His head rang. Adam held his hands to his head and kept his eyes squeezed shut for a time as the sound eventually died away. The creature inside the barn crumbled to ash leaving nothing behind her but a rather sloppy pile of unmentionable wet sludge. Outside, Adam lay atop the corrupted Earth hald in and half out of Sunny's arms. In his full armor, he was far to large for even her to carry, so she sat with him her spear held at her side at the ready if something were to come along.
Behind them, figures raced across the open and corrupted farmland. A woman in gore stained BDUs skidded to a stop beside them, opening a pocket on the front of her plate carrier with the ripping of Velcro, "What's wrong, did he git hit?"
"No I.... no, I think this is something different." He groggily heard the sound of worry in Sunny's voice, and more overtly the worry that was swirling around in her head. He could hear it all despite his best efforts, her concern for him spilling into his mind like a river torrent washing away his own thoughts.
What's wrong.
What is this.
Is this the surgery
And then off to his other side, the thoughts of the medic.
No penetrating wounds on the armor, so perhaps it is blunt force trauma, pain indicators are towards the head, so perhaps it was a concussive impact to the head, but then again that hardly makes sense with the SE suit.
It took him almost a full minute to regain control, slamming the barriers down around his head so the flood waters wouldn't pour in and drown him. With a sigh of relief, he shifted and began to ccrawl to his feet.
Sunny raised a hand to help him, "Adam are you ok? What was that?"
"Something we can deal with later."
Their medic looked just as confused, but she didn't bother to argue. Adam headed back into the barn retrieving his spear from the sludge and shaking it off with a face. Outside the sky was still red. Helicopter and hover jet rotors thrummed in the sky where they openly engaged wheeling packs of void kree.
The roar of distant jet engines echoed from somewhere above the bank of clouds.
Below them the ground still rumbled with anti air fire, and now Adam could finally see where it was coming from.
He pointed and sunny followed his finger to look, "The military installation. They must have set up anti air defenses when they built the compound around the void site.
Sunny nodded as the two of them broke into a jog, moving back up to join the formation and fill the hole they had briefly left, "The void must have taken over the system when the UNSC was forced out."
Adam nodded his agreement.
Looking to his right, just through a line of corpse white trees Adam could see another group of soldiers slowly moving forward towards the void site . They were getting closer and their formation was beginning to close inward.
It was an odd experience, Adam recognized the landscape around him despite how alien it was.
There in front of them was the dry creek bed where he had pretended he was exploring an alien planet, and over there was the rickety barbwire fence he had gotten his pants caught on that one time, and then there was the three he had fallen out of when he was nine years old, and yet the bark of the tree had gone white and porous like bone. Stepping forward to examine the tree and he swore he could see a delicate mist or red rising out of the porous holes.
Adam lifted a hand to his head again, as, in that instant his vision was suddenly..... overwhelmed with light and color.
His brain was almost overloaded as he tried to make sense of the view he was taking in, for a horrible moment he thought he had gone blind, which was completely insane considering he could SEE, he just couldn't make sense of what he was seeing. It was simply a horrible mass of colors and light and dark and contrast.
"Adam."
It took him almost a full fifteen seconds before his poor brain could make sense of what he was seeing, and that was when Adam realized.
The issue wasn't that he couldn't see anything, but the fact he could see EVERYTHING. Looking ut over the landscape, Adam could see the textured surface of the bone trees in perfect clarity at a hundred yards. Close up material was..... well things that were smooth were no longer smooth anymore as he...... it was hard to explain but he would have sworn he could sense the microscopic texture in each and every individual item placed around him. He could see the cracks and the divots and the grain, and all the other strange structures that held items together.
He could see the fibers on the uniforms of the soldiers that passed by, the patterns and the way they were woven int cloth.
Inside his head began to pound.
Adam shook his head forcibly closing his human eye to peer only from his mechanical right which, was thankfully as acute as it ever was. Compared to what he had just seen, the ultra-sensitive lens of his mechanical eye, which had once given him so much trouble was now a breath of relief .
"Approaching target site."
He picked up the pace in response to Maverick's call over the radio. Together he and Sunny slowly approached the location of his father's old work. Jim Vir had spent almost twenty years working with the farming conglomerate, and when Adam was a boy he had often played in these fields and ridden horses through the crop with his father on long, hot lazy days during the summer.
The plant stalks rose high over his head ,eight feet tall, but it didn't much resemble corn anymore, twisted, blackened and broken, tangled together in a mass that was almost like an impenetrable wall.
Adam tried to push his way in but the tangles were too dence and he only found himself cat ching armor on snags.
He pulled back not liking the idea of getting caught in there and being unable to move.
At the mercy of the void.
"New plan." He said over his radio, "The plans are too dence, its going to be impossible getting through without ending up in a worse situation. Find a path in and we will take it in teams. No one made argument with his assessment. He could see the salvos of anti air fire now, rising up from the middle of the field and brightening the sky in sharp yellow bursts of light.
Maverick, King James and Lord Celex pulled up to meet them. And with a team like that on his side, he didn't even bother to wait for the other soldiers to form up with them before heading down the slick path into the forest of tangled plant life. The ground below him was even less stable than it had been before rumbling and churning which left many of the marines and UNSC soldiers behind them staggering from one side to the other as they attempted to keep their feet.
Overhead the sky was even redder casting a pall over the land around them.
They made it a few feet before Adam knew something was wrong.
He could sense it in the sudden quiet and absence of void creatures. Even the gunfire had dissipated to some degree and they were left standing along in silence.
He held up a fist ready for anything.
The group formed int o tight circle.
Waiting.
And then it came, the massive bone leg shot out of the tangled jungle and slammed into the ground where Sunny had been not seconds before. With incredible speed she had dodged to the side at the last minute swinging her spear around in the opposite direction, and stabbing forward into the underbrush.
Soemthing squealed and the massive leg drew back.
Sunny came back with void blood on the tip of her spear.
And then.
The THING erupted from the tangled forest.
The Emperor roach towered a good ten feet over the already twelve foot stalks, legs taller than sunny and tapered to a deadly point. Its two front legs came down again. Celex shrunk down in size, and was last seen in Celzex form rolling across the ground and into the underbrush, where he vanished. Adam heard the screams and shouts of dying men as other units were suddenly besieged by giant emperor Roaches.
Two choppers broke off from the dogfight above to lend aid, hovering at a safe distance and letting loose with chain guns and missiles.
Sunny switched her spear for an energy edged sword, and sheered straight through the leg of the creature as it tried to come down agin.
Bullets weren't doing much against this creature, so Adam followed her lead, striking and hacking at the things legs.
It moved towards them, using its massive feet to slam downward. It was over them now, and they were blocked from the red sun in its shadow. Looking up, Adam found himself looking into the fang ringed maw of the beast.
Out of instinct Adam lept to the side and rolled out from under the creature, just as it dropped down with a bone rattling thud.
He turned fearing the worst, but when the creature stood back up, he saw the others had managed to make it free.
King James had lost his shield, but he didn't seem perturbed.
Overhead the Emperor roach roared.
And then something roared back.
The group of them looked up to find Lord Celex standing atop the roach's back in the form of a massive twelve foot tall Drev with prismatic rainbow carapace. With all four of his hands, and all his strength, he drove the tip of his spear down into the body of the creature. It roared and jerked but he didn't end there. Holding on with his lower hands for dear life lord Celex twisted cranked and cut into the things head. Adam and the others were forced to leap to the side as they battled it out one emperor to another.
The roach staggered one way and sunny rolled to escape its churning feet.
Celex twisted his spear and then Mavrick was diving for cover.
There was a snap, and with one final push lord Celex broke through some sort of barrier in the creatures head. The roach paused, stopped wobbled a bit, and then keeled over straight towards Sunny. She only just managed to leap back before being crushed as the roach spilled to the ground. Lord Celex rode atop it with great grace as it came crashing to the ground. He stood on its corpse panting, the breathing holes at the base of his neck flaring wide with the effort.
"Showoff." Adam grumbled.
Celex laughed, ad Adam cursed the Maker's hearing.
He motioned them forward and they raced down the pathway. He could still hearing the roaring of more emperor roaches, but they didn't have time to stop.
They needed to end this.
They came out of the tangle appearing just to the side of one of the compound walls which had been infected with a great pulsing mass of what might have been skin, but adam really didn't want to bother thinking about it. over the wall of the compound, stretching into the sky Adam could see a pillar of white bone jutting up towards the heavens.
He opened his human eye struggling to adjust to enhanced acuity before noting the slow trickle of red mist rising up from every pour in the bone. In a way it was behaving just like a bone should, producing red blood cells, but in this case that purpose had been corrupted for nefarious ends.
Just then another team of marines came bursting into the clearing.
They were all spattered in gore, but they looked on the verge of delighted.
"WHOOO!" One of them called, "GRENADE TO THE FACE!"
Adam would have to ask them about that story when this was all over.
They quieted as he raised a hand, and together those of them that made t slowly advanced towards the door stacking up in one team, his group going first.
They burst inside expecting to find a hallway, but instead they found themselves standing in an open courtyard. All the walls of the compound had been torn down except for the walls on the outside, all to make room for the great white bone pillar.
And the mother of all void mothers.
She lay on her side inside the circular compound, big enough her shoulders almost rose over the side of the compound walls. Her stomach was massively bloated, and now Adam understood where the emperor roaches had come from. She leered at him like the last mother had done, and as she did the rift in her stomach cracked open, goo and slime came spilling out, along with almost half a dozen tireless all to add to the already waiting tireless that ha been standing there when the door opened.
The fight broke out immediately and in earnest. Adam was charged by one of the tireless, ducking under it spear, and lunging forward placing his blade through its neck. He ducked as one came in from behind him, threw the first tireless off his spear and then came around in a leftward arc that clobbered the second tireless in the head. It staggered once and ran right into the reverse pull of Sunny's spear, the rear spike of which went straight through the creature's head. Adam met a third tireless spear to spear pushing and pulling over the open ground, testing each other's strength.
Adam pushed harder, harder, and then ducked and let go. The Tireless lurched forward in surprise, and got a belly full of steel for its trouble.
Adam had circled around now his back to the void mother, and just as he was finishing off one of the tireless, two more charged at him, Both of them worked together, using their combined weight to ram Adam in the chest. He was thrown back bodily slamming into something hard, but at the same time giving and rather sticky.
It was then he realized the horror as the void mother's womb closed in around him.
Likely thy should have thought about the consequences.
Because while Adam was entirely grossed out, and a thousand small Void Tvek hands had taken hold of his armor, he suddenly had a plan. He close dhis eyes tapping into the well of power that was his Anima. He could feel the walls beginning to squeeze in around him, could sense the crushing pressure.
Come on.
Come on.
Where was it.
He could feel it there, but it was like trying to pee after holding it so long. He was having to coax it out and there certainly wans't enough time for that.
His armor creaked.
He was growing uncomfortable.
He could hear the sound of the creature's thrumming heart, and then. Soemthing caught, and all of a sudden he was a torrent full of energy, the valve that released the pressure. Energy spilled out from every pour and cell on his body erupting through the armor with a massive blinding flash of light. The void mother's scream didn't last as she was pulverized from the inside out. Adam erupted into daylight thrown across the little clearing and straight into the base of the bone pillar.
Adam must have been thrown with an incredible force, because the weight of his body hitting the pillar splintered the thing in half.
With a roar the ground around them erupted.
They all fell to the ground as the tireless fell to their knees clawing at their bodies and faces. The orange void light int their eyes began to fade, and they fell to the ground.
Above them the red mist began to immediately dissipate, and the cast around them became far less red. Warm yellow sunlight spilled down onto his gore spattered armor as he lay in the clearing, amidst bodies now dissolving into mush.
Beyond him the entire field of twisted flora collapsed and crumbled.
Everything went still.
And Adam closed his eye.
It was time for a nap