First Cause • Spider-Man: Homecoming [Unedited]

37

•

From yanking on the segmented metal of the whip with all the power of a vengeful wraith, the insides of her gloves are ripped to strips of cloth and now offer the palms of her hands little to no protection.

Through these jagged tears in the fabric, Gadea feels the plastic handholds of her guard's rifle under her reaching fingertips, a bit chilly in this isolated, arctic room that begins to feel more and more like a coffin with each passing second. Though the identity of its intended inhabitant is changing constantly as the shifts in power and advantage ensue.

It could be said now that Gadea has gotten a hold on her gun and wields the sole material weapon, the tide has swerved in her favor. However the balance in dominance is once again knocked viciously onto its side as one of the two competent whips left originating from Anathem's back seek out Gadea's form through the murky half-darkness of the secondary deck.

Its advanced technology enables it to distinguish her dark Hand's uniform from the rest of the similarly tinted floor, and the pincers topping the appendage slice into the back of her trapezoid muscle as an introduction to the rest of the whip curling around her shoulder and right arm. With a tug, the whip swats the floor out from under Gadea's bent knees and pulls her high into the air with nothing supporting her weight but her shoulder's joint. Unaware of her own self, her lips wrench apart to scream in pain.

Her entire right arm is encased by the whip. Its many contorting ridges call to mind the similar movements of the gargantuan muscles of the Terran reptile, the boa constrictor. And much like the animals on which the constrictor preys, her arm will be reduced to nothing but a flesh sac in which her shattered bones will be stored if quick action is not taken.

Being lurched off the ground by her arm has both triggered a shout and a tensing of the muscles in her body. Part of those muscles being the ones in her left hand, the nondominant hand holding the rifle like it's the only time it will ever be this useful again, and perhaps that might be the case. A distant part of Gadea muses she's always had such a bad history of letting her guns simply fall from her clutches in the worst of times, it will be when they are preparing her corpse for burial rights that they will pry this rifle out of her lifeless fingers.

Until such a time, though, she is content to hoist the weapon as high as her determined hand will go before it begins to quiver with the effort of singularly bearing its mass. That height reveals itself to be well over her head, where her arm dangles her as if she is but a doll in the hands of a well-meaning but destructive child.

She can't see so she can't aim. Still she presses her thumb against the trigger and fires at will, her shriek of rage and fear and hope and pain accompanying the sounds of bolt after bolt leaving the barrel. A second shriek mirrors that of her own, though its pain is so tangible, Gadea could have tried to reach into the air and pluck it out.