Amaranthine

Incongruously, Nick felt a bit like a medieval knight. No, he didn’t wear armor, held no shield, and he certainly wasn’t dashing, unless you were a very specific subset of the population. However, he wielded Cait like a remarkably animated war hammer as he and Qi charged the outflow tunnel, and that was enough.

When they’d tried this in their first encounters with Ironhides, it’d been a stopgap. Nick couldn’t even touch the beasts without being shredded against their fur, and Cait, even hitting as hard as she did, was mostly ineffective. Now, his tentacles might be tough enough to take a few hits, but when he hit one with 800 lbs. of indestructible blonde? That was good effect on target.

“Can’t fucking wait until I can be useful as anything but a big-titted stick,” Cait complained, having locked herself stock straight, arms crossed over her chest like a petulant child. Her pose didn’t shift an inch as her head caved in the side of an Ironhide’s face. “This is almost boring, honestly.”

-STOP COMPLAINING-

-YOU’RE A GOOD STICK-

Nick swept her straight through a jumping Silver. The controlled civilians were actually a little less durable than the Ironhides. Presumably, Gwyn would have ideas as to why, but Nick had zero. He was just happy he didn’t have to spend long killing them, and thus risk thinking about the ethical considerations of fighting back against mind controlled people.

He and Qi had quickly fallen into a rhythm, despite not having worked together much previously. The dragon actually fought a lot like Cait, a brawler who used their immense strength to simulate super-speed. That was in addition to her claws and bursts of inferno-like flame of course, but really, against these foes, that was icing on the cake. They each required personal attention to bring down for good, no frying swaths of coonbeasts or skeletons like she’d done in the past.

In his ‘peripheral’ (which wasn’t the right word, but what did you call the part of omnidirectional vision you weren’t focusing on?) Nick saw Qi take a big hit from one of the Ironhides, sending her flying right for him.

-NEVER LEARN, HUH?- His text to voice exclaimed as he shifted, whipping a tentacle out to follow Qi as she shot past, grabbing her ankles and anchoring her. He stretched, then flung her back into the fray, claws outstretched and laughing like a maniac. He heard her call ‘Nope!’ right before her impact cratered the chest of the monster that had hit her. Then she was lost in the fight again, dealing death like a dragon of myth.

Still, wish it wasn’t just us. Qi’s strong, stronger than Cait, but if she goes down, enough effort could strip those scales.

“Do love to watch her work,” Cait observed wistfully, although Nick doubted she was having any real luck tracking the dragon, given that she herself was being flailed in wild, brutal violence pretty much constantly.

The trio had given up on ‘clearing’ the outflow tunnel well before they’d even reached the entrance, and now, as they ventured in, the decision was reaffirmed.

“How are there so many of these things?” Cait complained. In response, Nick just hissed. A duo of Ironhides had pinned one of his tentacles to the ground and were in the process of ripping it to shreds when Cait’s body flattened them, severing the limb in the process. She continued like nothing had happened, despite now dripping black gore in addition to red. “I mean, were they hibernating? This is the kind of army you store away for an apocalypse.”

-BIG MR. HOUSE VIBES-, Nick agreed, getting a big grin and a snap of her fingers from Cait as she pointed excitedly back at him.

“Yes! Exactly that!” she agreed. She looked at her finger, then was visibly inspired as she T-posed, fingers splayed to either side. “Check it out! Warpick Cait!”

The idea was good in theory, but after the third corpse she wiggled off her arm, Nick could tell she regretted having it. It wasn’t long before they reached their first fork in the sewer system, the massive outflow shrinking into two tubes that would be relatively spacious for a regular human, but Qi was going to be scraping her horns along top of, especially with how raged out she was.

While the fork implied a decision point, it really wasn’t much of a choice. One tunnel was empty, the other still vomited monsters like the silvered throat of hell. Qi was clearly just going to charge in, but Nick grabbed her around the waist before she could.

HOLD UP, ME FIRST. WORRIED YOU’LL GET STUCK.

“You can’t say that to a girl, B-Man,” Cait scolded. “She’ll get body imaged issues.”

Qi’s flaming red eyes still somehow managed to roll, and she mockingly bowed, gesturing Nick ahead.

“Bitch, if I have body images issues, everyone else is fucked,” Qi shot back at Cait, giving them both a big toothy grin. While that would normally be an entirely valid statement, Qi was more Godzilla than Goddamn right now, but it felt like a bad idea to point that out. “Good point though, B-man. I’m not getting any smaller with all this fighting.”

Nick pushed past her, entering the tunnel Cait-first. She made an excellent riot shield, and with his newfound strength he was more than powerful enough to begin pushing back the monstertide. He did his best to keep track of Qi behind him, snaking a free tentacle back to assist when she was threatening to be overwhelmed, but even with semi-split consciousness, it was a hell of a lot to manage.

Ironhides and Silvers howled out of the depths of the tunnel towards him, the echoes and residual scents of the sewer beginning to play havoc on his senses. Fortunately, even if he just held Cait up dead center in the tunnel, there wasn’t really enough space for enemies to dash past her full speed.

Those that tried got slammed to the sides or ceilings, crushed under her unyielding thighs or flanks while Nick’s free tentacles kept others at bay.

“You know, I lot of my fan page is just people begging me to do exactly this to them,” Cait said conversationally as Nick used her thigh to pop a Silver’s head against the wall. “Not sure I see the appeal.”

BULLSHIT

I’VE SEEN YOU ‘WATCH MOVIES’ YOU DEFINITELY COULDN’T SEE THROUGH KENNEDY’S LEGS

“Well yeah,” Cait protested, “but my head doesn’t pop when that happens.”

I DON’T THINK PEOPLE ACTUALLY WANT THAT

“Idk man, I’d bet some of them are serious. If the whole superhero thing doesn’t work out, could probably start up an OnlyFans doing Gallagher with my thighs and sadbois.”

PRETTY SURE THE REST OF US WOULD HAVE TO KILL YOU THEN

“You can’t!” Cait said brightly, a point demonstrated nicely as a frustrated Ironhide scraped its claws across her eyeball, leaving exactly zero damage. “That’s the beauty of it!”

YOU EVER THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT DIRECTOR SWAN WOULD DO TO YOU IF YOU DID BREAK BAD?

Cait’s mischevious grin fell, and Nick felt her shiver in his grip.

“I am now,” she said, looking around the concrete tunnel. “I imagine my eternity would look pretty similar to this, huh?”

BEST WAY TO DEAL WITH A BAD IMMORTAL, HISTORICALLY SPEAKING

“Okay, fuck you, this already wasn’t great for claustrophobia and now this shit is gonna break through my sertraline,” Cait complained, beginning to wiggle a bit in his grip.

OH FUCK

FORGOT YOU ACTUALLY HAVE A WEAKNESS

“Yeah, let’s speed this the fuck up please.”

Nick did his best, but it was slow going. The tunnel hit an incline, and while it didn’t change things that much the monsters were having a little easier time getting past Nick’s girl-shield. His tentacles were now in a constant state of raw blackness, nowhere near incapacitating with his healing, but beginning to overcome his impressive pain tolerance through a death of a thousand cuts.

More important was the effect on Qi’s rearguard. She dug her talons in as best she could, but walking backwards, uphill, in a space that was rapidly becoming simply too small for her, all the while fighting off the constant crazed attacks of monsters was just on the edge of too much for her. Nick had to catch her from stumbling a few times, and if she hadn’t simply been too big to squeeze past would have taken a few claws in the back himself.

Finally, ramming Cait forward into a press of Silvered bodies, he pushed her through into a wide cistern, fed by man-sized pipes on all sides. Thankfully it was dry-ish, only some rain water accumulated instead of the filth it’d contained during operation.

Nick smashed the last few beasts to splinters, and let Cait go, as she dropped to her feet in the stagnant water.

Behind them, Qi groaned in releif as she stretched back into her full size, stepping out of the tunnel. Her throat blazed orange in Nick’s Altered sense before she belched forth a hellblast of flame, hot enough to give pause to even their armored enemies. That pushed them back far enough for her to dig her claws into the ceiling of the tunnel and smash.

The tunnel caved in, and for the first time in what felt like an hour it was quiet save for the slow drip of damp from the walls.

“Won’t hold them forever,” Qi said, already tearing chunks out of the surrounding walls, melting them to slag and reinforcing the cave-in. “Fuck do we go now? We’ve just been playing follow-the-monster this far, but-“

She gestured to the obviously empty cistern

“-no monsters.”

“B-man?” Cait asked. “Anything in your spidey-senses? Elf eyes?”

DON’T HAVE EYES, Nick wrote, but pushed into his Altered sense regardless. It was always present, but it wasn't always at the forefront of his mind. Bringing it there sometimes let him pick up on things he’d missed before.

He scanned the walls of the cistern, finding little. A few specks of Altered energy that seemed to just be bugs with minor mutations, otherwise everything totally mundane. Except….

Except there was a trace. Not fresh, not active, but the more he focused the more he was sure it was there. He pulled himself to the patch of wall, in case being close helped. He still didn’t really know how this sense worked.

Close to the wall, he could almost taste the remnant of power, and found it was one he’d become very familiar with since entering Technocago.

THERE WAS A PLAZLOAD LINE HERE

He crawled himself along the wall, following the faint trace of the line until it entered one of the pipes feeding into the cistern.

THIS WAY

Part of his mind wanted to pull him along the trail, like a bloodhound on his scent. Nick knew it for what it was now though, could all but see it flowing out from the beast within, and resisted.

“Council said there weren’t any down here right?” Qi asked, while Cait hupped up into the hole. “Not a good sign for this being a lone madman, what’s the play?”

“I mean, we gotta go in, right?” Cait said, visibly trepadatious. The pipe was smaller than the last one by a good margin, and despite her affinity for some tight spaces, they were usually the ones attached to women.

Qi scoffed, gesturing at her own body. She’d grown to well over 12 feet tall during the fight, and must’ve been even more hunched than Nick had thought to fit into the last tunnel. She simply wasn’t getting into this one.

“No fucking way,” she said, confirming Nick’s thought. She turned, looking at the slagged over tunnel they’d come from. They could all hear struggle on the other side of it. “You two go ahead. This is a pretty good holdout, I’ll keep them off your back.”

Cait hopped down from the suspicious tunnel, running over to hug Qi around the thigh. Big as she was, even Cait’s arms barely met on the other side. She grinned up at the dragon.

“Make yourself a way out first, ja rule?” she ordered, gently kissing an armored scale the size of her head. “Don’t like my girls making last stands.”

It was weird to see a dragon blush, and without Nick’s senses, it probably wouldn’t even have been noticeable. But it was still cute, and Qi nodded, patting Cait on the head before climbing up to claw at the roof.

Cait ran back to Nick, pulling herself into the pipe and glaring down it.

“Alright buddy, looks like it’s down to the OG’s. Lets save us a fuckin’ city. Again.”