Had I not managed to deploy my staff's enchanted shield the millisecond before all of the explosions went off, it was a certainty that neither me nor Shephard would have been alive.
The entire room was vaporised in an instant as all the gas canisters were ignited by that sonic blast unleashed by one of these three-legged creatures, taking it and the rest of its waking kin with it as blazing fires ripped through the room, reducing them to smouldering gizzards. It did not seem so at first, but the explosions turned out to be the least of our worries. Not even three seconds after the flames began to subside, the ground began to violently tremor, causing me to lose concentration on my shield as me and Shephard collapsed to the ground, which was already beginning to give way.
The scorched room groaned and screeched as already weakened metal foundations buckled under the stress from the explosion, and seconds after, much to our increased dismay, the whole room caved in on itself, cascading down a revealed abyss that Shephard and I were caught up falling amongst the plunging debris. We fell at least a couple of stories before tumbling onto a rocky surface far too steep to grab any hold on. We had momentarily lost track of each other, though we were both heading in the same direction: down.
I had my staff retracted and held it close to me like it was my infant child as I tumbled, my suit taking a few good beatings as I did―the sounds of heavy debris banging my helmet as if my head were inside of a drum. Moments later, the slope reached its end, and I found myself suddenly plummeting straight down towards an underground river several stories below. A crackle on my comm alerted me that Shephard was still close by and was well aware of our incoming predicament but cursing in terror.
The plunge was not as bad as I had expected, but it was the powerful current that startled me. Tumbling around in the water for a moment, I found myself getting propelled forward down a roaring rapid that carried me through a narrow network of chutes, bumping and slamming me all over the place as I held my staff so tightly it felt like my clawed nails would rip right through my gloves. Shephard made feeble attempts to reach out through our comms, but all of that was lost in trying to stabilise ourselves as we got knocked around in the dark.
After about fifteen seconds of dark and disorienting rapids, though to us it felt like hours, we were suddenly pushed out into open water. There were glowing orange crystals down here, but the waters were grey and hazy, so their glows looked very faint but provided decent depth to our surroundings. I didn't need my suit's atmospheric sensors to tell me that the water was hot; my whole body flared up with warmth like I was caught underneath a brutal sun lamp.
It wasn't uncomfortable, but I foresaw it getting unbearable if I remained in there for too long. Once my equilibrium found what was right-side-up again, I whipped my head around in hopes of finding Shephard, but I couldn't spot him in my direct field of view. "Shephard!" I called out to him, pressing my finger against my helmet's long-range comm desperately. "Shephard! Please answer me!"
"I'm okay! Shit―I'm okay!" he answered back, scratchily, but alive, which brought me instant relief amongst the chaos still inflicting us. "Up! Gotta swim up!"
His instructions confused me a bit at first, but I instantly understood his urgency when I looked up to see a rippling waterline a couple dozen metres directly above―highlighted by glowing crystals somewhere above the surface. Once I was able to spot a dark humanoid shape swimming breaking for the surface above, I followed in his wake and stroked upwards like I were an athlete devoted to the sport (an athlete counteractively wearing heavy high-impact-reactive armour). I broke the surface within thirty seconds of its discovery and saw Shephard's helmeted head bobbing in the water as he stroked in place before eventually spotting me amongst the waves.
"Oh, thank God," he sighed, our local comms working clearly again.
"Let's get to that ledge," I prompted, moments before I began to freestyle my way towards that flat rocky sheet that primarily consisted the chamber floor with Shephard following my lead. Less than thirty seconds later, we made it to the thin ledge, where the water continued to flow underneath, almost like this were a sheet of floating ice. Had my suit not provided me with surplus strength, I probably wouldn't have been able to pull myself and my suit out of the water―even with the lower gravity.
I hauled myself over the hard ledge and crawled forward a few paces before plopping myself down in exhaustion as my suit made a hard metallic thump. A good amount of steam was rising from my suit, thanks to the hot water bath I had plunged in. There was a chance I may have boiled alive down there in those waters. This suit was a true lifesaver.
Shephard sprawled out next to me when he inevitably hauled himself out. "Uuuugh…" he groaned with enervation. "Gotta love Mondays…"
It was around this time that my suit's automatic readouts displayed themselves on my visor and their accompanying numbers. "Power: forty-six percent. Minor damage sustained," he informed me, resounding as it was unfittingly peppy as a few urgent peeps went off to emphasise my declining integrity.
As I allowed myself this moment of respite, I moved my head to look around this open chamber. There was a large cone-shaped stone column in the middle of the chamber, and there was a plethora of glowing bulb plants and crystals that kept the room illuminated. Of course, we were not the lone occupants in this chamber, for we were eventually noticed by a pack of familiar-looking creatures that took great interest in us.
There were about nine of those yellow, three-legged creatures now hopping over to us from the other end of the chamber, squeaking and whistling with aggression as they closed in on us. "Shit, look alive!" Shephard prompted, jumping to his feet and whipping his shotgun out, which he astonishingly had not lost his grip of while riding the rapids. I was already rising to my feet, but the rampant blasts from Shephard's weapon made me jump up quickly to attention. He had already killed a couple, for I saw them tumbling forward with large gashes in their bodies, but that did little to deter the others, a few of which had now rushed over to single me out.
They abruptly stopped before me and began to loudly squeal in unison, their pitches getting louder as the blue stripes on their backs began to glow with intensity. I had only time to redeploy my staff by the time they unleashed their sonic blasts, which could be visualised as massive purple rings of some kind of discharge shooting out from them, which was powerful enough to essentially send me cartwheeling back into the water.
That fearsome primal rage spontaneously took charge in me again as I splashed into the water―a surge I had not felt since fighting that rabid zombie in the bowels of Aldana. It was so overpowering that I actually found myself tapping into a certain unstable magic spell I had never used ever since Fox had "taught" my staff when it was in his care: the rocket boost, as he affectionately called it. I suddenly found a use for it now.
Gritting my teeth in fury, I angled my staff upward while in the water before I was suddenly flung out and above the water from a magic discharge that had burst downward from the staff's hilt, effectively making it a rocket for a moment, so Fox's name for the spell was rather accurate. I burst out from the water with a ferocious cry as I pelted straight through a gathering of the little monsters as they overwhelmed Shephard, incapacitating a few of them.
I slid on the ground and used my momentum to pull me back on my feet with virtually no effort, providing me time to take on more of these buggers while they were still dazed. I whacked, bashed, and sliced through these remaining creatures, holding nothing back as my magical tactics took a back seat while my primal need for physical release demanded satisfaction, and these infuriating but ignorant Xenian denizens were my outlet. My actual detailed recount of the brief skirmish is a little blurry, but I remember the instance when it ended: the unsheathed blade in my hilt being driven straight through the compound eye of the last standing creature, puncturing it far enough it came out by the rear.
I breathed heavily through my teeth as I watched yellow blood gushing from the now-deceased creature, my brief spurt of seldom inner rage dissipating rapidly. So much so I felt deflated as I solemnly pulled my staff out of the carcass and fell to my knees, sighing with almost debilitating fatigue as I tried to recollect myself―getting my mind back to a state of clarity and tranquillity like I had trained myself to remain in.
"Holy shit, man…" I heard Shephard mutter in disbelief while I recollected myself, leaning on my staff with its hilt planted firmly in the ground. "You need a minute?"
Currently unsatisfied with the slightly staticky audio receptors in my helmet―and more so fuelled by my need for a fuller air intake (air quality was good down here), I took off my helmet with a sharp hiss as the airtightness broke and I set it aside on the ground. "I just…need a little air." I said, trying to be reassuring.
Shephard always got encouraged to take his helmet off when he saw me do it, and he did so again in this instance. Still feeling uneasy, I tried to quell such pensive worries by loosening my shoulders and climbing to my feet. Better to look like I returned to a productive state of consciousness than forwardly display otherwise.
"I wasn't in a particular mood for an ambush. I just got a little cranky," I said. That made Shephard laugh a little with irony.
"Yeah. Remind me not to keep yanking your tail anymore," he insisted, looking at the creature I had my staff impaled into. I smiled meekly at his little joke, for I wasn't oblivious to the impression I just gave him. We were surrounded by the carcases I made in only several seconds at least after all. Even though I hardly remembered what happened in the fight.
Shephard and I began looking around the chamber we found ourselves in. Things did not turn out how we planned at all. It looked like our trek through Xen had already reached its first true curdle, and neither of us felt excited about winging it out here.
"Well, this sure went pear-shaped fast," he remarked with equal parts disappointment and resignation as he began reloading his shotgun after digging more shells out of the pouch around his waist. "Looks like getting back on the right road is going to be a bit trickier than we'd like it to be."
"Quite," I agreed, dreary of our current circumstances. "I'm not sure how we'll possibly find our way back on track now."
"There's a few sluices around in here," Shephard pointed out as he slid each shell into the cartridge chamber one at a time. And he was right, there were a couple of passageways we could take that I could see in here. "We'll just have to see where they'll lead."
"And if they don't bring us back to that wonderful yellow rope I now miss so much?" I wondered, already heart-stricken for an ongoing line of rope I regretted taking for granted.
Smirking, Shephard finished loading his gun and cocked the forearm, brimming with a ray of confidence that made me feel more hopeful. "We make our own path."
While vitally necessary in bearing the extremely hazardous elements present in Xen, our EASs did not make navigating through narrow passages a picnic by any stretch.
Our bulky suits made traversing through our chosen pathway a bit of a trial; we hardly had enough room to walk without having to turn sideways just to have enough space to inch along. We hardly had a choice in tunnels to go through; the only other one that was available for us to investigate was akin to a crawlspace entrance and barely had enough room to crawl through. We figured that this narrow slit of a passageway, while claustrophobic and really uninviting, was the only true way out if those screaming three-legged beasts made it inside―which Shephard had begun referring to as "hammies" due to them apparently looking like cured legs of ham.
Our initial hopes for this being that pack of hammies' entryway into this cave had turned out to be vindicated, for ambient Xenian daylight once more began to permeate the narrow space ahead. Stirred by the excitement of reaching the outside, we carefully persisted forward towards our goal, which was getting more visible by the moment. Our narrow passageway soon began to expand to a much more comfortable width, leading us into a much bigger cave that rounded leftward a dozen metres or so away, highlighted by the soft, ambient turquoise light. The lack of any luminescent crystals or flora made the light even more alluring, as well as the faint but distinct babbling sound echoing around the walls that was uncanny to a running brook or stream.
Traipsing across the gravelly cave floor, we eventually made it to the mouth of the cave, which was large enough to fit a bottlenose fighter through, and we once more felt like we had stumbled into a completely different world. Shephard and I stepped out in amazement as we were greeted by a majestic deciduous landscape with squat but lavish trees with thick, curly sea-green trunks, exposed roots, and jet-black, palm-like leaves that had spiny edges and bright red veins, which almost looked like they glowed.
The green nebulae in the sky looked to have dimmed slightly as darker, more oppressive-looking gasses began to envelope the sky, but the primary light source in this region was burning just above the extensive tree tops, its sharp rays shining through while being tinted teal by the ambient mists permeating throughout the forest. Our eyes were instantly drawn upward once coming across these marvellous trees, and when they inevitably fell to the ground, we saw a gentle stream rolling down a bed of smoothened rocks that were as dark grey as the soil around them.
This was such a radical departure from the desolate wasteland we saw most of in Xen, where only the harshest and most resilient organisms seemed to be able to prosper. It was teeming with life here, and it actually felt inviting. A very alien concept to foster in a realm where all things in it were innately alien to each other.
"Woooaah… Check this out," Shephard gaped in amazement, sounding like his breath got taken away. I was also stunned; I was not expecting to run into such a breathtaking sight, and not because it evoked existential cosmic terrors unlike the last couple of times. This actually spurred feelings of wonder and peace, two feelings that Xen had not been keen on until now
We began stepping out into the clearing towards the running stream; it continued to flow to the left of us, into the black woods that seemed to spread out in all directions. The gentle waters babbled with such serenity that I already subconsciously began feeling out a place for a good spot to meditate. This felt like a delightful step up from the lively basin we left behind a little while ago.
"And to think, we could have been led through patches like this instead of the barren hellscapes," Shephard pined, regretful that our faithful yellow rope trail seemed to have taken us only through unsightly hazardous environments. His lamentations also brought up a very glaring problem that began to sour what was already the nicest-looking place we had stumbled across. "Looks like we're going to be ruffing it for a while. Gotta figure out where the hell we are and how to get back where we need to be, but I can see us getting lost pretty easily in here."
I was well aware of this predicament, but I felt more at ease about it than Shephard. I was a girl who had been "ruffing" it for many years in many wild and perilous places, and for the first time here, I was presented with an obstacle that I had seasoned experience in solving, and they key to this one in front of me lied in the very stream babbling a few metres away.
"We follow up the stream," I suggested, making Shephard turn to me with attentiveness. "I wager we find a prominent vantage point from its source, seeing as the terrain does increase further up."
Shephard looked out to where I was pointing for him, noticing that the water was coming down a small hill, as most flowing water often did. He began to nod with consideration. "Well, it's something," he conceded. "Getting a lay of the land does require getting to higher ground, after all. Let's get a move on."