GojiBean
Your resident irradiated Kaiju King
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His ears were ringing, his head was swimming, and his eyes refused to focus. Had he not had both hands on the ground and felt the Earth beneath his legs, he wouldn't have even known he was seated and leaning to his left side trying to hold himself up.
What just happened? He thought.
The world sounded like an ocean of muffled nothings. Just a low rumbling and high pitched ringing which was slowly fading away. As the seconds ticked by he could swear he was hearing people talking to each other. Or, perhaps... Yelling? Yes. Yelling sounded more accurate. But it was still so muffled he couldn't make out what was being shouted.
His eyes finally began to focus and scanned left to right. On his left, he recognized a few faces. Faces of his comrades. People he'd lived with before all this. People he trained with. People he fought beside. But wait. If they were there then what was over-
BANG!
...
All faded to white.
"Shit! Carter's down!" Screamed a large portly man hunkered down behind a crudely constructed wall of dirt and rock, clutching a musket to his chest as he fought to reload it.
"We can't hold this position! We need to fall back!" Screamed a woman on another identical wall trying to put pressure on a gunshot wound to another young man's stomach as he coughed blood and red saliva onto her hands.
"We can't! We're pinned down!" The portly man shouted.
"We've got to do something!" The woman shouted back.
"I know! But what do you want me to do about this?!" He replied as he leaned over the wall and fired another shot before ducking and reloading.
A young man dashed from behind a tree nearby to the wall the woman was at.
"This position's lost! We've gotta move!" He cried.
"We can't! They've got us pinned down and we've got injured to deal with!" She screamed.
"We need a distraction or something!" The portly man said as he rose up again to fire, but was clipped in the shoulder by a bullet whizzing past sending his shot off the mark and forcing him to duck down and grip his shoulder in pain.
"What do we have?" The young man asked.
"We've got nothing! He's the only rifleman at this position and there's at least two dozen enemies still out there firing at us!"
"Dammit!" The young man exclaimed as he peeked over the top.
SPLAT!
The young man's body hit the ground, and the woman knew better than to look at what had just happened as her face drained of what little color it had left.
"Leila! Run! The kid's dead!" The portly man shouted.
"I know he is!"
"Not that kid! The one you're trying to help!"
She looked down. The young man's eyes had glazed over and his chest was still.
Her eyes welled with tears as she lifted her bloodstained and trembling hands.
"Just get out of here! You can still make it back to camp if you reach the tree line!"
"What about you?"
"No way my fat ass is getting out of this! Get going!" He yelled as he brought the gun up, freshly reloaded, and leaned around the corner of his wall to fire at his target.
Leila grit her teeth and looked behind herself towards the tree line trying to avoid putting the young man whose head had been blown off in her peripheral vision. It was a good distance away. The young man from before managed the dash. But could she?
The large man reloaded his musket and started leaning around to try and fire a shot, but...
BANG!
Leila shielded her eyes by looking away.
She had to run. But her legs were shaking and felt like they had massive lead weights attached to them. But the longer she waited, the more likely she was to get caught and die. Or worse... She'd seen what they did to women they caught. She had to run. She had to run!
Bark! Bark!
Her eyes shot open, and without thinking she pushed herself to her feet and lurched towards the trees. A few gunshots rang out behind her. But nothing seemed to hit her. She continued running.
Bark! Bark!
... Please, no! She prayed.
The trees were so close! Just a little further!
Bang! Bang! Bang!
No pain. No blood. Nothing. She was safe! The trees were just-
BARK!!
Her hand stopped short of the first tree's lowest branch as pain raced through her left ankle and she fell to the ground. Within moment she felt the full sting of teeth sinking into the flesh of her ankle and calf muscles in her leg as the dogs chasing her began wrenching their heads left and right tearing her leg apart. She shrieked in agony and shifted to try and fight them off. But they bit into her hands and arms to continue their assault.
It was unlike anything she'd ever felt before. The pain. The blood... So much blood. And it was hers! It was all hers! Her arms had long red streaks. Her legs were on fire. Her stomach was on fire. What was happening?!
A shadow rose up above her. And as she looked up she stared down the barrel of a gun before a blinding flash of light saw her entire world turn to white...
...
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With night beginning to fall, a new group of faces had appeared on the now quiet and abandoned scene of the battle.
"It was a massacre." A tall aged man said as he hung his head and closed his eyes.
"Yeah." Replied another tall, well muscled individual with full Veilbrand military battle armor.
"General Sol, looks like they took the rifle we had issued to the group." Said a rather slender young man with a clipboard who jogged up to the armored General.
"Of course they did. Those bastards wouldn't leave anything for us to salvage from all this." General Sol replied.
"They had dogs too." Added a woman in her mid-30's wearing near identical armor as she inspected paw prints and the wounds on the woman's corpse.
"How many, Star?" General Sol asked.
She stood up and heaved a sigh.
"At least three. Maybe four. Hard to tell with how the prints are scraping over each other." She replied.
"Ravenous bunch. You think they starved them beforehand?" General Sol asked.
"Probably." She replied flatly.
"Hey, Shor. What do you make of this?" General Sol called to the aged man.
"I believe we're lucky to have only stationed seven people here." He replied solemnly.
"That's a bit cold, isn't it sir?" General Star asked while cocking her head to one side.
"Cold. Distant. Dismissive. I've heard it all, my dear General Star." Shor replied turning to face her with a blank expression. "Once you see this kind of scene as many times as I have, it's hard to process it as anything more than another loss."
She took a breath and let it out on a quiet sigh through her nose.
General Sol, meanwhile, shook his head slowly.
"We should get back. We need to inform the others to reinforce the next few camps and checkpoints after losing this one." He said.
Shor and General Star nodded, and the General whistled for the rest of their followers to come along. And as they made their way towards the tree line General Star took one last glance back at the bodies.
"She's not going to be happy to hear about this."
General Sol nodded.
"You're telling me."
The group checked their surroundings carefully as they entered the trees and disappeared into the darkness.
