PHASE 4
- Aggression -
I used to love being alone. When I was a kid, I'd run out into the country all by myself, just to see what I could find. Sometimes I'd follow the trail of the hunting parties, or I'd look for someplace so out of the way that no one would find me if they tried. It all felt like an adventure.
Of course it was stupid of me. Of course I knew there was danger out there, and I found all kinds of trouble. I wasn't even that brave; I just had a lucky kid's way of thinking, that the really nasty accidents are what happen to other people.
Looking back, I'm not sure when all that changed, but I have a good idea why. I never stopped taking risks, but I got smart enough to be prepared. What saved me in the end was realizing I had someone I wanted to protect—because one good way to lose your head is to spend too much time fighting for nothing.
The closer Fang came to the break in Cocoon's shell, the slower her progress got. Each ravine seemed a little larger and sharper than the last, as the ground rose up into a mass of jagged peaks. Every path she tried to pick through the terrain ended up turning back on itself, winding off in some random direction, or leading her straight to a cliff.
With all that to keep her attention, she didn't notice for a while that the ground she was walking through wasn't quite ground anymore. Rusted metal pipes and grating stuck out of the earth, like half-exposed bones in a butcher's carcass. Next came bent metal pylons embedded in the ridgeline, a rusted old generator, a broken tunnel made of welded copper ribbing.
It was eerie, and not just because the landscape was getting even more artificial than she'd come to expect. The more pieces she saw, the more it looked familiar in a way that the rest of Cocoon's technology hadn't. And the farther she walked, the more pieces she saw.
Fang had been too focused on the big hole in the sky to notice, but it felt like she was making her way through an old junkyard on Gran Pulse.
The more weird machinery crept into the landscape, the harder it got to navigate, as the terrain began to sacrifice handholds and solid ground for what looked like a giant pile of trash. Following the only path she could find, however winding and senseless it was, became her only real option.
At least she was getting closer. The hole in Cocoon's shell took up almost the entire sky in front of her now, though she guessed she was still a long way from actually getting there. When she needed a break, she'd stare up at the opening for some hint of Gran Pulse, or even some familiar stars, but she never saw one. There was just a blank, blue-tinged void, as if existence came to a stop at the edge of that hole.
That view was somehow even more unsettling to look at than Cocoon's usual impossible landscape, but for some reason it kept drawing her eye. Maybe because that blank, hazy blue was actually the closest she could get to the daytime sky on Gran Pulse, even if it shouldn't be in the middle of the ground.
Just as she was reminding herself to focus on the ridge in front of her, Fang heard a noise on the other side. There was a kind of high-pitched whirring, followed by a thud forceful enough to shake the ground she was standing on, and then a clattering rumble that rivaled a small avalanche.
She heard voices, too. Shouting. Scared.
Using her spear and one of the open patches of dirt for leverage, she vaulted over the ridge, which was a mostly intact metal arch on the other side. She slid down it to perch a small ledge made from a jumble of spare parts, atop a longer and steeper drop.
Below her, she saw people, the first she'd come across in days. There were a couple dozen, all ages, and they didn't have the matching outfits that Cocoon's warriors seemed to wear, so she guessed they were ordinary townspeople.
Advancing on them was a creature that resembled a giant metal scorpion, with a segmented tail poised over its metal head and six glowing red eyes. Bold lettering in Cocoon's language ran along its arms, which ended in rows of razor-edged wheels that reached forward like claws.
The thing was big enough to be a minor fal'Cie, but its body was too simple and its movements were too clumsy. Fang guessed it was another of Cocoon's perversions—if they took living monsters and made them half-machine, why not make a machine to imitate a monster?
Watching it hound the people below, Fang was a little surprised at how angry it made her. Everything about this world was some kind of mockery of nature, yet the people in Cocoon took it all for granted. They lived off of food from the fal'Cie so they didn't have to hunt, and made these twisted creatures to fend off monsters so they didn't have to fight. When a real threat appeared, they just cowered in a corner and waited to die. And these were the people who had terrorized Gran Pulse since before the time of memory?
The blades of her spear snapped into place as she took the weapon in hand. The drop was a bit too far for her to make in one jump, so she aimed for a thick metal girder about halfway down the slope. It groaned under the force of her landing and threatened to give way completely, but she didn't give it the chance. Another hop sent her crashing right down on top of the machine, landing on its right arm and driving the end of her spear into its joint.
Whoever had built the thing must have made it smart enough to tell when a real threat was around. It froze, and the arm jerked under her as Fang jumped off, taking a swipe at its tail and landing behind it. Blue floodlights glared out from under its head as the machine lumbered around to face her.
"Got your attention, yeah?" Fang shifted her grip on her spear, trying not to enjoy this too much. "What are you gonna do now?"
She had to admit, its answer was a surprise. What passed for its head split open, dividing down the middle into a pair of metal panes that slid apart to reveal the barrel of a gigantic cannon. Fang just had enough time to get her guard up before it smothered her in a wave of crackling energy.
If there was one thing that l'Cie power had given her, it was the ability to take a tough hit. There was a special kind of rush that came from standing in the middle of a maelstrom and barely getting singed, but at the same time it left her in a kind of daze that took a second to snap out of.
As soon as she was back to her senses, she noticed one of its arms swinging right at her. Each one of the sawblades was nearly as tall as she was, and they sent a shower of sparks flying up as they raked across the ground.
Fang ducked inside their path, which went on along a robotically straight line behind her, and drove her spear right into the joint where the arm attached to its body. She hit it with enough force to buckle its metal skin, and the popping sound of blown wiring chased a burst of sparks out of the joint. But otherwise, the thing barely moved. Fang hit it again, driving a gash through the metal, and again to strike at the machinery inside. She got a couple more sparks, but otherwise the damn thing just kept standing there.
A bright light flashed above her. Fang jumped back just as four beams of white-hot energy came searing out of the machine's tail, but she couldn't get her guard up fast enough. The blast caught her right below her right shoulder, and felt like it burned all the way through to her back.
She stumbled, more from the shock than the force of the blast, and her feet caught each other as she tried to backpedal. She saw the ground coming up at her, and instinct told her to roll with the fall instead of trying to block it, but instinct hadn't caught up with the fresh burn just under her arm until she was already rolling onto it. The pain wasn't as bad as when the eidolon had appeared, but it was enough to leave her in a heap on the ground.
By the time Fang remembered why that wasn't where she wanted to be, four giant buzzsaws were grinding across the ground not ten feet away.
At least her legs still worked, which she found out when they pushed her just clear of the spinning claws. Charging on ahead was the only way to keep from going flat on her face again, and she chased herself under the machine's arm, regaining her balance somewhere beside the stubby legs that held it off the ground.
Somehow, she'd managed to keep hold of her spear. Shifting her grip on the weapon and putting the full force of her good arm behind it, she stabbed at the thinnest joint in the machine's nearest leg. The metal buckled a bit, and again the machine didn't recoil, so Fang brought the head of her spear down again to open up a gash in the plating that had covered its more delicate circuitry.
Finally the legs started moving. Fang darted past them to get behind the machine, thinking it wouldn't be turning around very fast on legs that short. She came to a stop just behind the thing's tail, where the ledge split between a short drop behind her and a very long one to the side, and finally took a second to catch her breath. If she focused, the burning in her wound began to die down, and she could feel the strength coming back to her arm. That was one thing she could get used to about being a l'Cie.
On the other hand, it made her sluggish again. When the ground in front of her brightened all of a sudden, it took her a second to realize that the machine was gone, and it's floodlights were bathing the whole area blue. And it took another second for her to make sense of that, look up, and see the thing near the peak of a towering jump that would bring it right back down on her head.
She knew she should dodge, but she couldn't read its moves well enough with the floodlights in her face. And it was coming back down now. Fast.
She needed more time.
Fang threw out her hand. The air in front of her rippled, and a faint, disembodied glow shot upward to envelop the falling machine. And she saw its breakneck descent snap back to a leisurely drift.
It was still coming right at her, but Fang had what she needed. Firming up her grip on her spear, she jumped up and sideways onto a protruding bit of scrap, and then up again onto another, and then the machine was floating down right past her. Another jump put her above the thing, where she didn't have a good foothold, so she pushed off immediately, put all her weight behind the spear, and came down on top of the machine just as it hit the ground on the narrow ledge where she'd been standing.
Her spear drove right into the damaged joint that held the arm on the inner side of the ledge. The impact came with a satisfying creak, the metal buckled under her, and she saw the ribbing underneath start to peel apart.
If the machine had been slow to respond before, now it barely moved at all. Fang drove her spear down against it again, and again, and her last blow snapped right through the joint and sent its arm crashing to the ground.
She'd been standing on the arm, so it was a trick to keep her footing as she came down between the two pieces of the machine. The blades on the severed arm were still spinning, dragging it in an arc behind her back, and then both pieces of the machine crumpled over the edge, taking a tiny avalanche of trash down with it.
As she rested the spear on her shoulders, Fang let herself enjoy the moment a bit. Apart from that business with the eidolon, it had been a while since she'd had a really good fight. Or, at least, a fight that she'd won.
There was some kind of commotion behind her. Fang turned around to find a little gaggle of people huddled under a nearby outcrop, just beyond the little ledge she was standing on.
The villagers. Fang had completely forgot about them while the fight was going on.
Up close, the group looked even more out of place amid the landscape of half-buried junk, and from the look of them they knew it. They seemed to be keeping their distance from everything, including the walls of the ravine.
And they recoiled when they saw her turn around.
"What happened?" One of them, a little girl, was edging closer than the others. "Did the army go away?"
At first, Fang just stared at the girl. She wore a cap that had been fashioned with a pair of animal ears and a silly red pom-pom dangling from it. The rest of her outfit didn't match at all, like she'd just put on as many clothes as she could manage.
Then an older man ran up to pull the girl back. "Keep away from her!" he shouted, and Fang got the impression he was talking to her and not the girl.
His move seemed to send a jolt through the crowd, as the people huddled closer together and started chattering to each other.
"She used magic!" a man shouted from somewhere in the back. "That's a l'Cie!"
There was barely enough room for all of them in the little patch of level ground, less as the people in front recoiled away from her and some of the people in back were pressing forward. They mostly looked confused or scared at first, but she could see that changing as more people spoke out.
"Is she the one they're after?"
"She's the cause of all this!"
"L'Cie monster! She'll taint us all!"
If Fang looked closely, she thought she could recognize some of the people she'd met in that town by the shore, after she and Vanille had woke up. She didn't know why they were out here, though, and none of them seemed to remember her. All they saw was a l'Cie.
One of them, a boy who looked about Vanille's age, picked up what looked like a rusty gear about the size of his hand, and hurled it at her with a panicked look and an unintelligible shout. And as Fang brought her spear up to meet it, she could almost feel something inside her snap.
A pale blue glow flashed out from the brand on her shoulder seemed as she batted the gear out of the air and sent it spinning away into the ravine. A new exclamation ran through the crowd, who recoiled almost as one.
"Yeah, that's right," she said. She could feel a sort of cold fire raging inside her shoulder, a little like it had before the eidolon appeared. "I'm the big, nasty l'Cie, come all the way from the world below, just to ruin your day!" She jumped off the outcrop, dropping down to the clearing in front of the villagers and landing just a few feet away. "Come on, then! Give it your best shot!"
A few of the people in front of her were kids, but most of them had to be of fighting age. Some even held weapons that looked like the ones Cocoon's warriors had used. But they all backed away, the ones in front almost tripping over the ones in back to keep their distance from her, acting more like sheep than any people Fang knew.
"Come on!" Fang slashed at the air between them, and the group broke into a flat-out stampede. Now they really were tripping over each other in their hurry to escape, clambering over debris or losing their footing to slide off down the slope of the ravine.
If there was one thing Cocoon's people were good at, it was running away. Within a few seconds, Fang had the open ground all to herself.
She'd grown up hearing horror stories about Cocoon. The world above was supposed to be a nest of vipers waiting to strike at any moment. So why were all the people here such cowards? For all their weapons and gizmos, even their warriors barely knew how to put up a fight.
Most of them, anyway.
Sighing, Fang slung her spear back over her shoulder and leaned against the wall of the metal ledge that loomed over her now. Only gradually, as she looked up at the overhang above her, did she notice the writing on it.
A chill came over her as she read. The text itself was too broken to be legible, with only a few letters surviving intact. But it wasn't the sort of writing she'd seen on Cocoon. Everything about it, from the characters to the writing style, was far too familiar.
She took a step away from the wall, jumped back to the little elevated ledge, took a close look at the thing for the first time, and found herself staring at the ruined hull of a Mah'habaran battle cruiser. Half the airship's skin had been peeled off, and its aft section was missing entirely, but there was no mistaking that she was face-to-face with one of the most powerful warships of Gran Pulse.
"What's with that?" she asked, nearly choking on the words. She wanted to imagine the ship had come here as part of some invasion, been shot down in an ancient battle, but she knew better. She'd probably known ever since she'd realized what this landscape was made of.
And she knew that the big hole in Cocoon's shell had been telling her a lie. Whatever damage her people had managed to do in the war, she was looking at proof that Gran Pulse had lost.