Total pages in book: 50
Estimated words: 46314 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 232(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 46314 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 232(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
“You got us trapped underground. Get us untrapped, hero.”
After a brief pause in which I am sure he is considering whether or not to whip my ass, Order goes back to work on the control panel. It is very polite, but very obstinate. I know Order must be getting frustrated with it, but he too remains polite and restrained. I guess he’ll find some way to…
BOOM!
The vault seal blows open in a sudden detonation that fills the vault with bits of dirt and smoke. I can only imagine what has happened to the lid itself, probably spiraling off into space with the force of the explosion.
“Wow, how the fuck did you do that?” I knew he was trying to get us out, but that detonation made the entire vault shudder.
Order looks at me, and I emit an involuntary shriek. He does not look like his normal pleasant self. His eyes are all wide, more round than the normal human shape, and his mouth has changed dramatically too. There are fangs now, descending from behind his lips, through his teeth. As I stare, horrified, both of them start to drip with a purple poison. I’ve never seen him in attack mode before, and the sight is fearsome.
But that’s not the scariest thing happening right now. Something is coming down through the hole. Something scaled. Something slithery. Something wrong and dangerous and bad.
It’s a fucking snake. But also a man. It’s a mutant, in the same way Order is a mutant. He comes down head first, in the way people are absolutely not supposed to descend stairs. He has arms and legs, but the way he moves is more sinuous than one might expect from a person with bones in their body.
His face is covered in small green scales, and his eyes are slitted yellow. There’s no way he is going to fit in at a public park. He’s a beast and a predator, and he is invading our little burrow with malice in mind, a serpent breaking into a burrow for its own nefarious reasons.
The snake hisses and strikes out, leaping across the space toward Order, but Order is not there anymore. He is on the side of the wall, crouching horizontally, sticking to the surface.
I cannot see how a spider could ever take a snake, but that swiftly turns out to be because I don’t know jack about the animal kingdom. The snake is at a disadvantage in the relatively confined quarters of the entrance area. Order leaps from the side of the wall and onto the snake’s back, and wrapping his many arms around its torso, he begins to absolutely pump web out around not just the snake, but around the walls too.
The snake is not going down easily. It twists and thrashes its body, limbs flailing. But this kind of fight is not going down the way a fight between two strong men would usually go. They are both deploying their mutant powers against one another hard and fast.
The snake flips around and strikes at Order again. Order leaps away, this time to the ceiling. He scuttles across the roof, his palms sticking and then unsticking with every hand-step.
“Order?”
The snake speaks for the first time. Order’s head twists upside fucking down in a way I will absolutely never ever be able to unsee. A neck shouldn’t be able to bend that way, but he is able to look almost straight down while the rest of his torso is able to stay clinging to the roof.
“Stealth?”
From the moment the vault blew open to now, less than ten seconds have passed. There was an absolute flurry of violence enacted by both of these creatures, who it turns out apparently know one another.
“Why are you attacking me?” The snake sounds offended.
“Why are you blowing the fucking roof off the vault?” Order growls the question with the unmistakeable tone of a pissed off older brother.
“It was stuck. Get this web shit off me.”
“It wasn’t stuck. It was sealed.” Order releases his grip on the roof and drops in a backflip down to the floor. He stands in front of Stealth, the snake guy, who is getting himself progressively more trapped in Order’s web with every attempt to get out of it.
“I needed to get in,” Stealth says. “This is our rendezvous point. You shouldn’t have sealed it. That’s fucked up.”
“I didn’t mean to seal it,” Order says. “The control panel defaulted to thirty days.”
“I thought Tinker fixed that.”
“He didn’t.”
By this time, Order is picking the web off Stealth, freeing what I am guessing is another mutant sibling from his web.
It is at this point that Obigor decides what we all really need is the song of his people. He starts shriek-barking at the top of his tiny lungs, producing a sudden burst of sound that makes both Order and Stealth jump as his howling activates the remnants of the adrenalin running through their systems.