by GoozX, Sonhaven and Captain Sammitch
Three miles east of the caves:
In the shadows and darkness of the storm, a figure ran for his life, or unlife, if you will. Shawn was what you could call a youngblood; he had only been a pale for seventy years or so. He knew that his time had ended before it had ever really begun.
"You have three hours, and then your time is over. So make the most of it."
Jarvis, Master Stein's second-in-command, had promoted him. He was given full resources to take out the Harbringer and his building army of followers. This was Shawn's chance to show that he was strong and could handle leadership. Only, he couldn't.
The Harbringer lay waste to the pale underground. Hundreds of soldiers were taken out like nothing, dust in the wind. Three hours had ended. So had Shawn's time to prove himself.
Shawn stopped; his heart would have done the same if it was still beating. He was surrounded by five figures in robes, large-built men, pureblood vampires, demons of the higher order.
One let down his hood. "You have failed your master."
"Lieutenant Roberson!" Shawn cried out. "They were too much for us. The Harbringer has allied with metas, alpha level... and..."
"Hush." Roberson's words stayed in the air as Shawn silenced.
Shawn dropped to his knees. "I failed."
Roberson approached, placing his hands on the side of Shawn's head. Burnt flesh filled the air as Roberson's hands melted into Shawn's head. Shawn would have screamed in pain if he could. He really would have. A few moments passed, and only ash remained.
Roberson approached the others. He lifted his arms high into the air. "What the weak have failed to accomplish, we must amend." Roberson's eyes turned silver. "The Harbringer is free. We must give our everything to distract him. For in just minutes, the Beast shall arise. And with the souls of fifty shall the Beast regain control of the balance. Then the island, our homeland, will once again be ours."
They moved forward to find the Harbringer and his allies.
The mountains over the caves:
Priest stood in front of the entrance to Otto's cave. He looked over the horizon. Danny Hearn, the self-appointed leader of this band of self-styled heroes didn't trust him enough to include him on the rescue mission. This actually made Priest have more respect for Danny. Maybe he wasn't as much of a fool as he remembered. Time did change people.
Priest turned, catching an off-guard Tayden and lifting his six-foot-three-inch frame off the ground. The energy that Tayden gave off was different, almost angelic, if you will. Priest put him down.
"Sorry," Priest said as he turned back to the horizon. "I felt someone different approaching."
Tayden thought for a moment. "You can feel what someone truly is?"
"No." Priest never turned back toward Tayden. "I can feel energy. Each human, meta, has a different, distinctive energy. You have neither, which means demon or higher being."
"I--"
Before Tayden could formulate his sentence, Priest ran toward the trees in the near distance. In a moment, a struggle took place. And Priest returned with a broken body.
Priest threw the half-conscious body on the hard floor. "Who are you, and why have you been spying on us? Speak, vampire." Priest's hands were crushing the vampire's skull.
"I belong to he, Stein. Do what you will with me, for the Beast rises. Soon, the light dies."
Priest turned toward Tayden, who showed true emotion. The people in the caves below felt the pure fear of an angel for a moment before returning to bliss.
"The Beast?" Tayden looked all around. "Now? No, it can't be true."
Priest took a knife from a leg pouch and beheaded the vampire, turning it to ash. "What is this thing and how do we kill it?" Priest asked.
"Oh no," Tayden said to no one. "The unnatural caves, the curves, passages, a pattern."
Priest looked at Tayden, who stopped himself. He took a deep breath and ran for the caves. Priest followed. As they got to the caves, Priest grabbed Tayden's arm. "What's going on?"
Before Tayden could answer, an earthquake erupted, and the ground split apart. Both men fell ten feet, landing in the caves below.
Smoke filled the air, blinding the two men. Another quake hit, and a body ripped through the dirt. The figure stood tall and stretched its arms. Two large hooves stepped deep into the soft ground. The Beast's massive form stood over the two men. Its skin was reptile-like and the color of blood. Its eyes were green and snakelike.
Priest was a large-built man who stood at six-foot-two; Tayden, while thin, stood at six-foot-three. Both men looked like children in the presence of the Beast.
"One other thing," Tayden said, catching Priest's attention. "If he eats fifty souls, he will grow invincible..."
"Call for back up!" Priest said as he tightened his fists and grew larger. Priest stood in front of the Beast and his prey.
Tayden took out Chance's cell phone and pressed the menu button. He searched through the long list of numbers as the Beast made its way toward Priest.
Finally, Tayden had reached Danny's cell. He pressed the send button.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP
There was no signal.
"This is going to be bad." Priest just managed to get out the words when a huge paw from the infernal Beast knocked him through a cavern wall.
Tayden put the cell phone away. It's pointless trying to get through these walls, he thought. Physical methods of communication are so inefficient. He turned around as he heard the crashing sound.
"Hey! Are you o--" Before Tayden could finish the sentence or even take a step toward his wounded comrade, Priest was on his feet. His massive size was now even larger than when he had hit the ground. "Protect the others," Priest spoke through gritted teeth as he pulled out a weapon.
Tayden ran down the cave to the direction where he felt the citizens of La Perdida to be.
When Tayden got there, he shouted out to the refugees, "Hey everybody, the Beast is in here, and we've got to go back outside, okay?"
You could have heard a pin drop.
Then someone yelled, "FUCK that, man! There's a hurricane outside!"
"Yeah, well, here are the options: A, stay and get eaten by a big monster and help bring about the Apocalypse. B, go back out in the hurricane and find another shelter." Everyone just looked at Tayden and each other for a moment.
Then Tayden said, "If we go outside, I'll sing that stupid buy the world a Coke song with you."
The crowd cheered and headed back up the ladder through the trap door. Tayden just looked upward. "You're really funny, ya know that?" Just then, the cell phone rang.
Phil Smith, M'xy, and Grissom Montag were searching through the Royal Crown Tower, looking for people who might be trapped inside. Phil wasn't entirely sure what he was doing, but if he listened carefully, he could make out faint echoes, characteristic imprints of human beings. Whenever he found one, he would call the others over, and they would carefully extricate the trapped person from their hiding place.
Things were going well until Phil felt the ground shake slightly. Thrown by his sudden loss of concentration, Phil tried to tune in again. And he picked up on something that was definitely not human.
Phil stepped back. "We got trouble."
Grissom eyed him curiously. "That's a bit obvious."
Phil shook his head. "Not here. But close by."
Grissom turned to see M'xy effortlessly lift a row of fallen file cabinets off a shaken secretary, help her to her feet, and wrap her in a cow-pattern blanket he seemed to pull out of thin air. Somewhat amused, he nonetheless picked up on the urgency in Phil's voice. "Well, what do you want to do?"
Phil started to head for the door. "I'm gonna go check it out."
"Well, what about the people here?" Grissom asked.
Phil didn't turn around. "You've got M'xy. You've got your cell phone. And you've got the others' numbers. And if you really need help, chances are I'll know it before you get a chance to call for help, anyway."
He stopped in the doorway and turned around. "I don't know what's going to happen next. I don't know how I'll handle it. I don't even know how I'm doing whatever it is I'm doing. But I do know that whatever it is I have to do, I'm going to do my level best to get the job done. I've got a gift. I intend to make a difference with it." And with that, he was gone.
Grissom shook his head, then turned to help M'xy, thinking, And just when we thought we had Phil all figured out...
Back at the battle, Priest squeezed the trigger of his -- for lack of a better term -- gun (though it was no weapon this era had ever seen). Bolts of plasma energy sprayed from the weapon for a solid two minutes until the barrel simply melted.
Priest threw the overheated weapon down. The Beast shook its large head. It was then that Priest noticed a very small stream of liquid dripping from one of the Beast's horns. The Beast roared.
He was never one to smile, but somehow this one slipped out as he said, "So... you can bleed."
Priest was running low on weapons but definitely not on ideas. He had figured out one particular disadvantage the Beast possessed: speed, or more appropriately, the lack thereof. Priest himself wasn't a small man at all, but he had very little trouble keeping one step ahead of the Beast, and dodging its blows was getting easier. Since very large creatures tired more quickly than smaller ones, Priest was counting on that critical speed gap to increase as the fight went on. If, that was, the usual principles of biology applied to forty-foot mythological creatures from the nether regions of the earth. As for that, Priest had no idea.
Still, speed differential or not, Priest was barely able to dent the monster, and unlike Chance, sooner or later his luck would run out. He was going to try a few more things, and if they didn't work, he would adapt his strategy from offensive mode to defensive mode, and eventually to get the hell out of Dodge mode.
Tayden stuck his head out of one of the passages. "Watch out for the--"
CLANG!
A red-hot length of metal flew through the air and struck the Beast in the chest, knocking it backward. It slowly got to its feet, obviously winded. Before Priest could take advantage of the situation, he heard a voice coming down another tunnel.
"WATCH OUT!"
Priest ducked out of the way as a hail of rocks shot by, propelled by an unseen force. The rocks, some four feet across and weighing a thousand pounds, pummeled the Beast, and although it wasn't even knocked to the ground, the Beast was losing some of its momentum.
The source of the voice, of course, was a very irate Phil Smith, who emerged into the cavern both astounded and pretty angry that his telekinetic onslaught hadn't visibly wounded the Beast. "That didn't work? What the--?"
Priest threw himself at Phil and knocked him out of the way as the Beast's immense tail whipped toward the bewildered kinetic. It would have crushed Phil against the cavern wall, but Priest took the brunt of the onslaught and merely had the wind knocked out of him. "What do you think you're doing down here?" Priest demanded as he dodged the tail's backlash. "You cannot possibly hope to handle this monster!"
"Well, excuse me for trying to help!" Phil shouted back as he ducked and rolled under the swinging tail. "I felt the earthquake and heard something weird down here, so I thought you might need a hand. I didn't expect to run into Mothra over there!" He jumped over the tail again and hurled another big rock at the creature, causing it to stumble backward. "You got any more fancy futuristic guns?"
Priest shook his head.
"Well take these!" Phil reached into his jacket and tossed two grenades to Priest, careful not to dislodge the pins. "I still haven't finished unloading that Jeep!"
He turned and ran right into the path of the Beast's giant paw. Phil was knocked to the cavern floor and managed to roll out from under the Beast's enormous foot. "I kinda wish I had taken the time to plan this a bit more," he said to himself as his nose started to bleed. Again.