A/N: Chapter late due to revisions to other chapters. My apologies.
Disclaimer: I do not own FFVII or FFX, nor do I stand to make any money off its creative property.
The Fall of Gaia
Chapter Five: Behemoth
There was no time for Zeitu to try to evaluate the situation before a great snarling Behemoth had its claw reaching through the door in an attempt to grab a delicious looking victim. Cirri was the first to react, and the report from her gun was unexpectedly loud in Zeitu's ears in these tight quarters. Cloud, seeing a moment's opportunity in the Behemoth's startled withdraw from a source of sudden pain, leaped forward with his sword in hand, pulling the two-handed sword's great blade horizontally to slice off the fiend's hand. The blade caught into the extremely tough bone of the great creature, and Cloud was drawn forward in his attempt to wrench the blade free of rapidly healing flesh. It was at this time that Zeitu's brain decided to remember that he was supposed to be fighting alongside them, and he found himself beginning to move unusually dextrously as he charged into battle, rolling forward to dodge the Behemoth's other fist crashing through the front wall of the equipment shop and letting it pass over his body as it reached at Cloud to try to pull him off. Zeitu decided to stay down for the moment as a volley of bullets from the back of the store buried themselves into the flesh of the fiend's left arm, which was currently above him.
The large beast pulled itself up into a standing position outside of the equipment shop, dragging Cloud, still trying to pull out his sword, out with its arms and allowing the smaller fiends room to leap through the huge hole that used to be a wall and attack the civilians. Zeitu was swiftly on his feet again, slicing through two of the fiends and leaping out into the street to try to help Cloud or at least get him out of the soldier-police's line of fire. Cirri was soon out there with them, laying down covering fire in a perimeter around the fight with the Behemoth while a sudden burst of flame saw Cloud's sword explosively ejecting from the creature's right arm, blowing off its right claw in the process.
A peculiar glowing white wind swirled around the beast, cauterizing the stub that used to be its hand as it roared in pain. An answering roar from down the street signaled to Cloud, Zeitu, Cirri, and the entrenched people inside the shop, that the Behemoth was not alone and that a tactical retreat might be in order. The solider-police needed no prompting, providing a zone of safety as they led the civilians down an alleyway out the back door of the equipment shop and marking up the three fighters in the street as either necessary losses or strong enough to take care of themselves. Zeitu, on the other hand, was determined not to run until at least this Behemoth was dead; otherwise, it would probably just follow them and they'd find themselves in the same situation all over again. He glanced over at Cirri, and the look on the girl's face eliminated all hope of convincing her of running away with the civilian group.
He hadn't noticed it before, but in these fights, Cirri seemed to dive straight into battle and, in some way, find some sort of calm or satisfaction from participating. While he found his thoughts drawn to the idea of running, and it was only the self-convinced belief that near Cloud and fighting was the safest location in the middle of this green fog that kept him here, she seemed to relish the battle for its own sake. Not to mention, she seemed to hold the gun naturally and clearly had had some sort of training with firearms. She wasn't the girl he had imagined in his head from across the glass.
This train of thought was interrupted when Cloud's blade took advantage of an opening in the Behemoth's defenses, his hands expertly maneuvering the massive sword into an upward slash that found the fiend's good arm lacking a critical motor-nerve that left its left arm limply hanging. The white wind started to pick up again and surround the damaged body part, and Zeitu decided to make a bet on the idea that the wind was some sort of spell that the beast was casting. And, while the beast was focused on casting that spell, and Cloud was providing a distraction by trying to maneuver into a position to take out one of the beast's legs, and Cirri was still holding a line by gunning down any of the smaller fiends that came too close, Zeitu would find his chance to hopefully strike through. Using the flat side of his longsword to bash a fiend he was fighting at the moment away from himself, he charged forward straight at the Behemoth, surprising himself once again by being able to predict the beast's telegraphed right-armed stump-thrust. He leaped in the air in anticipation, launched himself off the top of the beast's arm, and dug his longsword directly into its eye, twisting it and closing his own eyes to try to block out the disgusting image of seeing a living being having its skull pierced with a blade. The creature exploded into pyre-flies and small meteors, breaking Zeitu's arm and blowing away a large swath of fiends.
Zeitu was on the ground, writhing in pain when Cloud was suddenly beside him. "Good work, Cure, we have to move. Let's go!" Zeitu was about to tell off Cloud for being so demanding of him when he was clearly wounded, but with a gasp he felt his arm bones snapping painfully back into place and the wound sealing with an excruciating burning sensation. Cloud pulled Zeitu up onto his feet, and Zeitu picked up his longsword as he ran to follow after Cloud and Cirri into the alleyway before the other Behemoth could show up.
Cloud looked extremely tired. He was clearly trying to hide this fact from Zeitu and Cirri, but despite his attempts to cover up his exhaustion, his movement was sluggish. Zeitu looked at his sphere-net key to check the time, wondering how much longer they could repeat this cycle of run-fight-run before they eventually dropped dead from lack of energy, and found himself staring at a malfunctioning piece of equipment. The thing was sparking erratically and glowing with a faint green aura, and Zeitu surmised that it had absorbed some of the energy from the Behemoth's death throes and was on the fritz. It didn't look broken, per se, but it would take more time than Zeitu had at the moment to figure out what was wrong with it and get to work repairing it.
"Cloud, are you okay? You don't look so good," Cirri whispered to Cloud after they had found a small, vacant alleyway with easy escape routes and cleared it of fiends. "It's much harder to cast than normal," was Cloud's response as he looked to eight glowing, colored orbs running down the center of his blade. Zeitu recognized a purplish colored orb that looked a lot like the four orbs running down the center of his own blade. "Hey, wait, what are those spheres in these swords, anyways? I've never seen anything like them before." Cloud looked surprised for a moment, then suddenly nostalgic and melancholy, and then stoic as the mask went back on. "They're materia. Condensed mako that let you tap into the knowledge of the Planet." Zeitu and Cirri both stared at Cloud with bemused looks on their faces and were met with a concerned and brooding stare in return. After a moment of silence, Zeitu broke it with "It looks like there's a lot that needs to be explained, here."
"Yeah," was Cloud's only reply.
A/N: Thank you for reading.