Grimm, the tough old bird, had taken three of them with him. He had done it, not only to save Lara, but to save himself. If he had so much as stopped struggling, he wouldn't have been Grimm any longer. Of all of them, the Island had touched him the least. Lara envied him for it. She was changing, and the only other option was to die.
She had to change into a survivor, and she did. Grimm had to change into a prisoner, and he refused. It was why she lived, and he died.
And then Lara did something unusual. She vowed to make the bastards pay.
It was a strangely empowering feeling; the sudden certainty that she had a new goal. For the first time since the boat had sunk, Lara was after something more than living to see the dawn. She wanted more than escape. She wanted victory. She wanted blood. She wanted to make them face the same unholy carnage that she had faced.
She could hear them running on the far side of the temple walls. They were jockeying for position, taking places on the far side of the stone walls and ornate doors.
Even a few days before, Lara would have wept for the stonework as she taped the launcher to her shotgun. And then she realized suddenly that she didn't care.
"She has a grenade launcher!" A voice shouted in panic. Panic. Just for a second, Lara found it intoxicating. These beasts had slaughtered and pillaged anyone unlucky enough to come near... And now they were afraid of her.
"That's right!" She heard her voice howl exultantly. "Run, You Bastards!"
It was the exact moment she had become a better predator than them. A hunter among hunters. A Lion amongst Jackals. She had killed, she had defeated her hunters... but until that moment, they had never run away from her.
The layers of the island went back to pre-Christian times, and ended with modern shipwrecks. The worst elements of human beings had been brought to bear on anyone unlucky enough to survive. The island had beaten the gentleness, beaten the compassion, beaten the simple humanity clean out of all of them and replaced it with madness and bloodlust.
And Lara Croft, the girl who had sobbed over her first campfire, simpered over her lightest wounds, and wept for a dead deer... was now locked and loaded for war; an equal match for all of them put together.
She wasn't the latest resident in the Tombs of Purgatory any longer.
She was the Predator.
AN: Read and Review