Liberty and Death: Chapter 40
Chapter 40
Hawk came back like a storm.
She ripped the Alphound off Cora’s shoulder, twisted it with a popping crackle like the thing was made of bubble wrap, and yote it hard into the Alphound that had still been waiting its turn on Cora, then roared as she chased the tumbling ball off down the alley way.
“Make me run from a fuckin’ fight!? I’ll kill every one of you freaks that ever existed!!!”
Enthusiasm aside, Hawk hadn’t really finished the job of freeing Cora. She had felt the Alphound’s jaws around her arm loosen somewhat, be it in shock, fear or awe.
She growled, getting her free hand around its throat and squeezing. It was both more effective and grosser than she’d expected. Cora had small hands. With as much strength as they contained right now, in as small of an area, she ended up ripping its windpipe out, Roadhouse style.
‘whEEeeE!’
Her arm was doused in red blood as the thing coughed and died, but she was free.
The scrapes and gouges over her upper body were already healing, painful but shallow, filling with silver. Her leg was another matter. It had been shredded, and now was more or less encased in a nanite cast from the knee down. She wasn’t moving with it.
Cora bared her teeth, thankful that Linnea hadn’t been an acrylics girlie. With her new strength, flipping herself over and pulling herself over the rough cobblestone street wasn’t comfortable, but it was pretty fast. She burst out of the alley entrance, to find Hawk in yet another fight straight out of Godzilla.
The giantess laughed as the Matriarch’s claws sparked off her forearm plate, crouching into the blow and darting forward to deliver an uppercut into it’s armpit that actually lifted it off the ground a bit.
The enormous Alphound roared in indignation, and it’s extra pair of legs made themselves known, lashing out to hit Hawk in the stomach, blasting her backwards into a stone facade.
Beneath the monster, a black clad form resolved into existence, burying two wickedly curved blades into the attachment point of either arm and wrenching backwards. The Matriarch roared in pain as those limbs fell limp, immediately slamming itself down to try and crush the small woman. Kyra, however, was used to fighting people bigger than her, and she left a nasty gash on its underbelly for its trouble.
The Matriarch spun to follow, but it met Iain’s longsword, cringing back from a shallow slice across its smooth dome.
“Awright then, ye big fookin’ beastie, try a real man, why don’t ye?” Iain roared, but Cora could see what he was really doing. He poked and prodded with that big sword, but while new cuts and scrapes appeared on the monster, none of it was damage. Instead, his sword always ended up juuuust where it needed to be to deflect the Matriarch’s next sweep.
All while Hawk shook herself out of a pile of rubble.
Hawk, keyed up as she was, still had the fight-sense to take advantage of a distraction when she was handed one. She ran, but she didn’t roar, as she charged the Matriarch’s open flank.
With each step, Cora saw power gathering in her arms, tattoos taking on a beautiful azure glow that radiated danger. Too late, the Matriarch noticed, or maybe just sensed her in that way animals can sense an approaching predator. Its half turn just meant it got a good view of Hawk releasing a meteoric right straight into its ribcage.
The impact felt like it froze the world for a second, Hawk’s fist pressing hard into the Matriarch’s insanely durable bones, before, with the power of {Brutal Blow} Hawk’s fist won out.
A section of the matriarch ribcage imploded like an anime frame, and it rocked back like a bus hit by a car. It wobbled, it bled from its mouth, but it stayed on its feet.
Fuck me, that thing won’t die, Cora thought, as even with what had to be maybe one functioning lung, the Matriarch held off Hawk’s assault.
[Big Sys], how do I do that bullet thing?
I WOULDN’T, IT'S EXPENSIVE
How?
SHEESH. OKAY, THE SHIMMER YOU HAVEN’T DIGESTED YET, YOU KNOW, THE STUFF THAT WILL LEVEL YOU UP?
MOVE THAT INTO YOUR GUN
Okay… Cora thought, and willed it to be so. It was sluggish, not the kind of instinctive process she suspected [Big Sys] had helped out with yesterday, and it drained her. She knew this was wasteful, but when she saw some of the Matriarch’s wounds beginning to close, she knew it was necessary.
“HAWK!” She shouted, as a glow began to emanate from her gun’s chamber, “HOLD HER!”
Hawk glanced at her for just a moment, but then dodged in. She kicked out one of the Matriarch’s knees, and wrapped her arms around its thick neck, bearing it down to the ground.
Cora held the power, beginning to sweat from the effort, as she willed a bit of it into her Reactimax. As the world slowed, it was easy to line up the crosshair on the Matriarch's eye, just for one shot.
The gun bucked in her hand, harder than it should have, far harder. It probably would have shattered her wrist without Lacey’s extra [Str], but for now all she could focus on was actually seeing the bullet, jacketed in corruscating energy, rushing for the monster’s unblinking black eye.
Then time sped back up, and its head burst all over Hawk, who treated it like a hot shower after a long day.
“WHOOOOO!!!!” The big girl yelled, shaking the (mostly) headless corpse of their adversary, its neck now flopping grotesquely in her grasp. “What a fuckin’ scrap!”
“Aye,” panted Iain, using his sword as a resting post. “Ain’t had a fight like that since me war days. Were closer than I woulda liked, especially fer the boss, if the state o’ that leg is anythin’ ter go by.”
“Cora’s right,” Kyra said, appearing beside him. “I need to get stronger. I might’ve helped with those arms, but I probably hit it a hundred other times and I don’t think it noticed.”
“Yeah, well, those arms weren’t nothin’, short stuff,” Hawk called over her shoulder. She grinned down at Cora, towering over her. Then, easy as pie, she bent down and pulled Cora up into a princess carry. Cora wrapped her arms around Hawk’s sturdy neck. It was instinctive.
That meant she didn’t have any hands free to protest when Hawk dipped her head, bringing her lips to Cora’s neck, letting those sharp teeth close on it hard, just a little harder than they needed to draw blood. Cora gasped, but it wasn’t in pain.
“Had to make sure I wasn’t a liar, yeah?” Hawk whispered into her ear, and Cora melted. She’d played out scenes like this a hundred times with the most attractive people humanity had to offer. But never for real. Never with her.
She barely even realized they were moving, eyes devouring every contour of Hawk’s face as she brought them over to the others.
“Good gods, Cora, get yourself together,” Kyra teased, pulling the smitten woman out of her trance. Cora pulled her eyes off of Hawk to glare at the smaller woman. She found Kyra smirking at her, but there was something more than mockery behind her eyes.
“How long till your nanites fix your leg, you think?” Kyra asked quickly, when Cora started to squint at her, trying to read what else she was seeing.
Cora wiggled the silver club foot she currently had, realizing she had basically no clue.
Or do I?
She focused on herself in her HUD, looking for her silhouette. It floated into focus, her whole body healthy green, except a bright yellow leg, and a neck just slightly worse off than everything else.
“I’ll be fine, soon,” Cora said, trying hard not to think about her neck, or the way Hawk’s fingers stroked lazily, possessively, at her side. “Just drop me by the Matriarch, I’ll start harvesting while I wait for the nanites to finish.”
Hawk complied, and Cora got to work with [Rib Cutter].
As she began, her vision filled with a blue screen.
[WEAPON EVOLUTION CONDITION MET: HARVEST A TIER (V) OR HIGHER MONSTER]
[[Rib Cutter] GAINS NEW BONUSES]
[Rib Cutter]: +5 [Dex] and +5 eff. [Str]. Increased speed and quality when harvesting Monsters.
Hellllllll yeah! Cora thought, as the knife slid through flesh like butter that it could barely have cut when the thing was alive. She worked its blade around the bone plates, trying to keep the skin as intact as she could. She was already thinking that Alphound skin would be the new couture around Luxholme if she had her way, and Alphound Matriarch skin could only be better.
The skin came off satisfyingly easy, like peeling old glue off of your hands when you were a kid. The only downside was that it was actually too intact. No way it was fitting into the pocket space. It looked like Hawk’s goblin would be getting a blanket.
Speaking of the goblins, the ones on the roof had thrown a few more half-hearted stones, but had fled after Cora bullseyed one, more or less without looking. This particular noise was no longer something they wanted any part of.
The bone plates on the Matriarch were more difficult. Sharp as [Rib Cutter] might be for this kind of work, it was not sharp enough to cut through the thick anchoring points of bone. Even with Cora wrenching at them with her enhanced [Str] the things didn’t budge.
“Yo, Hawk!” She called, testing her leg. The silver had dissipated, and she felt good as new. Maybe better, that Achilles had felt a little tight for years, but she felt no tension there now. “Toss me one of them goblin clu– Agh!”
She heard Hawk chuckle as Cora ducked beneath a bone plate to avoid the requested weapon, but in doing so she proved she’d been onto something. The club snapped the bone plate off with a sharp ‘snap!’ and Cora picked it up, feeding it through her little mail-slot in reality.
In the end, basically all of the Matriarch glowed in Harvested vision. After her friends had finished cleaning up everything else, garnering them a whopping 10 adrenobytes, 2 more esoteric pieces of Cyberware, 17 Alphound skins, 3 Shimcores and one goblin club with a minor enchantment, they all moved in to help Cora with butchering the big motherfucker, feeding it piece by piece through the portal, bones and all.
YOU GOTTA WORK ON YOUR PRIORITIES
Wym?
YOU KILLED A SUB-BOSS, IDIOT, YOU LEVELED UP. YOUR CLASS IS WAITING.