Salvador frowned in confusion, staggering slightly as the impacts shuddered throughout the hull. "What's that? Something turning on?"

"We destroyed everything that turns on," Axton bit out. He panned his weapon around the cargo bay. "Can anyone tell where it's coming from?"

Maya had her eyes closed, listening. "I'd almost swear it's coming from outside the ship, except..."

"Except there's nothing out there except cliff face," Gaige finished. The pounding was still continuing, and growing louder. "So where-"

A piercing shriek of rending metal shattered the air, and the most powerful impact yet rocked the ship. The deck pitched forward sharply, throwing the others off the balcony and back into the water.

Gaige came up for air, sputtering. She found herself staring up at the ceiling, and there were suddenly what looked like gray tree trunks tipped with rock sticking through the metal. They seemed to flex-

"Fingers?"

Half the remaining cargo hold bulkhead vanished, ripped away and hurled into the distance, and the Vault Hunters found themselves staring at a creature almost as big as the Eridian Warrior. It roared at them, foul smelling breath filling the air and spewing bits of purple slime-

"Look out!"

A massive forearm came smashing down, punching through the roof like it were paper. The creature was too big to actually get into the cargo hold, but its was vicious enough to try. The creature kept tearing at the ship, trying to rip enough of the metal away to get at the small band of fighters.

Gaige didn't notice if anyone had gotten crushed. She just opened fire, shooting wildly at the thing's face, its arms, anywhere that looked like a target.

Fortunately, it was big enough that everything was a target.

She wasn't firing alone for long, either. Maya's SMG joined in, then Axton's rifle. Zero started taking precise, rapid shots with a bayoneted sniper rifle. Krieg had opened up with his rarely used firearm, the biggest, nastiest, most rusted hunk of metal ever to spew a bullet. Salvador was firing two-handed, both weapons hurling lead. The air was thick with gunsmoke and the smell of cordite.

Unfortunately, all their fire only seemed to aggravate it. The monster roared again, ignoring the bullets it must have swallowed, and lurched forward, snapping its train car sized jaws at them.

"The left arm! Shoot the left arm!"

Gaige couldn't tell who actually shouted the order, but nobody questioned. Seven guns shifted to the weight-bearing limb, blasting in a desperate attempt to make the creature lose its grip. The thing slammed its right arm down, smashing through more of the roof. Water cascaded around them, and inexplicably, their own bullets started ricocheting everywhere. Gaige flinched as her shield indicator flashed a warning-

There was an abrupt, focused explosion at the creature's right eye. It shrieked in pain, clutching at the bleeding eye socket with both hands-

-and fell out of the ship.

Salvador blinked and lowered his guns. "Where'd big and ugly go?"

"The fastball special Has earned us a little time," Zero said, slipping another grenade from his belt, "But it can't be dead."

"Not from that little blast," Axton growled. "It'll be back up the cliff in a second, and royally pissed."

"What is that thing?" Gaige gasped. "What the hell is it?!"

"I think it's a bullymong," Maya said in disbelief, "but I've never seen one that big."

"Whatever it is, it's coming back!" Salvador yelled. He was standing at the edge of the hole in the ship, staring down the cliff face. "We've got maybe two minutes!"

Axton looked at the others. "Any ideas?"

"Shoot while he's climbing," Maya suggested. "Maybe we can kill it before it gets here."

"Our best shots couldn't scratch that thing at point-blank range!"

"Blast it off the cliff?"

"We all know it'd just keep coming. Besides, I don't think we can destroy enough rock face to slow its climb."

"Concentrate fire," Zero suggested. "All of our strength at one point Might just be enough."

"We already tried that!"

"Not with all our firepower we didn't," Gaige said quickly. "Axton, give me your ECHO."

"What?"

"Your ECHO! I've got an idea, but there's not much time!"

"Are you nuts?!" Axton yelped. "That's got all my combat data in it! You mess that up and I could lose all my turret skills!"

"If you don't give it to me, we're not getting out of here alive!" Gaige shouted.

"Decide fast, hermano!" Salvador yelled, retreating from the cliff edge. "He's comin' up quick!"

Axton hesitated another half second, gritted his teeth and slapped the device into Gaige's hand. "Make it fast."

Gaige hooked the device to her mechanical arm and started typing something on her own ECHO unit. "This should just take a minute..."

"Here it comes!"

Thick, gnarled, clawed fingers dug into the floor of the cargo hold. "Gaige..."

"Thirty seconds! Cover me!"

The bullymong's massive left arm appeared.

"Gaige!"

"Ready!" She held her hand out. "Follow Deathtrap's lead!" Her fist clenched, and Deathtrap flared into existence. Normally, the floating killing machine was intimidating enough, between the spikes all over its body and the bladed hand. This time...

Axton stared in disbelief. "Did you fuse my turrets to your robot's arms?!"

"Missile pods and all." Gaige grinned. "Kill it, boy!"

Deathtrap unleashed a hail of fire that could have leveled a city. His innate laser and lightning shot forth, burning and blasting at the impenetrable hide. Twin turrets, each with twin guns and dual missile pods threw enough destructive power to kill a battalion of enemies at the giant bullymong's left shoulder. It took a swipe at Deathtrap with its right arm, but the robot dodged out of the way and continued the relentless assault.

"Fire! Fire now!"

Seven guns once more added fire to fray, pounding its thick hide in concert with Deathtrap's onslaught. The creature bellowed in pain and confusion, unable to block all the fire or kill the attackers. Deathtrap pressed the advantage, flying in closer to the bullymong-

The armor cracked.

Gaige didn't actually see what happened next. The creature was obscured by smoke and debris when a horrifying sound, a wailing, raging shriek, echoed around them. A few seconds later she realized Deathtrap had stopped firing, and released her own trigger. Gradually, everyone stopped shooting and the smoke began to clear.

The bullymong's left arm up to the shoulder was still in front of them. The rest of the creature was gone.

Gaige let out a shaky sigh and collapsed to the deck, ignoring the water that came up to her chest. "I... I don't think it's coming back from that."

Maya walked cautiously up to the edge of the ship and chanced a look down. She flinched back quickly, grimacing. "Nope, not coming back. He didn't catch himself that time."

Krieg joined her and whistled. "Grenade in the sauce pot again."

"That was you?! I was finding spaghetti sauce everywhere for a week!"

Axton looked over Deathtrap as the bot flew back to Gaige's side. "Interesting tactic."

"A killer robot gunzerking with missile turret mounted, slag-spewing dual chain guns," Salvador said. He sounded odd. "It's... I..."

Maya looked at Salvador in disbelief. "Sal, are you crying?"

Salvador sniffed and wiped his nose. "I've never seen anything so beautiful!" he wailed. He dropped to his knees and engulfed Gaige in a bearhug. "Thank you, mi hermana! I'll never forget this!"

Maya laughed as the startled girl patted Salvador's shoulder, clearly uncertain how to escape from her delightedly sobbing friend. Krieg seemed to be laughing under his mask, and even Zero had to flash a :D

Only Axton seemed subdued. He was looking at Deathtrap's arms. "You'll be able to... undo that, right?"

Now Gaige had to laugh. "Of course," she assured him, pushing Salvador off and standing up. "I'll separate their programs when we get back to Sanctuary." Her smile faded as she looked at the monstrous, motionless arm. "Where did that thing come from?"

"No idea," Salvador sniffed. His nose was still running, but he was getting himself back under control. "Bullymongs get big, but that thing was legendary. There's never been one like that." He grinned wildly. "For killing that, I say this with more truth than I ever have before: I am ALL that is man!"

Maya rolled her eyes. "You goof."

Gaige was running her metal hand over the claws. "It can't have been here when we came out the first time. You know Hammerlock would've gone to any lengths to hunt something like this."

Maya joined her. "But something like that doesn't just crop up out of nowhere. It's got to be..." She trailed off. "Gaige, you're wounded!"

"Huh?"

"You've got a hole in your left arm."

"I do?" Gaige checked her mechanical forearm, and, to her surprise, found a bullethole a few inches behind the wrist. She held it up to her eye and looked at Maya through it. "Whoa. When did that happen?"

Maya took her hand, examining it. "Maybe you picked up a stray round from Deathtrap's barrage. Or it could have happened during all the ricochets."

"I guess," Gaige admitted. "At least it doesn't hurt." She looked closer. "Uh-oh."

"What is it?"

She gave Axton a sheepish grin. "All of Deathtrap's digistruct circuitry is in this arm. This shot, whenever it got me... weeeell..."

Deathtrap dissolved, but it wasn't the usual smooth, simple dissolution. Random bits of him seemed to explode into fragments of light until there was nothing left.

Gaige sighed. "It nicked the digistruct circuitry. I can't summon Deathtrap until I fix it." Her expression grew a little more embarrassed. "Or give you back your turrets."

A look very close to panic raced over Axton's features. "What?!"

"I can still separate the two systems!" Gaige said hastily. "It'll just take me a little longer."

"How long?" he demanded.

"More time than it has to if you keep badgering her," Maya cut in sharply. "Let's get those plans and go home."

"All right, all right. I just hope computers still work after all this," Axton fretted. "Otherwise this whole day will have been for nothing."

"Well, the light ramp is still on. That's a good sign," Gaige pointed out hopefully.

"Yeah." Axton looked out at the others. "You three coming?"

Zero and Krieg were both sloshing around in the shallower, but still semi-deep water, staring down. "Tiger lost his fang!" Krieg shouted back.

"I, too, need my blade. My guns without their sword friend?" Zero shook his head and sighed. "They'd get too lonely."

"Know the feeling," Axton said dryly. "How about you, Sal?"

"Hey, muchachos! Check it out!" Salvador was standing where the giant arm had joined its owner's shoulder. From just the right angle, it looked like... "I've got a huge hand!"

Axton just rolled his eyes and went up the ramp. Gaige was already at one of the terminals, sitting on an ammo crate and typing. Maya was leaning over her shoulder, watching. "How's it going?"

"Slowly," Gaige said absently. "I think the data we need is still intact, but I'm having to dig through the whole file system to find it. Nakyama wasn't much for keeping anything other than his Jack research data organized."

"Speaking of which, I was thinking about... Mongzilla, or whatever you want to call it," Maya said.

"'Mongzilla' seems about right," Axton said. "What about it?"

"There is no way we just missed that thing last time around," Maya insisted. "Given that it attacked us in this ship, coupled with the way the security systems inexplicably came on like that... do think Nakyama might still be alive?"

"And he set all this up?" Axton shrugged. "Maybe. He did like to make lethal monsters from the darkest corners of a madman's nightmares."

"By those standards, Mongzilla out there was almost too plain," Gaige quipped. "No sick Jack face anywhere on it, for one thing."

"Do you suppose Jackenstein might've... bred... before we killed it?" Maya asked uneasily. "It was part bullymong, after all."

Gaige stopped typing and made a face. "Ew. Thanks for that mental image."

"No idea," Axton said, ignoring Gaige. "Sal or Hammerlock might know how fast a bullymong grows. We could check with them."

"I wonder if we could check the local fauna concentration," Maya mused. "If we could see how fast the animal population has been decreasing, maybe we could judge how much it's been eating. That would give us a timeline for its growth."

"Even with all the tough critters here, Mongzilla would've been top of the heap," Axton said, nodding. "Everything would've been food."

"And it would've needed a lot to get to that size," Maya went on. "In a few years, it might even..." she trailed off. "Oh, god."

"What?"

"It needed food," Maya said, her tone faint and horrified. "So much food that it cleared out the whole canyon." She looked at Axton with haunted eyes. "That... mountain of bodies out front..."

Axton tried to wrap his head around it. "You think that was its version of a bullymong waste pile?"

"That wasn't waste." Gaige had stopped typing. "All that stuff was intact, like it hadn't even been touched yet." She turned to Maya, starting to look like she might throw up again. "You think someone was feeding it."

"Feeding it?!" Axton looked at the arm laying in the cargo hold. "You mean someone slaughtered everyone and everything in this entire canyon to feed some kind of unnatural freak? Who would do that?"

There was a long silence, then Gaige smiled feebly. "You guys haven't taken any jobs from Dr. Zed lately, have you?"

A weak laugh managed to escape all three of them, and the tension dropped a little. Maya patted Gaige's shoulder. "Maybe we'll find out someday, but it's not why we're here right now. Keep looking for the schematics. We're all ready to go home."

"Schematics. Right." Gaige exhaled sharply and returned to her typing. "I was actually almost there...uh... here we go!"

"No kidding?" Axton and Maya both looked at the screen. "How do they look?"

"Not corrupted, if that's what you're worried about," Gaige said. "It's a big file, though. Between the sheer amount of data and the damaged processing speed... I'd say we're looking at about a ten minute file transfer."

"Ten minutes is good," Axton said. "I'll see if our melee fighters found their weapons yet."

"Oh, wait, one more thing!"

Axton paused at the doorway and turned around. "Sure, what?"

"Can you pull one of those talons off the arm? I wanna show Hammerlock."

Axton just stared at Gaige, while Maya covered her mouth with one hand, clearly trying not to laugh. "Really? Hammerlock?"

"How else am I gonna convince him we just took down the biggest bullymong in Pandoran history?"

"We could take a picture," Maya said, the edge of a laugh in her voice.

"That too! Actually, let's do that first! A picture before we deface it for a trophy! And I can show off my war wound while we're at it!" She dashed past Axton, back into the hold. "Hey, guys! Group photo in front of the arm!"

"Awesome idea, hermana!"

Axton glanced at Maya, who was now shaking with laughter. "I still say this Hammerlock crush isn't healthy."

"It's harmless," Maya said, walking past. "Besides, this picture will look great framed and hanging next to our wanted posters."

"You realize this means we're walking back into that blasted lake again, right?"

Maya shrugged. "Some things are worth wet feet."

[Up from the depths,

Thirty stories high,

Breathing slag,

His head in the sky,

MONGZILLA

MONGZILLA

MONGZILLA

MOOOOONGZILLA!]

*ahem*

[Thank you for reading.]