FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Save Point: The Honeycomb

The whole left side of Cleos face is a ruin, torn open completely by the powered claw on Kilseths gauntlet when it passed effortlessly through her flesh. Her eyeball on that side is completely gone, sheared away at the optic nerve, and the skin is torn open loosely into several dangling flaps that expose her huge bloodied teeth all the way down one side. A large part of the muscle underneath has been torn away or completely destroyed, and there are glimmers where the osteo-armor built into her skull and occipital bones has been exposed. There are scrapes in the thin and translucent layer, the name of which temporarily escapes him, which connects flesh to bone.

She looks, in a word, ghastly.

She wavers and nearly falls backward once they finally have a moment to rest, catching herself on her heels at the last second and reaching halfway toward her injury before realizing that probably wouldn't help matters any. Her integrated systems have already completely shut down the major nerves in that side of her face, which have been totally severed anyway, but she has to keep most of the remainder up and running to be able to move and breathe and see, which means that it all bleeds around painfully over the edges and really fucking hurts.

Disturbing sensations are in no way limited to pain. She can feel all sorts of creepy responses in the numbed tissue as things move in ways they were never meant to move, in places nothing was ever meant to go. When she tests the motion of her jaw, there are several horrifying pings as tiny tendons and muscle tissues, weakened by the damage, give way abruptly.

Terrowne really wishes he had a towel or something like it that he could press to her face to try and help her hold everything together, then spots the abandoned bundle of bandaging discarded when she pulled the gun and made her creditable but futile attempt to shoot Kilseth.

Throwing away the already stained interior layer, he wraps the remaining fresh bandaging about his hand five or six times to create a loosely overlapping pad, then rushes over to her to support her head. "Stay still," he instructs, then pushes the pad sort of upward and sideways against the wound, to push all the flaps of skin back into alignment over whatever's left beneath.

Cleo hisses and snarls, then relaxes slightly when he puts her own hand atop the padding instead of his to let her control the force and angle.

"Ere's'ethkil?" she spits, drooling sticky redirected saliva down her chin. "E'gotta'go!"

The nanites are already trying to put her face back together, doing their best by pulling separated tissues back into position with long thin strands of congealed blood, modifying and adjusting the thickness of coagulation to try and minimize further bleeding and hold everything in place. There is nonetheless a limit to what they can do and how fast, and purely cosmetic stuff such as growing back the missing muscles and forming a new eye is going to have to wait.

The eye will probably take the longest and be finished last, as an infinitude of receptors are lined up with their matching nerves and tested against what they register in the brain. Still, at least she knows that it will grow back, which makes the suffering of the moment easier to accept.

~*~

She is startled, mainly because of her lack of depth perception, when Sethkill suddenly reappears in a literal eyeblink, hurled out of the portal aperture, which collapses almost immediately behind him. At first she can't track his outline properly, which she quite reasonably assumes is probably also due to being smacked in the head and having only one eye left, but then she realizes that he is in fact completely missing his left arm, which seems to have been scorched off below the shoulder by some sort of intense energy burst. He seems to still be breathing, but for fully understandable reasons has been rendered semi-conscious by the collision.

Well, that puts that one into perspective. Damn, that Kilseth has one hell of a right hook.

Aperture collapsed, the lights on the portal ring flicker several times and go out, then patterns of burning crawling appear and begin to propagate slowly around the surface along strictly defined paths, like tightly folded layers of paper catching alight one at a time. It's the nanotech equivalent of an automatic destruct, systematically eating alive the fine solid-state circuitry that enables the effect and denying any technological advantage to the winners.

But then some of the burning paths flow down off the ring and start to spread out into and along the floor, following a complex pattern of rapidly branching geometric subdivisions. She can't help but remember Sethkill discussing sethura construction methods, and Terrowne using the words 'honeycomb' and 'collapse' in relation to the giant wasps-nest that they are now right on top of.

Things like this are why she does not like bees.

~*~

She confines herself to an 'Uh'oh!" as Terrowne apparently reaches the exact same conclusion as she has and dashes over to pick up Sethkill, using his remaining arm as a hook over the shoulder with which to pick up the rest of him, grabbing under the second set of knees to try and fold him up compactly for carrying purposes. He looks kind of like a baby antelope being picked up by a farmer, or maybe just a dead deer being carried home by a hunter, neck flopping limply.

The outer stairs of the ziggurut, whilst totally useless as a line of attack, are, it turns out, great for fleeing down, quite possibly intentionally. They have to be load-bearing, in case large numbers of people should decide to climb them all at the same time, and are a straight shot back down to the ground, even if was probably the sethura who were supposed to be retreating down them, gun muzzles flashing, whilst collapsing the building on all their poorly armed human enemies as they tried to take it upwards from the warren below. Quite the suitable home for would be gods.

There's really no time to worry about the other winners, turned friend or foe depending on their self-interest and susceptibility to Kilseths vague supremacist doctrines. They'll have to make their own way out, one way or another.