Chapter Text
“Nooooooooooo!” someone screams. Grief tears at their vocal chords, shredding the humanity from it as it smashes and clips into an ocean of nameless noise. Voices drown in it – gasping for air on channels awash with devastation – and then plunge below as yet another wave of horror crests and crashes.
“Oh my god…”
That voice cuts through it all. Alex’s voice. Barely breathed, trembling, shocked – even if their headsets hadn’t been linked, Greg knows he’d hear it nonetheless. Hear it echo in his own tight lungs like two strings harmonized. Oh my god, he thinks. Oh my god.
All they see is House Queen. Her supine corpse bent back – snapped – the twisted, jagged skeleton of The Shard skewered through her just beneath her lightless core. Taskmaster’s sensors, cameras, eyes zoom to their maximum – so the Conn-Pod is filled with the blurry, grainy, near-colourless image of the abrupt metal tomb. Through ocean-like salt water, Greg witnesses with wide and weeping eyes.
Which means he doesn’t notice.
Two voices yelling – as loud as the rest – one high, one low. Grief-stained but legible. Tight and caught in the throat, but clinging to something like professionalism. Yelling something. Lots of things. Cracks in the dam of horror – a flickering phone screen at the 4-D IMAX personal showing of devastation before them – wavering shadows around the edges of the scene suggest movement where the Taskmaster isn’t staring.
And then; a flash of black.
Greg and Alex flinch. Taskmaster launches back. Servos screech and metal buckles – the Jaeger staggers, tearing up the Thames.
“—umar! Watson! I repeat – stay back!” Mel orders, her usually soft voice teetering on the edge of breaking.
“Chain Bastard; hold your position. That’s an order,” Hugh begs. Begs. “Susan, Sue – please listen.”
Together, Greg and Alex zoom out. Like making for the surface. Like bursting out of storm tossed waves and tearing rain-soaked air into burning lungs. The view from Taskmaster smash-zooms out and both of them gasp.
Diverse Stripe is on all fours – scrambling forward clawing gentrified docklands into paste. Mark and Nish roar their fury through ragged throats – hot, sobbing wrecks – ignoring anything that isn’t getting to where Judi, Bridget, and Sophie lay. They stumble, stagger, swiping at buildings, and barely spare a glance for the steaming, acidic projectiles Parashot is spraying wildly from on high.
And Chain Bastard… Chain Bastard is unchained. Plasma whips in both hands, the Jaeger lashes out blindly – a whirling maelstrom of flash-boiling attacks with every determined, deadly step closer she takes to House Queen. Sue and Susan scream battle cries, threats, promises – utterly single minded in their drive to reach the skewered Jaeger.
Three huge, hulking forms converging on the ruined Shard.
Three.
Hunkered. Crawling. Partially hidden by the City of London’s towering finance district; a misshapen shadow slithers and jerks its way towards the skewered corpse of a fallen god. Its plethora of bulging eyes cast sulphurous light through abandoned glass-walled offices.
And the Jaegers haven't seen it.
“Oh—” Alex breathes.
“—Fuck!” Greg finishes.
Together, they brace their – and Taskmaster’s – legs to counteract the forces as they whip the Conn-Pod around, searching.
Like gnats, thoughts and fears buzz in Greg's mind, most of them his own. Are they dead? Are they alive? Sophie? Judi? Bridget? What if they're alive? What if they're trapped? What if they're bleeding out, alone and terrified, dangling from their dive harnesses? What if Parashot’s maggots are writhing against their skin, flaying the suits off them with glowing, caustic mucus? What if they're screaming? Gurgling? Alone and unheard? What if they're unconscious, paralyzed, unable to do anything to free themselves until Grandfather unhinges its jaw and swallows the Conn-Pod whole? How long until Grandfather gets there? What is Parashot's target?
Where's Whiplash?
There. Alex spotted it. Greg felt his heart seize, felt every nerve in his body flash, piggybacked onto Alex’s instantaneous impulse to turn and zoom and stare. There it was – flattened and barely visible, immobile but for the twitches of the ends of its razor tipped tendrils. Like the long-bound roots of a city’s trees, the lashes kink and slither down London’s crazed streets. They plaster down alleyways and coil inside half-smashed courtyards, pressing flat like tapeworms against the cobbled ground in the shadow of The Shard.
Waiting.
Realisation twists like worms in Greg’s gut. “It’s a trap…” he says, to himself as much as to Alex. Every muscle in his body demands they move – they run – and join the fight. Save them! his bones scream. The soles of his feet burn and itch and ache to fucking sprint, but—
“Greg, no!” Alex.
His feet are lead. His hands form fists and clamp at all three of their sides. His body fights, and the link strength indicator in the corner of his eye flickers and drops.
“Look.”
Greg looks. Grandfather. Slithering and skittering – metal and chitin – as it approaches The Shard. Mud coloured, yellow, sickly, and… and in the crevices between stolen armour plates – beginning to glow an unearthly blue.
“Oh, shit – the EMP.”
They nod; Alex driven and Greg pliant with shock.
“Can we—” Greg starts, his chest tight with fear. “Can we get to it in time?”
Alex shakes his head, alone. “I don’t know.”
Greg flicks a switch with his mind. “Mel! Come in Mel.”
“Greg?!” she almost screeches. “They’re not list—”
“—Mel, Grandfather is powering up. About eight seconds in. Can we get to it first?”
“Uhhhh…”
Greg hears quick, muttered questions issued behind a hand-muffled mic.
Grandfather’s glow intensifies.
“Davies, Dennis here.”
“Hugh,” Greg replies. “It’s a trap.”
“We can see them on the readouts. Converging.” Hugh pauses. All of them hear Mel arguing with someone in the background. “House Queen. Is she…?”
“Down.” Greg’s throat is razors. “Don’t know more.”
“Fu—”
“—Taskmaster! Go now,” Mel barks – the order coming like a punch.
Alex and Greg don’t need telling twice. Immediately, they launch themselves forward – the hum of the reactor blasting up into the Conn-Pod to rattle their bones. They dangle from the dive rig as Taskmaster leans, ten story arms swing like deadly pendulums and each massive, loping step kicks up ancient mud and pulverizes pavement.
“You must go faster Taskmaster,” Mel insists. “EMP in 6… 5… 4…”
Greg’s arms burn. His calves are fire. He and Alex stride in their suits, hauling their bodies against the harnesses’ grasp, pushing Taskmaster faster and faster and faster. Each massive bound shakes the earth and sends a shockwave that rattles Greg’s teeth in his jaw.
Greg has to speak the unspoken fear between them. He has to. “The QRS?” he asks Alex – two tiny words that he makes mean so much more with the blast of uncertainty he sends through the link they share. Will it work? Are they safe? Is this it?
“3… 2…”
Grandfather glows like a blue star. Its awful light fills the screens, searing the pilots corneas.
“Small if,” Alex replies. His voice is brittle and hopeful, and Greg almost stumbles with the sheer force of emotions that batter him in return. The fear. The passion. The vicious determination that this can’t be it. It just can’t be.
Their hands ball into fists. They pull back their right, all of Taskmaster’s enormous torso twisting as each bounded leap tears up London’s streets, and their left flies out for balance, decapitating a steeple like a dandelion clock.
“1.”
Greg and Alex swing.
Grandfather is a supernova.
White. Light. Brighter than god. Eyes burn behind eyelids. Behind filters and lenses and flash-nuked screens. Behind melted cameras and sensors.
Greg screams, hearing nothing. His skin turns to blades. The air lacerates his lungs, even through his suit. His eyeballs frost over.
Agony. Agony shared. He feels Alex’s pain. Feels it all along his side. His left. Where Rik had been. Where Alex is. Where Alex screams.
There was light. Now blacker than the deepest trench. Silence like a shroud, unnatural – the energy of every atom ripped away, whether heat or sound or movement.
Taskmaster has gone dark.
Greg blinks, and hears his own cry from the pain. The screens are dead – burnt or just unpowered – but through the massive Conn-Pod panes of reinforced and filtered glass eyes, through aching eyes crazed with melting rime, he sees.
Grandfather unleashed.
Yellowed eyes like beacons – each one a lighthouse of death – beam through a flash frozen London. Every mote of moisture now a shard of sparkling ice pirouetting through the sickest, yellow air. Grandfather upright. Taller, somehow, than it was before, and as Greg and Alex pant and shiver and fail to cry frozen tears suspended in their steely tomb, rears up and roars triumphant.
The world trembles.
Not a single strip of wire in all of London lives. No LED or switch or battery pushes electrons from one end to the other. Backups of backups lie still.
And yet…
There’s warmth.
Goosebumps raise. Hairs stand up and shiver, just a little, all long Greg’s side. His skin is frozen, his lungs are too, but all along his left he feels a gentle heat.
He turns, the dive rig fighting him, his head swivelling in his helmet, and finds Alex looking back.
“Greg?”
“Alex. Are you okay?”
Alex hums, unsure, and it simply underlines how silent Taskmaster’s reactor is. The Jaeger reduced to a creaking pillar of hollow steel.
Greg feels his own lips thin, unhappy, and he huffs out a cloud through his nose – turning his helmet into a jar of momentary fog.
“I think so,” Alex says. “Are you?”
Is he? Greg aches. Hurts. He closes his eyes and takes stock for a second – trying to work out what kind of a state he’s in, without Alex’s worried blue eyes piercing him. Hanging from the dive rig, his armoured, plugged in suit, feeling more and more like a prison than a second skin by the second. He takes a shuddered, freezing breath, and there it is again; the warmth. His left hand twitches and his eyes snap open just quick enough to see – Alex’s own fingers doing the same.
An echo.
Realisation dawns.
“Alex?” Greg asks, or tries to. Because how do you ask someone if something impossible – something inexplicable – might be happening?
“I… I think so?” Which makes no sense. Except that it does make sense. It makes all of the sense.
Greg makes a fist. Alex does too. Simultaneously. Greg feels the urge to raise his hand – and does – at exactly the same moment Alex does.
“How—”
“—Are we doing this?”
Warmth. It fills him – pours in like gold.
Greg knows Alex feels it too.
Deep down in the depths; a barely audible thrum. And then… light.
“Oh my god!” Alex gasps. “It— It’s working! Greg! The QRS is working!”
“Holy shit!” Greg boggles at Alex for a second, and then looks down – they both do. The light grows. The thrum becomes a hum becomes a rumble. Switches clunk. Metal creaks. A single blinking light pops into life in the corner of their helmet screens. “Oh my fucking god!” Greg yanks his head back up to beam at Alex. “You fucking did it!” he blasts Alex full in the face with the power of his joy.
He feels Alex vibrating with it – feels it reverberate back and forth down this impossible connection. Both of them incandescent with giddy delight, relief, love.
Then the alarms blare.
Greg’s instincts scream – years of piloting a Jaeger – and he ducks. Alex follows Greg’s intuition without an atom of doubt and Taskmaster drops like a rock.
Ice explodes from the Jaeger’s red panels, shattering like light in glass. A shadow – Alex caught it – his body flinches, his nerves’s cry echo in Greg’s own, and Greg’s brain itches at the threat.
Neither of them have time to think. Both of them know what to do.
Taskmaster slams into a hunkered crouch that shakes the earth. Greg and Alex smack the Jaeger’s flattened palm off the ice-rimed concrete crumbs and, muscles churning, pushes off and up.
Their other hand a fist.
Taskmaster burns blue, the reactor resonates through Greg’s every molecule, and twisting, leaping, launching with every ounce of force this titan can produce – they punch.
The impact – the crunch – reads like an earthquake, and Taskmaster’s rocket-augmented uppercut slices through hungry tendrils to connect with Whiplash’s slavering, dripping jaw, and cleaves it off its face. Viscera sprays – the frozen sky spattered blue – and Whiplash, jawless, screams.
Taskmaster lands. Alex and Greg, suits free of frost and panting hard, stand tall. The Kaiju writhes and screeches, toppling backwards into a warehouse’s ruined corpse, its rended skull spewing pulses of thick, glowing gore that bubble and foam with each cry.
Whiplash’s jaw lands with a splat in the frozen Thames mud at Taskmaster’s feet.
Holy. Shit.
Greg’s chest is full – too full – of breath and beats and victory. Alex at his side vibrates with veins pumping pure adrenaline.
“Fuck,” Greg breathes, and for once, it’s not fear or anger or regret. For once, it’s awe.
A glance down. Taskmaster, Alex and Greg look upon their armoured hands, and see. One blackened with London’s very lifeblood, the other glows with the dulling gore of the enemy they have proved can bleed.
Greg’s heart clenches.
Hope.
Shit.
He blinks, and they look up.
Whiplash scrambles back, tendrils thrashing, a trail of blood spattered all around upon a London frozen. Ice covers everything. Every cobble, every brick, every steel and glass monstrosity. The Thames is unmoving – Taskmaster’s desperate wake razor sharp and immobile, ground to powder where they’d crouched and punched and stood. Not a single light blinks. No raindrop falls, no cloud survives beyond the half-mile circle they’re in. Nothing but perfect, deadly stillness.
Except…
Amidst the icicles of towerblocks – past the razor-edged, ragged sails of ice that sprayed from every building’s lee with Grandfather at the foci – statues. Giants carved in ice. Motionless. Powerless, in every single way. Frozen in the moment when the blast had hit – charging, crawling, reaching desperately towards the equally ice-bound corpse of House Queen upon her shard of ice. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
“Bastard, come in?” Greg speaks into a dead channel. “Stripe. Can you hear me? Anyon—?”
“—Greg!” Alex gasps, but they’re already moving. They jink left. Metal groans and clanks and almost snaps, and partly frozen microphones pick up the hissing, spitting, squealing zip of Kaiju parasitic shot and spit it in their helmets as it spatters where the Conn-Pod was.
Parashot.
Without clouds to hide in, it banks – leathery wings snapping loud – and pulls up into an aching blue sky. It beats the frozen air and hides inside the low sun’s glare.
Greg and Alex move.
“Grandfather,” Greg insists.
“No.”
Greg almost stumbles, he’s so shocked that Alex would disagree. Taskmaster hitches as it stomps out of the crunching river and heads towards the epicentre, then they fall back into step – long legs striding in their harnesses, arms swinging pendulous and deadly.
“Why the fuck not?” Greg demands.
“The QRS. We need to restart the other Jaegers.” Alex pulls attention off of where Grandfather slithers closer still to House Queen, and puts it on Diverse Stripe – the closest frozen mech.
Greg frowns. Feels conflicted. Feels unsure. “We can do that?” He doesn’t ask if they should, but Alex feels it nonetheless, whispered from mind to mind. “How?”
Warmth, and the sparkling, bittersweet feel of teasing humour brushes up against Greg’s brain.
“I thought you’d read the files?” Alex asks, and there’s a flash, a moment, an image of the two of them in a rainsoaked Land Rover suddenly plunged into the dark of Two Thrones main hanger. Of a lab-coat wearing nerdy stranger and the soaked and grumpy, black-clad transfer fresh off a helicopter. Of Greg telling Alex of course he’d read the files. The memory smashes into both their minds – lovely, awkward, exciting and sad. The first time they’d met – in person, at least. How things had changed.
It’s gone. And in its wake, Greg’s left with a hundred thousand feelings, his own and Alex’s both. A broth of bittersweet regrets and desperate clinginess for that moment and all the ones that followed.
And most of all, there’s pride. Because they’re here. Now. Together and strong. And Greg would fucking fist-fight Grandfather and Parashot and all the fucking rest to hold on to what they’ve got right now.
Greg huffs. “Of course I’ve read the files, you prick, but… remind me anyway.”
Bare seconds had passed. Taskmaster hadn’t even stumbled in its determined sprint for Diverse Stripe, and now Greg’s mind boils with almost-understood technical jargon, theories and schematics that bleed from the racing mind to his left.
Suddenly, it quiets and instead, Alex simply says, “Sort of ah… a special cuddle?”
Greg’s brain stops. Confusion. Suspicion. “Do you mean we have to—”
“—No! No, not— Not that. No. Just— There’s no universal interface…” Diagrams flash before their eyes. The frustration of long nights trying to solve The Problem. Falling asleep, bone tired, hands entwined off the edges of their cots. “...so it’s Jaeger chassis to chassis contact over as much QRS surface area as possible to jump start the reac— DUCK!”
They drop – Taskmaster’s knee buckling – and they throw out their other leg straight. Taskmaster tears up half a row of terraced houses, drifting to a stop, as the sky turns black above them. Talons the length of buses claw at where they were – scratch and screech against their protectively raised arm, razor-blading red finish off the metal hull. Too late, Alex and Greg twist and reach and try to grab – but Parashot is gone.
“Shit.”
Alex hums, agreeing.
Both their hearts thunder loud, and Taskmaster’s reactor seethes.
But Diverse Stripe is right there.
They twist, and push, and heave Taskmaster to its massive metal feet. Conn-Pod on a swivel, they search for Parashot and find nothing. Whiplash lurks just out of reach, tendrils clawing at its ragged maw. Grandfather’s at the base of The Shard, slowed and drooling. It starts to heave its swollen, awful body up.
“Shit!”
Two more steps. Two more steps to where Diverse Stripe is hunkered. Frozen. Still. Greg and Alex throw themselves and Taskmaster forward and fling their arms out wide.
Ice explodes as metal smashes metal in a glowing gold embrace.
“Alright, what n—?”
The reactor roars. Louder and louder. Brighter and brighter. It shakes its shell, their rigs; the world.
Steam blasts off from where the two Jaeger’s touch, and the Conn-Pod’s view is whitened to uselessness. Greg and Alex, arms wide and crushing thin air, tremble with the force of it. Down on their knees, the rig holding them where Taskmaster’s bound by gravity, they hug Diverse Stripe for all their worth, and Taskmaster thunders with power.
There’s a crack – deafening – and Alex and Greg both flinch before realising it came from the headsets rather than outside. White noise follows.
“—What the cunting fuck!?”
“Nish?!” Alex blurts, his voice breaking.
Waves of relief batter Greg from his left, his arms going weak with it.
“Horney??” Nish’s voice wavers and crackles through their helmets. “Holy shit, Horne – what have you done?”
“Are you okay? Is Watto there?”
Nish’s voice gets clearer with every frantic syllable. “Yeah, yeah. Fucking peachy with our dicks frozen off. Our… What the— The reactor’s live?!”
“Ah. Unexpected that, I’d say. Your doing, Horne?” Mark asks, somehow straddling the line between laid-back and hysterical. “Definitely warrants a ‘thank you’.”
Nish and Mark’s voices come through clear – increasingly so as Taskmaster’s reactor sounds weaken. Greg’s eye flicks up to check the power readings – which had been screaming at the top of the Jaeger’s limits but were now wavering and dropping quickly towards 50%.
“Alex?” he warns.
Alex nods and Greg feels it in his neck. Feels the shift in his muscles all along his arms and chest even before they relax Taskmaster’s embrace.
“Stripe, we need Grandfather distracted – can you do that?” Greg asks.
Blinding, crackling blue sparks explode across Taskmaster’s screen, and Greg and Alex flinch simultaneously. Forked lightning licks and spasms in the widening gap between Taskmaster and Diverse Stripe – peeling electrons from the air. Greg pulls – forces clawing at the space between the two massive metal forms like gravity – and fights the lightning’s hunger. Taskmaster’s reactor groans, and the readout flickers with every struggle. He hears Alex grunt with the effort, his own lip bitten with the same.
“What the—?”
Like velco, they tear apart – the blue arcs snapping and fading, leaving scars of light behind Greg’s eyelids, and Taskmaster staggers back.
Thirty-six percent power remaining.
As if nothing had happened, Nish splutters into his headset. “Distracted!? We need to fuckin’—
“—Negative, Stripe. Distracted. Now,” Greg orders.
“But—”
“—We’re on it, Taskmaster.” Mark Watson’s voice trembles across the comms. “Arming missiles…”
Greg and Alex steady Taskmaster, bracing its energy-depleted legs, and look to House Queen, The Shard, and Grandfather.
The monster has a claw wrapped around House Queen’s boot, dangling limp from the skyscraper, and is slowly… slowly pulling her down. House Queen slides, jerkily, further down the widening, lacerating, shape of the glass and steel building with horrifying, metal spasms. Ever closer to Grandfather’s opening maw.
“Now, Stripe!”
“Oh, shit!” Nish gasps. “Right!”
From the corner of Taskmaster’s vision – two flashes of red in the ice-white world they’re in. Hissing whooshes reverberate through the metal hull on the Jaeger’s right as the missiles fly, sending Stripe staggering back with the force.
“Missiles away!”
Everything about Greg wants him to stop and watch their flight, but they haven’t time.
Comms muted, as if fearful the Kaiju will hear him, Greg whispers. “How long till a second EMP?”
Alex hums. “We’re not sure.”
“Guess.”
“Three? Maybe five minutes?”
“Fuck!” To Greg’s left, uncertainty blasts off Alex like radiation. “Okay. Can we reach Two Thrones?”
“Yes. If Stripe can. We can piggy-back off them.”
“What about our power levels?”
“Already recovering.”
Greg’s been staring at the heads up display showing active blips on their map – high-level overviews of Diverse Stripe’s status contrasting with the blank, empty voids of House Queen’s and Chain Bastard’s.
Alex knows what he’s going to ask.
“We’d need sixty percent to be safe,” he answers, softly.
“Or?” Greg asks.
Alex doesn’t like it. “Fifty. Forty-eight at the absolute minimum.”
Greg looks at the slowly crawling power reading and doesn’t so much run the numbers as let his gut take the wheel. The creeping feeling up the back of his spine, inching up, raising the hair on the back of his sweat-slick neck from what he assumes is Alex’s anxiety, merely underscores what he’s already sure of.
They don’t have time for ‘safe’.
Two flashes of light. Two booms. Alex and Greg glance across and see colour splash against Grandfather’s frost-mottled hide – bright and brilliant against filth and decay – and as if in slow motion, Grandfather staggers back and roars.
“Fuck yeah!” Nish yells, near deafening. “How’d you like them apples, cunt!”
Greg can’t find a smile to spare.
Forty one percent.
“Can you report to—”
“—On it,” Alex answers, like a pat on the arm. “Mark, Nish – I need you to open your local channel up to get us Two Thrones and…”
Something subtle shifts between them that they’d struggle to describe to a non-pilot. Greg feels… heavier. His attention put behind a partition with Alex on the other side, muffled and out of sight, but still near. Taskmaster feels sharper, and not in a pleasant way – but in a way that Greg can at least find useful.
The pressure at the back of his head begins to build.
Alex is talking, and Greg’s ears mechanically take it all in, but his brain marks it ‘handled’ and lets it wash over him, unattended. Greg’s eyes flick from readout to readout, evaluating their status, and Alex doesn’t react. When Greg turns Taskmaster’s head to scan the skies for Parashot, it’s as if Alex is frictionlessly letting him go wherever he wants – his verbal report to Two Thrones completely uninterrupted.
No sign yet of Parashot, but holy shit – Grandfather is pissed the fuck off.
Grandfather rages – rotten, ragged claws raking over the barely damaged chitin-and-steel impact zones of Stripe’s two missiles. It lashes out. Its tail whips and flattens platforms 6 to 15 of London Bridge station. It levels its hundreds of yellow, twitching eyes up the river and finds its attackers – Diverse Stripe and Taskmaster – and it bares its thousand dripping teeth. You. The spike of fear Greg feels goes… unshared.
He bites back his urge to whine Alex’s name. He stuffs the loneliness back where it used to live, and instead hastily breaks eye contact with Grandfather.
He’s looking to Chain Bastard.
Shimmering in the clear sunlight – her brown and lime green plating near iridescent beneath a metre of white ice – she’s beautiful and awful. Frozen mid stride, her lifeless plasma whips – chains the length of aircraft carriers – carve French curves from the air and lash her, Lilliputian, to the earth. Angelic wings of ice billow from her lunging form, in her lee from Grandfather’s blast, and in the brief moment Greg watches, one sheet of ragged ice cleaves off in the pitiless sunlight and shatters at Chain Bastard’s feet.
Forty four percent.
Fuck it, Greg thinks, left to himself. The headache tightens like a vise, as he lifts his foot and brings Taskmaster with him. He needs to—
“—Greg!”
A sudden snap. Faster than thought. A BANG. Crunch. Greg’s wrenched to the side. The harness hauls him tight. His view cants. The ground swells up. The skittering, screeching screams of razor sharp blades rattle through his bones, teeth, brain – the sound of it shearing through his ears.
Another tendril flies out. They’ve not even hit the ground yet. Greg flings out an arm and suddenly Alex smashes into his mind once more. Worry. Fear. Panic and resolve. The Conn-Pod snaps to the right. A mass of writhing tentacles smash across the viewscreens. They wrap. And they tighten.
“Al—?” is all Greg gets to say before the dive-transmitted wall of absolute trust from Alex knocks the fucking air from his lungs. Greg grasps it like a lifeline – like clasped arms, like a crushing, desperate hug – and moves.
Like when they wrestled, Alex and Greg move as one. They twist. They already know they’re falling, but they can use it. They twist and they reach and they grab two fistfuls – two mechanised, weaponized, gigantic armfuls – of writhing, thrashing tendrils and yank them to Taskmaster’s glowing chest.
There’s screaming. There’s boiling. There’s clouds of rancid smoke.
Still, they fall.
Like an ancient oak, they fall. London rises up – so far away and then so close – and Greg and Alex go over on Taskmaster’s shoulder. They push off with their legs – the jagged bones of buildings their only purchase – and hit the edge of the frozen Thames with a smash.
They roll.
Whiplash hits the earth and doesn’t.
Tendrils spasm in Greg and Alex’s grasp, desperate to get away. They burn. They’re wrenched. They’re wrung out, distended, the Kaiju’s hide stretched until translucent, its blue, acidic fluids pulsing beneath.
Taskmaster lands, one leg folded underneath it, Whiplash contorting behind and underneath their arm.
Greg grunts and heaves, and the two of them yank their arms forward as hard as the harness lets them.
Whiplash kicks and scrabbles. Blades lash Taskmaster’s back to a cacophony of metallic screams. Greg and Alex lean forward, pulling forward, their fists white with effort, their arms shaking in time – Taskmaster’s enormous hands full of Whiplash’s tentacles – a cloud of rotting brown, sickly blue, and hard and biting greyish claws.
Warnings blink. Greg’s face is red. Blades find purchase in the armour’s seams.Greg feels it, knows it, the cutting, stabbing pain. He gasps, and finds no air. His hands can’t hold. He can’t! He can’t.
A pop. Just one. A splash of blue.
Whiplash screams; a tendril’s ragged stump flails and sprays hissing azure blood.
A dying tentacle wriggles, bodiless, in Taskmaster’s grasp and stops – falls limp.
But even so, he can’t.
Greg’s hands spasm open – Alex’s the same – and they both gasp simultaneously. And then they gasp again.
Like a meteor – trailing fire and burning ozone, a sonic boom exploding just by Taskmaster’s head – Stripe’s Super-sonic Rocket Mace plunges past the Conn-Pod and crunches into Whiplash.
Taskmaster – Greg and Alex – stagger forward, and Diverse Stripe steps in between the Kaiju and the Jaeger – wrenching out their mace.
Distant hissing, far below their dangling feet, from the fire suppression systems. Alerts blink, power rerouted, and Greg and Alex pant, arms tired hanging by their side – a forgotten, dripping tentacle still hanging from their grasp.
Forty-five percent and holding.
Only forty-five percent.
Grandfather is coming. Stripe is holding Whiplash off. Parashot is nowhere to be seen.
They have to get to ‘Bastard.
“Go!” Nish grunts across the comms, as if he too has a link inside of Greg’s brain. “We’ll hold them here.”
Greg finds himself nodding – Alex initiating the movement to match the way Greg feels. “On it,” Greg assures them. “No dying in the meantime, right?”
Mark’s breathy laugh, touched with panic, colours his reply. “Well, if you’re, ah, making it an order…”
“He is.” Alex nods again, this time just for him. “Me too.”
Taskmaster turns to face Chain Bastard. Thrusters pulse and metal groans and they throw their centre of gravity ahead, tired arms swinging, massive, metallic strides fighting their monstrous inertia.
“Well, fuck. An order from Horney! That is seriou— FUCKYOU!” Nish yells, cutting himself off.
Behind Greg, metal fists and chitin blades clash – the rapidly increasing distance that their gigantic strides provide barely tempering the tumult.
In the viewscreens, Chain Bastard approaches.