Elena wasn't particularly good at violence. She was very good at making other people commit violence, but doing it herself was a less than inviting task. In the past she might have made Brent do it for her, but when an alien gun materialized in her hand and giant monsters appeared from thin air, she found that she was exceptionally good at being violent.
The room was a mess. Parts of the ceiling were missing, walls were collapsed, desks were overturned and bodies were everywhere. But the corpses didn't scare Elena. What scared her were the creatures.
They were taller than her by a at least a meter, and instead of hands they had what appeared to be clawed tentacles. They had a blob instead of feet, which made them slower but sturdier. Instead of a face they had black and red patterns etched across their heads, as well as the rest of their bodies. There were at least a few dozen of them, against four humans.
The Spectrobes did most of the fighting. King Caesar retreated into Elena's Prizmod, but Talia, Jett, and Ajax each had their own Spectrobes to command.
Jett and his Spikan fought like they were connected. Spikan slashed with his tail to knock the foe away, and Jett would complement it with a shot from his dynalium.
Ajax took the more direct approach, relying on speed and ferocity to defeat his foes. He was more agile than he looked, able to jump and leap out of the way of the creature's attack. His companion was a Zozane, a yellow leopard-like creature that was able to rotate so quickly the friction created small bolts of lightning. Instead of a dynalium, Ajax used a sword to cut down the Krawl. He would slash and stab at the creatures, and when one was off balance his Zozane would roll in and finish the job.
Talia had the most interesting technique of them all. Her Spectrobe was a Rydrake, Evolved as opposed to Adult like the others. She sat on its back like it was a horse and rode it across the room, letting its wings tear down Krawl at her flank while she sniped stragglers with her dynalium.
Elena spent the duration of the fight behind Jett, firing potshots while the others did the real fighting. She may have killed five of them, which isn't bad for someone without a fighting Spectrobe.
The battle lasted only a few minutes, no more than five, but at the end Elena was thoroughly exhausted. She wanted to go home and take a bath and wipe the dirt and grim off her skin. She wanted to sleep for a year and forget the smell of bloody corpses and disintegrating Krawl. They didn't smell like blood or rot, more like boiled cabbage or burnt ramen.
All the Spectrobes had disappeared, as had all their weapons. Elena knew her dynalium went into her Prizmod, and she wondered what else was in there. A sword? Food? Medicine?
"Ajax, you and Talia take the East Wing and clear out any remaining Krawl," Jett ordered. Suddenly he seemed like so much more than the awkward kid from the spaceship. He was suddenly in control of an insane situation, giving orders in a voice befitting a Disney princess rather than a soldier. But they obeyed his orders without question. "Elena and I will go to the West Wing to find the fossil and clear out any stragglers. I'll contact you when we're finished."
Ajax nodded and he left with Talia without a word. They jogged down the hall, their Spectrobes now returned to their respective Cosmolink and Prizmod. King Caesar had returned, but became much sadder at the sight of human corpses.
"Should we bury them?" Elena asked, regarding the bodies.
"Bury?" Jetty asked, already walking to the West Wing.
"Yeah. On Earth we usually bury our dead."
"Why?" he asked. He wasn't trying to be rude, he just didn't understand.
"It's a sign of respect. Ancient cultures thought that for a person to get to the afterlife they had to be buried."
"In Nanairo we burn bodies and turn their ashes into artificial reefs. Kollin has massive oceans, and most of our reefs are damaged. Kind of like Earth in that regard. Now come on, we need to find that fossil."
"Fossil?" Elena asked, mining for more information.
"Remember how you woke Komainu from a fossil? Well that's how all Spectrobes are awakened. And there's one here," Jett explained.
"And how do we find it?"
"Ask Komainu. He can find it."
Elena looked at him skeptically. But it wasn't exactly the strangest thing to happen that day. "King Caesar," she said, gaining the creature's attention. "Find the fossil."
His face lit up with a smile and he began sniffing around the floor of the hallway, strangely comical in contrast to the ominous flickering of the lights. He turned around to face Elena and started bouncing excitedly. Then he ran off down the hall.
They followed him for what felt like miles. They were probably underground now, given the slope of the floor. Then they found a massive steel door that had been knocked in. Inside was every conspiracy theory wrapped into one convenient storage room.
A dozen prototype weapons lay scattered across the room, besides overturned tables and what may or may not be damaged engines. On the far right there was a damaged spaceship, very similar to the one Jett used. On the left there were two tanks of a strange liquid, and in the liquid were two humans.
They were floating in some kind of stasis, one male and one female. The man had red hair, which made Elena assume that he too was a Spectrobe master. Jett made the same assumption, because his mouth was agape in.
"Were they your friends?" Elena asked.
"This is Ouran," he explained, not really answering her question.
"No way," Ajax interjected. "I though he didn't escape Giorna."
"It looks like he did. Guess he didn't make it as far as he had hoped," Talia observed.
"Or maybe he wanted to come here," Jett suggested. Maybe he had hoped to use something here to face the Krawl."
"But where's his-"
"-Prizmod," a deep, raspy voice finished. A tall, gaunt figure emerged from behind the cryotanks. His appearance made King Caesar leap back into Elena's Prizmod. His skin was an inhuman shade of grey, like wet clay. His hair, which may have once been white, was now a strange shade of green. Even stranger, he had green tattoos tracing up and down his body, swirling and twisting along his skin. "It's right here," he revealed the device in his hand before dropping it to the ground. With a single stomp, he shattered the Prizmod into a dozen pieces, shards of glass littering the floor.
"Who are you?" Ajax demanded.
"Tell me, young Spectrobe Masters. How many Krawl have you faced? A hundred? A thousand? How many of them were High Krawl?"
"My father killed the last High Krawl," Jett replied. "You remember of Krux, right? With his death, the High Krawl were no more."
"Foolish boy," the creature replied with a smile of knives. "You've never been outside your own star system until today, how would you know anything about High Krawl?"
"What's a High Krawl?" Elena quietly asked Talia.
"It's what we call a human whose been fused with a powerful Krawl. We thought they were all dead."
Despite their hushed tones, the man who was once Snowell heard them. "Haven't you been listening? Do you really doubt me? Come, then! Let's see what you children are really capable of."
For someone who could sound big and strong, the High Krawl was incredibly weak. Despite the dark power flowing through his veins, he was still a frail old man. He may have talked a big game, but his bite was weaker than his bark.
First, Talia and her Rydrake went for a direct attack. She probably thought that he would fall immediately to a Flash property Spectrobe. She didn't realize that he was an Aurora Krawl, against which Flash is weak. He batted them to the side with one hand.
Jett and Ajax worked at a team, Spikan covering them as they fired their Dynaliums and Zozane committing to a full frontal assault. Snowell didn't last more than a minute against them.
The battle was over quickly, the only casualty being Talia's pride. Snowell had no final words, no deathbed monologue about how he would have his revenge. He simply dissipated into black dust and scattered across the floor.
"Alright," Jett said as the adult Spectrobes returned to the Cosmolink. "Let's take a full inventory. If anything looks important, we probably need it. Elena, I want you to look in their computers and see what you can find. When you finish, do a full file transfer to you Prizmod just in case you missed something."
The first thing she did was look for a search bar. When she finally found one, she ran a search of the base's Intranet. She found that the people in the cryogenic chambers were found at Roswell, that their ship was what fueled American innovation for half a century, giving the world the Silicon Age, and that their weapons were too advanced to even try reverse engineering. There was nothing about Krawl, Spectrobes, or the Nanairo Planetary Patrol.
"Jett, you aren't gonna believe this," Ajax shouted. "I think I just found a Dracopod."