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He caught the freeze up, a moment in time where everything seemed suspended. Were they free of this hell? Would she collapse to the floor in a heap?

No. No, she instead darted towards them, blades crashing through hastily thrown up arms to connect against his chest. It was a hard hit, one that crashed against his shield and left him momentarily stunned. Where she had struck, it burned, and he was afraid at what he might see if he looked down.

With her rapid motion, everything else seemed to spring back to life. Horace and Lex doing their best to fend her off, Nora leaping into the fray again. Thomas was quick to follow, releasing a bolt of electric blue from his crossbow even while he swung both fists, getting in much closer than he had ever intended to before.

There didn't really seem to be much point in staying back. She was too fast. Might as well get in and throw something more solid at her.

Stumbling back again, breathing heavily, he glanced towards Nora. "Yes, perhaps. Are you okay, Bella?" His smile had finally slipped away, as well as his typical good cheer. Nora sounded rather shaken, and he was concerned.


HP: 24
Damage: 8 + 2 = 10

Laugher HP: 106

Buffs: Mist-using trainee sun buff

It was ******** hard to concentrate with all the chaos going on, out there ******** people were tearing one another to shreds and there was ******** nothing he could do to help. He didn’t have the antidotes, he had no way of fixing any of this and if people didn’t come home, if they lost their loved ones to this ******** outbreak, it would rest on his shoulders. It was one thing to have people hating you for being a douchebag, for being inherently unlikeable, it was quite another to have them hating you for taking away the only thing they’d ever possessed.

Even that tragic scenario where everyone resented him bitterly for ever depended on him getting out at all, it depended on the fact that they’d make it home from this ******** lost cause, a future that seemed slimmed and slimmer every hour. He could feel the ground beneath their feet heave with the s**t living down there and they were already pushed almost to breaking point on the surface, it was almost completely hopeless if he was honest with himself and if he was less bullheaded he’d have them all retreat. But the results of retreat were also - in their own way - unthinkable. The odds here were grim, that was for damn sure, but by the longest shot - the tiniest slimmest ******** chance - possible. In this line of work, sometimes ******** miracles happened when you least expected them and that was what he had to depend on. If they ran from this fight, it would outgrow the mall, spreading and multiplying at an uncontrollable rate and they would never have the chance to contain it again. No amount of antidote would ever suffice. This was more than him, more than all of them and he wasn’t about to ask people to give what he wouldn’t also give himself.

He’d lived over a thousand ******** years as an ancient in some ******** up alternate world, watching the steady rise and fall of civilisations whose names he didn’t know and had taken the lives of people who didn’t deserve it, who couldn’t go on, who had earned their brutal end, who were sacrificed for causes they didn’t believe in and he’d been able to do it without feeling regret or shame. He’d done nothing but his set task and role, leaving what came after to those who dealt with it, and he hadn’t known regret. He wished with all his heart right now that he was able to have that strength, to be greater than the weakness that was built into him as a human. But the fact remained that no matter what he did, that was what he was, and he lamented every ******** person - and all of them were better than him, because he was the lowest of the low - who had to be sacrificed for some abstract greater good they would never reap the rewards of. Sometimes life just put you in a shitty place and there was no rhyme or reason to it, you just did what you could and survived until you couldn’t.

Rep found himself jarred out of his morbid line of thought by a voice which carried down the hallway from the dark depths of the warehouse level. He’d been avoiding the place as much as possible, going only as far as he had to to drop off or deal with the civilians, but he knew no one else was ******** alive down there right now.

“I hate you! I want my mom! Why did you do this to me? Why did you do it?”

It made Rep’s blood run cold. Despite all his best attempts at compartmentalising for the last few hours he’d heard nothing but the voices over and over, sometimes pleading, sometimes accusing and worst of all, sometimes grateful. Some of them had called him a hero, a good person, a saviour. He’d known better. But he couldn’t forget the voices, and the one he heard now he had absolutely heard earlier and there was no way it could be her.

He gave Harrison a concerned look, checked that he too had heard the voice - he had - and left to investigate it, leaving the Moon hunter to guard the control room in his absence. He told him he loved him before he went, just in ******** case.

The stairs went down and down and down, and Rep found himself truly unnerved for the first time that day. It was one thing to deal with the infected, he had been dealing with them for some time on regular missions, they were predictable to a point, following habitual patterns and behaviours. This was something else. He stepped onto one of the landings and there was a splash as he found himself ankle deep in rank pooled water. The sprinkler system seemed to be doing its job and flooding out the lower levels.

There was a cold breeze, a draught that blew through the whole floor of the building. It wasn’t without consequence, to Rep it meant that there were holes to the surface near here, and more concerning even than that, that some of them might be to outside the mall itself. He had to have faith in the perimeter guard to hold it.

Splashing in a way that made him anxious ( anything could find him like this ) he made his way through the winding passages towards the voice that still called to him, just out of reach, taunting him with the things he’d heard, the argument he’d had with a little girl too young to be listened to by an adult but who had seen him for what he really was.

There was a splashing, roaring sort of sound and he looked around into what should have been one of the stairwells. The water was cascading off into what looked like a bottomless abyss, the stairs completely missing, torn out in ragged chunks by something absolutely ******** enormous. It looked like someone had driven a diamond drill through the place. HIs night vision didn’t reach far enough to tell even the full scope of the tunnel beyond it, it went far deeper than the warehouses with their boxes of stored produce and products had ever reached.

Carefully - because who the ******** wanted to fall off into the center of the earth? - he stepped out to the edge of the broken ledge, every step cautious, ready to leap back with all the height Tracey afforded him if it collapsed. He stopped, peering out, his hands shaking for reasons he couldn’t even explain, looking for the little girl he was sure had to be here, who he’d ******** failed like all the others, hopeful and delirious, wanting to save her and redeem himself.

Maybe it was hell, he thought, maybe this was his purgatory, sent here finally for all the s**t he’d done and made to pursue forgiveness endlessly throughout eternity.



There was a rumble, a shift that was felt in the bones, in the very heart of everything, like a bass woofer at a club aimed directly at his body, making him feel like he might die. There was something there. There was something ******** there.

And holy s**t it was big. It was so so ******** big.

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“I know what you are doing.” the little girl’s voice, loud enough to almost deafen him said, echoing words without comprehension, blank green eyes fixed on him.

It was testament to the improvement Deus had wrought upon Rep’s survival skills that he turned and ran without hesitation, without bravado and without a ******** sound as far away from the thing as he could get, along the winding passages back to the ice rink.

"YES." The shout of encouragement was quite possibly louder than anything Mimsy had ever spoken before, charged with an adoring enthusiasm that seemed to have overtaken her. "I feel this way about our marriage too! No one should touch us. No one can."

This was highly attractive.

And that level of attraction, scientifically speaking, meant that she found herself needing to be close to him. It went far past that typical necessity, and if she could have bonded with him on a molecular level to be together permanently she would have. The best that she could achieve was to work diligently to tie the two of them together, just as she had in missions prior. She left enough room to avoid being a detriment to his ability to attack (and to avoid his attacks being a detriment to her), but the knot was such an intricate tangle by the time she was finished that they would most likely need to be cut apart again.

Anyone being allowed to do that was another thing entirely - with Svensyl now summoned, she fiercely guarded her most valuable treasure, swatting away even the tiniest bits of viscera and remains that were flung towards him.

"Kill it!" she demanded, eyes wide and wild and hungry for this satisfaction. "Kill it all so there will be nothing left to keep us apart!"

The relentless thunk of Jezebel hitting flesh paused as he halted in mid-air. His already panicked eyes widened as he let Mimsy's screams finally sink in, filling his head with nothing but the words she was saying. This tentacle was trying to keep them apart? Keep them apart? His hands shook with fury that his body wasn't capable of handling, and he lowered Jezebel for a second, just enough to look at her.

"Mimsy." He whimpered, reaching out to pat her face with one hand. "Don't."

He wanted to tell her in detail how important - vital - life threateningly necessary it was for her to never let anything get between them. He wanted to write goddamn sonnets about her role in every single breath he took. He wanted to, but he couldn't. Because he couldn't think enough to put together more than two words, and those words were Mimsy, and Don't.

He shuddered, and the animal returned; his eyes dulled and Jezebel was launched in a swivel, as he turned back to destroy the tentacle again. His was a one track mind, now. Something was in the way - something had to die. She wanted it to die. That was all he could think about. This was his absolute, now.

He could only afford one.

It was surprisingly easy to make him fall back onto his a** from the force of her pulling, because there was no stability in his body anymore. He was charging wild and free, and her pull made him crumble, until she was crawling on top of him and he couldn't see anymore.

Jezebel fell from his bloody fingertips, knocking hard against the weapon already on the floor and landing flat, X shaped across him before she finally stilled.

Mimsy was screaming, and Robert was blind, his eyes filled with nothing but red, red, red - so he reached out, trying to find her and protect her - and instead, his hands found her hair and held on to it, gripping enough to pull. He pulled her closer, even as he struggled to sit up, turn around, and face her.

There she was, he thought with relief, as his vision focused only on her. He let out a sharp sigh, but his breath and heartbeat refused to slow despite it.

"Don't let anything. Get between us." He found the words, and his sanity, for a minute. His skin was crawling with blackness, from the multiple bite wounds all meeting up with one another as they took him over, but despite that he managed to smile at the woman he held by cupping her head and gripping her hair, one last time. "Okay?"

The water that continued pouring all around them wasn't exactly helping matters any but Nellie kept going at it.

HP: 23 + 1 = 24