Chapter 2: Something Fish-ed This Way Comes  

“Run!”

Electra followed her own advice.

She booked it towards the beach, half running into me.

“Gah—!” She knocked me off my feet, and I crashed into the surf. It drove the air from my lungs and scattered my armful of salvaged parts into the waves. My hands snapped out, but I caught nothing but air. The thing let out an ululating cry.

The sound hit me like a blow. I gasped, sound driving through my head like nine inch nails. Someone started screaming. I didn’t realize that someone was me until I’d already clapped my hands over my ears. Blinking rapidly, I saw the mass of tentacles advance on me in an roiling mass.

I was going to die here.

Then a hand came down on my shoulder. It cut through the fog surrounding me. I only had time to blink before Electra hauled me to my feet. “Come on!” Her voice sent my head spinning again, but in a good way, spinning back to the real world and away from whatever mess the monster had left me in.

“We have to run!”

I nodded, turning with the hero to dash towards the shore. As I ran, I snatched up what bits of metal and wire that I could, thoughts churning as frantically as the waves beneath my feet.

Unfortunately, I was also much shorter than Electra, and the water was pouring up the beach now, as if someone had upended a pitcher the size of a stadium onto the coast. I scrambled, armful of salvaged parts in hand, but I barely managed to make any headway.

Beneath my feet, the waves pulled back at the sand, making me feel like I was running on a treadmill as I struggled not to slip on the softening sand.

Ahead of me, Electra pulled further and further away with each step. The water only came up to her calves, but for me, each step felt like I was running through molasses instead of just water.

In addition to the twenty pounds of metal in my arms. But I couldn’t drop it.

Not if we were going to make it out alive.

Electra glanced back over her shoulder, and I felt my heart fall to the bottom of my feet as her expression paled. “Just run!” She waved her hand. “We don’t need that stuff!”

I shook my head, breath heaving.

So much, I thought, for no more cardio today.

“You’re gonna die!”

“Without—” I heaved a breath, “this, we—” I almost fell, my ankle screaming as it twisted, “die anyway!”

I could see the moment she realized that I wasn’t going to make it. Electra’s face flickered through a dozen emotions in the span of a heartbeat, before settling on resignation. She was going to leave me, because I was too slow.

And I was going to die.

I bowed my head, legs striving frantically against the waves. It didn’t matter if Electra was just out to save her own skin! I didn’t need her help! I’d save myself just like I always—

I had a moment to blink as a pair of hands grabbed me, looking up just in time to see Electra toss me over her shoulder.

“This is why!” She turned, legs pumping. “You never skip leg dayyyyyyyy!”

I gaped.

“That’s what you’re going with?!” I glanced back, stomach twisting in knots when I saw how close the tentacle thing was.

“You’re the one—” The salt water sprayed beneath her feet, “who can’t run to save your life!”

I swallowed a retort. Even with me on her back, the hero was going nearly twice as fast as I’d managed. I looked away from the monster as my head started to throb. “Just get us to the sand!”

“I’m trying!”

I growled, trying desperately to keep a hold of the metal and wires in my hand. I bit back a curse. Would I even be able to get it set up in time?

It seemed like I’d have to.

Somehow, I felt a grin spreading across my face.

“Brace yourself!”

My head snapped up at the words. Electra crouched. I felt her muscles tensing beneath me like a steel spring, and then she threw.

I went flying, mouth agape. As I tipped over backwards, I saw Electra a half step behind.

I closed my eyes and curled into a ball, hitting the sand with all the grace and poise of a boulder. The impact drove the air from my lungs and my precious cargo from my grip for the second time.

“No!”

I forced myself upright, staggering as another mind-bending scream shattered the air. I dove across the sand, snatching up the wire and the metal coil, tossing them farther from the water.

Even now, the waves continued to crash against the shore like a storm. We’d landed on a berm of higher ground where the sand swept upwards. It was probably the normal high tide mark, showing the edge of the water’s reach.

Now we had at most a minute until we were back in the water.

And maybe half of that until the tentacled monstrosity got close enough to kill us both. It was speeding up, too. Like it was getting used to walking on land.

I pushed the thought from my head. Now it was my turn.

“Keep running!” Electra skid to a stop besides me, grabbing at my shoulder.

“Where?” I was already working, frantically twisting a length of scrap metal into a U shape. “We don’t have anywhere to run! The water’s not stopping!”

“It’ll stop!”

“And if not?” I shook my head, pulling out a length of wire. “Cut this for me, here!”

With a growl, she yanked a thin utility knife from its thigh holster, slicing through the metal with a flick. “We don’t have much time, Empress!”

“You think I DON’T KNOW THAT?!”

Add the insulator to the metal. There, done. Here’s hoping it wouldn’t burn out.

I ripped my omni-tool from my belt, jamming the head into a crease in my suit’s chest plate. With a twist, the panel popped open, revealing the suit’s reactor. It was a hexagon of metal and glass-steel, generating enough energy to power this suit for the rest of my natural life.

Alternatively, something else for one, massive, load.

Of course, I couldn’t just pop the stupid thing out. I grabbed the length of wire again, cursing my good sense. I’d installed a minor forcefield generator, a precaution which was supposed to stop some enterprising hero from ripping it out and rendering me powerless.

Now, of course, it was more likely to kill me than protect me, so it had to go.

I jammed the insulated piece of metal into the capacitor bank right next to the reactor. This wasn’t why I made them open, but it would do the trick. The suit jerked as part of its power flow was cut off. Still, I didn’t design my armor to have a single point of failure.

Only now I was realizing that the single point of failure was me.

“Any day now!”

I glared up at Electra. “Then maybe stop distracting me!”

“Just want to make sure you—!”

“Shut! Up!”

I pushed past the tremor in my hands, winding the length of wire around several key junctions, bypassing fuses and resistors. With a grunt, I pushed the other end directly into the charging port, yanking my hand back as the material of my gloves nearly popped from the sudden surge of electricity.

With a whine, the servos in my armor went dead as countless precise circuits and fuses were overloaded all at once, welding them shut.

And like that, my armor died.

All I was left with was a hunk of metal, already bent out of the way, and a glowing power core.

My field disabled, and the much more mundane issue of electrical discharge taken care of, I grabbed the handle in the center of the hexagon, giving it a sharp twist. With a hiss, the entire reactor popped free, resting in my hands with a gentle red glow.

Not that it produced anything but white light; I’d just tinted the steel-glass red when I’d made the thing.

I couldn’t stop myself from smiling faintly. This little, unassuming core was my life’s work. My magnum opus. It was powered by exotic materials I’d painstakingly stole, crafted at laboratories that had been destroyed, and marooned a literal world away.

I’d probably never be able to make one again.

“Empress! Not sure about you but—!”

A massive tentacle crashed to the sand about a meter away from us.

I sighed. It really was a shame.

“Hey, Electra.” I rolled my wrist.

“What?”

“Catch!”

I lobbed my power core through the air, watching it tumble end over end towards the surprised hero. My last thought before she grabbed it was, it would really suck if she had a maximum capacity.

Like, really, really suck.

I saw Electra open her mouth, only to freeze when her fingers made contact with the metal cathode of the core, and approximately all of the electricity.

She exploded in an orb of white-blue lightning. Arcs of electricity struck the sand with so much energy that entire swaths of the beach were turned to glass.

For a second, I even lost sight of her, before a glowing figure appeared in the center of the maelstrom of electricity.

I pointed at the thrashing monster. “Any day now!”

The hero blinked at my words, eyes going solid white as the power coursed through her. It took another second, even as she continued to absorb every last drop of power from my reactor, until the idiot finally realized what I’d done.

She turned towards the massive mound of flesh and eyes as a dozen tentacles reared out of the air above us, ready to slam down and do—

Well, whatever it was that tentacles did to defenseless young women, I assumed.

It was an immense splotch of red and black against the horizon, nearly taking up all of my view with its beady black eyes and thrashing limbs. As it raised itself over us, it was as if the beast was the darkness itself.

But Electra? Electra was light.

“Sorry!” She raised an arm. “But you’re in the wrong genre, freak!”

I rolled my eyes.

Well, I would have.

But the flash of blinding light, the physical force of the thunderclap, blew me onto my back.

The monster screamed again, but this time in pain.

Electra laughed, her body rising off the ground from the sheer power coursing through her. Each wild arc bent through the air, slamming into the creature as it writhed. The very water around it became charged, feeding the harnessed lightning back into its bulk again and again.

And then, with one final surge, it was over.

I blinked the spots from my eyes. The image of Electra suspended in the air like some kind of Zeus wannabe was literally seared into my retinas. Slowly, I pushed myself to my feet, rubbing at my face.

My ears wouldn’t stop ringing.

“Did that kill it?” I winced. I could barely hear my own voice.

“What?” Electra turned to look at me, eyes back to their normal dull blue. At some point she’d fallen back to the ground. “I can’t hear you!”

“I said!” This time I yelled for real. “Did that kill it!?”

Then the It moved.

We both spun towards the monster.

If possible, it looked even more grotesque than it had before. All the eyes I could see were popped from the force of the current, great gouts of rancid yellow ichor pouring down its burned and boiled flesh. The thing twitched and spasmed, stretches of its skin sloughing off to reveal blackened muscles and bones beneath.

Its cells, in the billions, realized that they were dead.

I shivered at the sight.

I forced myself off the sand, staggering back. To my side, Electra’s legs gave out, and she collapsed to the ground.

“I don’t—” she doubled over, panting, “think I can run, anymore.”

“SKRUUUERRRRSIAAAAAAAAA!!!”

I clutched at my ears, fingers coming back red. “I don’t think it would let us even if we could.” The beast’s movements became even more frantic. My heart began to sink, as I realized that we hadn’t killed it.

Or rather, as tentacles and eyes and blood all cascaded down to the frothing waves, we hadn’t killed enough of it.

The monstrosity raised itself up from the water, almost drunkenly, flesh and tentacles sloughing off to reveal a single, massive eye at its core. The cross shaped pupil widened, before looking at me, boring into the depths of my very soul. And I fell into the void of its gaze.

I would have screamed, but I could not find my mouth.

I was nothing.

The darkness was everything.

I struggled, breathlessly, against it, but I couldn’t do anything but hold it back for a second longer.

Tendrils of darkness reached towards me.

Then—

I gasped, snapping backwards as the real world surged back to fill the void.

In front of me, the massive eye rolled back into the creature’s morbid mass.

And it crashed down into the waves.

“Is it…” Electra staggered upright. “Dead?”

Ding!

I blinked, as a blue box appeared in front of my face.

System Message

For defeating a creature from beyond and communing with forces beyond mortal comprehension, you have unlocked the Demogogue class!