“Come on, Goddammit! Use the power I’ve given you. Fight back!”
His spike-knuckled fist slammed into my bare face, sending me flying through the air and into a nearby tree. Despite the tree’s time-hardened and hulking form, I went right through it as if it were merely cardboard. I landed roughly, first skidding over some rocks and then tumbling down a slope; coming to rest in a muddy depression several meters away.
Entangled in vines and covered in earthen debris, I tossed and turned amidst the muck; terror making me momentarily ignorant to the pain of The Thing’s Herculean punch. The sound of the air above whipping in response to the sudden appearance of something only served to hasten my limbs. I managed to regain a semblance of physical coordination and untangle myself; and, rising from the ditch, quickly scrambled toward a moss-covered mound. Hiding behind it, I assessed the situation, and quickly came to the grim realization that there was simply nothing I could do; that I’d have to either fight back and hope to somehow win—or let it kill me and hope that the method of death would be quick and painless.
The sun, high-resting, brilliant, and unobscured, seemed to be working against me; there were no substantial shadows in which to hide, all was bathed in an almost mystifying radiance. My attacker needed only to fly past the mound to spot me. With panic rattling my heart and stifling my breathing, I searched for something—a rock or log or natural club of some kind—that I could use to strike The Thing; even whilst knowing that, regardless of the object, I’d probably not do any significant damage. Earlier, I had watched it fall from the sky and land on solid rock; cratering the land in the process. A stone, no matter how big, probably wouldn’t even scratch it. But still, I had to think of something...
A sudden smell, a faint, chemical scent of burning, saved me from being bisected by his ocular lasers. I leapt forward, landing flatly on the ground, as a beam of searing hard-light swept above me; just barely missing my scalp. Turning around, I saw the top half of the mound slide a few inches askew from its base; the lingering incision molten, the moss thereon aflame. Hovering a few feet above the mound was The Thing, that infernal, star-sent nightmare who’d chosen me to be his Earthen opponent in some sadistic interspecies bout.
“You can fight, or you can die—painfully. If you make me break a sweat, I’ll end you quickly. You have my word. But if you bore me, I will take my time. I will make sure you know true, cosmic antipathy. And then I will eradicate every civilization on this planet. The fate of the world is in your hands—what're you gonna do?”
Adrenaline surged as my terror mounted. My muscles, supernaturally endowed with enhanced strength, contracted beneath my skin. My vision blurred as my blood pressure rose, and for a moment I feared that I’d have a heart attack before even throwing a punch. But then an errant breeze blew across my face, and with it came a smell; a whiff of grilled meats. I didn’t know from where the smell had come, but knew by its intensity that there were people nearby—relatively speaking. My sense of smell had no doubt been heightened, but even a radius of a few miles was close for two beings who could cross entire regions in a few moments. People nearby almost assuredly meant collateral damage; the recognition of this grim fact had a calming effect upon my body and nerves. It was no longer just my life on the line, or the lives of others following my promised demise. There were people here, now, who I needed to protect from the alien gladiator.
Through conscious effort, I brought my rampant vitals under control, and rose to stand—considerably less afraid. The grass smoldered around me, and the combined heat of the laser-blasted area and the blazing sun drew sweat from my body; dampening my dirt-stained shirt. I must’ve looked ridiculous, staring up at that eight-foot-tall, chitin-armored alien, challenging him whilst wearing a t-shirt and sweat pants; but in the moment I felt—for the first time in my life—powerful, ready to defend myself against something markedly greater.
Knowing that he’d just swat me down if I tried to engage him in the air, I began my assault with a ranged attack of my own. Utilizing my abdominal muscles and a preternatural control of my digestive organs, I channeled a surge of stomach acid and bile from the depths of my gut, spewing it out of my mouth in a green, noxious torrent.
His reaction was one of disgust and disbelief. The torrent struck him before he could react, probably stunned by the sheer vileness of the attack. He teetered in the air, and I let out another volley, this one even more acrid than the last. It struck him squarely, coating his monstrously insectoid body, and after a moment of mid-air writhing, he fell landward. My esophagus burned, and my gums throbbed; but still I readied myself for a third shot, knowing that it’d take more than some molten vomit to kill the thing.
It had landed a few feet behind the split mound, and rounding this I found the daemon rolling around on the ground; sloughing off sheets of my vomit. The stuff burned the grass wherever it landed, and the resultant smell was intolerably noxious. My eyes began to water, and my nose—already burning—felt as if it would fall off my face if I didn’t filter the stench somehow. Quickly ripping off a part of my sleeve, I wrapped the fabric around my nose and again prepared to unleash another spray. But in the brief lapse of focus, the thing had displaced all of the vomit—no doubt through some hyper-sped motion—and crossed the distance between us in an instant.
With its monstrous strength, it promptly punched a hole through my stomach.
Blood and bile gushed outward in a brownish admixture as the thing withdrew its fist from my belly. I fell to my knees as a wave of inexpressible agony overcame me; the sensation of having been abominably penetrated unlike anything I had ever experienced before. The alien stepped back and admired his work, cackling evilly as I keeled over from the pain—and the partial destruction of my spinal cord. My vision went red and swam, the world seeming to distort and upheave around me. Some instinct, heretofore unexperienced, told me to push—that's the best way I can describe it—and I complied; hoping that it would stifle the thought-effacing pain.
And, miraculously, it did.
My hands—which I’d brought to my stomach in an effort to keep some of my guts held within my body—suddenly slipped against a flat surface. Looking down, I saw that my wound had closed; that there was only skin, freshly grown and slick mostly with sweat; the only blood present being what had coated my hands and rubbed off. The thought, the instinct to push, had allowed me to rapidly regenerate.
“Good job, you’ve mastered one of the most basic abilities of your powerset.” The creature’s blatantly sardonic tone infuriated me. Like a hot-headed child who’d just been knocked down by an older sibling, I stood, wiped away what I could of the blood and sweat, and charged at him.
My fist connected squarely with his chest. I had hoped to do to him what he’d done to me: put a hole in his body, only at his heart, rather than his stomach. But upon contact with his thickly armored pecs my hand merely imploded; the fingers collapsing into my palm in a mess of tendon and bone. I cried out, but before my voice could even carry to the treetops, his hand gripped my throat, and I was effortlessly lifted from the ground.
Struggling against the strangulation, I tried to kick at him; but his other hand seized my left leg at the knee cap and squeezed. The joint shattered, and this time a howl did escape me—the air pushing itself through my constricted throat. He laughed, loudly and cruelly, his voice even rising to drown out my own. Dismissively, he then chucked me away like a piece of trash, and I fell face-first onto the ground not far from where I’d initially landed following his super-punch.
My entire body throbbed with the twofold agonies of my injuries. Despite my superhuman physical resilience, he was just so much stronger, could inflict more damage than I could physically or psychologically endure.
“Get up. Heal yourself, or I’ll set this entire forest ablaze.” His demonic voice, more than the sinister words themselves, gave me the motivation I needed. There was nothing but evil in those tones, an utter lack of humanity—it was the voice of one who had, elsewhere on other, remoter worlds, inflicted unfathomable terrors and obscenities upon helpless populaces. With the same impulse of “pushing” I had used before, I autonomously and simultaneously repaired my crushed windpipe and busted kneecap. The restoration brought its own measure of pain, but I gritted my teeth against it and rose to my feet.
His jet-black body glistened in the sunlight, like some man-sized, futuristically armored bat. His face, saw-toothed and infinitely ghoulish, gazed at me with an expression of open menace, of satanic mirth. It filled me with rage, horror, and indignation, all at once, and I would’ve abruptly—and no doubt uselessly—charged at him again; but a memory, providentially recalled, stayed my hand; and I at last realized how I could defeat the super-powered incubus.
Earlier in the day, I had been hiking along a well-worn trail, on a short jaunt not far from my home. Whilst rounding a bend in the trail—beside which was a steep cliff, its edge perilously unguarded—I spotted the creature falling from the upper atmosphere, trailing a plume of pitch-black smoke in its wake. It landed at the base of the cliff, cratering the land there; and after only a few moments rose and flew up into the air, apparently having suffered no major injuries from its atmospheric entry.
Had I been a little slower to that point in my hike, I would’ve been spared the subsequent endowment of power and violence; but during his ascent he had spotted me standing there, dumbstruck, and proceeded to alter his course toward my direction; and thus began the terrifying ordeal.... But one thing I hadn’t consciously taken notice of, one thing that I only recalled when standing face-to-face with that dark-armored nightmare, was the nature of his flight—the mechanism by which it was achieved.
It lacked wings, and seemed to accomplish flight by exerting some sort of telekinetic force upon itself; or, just as supernaturally, by manipulating gravity so that it suddenly became lighter than air in some fashion. Regardless, its body—or rather, two small, unshielded portions of its lower abdomen—would briefly glow upon the activation of the flight-ability. Seeing this, as it prepared to rise again and rain some new power of death upon me, I got the idea to “clog” those fortuitously unprotected orifices.
Just as its savagely taloned feet left the earth, I again summoned from the depths of my bowels a potent surge of bile, this time internally honing and shaping the stream so that it would spew forth precisely, rather than in a great torrential shower. Using my tongue as a divider—the flesh of it naturally impervious to the acidic effects—I split the stream in two, sending dual blasts toward each of the orange-tinged holes in the creature’s body. The streams struck true, and the fiend cried out—shocked, agonized. He was immediately grounded, figuratively de-winged.
I let up off the oral assault just as I began to feel woozy, probably from having exerted too much of my gastrointestinal energies. The creature writhed on the ground, my bile burning away at its insides. I watched, appalled and awed, as his chitinous armor expanded, the flesh beneath swelling and inflaming. A moment later, in a great shower of bits and iridescent blood, the thing exploded.
Blood, bile, and black flesh glistened in the radiance of the now midday sun, and I took in the grisly scene as one gazing upon the twinkling surface of a calm lake. I had, somehow, beaten the creature in its own gladiatorial game.
I knew that I couldn’t simply let the foul remains of that extraterrestrial asshole linger; who knows what effects the offal might have on the environment, or the bolder carrion animals. So, with one final, all-enveloping spew, I doused the whole area in my acrid bile, melting all evidence of the creature's heinous existence. Toxic smoke soon rose from the dissolving gore, blackening the surrounding leafage and stinging my eyes, so I turned and left.
Super powers were forced upon me, and using them I fought a powerful alien horror and won. Earth is safe, for now....
---
Comments