The section of Deepspire where she and the others had faced the Stalkers in the Dark was, by her recollection, miles below the gigantic debris pit that lay not far from her current position. She could see where the subterranean blasts had collapsed this entire section of city inwards, filling the hollow pits of the Stalkers with incalculable tonnage. She recalled watching it from a similar angle, high in a still as yet unscrapped medical facility.
Jada turned to look behind her, overwhelmed by the memory, and could almost see the ravaged body of Ben Takeda lying in a hospital bed before her. A cascade of sensations and memories buffeted her psyche, and she was vividly assaulted by her own mind as she struggled to engage her breathing techniques.
When a single gunshot rang out and a bullet tore a piece of concrete out of the wall next to her, Jada hurled herself to the ground. For a moment, she wondered if her hallucinations had become that powerful considering that she was retracing some of the worst moments of her life and then baleful howls went up all around her.
She may have been awash in memories of the past, but her keen hearing took note of the unmistakable sounds of several hostiles rushing across the broken ground towards her. She scampered across the crumbling concrete as two more shots nearly struck her, this time realizing that they were coming from the half-demolished building on her left. Jada scolded herself for the oversight, so focused was she on her destination and coping with her troubled mind that she’d neglected the basics of terrain awareness.
From the sound of the report, the shooter was using a pistol, which accounted for how the enemy had managed to miss three times in a row. At this distance, even a crack shot with a pistol was likely to miss at least once.
The merc reached a massive hole in the floor and poured herself through it, taking a firm grip on the edge, and going in headfirst so that she could swing her body around and land on her feet when she let go. Jada stuck the landing and unslung her assault rifle just in time to realize her mistake.
Whether the shooter was trying to hit her or not, he or she had successfully driven the merc back to the ground floor where she now stood surrounded by enemies. Their elongated bodies were slick with mucus, their weeping mouths filled with rows of barbed teeth.
Four of them writhed in the shadows of the broken room, each one long enough to wrap itself around her with ease. They were poised to strike, but just as they surged towards her, they were stopped short by a high-pitched keening sound that was all too familiar. The giant bone worms that had once served the Stalkers had managed to tunnel their way to the surface, where she presumed by the familiar keening sound they’d found new masters.
Jada bitterly accepted the cost of her hubris. She might be hard meat indeed, but what soft things could possibly have survived in this harsh place? In this wasteland, only the hard remained, the scavengers had long been devoured, and now it was predator against predator. She knew that the moment she moved, they would attack, for even with the mastery of the whistle, she could feel their hunger positively radiating from them. It would only be a matter of moments before whoever controlled the worms revealed themselves. Jada slowed her breathing and stood perfectly still. The most likely tactic at this point was to salvage her equipment and the choicest cuts of her meat before the worms annihilated her body.
Jada recalled vividly from the last time she’d fought these creatures that they were able to swiftly batter their way through the flak boards that the salvage marines had brought to use as mobile defenses. The creatures were incredibly strong, their undulating bodies essentially thick ropes of muscle with a digestive track, tipped with a hardened area at the front of the creature that allowed it to smash and chew through just about anything. She had come to this planet to face her past and now here she was, surrounded by beasts all too real and all too eager to give her closure one way or the other.
As the sharp stench of the creatures reached her senses even through the re-breather’s filter, the tangible truth of them brought a change over the merc.
The beasts might be as terrifyingly deadly as they once were, but Jada had become something far worse. The boarding knife was the only thing she’d kept from her days as a salvage marine, stolen from her kit just before she mustered out. There had been no convenient fitting for it while wearing her mag-armor, so Jada had not carried it into battle since that last fight on Gedra Prime. For this journey, she had strapped it to her forearm, in the traditional Reaper fashion. She could have raised her assault rifle and fired point blank into the wall of flesh that writhed before her, and yet it was the knife that suddenly filled her fist.
The merc was silent as she moved. Inside, her mind screamed in fear and anger, grief and horror as she sprang forward, letting the assault rifle fall back on its sling.
Before the nearest bone worm could react, Jada had wrapped her right arm tightly around its head, just behind the ridge of its hardened front end, holding it despite the creature’s formidable strength. The merc was an enhanced meta-human, extremely well-trained and conditioned, capable of feats beyond any unenhanced human, yet it still tested her strength and agility to maintain her hold on the frenzied beast.
She plunged her boarding knife into the creature’s sticky flesh, just behind the ridge and pulled the blade around in a circular motion, twisting the handle. The creature’s head was nearly severed by her deep cut and the thrashing of its powerful body finished its own decapitation.
Another worm launched itself at Jada’s upper body while another coiled around her legs. The merc was lost in a berserker’s fury and slashed wildly at the two worms as they wrestled her to the ground. She managed to get her hand under the mandibles of the beast attempting to burrow its head through her belly and stabbed it from point to hilt three times before it finally stopped struggling.
The worm near her feet had wrapped itself around her left leg so tightly that she had already lost feeling in it. Barbed teeth sank into her right leg just as she was able to turn her attention to it. Jada hacked at the worm with the knife, cleaving great chunks out of its flesh, but it continued to burrow into the meat of her leg.
The simple, disposable body glove she’d donned underneath her cloak was ripped to shreds as the creature chewed and swallowed a mouthful of her thigh muscle. Jada howled in pain and fury as she desperately fought against the urge to pass out from blood loss. Finally, she sunk the blade into the creature’s head, just behind the hardened ridge as she’d done with its brood kin, but before she could make good on decapitating it, the fourth worm joined the fray.
The keening sounded again and the fourth worm whipped its body at Jada, slamming into her and knocking the woman across the rubble-strewn floor and into the far wall. The merc was dazed from the impact, but thankfully, the force of the blow had loosened the grip of the other worm upon her body, though her thigh was spurting blood from their deadly embrace.
While the worm who had bitten her was hurling itself this way and that, the boarding knife buried in its body and seeming to drive it mad with pain, the remaining worm moved in for the kill.
Jada was wounded, but she was a veteran of many conflicts, conditioned to fight against the most terrible of odds and her reflexes were superb. Before she realized what she was doing, the merc slung her rifle around and fired it from the hip, squeezing the trigger over and over as she peppered the worm with high-velocity rounds.