The jagged rocks of the chasm floor still smoked where the weight of the landslide had been momentarily suppressed. The Boss, a mountain of muscle wrapped in scorched tactical gear, roared as he finally shoved the last of the debris aside. His skin was already returning to its normal, angry crimson hue after the momentary cool-down. He didn't waste a second; his focus locked onto the slender, armored silhouette of Pulse.
Pulse, ever the pragmatist, was already moving, but the Boss was unnervingly fast. A bellowing charge, and the distance closed in three massive strides, air sizzling around the Boss's boots where the extreme heat of his power leaked out.
Realizing the moment was critical, Pulse drew his black-steel sword. His fingers tightened on the hilt, and a low, resonant hum filled the air. This was no ordinary sound; it was the frequency of controlled destruction. The blade began to shimmer, vibrating at a pitch so high and fast it blurred out of phase with reality, looking less like steel and more like a pillar of pure, singing light.
Pulse slammed the tip of the vibrating sword straight down into the rocky ground.
The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic. The earth didn't just crack; it convulsed. A high-frequency shockwave traveled through the bedrock. Where the Boss's feet were about to land, the ground suddenly failed, splitting open in a wide, yawning crevice.
The Boss halted mid-sprint, but momentum dragged him forward. He watched the rock below him fragment into millions of tiny, unstable particles. He plunged downward a few feet before his massive arms shot out, hands gripping the opposing lips of the fracture, his muscles bulging as he held his entire weight suspended over the abyss.
Pulse didn't hesitate. He knelt, placing his empty palm flat on the solid rock next to the fissure. He pumped his power again, a deep, earth-shaking thrumming that resonated up his arm and into the ground.
The walls of the chasm, which the Boss gripped for dear life, began to churn. The vibration intensified, breaking the structural integrity of the rock at a molecular level, turning the solid granite to the consistency of fine, flowing beach sand.
A look of pure frustration contorted the Boss's face. He cursed, his grip dissolving into useless friction. With a groan of rock and sliding sand, he disappeared into the twenty-foot-deep crack.
Pulse relaxed his posture, ready for the finish, intending to turn the entire pit into a flowing quicksand trap.
But the Boss was built of stubborn malice and latent heat. Even thirty feet down, falling through the churning sand, he was working. Pulse could hear muffled, desperate scrabbling. The sand around the Boss's descent began to flash and vaporize. He was melting the grains the instant he touched them, creating small pockets of fused, glassy slag to maintain purchase, slowing his fall just enough to land with a heavy thud instead of a crushing impact.
Pulse started to bring his hand down for the final wave of vibrational dissolution when a metallic thunk echoed from the depths.
A thick, carbon-fiber line exploded out of the fissure, the tip of its grappling hook biting deep into the solid rock wall directly behind Pulse.
Before Pulse could even react, the cable snapped taut. The Boss, using his strength and the high-powered winch, yanked himself out of the thirty-foot hole with terrifying speed. He didn't climb; he launched.
Pulse's quiet eyes widened fractions of an inch behind his visor. The speed was inhuman. He didn't attempt to engage. Engaging meant being caught. Survival was always the priority.
"Change of plans," Pulse muttered to himself, pivoting instantly and sprinting away from the fissure, his armored boots eating up the distance in a blur.
The Boss emerged from the crack in a cloud of dust and steam, his body radiating heat that warped the air. He scanned the area for Pulse, rage still hot in his gut, but his charge stalled immediately.
His eyes fell on the tableau seventy yards away.
Crystara, dressed in her signature outfit of tattered T-shirt and skimpy shorts and in her crystal form, looked entirely too casual for the violence she was dispensing. A1, the team's sniper, was pinned beneath her, his face a bruised, bloody mess. Crystara was using only her boot heel, relentlessly, methodically, slamming A1's head against the fragmented floor. Thud. Crunch. Thud. Each impact sent a spray of scarlet across the gray stone.
A2, the designated aerial-combat specialist, had still transformed. His gigantic, leathery wings spanned nearly ten feet, his monstrous bat-like head tilted in a silent, savage snarl as he prepared to dive-bomb the brutal scene.
Crystara heard the heavy flap of wings. Without stopping her rhythmic torture of A1, she simply hunched over, turning her back to the descending A2.
The air behind her shimmered. Instantly, a lattice of razor-sharp, diamond-hard crystals erupted from her skin, covering her back, shoulders, and the back of her thighs. The crystalline armor was dense, sharp, and designed to impale.
A2 shrieked, the sound high-pitched and animalistic, banking hard mid-flight to avoid being shredded by the sudden, brutal defense mechanism. He flapped frantically, hovering just out of range, unable to get past the crystal spikes.
Crystara gave a satisfied, lazy smirk, then resumed her work, forcing A1's head into the rock with another wet, sickening thump.
That was enough.
The Boss, seeing his man broken and helpless, screamed, "ENOUGH!"
He erupted into motion, charging Crystara like a molten freight train.
Pulse, sprinting full-tilt toward the periphery, risked a glance back and shouted, "Crystara! Incoming!"
She didn't even flinch. She simply switched her leverage, grabbing A1 by a handful of blood-matted hair and yanking his head up, holding his broken, vacant face directly toward the charging Boss.
"Stop," Crystara commanded, her voice dangerously pleasant. "Or I'll kill this fucker."
The Boss skidded to a stop, the intense heat radiating from his body turning the ground beneath him into smoking, bubbling tar. He stopped so abruptly that the tar solidified around his heels. He was barely thirty feet away, his chest heaving, his eyes alight with fire and fury.
Crystara's smirk widened with genuine delight. He cared. This hard-headed brute actually cared about the useless sniper guy. It was the leverage she needed.
"Good man," she purred. "Now, let us walk. Right now, or I'll twist and rip this guy's head off like a wine cork."
The Boss struggled with his internal furnace, the heat intensifying around him but refusing to explode. "It's obvious on what you'll do after," he hissed, the words tasting like ash. "You'll kill him the moment you're clear. You'll eliminate a potential enemy just to lighten the load after you escape. So why the hell would I listen?"
Pulse, who had doubled back slightly and was now watching from a safe distance, weighed in before Crystara could escalate the situation further.
"Why? Because that's what you'd do if you were in our position?" Pulse called out, his voice calm, cutting through the heavy tension. "We will let him go if you let us go. Think logistically."
He stepped closer, moving behind Crystara, signaling that he was the voice of reason, not surrender.
"It's already obvious who ordered you three to come into the Rift after us. Even if we snap this guy's neck right now, your benefactor will still come after us, probably ordering ten more squads just like yours," Pulse argued, gesturing vaguely toward the wounded A1. "We literally gain nothing strategically from killing your men. We gain survival leverage by walking away now."
The pragmatic argument hit home. The Boss's shoulders relaxed fractionally, the heat around him dying down from white-hot to a dull orange glow. A2, still hovering in his hideous bat form, slowly backed off, his monstrous form receding a few yards into the gloom.
"I'll start gathering the gear, Crystara," Pulse said, moving to their hastily assembled camp to grab their few packs.
The standoff was holding, a moment of negotiated peace born purely out of self-interest.
But the peace was violently ripped apart.
To their east, the ground began to tremble, the vibrations not from Pulse's power, but from something approaching with terrifying speed. A monstrous sound, like a mountain grinding its teeth, heralded its arrival.
Then it burst into sight: an armored monstrosity, roughly the size of a shipping container, covered in plates of chitinous black scales. It resembled a gigantic, steroid-pumped mole, its massive forelimbs ending in razor-sharp digging claws.
Crystara glanced at the rapidly approaching creature, then back at the Boss. "You deal with the incoming problem."
"Bitch, I am not your servant," the Boss snarled, fury returning.
Crystara applied pressure to A1's neck, eliciting a pathetic, gargling sound. "This isn't serving me; this is saving your man's life," she countered coolly. "I will fucking make sure you man is the first one to be eaten alive if you let that thing get within fifty feet of us."
The threat was effective. The Boss let out a guttural, defeated grunt. He didn't need to be told twice about priorities.
He turned toward the Moleroth. Every step he took now was deliberate, heavy, and lethal. The ground around his boots hissed, the rock turning instantly to glassy, smoking magma before rapidly cooling into scorched black crust. He was generating a field of intense, localized thermal energy.
The gargantuan monstrous creature, driven by instinct and territorial aggression, accepted the challenge. It lowered its head, thick armor plates scraping, and accelerated, lifting one massive, clawed arm high above its head, intending to slam the smaller figure into paste.
The Boss stood his ground.
The monster's arm descended with the force of a wrecking ball. The Boss didn't move, instead intensifying the thermal aura around his body to an unbearable degree.
The moment the thick chitinous armor of the Moleroth's forearm pierced the twelve-inch perimeter of the Boss's heat field, the material instantly flash-vaporized. The heat was so intense, so localized, that blood and muscle didn't just burn, they essentially exploded outward in a cloud of cooked steam and pulverized gore.
The monster shrieked, a sound of agony mixed with confusion, and stumbled backward. Its forearm now ended in a horrific, ragged mess, a perfect scorched hole punched clean through the bone and flesh, smoking fiercely.
Without giving the creature a chance to recover, the Boss dove. He didn't aim for the head or the legs; he aimed for the soft, vulnerable underbelly, which was protected by thin, segmented scales.
He hit the creature's abdomen like a missile.
The Moleroth screamed again, a high-pitched, wet cry of pure torment. The Boss had vanished inside.
The subsequent scene was one of sickening, internal chaos. The Moleroth convulsed violently, bucking and thrashing like an earthquake. The scales of its stomach began to turn jet black, then red, then started melting and dripping off its body in sickening ribbons. The Boss, a walking furnace, was moving inside the creature, turning internal organs, muscle, and bone structure into liquid slag instantly.
Thick, black smoke poured from the monster's mouth and every orifice. The stench of burned flesh, boiled blood, and pressurized steam was suffocating. The Moleroth stumbled blindly for agonizing moments, its internal structure failing simultaneously.
Finally, with a sound like a collapsing building, the creature crashed, its massive body slamming the ground. The head came to rest, facing directly toward Crystara and Pulse.
On the monster's skull, the heavy armor plates began to smoke, then burn, then melt away like wax under a blowtorch. The thick bone beneath turned black and cracked open under the localized pressure and heat.
With a final, sickening crack, the skull split wide open, and the Boss stepped out of the gaping, steaming wreckage, covered head to toe in scorched viscera and smoking blood.
He stood over the steaming corpse, breathing heavily, the raw, primal energy of the kill still vibrating off his frame.
"Good boy," Crystara said, completely unfazed by the gore.
Pulse leaned in, his voice a low, urgent whisper in Crystara's ear. "Seriously, don't antagonize the dude right now."
Crystara rolled her eyes but whispered back, "Fucking fine."
She adjusted her grip on A1, who was now barely conscious, and addressed the Boss.
"We retreat to the surface now. We call our Bureau's ship. Once our bird arrives and we are confirmed clear, we let go of your man," she stated, her terms clear and absolute.
The Boss surveyed the smoking corpse of the Moleroth, then looked at the fragile life still dangling in Crystara's grip. His rage was spent, replaced by bitter pragmatism.
"Go," he ground out, the single word laced with simmering fury and annoyance. "Get out of my sight."
Pulse, already shouldering their packs, nodded to Crystara. The negotiation had ended in a forced, grudging truce. With A2 hovering cautiously and the Boss radiating lethal heat, Pulse and Crystara began their retreat toward the upper levels of the Rift, A1 still serving as their essential, bloody shield.