Eyes burst like ectopuses, heads stiffened—gaping jaws wide and rigid—as steel thrust through them. Legs fell away, bodies crumpled, joints shattered beneath white boots; enormous spider bodies crashed, missing him by a hair's breadth. Phantom fought like a demon with every limb and weapon he had. Yet for every spider killed, another replaced it.
Spider fangs snapped shut like traps, their legs plunged toward him like spears, barbs and hooks slashed his flesh. He fought to stay in front of Dash, to shield and protect the cowering other who obviously had never been in this kind of fight.
Curled in a ball, shield held like an umbrella against a tornado, Dash was paralyzed with life-threatening terror—until more spiders flanked them.
His shield fell from nerveless fingers.
Dash bolted.
"No! Don't run you idiot!" Phantom bellowed, turning to grab the jock before he could do something stupid.
Too late. Spiders pounced like tigers on the fleeing prey. Phantom broke away from one spider, ignoring a stab at his back and carved another's head clean off. He charged the spiders tearing at Dash with shield held in front and sword pointed like a rhino's horn. The closest spider died instantly.
"Dash get behind me!"
"They're behind us!"
Kicking a leg shattered the closest spider's exoskeleton and Phantom spun around to see spiders crawling toward Dash. Spiders rushed to take the place of the fallen on his side. They were surrounded.
"Stay right behind me and get ready to run. We need to punch our way through." Spiders encircled them, but the arachnid ring wasn't all a dozen deep; in some places a single spider stood between them and escape. Scanning the advancing predators, Phantom found the weakest.
"This way!" Phantom pointed his sword at the spider he picked out as others rushed. Shield out, body low, sword readied, the superhero charged; Dash nearly hitting his heels from behind as dozens of spiders sprang as one.
This Brown Recluse loomed enormously, even larger than most but the eyes were milky with age and its steps faltered due to missing two legs. It hesitated at their rush. Phantom slashed at one leg, running right beneath the body as the severed limb fell away, Dash practically piggybacking on him.
Another slash, another leg fell away and both boys shot out from beneath the ancient arachnid as it crashed to the ground. Phantom headed straight for the corner behind it.
"There's no way out!" Dash wailed, staring between forbidding walls trapping them. Were they going to fight their way out? But how? He was used to nerds and geeks, not creatures towering over his head!
"There's one way. Get behind me. Stay behind me. Keep your shield up and don't run unless I stop fighting," Phantom commanded.
The jock jerked his head up and down, clutching at his bloody leg. Could he even run anymore? Phantom stood in front of him, sword and shield drenched in spider guts, blood running from his wounds as the horde of monsters closed in.
Never had Phantom fought like this. Legs and fangs tore at him, whole bodies several times his size hit him. The battle was worse than a hundred ghost fights shoved into a few minutes. Even that one time his father had been testing (i.e. playing with) the new security lock on the portal, he hadn't fought so many. And in so little time.
Minutes ground to a halt as though Clockwork himself were influencing this fight. A sword thrust into the bulbous eyes of one spider finished it. A pair of legs struck at him. He slammed the shield's edge into the fangs of another. The body smashed into him. A kick broke the leg of a third in as many seconds. Instantly they were replaced by more hungry fangs snapping at his throat, more alien eyes locked on him—were they out of juicy flies?—more massive legs thrusting toward his chest.
Phantom fought them all until they were only corpses.
Blood, spider and human, flowed into rivers through the battle. Adrenaline surged like bloodlust as they danced the dance of death. But time took its terrible toll. Now it took two or three strikes to kill a single spider. Now every move kept half a dozen wounds from closing. Piles of corpses turned into a mountain the spiders had to crawl over or push aside just to reach them but Phantom barely killed them in time.
They kept coming.
Once, Phantom fell, leg collapsing beneath him, blood welling from a lucky strike. Adrenaline alone wasn't enough to keep him going. A spider pounced, trapping his kneeling body between its legs, fangs open wide to snap shut like a steel vice.
No! he was not going to die here. Not like this. With strength born of fear the ghost hero ripped his arm free and slammed his sword into the descending mouth. Fangs snapped shut so close they tore through his suit. With a desperate swing, he smashed the shield on one fang, then the other before getting to his feet. A couple of tugs ripped the sword free and he stabbed the still twitching spider once, twice, thrice.
Finally it stopped moving.
So did Phantom.
"Woah!" Dash looked over the spiders. To his eyes there were hundreds, all unmoving, gashes parting monstrous flesh, limbs hacked off, fangs and heads and eyes crushed into a murky, sludgy mess. And among all that gore was Phantom, holding his sword and shield like Conan the Barbarian.
"That was awesome! Um…do we run now?"
Phantom didn't want to run, didn't want to move. Leaning against his sword was the only way to keep from toppling over completely and joining the lucky spiders. But no, he couldn't rest. Someone still needed him, even if that someone was Dash.
But…just a few minutes.
"Phantom?"
Feeling like his eyes were cemented shut, Phantom opened them. Feeling like he had walked through a salt-water and lemon-juice waterfall, Phantom lifted his head. Feeling like every joint had been turned to iron, drenched in a rainstorm and left to dry in the desert, Phantom slowly got to his feet. The Fenton Crammer. His powers. He didn't have much time.
Dash might have even less.
"Right…let's go."
By the time they made it to the vine Phantom didn't feel quite so rusty, but the drain on his ghost core was so bad he couldn't even feel the leeching effect. His powers felt numb. Without ectoplasm bolstering his strength, even the short knife/sword felt like a lead brick. Without adrenaline surging through his veins every step tugged at dozens of wounds, making them flare like rockets. He dragged the blade along the ground, unable to muster the strength to lift it as his blood joined the gore.
"Up here," Phantom said, pressing one hand onto the vine. "How are those cuts?"
"They're fine…okay," Dash insisted.
"Then I hate to say this, but let's climb."
The climb was hell—seventh circle at least. The highest mountain, the steepest cliff he'd ever seen couldn't have been this hard of a climb. Phantom's whole body burned star-plasma hot. Climbing after the worst battle made the agony burn a thousand times more painfully in every wound: chest, legs, sides, arms.
Even his neck burned, and when he took his hand away from it, the tanned skin was stained red.
Hope strained more than any muscle though. He couldn't feel his powers. Did he have the strength left to save himself? Could Dash alone save them both? Or would the Fenton Crammer have no effect, if they could even reach it, and condemn them to a puny life until death?
Which, as things were going, wouldn't be too long.
"Pull yourself up with your whole body. It's more efficient," Dash demonstrated. "Takes some pressure off your arms."
"Thanks," said Phantom.
His arms didn't need more pressure; they'd been ready to fall off after the battle. A few deeper gashes and they would have fallen off. Gravity pulled as heavily on the sword sheathed in his belt and the shield on his back as death on the soul. Still, that was better than carrying the blood-stained things in his teeth like a pirate.
The braid of vine was one of the Fenton Graveyard of Inventions many colonists and lead to a second story window; Jazz's window. If they could just make it up there, one way or another, they would have help.
Suddenly Phantom's pewter grip faltered and he slid back, muscles twitching and trembling with agony as he tried to stop. No, no, no he had already climbed that inch and was not climbing it again. With a desperate grab he seized one of the leaves and flopped over it like a cooked piece of spaghetti to ride out the waves of pain. It died back down, or else he got used to this new level of suffering.
"Phantom?" Dash called out.
The superhero carefully flexed his arms and relaxed when they didn't tremble wildly. "Fine. Spiders just took…a lot out of me." Balancing himself carefully on the leaf, he leapt onto the vine again. Every muscle felt like sandbags someone poured boiling tar in but increment by increment the pair managed the climb.
"Hah, after that fight give me vine climbing any day," Dash admitted.
Phantom nodded in agreement; compared to battling what must have been a hundred venomous spiders intent on killing both of them, vine-climbing—even bruised and bloody—rocked.
"Amen…to that. Though with my luck…all those spiders will come back as ghosts." Cold sweat beaded on Phantom at that thought. That last spider…it had nearly finished them off.
"Hey, uh Phantom…how long does it take to become, ugh, a ghost?"
"Depends: few days, few weeks, few months. Usually you…don't instantly become a ghost…though I did." He pushed through the memory of so many volts of electricity, so much nerve-searing misery that he'd wanted to die if only for it to end.
Thank goodness his friends hadn't been in there.
"Taking years is also…very unusual." Though Vlad had taken years in the hospital before suddenly being 'declared dead' one night. Soon after he had been revived and the ecto-acne 'cured.' After finding that tidbit of information it hadn't taken a genius to conclude what had happened.
Vlad Masters had become Vlad Plasmius, just as Danny Fenton had become Danny Phantom.
Small mercies, his secret identity had been spared so far. His suit had transformed several more times during the battle—not that he'd noticed at the time—but the clothes hadn't fared any better than himself after the fight. Spider legs and jaws tore it so badly he was baring more than he was wearing. The arm sleeves had been the first casualty so he couldn't tell if the shirt was Phantom's long sleeved or Fenton's t-shirt. The pants were so badly stained with blood that they could have been jeans or part of a hazmat suit and he had no idea which. The dirty hair stuck to his face was still white though.
Completely oblivious to his identity crisis, Dash added. "Don't want a horde of ghostly spiders after us."
The football player was even worse off, despite his bulk. Phantom might have taken the blunt of the attacks and their shields, but the battle had taken its toll on Dash.
"Phantom! This won't stop bleeding." Dash stared at the ragged slices all over his body. "Coach said anything bleeding after ten minutes of pressure needed a hospital and I'm sure it's been ten hours!"
"Here…let's rest a moment and I'll bind it." He was no Tucker, without even Sam's experience, but Phantom still knew wounds inside and out.
"Hands away, don't try a tourniquet." Ripping a piece off what was left of his shirt, Phantom pressed it directly to the wound before gently wrapping another piece to keep the first in place.
"My arm's not gonna fall off? I'm not gonna bleed to death?"
"Trust me, this won't kill you," said the ghostly hero.
Dash shut up. "Right."
By the time all wounds were bandaged Phantom had hardly any shirt left, but Dash looked a little better. They continued climbing, but blood loss and some flesh wounds were as bad for Dash's physical prowess as the Fenton Crammer had been for Phantom's. At least the jock was so wrapped up in his own problems to be oblivious to anyone else's weaknesses.
"It's okay Dash," Phantom reassured. "You didn't get…stabbed by the fangs. If that had happened—"
"Hospital right?" Dash said.
"No. Quick painful death."
"Oh."
"Better than…slow painful death."
After another long length of putting one limb in front of the other, Dash got the courage to ask the question burning in his throat. "So how did you die?"
Phantom stiffened in mid-climb, jaw clenched against the memory—cold-hot agony like a star's searing death tore through him as ectoplasm split the world apart—and Dash immediately regretted the question. "I didn't mean—"
"Don't…" Phantom let out a deep breath, "Ask a ghost that. Please."
"Okay."
Dragging himself up, Danny reached a hand down and helped Dash onto the window sill. "In… here," he said shortly.
Dash curled into a ball and trying not to paw at his red-stained bandages. "I hate being puny! God we're never gonna make it up to the shrinker-thing."
"Yes…we will," Danny said with empty confidence. "We will," he added to make himself believe. Unfortunately his sister wasn't there to help them like he'd hoped but…"Hah! Here we are!"
"My Little Pony?" Dash stared at the tiny horse toys. "Can I have Rainbow Dash?"
"Is that what they are?" Phantom asked, mock innocently. When Dash blushed and stuttered he hid a smirk for a moment before giving Dash a small smile. "Alright, which one is Rainbow Dash? This one?" He pushed up a pony with Technicolor mane.
"Yeah," said Dash. "So…um…how're those going to help anyway?"
"Because we need a ride to the ops center." Phantom pointed out the window, to the massive, stinger-armed insects flying around, attracted to some flowers his sister had set out. Dash paled.
"They're huge."
"No, we're just little. Welcome to the world of puny." He heaved a pair of saddles on his shoulders. His shoulders did not appreciate that.
"Puny sucks ass."
A sigh. "I guess we can…rest here…a little while," Phantom said. Dash collapsed.
The no-longer-so-super hero didn't admit how badly he needed rest. In his short but very eventful career as a superhero he'd had to push himself hellishly hard, but nothing like this. Ironically what should have been a comedic 'Honey I Shrunk the Kids' adventure was turning into a contender for top five harshest days. He collapsed too, but Dash was nearly unconscious and didn't notice yet another moment of weakness. As they both relaxed in the relative safety of Jazz's window a particularly unwelcome voice spoke.
"There you two are."
Caught flat-footed and exhausted, Dash couldn't raise his shield in time to block the flying knives headed straight for his throat.
Phantom was suddenly there, as though he'd teleported to shield Dash. Blades slammed against glowing ectoplasm. The superhero's green eyes were wide with more than exhaustion, his hands trembling like Dash's whole body.
The desperate rescue had taken everything Phantom had and then some. He collapsed instantly, light dimly appearing around his waist. "No!" The word was choked out from behind gritted teeth. A bare hand clutched instinctively at his chest as though he was having a heart attack. Feeble light flared to lightning crackling around his torso, wavering only slightly before spreading up the halfa's body.
"Phantom! What's happening?" Dash stared fearfully.
Even Skulker backed away from the unfamiliar surge of electricity, "Welp?"
"I…" the electricity escaped control and slipped further over his body. With sheer force of will, Phantom latched onto the wild lightning, trying to reverse its course. Dash was still shouting but he didn't dare pay any attention to the words when cursed humanity was being revealed like a muscle exposed by skinning. Lightning leeched every scrap of ectoplasmic power from him on its journey over his body, leaving him raw as an open wound.
Hesitantly the quarterback reached out and touched a coil of crackling power. The new sensation was like someone's hand sliding through him while intangible, but a thousand times more acute. Intangibility always muted touch; this light concentrated all the sensation intangibility took away. If a light socket could feel, this was what it felt when someone stuck their finger in it. Jerking away, he overbalanced and collapsed. Power tore free from his feeble grip; with his concentration broken the rings swept faster over his throat.
"Ahhh!" As they slipped up his face, Danny grabbed for them but it was like trying to hold a chin-up when his arms wanted to fall off: trying, straining…
Failing.
With one last flash the lightning turned white hair to black and vanished.
Facing the ground, black hair hiding his features, Danny stared at his hands—his lighter-colored, non-glowing, human hands. Oh hell, his secret!
His mind buzzed around a thousand excuses and explanations. But how the hell was he supposed to pass himself off as anyone but Danny Fenton? And of all the people to find out it had to be Dash Baxter. Which attitude would his 'gym buddy' take: the hero-worshipping fan or the bullying bastard?
"Phantom?" Dash asked carefully.