Soulless Beauty Aorta

YELLOW, INITIATIVE VS GUILT

The three had been walking for what seemed like an eternity, a quiet elevator ride mixed in here and there as they descended into the very heart of The Shell. Rose's batteries had started to lose their charge, and Gardenia had woken up. Hyacinth broke the footstep-laden silence. "We ain't seen another Aorta for goddamn forever. I think we're going the wrong way, do-" "Are we going down?" Hyacinth started at Heather's smooth, deep voice. "... yeeess?" "Then we're making progress. The Quadrant Authority live in four quadrants-" Heather looked back at Hyacinth, "-Stationed in descending order around the center of The Shell. As long as we continually move downward, we'll get there eventually." A moment passed before Hyacinth irritatedly spoke under her breath"Well it'd be a lot faster if each elevator could move more than like 3 floors..."

Suddenly, the gradually curved corridor they were walking through opened up into a gigantic, circular room, with a domed ceiling. The room was a pit of darkness, save for the natural sunlight flooding in through enormous triangular windows on the sides, somehow penetrating this deeply into The Shell. Of what could be seen, the chamber resembled that of a circus or a child's playroom. Plastic palm trees and bushes jutted up from cracked pots, everything was in a state of disrepair. Wires hung from missing chunks in the ceiling, the upper wall was heavily damaged. Splotches of a dark liquid, both old stains and recent splatters, dotted the entire chamber. The room stank of putrefaction. It was a dead end, no other entrances or exits besides the one they'd come through, other than a marked port hole in the center of the domed ceiling above, directly below which lay the largest dark splatter. "Yup,'' Hyacinth broke the stunned silence, her hands resting on her wide hips, "This is the room of an artist."

Something began stirring on the ceiling. It dropped down onto the floor, in the center of the room, and heavy-duty blast doors slammed behind the five of them, a massive bolt in the center screwing in with a CLANK, locking them in. Slowly, the rotted, yellow creature stood up, steadying itself, clearly struggling to stand on its four feet.

It had the general form of an Aorta, but the body was horizontally severed at the torso, allowing it to rotate its lower and upper body freely, and between the body parts was a collection of thin, deformed and sharp, cylindrical off-white segments connected to form a column with blue and red strands running up and down it, spidering out all over. It had four arms and four legs, each ending in a hand or foot that glowed white when it made contact with a surface. Its eyes were closed, its mouth open and drooling, holding an eyeball between its quivering gray lips. It screeched, "H̴̲̠́Ä̶̼́L̶̨̦͊T̷̨͂̔"

[Yellow Demon SOMAT]

Twitching and creaking, it leapt up, clinging to a wall near the ceiling, and opening its chest, began to spew flame rounds at the group. The four dodged in separate directions, frantically avoiding the continuous shots. Gardenia immediately dashed towards the wall, crying, while Hyacinth ran directly under Somat and began jumping up, trying to grab it. "You mother fuck! I'll rip your ass down here!" It looked down and screeched.

It dropped directly onto her, flattening her body under its weight, and causing fine cracks to run up and down the platinum plates making up her torso and legs, "Jesus Christ it's heavy!" She was able to wheeze out. It held her arms out to the sides with one pair of hands, and dragged its other hands toward her throat. It's gnarled, rusty fingers wrapped around her mechanical throat, and began to choke her to death. "f̶̟̂o̷̙͙̒r̶̤̖̔͗g̴̬̿í̶̲̳v̵͚̕ȩ̵̖̄ ̵̘̖̊̋m̴͓͍̀ḙ̸͎͌̄", it spoke in a scratchy voice. "Hyacinth!" Rose dashed to try to aid her companion, only to be grabbed out of the air by the monster's first pair of hands, flinging from Hyacinth's arms and now strangling her as well.

CLANG! A piece of the wall that had broken off during the assault bounced off of the creature, launched by Heather. The monster dropped Rose and released its grip on Heather's throat, springing from over top of her. Its dense body ragdolled through the air before snapping to a rigid position mid-leap, and wrapping its entire form around Heather's body, causing him to instantly drop to his knees as it constricted, slowly crushing him. Hyacinth shot up and gulped down air, coughing, as Rose, on all fours and gasping after being dropped, turned to see the attacker crack Heather's face.

"H-Hey, HEY!" A high-pitched voice rang out across the room, silencing the sounds of the struggle, and attracting the attention of Somat. It was the voice of Gardenia. "Don't hurt my dad!" The tiny Aorta started screaming, her high voice cracking, and immediately broke into a full sprint toward the attacker. The yellowed beast kicked off of Heather's body with its feet, using the momentum to rip off his lower pair of arms as it leapt off of him towards the child, leaving Heather to burst out into a pained scream- only for Somat's body to be messily ripped in half at the off-white column by Hyacinth's jointed chainsaw, both halves making a sickening, heavy series of THUDs as they slammed to the floor and tumbled out to the sides of Gardenia. "Asshole!" Hyacinth exclaimed, covered in the dark red fluid that had erupted from the monster's body when she shredded it. Gardenia jumped onto and straddled the incapacitated beast's torso and began punching its twitching face over and over, "no, no no no no no no no no NO! You're mean, you're bad!" Hyacinth reached down and picked her up, holding her away from her body, the child still punching and kicking at nothing with her eyes closed. She turned to Heather, standing nearby and clutching his sides where his lower pair of arms used to be, "Here, you take this."

Somat's severed body parts lay on the ground writhing and screeching, spurting jolts of electricity and a thick fluid. Its top half dragged itself across the floor, fumbling to the side of the room and began tearing at the wall and slamming its head against it, over and over, screaming in pain, all the while sparking and leaking. The creature's desperate clawing and slamming eventually broke through the wall, revealing a hollow space behind it and causing huge tubes to burst from inside the wall and spray the same liquid coming from Somat. The fluid pooled beneath its body as the creature's movements slowed to a grinding, twitching halt, and it slumped over.

Rose knelt down to examine the now still waist and legs of the lower body, thinking Is that... blood? Before she was able to get a good look at the remains, they liquefied like those of any other Aorta, and were absorbed into the floor. The blast doors unsealed and opened back up.