|-NOTICE-|
Rumi has been eliminated.
|------------|
Crystals are nature's last hold from chaos. Creative forces contorted into chains of their own. Rapture from machine guns rail against the hold. Residents from Idle, recently freed themselves, take the weapons they've been given and decide to liberate these creative forces as well.
A bullet screeches past the screaming creature and into the reaches of the stained glass pillar behind it. Redness cleaves from rock on a bias, sending it sliding away from the earth and further down, down to the depths. Wilda watches it fall, her concentrated squint growing stronger, and she lets in a gulp of air before the ornament crashes against the crags, exploding into frags and erupting into glass-edge glitter.
Shrapnel and shells rip through mist, though miss the beast before them. How do they miss? Wilda curses around her, saving a smarting look for the God of Monsters, a whippet ten-times the normal size and plump in the gut and pulsating with milk. She turns to the newest sound of unsuccessful shooting to yell at one of her men, but can only roll her eyes when she sees a chimpanzee thing with a machine gun.
The beast lurches at something the other side of one of the stone pillars and there is screaming. It screams the same. It is not reveling in the hunt the same way her children have. It shows in her wide alien eyes turned downward. Slick and brimming.
Dell sees this and see's strength and hesitates, but the sergeant beside her looks at the same image and see's weakness. Wilda jumps into action. She lets the gun she's been given fall to the ground and instead extends her palm to the Queen, looking through the webbing between her fingers like a scope. A pain blossoms in her shoulder and moves down her arm like her tendon was a pulmonary that was a pipe clogged by a puffer fish. Oh, it hurts. Oh God, Mother, Queen of Monsters it hurts. But the hurt it will cause is greater still.
The sergeant concentrates and feels the skin of her palm peel away. The smoke and the choke and the prisoner and the guards and the chaos, pure chaos, around her seems to stop as the world crystallizes.
WIlda looks the beast in its pleading eyes and says goodbye.
Metal is ripped from the sergeant's arm and thrown into the monster, propelling it backwards and causing it to choke on its cries. The slug has left a gap in both sides of the creature's neck. It lifts up one tree-trunk leg to clutch at the wound but cannot keep its balance in such a state as bullets from everywhere start to hit a target who can no longer dodge them. The beast falls further back and rolls onto its side, uncontrolled. Its protests grow quieter and quieter until they fall silent. Her hill of a belly heaves no more.
In her wake, the rift which was her nest is open to the world. Red mist rises out of the opening in the earth and they fill the room with the stench of power. There is cheering and there is crying and there is shooting, still.
As the sergeant's eye's rise with the fumes of the future swirling and snaking up out of the caves and all the way into the midnight sky of Arizona, she imagines, Dell's eyes fall.
In the rift from normalcy, something moves. First Dell sees its shadow, but then it bounds again, and she watches a shock of tawny clamber from the raw red rocks and into the caves. She recognizes it as a jackalope, it's two proud prongs dipped in blood.
"Oh," she says.
|-FINALS-|
Do whatever you need to.
|-WORD LIMIT-|
None.
|-STAKES-|
Everything. Most of your fate lies in the hands of your fellow competitors now. I will also have a vote, but it will be the same as theirs. Judging will be based on a combination of both your performance on this task, as well as this competition overall.
|-DEADLINE-|
Sunday, December 4th, 10:00 PM EST
