Hourly Challenge: Spherical (or, prompt, what prompt?)

a/n: Doug is fighting something really big in a cramped space. It's not going well.

Swears, harm, menace. Badly written fight scene. Geeking over gameplay. Underedited because I'm running late. Completely ignored the prompt, sorry.

All the good things belong to Monolith Soft, but I built Spidey the underpowered Octoskell.

There was an advantage to the photon saber over the javelin that Doug hadn't considered when he'd left the safety of the surface world. The spluttering blue blade lit up the cramped and darkened crevice that was now his battlefield. Every swing helped him see exactly what he was fighting. That was about all the help the sword was providing though, he had to admit to himself.

To be honest, he didn't need the extra light, certainly not to let him know what he was fighting. The first triple blast the creature launched at him had cleared that question up sufficiently. Doug recognized that blast, and its effects. His vision had blurred immediately, making it hard to see any further than the already blinding tip of the photon sabre. BLADE called the status "virus", although it was more a venom as far as the Curators could tell. A fighter couldn't see far enough to aim and fire their guns except in the roughest "wave and pray" way.

"Joke's on you; I don't even HAVE a ranged weapon."

If that blast hadn't been enough to let him know, the photon saber confirmed it. Doug was now going multiple toe to multiple toe against Hartmut the freaking Calamity, or at least against as much of the giant millepod's maw as it could jam into the cave. Its multiple limbs, fanning out around it's slinky center body, dug into the walls of the cavern, bracing it against the puny blows from Spidey the Octoskell. Doug's best hope would be to aim for an eye or an antennae, but he was having trouble reaching past all the rows and rows of slashing teeth.

It wasn't as impossible as it looked. He kept telling himself that. He'd managed to avoid being bitten. He'd managed to snap off at least one flailing leg. He'd even managed to shave off the front fin, although that hadn't been quite the bonus he'd hoped for. Doug had been so happy to finally see the shining round lock-on target and feel his sword repeatedly slice into it. At first Hartmut had recoiled from the wound, arching and slamming against the roof of the cavern. However, without the wedge of fin on its back, the creature was able to jam itself deeper into the cavern, pushing Doug and Spidey back towards the row of abandoned skells.

He didn't like the company and he didn't feel any safety on this back shelf of cavern. Retreat hadn't saved any of the other pilots, although Doug wasn't sure they'd come here of their own volition. "Not like some idiots I could name," he mumbled to himself as he blocked a particularly insistant leg. Close up, he was surprised by how much the millepod used its limbs to fight. He'd never heard about this tactic, but then again no one had ever been idiot enough to fight a millepod this close. Best practice was to blast Hartmut at a distance. Currently, Doug would have preferred the distance of a full continent, maybe two. Noctilum, for example, looked nice at sunset.

He needed to get his act together. Focused as he was with the first leg, he had missed a feint from the side. Another leg struck Spidey, strong enough to break into the pilot's capsule. The tip sliced into Doug's shoulder and pinned him. His left arm went slack. Luckily it wasn't the arm controlling the beam saber, but this was plenty dire. Doug twisted his body as much as the restraints would allow, trying to dislodge the pointed tip from his body. He didn't dare move his working hands from the controls. He even smacked it with his head a couple times, awkwardly but with every bit of force he could manage. It was enough. The leg slid out from the capsule, not that this was a huge relief. It rejoined the continued flurry of enemy blows.

Doug was relieved when his wounded arm started to respond again, although the skell controls were getting slick from mim circulatory fluid. He didn't like that the cavern was getting darker, and possibly not from Hartmut or the virus effect. Now might be a good time to come up with a new plan, something that would change the likely ending.

He reviewed the situation in between flailing weakly at the monster, trying to think of advantages he could use. He came up with a rotten list. He had this rare chance to fight Hartmut close up, oh goody. He could have slapped it, if it weren't for all those teeth. He had his favorite beam sabre, which wasn't up to snuff. He had the company of a mess of thoroughly wrecked skells.

"What's it weak to? Think, Barret!" Thermal, maybe gravity, he wasn't sure about that, not while his head was sore from pounding on the attacker. The models and brands of sabers that would have been ideal scrolled in his head, along with prices and payment plans. Sadly, he was wielding Sakuraba's finest, light and fast and shooting out beam energy that Hartmut was practically immune to. He hadn't planned on fighting a tyrant the size of a land bridge, now had he?

Hartmut must be becoming used to his puny blows. It wedged its curving maw tighter into the cavern, and Doug scrambled back between the wreckage of the Verus and the baby skell. The larger skell crumpled and split along its back, not the encouragement that Doug needed right now. A heavy block of metal crashed against Spidey. "Come on! I so do NOT need friendly fire right now." Doug used a free arm to push it away, then two arms, because the metal apparatus was heavier than he'd expected. He slashed at another darting enemy appendage, then took a moment to get a better grip on the debris before pushing it away. "I should use it as a club; it might work better ... than ..."

It would most definitely work better than. It wasn't a hunk of scrap metal. It was a mid-model Detonation-F, and undamaged as far as Doug could tell in microsecond of inspection. Doug wished like hell he knew how fire resistant Spidey the Octoskell was.

a/n: Light it up, Doug! Oh, right, there was a prompt. I used the word "round"! Once. Will this still count?