Sky whale
1109 Words
Azir froze.
Sliding backwards with agonising slowness, he retreated toward his broken bed, a sharp gasp caught in his throat.
The faint moonlight caught the dull sparkle of diamond scales cladding its hide.
Above, the beast stiffened, nostrils flaring as it sniffed the air.
It lowered its head into the mouth of the chamber, sealing his exit.
Four narrow, yellow eyes locked onto him.
Its jaw parted, peeling back to reveal rows of pointy teeth in a weird smile.
Azir was trapped.
MOOOOAOOON
Suddenly, a violent sound shuddered through the dirt walls, knocking loose showers of dust.
A deep, agonising frequency filled the eerie air, rattling Azir's ribs.
It was a sound he knew too well.
Terrified by the shift, the beast cowered, letting out a panicked, echoing howl.
It took its great head out of the chamber and ran out into the open plains.
Azir waited, his heart pounding against his ribs as the heavy footfalls of the creature faded away.
With a bruised body, he slowly pulled himself out of the dirt hole.
He came up and looked around him at the yellowish wasteland.
The diamond-scaled beast was nowhere to be seen, running off with dozens of other mutated creatures, all fleeing the giant floating in the sky.
A leviathan of the galaxy.
The huge space species had smooth, pink skin that hovered between the glowing moon and Planet QX9.
This was a creature that ruled the dark blue sky, cut through green clouds, and was feared by mutated beasts and the ultimate challenge for SSS-rankers.
The titan swung its massive fin and glided into the atmosphere; the sky groaned.
Azir watched, as mesmerised as the day they first met.
For a fleeting second, the creature made eye contact, leaving a silent message hanging in the empty sky:
"I am as lonely as you are. But together, we are not."
Azir had a bittersweet smile.
It was the first time he felt protected.
His stomach let out another aggressive roar, shattering the moment.
He checked Dexy.
The countdown on his wrist was bleeding away, and with it, his borrowed strength.
He couldn't afford to hunt another C-rank beast in this state.
His best bet was a collapsed high-tech research lab he'd spotted days ago, half-swallowed by the yellowish ash dunes.
It was a graveyard of old-world technology.
It was a man-made infrastructure.
Thus, there must have been a man.
Meaning: Ration.
Azir checked Dexy.
Fluencythricine was a nerve blocker, effective for twenty-four hours, and he had slept three hours after the injection, so he still had about nineteen hours before the agony of his broken bones began again.
It was his fourth day without good food or water.
He walked through the clammy heaviness of the air to the lab entrance. It was a half-choked blast door of titanium, collapsed and tilted.
He squeezed his form through the narrow gap and fell into a pitch-black metallic corridor.
The air inside was stale, smelling of rust and long-dead circuitry.
His stomach let out a sharp, hollow echo against the metal walls. Azir winced, clapping a hand over his abdomen. In this dead silence, he might as well be carrying a siren.
He led the way down the sloping corridor towards the cafeteria sectors, following the faint, pale blue glow of Dexy's idle screen.
Azir froze, his boot hovering an inch above the floor.
The sound was distant, from the shadows ahead. It wasn't the heavy, earth-shaking thumps of a C-rank beast.
It was the mad, frantic clicking of dozens of tiny clawed feet scraping over the steel floorboards.
The corridor was flooded with a tide of movement.
Hyper-evolved rodents caught the pale blue light of his wrist device.
They were the size of small dogs, totally blind, their faces dominated by huge twitching snouts and transparent, needlelike whiskers.
Their hairless skins were a sickly, veiny white, rows of razor-sharp incisors snapping in their jaws.
They had no eyes, but Azir remained perfectly still as their oversized ears swivelled towards him.
They were eavesdropping.
Azir held his breath. His hand slowly drifted toward his boot, his fingers wrapping around the hilt of his emergency dagger.
If he could slip past them.
His stomach betrayed him with a violent, aggressive roar that vibrated through the quiet corridor.
The rodents went dead silent for a fraction of a second.
Then, the entire swarm erupted into a frenzied, high-pitched screech.
They launched themselves forward, a wave of snapping jaws and pale flesh, pinpointing the exact source of the sound.
The heavy metallic casing expanded into his hand, the arcanic energy core igniting with a sharp, blinding
The flash of light did nothing to blind the creatures, but the sheer kinetic heat of the blade sliced through the first three rodents that leapt at his throat.
Green, acidic blood sprayed across the walls, hissing as it ate into the metal.
Azir backpedalled, swinging the rigid longsword in tight, defensive arcs.
A rodent clamped its jaws onto his boot; he kicked it off violently, smashing its skull against the floor.
Another came from the ceiling, its claws tearing into his shirt, missing the healed wound on his shoulder.
He gripped it by the throat and drove his boot dagger into its chest.
But there were too many of them, and they followed him by his heavy breathing and the humming of his sword.
He drew the blade apart.
Azir swung the weapon in a wide horizontal circle around himself.
The flexible tether whistled through the air, slicing the last of the swarm into silent piles of light-colored, motionless flesh.
Silence filled the corridor once more, broken only by the heavy, ragged panting of Azir's own breath.
The air was heavy with the smell of copper and burnt rodent fur.
He deactivated the Whip-Sword, its segments rolling back into the silent wristband.
He glanced down at Dexy.
His energy reserves were totally drained, and the timer told him he had more than eighteen hours of chemical endurance left.
Sure enough, the echoing racket of the whip-sword would soon attract larger, nastier predators to the facility.
If he didn't find food in the next few minutes, the medicine wouldn't matter.
He'd be too weak to fight his way back up.
He clenched his teeth against the hollow ache in his core and shoved through the dead rodents, hurrying deeper into the dark, straight for the central storage vaults.
A few were still left, feeling him from the dark shadows of the giant holes they had made in the metallic walls.
But they learned their lesson, though; Azir would wipe them out if they didn't keep away.
- Writer
