Adult-FanFiction.org : Games

[PROTOTYPE]: Reborn	By : ShinaRyun Category: +M through R > Prototype Series Views: 3342 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: PROTOTYPE and all derivative/associated works and titles belong to Activision, Radical Entertainment, and their affiliates. I make NO PROFIT from this writing.

Chapter List
- 8
- 9
- 10
Fortunately, when the call went through, the Evolved were safely perched on a rooftop and free to answer, although doing so took no small amount of skill. “Ow!” Fritz grunted, bending his helmeted head down to grab at his left temple as his head started to rattle and shake.
“What?” Horst asked worriedly a moment before he suffered the same confusing problem, clutching at his pyramidal helmet as a sharp buzzing started to ring inside his head. It felt like a mild, repetitive vibrating within his armor, buzzing and shaking and generally confusing the hell out of both Evolved until the rhythmic pattern of the buzzing made something click in Fritz’s memory.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” he groaned as recognition dawned. “It’s our damn phones!”
“Well how the hell did that happen, eh?!” Horst grumbled as he clutched at his head and started poking a gauntleted finger at the side of his helmet, hoping to find some kind of natural button to make it stop. Over the side of the building they stood on, Darwin was oblivious to their troubles, happily gnawing away at the corpse of a DX-soldier they had killed when they had broken out of the clearing they had landed in. The occasional low, threatening growl from beneath them signaled that another infected human was starting to get too close to the dog as he fed; the mauled and half-eaten bodies of several infected were testament to how aggressive Darwin was when it came to his meals.
“Baby, I thought we agreed not to try to figure out the phone situation,” Fritz said with a sigh, eventually figuring out the trick of answering the incoming call by flexing a muscle under his armor. Once he got Horst to do the same, Maynard’s voice flooded into their ears as clearly as though he were standing with them.
“Gentlemen, I have some news for you when you return. Something’s come up, and I believe that you’ll want very much to see it.”
“Right now, I see everything I could ever want,” Fritz said, looking at the devastated cityscape around him. Up close, the seething, throbbing jungle of red-black flesh was even more beautiful than from a helicopter; the building on which he stood was like a dream come true all on its own. He guessed that it had been about ten stories tall when it had been built, but between viral growth beneath the island’s surface and the thick tendrils crawling up its sides and over its roof, the conglomeration of masonry and meat reached closer to fifteen stories tall. The walls, once clean red brick, were now covered with a lattice of vine-like creeping tendrils which wove through broken windows and provided a scaffold for heavier bundles of glistening biomass to climb up, spore-pumping pods and coiling loops rising up out of cracks in the ground. This on its own would have been enough to please Fritz, but the landscape of viral growth was what really made him grin behind his helmet.
“Yes, yes,” Maynard’s raspy voice grumbled in both Evolveds’ ears. “Whatever gets you off. Just get back here soon, it’s of vital importance!”
“Fine, Nixon,” Horst said with a sigh. “Two more targets, then we’ll call in our ride.” A few grumbled mutterings came over the line before Maynard’s voice dropped out, leaving the Evolved alone on the roof.
“What do you make of that?” Fritz asked.
Horst snorted and gestured as he spoke. “I can make a hat, I can make a broach, I can make a pterodactyl…but that’s beside the point, eh? One thing at a time…kill the soldiers, eat the scientists, steal the experiments, and then we worry about what Einstein’s creepy uncle’s found.”
“Deal,” Fritz said before taking a running leap off the roof and whistling sharply through his hound-skull helmet, the piercing call loud enough to get Darwin’s attention immediately. Seeing Fritz flying away had the massive dog up on his squat legs and wagging his stubby tail eagerly, giving an overly enthusiastic bark as he tore after the bounding Evolved. The two mutants had quickly figured out that gliding was impossible while clad in their armor, an annoyance more than a sacrifice when they could still clear ten stories in a bound and burst through the air if they had to. Their magnified strength and durability had allowed them to take down their first target with almost comical ease, ripping DX-soldiers limb from limb; being unable to float through the air was a paltry, and temporary cost.
Horst felt anything but cumbersome as he leapfrogged back and forth with Fritz, the wind rippling over his hard-shelled body and the ground flying beneath his feet. Each time he touched down, he felt masonry crackle and flesh shiver, as if the world around him was shaking in terror at his advance. Each growling burst of power that catapulted him through the air reminded him of the immense strength he controlled, the predatory energy which flowed through him and made him a terror among lesser creatures. It was a sensation that he remembered fondly from his first experiences in NYZ as an Evolved, getting his first taste of true power. Like a second childhood, with more murder.
The two Evolved and their canine companion made their way over and through the infected urban jungle until they reached their next target, where Fritz, leaping ahead of the other two, called an abrupt halt on a rooftop overlooking the scientists and soldiers they hunted. “What’s up?” Horst asked quietly, waving Darwin back to hide as Fritz peered over the roof’s edge.
“Think someone we killed must have gotten the word out that we mean business,” Fritz answered, motioning for Horst to look for himself. Retracting his massive helmet to not give away their position, Horst peeked over the edge and whistled at what he saw. The DX-soldiers standing guard around the scientists each wore a metal frame over their shoulders, chests, and arms, with a back-mounted power cell fueling the exoskeletons and the lethal-looking weapons mounted all over them.
“Any ideas?” Horst asked quietly, deferring to his militant lover’s practiced knowledge of advanced weaponry. Fritz retracted his helmet and took another look at the soldier’s armaments, pursing his lips in thought.
“Yeah…thing on the left arm’s a small-scale thermobaric cannon. Think of a pyromaniac’s scale of favorite toys with a lighter on one end and a flamethrower on the other; that thing would be a couple dozen notches over the flamethrower’s edge. We don’t need no water…”
“Got it,” Horst said with a nod, getting a good, long look at the thick-barreled weapon mounted on each exoskeleton’s left arm before he nodded towards the belt-fed weapon on the right. “And that?”
“Eh, just a snub-nose 20 mil,” Fritz said with a casual shrug. “Outlawed by the Geneva Convention, but…don’t think these guys really care. Five or six rounds a second on full auto, but they’re probably set to semi-auto to conserve ammo.” Horst was a moment away from commenting that it might be better to allow for rapid fire, given the perilous, enemy-rich environment, until he saw one of the soldiers heft up his right arm and fire a round from the small cannon. Twenty feet away, the infected he was aiming at simply fell apart, torso torn open by the large slug, hips barely holding together, arms and legs hitting the ground like bloody hailstones. The infected woman behind the first took the deformed bullet in her chest with enough force to knock her off her feet and keep her down.
“Alright then,” Horst muttered as he cautiously formed his helmet back over his head. “And the boxes on their shoulders?”
“If I had to hazard a guess? Short-range rockets or RPGs,” Fritz said with a sigh as he did the same, armoring up. “Kind of an afterthought, really. Shouldn’t be a problem if we move fast…I’m thinking we dive in, get their attention, then have Darwin come in from behind and catch ‘em off-guard.”
“Heh, twenty bucks says that we start taking fire the second we jump,” Horst husked. Whether he seemed to think of this as a positive or negative was impossible to tell. “You got the dog?”
“Yep,” Fritz muttered, leaning over the side of the building and hissing to get Darwin’s attention before giving him simple, quick instructions to wait until called for. Once he got an affirmative tilt of the dog’s massive head, he turned back towards Horst and raised an eyebrow behind his helmet as he slid his serrated claws out. “You want your sharp thingies?”
“Nah, I’m sticking with these for the moment,” Horst said, flexing his gauntleted hands. “Better for grabbing.”
“Suit yourself. On three?”
“Three!” Horst snarled as he took a running leap off the roof, flying high into the air before turning his body down like a diver off the block. The DX-soldiers, unused to attacks from above, were unprepared for the sudden impact of Horst’s armored body slamming into the lieutenant commanding the four-man squad. “Fuck!” one of the soldiers yelled, turning to try to bring his weapons to bear as Horst held the struggling lieutenant down and rained heavy blows across his chest and head. Distracted, the other three DX-soldiers had their backs turned as Fritz added his considerable power to the fight, bursting through the air to dive straight for one of the unwary soldiers, his toothed claws stabbing to their bases into his back.
“Suck and die,” Fritz spat as he ripped his claws down, tearing eight long, ragged gouges through the soldier’s back, julienning his lungs and most of his organs. At this point, one of the two surviving soldiers made the insightful observation that his lieutenant was quite dead, the man’s helmeted head smashed to a bloody pulp under Horst’s mighty hands. He must have believed that his lieutenant wished to be cremated, as he leveled his left arm at Horst and pulled the trigger. The wide muzzle of his thermobaric cannon glowed for a moment as its incendiary load flew down its barrel, then burst forth on a cone of burning gases which lit up the street like a dragon’s sneeze. The ensuing explosion did a hell of a lot more than that, completely obscuring Horst’s body in a sunburst of white-hot flames and igniting the viral flesh around him before detonating with worrying force, sending the dead lieutenant’s charred bones flying away and making the two surviving DX-soldiers flinch back from the heat wash.
Fritz, momentarily forgotten, took the opportunity to whistle for Darwin before pressing his assault with a vengeance. The soldier who hadn’t tried to incinerate Horst whipped on Fritz at his whistle, forgoing another explosion in favor of unloading his conventional cannon as Fritz charged at him. Bloodlust, anger, and his thick exoskeleton allowed Fritz to ignore most of the heavy slugs which flew at him, shrugging off a storm of metal that would have dropped an elephant as he sought to bring his prey within killing range. Claws lashed out like eager snakes as the DX-soldier tried to back away and keep space between them, an effort which proved to be fruitless as Fritz started to draw blood with every swipe and slash. The embattled soldier’s comrade rapidly radioed in their situation as he leveled his weapons at Fritz, then switched his aim towards the flying, furry tank which charged out of an alleyway and leapt for the scientists cowering around the monstrous corpse they had been studying. He managed to light off two shots from his 20-mil and one RPG before a heavy blow from behind made him roar in pain and stumble forward onto his knees, the metal arms of his weapons rack pushing to the ground to keep him from falling flat on his face. He whipped his head around to see what had hit him, and the immediate, primal terror which filled him made him sincerely wish that he had just shut his eyes and let death blindly take him.
Shrouded in the greasy smoke of burnt flesh, backlit by raging, dirty-red fire, with his armor gleaming like polished jet in the wake of the explosion and his massive, pointed helmet staring facelessly down, Horst looked like some demonic executioner fresh out of Hell. The meter-long talons which swung from his powerful arms made him appear more like a butcher; at least, that’s what the wounded DX-soldier thought a millisecond before those same claws lifted and took his head off in a single, blisteringly fast swipe.
“You’re alive,” Fritz noted dryly as he slashed upwards and severed his soldier’s left arm, digging deep grooves into the metal gun-frame.
“Takes more than fire to kill us, sweetheart,” Horst said with a chuckle as he jumped forward and snapped out a kick that lifted his armored skirt and turned Fritz’s DX-soldier’s hips into gravel. Fritz cackled as he quickly retracted his claws and grabbed the howling soldier’s head in both hands, ripping it off his shoulders with a wrenching yank.
“Heard that,” he said happily as he absorbed the severed head into him, sighing contently at the knowledge and the sustenance gained, his armor patching up seamlessly around the tiny fractures the large-caliber bullets had made. “How’d your armor take the explosion?”
“Eh,” Horst muttered as he prized the gun-rack off the soldier’s rapidly-cooling body, consuming the remains and nodding firmly as the biomass restored what he’d lost. “I wouldn’t make a habit of taking direct hits from those things, but you’ll live.” He shrugged as his armor reformed seamlessly around the consumed flesh, rolling his shoulders slowly. “Speaking of bad habits, did your mutt get scared off?”
“Nope,” Fritz said before swearing loudly and running around the corner of the building closest to them, where Darwin had tucked himself into an alley and settled down on his haunches to gnaw on the corpse of the infected monster that the now-crippled scientists had been studying. “No!” Fritz roared, stomping around the dog’s long, thick body to glare at him, meeting his huge, brown-red eyes. “Drop it!”
The dog paused mid-chew to just stare at Fritz, his massive ears drooping and swiveling back to make his eyes look even larger as a high-pitched, gentle whine wheedled out of his mouth. “No!” Fritz ordered firmly. “Drop it! Now!” Darwin made a little gusting sigh through his nose as he unclenched his jaw and spat out the mangled corpse, then dropped his immense head heavily onto the pavement with a singularly petulant look on his face.
“Oh, for the love of god,” Horst muttered with a heavy sigh as he came around to stand with Fritz, helping to carve what was left of the corpse in half and consuming his portion. “Sweetheart, that fucking dog is going to have you whipped worse than any woman ever could.”
“He will not,” Fritz muttered once he ate his half, then tore off one of the moaning scientist’s legs and tossed it to the dog, earning him a happy slurp across his armor and a wiggle of Darwin’s stumpy tail as the dog snapped up the leg, crushing bone like sugar crystal.
“Right,” Horst muttered. “I assume that we’re just going ignore Egypt, the pyramids, and the whole length of denial that you’re waist-deep in, eh?”
“Bite me.”
“Later. We need to move, I think that we’re going to have company soon.”
“Probably,” Fritz nodded as he divided the scientists up and consumed half while Horst did the same, finding a few interesting pieces of information but nothing particularly useful. “Pretty sure I heard one of the soldiers call for backup,” he mentioned as he waited for Horst to finish absorbing the last of the scientists.
“Then let’s make this next one fast,” Horst said seriously as he leapt into the air to start running over the rooftops once more, followed closely by Fritz and with Darwin tagging along on the ground, batting aside infected like weeds. Their next target was close, just a hop and a skip for the Evolved, neither of whom thought to bother with strategy; leaping off a roof and dive-bombing the shocked soldiers seemed to be a fairly effective means of getting the job done. Horst didn’t even bother with bringing his claws out, ducking and weaving to deliver crushing blows while Fritz moved like a dervish among the confused DX-soldiers, laying waste with his serrated claws, keeping the goons busy while Darwin sent scientists flying against walls with swipes of his paws and took off limbs with snaps of his teeth. This group was also studying some mutated mass of muscles, which Darwin snatched up and tore off with to guard while his masters fought.
“Where the fuck are those reinforcements?!” one DX-soldier screamed before Fritz’s slashing claws severed the power lines leading from his back-mounted generator to the rest of his gun-frame, turning the exoskeleton into dead weight that bore him down to the ground and left him easy prey. Fritz took the time to crouch down and stab his claws into the DX-soldier’s back beneath the thick armor, curling inwards and upwards to sever his spine in three places and mash his guts, the Evolved’s armor soaking up a dozen rounds of ammunition as he made his kill. He felt the seamless black plates shiver and fracture under the assault, sending small, damaging shockwaves through into the flesh beneath until a break in the fire allowed his body a reprieve.
The source of the pause became clear when Fritz turned his head, and saw Horst’s right arm protruding from the faceplate of the DX-soldier who had been shooting at him. The pyramid-helmeted Evolved grunted as he twisted his hand around, then viciously withdrew his arm to send the soldier’s brains flying to the ground in a goopy pink-grey mess. “Headshot,” the dominant Evolved snarled. A 20 mm slug ricocheting off of his helmet turned his attention away from his kill and set him lunging for his new attacker, while Fritz leapt bodily onto another DX-soldier in time to throw the man’s aim just as he fired his thermobaric cannon. An incendiary payload whooshed harmlessly into the sky, followed momentarily by the cannon that had launched it, the hand that had pulled its trigger, and then half of the soldier’s skull.
Horst finished his fight much more simply: he waded through the storm of bullets which his attacker foolishly hoped would stop him, trudging forward until he was close enough to the panicking soldier to swing both of his arms around together, as though clapping his hands. Unfortunately for the DX-soldier, Horst’s hands were curled into unforgiving fists, and his head lay squarely in the path between the two. His skull crushed like a soda can, and then melted with the rest of his body as Horst consumed him, his gun-frame dropping heavily to the ground.
“You okay?” he called to Fritz, turning around and flexing his arms loosely.
“Clear here,” Fritz said with a nod, sighing as he ducked down to snatch up one of the scientists that Darwin had dazed, crushing the man’s weak body against his armor and consuming him without a thought. “That’s the last of these things…want to call our ride back in?”
“Get Darwin first,” Horst called, picking up a scientist of his own and disintegrating the man with his feeder-tendrils. Fritz nodded and whistled for the dog, then scowled and grumbled to himself as he got no answer.
“Fucking bottomless pit…if he’s eaten that specimen, I’m not giving him any more body parts for a week.”
“So harsh,” Horst said dryly. “You go get him, I’ll clean up here.” Fritz nodded and took off running, calling for Darwin while Horst idly finished off the surviving scientists. It wasn’t until he consumed the third and last of the struggling, crippled men that he picked up on an approaching sound…a dull, heavy whop-whop-whop that made him tilt his head up and consider running up to a rooftop to see where it was coming from. He doubted that Fritz had called in their ride already, so…
Confusion gave way to realization, and then to genuine worry as the noise’s source came into view, streaking over the island with unbelievable speed and turning a ridiculously tight corner to hover menacingly over Horst. It was another Blackwatch helicopter, which was followed by another of the slower cargo-bearing models which had carried the Evolved out into the Testing Area. While the cargo choppers looked like beasts of burden, the one which dipped its nose towards Horst looked more like the brainchild of a dozen psychopaths, a duel-rotor monster of black metal that bristled with huge missile tubes and boxy rocket pods beneath stubby wings. Beneath the stacked cockpits, a double-barrel cannon that looked like it had been designed with genocide in mind aimed down at Horst before the massive machine had finished its turn, firing down on the Evolved unforgivingly. Whatever bulletproofing Horst thought he had disintegrated as 25mm depleted uranium shells thudded into him, forcing him back one step, then two before he desperately leapt aside and ran, the ground beneath his feet chewing up with craters as the swiveling cannon chased after him.
“Crap,” he cursed as red blood trailed down his cracked armor from the hard impacts, diving into an alleyway to put something more solid between himself and the armor-piercing bullets. When the brickwork and climbing viral flesh shielding him tore apart even faster than his armor from the hail of high-velocity bullets, he swore again and leapt up, bouncing between the close walls and whipping out his long claws once he landed on a rooftop. The gunship didn’t stop firing at him even as it started to climb through the air away from him; Horst dodged left across the roof, took two steps and jumped up after it, pouncing with a bestial roar. The helicopter twisted aside to keep him from being able to get a good grip on it, but the Evolved did get close enough to slash his claws through the devastating cannon, disabling it before he fell back to earth with a triumphant shout.
“Suck on that, bitch!” he snarled as he touched down, crouched and ready to move if the turning gunship tried to shoot him again. He didn’t have much need to; the gunship’s next attack affected too much space to move out of. Safely out of reach, the gunship started launching a hail of rockets at the Evolved, each of which detonated powerfully enough to make Horst swear and almost lift off the ground. More than two dozen rockets streaked in and lit off with ground-shaking payloads before the pilot threw down two missiles from his tubes just to be sure that everything within the huge cloud of smoke was dead. The two large munitions struck the ground and set off a pair of thermobaric explosions which lifted Horst from where the rockets had made him stumble. The explosions pulled him from his feet and sent his black-plated form flying down the street, smoking heavily from where the flames had crisped the flesh made vulnerable by the deep fissures and bullet holes in his armor.
Skidding to a halt fifty feet from where he had started, Horst groaned and slowly picked himself up, quickly snatching the first two infected humans that came close and consuming them hungrily, needing the healing factor after his ordeal. A third infected got dragged into his body before he heard a low whistle from beside him.
“I’d say that you just got your ass kicked, baby,” Fritz commented, leaning against the wall of another alley, out of sight of the gunship, Darwin sitting behind him with a curious look on his face as he stared down at Horst.
“If your mutt tries to eat me, I’m gonna rip his eyes out,” Horst growled, steadying on his feet and gratefully catching the half a monster that Fritz tossed to him, consuming the flesh eagerly as he ducked into the alley with his lover. “And just where the hell were you while I was dancing with an assault chopper?”
“Very happily not getting my ass kicked,” Fritz muttered, helping Horst to rest against the wall. “It’s that bad out there?”
“Let’s just say that Blackwatch has significantly improved its arsenal,” Horst grunted as he caught his breath, armor sealing up rapidly, his flesh healing a bit more slowly. “Thoughts?”
“One sec,” Fritz hissed, leaning around the corner. “Another helicopter…cargo one this time, with a cage beneath it.”
“That can’t be good,” Horst muttered, peeking around the corner and earning another explosion close to their alley, cursing as he remembered that his helmet poked out almost two feet ahead of him.
“What do you want to bet that we’re about to see Gentek’s latest attempt at making something even more dangerous than us?” Fritz asked sarcastically as he watched the gunship lift away to allow the cargo chopper to move into position over the bullet-torn street. Like its weapon-toting escort, the cargo ship didn’t land, only lowered itself to thirty feet over the street before it disengaged the clamps holding its containment cage in place against its belly. The clamps sprung open, and the big box was released to make its short journey to the earth, landing with a ground-shaking thud; during its brief fall, both Evolved clearly saw it tilt in midair as whatever it contained shifted its weight.
When it hit the ground, canisters built into the cage burst to release huge plumes of opaque smoke, obscuring the cage from view and leaving the Evolved blind to whatever was thumping around inside. Both stepped out from their cover curiously, shifting out their claws and peering vainly into the thick veil of smoke, struggling to see anything, reluctantly going on the defensive as they were forced to just wait and see what happened. Neither knew what to expect; both were surprised when instead of some slavering brute, the smoke parted around a pair of thick, spikey spears that whistled through the air with alarming speed, aimed for the Evolved’s heads.
Fritz ducked, while Horst tried to dodge aside, neither moving quite quickly enough in their armor to prevent contact. One spear scored along the length of Horst’s helmet before catapulting away into the crowd of infected behind them, while the other clipped a spine from Fritz’s shoulder plates clean off before sinking half its length through a brick wall behind him.
“The fuck?!” Fritz yelled as he bounced up, trying to squint into the fog. He got a momentary glimpse of three glowing red eyes deep in the smoke before a hail of spikey projectiles forced him to duck again and dodge away, tucking and rolling behind a car so wrapped in viral tendrils that it looked like a pile of red yarn seven feet high.
“Scatter!” he roared from cover, more for Darwin’s benefit than Horst’s. He trusted his lover to already know that they needed some protection until they could determine their enemy, but Darwin didn’t quite have the Evolved’s grasp for tactics. The simple command, spoken loudly enough to be heard for a mile around, would ensure that the dog knew to stay back and out of harm’s way while the Evolved dealt with the danger.
“Any ideas what this is?!” Horst roared from where he was hunkered down, looking only slightly undignified as he sheltered behind another tendril-wrapped car, risking a glance over the top before a stream of the spikey munitions whizzed at him and dug themselves into the tendrils.
“No clue!” Fritz answered, leaning out and promptly catching one of the flying things in his left shin. He pulled back immediately to examine the injury and was shocked to see a toothy, elongated prism of what appeared to be bone sticking out of his shin plate, the point of the barbed projectile dug deep into his armor and the flesh beneath. Were it not for his armor, he was certain that the golf-ball-sized chunk of bone would have torn right through his leg, striking with more force than the DX-soldier’s cannons had.
“Scheiße,” he spat as he yanked the boney spine out of his leg and tried to consume it, only slightly grateful when the spine disintegrated into his hand and gave him a better idea of what he was dealing with. The spine was a bullet, he discovered, though what kind of weapon fired bone bullets was beyond him; he caught a few hazy flickers of the creature that had fired it, but there was too little genetic material in the bullet to give him more than a vague image of a squat, muscular creature, something Gentek had created in a lab and slowly tweaked into the finished product which was attacking the Evolved.
There was a bit more, other than just the largely-unhelpful information; Fritz trembled and grinned as he felt his virus start to piece together something useful from the trace DNA in the bullet, his flesh squirming beneath his armor and searing heat starting to build up behind his eyes. He growled and did his best to hold still as his body accepted the change, the heat in his head growing until the Evolved went blind from the heat, his eyes squeezed shut, unsure what would happen until the mutations finally settled and the fiery burn died down, his flesh settling with a disturbing rustle and slither under his armor, the black plates shifting restlessly at the change. The change was not immediately apparent; Fritz didn’t feel any stronger or faster, and he didn’t feel anything new in his small arsenal of life-taking powers.
When he cautiously opened his eyes and saw the world around him in slightly-blurry, varied shades of blues and greens, his confusion cleared up and had he possessed a mouth, he would have broken out into a fierce grin.
“Horst!” he roared, laughing hysterically. “Get shot!”
“Not the subtlest way you could tell me that we’re breaking up!” Horst roared back.
“Trust me! Get shot, and consume the bullet! Gave me thermal vision when I did it!”
“Huh! Well then!” Horst replied, boldly reaching an arm out until one of the bone bullets whizzed into his open palm and dug halfway through his gauntleted hand. Fritz could not see quite as clearly with his heat-sensitive vision active as he could without, but he could still make out Horst retreating back into cover and consuming his bullet, then stiffening as his body went through the same transformation that Fritz’s had.
“Damn,” Horst rumbled once his body settled and he too could see the world through the eyes of a predator, glancing left and right, picking out heat-trails down the street where the cooling bodies of infected who had been in the line of their attacker’s fire lay. “How did you figure out this was thermal vision, sweetheart?!”
“Used to have a filter on our goggles,” the ex-Blackwatch soldier replied, risking another peak around the corner of his shuddering, disintegrating shelter to see their attacker. “Try it! See’s right through the smoke!”
Horst did just that, turning his elongated helmet point-down to minimize his profile and then poking out from cover to look down the street. Sure enough, the once-impenetrable smoke now appeared to be virtually transparent, just a vague haze which only gave the white-red body of heat in the middle of the cloud even sharper definition. The thing was big, somewhere between a Brawler and one of the hulking Juggernauts that the Evolved had tangled with before, with a squat torso and broad shoulders supported by a pair of thick, wide-spread legs. It didn’t move much, seeming to favor the concealment of the smoke, just twisting on its waist like a traversing piece of artillery to bring its weapons to bear on the Evolved’s rapidly-breaking shields. And such weapons…Horst could not clearly see the details of the things, but he had no doubt in his mind that the thing’s arms were long, thick-barreled guns. The gun’s muzzles glowed white-hot, as did the creature’s shoulders beneath cooler layers of armor, and a second joint at the base of each limb-gun that connected to each shoulder by thick bundles of muscle. Three eyes in the middle of the thing’s head also showed up as hard white against the red and orange of the rest of its body.
To most enemies, living artillery would have been intimidating. To the Evolved, the creature just looked promising.
“I am SO getting one of those!” Horst cackled.
“Any idea how?” Fritz called, cursing as a bullet shot straight through the weakened car and whizzed by his head.
“Yep! Need you to jump up and get its attention, sweetheart!”
“Why me?!?”
“Because I already had to tangle with the gunship!” Horst roared as he flexed his gauntleted hands, sank his fingers into his ruined shield and hefted it just enough to break the tendril’s hold on the car. “Hurry, while I still have something to throw at it!”
“I hate my fucking job!” Fritz roared before he did as Horst said, leaping up from behind his shelter towards the face of the closest building, then springing off of it to catapult himself high into the air. Their attacker locked onto the sudden movement with a sniper’s precision, sending a fresh hail of bullets after Fritz, more than a few of which struck him. Horst did not let his lover’s pain distract him, grunting loudly and lifting up the ruined car he had been hiding behind, his powerful body hefting a ton and a half of metal and viral flesh as easily as he might have lifted a tennis ball. He twisted on his feet like an Olympian throwing the hammer, his armored skirt flaring out around his legs as he turned and flung the car down the street, aimed to slam side-on to their attacker. Sure enough, the monster wasn’t built to dodge anything so large and fast, and so took the car’s full force across its front, stumbling back and letting out a low, howling roar of pain. Fritz, airborne, was the first of the two Evolved to get a clear look at the thing, switching back to his usual vision as their attacker stumbled out of the smoke and into the light.
“Gotcha now, shit-stain,” he snarled. The monster beneath him was an ugly mess of muscles and armor, each leg fit with thick black plates which resembled plows to more easily push through crowds or rubble, the head capped by a helmet of black plate. What interested Fritz the most, in the second he got to stare without impediment, were the monster’s shoulders. The armor there was especially thick, and he could guess why: both the shoulder and the second joint behind each limb-gun glowed fiercely, and turned even brighter once the monster got its bearings back and turned its guns on Fritz again.
“Firing chambers,” Fritz muttered under his breath before he was forced to burst aside and skid across the closest roof, his armor and helmet studded with more than a dozen of the armor-piercing bullets, roaring at the top of his lungs. “Horst! Go for the joints!”
“On it!” Horst answered from the ground, the Evolved already up and running the moment he got his balance back from his throw, streaking through the smoke and howling his challenge as he lunged for the monster. Fritz rolled over until he could look over the edge of the roof without exposing too much of himself, watching the massive monster turn its attention to Horst and start firing. Bullets whipped over Horst’s head and dug chinks out of his armor, and more than a few stuck into his chestplate or got caught in his skirt; Fritz finally saw some use for the skirt, since it actually did provide some protection for Horst’s pumping legs. Horst did not take the time to try to dodge for cover, pushing the offensive while he had a chance of doing so, closing the distance between him and the monster and attacking furiously. Seeing how thickly-armored its legs and torso were, he kept his claws retracted and attacked with his bare hands, his gauntlets snapping out once he got close enough to grab at the muzzle of the monster’s left limb-gun, twisting viciously to the right. The creature was too strong for him to tear the arm off, but it forced the monster to shift its heavy weight and turn with him, putting it off balance.
The monster’s right limb-gun swung in like a club that aimed to smash Horst’s body between its arms, but the Evolved saw it coming and shoved himself down beneath the strike, ducking and popping up on the monster’s right side while its momentum was still turning it left. Snarling, Horst lunged forward to grab his left hand into the thick muscles between the monster’s shoulder and second joint, then launched a right cross that could have shattered stone. His rock-hard knuckles punched into the glowing, round joint at the base of the monster’s right limb-gun, and the reaction was rather pronounced. Unable to withstand the force of the impact, the joint burst like a propane tank, releasing a cloud of blue-green flame that engulfed both Horst and the monster with a rushing whoosh of burning air. Five stories above them, Fritz felt the heat like a flamethrower’s nozzle pressing about an inch away from his skin, and couldn’t imagine how warm it was for Horst.
“Fucking HELL, that’s hot!” His lover’s voice rang out from beneath him just as the flame whipped itself out, allowing Fritz to see the results of the attack. Of the two, Horst had fared much better, his armor glossy as fresh obsidian from the burn, the holes in his armor smoking heavily where his flesh had been charred. Steam rising amid the black smoke made Fritz suspect that parts of Horst’s soft flesh might have gotten boiled in his armor like a lobster in its shell. The monster was worse off, missing its right limb-gun, the spaces between its armor smoking just as heavily as Horst’s but in many more places. One of its eyes was sealed shut, and as Horst leapt back to give himself some breathing room, a limp could be clearly seen in the monster’s step as it turned back around.
“Get a little toasty, love?” Fritz called.
“You come take a swing at this ugly motherfucker, you tell me!” Horst called, gesturing with the charred, smoking stump of the limb-gun he had claimed. He consumed the thing once he finished, and this time there was no time to wait or gather his breath as his body took in the new DNA and immediately made use of it. High above him, Fritz watched in awe as Horst’s right arm twisted, came apart, melted down into a mess of slithering viral goo, and then built itself up into a shape that was new to both Evolved. Horst’s shoulder swelled into a bulbous mass that resembled a red-orange globe slightly larger than a basketball, the glowing ball growing a thick sheathe of the Evolved’s trademark black armor, while cable-like tendrils sprouted out and latched onto Horst’s chest, back and side, anchoring the new mutation securely to his body. Beneath the glowing shoulder-bulge, a short arm ran thick with black-red tendrils and brightly-glowing cables to a second, smaller glowing joint, this one only about ten inches across.
Reaching out from the second joint came the thing which really grabbed Fritz’s attention: a cannon. Three feet of twisted black biomass formed into a gleaming tube, laced with thinner glowing lines that spiraled down its length and slung with a skinny, gleaming sharp edge along its underside which protruded another half-foot ahead of the muzzle like a bayonet.
“Oh, fuck yes,” Horst growled as he slowly flexed his new arm, examining it while the monster he had taken it from growled and snarled and brought its remaining limb-gun to bear. Fritz stopped it from firing, leaping off the roof of his building and diving onto the creature’s back with his claws out, stabbing all eight serrated talons into the still-smoking cracks in its armor either side of its head. The Evolved growled and tried to curl his talons into the monster’s flesh to rip its head off, but its flexing muscles and thick armor trapped his hands and kept him from moving.
“Shit! Kill it!” he called to Horst.
“Say cheese!” Horst snarled as he hefted his new cannon up straight from his shoulder, feeling the short arm between his shoulder and elbow lock out with the cannon’s body to form an even longer weapon. In the blink of an eye, his body generated something bigger than just a bullet within his arm, a three-foot long spear of hard black biomass that felt like a cork on a bottle of champagne inside of him, holding back massive pressure inside his shoulder. His glowing joints flared brighter as he released that pressure with a thought, firing the short spear point-blank at the crippled monster’s head while Fritz held it still. Fritz barely saw the spear move as it whipped through the air and pinned through the monster’s forehead, but he definitely felt it when it hit, piercing through the monster’s helmet and forcing its head back before ripping it clean off its shoulders. The spear’s incredible momentum carried it through the monster’s head until its point pushed out the back, pinning the creature’s severed head to the wall of the building behind it like a hunter’s trophy.
“Damn,” Fritz muttered, looking over his shoulder at the pinned head before the monster’s corpse teetered forward and fell, Fritz landing on his feet beside it, retracting his claws and looking over at his lover’s new weapon. “I do believe that we’re going to have fun with that!”
“I will,” Horst said with a chuckle, hefting his cannon and examining it more closely. “You won’t, unless you get a mouthful, eh?"
“Hnn,” Fritz snorted as he grinned and flexed his hands, punching both into the bloody, ragged wound where the monster’s head had been and starting to consume. Horst did as well, the two Evolved sharing their prize until nothing remained of the hulking thing but a massive pool of blood where it had fallen and its head on the wall. Horst watched gleefully as Fritz’s body mutated and developed a cannon of his own, shorter than Horsts and missing the bayonet beneath his barrel, but studded with rows of saw-like teeth along its bottom edge and armored with spikes over its glowing joints.
“Fucking brilliant,” he cackled as he hefted his new limb-gun and test-fired a burst of bullets into the monster’s mounted head, tearing it to pieces with spikey, sharp chunks of black biomass. “If this isn’t a game-changer, I don’t know what is!”
“Speaking of which,” Horst muttered, tapping Fritz’s shoulder to get his attention. He pointed up, where the two helicopters that had given them so much trouble still hovered, the cargo chopped starting to pull away while the gunship moved in and started lining itself up.
“We want to let that cargo ship get away?” Fritz asked.
“Nope.”
“You want to take it?”
“Speed’s more your bag, sweetheart. Besides, I’ve got unfinished business with the heavily-armed gentleman flying over us, eh?”
“Give ‘em hell,” Fritz grunted before he leaped away in pursuit of the fleeing cargo chopper, leaving Horst alone to deal with the gunship. The hovering attack craft just held its position above Horst, as if waiting for the Evolved to make a move, while Horst stood still in the middle of the bullet-chewed street with his cannon slung beside him.
“Go ahead,” he muttered, flexing his shoulder and locking his arm out straight, a spear loading into the weapon. “Make my day.”
One of the missile pods lit up as the gunship’s pilot pulled the trigger. Horst had his arm up and firing before the missile had completely cleared its tube, snap-firing his spear into the helicopter’s stubby left wing and throwing off its aim, the thermobaric missile flying into the side of a building fifty feet behind Horst. As one wing crumpled and fell to the ground, Horst got off a second spear into the helicopter’s right wing dropped it as well, declawing the huge predator and leaving it easy prey for the Evolved. A volley of spears flew up as the neutered gunship tried to turn away, punching holes through its armor and shaking it in midair until one clipped the tip of its long tail off, sending it into a spin that ended when it hit the ground.
Fritz came back from his business with the cargo chopper to find Horst sitting on the wreck of the gunship, the dead pilot and gunner riddled with biomass bullets and tossed out where the infected could eat their corpses. “Bad day to be a pilot,” he observed before whistling for Darwin.
“Blackwatch’s bad days are only just starting,” Horst replied with a chuckle. “Gods, I wish Mercer could have seen this…he’d have had fun with living artillery.”
“I’m sure he’ll enjoy it once we bring him back,” Fritz said with a smirk, turning away as he felt the ground shaking, announcing Darwin’s return before the huge dog came into view. Barreling down the street with his mouth open and his ears up, Fritz couldn’t help but laugh at how exuberantly the mutated Corgi plowed through the hordes of infected to get to them, leaving a swathe of broken bodies beneath his pounding feet. “Think Mercer will like him?” he asked Horst.
“I think Mercer’s going to think you’re as crazy as I do,” Horst muttered, shaking his head as the dog came close and gave an echoing, happy bark, panting hotly over Fritz and licking him seemingly without care for the sharp spines adorning his armor.
“Yeah, well, If Mercer doesn’t like him, I won’t have to share him,” Fritz said easily, scratching around the edges of Darwin’s armored helmet. “So, what now?”
“Now we get back,” Horst said decisively, standing from the wreckage of the gunship. “Find another group of scientists in our Gentek disguises, box up Sir Drools-A-Lot here, and radio in our ride.”
Fritz nodded and got Darwin’s attention, commanding him to try to tone down his happiness while Horst checked his phone for the nearest Gentek group. Within minutes, they had found the closest pack of scientists and soldiers and, using their disguises, the Evolved easily got Darwin into one of the group’s spare containment cages before calling in their helicopter back to base.
- 8
- 9
- 10
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

[PROTOTYPE]: Reborn