When Kyra snapped back into reality again, she found herself at the beginning of a long room atop a platform. Stairs led away from her and she had enough of a view to tell that she had absolutely made the right call in not running from those damned skeletons. There were a good dozen hostiles in the area with her, spread out along the length of the rectangular room she was in. Mostly they were zombies, but she caught sight of a few pinkies stomping around as well. And they all recognized her right away. A chorus of roars went up as the zombies opened fire and the pinkies began coming towards the steps that would grant them access to her.
She aimed her shotgun and fired almost without thinking.
Although she missed the zombie by a hair, she did end up hitting one of the dozen and a half or so weird metal barrels that she vaguely recognized that were scattered across the room. It was one of the loudest mistakes she'd ever made, and a pretty lucky one. The second the slug shell connected the with metal drum, it straight-up exploded into a green cloud. And then the one next to it did as well, and the one next to that.
Within seconds, the entire lower section of the room was engulfed in green explosions, and she saw the monsters coming apart at the seams, being blown to bits as a result. She found herself laughing as she bore witness to the totality of destruction she had wrought with a single shotgun shell. The explosions went on for about fifteen seconds and when the toxic dust had finally settled, all she could see were pulpy, gory remains splattered all over the place. Now that the room was clear, Kyra took a moment to actually study it.
The Blood Labyrinth, it seemed, was constructed of that same pale green brick she'd seen earlier, with floors that vaguely resembled asphalt. Or maybe she was thinking of something else. The platform she had appeared on featured the gateway and one ugly fountain. It dominated the center of the raised area she stood on: an octagon of green brick with a rectangular pillar in the center. Each side of the pillar featured a really hideous face sporting curling ram horns, and blood spilled out of the mouth in a continuous deluge, where it pooled in the octagon and then ran out one side, traveling down a little stream that bisected the center of the room, terminating in a pool farther on. A pool of blood that was now littered with floating bits and pieces of monsters.
It seemed, she surmised as she kept looking, that the UAC presence here was a bit stronger. One corner of the upper tier sported a pair of bunk beds and a trio of workstations were pressed up against the wall, cabling running from them to the gateway. One of the chairs in front of the workstations was still occupied. A scientist sat in it, well, leaned in it really, his head to the side, a large crater in his temple from where he'd shot himself. She turned away from the corpse, finishing her sweep of the upper area.
The only other thing of note was a window cut into the left side of the room. That bloody light was spilling in through it. Reluctantly, she moved closer and looked out the window. The view was on a fucking blood pond maybe twenty feet down. There didn't seem to be any way into or out of it, save for the open ceiling, and the walls, which were nearly as high up as her present location, were made of more green stone and were crawling with thick gray creeper vines that twitched and spasmed periodically.
Turning away from the sight, she moved over to the stairs and began moving down, making her way along the little blood creek. As she got down onto the lower level, she saw that the creek didn't actually end in the pool. It was simply redirected, coming out the right side and going over a fall through a narrow hole in the wall near the floor. Near that hole was another window. She heard an unfortunately familiar hissing sound coming from beyond, as well as more gurgling. Peering through it, she quickly switched to her assault rifle.
There was a large room beyond and a flotilla of flying skulls were buzzing around overhead a trio of fiends. She immediately started popping the skulls as fast as she could, given that they were absolutely the most dangerous threat. The fiends shrieked and began hurling fireballs at her, but she sidestepped and ignored them best she could as the skulls started making beelines for her. She burst the last one, spraying the area with bleached bone, just before it managed to reach her, then she quickly turned her rifle on the fiends and put them down with quick bullets to the head. Letting out her breath in a long sigh, she reloaded and kept going.
That was the name of the game: Keep Fucking Going.
No matter what, just keep going. She'd come this far, gone through two demon-infested bases and a section of Hell already. Just get through this and she'd be back on familiar ground. Probably ground overrun by screaming monsters, but it was familiar at least, and a lot closer to Earth. It would be a massive improvement over this place. Kyra finished making sure she'd killed off the hostiles beyond the window, then moved over to a door she'd spotted at the end of the room. It was similar to the medieval doors in design, but not in style, instead looking far more modern, made of polished metal. Had the UAC installed this?
She hit the button next to the door and moved on to the next room, which she immediately hated. Finding herself looking out over another large area with multiple levels and what seemed to be a trench that, yep, had blood in the bottom of it, running through a large portion of the area, was just the beginning of why she hated this place. There were torsos hanging from the ceiling in some areas, dripping blood. Human torsos, men and women who'd had everything below the gut ripped off. Their intestines hung from them like foamy, red-and-purple dead snakes. She made a note to cap each of them, just to be sure.
The place was also infested with more flying skulls, zombies, and fiends.
Just exactly who the fuck she wanted to see today.
Kyra got to work. She invested a lot of shotgun shells in the cleansing of this next area, blowing heads off of hostiles and scattering the whole place with bleached, scorched bone as she killed about ten more of those flying son of a bitch skulls. Seconds burned by, bleeding into minutes as she added even more blood to The Blood Labyrinth. The end result of her efforts was that she'd added to her demonic kill counter, grabbed some more shotgun shells and magazines, and abused her suit of armor a bit more.
She wasn't sure how long it was going to last, as there were several warnings she was ignoring relating to structural integrity failures and power shortages throughout the frame. After murdering her way through this section, making sure to put rounds through every single poor bastard that was strung up to the ceiling just to be absolutely sure that they were really dead, she found a pair of doors, and one of them was, of course, locked. It had that same red trim of skulls. The door next to it, however, wasn't locked down.
So she opened it.
It led to a much smaller room with a single pinky stomping around. She put it down with two shotgun blasts and scoped out the area. Quickly, she learned that this was, for the moment at least, a dead end, because the only other door in this room had another fucking red skull trim to it! Sighing heavily, she headed back to the starting point, as she'd seen another door near that area. Opening it up revealed another large, unnecessarily complex room that she quickly recognized as the place she'd originally found herself looking and firing into from where she'd started out. She spied the corpses she'd produced, as well as a few more zombies that had come in since then, probably to investigate what had happened to the others.
"I'll be happy to demonstrate," Kyra muttered as she took aim and fed the former humans their daily recommended dosages of lead.
As she started poking around this area, she really began to understand why they had decided to call it a labyrinth. Although this room actually wasn't complex at all, she realized as she began traversing it, it really just looked that way. There were multiple levels of platforms, another blood creek running through it, another goddamned locked down red-skull door, and a pair of lifts that took her a few minutes to figure out how to work. Her mind wandered as she hunted around, looking for useful supplies hidden away among the madness.
What must it have been like to work here? To live here? How had the UAC scientists, the Marines, the technicians, how had they all reacted when they were told what their job was going to be? How had it been framed to them? Did they know the true dangers of being here, or had they just listened to their guts and figured it would probably be dangerous as hell here? What kind of paycheck did it take to get someone to fucking live in this place? To eat meals here and sleep? To be here for days or, God forbid, weeks?
Kyra liked to think that she would've refused it outright, but...well...if it were framed right and the money was good enough, maybe not. Maybe she'd see it as a way to test herself. Honestly, if she'd never seen any of the demons, if she'd just come across these barren wastelands, she could see herself believing that while the place might once have been populated, (obviously, someone had built all this shit), it was now long empty. Because this seemed like a dead world. A wasteland of a realm. And honestly, part of her was deeply curious about this place. She was, on some level, absolutely fascinated by it.
What was this realm's history? Who had built all this and why? These were questions she kept coming back to again and again as she moved through these wretched places. It was no doubt a horrible, bloody history. Maybe they were looking at some kind of apocalypse scenario? What if this place had once been like Earth? And then some kind of event happened that poisoned the sky and killed the landscape and birthed these multitudes of living horrors? These monstrous things that could apparently continue adding to their ranks, given the fact that she now had frequently encountered her own kin among the hordes of the hostiles forces.
It was obvious that only madness ruled here, but had it always been that way?
"There you are, you son of a dildo," Kyra whispered as she finally found the red skull-key. It was, for whatever reason, tossed carelessly on the floor in a far corner of the room. She snagged it and then used it on the third red door she'd found so far, in the far left corner of the room. It led to a small chamber with a single pinky roving around mindlessly inside, and she quickly put it out of her misery with a pair of shotgun blasts.
There was a lift at the back of that room. She stepped aboard and pulled a lever. Her stomach jerked violently as the lift began its rapid descent, and now she found herself in yet another large, unnecessarily complex looking room with several different levels, pathways, lifts, and a lot more blood flowing all over the place. Not to mention a good scattering of hostiles around. She moved onto a simple platform that gave her a decent view over the area, switched to her assault rifle, and got to work. Squeezing the trigger and doling out the lead.
The trio of flying skulls hovering around had to go first, and she rained bone fragments down over the undead and the soon-to-be-dead demonic things, then began to aim for the zombies scattered across the platforms and pathways. They were pelting her position with shotgun and pistol fire. She popped the head of a former human with a three-round burst, and then cried out in surprise as one of those damned floating pumpkins hovered up into view from one of the blood trenches. Cursing, she turned the rifle to full auto and hosed the monstrous thing down with gunfire. Right as her assault rifle ran dry, the pumpkin returned fire.
The ball of energy smacked her in the chest and sent her falling back flat on her ass. Pain shot through her from multiple points and she grit her teeth against it, dropping her rifle and switching to her shotgun. From a sitting position, she opened fire, pumping the shotgun three times before popping the big, stupid, grinning monster and spraying the others with its guts. Surging to her feet, she put the shotgun to further use.
Within a few minutes, she'd cleaned up the rest of the bastards, spraying the area with their guts and gore and blood. As the last body fell, Kyra quickly fed more shells into her shotgun, then reloaded her assault rifle. She did a quick check of her ammo. She wasn't running out, but she was definitely beginning to deplete her stocks faster than she could replenish them. Well, it was already that time again to hunt for spare ammo among the dead she'd just produced. As she did, her mind went off on its own again.
Mainly she was thinking about what she wanted.
There was the big obvious stuff, like: To get out of this alive and intact. To never have to face another monster ever again. To kill the UAC. And mainly for this to be the extent of the invasion, a few lunar bases and nothing more.
To see the Earth, whole and intact.
But there were other things. She wanted a goddamned drink. A bite to eat. Oh how much she would give for a hamburger with everything. Except for onions. Those were awful. Or steak and eggs. Bacon. Tacos. What she wouldn't give for a full plate of tacos and burritos and an endless supply of chips and salsa.
Vodka. Whiskey. Booze of any kind, really. Kyra wanted to get hammered. Although even in her fantasies she did wonder if she'd ever be able to get wasted again in her life. Now that she knew these things existed, she found the notion of letting her guard down that much more difficult to accept. And a bath, too. A really, really long soak in really hot water. A Jacuzzi. To sleep, too. She wanted to sleep very badly, though the idea of doing it scared her worse than most other things. Then again, she'd been passed out butt-ass naked on the shores of Hell earlier and had apparently come out just fine. But that had been pure luck, even she knew that.
And sex.
Maybe it was stupid, the old underbrain talking, the primal parts of the human mind that still lurked in the older, darker trenches of the spirit, but she wanted to fuck so badly. Probably more than she wanted anything else. If she had to choose, if she only had one of those things available to her before dying right now, she'd choose one good, long, hard fuck. Preferably with a guy, but she'd take a sexy brunette with big, beautiful breasts. Or any hair color, really. She wasn't feeling particularly picky at the moment.
Would she ever get laid again?
It hadn't been all that difficult for all of her adult life. More people offered than she was interested in. But here and now, when her life was very likely being measured in minutes and hours rather than years and decades, where she was probably the only human for...ever, possibly, in this dimension, she could very well die before having sex again. In a way, she honestly hoped that she was the only living human being in this whole realm. She had a way out, and she (hopefully) wasn't too far from it. That probably wasn't true for anyone else who might be alive here. And this seemed about the worst place ever to be trapped in.
By the end of all her searching and musing and lonely thoughts about getting laid one more time, Kyra had managed only to find a few things. More ammo, for one. The zombies were packing, at least. Two red doors that actually ended up being the other two red doors that she had been forced to abandon for the time being. And, most importantly of all, a blue skull-key and a blue skull door, which she opened and stepped through, rifle at ready. And found something that she honestly wasn't in a great state of mind to see.
"What the fuck is this shit?" she growled.
The way beyond the door was a very small piece of land that gave way to a drop-off on all other sides, leading down to a pool of blood maybe fifteen feet down. She could see the way out of this room across from her, on another platform. And in between her and it were four rectangular pillars sticking up out of the blood, making a rudimentary path. And she would have to hop onto each one if she wanted to make it over there.
Because why the hell not?
Sighing, gritting her teeth in anger and frustration and exhaustion, Kyra girded herself for it, then made the first jump. She stuck it, waited for something bad to happen, and then when nothing did, made the second jump. As she was preparing to make the third, something shrieked very nearby and Kyra shrieked in response as cold fear shot through her system. She just barely managed to twist around, raise her shotgun, and blow the flying skull into bits without dying or falling off of the platform.
It felt like a miracle, and she stood there trembling for nearly a minute before getting herself under control and making the final few jumps. Feeling a lot more focused now, she opened up the next door and rode the lift she found down into another section of the labyrinth. And there she hesitated as she stepped off the lift. Kyra found herself now in a long stonework corridor with rows of torches along the walls. There were small, flat openings all along the base of the walls, spaced about six feet apart, down the entire length of the passageway, which was maybe a hundred feet long.
What, precisely, was this?
Something about it was extremely ominous. She took the opportunity to make sure that all of her weapons were topped off, even the rocket launcher, double-checking it to make sure it was ready to go at the drop of a hat. Nothing yet happened. Selecting her shotgun, Kyra took a step deeper into the tunnel. Still nothing.
Another step.
A deep, guttural growl came to her. She froze up, taking a step back, hunting for the source. The growl broadened, multiplied, drew closer. She heard a rapid ticking sound, like something striking stone over and over again. Breathing more rapidly, her heart hammering in her chest, sweating madly, Kyra kept trying to find the source of it.
Then she had it.
The sounds were coming from the slits near the ground. She aimed her shotgun at the nearest one, waiting. She didn't have to wait long. Thin, long legs of bone white emerged from the darkness and she stared in disgusted, wretched horror as a face emerged. An alien skull with far too many eyes, flipped upside down, peered up at her. Eight long, thin legs supported the hideous skull. It hissed and growled at her, then leaped.
Kyra squeezed the trigger and the awful spider thing vaporized into a plume of dark gore, spraying the wall.
"What is it with you fuckers and skulls?!" she screamed.
Another one emerged from the darkness, and then another from the other side of the hallway. Both began coming for her, and she saw more movement from other holes as even more spilled out into the tunnel.
"Oh fuck me," she whispered and fired the shotgun again.
She emptied the shotgun, vaporizing another seven of the ugly things, and bought herself just enough time to feed another eight shells into the weapon and keep blasting away. Dozens of them were coming at her now! What she wouldn't give for a goddamned grenade! Kyra was tempted to use the rocket launcher, but didn't give into temptation. What if something worse was waiting? Plus, it might not be the best to do that in a confined space. Although the suit of armor she was wearing could probably stand up to it…
Something she didn't particularly feel like testing.
The shotgun ran dry and she dropped it, switching to her assault rifle and rattling through the whole magazine on full automatic. She had to have dropped thirty of the things so far but more were coming. She ejected the spent mag and slapped a fresh one in, then kept going, hosing down the horde with as much precision as she could. The sheer amount of growling and hissing was beginning to overload her audio sensors, especially when combined with all the gunfire. What were these fucking things!?
How many were there?!
As her assault rifle ran dry, so did, finally, the tide of monsters.
She pulled out her pistol and put down the stragglers, then stood there at the head of a river of dark blood and death, of broken skull spider bodies, shaking and breathing heavily. Her hands trembling, she slowly reloaded her pistol, then began to check over her pockets and see if she'd missed anything, any spare mags for the assault rifle or shells. But no, all she had left now were her sidearm and rocket launcher. The other two weapons were dead. She let them hang by their slings and shifted the launcher so she could get at it more easily.
Never knew what might be up ahead.
With a loud crunch, she stepped deeper into the hallway. No more of the skull spiders came. She kept going, moving slowly down the hallway, picking up speed as she kicked her way through the drifts of corpses she'd just made. All she could hear were her lonely footsteps. Kyra kept going until she reached the end of the passageway, which terminated in another one of those medieval style doors. She walked right up to it and reached for the button, then hesitated. Something was beyond the door, she was almost certain.
Why wait?
Mustering her courage, Kyra hit the button. The door slid open and revealed another large stone chamber, although this one wasn't quite as complicated. The edges were lost in shadow, but near the back of the room, she could see the gateway she was looking for. Something was wrong, though. She moved a little bit into the room, trying to see the edges. And her light-amp feature pushed back the shadows, revealing…
"Oh sick," she whispered.
Suddenly, the giant skull spiders made sense. The outer perimeter of the room was covered in thick webbing, and embedded in the webbing were bodies. She saw mostly humans, but some fiends were wrapped up in there as well.
Okay, so she was in a spider's nest. A giant demonic spider. And she'd just killed several dozen of her babies.
So where was the giant spider?
Kyra heard something overhead, the slightest sound, and felt cold black terror boil through her as she snapped her gaze upwards and locked eyes with what was easily the biggest fucking spider she'd ever seen in her life. Except it wasn't quite a spider. It was a human/spider hybrid. It had the body of a giant spider, with thick white legs and a huge, fat body, but the torso of a...well, maybe human was too strong a word. A female torso with a vaguely feminine yet very demonic face with a cluster of eyes the color of space stuck out of the body.
The monster shrieked madly as soon as it realized Kyra had noticed it and dropped from the ceiling. Kyra barely managed to get out of the way. As she stumbled backwards, struggling to get some distance between them, she grabbed the rocket launcher, aimed, and fired. The rocket leaped from its metal nest and rapidly began crossing the distance between the two of them. She was sure that she'd killed this big ugly thing before it could get going, so grateful that she'd hung onto the launcher and not used it for anything else.
Then the giant spider bitch queen gestured sharply with one hand and the rocket flew right off course, instead going into a wall across the room and exploding harmlessly among the webbing and the dead.
"What the fuck?!" Kyra cried as she hastily reloaded.
What had that been!? She watched as the spider queen gestured again and there was an ugly ripping sound from the right. Kyra looked over and saw one of the fiend bodies come loose from the webbing. No, not come loose. It was ripped straight out, as though grasped by an invisible hand. The spider queen raised its hand and then jerked it towards her. Kyra cried out as the body came right for her. She sidestepped, barely avoiding the impromptu projectile. What was she fighting!? She had to end this quick.
She kept strafing as she finished reloading the launcher and the spider bitch started to rip more corpses off the walls and hurl them at her. As soon as the next rocket was slotted, she drew several steps closer, aimed, and fired. This one got closer, definitely, but the spider queen again deflected it harmlessly into the ceiling.
"Fuck!" Kyra screamed, scrambling to reload her third, and final, rocket.
What was she going to do!? Another body came flying at her and she jumped out of the way. Why in the fuck was there a giant spider monster woman in Hell who knew goddamned telekinesis? Seriously!? What kind of fucking sense did that make?! As she finished reloading and started trying to figure out how to deal with this problem that life had seen fit to throw at her, an idea suddenly slammed together in her head, and she was off and running before she could think better of it. It was time to put this armor to the test.
Kyra sprinted directly towards the spider queen, screaming madly as she ran, and prepared for the worst. As she got close enough, the spider queen did as she'd expected and gestured sharply at her. She was hit with a telekinetic blast and thrown backwards, but she pulled the trigger. This time, the rocket was too close to avoid. Kyra was thrown backwards even faster by another, much more powerful blast that consumed the spider bitch in a fiery eruption of death and smoke and force. She hit the stone floor and bounced a few times, and immediately several warning alarms began flashing in her suit. When she finally came to a halt, the suit suddenly died. Every single thing in it went offline. She laid there for a moment, waiting to see if it rebooted.
Nope. Nothing.
With a sigh, she activated the emergency escape protocol and the suit came off of her in bits and pieces. She sat up, shoving it off of her and listening to it clatter to the floor. She looked for signs of the spider queen and found the evil bitch splattered here, there, and everywhere. The rocket had more than done its job.
"Oh crap," she whispered as she laid eyes on the gateway and the workstation plugged into it. Those had, as far as she could tell, survived. Goddamn that had been stupid! But what if- "Double crap," she muttered, and started frantically searching the pockets of the armor. If that PDA was busted she might be fucked.
But she found it, intact. It powered on and the files were all there. Sighing in relief, Kyra got up and retrieved her pistol, the ammo for it, and any other supplies that might have survived the chaos. The launcher was empty, but she kept it anyway, just in case she came across a few more rockets. A new energy seemed to fill her as she hurried over to the workstation. She was home free! Well, she was at least getting out of this place.
Firing up the workstation, she scanned the PDA and watched as the coordinates to Luna Station appeared. The gateway turned on, dark energy crackling as a hole in reality itself appeared. Without hesitation, Kyra stepped up to it and then disappeared into the portal.