The Battle of Death Mountain: Alpha

[Thor]

Thor's muscles ached. His skin burned. His hammer lay beside him. He reached out, but the dragon's bite sent pain shooting through his arm. He let his hand fall. This was not his first death. Thor would return, he would grow stronger, and then he would return. He would slay this dragon. He would slay the dragon another time. Thor looked at the other primes. They danced around the dragon, dodging the colossal beasts attacks as best they could. His comrades fought on. The God of Thunder would not go quietly into the night! 

Thor took hold of his hammer, picking himself up. It was an Asgardian's duty, his right, to go down swinging. Thor would have it no other way. He launched himself into the air as the others continued to battle the beast. Thor slammed into Volvagia with one last mighty blow just as it's head rose above the smoke and dust of it's own attacks. Thor began to fall, but his body would never touch the ground. Flame enveloped him, eating through his clothes and his flesh. What fell from the sky was armor and bone and nothing else. The Thunder God was dead.

[Okor]

It is often said that it is preferable to burn out, than to fade away.

Astartes know this better than others. Their fate is to be incinerated atop a mound of fallen foes, swinging blades and emptied guns against the never-ending tide of hatred arrayed against them, until the Gods see fit to allow them to rest. Whether surrounded by their final sacrifices, or by their battle-brothers, they go neither gently, nor alone, into that good night.

Perhaps this fact was why something analogous to fear was creeping into his mind, a quiet dread of the unknown sinking into his psyche, icy needles plunging into his previous bravado and bravery. He couldn’t feel anything. This was far from uncommon, the blessings he had fought so hard for shielding him from agony. More disturbing was the lack of any sensation. He was blind, deaf, mute, and seemingly immobile. He commanded himself to rise, for his armour’s pistons to augment his leprous limbs, to continue the fight. It was impossible to stop now. The foe still lived, and it pursued the weaklings he had sworn to shield. He had made an oath to slay Volvagia, to cast it into the deepest pits of hell, whether to save the Gorons, or to eliminate the competition, he was unsure. He had been commanded to, and so he had fought.

A charred mandible fell from a soot-black skull, the carbonized muscle still clinging to the surface unable to hold it in place as he struggled to make use of now-incinerated lungs.

Why in the infinite hells had he tried to fight that beast? It was larger than a superheavy tank, with more firepower than the average orbital bombardment.

Why did he fight?

Decayed and starved brain cells proffered forth an answer. Because he lived.

As long as he drew breath, he had to steal life from the world, to draw blood and let it into his own veins, earning every second of his existence by ending others. It was a biological imperative to kill.

Electric signals ran down his singed spinal column, ending there as they failed to find his limbs, which settled around him as particulate mounds of ash.

It was an gene-forged addiction, an inbuilt impulse to find and kill the enemies of mankind. And Omnillium could cure it, could it not? The Smiling One’s insidious gift could rid him of his flaws, heal the maimed, allow the blind to see, tear the cancerous geneseed from his heart. He could be reborn, an Okor that no world had known, for a world none wished to know.

And he would die.

Every flaw, every scar, every psychosis he tried to banish to the darkest reaches of his mind, the parasites that crawled through the hearts that laid blackened in his heat-warped ribcage, was him.

The chill that passed through his slowly cooling remains, that barest reflection of fear, was him.

He didn’t want to die alone. There were no Gods watching his final breaths, no warp-sprites hovering over his broken form, awaiting his ascension from the realm of mortals. There was no vindication, no righteousness, no final testament to his strength, one last feat of battle to burn his name into legend. Just a slow, shameful, agonizing death. He needed to get up, he needed to draw blood, to interpose himself between his wards and the enemy.

But he couldn’t. By the Gods, he couldn’t.

With one last shudder of what few scraps of broiled muscle remained clinging to his scorched bone, the infernal energies that animated the long-dead legionnaire fleeing his incinerated corpse, leaving the broken and blackened remnants upon the ashen steppes.

Just another corpse on the battlefield.

[Zack Fair]

Zack had landed, recovered his sword, and wiped the blood from his eyes. It was an unwelcome feeling, though not unfamiliar. He stood covered in blood, not only his own, but likely Volvagia’s and even his allies’. His muscles cried in agony with each simple movement, and some failed to respond to even his most basic demands. It was too much like the cliffs of Midgar, the final moments before he had arrived in the Omniverse.
 
Suddenly, this second reality didn’t feel very much like a sandbox of infinite possibilities. Now, the Ashen Steppes felt the same as they looked: like Hell.
 
Ash, fire, and brimstone swept through the area through some terrifying combination of the natural environment and Volvagia’s wrath. On a normal day he would have noticed the burning material pelting his flesh, and recoiled in pain. Now it was drowned out, overshadowed by the screams of his nerve endings as they focused on the more intense stimuli.
 
He couldn’t even keep his right eye fully open, anymore. He wasn’t sure if it was from injury or simply drowned in his own blood, but he didn’t concern himself with it at the moment. There was another, more pressing matter.
 
Zack fumbled with his belt for a second, pulling his old flip phone from a back pouch. Snapping his wrist and flicking it open took far more energy than such a feat was worth, at this point, but he powered through the difficulty and held the phone to his face. He paused for a moment. He’d thought of a thousand overly cocky speeches and phrases he could have said to signify a victory, but hadn’t even dreamed of the possibility of failure. There was no pre-rehearsed concession speech in his brain. Certainly, there wasn’t any time to whip up one now.
 
Zack tapped a few buttons. He’d only recently exchanged contact information with Nealaphh, having done so while they were gathering at the camp and dividing into teams, but they had both seen the merit in having as many channels of communication between the groups as possible. Thus, leader of this grand operation was already on speed dial. Zack didn’t bother with anything other than a voice message, holding the button to transmit a short statement instead of waiting for a secure line to be established.
 
“Nealaphh!” Zack shouted into the phone, making sure he was heard over the other sounds that filled this battlefield. “Nealaphh, this isn’t working! We’re losing ground and men. Alpha’s going to have to-”
 
A shout of pain was a sufficient end to the message, and far more appropriate than anything he would have been able to think up. He was struck, not directly, but instead by the edge of a nearby fireball detonation. It was enough to hurl the warrior from where he stood, and the defeated super soldier crashed abruptly into the ash on a ledge outside of the caldera. He loudly cursed as he crashed to the surface, unaware that it was because of that abrupt movement that he would be spared from the inferno that was to consume their battlefield.
 
The landing was painful, and removed the last of his energy from him. The Buster Sword landed on the ground not far from him, as did his phone. Fortunately, it sent his incomplete message once he’d let go of the button. The point had gotten across, but it didn’t slow Zack’s desire to rise and continue fighting. This was one of those times where the will could not keep up with the body, because getting back to his feet was no longer an option.  Instead, his eyes drifted closed as the wind swept the ash over his body, burying him on the edge of the destruction. Volvagia soon departed, paying Zack no further thought. There was none to give him, after all.
 
His allies may have been the corpses, but he was in the grave.

[Gildarts]

Bloodied corpses mixed with the smite-worn rock that had been turned to rubble around their razed effort. Piles of of the freshly heated and uprooted terrain blanketed their battlefield. The dragon, lay siege elsewhere, meanwhile, Zack’s words had ceased after his shout of warning.

Silence lay, while the silence of the dead remained.

It was a tomb.

The only movement that stirred was the faint hissing of ever-burning heat from below. A dragon’s might had caused such enormous destruction, so much so, that its shimmer of power seemed to still be captured in the vibrance of the thrilling air.

While the dragon flew on, the graveyard remained. And nothing would take back the mistake they had made. The aftermath, had it been seen by a man’s eyes, would make even the strongest man wish he had never opened them. Such was the pain and terror, infused in a single place, that one could see still-warm blood caked on the many rocks, still tumbling, from the tremors of the earth.

The silence in the air hung on, there was no sound of any corpses coming back to life, and yet, softly, a stirring had begun below the mound of boulders, below the broken stone.

A single, maroon finger emerged around one of the stones. A finger became two, and then was four, with a thumb. Just whose body it belonged to, was a mystery, after all, certain parts of the Omniverse is known for reanimating flesh. However, this hand seemed to have a mind attached to it, and finally, the thumb and fingers grasped the targeted rock with enough force to cast it aside. A wrist could be seen now, but no hint of pigment from the blood-covered skin, as another stone was tossed aside, and the arm hung limply for a moment, until another, and another, had been cast off.

It was as though the hand were a beak, pecking away at softened shell, slowly gaining strength while using it, slowly, gaining the right to be free again. Blood oozed down the knuckles of the man who’s hand it belonged, while the dried blood caked in the aged layers of his skin. The hand, raised high to the sky in a fist, belonged to Gildarts. For he, had been buried alive.

One by one, peck by peck, Gildarts threw stone after stone off of his flesh, with his reach, extending nearly beyond his own shoulder, he fought the tangled weight of what felt like mountains above him, and wished, with all of his heart, that he had an ounce of strength left, that had once allowed him to break the boulders. Instead, the strongest was now the weakest, and he had to climb to achieve his perdition.

From within the shallow pools of rock, each sharpened chunk tore into his flesh, mangling the meat down to the bone. Gildarts felt the pain influence his hand’s grip, and had he a voice, would have yelped in pain. Rock after rock, bone after bone, the meat shredded with his every movement, and such a pain, was one that any man would have wished to receive death instead. Death is very easy. There is only one end to a beginning, but the Fairytail Wizard was a prime believer that if you were strong enough, you got to choose your own ending. Gildarts, surely, could allow himself to fall here, buried in his own tomb, delivered to the reaper, the god of the multiverse by the dragon’s beam of death, but there was nothing, and no man that could convince him, that dying in a mound of rock, while he had the only fight in him that mattered, to live.

He had to persuade his grueling body that the hell it now faced, that now seared his flesh with every heated rock, scalding his skin layers deep and sealing his lips shut, was finite. That living was worth it. Gildarts felt his hand hesitate on one of the hot rocks, but only for a moment, until the next one was tossed away. Luckily, the blast had made them all, more or less, hand-sized to that of a bowling ball. The dragon had struck down the pins on this mountain, for now, its home and cave, lay a wasteland like the rest of the verse.

Gildarts, though his eyes had not yet reached the light, could feel the friction causing the gashes on his body to rip, there was one particular one, that was practically eviscerating his stomach. He felt his eyes roll back in pain. Daggers, daggers everywhere, all around him, peeling back the skin from the bone. But a hundred times worse.

The Prime, as one might imagine, had little air to breathe below the surface. It was worse than a furnace, and Gildarts was deeply crushed inward, his bones, still intact, as his dextrous fingers lifted the next blazing rock. His fingertips had surely worn off during the battle, or perhaps, they were now simply numb. The carpals below his blacked skin were moving, but only, to grasp at the next stone. It was a hopeless existence. Atlas would have shrugged, and Sisyphus would have preferred never to have been born. That however, is what you got, for messing with Gods.

Alas, finally, a greater part of the Prime’s mangled shoulder felt the coolness of the air above him. His amber eyes could yet to see the daylight above him, but the sensation of ‘slightly colder than the current conditions that his body was enduring in this inferno’ gave the man hope to live on, even if it was just so that his lungs could remember, before he died, what air actually tasted like.

Over the next couple of unending minutes, Gildarts used every able part of his body to climb through the parted hole in the pile. A loud, enormous gasp, could be heard from Gildarts as his scalded lips burst open, for his lungs had taken too much time without air, and the world was looking too soggy around him. He was not even out of the pits of hell, when the weight of his body caved in on him. His shoulders bore down with the tremendous force of gravity, the smoke toiling above him and in the sky, spiraled dauntingly over the prime, warning him that his hell would not be over as swiftly as his ascension from the last shreds of death had been.

He keeled over, collapsing over the stone while the other half of his body still lay submerged in the part his torso had slithered out from. Blood was everywhere, falling onto the rocks that he had just made his bed. But he could not find the strength to move, only to breathe, as the air, though it was full of fumes and noxious gases, was still air, and from the stone-encased tomb he had come, suffocation would have been upon him had he waited to battle the rocks above him even a second later than his hand had moved to action.

Air rolled in and out, stumbling on the edges of his ribs. The sky was above him, and vaguely, he could see it. More importantly however, were now the daggers in his back. This was no place to rest, for a man who’s flesh had been gnawed off and mangled. The gore, perhaps, would have smelled, had most of his wounds not been cauterized by the very rocks that had buried him.

Blood that had dried black had stained the majority of Gildarts’ skin. His flesh, felt as though it had been cooked to “medium-rare” and the Prime had yet to stand, though he was being prompted to, from the jagged thorns in his back.

It was comfortable, it’s funny how a man could say that about pain, but Gildarts, at last, could hear the sound of his own breathing, the blood in his veins was pumping regularly, and though his entire body had been beaten, and laid nearly lame, the Prime, suddenly, lost the sensation of the pain all together. Numbed was everything around him, except the ringing in his ears, and a faint voice who’s pitch was feminine and that of a woman, “You have done well, Gildarts. However, you have chosen to use me, alas, too late. And now, you have your results. Your power however, is one that even I underestimated. You’re lucky to be alive...”

Alive? His eyes rolled around in his head some more before they came back to the light around him, with a little bit more focus, and a little bit less blur. He heaved his legs from the jaws of rock that had been his opening and escape from the trenches of the mountain. Blood sputtered from his lips now, as he had forced his torso upward. The man coughed and hacked, feeling no more immortal than a secondary, and the agony grunted out of his system, while splashes of blood came up and burned at his throat.

Ack! Ugh... The prime’s eyelids had been covered in black soot, or black blood, and the majority of his face looked like a mask, while the eyes, however, remained his own. The whites were distinguished upon the contrast of the black base, however weary, they glowed with a silent vigor, as though paying silent homage to the dead that he could taste in the sweet air around him. The fact that his body breathed, while he knew that there were fallen, who’s lips would not be willed to move again, disgusted the mage, who dared to breathe again.

Broken bones riddled his body, while there remained a severe gash on the side of the warrior’s left temple. More blood had seemed to pour out, during any effort he had expended. It must have hit a vein, or artery, and now, before his eyes could even lay on the destruction around him, his left one was sealed shut by his own blood.

A sorrowful gasp followed his single eye’s movement, as he had not even the strength to rise to his feet, but only the strength to keep his stomach from overturning, as his hands extended outward, to grasp another rock, to crawl forward, only to meet what was too smooth in his hand to have any semblance of stone. Filling the Prime’s ant-level view, was a skull, the size of his own, charred with layers of slimy disgust still upon it. Had the prime felt the texture in his fingers, it might have caused him to shiver with revolt.

In his desire to survive, climbing at the pace of one rock to the next, Gildarts had grasped upon the foreboding skull of a slain man, a symbol of hallowed death that wretched in his mouth more distastefully than that of an aimless fate. The deceased the mage held, as just another stone to throw over his shoulder, was surely one that the dragon had treated as a feast, while leaving the desecrated bones unburried, and the skin of the man, had surely been melted off as he had taken his last breath.