Taylor is DOOMed
- Thread starter mp3.1415player
- Start date
- Crossover
ExaltedNekoKun
Exalted Glorious Feline Light Source!
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him/Lord/Fuzzball
Oh, turning it into a steaming crater is absolutely, unquestionably likely. Just will there still be identifiable things in that crater, that remain mobile and get more identifiable. Then again, if Taylor manages to get a hold of the soul cube in hell, or anything remotely like it, I doubt that the Biology that Nilbog designed his creations with will matter much against her lawnmower-ing.
- Location
- Here
I've not played any version of DOOM produced this century. Are there any boss level opponents that would stand on a similar level to the Endbringers? If not at their true capability, then at the level they "sandbag" down to.....
It might be interesting if Taylor arrives not in Ellisberg or Brockton Bay, but in Canberra just as a certain false angel arrives (falls) in her arrival path.....
Will Doomgirl Rip And Tear the Hopekiller's wings off, bringing her to fall to ground level? What kind of Glorykill can the Doomgirl manage with the smallest of the first three Endbringers? Will Ziz regret her life choices for the remainder of her existence? (Both seconds of it.) And, how will the "normal" capes react to a girl in power armor grabbing an Endbringer by the upper and lower jaw and tearing it in half from crown to crotch?!?
Inquiring Minds want to know.....
It might be interesting if Taylor arrives not in Ellisberg or Brockton Bay, but in Canberra just as a certain false angel arrives (falls) in her arrival path.....
Will Doomgirl Rip And Tear the Hopekiller's wings off, bringing her to fall to ground level? What kind of Glorykill can the Doomgirl manage with the smallest of the first three Endbringers? Will Ziz regret her life choices for the remainder of her existence? (Both seconds of it.) And, how will the "normal" capes react to a girl in power armor grabbing an Endbringer by the upper and lower jaw and tearing it in half from crown to crotch?!?
Inquiring Minds want to know.....
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I think the DOOM 3 Cyberdemon and or DOOM 3 ROE Maladact might be in that range the DOOM 2016 Titan is bigger then Ziz Vevi and Bemmy combined and that was murdered by the Doom Slayer (Doom Guy) with nothing but a sword and shield not to mention whats coming down the pipe with DOOM Eternal Rip And Tearing an angel false or otherwise looks like its on the menu too
Neruz
Rogue Spiderbanana
- Location
- The Land of Fire and Poison
She's in 2016 Doom, so no Soul Cube, the closest thing to it conceptually would be the Crucible, which while not used by the Doomslayer in the game is revealed to be capable of turning into a big ole flaming sword right at the end, and is apparently going to show up in Doom Eternal as an actual weapon that the Doomslayer can use this time to chop dudes up with.
The closest thing that you actually fight in the game would be the Cyberdemon, who isn't really on the same level as the Endbringers being neither as large nor as powerful as them, but is certainly huge and strong none the less, and a lot faster than anything that size has any right to be.
That said, there was a demon known as The Titan in the past that the Doomslayer killed the shit out of prior to the events of the game. The Titan made Behemoth look small and puny in comparison, and in fact was so huge that his rotting remains form an entire level, aptly known as the Titan's Realm.
There's also the Icon of Sin, who is the reincarnated son of the traitor Night Sentinel (that may or may not be the Doomslayer), though the Icon of Sin is not fought as when you encounter it in-game it is slumbering. Apparently it will be a boss in Doom Eternal though.
Both Titan and Icon would handily match and possibly even exceed the Endbringers in destructive potential, though thanks to not actually being the Doomslayer Taylor has neither met nor fought either of these abominations.
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ExaltedNekoKun
Exalted Glorious Feline Light Source!
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him/Lord/Fuzzball
Comparing the on-screen Demons in DOOM to Endbringers has a minor problem. Endbringers by their very physical nature in 3+1 dimensional space (what we perceive) are just a fraction of their true-selves and by warping and layering other dimensions they becomes nearly two times stronger every layer of material deeper you go, starting at Aluminum and progressing from 50+ to 200 or so layers depending on where in the body you are looking at. You would need a supernatural weapon as nothing seen in the doom-verse made by humans, including the BFG-10000 in the eternal trailer should be able to do enough consistent damage in a time frame that the Endbringer could not regenerate or evacuate itself.
That said, Taylor is swinging by Hell before she makes it home, and Hell may be littered with Human weapons, but it also has other stuff... maybe other useful stuff.
That said, Taylor is swinging by Hell before she makes it home, and Hell may be littered with Human weapons, but it also has other stuff... maybe other useful stuff.
- Location
- Here
Considering the massive amount of RAGE Taylor has been marinating in, her respawn ability, and her upcoming slow bake in Hell Itself, I would not be surprised if Taylor herself will count as an immortal supernatural force of destruction who's mere presence will isolate the Endbringer from the parts that do not exist in normal reality by the time she gets back to Earth Bet. In other words, say goodbye to the bulk of the Endbringer's resistance, as it's resistance is reduced to that of an aluminum statue.....
Neruz
Rogue Spiderbanana
- Location
- The Land of Fire and Poison
Not necessarily; remember that human tech and weapons in Doom 2016 are heavily augmented with Argent Energy, which is literally Hell-power, exactly how that works is unclear but some of the high end weapons like the BFG 9000 are stated to straight up fire various forms of Argent Energy at enemies, so just because it's 'human tech' doesn't mean it's not a supernatural weapon and there is no way to tell how Shard bullshit would be able to cope with Hell bullshit, considering that Argent Energy is straight up demon magic and outright stated to defy conventional laws of physics, those same conventional laws of physics that the Shards are theoretically bound by and abuse the hell out of for their own bullshit.
Taylor is currently running around in a suit of power armor and carrying weapons that all operate using various forms of refined demon magic; which the UAC loved so much because one of the really nice things about demon magic is that it doesn't give a shit about entropy and is 100% environmentally clean and infinitely renewable, because it is literally magic.
Of course, the risk of demonic invasion turned out to be something of a downside.
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FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
Also don't forget... Taylor tried eating one of the demons. It didn't end well, but may have had lasting metaphysical effects
ExaltedNekoKun
Exalted Glorious Feline Light Source!
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him/Lord/Fuzzball
Well I think Argent Energy was corrupted by Demons as there was a group that used it before the whole betrayal thing. I'm recalling only bits and pieces of that DOOM game's lore as I was spectating behind my roommate's chair for most of it.
But yeah, Demon Magic, or even just Demon corrupted Magic would probably have some effect. I'd imagine the power armor shield's and any material laced/impregnated or a projection containing Argent Energy could have wildly immeasurable effects on Endbringers/Shards/Entities by virtue of its nature. I doubt the standard weapons up to chaingun would do anything, but the plasma weapons and BFG would probably do nicely.
As for eating the Demon and side effects... anti-thinker/precog? Or worse yet, any attempts to analyze Taylor using Shard abilities (not tech, just thinkers, extra-normal senses, simulations, etc) open them up to a view of Hell?
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6. DOOMed V: The Voyage Home (Of DOOM)
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
Taylor stood still as the strangest sensation she'd ever felt ebbed away.
She thought it was remarkably similar to watching water spiral down the drain, as experienced from the point of view of the water…
Blinking a few times, she shook her head hard, with the feeling that something in the back of her mind was watching curiously yet apprehensively. The girl growled at it, making whatever it was flinch.
"Yeah, I'll be coming for you, trust me on that," she snarled. "Once I've finished off any of the fuckers between me and home."
There was another sensation, this one coming from what she was becoming convinced was some sort of sixth sense she'd developed for detecting the monsters. It had served her well so far, each run through her own personal hell having enhanced it. Now it was prodding her very urgently. Looking around she examined where she'd ended up after the bizarre dimensional shift caused by the UAC machine. Surrounding her were rough stone walls that almost looked like they'd been melted, as if this place had once been full of lava. The rock was dark, almost black, and seemed to have tiny pinpricks of deep red light glowing somehow inside it here and there. Turning on the spot she inspected the entire place.
She was in a cave, as far as she could tell, one possibly a hundred feet across and maybe half that high. The ground was pitted and scored, piles of rubble around the edges which seemed to have flaked off the walls, and the entire affair was a rough oval, the far end narrowing with the roof coming down to ultimately form a misshapen tunnel that curved away to the left. The dull glow illuminating the area rather insufficiently came from the other end, where the same misty pinkish energy that had been inside the transportation machine she'd got running on the martian base. Just as in that case, staring at it made one's eyes try to go around a corner that wasn't there, although she noted absently that the effect didn't seem so peculiar this time. Perhaps she was getting used to it.
Walking over to the portal she studied it for a few seconds. It seemed stable, so if necessary she could go back through it, but right now she saw no reason to do so. The UAC facility would keep, and she'd more than had her fill of the fucking place anyway.
Turning around she looked at the exit from this cavern, thought for a moment, then made sure her plasma rifle was ready and headed for it. All the modifications she'd made to the trusty weapon, some of them the result of documentation she'd read, and some from her own ideas, had made it not only her standard go-to boomstick, but one she really liked.
A lot.
It was so good at killing things.
She suspected it was going to get a chance to do more killing very soon if the feeling in her bones was right.
Oddly enough, Taylor was fine with that. And very, very calm while still being a boiling cauldron of suppressed fury.
As she passed the middle of the cavern her armor HUD made an odd sound and popped up a message she'd never encountered before.
Dimensional transit waypoint saved.
She stopped and looked at the message, while trying to work out what it was talking about. There was a mention in one of the manuals she'd read about the armor having some sort of transdimensional navigation ability, linked to the way it had pockets that were preposterously larger on the inside and presumably using much the same technology, but she couldn't remember that specific message being mentioned. Possibly it was something the armor's onboard processor network had independently come up with. She was aware that the computers in this thing were amazingly powerful, probably far more so than anything at home, and seemed to be learning from her as time went on. Considering how deeply it was linked into her mind with the neural interface, that didn't entirely surprise her.
After a couple of seconds she shrugged. Right now it wasn't important. When she got home, she could work out what was going on, but she certainly wasn't going to waste time and risk problems by fucking around with her armor right now. Running a quick diagnostic, which came back all in the green, she dismissed the notification and resumed heading towards the exit.
The next ten minutes passed uneventfully as she moved with caution, skill, and enormous amounts of heavily armed paranoia down the winding passageway that led away from the cavern she'd arrived in. She didn't know what was up ahead, but she could hear some strange sounds and her monster sense was tingling.
Plus that thing in the back of her mind was watching very carefully. That was guaranteed to make her even more cautious.
Eventually she rounded one final bend, finding that there was now light coming from up ahead somewhere. She'd long passed into near-absolute darkness once the dim glow from the cavern vanished behind her and had been using both the impressively good light amplification system in the armor, as well as the thermal imaging, millimetric radar, and even more esoteric sensory packages it had. Now, she turned most of that off with an almost instinctive mental command, only leaving the night vision, which she wound down a lot.
As she even more carefully approached the light, looking from side to side, upwards, and behind herself in case of ambush, she kept her rifle ready to fire with all the tracking assist functions fully active. Eventually she found herself a short distance from a ninety-degree turn which was illuminated quite brightly by the standards of this place, but in real terms still fairly dimly. The light was a flickering orange-yellow like from a fire. The odd sounds had become much louder, some she recognized as the calls of the monsters she was all too familiar with, apparently at some distance, but a lot new to her. It was all underlaid by a nearly subsonic rumble like a train in the distance, which waxed and waned irregularly.
Her HUD told her that the outside temperature was over forty degrees centigrade, which was pretty hot but not excessively so. Inside the armor she felt completely comfortable, of course, since it sneered at any heat below the melting point of iridium.
Unfortunately some of the monsters used plasma which was much, much hotter than that. She'd found that to her cost more than a few times. On the other hand, her plasma was even hotter than that...
Taking a breath and readying herself, she raised the weapon, stepped around the corner ready for anything, and stopped dead.
There was a long, long silence.
"I am going to fucking slaughter you," she said with fury to the thing that seemed to live in her imagination. "After I do the same thing to those fuckers."
She paused, then added reflectively, "Which might take a while."
It was only the truth.
There were a lot of monsters down there, below the eighty foot cliff her tunnel exited at the top of.
Like, all the monsters.
And every single one of the vast crowd of things was looking right at her. Waiting.
Very slowly, her teeth bared in the most vicious grin in the history of grins.
"Prepare to die, Mr Monster," she almost sang before flinging herself off the cliff, opening fire on the way down and filling the sky of what appeared to be a cave large enough to lose Brockton Bay inside with brilliant blue-white plasma shots. Thousands of green, red, and purple fireballs came back at her.
Somehow directing her fall through them, most missing with only a few hitting her massively upgraded armor, she landed directly on top of one of the things that she'd chain-gunned to death right back at the beginning of this entire horrific event, ripped its head off with her free hand, stuck the plasma rifle into the remains of its neck, and pulled the trigger.
The entire ten foot tall horror exploded in a shower of gore, which rained down around and on her. She dropped to the ground as the legs of the thing fell to either side and grinned again as every monster she could see froze for a second or two.
"Hi!" she chirped brightly. "Let's play a game."
She put the plasma rifle away and pulled out in one smooth move the fuck-off big energy gun she'd liberated from the ARC labs, activating it with a flick of a finger. The sub-bass hum was soothing to her ears, making her entire armor gently vibrate, as the HUD linked to the gun and showed the energy levels and current shot count.
"The game's called… I kill you."
She pulled the trigger. Repeatedly.
When the gun indicated it was empty, she pulled out the empty energy cartridge, replaced it with a full one, put the empty into her storage, and looked around with satisfaction. Then she patted the enormous weapon fondly.
"I shall call you Mr Death, I think," she told it, sloshing her way through acres of knee-deep remains. In the distance she could see a huge crowd of monsters that seemed to be running away as fast as possible.
"Hey, come back, I'm not finished yet!" she shouted at the top of her voice, dark enjoyment in it.
They ran faster.
She followed, whistling to herself.
For the moment she was actually having an experience that she might term fun if she was so disposed.
"I love a target rich environment," she chuckled.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"I fucking hate a target rich environment!" Taylor screamed as she ran like mad. Behind her a huge crowd of enormous things howled and gibbered as they followed, rockets roaring past all around her. She spun, running backwards for a moment as she fired back with the plasma rifle, then kept the motion going to resume facing the right direction and charged around the side of one of the huge rock outcroppings this current area had sticking up all over the place. Above her the glowing orange sky rippled with eldritch currents, and huge flying things circled in the distance.
She was pretty sure that sooner or later one of them was going to attack. She could feel them watching warily.
Diving into a crack in the rock that was too small for the things chasing her to enter, she waited as they ran past, while reloading her weapons. The enormous energy gun was cooling down from being used rather extensively, 'Mr Death' having done a sterling job on most of the vast collection of this current crop of horrors until it had overheated. She didn't blame the thing, it was an experimental weapon after all and had held up far better than she'd expected. If she found herself with some time where something wasn't trying to eat her face she was fairly sure she could make a few changes to it to improve that situation, having had a few ideas, but right now that seemed unlikely to happen.
This place had an apparently never ending supply of monsters that made most of the ones back on Mars seem like mildly irritated kittens by comparison. She was actually having to work at killing them, and was in her opinion getting quite good at it, but the problem was that they were a lot smarter than the ones she was used to and seemed to be adapting to her tactics just as quickly.
Luckily she was also good at adapting. And so far was staying ahead of the things.
As she finished loading the railgun and hefted it, the last of the crowd of monsters that had been in pursuit ran past the entrance to her hidey-hole, its talons making skittering sounds on the rock. She counted silently to herself, then eased out of the crevasse and took aim. Tracking the rear guard of the attacking force, which seemed to have realized she'd managed to slip past and was slowing in the distance, she held the trigger down while activating a modification she'd added in the ARC lab but not had a chance to try yet. The gun vibrated in her hands, heating up rapidly, and made a slightly unnerving whistle at a very high pitch that made the entire collection of tall skeletal things stop dead, then whip around to face her.
She smirked at them as they all raised their own weapons, and released the trigger.
"Boom," she whispered.
Then she put the fully depleted and very hot railgun away, pulled out her chainsaw, fired it up, and charged. Monster flesh flew as the tool screamed, and she howled her own song of fury to match.
When it was done, she straightened up, dropping the disembodied leg she'd been using as a cudgel, and looked around in satisfaction.
"Motherfuckers," she said under her breath. "Yeah, not so tough when you're in pieces, are you?"
Kicking a pile of remains to the side she stomped towards the path onwards. After a few feet, she slowed and looked around. "Why is it getting brighter..." she muttered, seeing that the entire area seemed to be glowing more and more visibly as if the light from above had…
Taylor stopped and looked up.
"Oh, Fu..." she managed before the bus-sized plasma ball hit, seeing one of the huge flying things descending to her in a dive, another shot already incoming.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Taylor opened her eyes.
"Now I'm really mad," she grated as she stood up and looked around. Then she looked down at herself and started laughing grimly. "On the other hand, I don't need to piss around with Mars any more, looks like."
She headed towards the exit from the cavern, pulling out the big fucking gun as she walked.
"Mr Death is hungry," she said in a happy little voice, "And I'm coming for you all."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
One hundred and forty two arrivals back in that fucking cavern took the shine off having somewhere different to wake up than the original storage room. By that point she was absolutely incandescent with fury to the point that she could feel it apparently making reality itself look worried. She'd long since found that the odd dimensional portal had stopped causing her any issues with looking at it, and if anything her own vision seemed to have adapted to the odd way space in wherever she really was sometimes did odd things. She stretched, rolled her head inside her armor, and cracked her knuckles.
Her armor was like a part of her own body by now. She didn't even have to think about using it, she'd been in it for so long. Taylor didn't even really know how long she'd been slaughtering her way through this fucking place, aside from a rough estimate of probably months at least in her personal timeline. It was far, far larger than the martian base had been, and each time she'd taken a different route, finding all manner of strange things. Sometimes when she went around a corner the scenery abruptly changed as if she'd gone through another portal like the one back to Mars, the sensation of just for a moment falling down a hole in the universe getting less and less annoying each time. She'd fight her way through whatever the new place held, sometimes finding herself back in the place she'd started in, sometimes waking up back here when she ran into something she couldn't handle. Each time that happened, she gritted her teeth and went back there until she could end whatever had killed her.
She wasn't going to let a little thing like a gruesome death put her off her revenge.
The little boring monsters like the plasma imps were by now about as much trouble as cockroaches. She just stepped on them and kept going. It seemed like they were finally somehow getting the message, though, and the last four runs through they'd taken one look at her and run for their lives. A few of them simply froze in place and stared at her in apparent awe as she passed.
Those ones she let live. Most of the time.
Everything else died, eventually. Even the huge flying things.
She'd had to modify Mr Death quite a lot, using parts from some of the spare weapons she'd picked up, but in the end she'd managed to one-shot one of the enormous warped dragon-like creatures with the largest ball of virulently swirling green energy she'd ever seen. Of course, the fringe effects of the incredibly violent shot had killed her too, but she'd lived long enough to see the thing explode into tiny fragments crackling with energy. She'd died with a smirk of pleasure and the thought that perhaps extra shielding would be a good idea the next time.
Pulling out the huge weapon and her toolkit, along with a large pile of other confiscated tech, she set to work, humming to herself. This time she was going to bag herself a draconic demon -thing and live to kick its corpse in the head, if it had one left.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
By the two hundred and fifth time, she seemed to be on a roll, and hadn't died for weeks. This was good, but it was also a pain in the ass since it showed how fucking large this place was.
"Now where the hell am I?" Taylor grumbled, looking quickly around. Yet another one of those sudden dimensional shifts had popped up as she was chasing the last of the giant flying things, which had been retreating rapidly and roaring in agony and anger while trailing glowing ichor from the stump of one wing. She'd almost missed with her shot, but not quite.
Most of the other monsters were now definitely avoiding her, some of them looking downright terrified as much as she could tell from the utterly inhuman faces. Two hundred and five passes seemed to have given her an aura of instant death that even these things could pick up on, and they did not like it. She herself was eerily calm, the ever-present fury powering her onwards like a relentless machine, while simmering way down in the depths of her mind.
Of course, all this meant was that the things that did have the balls to attack her were getting steadily larger and more difficult to take out. This place seemed to have no end to the amount of horrors it could pull out of its ass and throw at her. And these dimensional jumps were getting more frequent too.
She'd seen some bizarre things even by her own standards. Floating islands the size of Massachusetts hanging in a sky that went on apparently forever, nothing visibly holding them up. Even larger caverns than the first one, covered in odd symbols, and entirely full of terrible creatures bent on destroying her. Until they met her, of course. They tended to change their minds fairly quickly at that point, at least the more intelligent ones did.
The stupid ones she just killed.
Sometimes she found herself among gigantic ruins made of blocks of some dark stone the size of houses, that seemed to form angles that shouldn't really be allowed to exist. She thought they were oddly pretty, but more than a little annoying since they gave the things she was dealing with strange places to hide. One of these areas was also full of some very aggressive tentacled things with too many eyes which were talking to each other in deep voices in some language she almost thought she recognized. As soon as they spotted her they attacked. Of course. She was expecting that.
Apparently they weren't expecting her. By the time she finished very little of the bizarre architecture was still intact, and all the things were dead or dying. She'd quite enjoyed that experience because of the way they'd looked so surprised when she started killing them. It had made her giggle a little.
Sometimes she passed through areas that looked similar to, but weirdly different from, the UAC base, as if they'd been patterned on it somehow but whoever did it hadn't read the instructions. Those places tended to be full of monsters that had some strange cybernetic modifications, all rusty metal and glowing electronics. She spend some time scavenging anything that looked interesting in such areas when she finished killing anything in them that looked funny at her. Some of that tech had found its way into her weapons and had definitely added to their lethality.
Sometimes she passed through places that were almost organic in nature, as if the very walls were alive, and not with the sound of music. Odd sounds even compared to what she was used to would come from somewhere, and strange crystalline growths sprouted all over the place. She'd found that she could blast her way right through the walls in that sort of area, using the tracker system to locate whatever she was pursuing or that was pursuing her. Who was chasing who tended to ebb and flow but on the whole she thought she was coming out ahead.
Once or twice she'd even found herself back in an area that seemed almost like the Mars base, with lower gravity and everything, but where the damage was even worse than her first experience. Open courtyards would give way to peculiarly old-appearing buildings, all of it decaying and falling to pieces. By the time she left those areas they were usually past the point of falling to pieces and more in the category of in pieces. Sometimes with large craters added.
She'd figured out how to use the energy cells for Mr Death to make a really good explosion a couple of dozen resets ago.
The mushroom cloud was very pretty…
Right now she was going through another of the strangely organic areas, and the tracks of the wounded giant flying creature were outlined in blue-glowing blood-equivalent. Cautiously walking along she pushed her way through twitching pseudo-flesh, occasionally ripping an obstructing piece away with her gauntleted hand and tossing it to the side. Everything looked slightly rotted as if it was barely holding onto whatever form of life it had, the tiny glowing lights she sometimes spotted deep inside barely visible and giving the impression of being on their last legs.
Grumbling to herself about stupid dragon-things that didn't have the decency to stop moving when she shot them, she pressed on, her omnipresent rage an almost comforting sensation in the depths of her mind. The unknown observer seemed to be back too, a feeling of slight amusement mixed with impressed awe coming from it. Taylor was by now entirely certain it was real, and wasn't happy about that. "You do realize I haven't forgotten about you, I hope," she told it absently as she peered around a mass of soft and gooey fleshlike stuff. The light changed up ahead somewhere and she scanned the area again with various sensors. Her quarry showed as being about half a mile ahead, and behind her a couple more of the things seemed to be trying to sneak up on her having apparently followed through whatever hole in space had led her here.
Pulling out one of her modified power cells she thought for a moment, running some calculations in her head with the ease of practice, then thumbed the keypad she'd added to the device with the right data. When it was set she carefully put it down and nudged it under an overhanging mass of fleshy whatever the hell it was, before walking away. A hundred yards further she send the command that armed the improvised bomb and watched the HUD report the status with a grim smile. "Trip over that, see what happens," she muttered to the pair of blips that she could see slowly closing on her position, and could feel in the distance.
Forgetting about them for now, she resumed following the original one. Several miles later there was an enormous flash of light that came from behind, transmitted through the translucent surroundings, and she grinned to herself. The shockwave came some time later, making the ground heave underfoot.
Both blips and her own mysterious sense of the monsters showed that there was now only the one ahead.
"Right. Let's finish this. I've got a dad waiting for me," she said, moving faster.
Some considerable time later, after pausing to eat an MRE and drink, she emerged from the strange underground area into what seemed to be the surface of wherever she really was. Looking up she could see what looked like stars, although the night sky didn't match anything like she could remember from home at all. Some of the stars were much too bright, and there was a rather impressive galaxy low on the horizon that was clearly visible to the naked eye.
After staring at it with a certain degree of impressed awe for a couple of minutes, she shook her head and resumed dealing with her main priority. Looking around she saw that she'd exited a vast cliff formed of that strange almost organic rock stuff which stretched off in both directions out of sight, and rose to at least a couple of hundred feet above her. The little traces of illumination in it seemed to have died off completely, and thinking back she realized that this probably coincided with her little present to the monsters that had been following her.
She shrugged. It wasn't important.
In front of her she could see the glowing trail ascending a slope covered in rubble, so she followed. She had a policy; Never let one of them get away.
At the top of the rise, she looked around again, seeing that the slope she'd climbed seemed to go both ways in a huge arc completely out of sight. In front of her in the far distance were more old buildings, another set of ruins most likely, as she'd encountered more than once. And in the middle distance the damaged but still kicking flying monster was crawling along, making it apparent it wasn't pleased at all but wasn't anywhere near dead yet.
Well, that was easy enough to fix.
Putting her plasma rifle away, the weapon now even more modified and fiddled with than before, she pulled out Mr Death and armed it. Flicking added switches with confidence and assurance she lifted the gun to her shoulder and took aim.
"Bye bye!" she said happily, firing the thing.
The vast ball of crackling energy roared across the plain towards the monster, tendrils of death reaching out for anything in range. She watched as it approached the hellish creature, then swore violently as the thing spotted the incoming shot and frantically dived out of the way with a flap of its remaining wing. Her energy ball flew past, a few of the energy beams from it striking the monster and causing it to convulse, but not powerful enough to kill it.
"Fuck!" she growled, lining up another shot. As she fired a second time the first one hit the distant ruins and made them much more ruined in a huge flash of green light, shrapnel rising high into the air in ballistic arcs. She ignored that in favor of watching the next round head towards the monster, which again avoided it.
"Fucking hell!" she shouted. "Hold fucking still so I can kill you properly, will you, you bastard?"
She fired again, and again, while running towards it. Each time the damned monster managed to barely escape certain death. She had no idea how it was doing that, since it was so badly fucked up, but maybe it just wanted to live more than they usually did.
By the time she was a hundred yards from it, the buildings on the horizon were mostly not there any more, there was a rising column of boiling green energy coming from somewhere in that direction, and she was extremely miffed. Stomping towards her quarry, she put the now-overheated gun away for the moment and pulled out her trusty chainsaw. Smiling like a serial killer she fired it up.
The monster looked at her, then screeched and attacked. She laughed and met it half way.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Quite a long time later, after a number of other visits to strange places including several more of those semi-living ones that twitched when you blew holes in the walls, Taylor finally found what she was looking for.
She stared at the absolutely enormous monster at the far end of the cavern.
It stared back.
The thing was at least sixty feet tall, had hooves, claws, wings, a tail, fur, scales, and god alone knew what else, and looked pissed. It was like someone had taken every mythological creature ever mentioned in literature and created a mashup of all of them. Bits of it seemed to extend into other dimensions, looking out of focus as if it was actually even larger than it should have been. She studied it closely, seeing the telltale signs of the same sort of odd energy that seemed to be all throughout this strange place. She was very familiar with it after all this time, and was pretty sure she could literally feel it inside her as well as around her. At first that had worried her a little, but nothing seemed to happen as a result so she'd stopped caring.
"YOU ARE BECOMING AN IRRITATION, INSIGNIFICANT PEST," the thing suddenly said in an enormously loud voice full of anger.
She blinked. That was new.
None of them had ever spoken in anything she could understand before, although she was fairly certain that a number of the types of monster were actually not far off human intelligence.
This one was glaring at her with glowing eyes full of hate, and radiating a sensation of death and destruction.
She returned the glare, doing a pretty good job of radiating right back at it.
"You are standing between me and the way home," she replied. "You can move or you can die."
Taylor was certain that the glowing portal she could see some distance past it was indeed the way to where she intended to go. It looked almost exactly like the one generated by the UAC machine and if it wasn't the exit from this place, she was going to be seriously upset.
She might even go back and kill all the rest of the monsters that had run away, even if she had to follow them all across the universe, merely to get across quite how peeved she really was.
"DIE?" It chuckled in a basso profundo voice. Somehow what passed for a face distorted into what might have been a smile. "YOU THINK YOU CAN POSSIBLY HURT ME YOU POINTLESS CREATURE?"
"I'm willing to give it a shot," she snarled, hefting the rail gun menacingly. "And I don't give up. At all."
"OTHERS HAVE TRIED. NONE HAVE SUCCEEDED," the thing chuckled nastily. All around her, she could feel and hear other monsters of all types closing in, but didn't bother looking. "ONLY ONE HAS EVER COME CLOSE AND HE IS GONE. YOU ARE NOT HIM."
Taylor smiled horribly.
"I'm Taylor Hebert, you bastard, and you never fuck with a Hebert," she roared, firing the rail gun as fast as she could pull the trigger. As soon as it was empty she pulled out the chain gun and opened up on the huge creature, the cavern strobing brightly from the muzzle flashes. When the barrels spun down, she looked at the result.
The thing grinned back at her.
"PITIFUL," it laughed.
Her eyes narrowed.
"I've killed dragons, and demons, and aliens, and floated in space, and swum through lava, all to get home to my dad. I've put up with more shit than I can even talk about and I have had enough!" The fury was rising and she was literally seeing red. Something about the creature changed, making it almost look wary.
"YOU CANNOT OVERCOME ME," it said, although there was an odd little note of… possibly worry, she noticed with the back of her mind, while the front of it was consumed with the white hot rage that abruptly swelled like a nuclear fireball.
"I haven't even started yet," she said evenly, her iron control holding her in place. Around her everything had gone silent as if the monsters she knew were out there were watching.
It raised a hand, energy forming around it. With an incredible shout of rage it let fly.
She was already moving, her mind awash with total all consuming fury that seemed to make everything slow down and become perfectly, beautifully focused.
Dismissing everything else about herself, Taylor let the rage take her as she attacked. She was laughing like an idiot when they met in the middle of the huge cavern.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Panting for breath, Taylor leaned against the wall, her eyes closed. She was dripping with sweat, aching all over, and her right arm was snapped in at least two places according to her armor's diagnostics.
After a long moment, she opened her eyes again and looked at the creature in front of her. It was in much worse condition than she was. One huge leg was lying on the floor some distance away, scorched and distorted, both wings were ruined, and all of its teeth were missing. The beast was staring at her in what looked like horrified terror from it's position on the floor, surrounded by bits of it that should by rights have been inside it.
"IMPOSSIBLE," it muttered. "WHAT ARE YOU?"
"Very, very pissed off," she told it, while digging out some of the repair nanites and sticking them into the injection port on the side of her heavily scorched armor. The pain of the things working was irrelevant and went unnoticed. Straightening up she dropped the empty cartridge on the floor on top of the other eleven, then slowly smiled at it. "And now I'm going to end this and go home."
She pulled out Mr Death and very slowly pushed an energy cell into it, before activating the weapon.
The vast creature looked at her, visibly recoiling. "I YIELD," it said, in angry but scared tones.
Taylor looked at it for several seconds. "Tough," she said, then aimed and fired until the gun beeped empty.
As the echoes died away, she heard vast numbers of monsters chittering and rumbling in the dark outside the cavern, feeling them realizing what had happened and apparently being shocked and scared. The sounds gradually died away to leave complete silence. She walked over to the vast creature and looked into the slowly dimming eyes set in a ruined face. "I told you to move. You chose not to. I always finish what I start." Putting the gun away she cocked her fist, then hit it directly between the eyes as hard as she could.
The huge skull literally exploded, showering her and the entire area with glowing blood. She was entirely covered in it and watched as it seemed to sink into the armor a little as it the glow gradually faded, leaving the original greenish-black metallic surface a sort of matte purplish color. Various error codes flashed up then went away again as the system appeared to dislike the contact for a moment. She shivered as a wave of tiredness went through her, before deciding to indulge in one last nanite pack. Flicking gore from the injection port she stuck the thing in and activated it, the burn almost pleasant this time after the last six solid hours of fighting. Closing her eyes again she waited until the sensation died away, leaving her feeling, if not fully rested, at least back to something approaching normal. And her arm was now fine, which was good.
Opening her eyes again she looked around. Nothing was moving, not even a plasma imp, so she shrugged, reloaded all her weapons just in case, put them away except for the plasma rifle, and headed for the portal that she hoped was the way home.
"I've killed more things than I can possibly count, died over four hundred times, learned more about tech than any ten Tinkers, seen other worlds, destroyed other worlds, and now I just want go home to my dad," she idly said as she reached the thing. "So I will be very, very, very angry if this doesn't lead me back." The girl looked meaningfully around at the enormous pools of dimming blood, internal organs, and total devastation. "You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. Don't fuck with me."
The little presence in the back of her mind that had been there through the entire fight abruptly vanished.
She smiled a little, and walked into the portal.
After everything she'd been through, home was going to be a nice change. And when she'd relaxed for a while, she could work out just who needed to be killed and how long this should take.
But before that, she needed her dad and a pizza.
She thought it was remarkably similar to watching water spiral down the drain, as experienced from the point of view of the water…
Blinking a few times, she shook her head hard, with the feeling that something in the back of her mind was watching curiously yet apprehensively. The girl growled at it, making whatever it was flinch.
"Yeah, I'll be coming for you, trust me on that," she snarled. "Once I've finished off any of the fuckers between me and home."
There was another sensation, this one coming from what she was becoming convinced was some sort of sixth sense she'd developed for detecting the monsters. It had served her well so far, each run through her own personal hell having enhanced it. Now it was prodding her very urgently. Looking around she examined where she'd ended up after the bizarre dimensional shift caused by the UAC machine. Surrounding her were rough stone walls that almost looked like they'd been melted, as if this place had once been full of lava. The rock was dark, almost black, and seemed to have tiny pinpricks of deep red light glowing somehow inside it here and there. Turning on the spot she inspected the entire place.
She was in a cave, as far as she could tell, one possibly a hundred feet across and maybe half that high. The ground was pitted and scored, piles of rubble around the edges which seemed to have flaked off the walls, and the entire affair was a rough oval, the far end narrowing with the roof coming down to ultimately form a misshapen tunnel that curved away to the left. The dull glow illuminating the area rather insufficiently came from the other end, where the same misty pinkish energy that had been inside the transportation machine she'd got running on the martian base. Just as in that case, staring at it made one's eyes try to go around a corner that wasn't there, although she noted absently that the effect didn't seem so peculiar this time. Perhaps she was getting used to it.
Walking over to the portal she studied it for a few seconds. It seemed stable, so if necessary she could go back through it, but right now she saw no reason to do so. The UAC facility would keep, and she'd more than had her fill of the fucking place anyway.
Turning around she looked at the exit from this cavern, thought for a moment, then made sure her plasma rifle was ready and headed for it. All the modifications she'd made to the trusty weapon, some of them the result of documentation she'd read, and some from her own ideas, had made it not only her standard go-to boomstick, but one she really liked.
A lot.
It was so good at killing things.
She suspected it was going to get a chance to do more killing very soon if the feeling in her bones was right.
Oddly enough, Taylor was fine with that. And very, very calm while still being a boiling cauldron of suppressed fury.
As she passed the middle of the cavern her armor HUD made an odd sound and popped up a message she'd never encountered before.
Dimensional transit waypoint saved.
She stopped and looked at the message, while trying to work out what it was talking about. There was a mention in one of the manuals she'd read about the armor having some sort of transdimensional navigation ability, linked to the way it had pockets that were preposterously larger on the inside and presumably using much the same technology, but she couldn't remember that specific message being mentioned. Possibly it was something the armor's onboard processor network had independently come up with. She was aware that the computers in this thing were amazingly powerful, probably far more so than anything at home, and seemed to be learning from her as time went on. Considering how deeply it was linked into her mind with the neural interface, that didn't entirely surprise her.
After a couple of seconds she shrugged. Right now it wasn't important. When she got home, she could work out what was going on, but she certainly wasn't going to waste time and risk problems by fucking around with her armor right now. Running a quick diagnostic, which came back all in the green, she dismissed the notification and resumed heading towards the exit.
The next ten minutes passed uneventfully as she moved with caution, skill, and enormous amounts of heavily armed paranoia down the winding passageway that led away from the cavern she'd arrived in. She didn't know what was up ahead, but she could hear some strange sounds and her monster sense was tingling.
Plus that thing in the back of her mind was watching very carefully. That was guaranteed to make her even more cautious.
Eventually she rounded one final bend, finding that there was now light coming from up ahead somewhere. She'd long passed into near-absolute darkness once the dim glow from the cavern vanished behind her and had been using both the impressively good light amplification system in the armor, as well as the thermal imaging, millimetric radar, and even more esoteric sensory packages it had. Now, she turned most of that off with an almost instinctive mental command, only leaving the night vision, which she wound down a lot.
As she even more carefully approached the light, looking from side to side, upwards, and behind herself in case of ambush, she kept her rifle ready to fire with all the tracking assist functions fully active. Eventually she found herself a short distance from a ninety-degree turn which was illuminated quite brightly by the standards of this place, but in real terms still fairly dimly. The light was a flickering orange-yellow like from a fire. The odd sounds had become much louder, some she recognized as the calls of the monsters she was all too familiar with, apparently at some distance, but a lot new to her. It was all underlaid by a nearly subsonic rumble like a train in the distance, which waxed and waned irregularly.
Her HUD told her that the outside temperature was over forty degrees centigrade, which was pretty hot but not excessively so. Inside the armor she felt completely comfortable, of course, since it sneered at any heat below the melting point of iridium.
Unfortunately some of the monsters used plasma which was much, much hotter than that. She'd found that to her cost more than a few times. On the other hand, her plasma was even hotter than that...
Taking a breath and readying herself, she raised the weapon, stepped around the corner ready for anything, and stopped dead.
There was a long, long silence.
"I am going to fucking slaughter you," she said with fury to the thing that seemed to live in her imagination. "After I do the same thing to those fuckers."
She paused, then added reflectively, "Which might take a while."
It was only the truth.
There were a lot of monsters down there, below the eighty foot cliff her tunnel exited at the top of.
Like, all the monsters.
And every single one of the vast crowd of things was looking right at her. Waiting.
Very slowly, her teeth bared in the most vicious grin in the history of grins.
"Prepare to die, Mr Monster," she almost sang before flinging herself off the cliff, opening fire on the way down and filling the sky of what appeared to be a cave large enough to lose Brockton Bay inside with brilliant blue-white plasma shots. Thousands of green, red, and purple fireballs came back at her.
Somehow directing her fall through them, most missing with only a few hitting her massively upgraded armor, she landed directly on top of one of the things that she'd chain-gunned to death right back at the beginning of this entire horrific event, ripped its head off with her free hand, stuck the plasma rifle into the remains of its neck, and pulled the trigger.
The entire ten foot tall horror exploded in a shower of gore, which rained down around and on her. She dropped to the ground as the legs of the thing fell to either side and grinned again as every monster she could see froze for a second or two.
"Hi!" she chirped brightly. "Let's play a game."
She put the plasma rifle away and pulled out in one smooth move the fuck-off big energy gun she'd liberated from the ARC labs, activating it with a flick of a finger. The sub-bass hum was soothing to her ears, making her entire armor gently vibrate, as the HUD linked to the gun and showed the energy levels and current shot count.
"The game's called… I kill you."
She pulled the trigger. Repeatedly.
When the gun indicated it was empty, she pulled out the empty energy cartridge, replaced it with a full one, put the empty into her storage, and looked around with satisfaction. Then she patted the enormous weapon fondly.
"I shall call you Mr Death, I think," she told it, sloshing her way through acres of knee-deep remains. In the distance she could see a huge crowd of monsters that seemed to be running away as fast as possible.
"Hey, come back, I'm not finished yet!" she shouted at the top of her voice, dark enjoyment in it.
They ran faster.
She followed, whistling to herself.
For the moment she was actually having an experience that she might term fun if she was so disposed.
"I love a target rich environment," she chuckled.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"I fucking hate a target rich environment!" Taylor screamed as she ran like mad. Behind her a huge crowd of enormous things howled and gibbered as they followed, rockets roaring past all around her. She spun, running backwards for a moment as she fired back with the plasma rifle, then kept the motion going to resume facing the right direction and charged around the side of one of the huge rock outcroppings this current area had sticking up all over the place. Above her the glowing orange sky rippled with eldritch currents, and huge flying things circled in the distance.
She was pretty sure that sooner or later one of them was going to attack. She could feel them watching warily.
Diving into a crack in the rock that was too small for the things chasing her to enter, she waited as they ran past, while reloading her weapons. The enormous energy gun was cooling down from being used rather extensively, 'Mr Death' having done a sterling job on most of the vast collection of this current crop of horrors until it had overheated. She didn't blame the thing, it was an experimental weapon after all and had held up far better than she'd expected. If she found herself with some time where something wasn't trying to eat her face she was fairly sure she could make a few changes to it to improve that situation, having had a few ideas, but right now that seemed unlikely to happen.
This place had an apparently never ending supply of monsters that made most of the ones back on Mars seem like mildly irritated kittens by comparison. She was actually having to work at killing them, and was in her opinion getting quite good at it, but the problem was that they were a lot smarter than the ones she was used to and seemed to be adapting to her tactics just as quickly.
Luckily she was also good at adapting. And so far was staying ahead of the things.
As she finished loading the railgun and hefted it, the last of the crowd of monsters that had been in pursuit ran past the entrance to her hidey-hole, its talons making skittering sounds on the rock. She counted silently to herself, then eased out of the crevasse and took aim. Tracking the rear guard of the attacking force, which seemed to have realized she'd managed to slip past and was slowing in the distance, she held the trigger down while activating a modification she'd added in the ARC lab but not had a chance to try yet. The gun vibrated in her hands, heating up rapidly, and made a slightly unnerving whistle at a very high pitch that made the entire collection of tall skeletal things stop dead, then whip around to face her.
She smirked at them as they all raised their own weapons, and released the trigger.
"Boom," she whispered.
Then she put the fully depleted and very hot railgun away, pulled out her chainsaw, fired it up, and charged. Monster flesh flew as the tool screamed, and she howled her own song of fury to match.
When it was done, she straightened up, dropping the disembodied leg she'd been using as a cudgel, and looked around in satisfaction.
"Motherfuckers," she said under her breath. "Yeah, not so tough when you're in pieces, are you?"
Kicking a pile of remains to the side she stomped towards the path onwards. After a few feet, she slowed and looked around. "Why is it getting brighter..." she muttered, seeing that the entire area seemed to be glowing more and more visibly as if the light from above had…
Taylor stopped and looked up.
"Oh, Fu..." she managed before the bus-sized plasma ball hit, seeing one of the huge flying things descending to her in a dive, another shot already incoming.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Taylor opened her eyes.
"Now I'm really mad," she grated as she stood up and looked around. Then she looked down at herself and started laughing grimly. "On the other hand, I don't need to piss around with Mars any more, looks like."
She headed towards the exit from the cavern, pulling out the big fucking gun as she walked.
"Mr Death is hungry," she said in a happy little voice, "And I'm coming for you all."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
One hundred and forty two arrivals back in that fucking cavern took the shine off having somewhere different to wake up than the original storage room. By that point she was absolutely incandescent with fury to the point that she could feel it apparently making reality itself look worried. She'd long since found that the odd dimensional portal had stopped causing her any issues with looking at it, and if anything her own vision seemed to have adapted to the odd way space in wherever she really was sometimes did odd things. She stretched, rolled her head inside her armor, and cracked her knuckles.
Her armor was like a part of her own body by now. She didn't even have to think about using it, she'd been in it for so long. Taylor didn't even really know how long she'd been slaughtering her way through this fucking place, aside from a rough estimate of probably months at least in her personal timeline. It was far, far larger than the martian base had been, and each time she'd taken a different route, finding all manner of strange things. Sometimes when she went around a corner the scenery abruptly changed as if she'd gone through another portal like the one back to Mars, the sensation of just for a moment falling down a hole in the universe getting less and less annoying each time. She'd fight her way through whatever the new place held, sometimes finding herself back in the place she'd started in, sometimes waking up back here when she ran into something she couldn't handle. Each time that happened, she gritted her teeth and went back there until she could end whatever had killed her.
She wasn't going to let a little thing like a gruesome death put her off her revenge.
The little boring monsters like the plasma imps were by now about as much trouble as cockroaches. She just stepped on them and kept going. It seemed like they were finally somehow getting the message, though, and the last four runs through they'd taken one look at her and run for their lives. A few of them simply froze in place and stared at her in apparent awe as she passed.
Those ones she let live. Most of the time.
Everything else died, eventually. Even the huge flying things.
She'd had to modify Mr Death quite a lot, using parts from some of the spare weapons she'd picked up, but in the end she'd managed to one-shot one of the enormous warped dragon-like creatures with the largest ball of virulently swirling green energy she'd ever seen. Of course, the fringe effects of the incredibly violent shot had killed her too, but she'd lived long enough to see the thing explode into tiny fragments crackling with energy. She'd died with a smirk of pleasure and the thought that perhaps extra shielding would be a good idea the next time.
Pulling out the huge weapon and her toolkit, along with a large pile of other confiscated tech, she set to work, humming to herself. This time she was going to bag herself a draconic demon -thing and live to kick its corpse in the head, if it had one left.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
By the two hundred and fifth time, she seemed to be on a roll, and hadn't died for weeks. This was good, but it was also a pain in the ass since it showed how fucking large this place was.
"Now where the hell am I?" Taylor grumbled, looking quickly around. Yet another one of those sudden dimensional shifts had popped up as she was chasing the last of the giant flying things, which had been retreating rapidly and roaring in agony and anger while trailing glowing ichor from the stump of one wing. She'd almost missed with her shot, but not quite.
Most of the other monsters were now definitely avoiding her, some of them looking downright terrified as much as she could tell from the utterly inhuman faces. Two hundred and five passes seemed to have given her an aura of instant death that even these things could pick up on, and they did not like it. She herself was eerily calm, the ever-present fury powering her onwards like a relentless machine, while simmering way down in the depths of her mind.
Of course, all this meant was that the things that did have the balls to attack her were getting steadily larger and more difficult to take out. This place seemed to have no end to the amount of horrors it could pull out of its ass and throw at her. And these dimensional jumps were getting more frequent too.
She'd seen some bizarre things even by her own standards. Floating islands the size of Massachusetts hanging in a sky that went on apparently forever, nothing visibly holding them up. Even larger caverns than the first one, covered in odd symbols, and entirely full of terrible creatures bent on destroying her. Until they met her, of course. They tended to change their minds fairly quickly at that point, at least the more intelligent ones did.
The stupid ones she just killed.
Sometimes she found herself among gigantic ruins made of blocks of some dark stone the size of houses, that seemed to form angles that shouldn't really be allowed to exist. She thought they were oddly pretty, but more than a little annoying since they gave the things she was dealing with strange places to hide. One of these areas was also full of some very aggressive tentacled things with too many eyes which were talking to each other in deep voices in some language she almost thought she recognized. As soon as they spotted her they attacked. Of course. She was expecting that.
Apparently they weren't expecting her. By the time she finished very little of the bizarre architecture was still intact, and all the things were dead or dying. She'd quite enjoyed that experience because of the way they'd looked so surprised when she started killing them. It had made her giggle a little.
Sometimes she passed through areas that looked similar to, but weirdly different from, the UAC base, as if they'd been patterned on it somehow but whoever did it hadn't read the instructions. Those places tended to be full of monsters that had some strange cybernetic modifications, all rusty metal and glowing electronics. She spend some time scavenging anything that looked interesting in such areas when she finished killing anything in them that looked funny at her. Some of that tech had found its way into her weapons and had definitely added to their lethality.
Sometimes she passed through places that were almost organic in nature, as if the very walls were alive, and not with the sound of music. Odd sounds even compared to what she was used to would come from somewhere, and strange crystalline growths sprouted all over the place. She'd found that she could blast her way right through the walls in that sort of area, using the tracker system to locate whatever she was pursuing or that was pursuing her. Who was chasing who tended to ebb and flow but on the whole she thought she was coming out ahead.
Once or twice she'd even found herself back in an area that seemed almost like the Mars base, with lower gravity and everything, but where the damage was even worse than her first experience. Open courtyards would give way to peculiarly old-appearing buildings, all of it decaying and falling to pieces. By the time she left those areas they were usually past the point of falling to pieces and more in the category of in pieces. Sometimes with large craters added.
She'd figured out how to use the energy cells for Mr Death to make a really good explosion a couple of dozen resets ago.
The mushroom cloud was very pretty…
Right now she was going through another of the strangely organic areas, and the tracks of the wounded giant flying creature were outlined in blue-glowing blood-equivalent. Cautiously walking along she pushed her way through twitching pseudo-flesh, occasionally ripping an obstructing piece away with her gauntleted hand and tossing it to the side. Everything looked slightly rotted as if it was barely holding onto whatever form of life it had, the tiny glowing lights she sometimes spotted deep inside barely visible and giving the impression of being on their last legs.
Grumbling to herself about stupid dragon-things that didn't have the decency to stop moving when she shot them, she pressed on, her omnipresent rage an almost comforting sensation in the depths of her mind. The unknown observer seemed to be back too, a feeling of slight amusement mixed with impressed awe coming from it. Taylor was by now entirely certain it was real, and wasn't happy about that. "You do realize I haven't forgotten about you, I hope," she told it absently as she peered around a mass of soft and gooey fleshlike stuff. The light changed up ahead somewhere and she scanned the area again with various sensors. Her quarry showed as being about half a mile ahead, and behind her a couple more of the things seemed to be trying to sneak up on her having apparently followed through whatever hole in space had led her here.
Pulling out one of her modified power cells she thought for a moment, running some calculations in her head with the ease of practice, then thumbed the keypad she'd added to the device with the right data. When it was set she carefully put it down and nudged it under an overhanging mass of fleshy whatever the hell it was, before walking away. A hundred yards further she send the command that armed the improvised bomb and watched the HUD report the status with a grim smile. "Trip over that, see what happens," she muttered to the pair of blips that she could see slowly closing on her position, and could feel in the distance.
Forgetting about them for now, she resumed following the original one. Several miles later there was an enormous flash of light that came from behind, transmitted through the translucent surroundings, and she grinned to herself. The shockwave came some time later, making the ground heave underfoot.
Both blips and her own mysterious sense of the monsters showed that there was now only the one ahead.
"Right. Let's finish this. I've got a dad waiting for me," she said, moving faster.
Some considerable time later, after pausing to eat an MRE and drink, she emerged from the strange underground area into what seemed to be the surface of wherever she really was. Looking up she could see what looked like stars, although the night sky didn't match anything like she could remember from home at all. Some of the stars were much too bright, and there was a rather impressive galaxy low on the horizon that was clearly visible to the naked eye.
After staring at it with a certain degree of impressed awe for a couple of minutes, she shook her head and resumed dealing with her main priority. Looking around she saw that she'd exited a vast cliff formed of that strange almost organic rock stuff which stretched off in both directions out of sight, and rose to at least a couple of hundred feet above her. The little traces of illumination in it seemed to have died off completely, and thinking back she realized that this probably coincided with her little present to the monsters that had been following her.
She shrugged. It wasn't important.
In front of her she could see the glowing trail ascending a slope covered in rubble, so she followed. She had a policy; Never let one of them get away.
At the top of the rise, she looked around again, seeing that the slope she'd climbed seemed to go both ways in a huge arc completely out of sight. In front of her in the far distance were more old buildings, another set of ruins most likely, as she'd encountered more than once. And in the middle distance the damaged but still kicking flying monster was crawling along, making it apparent it wasn't pleased at all but wasn't anywhere near dead yet.
Well, that was easy enough to fix.
Putting her plasma rifle away, the weapon now even more modified and fiddled with than before, she pulled out Mr Death and armed it. Flicking added switches with confidence and assurance she lifted the gun to her shoulder and took aim.
"Bye bye!" she said happily, firing the thing.
The vast ball of crackling energy roared across the plain towards the monster, tendrils of death reaching out for anything in range. She watched as it approached the hellish creature, then swore violently as the thing spotted the incoming shot and frantically dived out of the way with a flap of its remaining wing. Her energy ball flew past, a few of the energy beams from it striking the monster and causing it to convulse, but not powerful enough to kill it.
"Fuck!" she growled, lining up another shot. As she fired a second time the first one hit the distant ruins and made them much more ruined in a huge flash of green light, shrapnel rising high into the air in ballistic arcs. She ignored that in favor of watching the next round head towards the monster, which again avoided it.
"Fucking hell!" she shouted. "Hold fucking still so I can kill you properly, will you, you bastard?"
She fired again, and again, while running towards it. Each time the damned monster managed to barely escape certain death. She had no idea how it was doing that, since it was so badly fucked up, but maybe it just wanted to live more than they usually did.
By the time she was a hundred yards from it, the buildings on the horizon were mostly not there any more, there was a rising column of boiling green energy coming from somewhere in that direction, and she was extremely miffed. Stomping towards her quarry, she put the now-overheated gun away for the moment and pulled out her trusty chainsaw. Smiling like a serial killer she fired it up.
The monster looked at her, then screeched and attacked. She laughed and met it half way.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Quite a long time later, after a number of other visits to strange places including several more of those semi-living ones that twitched when you blew holes in the walls, Taylor finally found what she was looking for.
She stared at the absolutely enormous monster at the far end of the cavern.
It stared back.
The thing was at least sixty feet tall, had hooves, claws, wings, a tail, fur, scales, and god alone knew what else, and looked pissed. It was like someone had taken every mythological creature ever mentioned in literature and created a mashup of all of them. Bits of it seemed to extend into other dimensions, looking out of focus as if it was actually even larger than it should have been. She studied it closely, seeing the telltale signs of the same sort of odd energy that seemed to be all throughout this strange place. She was very familiar with it after all this time, and was pretty sure she could literally feel it inside her as well as around her. At first that had worried her a little, but nothing seemed to happen as a result so she'd stopped caring.
"YOU ARE BECOMING AN IRRITATION, INSIGNIFICANT PEST," the thing suddenly said in an enormously loud voice full of anger.
She blinked. That was new.
None of them had ever spoken in anything she could understand before, although she was fairly certain that a number of the types of monster were actually not far off human intelligence.
This one was glaring at her with glowing eyes full of hate, and radiating a sensation of death and destruction.
She returned the glare, doing a pretty good job of radiating right back at it.
"You are standing between me and the way home," she replied. "You can move or you can die."
Taylor was certain that the glowing portal she could see some distance past it was indeed the way to where she intended to go. It looked almost exactly like the one generated by the UAC machine and if it wasn't the exit from this place, she was going to be seriously upset.
She might even go back and kill all the rest of the monsters that had run away, even if she had to follow them all across the universe, merely to get across quite how peeved she really was.
"DIE?" It chuckled in a basso profundo voice. Somehow what passed for a face distorted into what might have been a smile. "YOU THINK YOU CAN POSSIBLY HURT ME YOU POINTLESS CREATURE?"
"I'm willing to give it a shot," she snarled, hefting the rail gun menacingly. "And I don't give up. At all."
"OTHERS HAVE TRIED. NONE HAVE SUCCEEDED," the thing chuckled nastily. All around her, she could feel and hear other monsters of all types closing in, but didn't bother looking. "ONLY ONE HAS EVER COME CLOSE AND HE IS GONE. YOU ARE NOT HIM."
Taylor smiled horribly.
"I'm Taylor Hebert, you bastard, and you never fuck with a Hebert," she roared, firing the rail gun as fast as she could pull the trigger. As soon as it was empty she pulled out the chain gun and opened up on the huge creature, the cavern strobing brightly from the muzzle flashes. When the barrels spun down, she looked at the result.
The thing grinned back at her.
"PITIFUL," it laughed.
Her eyes narrowed.
"I've killed dragons, and demons, and aliens, and floated in space, and swum through lava, all to get home to my dad. I've put up with more shit than I can even talk about and I have had enough!" The fury was rising and she was literally seeing red. Something about the creature changed, making it almost look wary.
"YOU CANNOT OVERCOME ME," it said, although there was an odd little note of… possibly worry, she noticed with the back of her mind, while the front of it was consumed with the white hot rage that abruptly swelled like a nuclear fireball.
"I haven't even started yet," she said evenly, her iron control holding her in place. Around her everything had gone silent as if the monsters she knew were out there were watching.
It raised a hand, energy forming around it. With an incredible shout of rage it let fly.
She was already moving, her mind awash with total all consuming fury that seemed to make everything slow down and become perfectly, beautifully focused.
Dismissing everything else about herself, Taylor let the rage take her as she attacked. She was laughing like an idiot when they met in the middle of the huge cavern.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Panting for breath, Taylor leaned against the wall, her eyes closed. She was dripping with sweat, aching all over, and her right arm was snapped in at least two places according to her armor's diagnostics.
After a long moment, she opened her eyes again and looked at the creature in front of her. It was in much worse condition than she was. One huge leg was lying on the floor some distance away, scorched and distorted, both wings were ruined, and all of its teeth were missing. The beast was staring at her in what looked like horrified terror from it's position on the floor, surrounded by bits of it that should by rights have been inside it.
"IMPOSSIBLE," it muttered. "WHAT ARE YOU?"
"Very, very pissed off," she told it, while digging out some of the repair nanites and sticking them into the injection port on the side of her heavily scorched armor. The pain of the things working was irrelevant and went unnoticed. Straightening up she dropped the empty cartridge on the floor on top of the other eleven, then slowly smiled at it. "And now I'm going to end this and go home."
She pulled out Mr Death and very slowly pushed an energy cell into it, before activating the weapon.
The vast creature looked at her, visibly recoiling. "I YIELD," it said, in angry but scared tones.
Taylor looked at it for several seconds. "Tough," she said, then aimed and fired until the gun beeped empty.
As the echoes died away, she heard vast numbers of monsters chittering and rumbling in the dark outside the cavern, feeling them realizing what had happened and apparently being shocked and scared. The sounds gradually died away to leave complete silence. She walked over to the vast creature and looked into the slowly dimming eyes set in a ruined face. "I told you to move. You chose not to. I always finish what I start." Putting the gun away she cocked her fist, then hit it directly between the eyes as hard as she could.
The huge skull literally exploded, showering her and the entire area with glowing blood. She was entirely covered in it and watched as it seemed to sink into the armor a little as it the glow gradually faded, leaving the original greenish-black metallic surface a sort of matte purplish color. Various error codes flashed up then went away again as the system appeared to dislike the contact for a moment. She shivered as a wave of tiredness went through her, before deciding to indulge in one last nanite pack. Flicking gore from the injection port she stuck the thing in and activated it, the burn almost pleasant this time after the last six solid hours of fighting. Closing her eyes again she waited until the sensation died away, leaving her feeling, if not fully rested, at least back to something approaching normal. And her arm was now fine, which was good.
Opening her eyes again she looked around. Nothing was moving, not even a plasma imp, so she shrugged, reloaded all her weapons just in case, put them away except for the plasma rifle, and headed for the portal that she hoped was the way home.
"I've killed more things than I can possibly count, died over four hundred times, learned more about tech than any ten Tinkers, seen other worlds, destroyed other worlds, and now I just want go home to my dad," she idly said as she reached the thing. "So I will be very, very, very angry if this doesn't lead me back." The girl looked meaningfully around at the enormous pools of dimming blood, internal organs, and total devastation. "You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. Don't fuck with me."
The little presence in the back of her mind that had been there through the entire fight abruptly vanished.
She smiled a little, and walked into the portal.
After everything she'd been through, home was going to be a nice change. And when she'd relaxed for a while, she could work out just who needed to be killed and how long this should take.
But before that, she needed her dad and a pizza.
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LocalCatHybrid
Now I am become floof, the floofer of floofs.
- Location
- You know where...
- Pronouns
- Il/Lui
I will laugh if it turns out she unknowingly blazed right through Ellisburg
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!
Oh, you have NO idea Taylor, none!
ExaltedNekoKun
Exalted Glorious Feline Light Source!
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him/Lord/Fuzzball
Pretty sure she might have blazed through maybe some shards that found their way into a Hell... or maybe a Hell extended itself onto a world the Shards were. If it wasn't just outright kicking in a Lovecraftian Horror's door and ruining their home.
Both look similar enough I suppose.
She's definitely Demon Juiced now, as is her gear.
Both look similar enough I suppose.
She's definitely Demon Juiced now, as is her gear.
- Location
- brazil
Yeah i really don't know how the people who sent her there think that anything good will come from this , this will only end with all the worlds burning and they suffering for eternity while she torture them , this will not be even a pyrrhic victory .
ExaltedNekoKun
Exalted Glorious Feline Light Source!
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him/Lord/Fuzzball
So.. basically instead of being a near automaton during Gold Morning, she'll just be murderously crazed? Cause all the worlds were already burning. Just this time she won't need meatshields.
- Location
- USA
Pretty sure she might have blazed through maybe some shards that found their way into a Hell... or maybe a Hell extended itself onto a world the Shards were. If it wasn't just outright kicking in a Lovecraftian Horror's door and ruining their home.
Both look similar enough I suppose.
She's definitely Demon Juiced now, as is her gear.
...Actually, I think she did run into a room full of shoggoths, if I'm reading that bit about the room with non-Euclidean geometry and multi-eyed tentacle monsters with a strangely familiar language right.
I believe I speak for all the citizens of all the Earths when I say...
Oh, shit.
Just what does she mean by 'destroyed worlds', anyway?
She's been modifying her weapons and armor with multi-universal tech, she can punchsplode giant demons... she is an unstoppable force of rage.
Also... I noticed exactly how comfortable she is in that armor, and for just how long - continuously - it's been mostly keeping her alive.
I bet she doesn't even notice it... and gets EVEN ANGRIER if someone suggests she take it off.
Visiting Winslow should be very much like walking into a nest of plasma imps... you know, the ones that were doing nothing but flee in terror most of this chapter?
As were, I note, more and more of Hell's denizens.
The gangs of BB should take note - Hell has found freezing in terrified awe is, statistically, by far the best tactic to use against DOOMlor if you want to survive. She mostly doesn't kill you.
It leaves you totally defenseless, true... but it's not like you had any defenses that actually stood a chance against Her Eternal Rage anyway, eh?
I bet she obliterates a gang within two days. Not fights one, totally eradicates it from existence - not one member left alive and willing to say they are or were a member.
Ever.
Again.
Taylor Hebert, the eldrich horror's eldrich horror, casually breaching the barriers of time and space to casually murderize a poor shoggoth family and continue on.
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Ah... Taylor's getting a bit... more trigger-happy then she was before. Rage is GOOD. I wanna see more.
CinnabarSage
W̵̯͚̭͍͕͜o̷͈̥̙͖l̨͟҉̹o͕̼̝̜l̩͈͡o͙̼͚̗
- Location
- WA, USA
I want to see her wake up in the hospital and she's retained the nanite augments so no need for excessive hospital bills.
She heads back to school and goes to class with madison to find her seat 'juiced' and she just slowly turns to madison with a pinning look. walks through the desks pushing them out of the way and grabs her by the hair, drags her over and jams her face in it. really wipe her face back and forth in half effort to sop it up.
She heads back to school and goes to class with madison to find her seat 'juiced' and she just slowly turns to madison with a pinning look. walks through the desks pushing them out of the way and grabs her by the hair, drags her over and jams her face in it. really wipe her face back and forth in half effort to sop it up.