[TheFightingSpirit]

Incursion One: The Black Water Menace

Over the roar of panic spreading through the city streets like a bush fire, policemen and Agency soldiers attempt to contain the situation. “… Stay in your homes. I repeat. This is not a drill. Stay in your homes.”

Robert Lam tore through the crowds searching for his friend. “Allison!”

One minute he was walking home from work. The next he heard an explosion from near the quarantine wall south of the city. He had a fair idea of what was happening, just as any citizen of Steele City would.

A mutant from the wasteland beyond the wall must have broken past the defences again.

No matter. Once he found Allison they’d bunker up indoors and wait it out. The military always pushed back the incursions.

Military helicopters swooped in overhead and the sound of jet engines could be heard a mile off. Search lanterns blazed through the quickly receding daylight.

For an instant, Robert spotted Allison darting around the corner of the block. He called after her and gave chase.

Evidently she had not heard him, for when he broke into the next street she was nowhere to be seen. At the far end of the avenue, Robert spotted the swarming armed forces. He saw the ragged edge of the wall and the wildness beyond, where, whatever it was, had blasted a huge hole through metres of reinforced concrete.

He didn’t see the monstrous, infected elk until it loomed over him, dagger teeth dripping with the vile black ichor meteorite showers had brought to Earth half a decade ago. If someone told him then that an infection from space, an alien ichor, would take over half the southern regions of the country, he might have laughed. Aliens? Where was the evidence?

Well, here was the evidence. They weren’t alone in the universe.

“Oh wow…” Robert backed away. He continued, as though humouring the beast would work. “Well aren’t you a big ol’ thing.”

The Elk dragged it’s hooves along the ground, ripping through concrete like it were sand and snorting clouds of vapour in the chill, late summer air.

“I gotta tell you, boy. You really don’t want to eat me.”

The Elk roared. Could deer roar?

“Okay, maybe you do… but I’m really not that tasty and I certainly wouldn’t make a good mutant.” He searched for an escape route. “I’m useless see. When everyone runs away from you, what do I do? Yeah, that’s right, I run towards you. Of course I do…”

As Robert move backwards up the middle of the avenue, the infected elk kept pace, eyes locked on his. He thought he saw intelligence, even emotion, in those oversized eyes but like a dream it dissolved a second later.

A search lantern snapped on overhead, dazzling the elk. It reared up, antler locked through a helicopter’s landing tracks. The elk thrashed once and the soldier operating the lantern tumbled from the open side doors. It’s thrashed again and pulled the helicopter out of the sky.

Robert pushed the sound of the soldier hitting the pavement out of mind and ducked down a narrow side street. Most people were well practised in ignoring the sickening facts of the modern life.

Hands clamped down on his shoulders and a slender finger pressed up against his lips.

Robert twisted and saw who it was, instantly recognising her from the blonde hair and denim jacket emblazoned with various pin badges from memorable humanitarian rallies.

He relaxed and she released him.

“No loud sounds,” whispered Allison.

He jerked a thumb back at the downed helicopter and the rampaging beast stamping through its aluminium, fibreglass shell. “Thank god for the Agency, huh?”

“A guy lost his life, Robert.”

“That’s what they sign up for…”

“He - he probably had a family.”

Robert sighed. “I know.”

Allison wrapped her arms around him in a tight, squeezing hug. “I’m glad you’re not beast chow though.”

He smiled, and locked his arms together behind her back. “I’m glad too. I look better whole… not splattered across a street somewhere.”

He opened his eyes to a strange sight.

On the back of his hands glowed two symbols. One red and shaped like a licking flame, and the other grey-white like a shard of metal, both encircled with thin pulsating lines.

“Allison?” Robert pulled back.

“I know,” she replied and held out her own hands, “look.”

Indeed, two symbols graced her flesh as well; a shining white wisp of air and a stylised golden sun.

“What is this?” He ran a finger over the red flame. It felt… warm, yet not like the human body should be. To the touch, it felt little more than skin.

She shrugged. “How the hell should I know?”

Out in the street, the elk roared. As though driven by some new unseen madness, it charged them down but couldn’t fit its bulk down the street. It tried, it thrashed and it flailed and cracks snaked their way across the masonry on either side.

“We should do something about that…”

“Probably,” Allison agreed.

“Shall we run?” Neither of them moved an inch. The symbols on his hand pulsed brighter, searing an unspoken message into his skin. Robert sighed and hung his head. “We’re not going to run, are we?”

Muscles rippled in the elk’s legs as it forced its way further forward.

“How can we leave that thing knocking around?”

“The military can-“

“They can’t do shit, Robert. They’ve been losing for months. The mutants just get stronger.” Allison held her hands up in his face. “This means something, I can feel it.”

The beast pushed its way in past the neck of the side street toward them. Masonry sliced into its flank and crumbled to the ground.

“Now or never,” Robert shrugged.

The elk bore down upon them. Until then he’d ignored what they were getting into. How the hell do we take down a three ton monstrosity?

A jolt of pain shot through his head and everything became clearer, like a short, sharp storm clearing a clinging, humid fog. His eyes flashed toward his hands, and then over to Allison. He could see a mutual understanding in her eyes.

Robert and Allison step in front of the elk, giving it pause. The beast must have been quite used to pitiful little creatures like them running away, not this.

They crossed their arms at their waists and called, “Cross Form!”

The flame and air symbols on Robert and Allison’s right hand shimmered and shifted, becoming a semi-circular metal object with a large recess in the centre. Their second symbols, the shard of metal and the golden sun, drained away and became shining jewels settled in the recess.

They swung their arms in opposing arcs. The gems lit up, red for Robert and a bright white for Allison, and by the time they’d recrossed their arms in a plus across their chests, the light overtook them.

The elk moved a step back and bared its razor teeth.

When the power receded, Robert and Allison found themselves clad in hyper-flexible suits of armour. Robert’s red suit had metal grey accents and Allison’s white suit, golden ones. Their sleek helmets were divided between the two colours straight across the horizontal, just below the visor. A perfect blend of their two symbols sat proudly upon their foreheads.

The beast roared and roared. Its jaws opened wider and wider and wider still until its head peeled like a banana, folding back on itself with a sickening crunch. The mass of Black Water in place of its tongue seeped forth and became a roiling, bubbling, seething pillar that reached out to them.

A gash split the pillar in half and formed a mouth of sorts. It spoke in a deep bass. “Magi… magi…”

Robert and Allison shared a look.

“Magi!”

“So what if we are?” said Robert.

“You will be eliminated…”

“I thought you might say that.” He couldn’t explain why the defiled creature before him didn’t disgust him. He couldn’t explain how he knew what a Magi was. In a way, he didn’t know, it was just instinct.

“You… will be eliminated…”

The black mass morphed once more, shifting into a crude approximation of the elk’s now utterly destroyed head. Two horns made from the bones of the creature protruded from it and a pair of arms formed from the remaining ichor and flexed.

To Robert, it looked rather like a pitch demon was trying to crawl out of the elk’s body the hard way. “Shall we, Allison?”

“Seems to be our duty.”

He raised his hand, palm face forward and called, “Flame advent.”

A cone of crimson fire burst forth. For all its talk of Magi, the Elk was caught off guard and took the attack full force in the face. It screamed unlike anything Robert had ever heard and leaped back into the street.

“Let me try.” Allison stretched her arms out wide. “Tornado advent!”

Wind whipped around her feet and surrounded her in a whirling vortex of dust and rubble. One by one, Allison flung chunks of masonry at the Elk then released the tornado. The wild winds picked up the three ton monster and sent it crashing into a nearby rental store.

It struggled for a moment before expiring; it's body abused one iota too far.

The Black Water poured from it as though it knew when to abandon ship, and soon lay in a small lake before them. From the pool rose six slim, vaguely humanoid figures. They pulled themselves onto dry land and shambled slowly toward the new magi.

“Heh… neat party trick.”

Before they could form a plan of attack, two new military helicopters swooped in from overhead.

Squads of soldiers abseiled to the ground and quickly encircled the grunts. No orders passed between them, they simply opened fire with their semi-automatics.

The grunts fell back to the pool of Black Water and one by one merged with it. The lake coalesced into a ball. Tendrils shot from it impaling the soldiers all at once through the throat, killing them instantly

The helicopters retreated back towards the breach in the wall - safety in numbers perhaps, or returning to the wall for backup - and Allison and Robert swore in unison.

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