you, you bastard. I will murder you and all of you. I will end you!" Ichor coated the end of his gun and his second black razor stabbed the grimm repeatedly. He reveled in its futile attempts to escape.
The bullhead is a versatile and capable aircraft, meant for a wide array of jobs. It doesn't have the massive size of its larger cousins, nor does it have the speed and maneuverability of military fighter craft. What it can do, though, is take a lot of punishment. It was built to hum along at a stead pace, able to carry heavy loads and able to absorb or just survive immense punishment. It was an ugly, bull-headed airship and Farin loved it as only a pilot could.
He felt the groans and rumbles of his ship through his fingers as he pushed it far past the speeds intended by its creators. He felt the screams of the metal through his feet and through his back as he dove past the sensible limits of experience. His whole being was in tune with his ship, a perfect synthesis of man and machine. It was a feeling only a few pilots in the world ever truly experience. And most die from it. Farin growled out loud. "But not me!"
Faster he went, his mind surging out ahead of him, finding the exact moment in time when the speed became too great to recover from. "I'm the best!"
Closer. The last possible second was rushing towards him faster than he had ever experience.
"I'm the best!" Future and present were rushing together, death and life charging at full speed.
"Freaking pilot" He could feel time itself convulse as his vision and his sight fought inside of him.
"In this entire" Closer, faster, his heart was screaming in his chest.
"Freaking!" His breath rushed in and out of his mouth, unnoticed.
"World!" Farin pulled back, using all of his muscles to force himself up and away from the earth. His ship gave off a tortured cry, the forces assaulting the armored frame almost unbearable. A crack raced down one of the windows in the cock pit, partially surrendering to the strain.
The craft streaked over the ridge of a forested hill, missing the tops of the trees by less space than Farin wanted to think about. He shuddered, his baby shuddered as they struggled to raise their head. Shrieks and creaks and groans and shivered flowed through the airship's frame. He was so glad that he had such good a mechanic on his team. That same mechanic was going to be infuriated at what he was doing to it right now. But it was the next step that would really piss Farin's mechanic off. The engines were probably going to need replacement. If they didn't immediately fail and kill everyone.
Normally, Farin Greyson would have carefully transitioned between forward flight and hover mode. He would have gently teased the engines downward to keep from unbalancing them. A careful engine reconfiguration could reduce the need for costly engine maintenance. And that meant less money going to the bullhead and more money going to the bank. Farin was fond of his bank account. So he almost wept at having to use the emergency hover switch. Then the cat faunus reached down and casually triggered the emergency hover switch.
The engines emitted a high pitched, tortured cry that no one aboard had ever heard an airship engine make. This is because it was very close to the high pitched scream an engine made just as it exploded. The bull head stopped pushing itself through the air and started pushing itself upward. The turbulence that resulted almost flipped the craft over. But without the forward thrust, Farin was able to spin the entire plane around, looking like a drunken turtle spinning through the sky. Mashing on the somewhat unresponsive maneuvering thrusters, Farin now had his ship flying backward at a higher speed through the air than a bullhead was supposed to travel when it was pointed the right way. The twisted sounds of the aircraft's frame seemed to echo back the insanity of Nigel's laugh.
But now Farin could aim his machine guns. The bullhead's machine guns were more designed for ground support than air to air combat, but a good pilot could aim them like he was pointing a handgun. A deafening roar arose from the front of the airship, massive dust powered spouting forth faster than the ear could register each shot. Even in the day, it was a brightly lit rainbow beam of death. And Farin brushed it through every grimm he saw.
Fire, and ice and lighting and darkness and water and half a dozen other forms of energy all tore through the remaining stingers, blowing them into evaporating chunks of shadow. As the last one died, Farin whispered hoarsely to his precious airship. "We've never been this good before." Then he started to weep, tears of strain and relief rolling down his face as he carefully spun his machine back to a more normal orientation. And a good idea considering the craft was still traveling faster than the recommended airspeed limit.
The Cat pilot saw a flat topped hill ahead, a perfect landing spot. He would need to perform some emergency repairs himself before he dared travel all the way back to Vale. He gently brought the bullhead to the ground, the feet of the ship barely registering any impact at all. Then he slowly slowed the engines until they were off.
The sudden silence was a shock to Greyson's passengers. Farin turned around and saw Slade, as white as any sheet; eyes dilated in fear. One hand had clawed through the leather of a seat, the other was locked in a death grip on the overhead handrail. Then he saw Itari. She was slumped over, almost out of her harness. She looked bereft of life.
Then he saw Stone as the large man stood up. He looked entirely too relaxed for the hell they had just been through.
Stone stretched then looked at the emotionally drained wreck that was his pilot. "You might just be one of the most insane people I have ever met." Then he leaned over and clapped a hand on the pilot's shoulder and grinned. "And you might actually be the best freaking pilot in the whole freaking world." He threw his thumb behind him and said, "She's not dead, by the way. She passed out in panic when she though we were going to hit."
Farin shook his head a bit to clear his thoughts, then said, "Your teammate. The one outside. There's something wrong with him. I don't know. There's something... bad." Stone's face fell into an expression of grief, one that his face seemed well acquainted with.
"Yeah. I know." Then he raised his voice to make sure everyone heard him clearly. "I'm going outside to deal with Nigel. The rest of you stay in here. Don't let him see you." Stone paused at the doorway to unfasten Nigel's tether from the hatchway. "If you don't hear from me in 10 minutes, leave. And don't let him see you." And with that, Stone walked out the door.
