Monsters surged forward. four hundred streamers of smoke ripped trough the air, the detonation accompanying each stream lighting up the space even more than the haunting orange glow of the antithesis pods. And through it all, towered the imposing figure of the Model Six. The model Eight was close in sheer size. I mean, the model eight had been rger than a car, and had been composed entirely of armored ptes and fibrous muscle. It was also about as active as a very slow moving slug, however, and very single-minded. This monstrosity before me had no such limitations, and no reservations whatsoever to speak of.

  I leapt up to avoid the lunging trifold jaws of a model three as it bore down on me, digging the reinforced talons of my new hands into the psteel of the wall to haul myself up the smooth surface out of reach of the monsters. A model four was extending its tentacles my way, and I had to release one hand to ssh at the offending appendages as quickly as I could, the advanced metal somehow maintaining its edge even as I abused the metallic bdes again and again. Model threes tried to leap after me, but to my relief, they failed to find purchase.

  The model six brought its head up to meet my gaze.

  You know manticores? The mythological creature? Their description, I am pretty sure, always sounded just a bit fucked up to me. Face of a man, lion's mane, dragon wings, and a barbed tail that could shoot venom? Nightmare fuel.

  This was, without a doubt, worse.

  I want you to picture a panther. Big. Bck, muscur jaws you know could crush your head with about as much effort as it takes to crush a grape. Now, if you scaled that up a couple times, repced it's limbs with the legs of an elephant, and covered that horrifying creature with armored bone ptes, exposed bulbous muscles, you can conjure up an approximate image of what it's like to look at a model six. I fired my rocket at it and winced as the detonation did little more than bst off a chunk of alien flesh, not even causing the creature to stumble as it plodded inexorably towards me. I would have preferred for the thing to bellow - to roar- to challenge it's domain somehow, but it didn't. It just... opened it's jaws.

  Ptes of bone lined the inside of that throat.

  It was easy to imagine what would happen to anything that ended up inside that mouth.

  I heard scrabbling cws above me, and my problems made themselves very expressly manifest. Dozens of small monkey creatures - the things I had seen severing the pnt pods from the main root structure, were scrabbling down the wall at me, making as little sound as anything else. I twisted my arm currently embedded into the wall, hauling my body up to sm an armored foot into the face of one of the monkey creatures, sending it flying back into the creature behind it. I sshed with my free arm, stress rising as I gritted my teeth against the pain in my shoulder as I clung desperately to the wall, jerking myself back and forth as I desperately hacked around me with my bde-arm.

  Something smmed into the wall, and I cried out as my talons skated free for a moment before I tched onto a pipe stretching across the room. Below me stood the model six, rearing up, ready to add to the massive dent it had left in the wall from it's apparent charge. It lifted up onto it's four hind limbs, and tipped its bone-pted head forward, smming into the psteel.

  The entire structure seemed to shake with the impact, and I gritted my teeth.

  "Scyl!" I gasped through the pain and the effort. "Ideas!"

  If you were to purchase some of that solution, it would likely go a long way to resolving the most pressing issue.

  The issue in question rammed into the wall again, and I couldn't help but scream in pain as the muscles of my shoulder cried out in agony as I slid down the wall, my talons leaving massive gouges in the psteel surface, as one of the tender creatures leapt onto my back and started hacking with it's cws. I rolled over and fttened it against the wall, leading to it dropping beneath the model six's foot, turning the creature into a fine paste in the process.

  "Missile - I need acid - deployed inside monster."

  Understood. Please don't die, we don't even know you yet.

  A torpedo of some kind - well, missile, I guess, I couldn't tell you the difference between rocket propelled weapons - dropped into my waiting palm, and I loaded it into my free arm as quickly as I dared, clinging to the wall for dear life, as a horde of monsters climbed on top of each other like zombies in a horror film to get to me, their snapping jaws maybe a foot away from my dangling legs at most.

  I aimed down for the model six, right as it opened it's maw, ready to swallow me next time it smmed against the wall.

  I fired.

  The rocked screeched forward, stabbing into the monster's mouth and vanishing into the mass of flesh that composed the alien creature. It shook itself, clearly enraged at the pain, and smmed it's trunk-like limbs into the wall again. I unched myself right before it hit the wall, and I put all the effort of my new synthetic muscles as well as what remained of my original body into getting as far across the space as I could. I nded on a mass of woody vines that wound around the main cistern, and I scrambled to get higher, barely managing to avoid the snapping jaws of a model three that erupted from a pod right next to me. It was malformed, and looked almost like it's flesh was melting, but it was far from alone. All across the hive structure, pods were bursting, releasing half-formed and distorted aliens into the air. Some sailed past me to crunch to the ground below. the body of a model one smacked me right in the face, smearing alien goop across my vision.

  I managed to find a perch I could stand on, a walkway that wound around the structure of the hive, where monsters were charging from above and below. Both sets of bdes extended, and I snarled as I whirled about on the walkway. I felt the resistance of my bdes meting alien tissues, and I was dimly aware of the pain being reyed to my nervous system as a model three leapt onto the neural interface, trying to bite at the metal ptes on my back, driving me to the ground for a moment before I managed to roll and kick it off the ptform to the floor below.

  I stood, and saw the shuddering sight of my least favorite creature on the pnet.

  The model six.

  It was perched at the base of the ptform. Jaws open wide.

  I resigned myself to die, right before the creature shuddered.

  It twitched, and then it's underside burst open with the worst smell I have experienced in my life. Bile poured from the underside of the monster as it dropped to the floor, crushing what was left of a model three beneath it, and falling off the walkway to ftten most of a model four that had been climbing the side of the root structure.

  Well then.

  "Scyl, I need new weapons."

  Understood. Launcher is reloaded. Would you like additional weapons operatable with the G-9 interface?

  "Yes. Target rich environment. You know Doc Oc?"

  Were you by chance obsessed with early 2000's media as a child?

  "No clue. You know what I'm getting at?"

  with the points from the sin model 6, two offensive prosthetic tentacle-like limbs may be purchased. I regret to inform you they have... options.

  "Bdes."

  But tactically -

  "BLADES!"

  I shouted, not because I was mad, but because, I admit, I was panicking. A surge of monsters charged me from both directions, and I charged up the ramp towards the top of the root structure, as that small army of monstrosities seemed to be made mostly of half-formed abominations, while the army behind me was made of fully-formed jaw-snapping alien horrors.

  They will take time to attach - I will deploy the T3 - CH PR-135 -T model offensive prosthetics the moment you've cleared enough of a window to grab them and affix them to the G-9 Interface.

  "REALLY?" I shouted as bck ichor spurted over me as I gutted a model three before heaving it over the edge.

  Sorry.