Hourly Challenge: Pair (redux)
a/n: Doug vs Hartmut 8.0, now with explosions. Spidey the Skell concludes!
Small swears, no cliffhangers! Completely ignoring the prompt this time, sorry.
All the good things belong to Monolith Soft, but Spidey the Skell is my OC skell.
Doug and Spidey pulled hard on the handle of the flail. The light shining the weapon's tip changed from a cheerful glow to a burning scarlet that sliced through Hartmut's jagged bite. Doug directed the skell to jump up, toward the ever narrowing gap between the teeth. He didn't release the handle, mostly because he was too busy scrambling to work the three available limbs, but he did notice that the chain wasn't slacking.
"Damn it, we're not moving." They must be slipping on the tongue or gums. What an embarrassing and disgusting way to go, he thought. To his horrified eyes, the monster's teeth were growing larger and more threatening. Then they raked along the window of the skell with a terrible screeching sound. "Come on, not fair. This thing has retractable jaws?!"
A moment later Doug realized part of his best hopes had been come true. The teeth were scraping the skell because he was moving out and past them. Spidey and its pilot had pulled and jumped their way to freedom. They hadn't reached safety though. Doug and Spidey were balanced on the lips of Hartmut's second lowest jaw. Doug pushed Spidey to make one more jump as the tyrant monster opened its maw again.
The chain still hadn't gone slack.
Spidey skidded on its belly onto the shelf, rear legs flailing. Doug used an upper arm (the one with the saber) to flip the skell on its back so he could get a glimpse of his eventual doom. Hartmut was snapping its jaws, blasting the area like bellows with every bite. Spidey and Doug were just a little too low for it to catch, but that wouldn't last. Already it was tilting its massive body, angling to scrape the soldier and mech from the cliff shelf. Spidey managed to get a purchase on the edge of the rock with one leg, then two, then all four lower legs. Feet spread wide and digging in firmly, the skell bent itself upright. Doug was going to meet his end standing.
And still the chain hadn't gone slack.
He hadn't dropped the handle. Four limbs stuck into the ground. One arm waved a ground weapon, useless as a kid's glow stick. That left three arms curled uselessly back over the skell's tiny rounded shoulder, clinging to the leash of the Detonation-F. The super weapon's explosive end was somewhere behind him, filling the cave with a dull and feverish red and doing nothing else.
Not exactly nothing. That chain hadn't gone slack.
Doug gave one more tug on the handle, not so much as an offensive tactic as one final act of resistance, leaning into this last brief fight. If the flail was only going to be good for an anchor, maybe he could use it to help him dart in and pull back, dart in and pull back. He could get a few tiny hits in before he missed the timing and found out what it was like to be bait.
He almost rolled forward off the edge of the shelf as the skell's arms whipped up and over. The chain, still taut, lifted over his shoulder as the head of the flail rose up behind him. Black giants, the shadows of the wrecked skells, raced across the cave walls, then sunk into nothing as the glowing tip dawned like a red sun. Doug now felt the skell being pushed backwards. He dropped Spidey down into a crouch, spreading the legs even wider, low enough that the free arm could join in the effort to stabilize the skell.
As the weapon's explosive end crested and then slammed down on Hartmut's intrusive snout, the light it emitted flashed instantaneously from red to the most brilliant white explosion that Doug had ever seen. The sound didn't even register for Doug; his mechanical ears had the advantage over organic ones and shut down immediately. No combat-related hearing loss in his future, if he had a future. But he felt the explosion in his chest, in his gut, and he'd remember that feeling for the rest of his life. If he had the rest of a life.
Spidey's tiny legs were no match for this explosion, but to Doug's horror he wasn't pushed backwards. Instead, he felt the skell pulled forward, into the space that was filled with Hartmut, Hartmut's teeth, and Hartmut's mouth. And the explosive tip of the Detonation-F.
Except that the space was empty, or rather, it was empty of Hartmut. The narrow cavern was filled now with pure explosion, an unending fury of white and heat and destruction, and Doug was zooming through this corridor of storm. Somewhere ahead of him a giant monster was being pushed out by the front of the shockwave, but Doug had the leisure to tumble around in the madness.
The Detonation-F's explosion should have been over now, but the blast kept rolling, now with sparks of electricity and a thrum of gravitational blast shooting through it. He should have been dead several seconds ago, but finding that not to be the case, Doug did what he did best: he maneuvered the skell in the swirling madness, reaching out with the legs to find an edge of the cavern, angling the arms to control tumbling and doing his best to direct its movements. An outsider, if they could have seen anything in the white hot light, would have seen a glittering spider flailing and whirling and occasionally bouncing off the wall with a metallic ping that was utterly drowned by the roar of the destructive wind. But Doug convinced himself that he was getting a handle on the turbulence and that any moment he could step out of the madness.
The cavern was almost too short for him to manage it in time. The energy wave poured out of the narrow slot cut into the wall of the greater abyss and dispersed. Doug and Spidey came to a skidding halt at the very entrance of the cavern, hanging by six legs on the upper curve. Out in the open air of the abyss, Hartmut curled back on itself in a squirming looping flip. Its howls were silent. Doug shook his head, hoping to bring his ears back on-line, and jammed his foot down on the accelerator. Spidey scrambled up the wall of the abyss.
Later, Doug swore to Alexa that the zig-zag path he'd taken up the canyon wall was a defensive measure, not because every system was struggling, including the pilot himself. He swore that he knew from the start that the dark shadow hovering above the weather barrier was a very worried Alexa, flying Doug's own skell. That the yelp she'd heard over the comm wasn't terror when she'd managed to lasso the skittering prototype. She'd just knocked the wind out of him, that was it. And he swore, over and over, that he'd know the shape of the cavern would aim every flame of the flail's explosion, as well as additional explosions from the other weapons in the skell graveyard, directly into Hartmut's ugly face.
"Shaped charges, ya know?" he'd babbled as Alexa did a hasty patch on his shoulder before flying them back to NLA. His hand gestures weren't helping either his explanation or her attempts at first aid. "Kind of like a funnel but outward? Tiny in the back but BOOM in the front?"
"Sure thing, Dougie, sure thing. You need another pain shot?"
"Just fine, 'lexa. Say, we gonna come back again? I have a thing or two to say to that goldfish."
a/n: Done. The prompt may not be obvious but it did influence how the ending went (the wrecked skells also helping the explosions).
If you have a suggestion, request, prompt, throw them at me. I'm begging. I need something to distract me from Soulmate Goose AU, but with Saltat.