Lycaon

When a strange female voice intruded into Lycaon's communication system, it took him a half second to realize it as Belle's digital assistant. "Get Belle out!"

A simple advisement that said everything that it needed to, though at an inopportune time: midway through Lycaon's high kick at a pouncing ethereal. His cybernetic shin smashed into the murderous little fax machine and sent its fragments bouncing off the hallway walls. Nearby, Ben Bigger's girder-hammer smashed down on a scrambling fax machine. All of the abandoned office equipment having somehow spontaneously corrupted, grown stumpy little limbs, and became eager for their blood.

As ethereals went, these were not high on the danger scale- but there sure were a lot of them. Far too many for a single person to handle, and so it was with sincere chagrin that as soon as his kicking foot returned to the ground, Lycaon leapt backwards towards Belle and the server room, leaving Ben alone with the horde.

"Hold fast, Lord Ben!" said Lycaon. "But a moment!"

"Hey!" said Ben, surprised at his comrade's sudden retreat. Another fax machine scrambled atop his girder, intending to run along its length to get at Ben's face. Ben lifted the girder two handed and slammed it against the ceiling, crushing the attacker against the crossbeams. He then smashed it back down on two scarab-like telephones trying to get at his ankles along the ground.

Belle's safety was of much higher priority to Lycaon than justifying himself to Ben, so Lycaon wasted no time explaining himself. He turned on the balls of his feet and leapt through the hole in the wall, rolled to a smooth landing, and saw the open server room door before him. Belle was on her knees in her VR headset, arms typing frantically on an invisible keyboard, meanwhile blue arcs of energy were coiling themselves off the top of the server tower. Lycaon had seen this before.

Lycaon's legs fired their propulsion jets, shooting him towards Belle. He screeched to a halt on the tile, his metallic heels grinding him back to a fast stop. He took firm grasp of the back of Belle's clothing, letting himself fall ass-first toward the ground, Belle's body between his splayed legs. He pulled Belle backwards onto his chest, his back hitting the tile floor as he did so, and with his toes now skyward and facing back the other direction, he fired his leg jets once again. The engines whined into full thrust and rocketed Lycaon back along the floor, his white back fur and tank top smooth enough to slide him along the tile on his back with Belle secured atop his abdomen. They slid out of the server room, scooting along the floor of the little entrance room with alarming speed towards the opposite wall. With a desperate hyper-extension of one leg, Lycaon managed to plant his toes on the wall, arching his spine up and back to make contact, barely preventing the top of his skull from slamming into the wall.

"Explosion imminent!" said the voice in Lycaon's ear.

"Lycaon! What are you-?!" objected Belle immediately upon them stopping, but Lycaon rolled Belle over and smothered her body with his own. Her objection became a grunt as his weight again smothered her under him.

The server tower did not so much explode as spontaneously fragment outward like a grenade, shards of plastic and metal filling the small rooms and bouncing off every hard surface. Lycaon's quick roll had taken them out of the direct line of the blast, thanks to the doorway which separated the two rooms, but he grunted as he felt a few sharp somethings penetrate his fur coat and impale themselves into his flesh at various points of his body.

The clinkings and clankings of bouncing shrapnel ended. He popped up on all fours, bridging himself over Belle's body that had been curled up in a fetal position beneath him. Belle took off her VR headset and looked at him. She seemed unharmed and nodded, answering Lycaon's unvoiced concern. Lycaon could smell blood in the air, but it was only his. Belle was unscathed.

"Lady Belle, I must return to Lord Ben," said Lycaon quickly, his attention already shifting back to the sounds of physical combat outside their room. "Please station yourself near the hole in the wall, and when it is clear, we will leave."

"A- alright," said Belle, a little shakily.

Lycaon judged her in sound mind, however, and he sprang away from her and turned towards Ben's battlefield. A single ethereal had passed Ben and was clambering through the hole in the wall towards Lycaon and Belle. It was some sort of laptop computer that had grown six legs and teeth. Lycaon lifted one leg and stomped the thing into the wall, shattering it entirely. Wherever its headcore was inside it, he got it- the creature began dissolving.

Outside, Ben was holding his girder in both hands and straining to block the advance of three copy machines that had grown burly arms and legs from compressed sheetrock. Ben was grimacing and straining, and could do nothing about a growing horde of smaller ethereals that were crawling their way up the hallway behind their copy-machine vanguard. He needed support immediately.

Lycaon rolled out of the hole in the wall, planted a foot, and launched a high kick in a downward arc, his leg jets firing to increase the velocity of his foot. His metallic toes knifed upon the top of the nearest copy machine, penetrating the plastic cover, shattering the glass of the copy surface, and then shattering something else that wasn't glass that was within: the headcore that Lycaon's experience with ethereals had taught him to expect to find just there. That ethereal fell limp and began to dissolve.

Ben Bigger was apparently not stronger than three burly ethereals; however, he was stronger than two. The moment Lycaon killed the third, Ben roared in defiance and shoved savagely up and forward on his girder. The two copy-machines were pushed off balance on their heels and fell backward under the weight of the girder and Ben's strength. They hit the floor, the girder hit them, and Ben's jumping weight hit the girder- grinding the two living machines into bits of plastic and glass upon the ground.

The ethereal swarm pounced, but Lycaon stepped into their path, becoming a spinning blur of kicks and icy-blue leg jet ignitions. The walls and ceiling of the hallway rattled with the flying pieces of broken ethereals. Whether top, dervish, or ballerina- Lycaon at some point resembled them all as he responded instinctively to the leaping attackers.

After the last murderous little machine had launched itself helpfully right into Lycaon's wheelhouse (crunch!), he spun to an easy stop. His breathing was slightly elevated, but all in all, these ethereals were not much of a threat. The hallway was a mess of broken parts and fractured plastics.

"Ben!" yelped Belle. "Lycaon!"

Lycaon's head jerked towards the sound, but the first thing he saw in Belle's direction was a smallish ethereal that must have gotten past him. It was a paper cutter, of all things, and its long-handled blade was poised to snap upon his own tail. The world went into slow motion. He was flat footed.

A bear paw slapped the ethereal to the ground, shattering it. A bear foot then smashed it into pieces. Lycaon looked gratefully at a grimacing Ben Bigger, who looked up from his foot and grinned at Lycaon.

"You have my gratitude, Lord Ben," said Lycaon, his chest swelling with genuine gratitude.

"You'd look a bit funny without the tail," said Ben with a smile. "And I only saw it because Belle shouted."

Lycaon looked to Belle who was half out of the hole in the wall, holding a hand to her chest, and looking relieved. "Thank you, Lady Belle."

Belle's relief turned to frustration. "Be more careful!"

"As you wish, Lady Belle," said Lycaon.

Suddenly, both Belle and Ben put hands to ears.

Belle

Her heart still thumping over Lycaon's close call, Belle startled slightly as Wise's voice suddenly crackled in her earbud.

"Belle, we're in," said Wise. "Looks like… we're a couple blocks away. You all okay?"

"Yeah," said Belle, "We just fought some ethereals but we're okay."

"Good. Well, uh," said Wise distractedly. "I'm not sure what Koleda and the others are planning to do now, but it seems there's something in here they already don't like. They're discussing new plans."

Belle looked over to see Ben Bigger also paying attention to his own earbud. He was frowning thoughtfully, but he saw Belle's gaze.

"I didn't notice, but this hollow is apparently much larger inside than outside," said Ben to the silent question. "The street plans don't match up and there are buildings in here that should not exist."

Belle didn't know what to make of that. "What does that mean?"

"Some of the buildings in here are real, and the others are reflections of the hollowspace," said Ben with a sigh, "And they're all shuffled- so, it means my hope of clearing the hollow and the buildings is dead in the water. No point in knocking down buildings that don't actually exist. We just need to hunt the hollow's source and be done with it."

Belle knew that the interior of the hollow could be different from the reality it had consumed, but she'd never thought about the ramifications afterward. Belobog's central focus on in-hollow construction and demolition obviously made their people well-versed in the weird interactions of hollowspace and reality. It might be interesting to hear some of their stories sometime, but that was definitely sometime else.

"I want to check out the server room," said Belle, seeing as they still had time.

Lycaon's tail flicked. "Lady Belle, we have defeated this group of ethereals, but there may be others and we are isolated from our reinforcements. We should rendezvous with them and return here with force."

Belle felt a growth of frustration. But they were right here! Yet Ben was nodding in agreement with Lycaon's words, and that took the wind out of Belle's sails. If both her escorts were in agreement, then perhaps her instinct to keep digging was in the wrong. The last time she'd ignored advice and struck out on her own she'd downloaded a figurative bomb into her brain. So…

"Okay, I guess-" said Belle.

The world shuddered violently, throwing everyone off balance.

"Alert!" said Fairy suddenly. "Massive ethereal signal detected near your position."

A strange, rippling, crackling sound grew up around them. The hallways, the walls, the ceiling tiles- everything around them suddenly began to grow outward with weblike projections. Belle felt something tug at her shoulder and she saw Ben's wall hole growing this webbing from all sides- she scrambled through in a panic, not wanting to be trapped behind it, and Lycaon was there immediately to pull her through.

But the webbing did not stick to her shoulder, and none of it seemed interested in their feet, either. The webbing was reaching out for other bits of webbing, the various growing materials meeting and tangling and then apparently hardening. Whatever was happening, it looked gross and Belle didn't like it.

"The hollow source is here now," said Belle. "We must have attracted it. Let's go get the others!"

"Yes," agreed Lycaon and Ben together. No experienced hollow raider was eager to confront the types of ethereals that could generate a hollow. They were always strong, dangerous, and large. Something you wanted a large team to take on.

Ben set off down the hall back towards the building exit. Lycaon reached for Belle and walked behind her closely, a hand in the small of her back, as she trotted after Ben. His ears were rotating wildly and he was grimacing. Whatever he was hearing, he obviously didn't like it.

The earth shuddered again, forcing them all to a stumbling stop, then the entire world lurched off kilter. The left side of the hallway suddenly tilted upward and the right side tilted downward. Ben fell and rolled into the downward wall, his girder smashing into the wall plaster. Lycaon's legs splayed out like those of a camera tripod and Belle felt his hands grip her tightly and hold her upright as she lost her balance- they slid slowly down towards the right-lower wall, too.

Then the world lurched again, and the tilt suddenly corrected itself. Belle felt a butterfly in her stomach as she felt like she was being pulled towards the floor by suddenly more intense gravity. She heard Lycaon grunt with the effort of holding himself upright. Ben, who had been in the middle of getting up, flopped and rolled back to the floor as everything leveled out, his girder falling limply to the floor ahead of him.

Ben got up and continued on down the hall, running faster now. Lycaon and Belle were close behind, their steps fast but cautious, as the floor under them seemed to be unsteady. It kept moving in slight ways that kept the floor from being exactly where a foot expected the floor to be from step to step.

"Belle! We found the hollow-source!" said Wise's excited voice in her ear. "Belle, do you see it? It's like one of those movies, right?! With the giant lizard attacking the city!? You see it, don't you?!"

Simultaneously, she and Ben and Lycaon came to a trotting stop in the entrance lobby where they had entered the office building. Instead of a desolate, abandoned street outside the windows- there was a desolate and abandoned cityscape stretching out below them, running outward into the near distance till the curving horizon of the hollow's event horizon delineated the edge of the hollow's world.

That viewpoint suddenly altered drunkenly, and Belle's stomach protested as her entire world tilted in the same direction. Lycaon's leg's splayed out again and he caught her. Ben teetered forward on tiptoes to keep his balance and slammed his girder down and leaned on it. The floor under them continued to move drunkenly.

Belle suddenly realized what was happening.

"Wise, we can't see it," said Belle, a lurch of the floor cutting off her next sentence for a moment.

"What?!" said Wise. "It's huge! It's crushing other buildings!"

"Wise, we can't see it because we are in it!"

"...oh," said Wise.