In seconds, the poisonous gas-filled cavern descended into madness. The giant seven-foot-tall lizardmen swarmed Ace and BB in one wild wave, some leading with their clawed hands, and some with their snapping jaws lined with numerous jagged teeth.
But the GLYPH duo was ready. Both swung their weapons in unison, covering their designated half of the circumference around them. BB’s swing, guided by her high-level baseball skills, was much, much faster and more powerful, clocking two lizardmen on the jaws and sending them flying to the back of the crowd, and crushing the arm of a third.
That’s not to say that Ace was any slouch. While he didn’t manage to cleave through the first batch as cleanly or convincingly in his attack, he did still rock the skull of one, and slam the gut of the second, which had the beast flopping around howling in pain, reminding him that their hearts were located in their stomachs, and seemed to be a pretty potent weak point for them.
The third lizardman’s initial charge was unimpeded, giving him a clear shot at swiping at Ace with his deadly claws during the downtime after Ace’s hammer swing.
But all it took was one simple pull of his weapon’s trigger to activate the built-in shotgun, blasting the lizardman in the face and chest. Green blood sprayed skyward, staining some of the other reptilian attackers awaiting their turn at a chance to tear apart the invading humans.
By the time that shotgun shot had gone off, BB had already moved on to her next opponents. After slamming one of them in the knees and sending it snapping backwards, she leaped up and jumped off of its shoulders, descending upon another pair with a spinning swing. The impact threw them both back, and like dominoes, the few behind them toppled as well, nearly getting trampled by their stampeding brethren.
A wild pair of claws reached out desperately for her, with one of the nails managing to nick a hole in her jacket. She spun around with a scowl. “Oi! Get off me!” She bashed the handle of her bat into the lizardman’s snout, eliciting a shrill squeal of pain before nailing him in the gut with a powerful sidekick.
As Ace ducked beneath a claw of his own, he fired another shotgun blast to repel two lizardmen who were getting far too close for comfort. In that short moment of clearance, he brought his fingers to his mask, flipping the goggles to X-Ray vision. He scanned the area as quickly as he could in search of whichever one was holding onto the FORMA.
He found them far in the back, moving even further away. “BB! The one with the FORMA’s getting away! He’s way in the back to your left!”
BB smashed her baseball bat into a tail that had opened a cut across her cheek, smashing the thing to a pile of writhing blood and goop on the cavern ground. She then slipped past a lunging bite attempt from another lizardman, elbowing him in the eye before slamming him in the skull.
She jumped onto this one’s back as it bent over in pain, her eyes panning around the cavern to try and find the retreating lizardmen. She wasn’t afforded much time on her little reptilian roost, however, forced to jump away or have her foot bitten clean off her leg.
On the other side of the cavern, Ace hissed in pain as an errant swipe opened a few gashes in his arm. He rolled beneath another incoming attack and fired off a few more shotgun blasts to drive some of them back and give himself some breathing room, but those little windows of time weren’t going to be long enough to do anything meaningful, like make a clean break for the lizardman holding the FORMA, nor give him time to input another combination lock into his briefcase.
Knowing he had to think quickly and act quicker, he aimed the shotgun hammer upward at one of the ledges beneath a tunnel a short distance above his position, firing a few times.
The ledge came down in crumbled chunks, crushing the heads of a few of the lizardmen. Hopefully, that would buy him enough time to do something bigger.
Taking a running leap towards the pile of rubble piled on top of a pile of lizardmen, his fingers moved to the combination lock on his briefcase, rolling them around to another set of numbers: 951, not bothering to touch the last two digits.
As the briefcase beeped, he flicked it open mid-run, and out came a grappling hook gun, which he launched up to a random ledge above, not confident he had enough time to look for the specific one that Annabelle was on.
It latched onto the wall and he reeled himself up to it, and not a moment too soon, as a stream of lizard spit came flying in, striking the space he’d been occupying a fraction of a second earlier.
He kicked off of the wall and landed on the ledge, spinning around to make sure there weren’t any more in the tunnel connected to it. With the coast clear, he quickly looked back to the rest of the cavern, first in search of BB.
She was still in the midst of the lizardmen pile, sending the giant monsters flying dozens of feet like ragdolls, each one either bowling a few of its allies over, or leaving cracks and dents in the rock walls surrounding the cavern. She was brutalizing them pretty badly, but there were so many of them, and the one with the FORMA had disappeared from Ace’s field of vision, likely into one of the tunnels.
He aimed his sights higher up, locating the ledge Annabelle was on. He fired the grappling gun up and rejoined her. “Hey, can you keep track of the one with the FORMA?”
She saluted him. “Aye aye, agent! Would you and/or BB like some combat assistance as well?”
“Can you fight?”
“My combat apparatus is not currently attached, but I can provide assistance via my Amp systems if requested!”
He shrugged. “I have no idea what that means, but go nuts.”
She suddenly reached out towards him, planting her hands on his chest. Her eyes began to glow green as she said, “Agility Amp, activate!”
Ace let out a surprised little half-gasp as a sudden pressure hit his chest and washed over his body. It wasn’t exactly painful, but it wasn’t a gentle caress either. Before he could ask what she just did, he suddenly felt every part of his body moving faster. Uncomfortably so, almost. Annabelle seemed to be moving in slow motion as well, and when he glanced over the edge of the ledge, he could see the horde of lizardmen under the same effect.
He gave her a thumbs up. “Heythankskiddothisisawesome!”
His fingers spun the combination lock of his briefcase in the blink of an eye – 91061.
This time, the briefcase conjured up a shotgun with some kind of attachment on the barrel. At the same time, the shotgun hammer quickly disappeared in a layer of green light similar to the one that his mask manifested during his disguises.
Strapping the new shotgun to his back, he fired the grappling gun towards the ground floor, creating a nice little zipline to rejoin the fight on the ground. He then reached out and wrapped his arm around Annabelle’s waist. “Alright,letsgolittlelady!”
But when he tried to pick her up in one clean sweeping jump, he immediately came to a stop. She was heavy. Like, unbelievably heavy. “Uhhhh,okay,Iguessthat’snothappening…”
Annabelle pressed her hands to his arms, and this time, the lights of her eyes shifted to a bright orange. “Arm Amp, activate!”
After another pulse pushed through him, Ace immediately found himself able to properly grab and lift Annabelle. With a chuckle, he then said, “Alright, you’ve definitely got some nifty tricks.” It seemed his sense of speed and time was back to normal.
Ace and Annabelle rode the zipline down towards the ground floor, with Annabelle activating her scanners to search for the FORMA.
Releasing his grip on the grappling gun, Ace grabbed the shotgun on his back and fired a shot. The attachment came into play as the trigger was pulled, turning the projectile into a ball of electricity. As it struck the first lizardman, it burst into a wave, and the bolts jumped to a few of the surrounding ones, stunning them all momentarily.
They dropped to the ground near BB, watching as she aimed a nasty kick right into the gut of a lizardman. The monster’s guts seemed to internally explode, and the outward curve of its tummy caved inward. The lizardman howled in pain, keeling over and spewing acid spit in all directions.
“Annabelle, where’d the one with the FORMA go?” Ace called out, stunning another nearby pack of lizardmen.
She pointed down one of the nearby tunnels, and he lifted her up again and began running towards that tunnel, knowing her awkward penguin walk would render her completely incapable of chasing after the target herself. “BB! This way!” he called out.
He didn’t have time to look back and confirm that she’d heard him and followed his command, racing into the tunnel as quickly as possible. They were on a time limit, after all, and couldn’t risk losing the target under any circumstances.
Luckily, BB had heard him, and easily caught up to and even passed him, a testament to her excellent physical conditioning. “Where we goin’?” she asked, seeing that they were rapidly approaching a set of three forking paths.
Annabelle pointed towards the rightmost tunnel. “That way!”
BB started sprinting even faster than before, and in seconds was completely gone from Ace’s field of vision. That didn’t exactly thrill him, but hey, if it helped them succeed at their mission, then fine.
As Ace rounded the corner, he heard a few snarls down the tunnel, followed by the loud BAM! of BB’s bat striking a target. It seemed she’d found the fleeing lizardmen in another cavern.
Ace held his shotgun out and fired at the stomach one, causing two of them to jitter in place as they were shocked from head to toe.
That just left one remaining – the one with the FORMA. But just as BB rushed towards him to take him down, he held the card up and snarled.
The FORMA released a burst of force in a bubble-like shape around itself. BB was caught in it and was thrown backwards, though she managed to stay on her feet.
But that wasn’t the only effect of the lizardman using the FORMA – from that burst of force manifested a gigantic drill the size of a car, held firmly in the lizardman’s grip.
“Uh oh,” Ace said.
With another snarl, the lizardman charged forward, holding the massive drill in front of him like a jousting lance. Ace (still with Annabelle in his grip) and BB leaped in opposite directions, narrowly avoiding being turned to puddles of flesh.
The lizardman’s charge took him all the way to the opposite side of the cavern, and the drill opened a massive gash in the earth, causing a spray of rocks to explode from the impact point.
As the lizardman struggled to dislodge the drill from the wall, Ace set Annabelle down for a moment and flicked through his briefcase again, settling the first three dials on 161.
His grappling gun evaporated into the bright green light, while the briefcase produced a thick, glossy metal shield, which Ace strapped to his arm. He looked over at Annabelle and winked, not that she could see it beneath his mask. “Fingers crossed this bad boy holds up against that drill, yeah?”
Annabelle placed her hands on the shield, and her eyes shifted to a different shade of blue. “Armor Amp, activate!”
The blue light washed over the surface of the shield. Ace couldn’t feel anything different about it, but was able to deduce its effects, reaching out to pat her on the head. “I’m buying you ice cream after this. Actually, can you even eat ice cream? Do you even eat at all?”
Before he could get an answer from her, the lizardman was back on the attack, charging directly for Ace and Annabelle. Either the shield was going to hold and save them, or they were both goners.
Fortunately, Annabelle’s Armor Amp seemed to work wonders. The second the massive shield barreled into the shield, the lizardman’s charge was instantly halted. No matter how hard he snarled and tried to push forward, the drill would not budge forward. Ace’s arms stung like an absolute motherfucker holding the shield up, but it did stay steady. “Batter up, BB!”
With a smirk, BB gripped tightly to her baseball bat and sprinted towards the now-stationary lizardman. At just the right distance, she threw her body into a batting stance and swung.
The bat rocked the lizardman’s sides with so much force that his internal organs all shifted, bouncing around inside of his body like pinballs. As BB’s swing continued its follow-through, all of those said organs were then forced out of the lizard’s body entirely, soaring across the cavern in all directions as its host was reduced to nothing more than gorey, acidic sludge.
“Aw, son of a bitch!” BB hissed, throwing off her jacket and flicking her arms out. She’d gotten quite a bit of the acidic spit of the dead lizardman on her skin. Not enough to do any serious damage, but enough to sting like hell.
The giant drill shut off and dropped to the ground. Not long after, it dissolved in a flash, leaving behind nothing more than the FORMA card.
Ace put the shield away and walked over to the FORMA, though he gestured towards the splattered pile of what was once the lizardman. “I was kinda expecting you to just knock him out or something instead of turning him into an abstract art project.”
BB shrugged. “I didn’t think I was hittin’ him that hard. Maybe he was just weak.”
He reached down and picked up the FORMA. Emblazoned on the front was the word ‘Drill’. After pocketing it, the three of them heard the rumbling of more lizardmen in the tunnel they’d come from. “Alright, let’s get the hell outta here ASAP, yeah?”
The GLYPH trio emerged from the BUBBLE, returning to the master bedroom of Unit 22 at the Bell Garden apartment building. Not long after stepping out from the BUBBLE, it began to shrink, before disappearing in one little pop, returning the bedroom to its normal self.
“Alright…Good job, team,” Ace said. “A+ for everyone.”
Annabelle saluted, kicking the edge of the bed, warping the corner of the mattress. Permanently. “Acknowledged, Aztec!”
“You don’t have any logic to the nicknames you pick, do you?”
BB took in a big breath and stretched her back. “Mmm, air that doesn’t smell like shit! I missed ya!” She then gave her sweat, blood, and lizard-spit coated arms a sniff and winced. “Bwegh! I need a bubblebath…”
