Chapter 17.5: Interlude Two-Old Scores

[H1]Chapter 17.5: Interlude Two: Old Scores [/H1]

Once, Eliza has been shot through her right lung. The battlefield and the reasons for it weren't important as they lay long, long behind her, but the near intimate experience with death and debt she had to pay for recovery had convinced her to renew her studies in resonance communications to be something other than a meathead ground pounder.

Yet, that single experience from her past was the closest comparison she had to what she felt now. A deep, piercing stab that threatened to tear her heart in two as she had to look away from her pleading daughter's folded ears and trembling lips from atop a pile of armored vests.

Eliza gripped her chest with a trembling hand. She leaned against a bulkhead, if for but a moment, and tried to calm her breathing.

Gwen was such a smart young girl, so atypical to Eliza's expectations of children sometimes, but she was still too young to really understand why Eliza could not stay.

A part of her, the inner beast she rarely let out, howled and demanded she go back and comfort her distressed daughter and damn the consequences. The cold, intellectual part of her that kept the beast chained idly noted that would be a great way for both of them to be dragged beneath the waves as an unholy abomination's snack. 

Or worse.

Gwen's future would not end here. 

Recovered, Eliza sprinted through the ship on her way back to the upper deck. The ship shuddered with a tremendous impact. The force set Eliza off balance but she easily corrected herself with an agile twist.

"Sandy, situation report?" she shouted at a nearby speaker tube. 

A nearby speaker blared to life. "Captain Mor, the sandcrawler's grappled onto the forward hull! I cannot shake her!" came Sandy's panicked cry. 

"Understood." Eliza was already moving.

"Hurry, it's eating into my outer skin!" Sandy's voice followed through the passageway.

"I'm on my way." 

Eliza took a deep, calming breath, and focused. Awareness of the power within bloomed in her mind. Mana bubbled within her channels, agitated and in accordance with her mood, yet currently that's all it did, waiting for her will to mold it into action. Yet, for all that she had a developed mana network and could control the flow of it in her body, she was nothing more than a novice when it came to formalized thaumaturgy. 

Any mage worth the title could do far, far more with the raw energies of the arcane than she could. Even the family crest she shared with Gwen, a treasure beyond dear to her heart and worth a pretty crown itself, only allowed a small degree of familiarity with raw thaumaturgy; nothing like the lifetime of training expected of even a mediocre mage, nevertheless the things some of people's heroes underwent to perform feats of legend. That's where the sigil slumbering in her chest came in.

"The Type 23E Sigil or as I like to call it, 'Savior of the Worthless'," Eliza softly repeated the words of her old instructor, "is a gods damned miracle of modern thaumatology, and it lets all of you green little shits act like you're a damn monk with twenty years of martial reinforcement training. Never, ever, forget how damn lucky you are to have it."

"Breathe in, breathe out, extend your will, let your internal reservoir flood through and—" Eliza continued, and willed her mana to action, pouring it into the inactive sigil. 

It burst into life as her mana completed the circuit. It synched up with her nervous system with a sharp jab up her spine. Spells formed in her mind's eye and loaded into her flesh with practiced ease: viribus, celeritas, aspectu. Her muscles tensed, and she exploded forward, rushing forward as the world slowed down.

Decks blurred by. Some hatches opened for her, others tried and failed with the grinding of rusted gears. Eliza gave Sandy a silent thanks while silently cursing herself for every second she was stalled ripping open a door. Light gleamed at the top of a stairway. Eliza blurred upward and into the light of day. In that moment, her perception raced, and Eliza saw.

In the two minutes she had been gone, the entire ship had dipped disturbingly low into the water. Waves splashed over the ship's railing. Massive limbs, encased in black armored carapace and seven in total with even more beneath the waters, stretched across the prow and deck. Their pull overcame the ship's buoyancy and dragged the ship lower into the water with steady speed.

As she watched, a huge tentacle at the stern lazily, almost contemptuously smashed across the deck with a tremendous impact. It flattened much of the remaining railing, ripped up ship's light she'd been working on just the other day, strained a turret in its creche to the breaking point with contemptuous ease before it cast all of them into the surrounding waters. The tangle of limbs moved over the ship like a constrictor across the while the bulk of its body remained beneath the waves. Muffled and subdued, Eliza nonetheless felt through her feet tremors in the deck born of screaming steel torn apart by gnawing beaks and teeth gnawing. All this culminated in a nightmare of movement in the ship that left Eliza stumbling while her imagination filled in the worst for what she couldn't see.

A tentacle nearby seemed to sense her presence, a face half molded onto its frame opened its single remaining eye, and—

"Hey Elly, been a minute, hasn't it?" Tomas asked her from the open hatchway.

 

Eliza blinked, and yawned. Her work at the resonance console had continued late into the night. Decoding transmissions plus transferring messages took a lot of work. Goddess, she must have nodded off.

 

"Here you go," Tomas said, handing her a hot cup of mountain tea. The aromatic fragrance, with just a touch of spice, was lovely, and she practically inhaled the long lost scent with a sigh of pure satisfaction.

 

Wait, long lost? This was standard issue on the ship.

 

"Been hard at work, haven't you?" Tomas said, hand on her shoulder. His tail shifted, intertwining with hers in a way that made her heart sing. He tskked. "So much work, too. Here, let me take over for the shift?" he whispered in her ear.

 

Something was weird. Tomas…Tomas meant a lot to her, more than regulations allowed even with their equal ranks, but it felt like she hadn't been touched in a long time, not like this. Why was this simple touch making her heart weep? "But—" 

 

"No butts, you've been overworking and for what? You know we don't get overtime pay in a warzone. Should've let me take over an hour ago, you silly minx. It's okay to let go, you know? Just go to sleep? I'll handle everything," he said to her.

 

It…it did sound good. She was so, so tired, but first she had to put Gwen to—

She bit her cheek. Pain blossomed and she tasted iron. Rage consumed her.

She raised her shard thrower, took aim, and fired three times in rapid succession.

The first shard went wide as the face jerked and larger tentacle mass began to move. The second impacted the armored carapace and disintegrated in a burst of shrapnel. The third shot slammed into dear Tomas's head and splattered his skull out the back.

The illusion shattered. The man who was her Tomas a moment ago warped into a rictus of horror with a half-hanging, lifeless jaw leaking ichor. The head itself merged into the flesh around the tentacle in a crude melding of cancerous mass. Inhuman screams rang out from the sea, rising in pitch and rage before cutting off suddenly.

A small part of Eliza's heart broke as Tomas's face went slack. She'd hoped…

Her hopes were foolish. A dream that could never be. Instinct saw her throw herself backward as a tentacle rocketed through the space she'd occupied previously like a massive branch-sized spear of ebony.

Eliza was back to her feet in an instant. Three pitch black, spider leg like tentacles squared off against her, each unerringly orienting in her direction like they could see her. One was returning to an upright position. One firmly gripped the bow of the ship and was beginning to drag it below. The third was repositioning, almost like it was surveying the situation. There were at least five other limbs beneath the sea, but Eliza was not willing to bet this thing was young and only had a mere eight legs.

The situation was less than ideal.

Fighting a sand crawler on foot by yourself was, outside the legendary tales, generally a good way to kill yourself in spectacularly violent fashion. Standard protocol was for pairs of fully functional destroyers with full combat crews to patrol the seas near each other, guard one another's flanks, and to drop shock charges or the rarer heavy storm charges to drive the creatures to the surface, whereupon the ship's 5inch shard launchers would finish them off. If the creature tried to ensnare crewmen with their Call, then unaffected or shielded crewmen were to use small arms to pick off the heads to disrupt their Song. If the ship was grappled by a Sand Crawler, high explosives were recommended. 

She didn't have a tenth of that at her disposal. She had herself. The rest of the wet crew was dead and buried. She had a sturdy N-23 carbine with 6 shards left and 5 reloads in her ammunition pouch. Sandy was already damaged before, and now her hull was taking even further damage as the crawler ripped into her. However bad it was up top, it was almost certainly worse below the waves where the sandcrawler was latched on. Most of the remaining anti-crawler weapons' charges were still stored below and in questionably safe state. 

Most. 

Unfortunately, Eliza's answer to the sandcrawler beneath the waves was on the opposite end of the ship, close to the killing range of all three tentacles. Eliza tensed and breathed out. Mana bubbled within her, and spells woven into her flesh reinforced in triplicate. The world slowed. She raised her rifle. The tentacle nearest her bent back with a textbook harpoon strike that would see her impaled should it reach its full potential speed.

"Now, Sandy!" she shouted

With those words, every remaining turret on the ship opened fire. Of the four semi-operable turrets, three successfully charged and propelled their shot with a sonic boom that whipped air and sound past Eliza's ears. Their shots left an audible bass tone that was felt more than heard and reverberated up Eliza's spine. Even with her ears folded, she knew she would hear the ringing all day. This assumed she lived, of course.

By all the dead gods she would.

Absolutely none of the turrets hit remotely anywhere close to the tentacles. They weren't even aimed in their general direction as the gears to turn the turrets were long rusted to ruin beyond her ability to repair. Maybe with Sandy operational that could have been different in another six months, but she didn't have that long before they starved.

The shots instead rocketed out to sea to ruin some poor fish's day. Even with Sandy's assistance, the fact remained that they were worthless and deadweight unless something happened to go in front of them, and even there, reloading would be a pain that by herself and done manually could take her ten minutes. What they did do was serve as a lovely surprise and distraction for the sandcrawler whose tentacles retracted briefly to zero in on the previously ignored and inactive threats.

At least, that was the plan.

The last turret did not immediately fire with the others. It instead charged, hummed violently, and sparked with violet energy that had a notable, high-pitched whine. 

Oh shi—

Eliza hurled herself to the deck heedless of the tentacles rushing at her before metal screamed as if in agony. Heat fled the entire deck such that Eliza's teeth immediately turned to chattering and her fur bristled in shock as metal crunched, compressed, and thaumic energy ran wild. Oxygen liquified from the air and pooled on the deck only to evaporate just as quickly in the rushing wind as the turret imploded and compressed only for the tortured metal's scream to cut off suddenly as the gun's spell matrix collapsed like shattered glass.

For a brief second there was absolute silence bar the rushing wind, and then the metal, violently forced into a compressed space suddenly found itself without said compressing force. It promptly bounced back towards its original rigid shape, and the turret's remnants tore itself apart in high speed shrapnel.

The sheer force shook the deck as good as any shell hit, threw whistling fragments of alchemical steel and polymer over her head, and threw her straight up. She slammed back down and smashed her face into the deck. Blood flooded her mouth.

Eliza forced herself up, spitting out blood as she did so. Where the turret once was laid a great warped depression in the ship, piles of crushed metal, and ice shards.

The sandcrawler's tentacles and even the rhythmic grinding of the hull reverberating throughout the ship paused, as if the sandcrawler were concussed or confused. Some tentacles had even taken damage and retracted into the water, even, but it was marginal and not nearly enough to drive it off.

Eliza took the opportunity. She flipped upright and sprinted toward the foredeck bow.

Here, on the bow, laid one of the remaining pieces of deck machinery. Dipped into a circular impression in the deck plating was what looked somewhat like a mortar, albeit one whose barrel was so wide Eliza could have curled up in. Besides it were a variety of control panels, as well as a mechanical crank to manually adjust it.

Eliza was well aware it, like most of the machinery on the ship, was in a dubious state of service after five years sitting in an estuary and rusting away, despite the ship's preservation spells and her best efforts. But, unlike most of the other primary ship weapons, she'd tried her best to keep this up and even repair it. She hadn't had enough resources or ability to fully re-establish Sandy's control and had hoped beyond hope Sandy's passive regeneration would eventually kick in, but frankly she'd never been sure Sandy would even wake up in the first place. As such, she'd set the launcher to manual controls. She'd also known that this single machine, the ship's one and only functional depth launcher, would be one of the few viable weapons against the sandcrawler. Just loading it had been a colossal pain, too, as the loading mechanism was busted as was the charge hoist, meaning she'd had to painstakingly drag one 250kg storm charge through the ship and preload it.

The crank was big, tough, and meant to have at least three grown cat folk to man it. Eliza operated it with a screech of metal at about 2/3 normal speed, burning her mana at a prestigious pace to fuel the strength she needed to adjust the aim to far, far too close range for any sailor's sanity. Once set and the sandcrawler's black spear like limbs distressingly close, she depressed the ignition panel. The entire launcher lit up internally as projection runes activated for the first time in years, flickered, and nearly gave Eliza a heart attack as they went dark before a swoosh of rushing air heralded the launcher throwing the storm charge overboard.

Eliza's heart did feel like it fell out of body and into the abyss as, suddenly, a great, black spiked leg, previously unseen, rocketed up and wrapped around the charge before it could hit the water with incredible speed. Nearby, a larger, more developed and segmented tentacle morphed to reveal distressingly real elven woman's face. Its eyes focused on her with unerring precision.. Movement in her peripheral vision told her everything she needed to know about the other tentacles being done with the turrets.

Eliza let go of all restraint. Mana boiled in her veins. Reinforcement matrices woven into her flesh and nerves activated, and accelerated. Her muscles screamed and sharp pains rang up and down her spine as mana flooded her body and she knew she had gone beyond her tolerance. 

She accepted the risk. She ripped a small package from her jacket. 

Blank, dead eyes from a dozen faces followed her movements. Multiple tentacles shot forward with previously unseen speed. If Eliza focused she could see the magic woven into them, its own thaumaturgical enhancements active. In any other situation, that'd be terrifying. 

Everyone knew sandcrawler handlers killed their creations off before they matured enough to use magic. 

Her hands moved, but the process was so slow. She knew at once she wasn't going to make it. She was fast in this state, so much faster that the world seemed slow. The sandcrawler, on the other hand, was faster. She would not make it in time.

Spite drove her on. An abstract part of her mind wondered if the sandcrawler intended to take her head for its collection or just eat her.

Neither was comforting, but spite and adrenaline drove her on. She might at least give the tentacles a very bad day.

The ship lurched, suddenly and without warning. Shock reverberated through the hull and deck. Eliza lost her balance as the ship all but slammed leftward with a geyser of water by the bow. The ship smashed into the rightmost tentacle arms, but by the secondary shocks, it did more than that as every tentacle around the ship suddenly lurched as if dragged by an unseen force.

Eliza armed her improvised bomb. A proper grenade would have been nice, but Sandy hadn't been resupplied with grenades for the crew at her last stop and Aoife had used the ones she'd 'acquired' to save Eliza's life. Aoife was long gone on her trip through the Dark Paths, but Eliza liked to believe her explosive enthusiast friend smiled back at her as Eliza threw the bomb from her prone position.

It sailed through the air in an arc, aimed just slightly ahead of the swaying tentacle. Eliza had hoped it would express panic. She saw nothing but the movement of its eyes on the package and tensing of muscles that wouldn't respond in time. Meters from the storm charge, it blew.

Unlike the turrets, this was a purely chemical reaction. Heat bloomed and sound screamed. Eliza's eardrums felt like they'd been stabbed and her ears folded. Then the storm charge went off.

The explosion had been a small firebomb, nothing more. Improvised between what she could find onboard, half remembered lessons from the Arsonist's Stratagem taught to her by her Grandfather, and technical manuals on specialized explosive shells. Also surprisingly volatile cleaning chemicals. For something the size and scale of the Sandcrawler, it'd be an annoyance. To its primary, original face, unpleasant in the extreme, but survivable. In proximity to the storm charge, though…

This was less a boom and more the roaring of the heavens. Thunder rocked the sky for a brief instant as lightning made its wrath known in broad daylight. Eliza didn't fear for she knew Sandy was insulated against this cat-folk made recreation of the gods. The sandcrawler wasn't. 

A chorus of gibbering screams filled the air. The main tentacle head had half its face charred. Its mouth opened in a wordless scream. Shocks and arcs of electricity raced along its face and into the wider, convulsing body beneath the waves. Parts of it steamed beneath the armor, and Eliza was suddenly reminded of the fried squid she'd had as a child as the savory scent filled the air. 

Suddenly, Sandy lurched forward. The tentacles all sunk beneath the waves. Eliza half expected one last spiteful glare, but no. The speed with which the tentacles shrunk from view into the water told her everything she needed to know about the sandcrawler's ability to maintain its position in the waves.

Eliza breathed out.

The entire exchange took less than a minute.

Eliza grimaced, very aware that while she had mana to spare at the moment, there would be a price to pay the moment she deactivated the hungry sigil in her chest which would only get worse the longer she held onto it. Reluctantly, Eliza cut the feed. Strength left her fingers and she dropped her carbine as her muscles suddenly felt like jelly. Then, an overwhelming wave of nausea ran up her throat simultaneously as pain jolted up her spine. She fell to her knees and retched. She'd only had rice gruel that morning and yet it refused to stay inside her as her body rebelled against the unnaturally drained state with waves of needle like pain through her legs and arms.

She bit down on her lip with enough force to draw more blood and focused just on turning her gasps into calmer, regulated breathing, at least for now.

"Captain Mor? Captain Mor!?" Sandy's voice called from a distant part of the ship. Eliza raised her head, wondering why Sandy wasn't using a closer voice tube before realizing the nearest ones were smashed shrapnel on the deck.

Eliza stumbled back toward the bridge, whose glass had shattered at some point.

"I'm here, Sandy," Eliza groaned, leaning heavily against the voice tube. She steadied her breathing while circulating mana through her channels. The pain lessened as her body's normal processes resumed, but she still felt awful. She'd known enhancing herself after so long out of practice would be bad, but her body must be in an even worse state than she'd thought if that brief period was enough to do this to her.

"I'm not picking up any traces of the sandcrawler, I think it fled," Sandy's voice carried a slight quiver.

"That's…good," Eliza said. She reached into her jacket and drew another small package. It was an old candy bar. It was her last. She'd given nearly all of them to Gwen. Nearly. "Sorry, Gwen," she muttered, before ripping the package open and downing the lemony and frankly sickly-sweet bar of dried grain down.

"What did you do at the end there? When the ship lurched, I mean." As the sugar dissolved, Eliza was already feeling better, although it'd be a little while before she could go all out again. An old adage popped into her head. "Thaumaturgy always carries a price."

"...you're not going to like it." Sandy's tone was suddenly sheepish, almost childlike to the point Eliza was immediately suspicious of what Sandy had done.

"You saved my life. I can't be mad."

"I blew my own pumping tanks to create flooding in the forward decks of the ship."

…

Eliza blinked, blinked once more, and then rubbed her eyes. That wasn't what she expected, but it was equally if not worse. "Dammit. That means…"

"I'm sinking, yes. I've somewhat contained it with automatic seals, but many of those are damaged or meant to have manual operation. It's minimally effective given the, uh, deterioration." Sandy's voice and tone was a two parts grim, one part sheepish, and mildly polite all at once in way Eliza could only conceptualize as a princess admitting she solved the rat infestation in her tower by blowing it the fuck up.

"How much longer do we have?" Eliza asked. They didn't have a devoted outrider, but there were life rafts. At least one should still be functional.

"I'd estimate around 15 minutes before flooding reduces all speed to a crawl, and then I go down." Sandy's voice was soft at the end, and Eliza couldn't blame her. This was her body, after all, and it was doomed. 

Eliza scanned the sea and was relieved to see that at least the main landmass was a lot closer than it was before and they hadn't been dragged back during the fight. Eliza looked to the steering wheel. Or more precisely, what was left of the steering wheel. It'd been bent and knocked out of place at some point.

"Can you steer, at all?" Eliza asked.

"...no. That was the first thing it ripped into. It's one reason I blew a hole in my own body to get at least some movement back. I can keep going straight and that's it."

Eliza said nothing for a minute, merely digesting the information as, without the whispers and screams of the sandcrawler, the sea seemed freakishly calm today. She even saw a seagull flying nearby.

"At least we're close. Keep us going, and I'm going to go get Gwen. Oh, and Sandy?"

"Yes, Captain Mor?"

"It's Eliza, and I just wanted you to know. You're coming with us, after all that."

"...thank you, Eliza. Please, go to your daughter."

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[H3]Chapter 17.5 Author's Notes[/H3]

 

Post Release Edit: Updated scene with Sandcrawler. Gist still occurs, but I had it exhibit more direct human emotion than I wanted. Other errors fixed.

Finally we have the sandcrawler in all its horror. I mentioned in a previous author's note that it went through numerous iterations, but that really doesn't capture it in full. It was at first something like an oversized Eurypterid, but then I started incorporating aspects of spiders (particularly in the tentacles), and at some point I had a bright idea: "What if they are born from sirens and grafted onto a flesh molding submerged scorpion-kraken like chimeric monster to fill in as a submarine like merchant raider? Also they collect faces?"

Yeah, I had way too much fun making this thing. Whether it's gone or not, shall remain to be seen.

One more chapter to go and Arc One is finished.

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