Oh, shit! Oh, Fuck! Oh, no!

  And other such thoughts were all that was going through my head, as I lay on a fireman’s carry atop of Alex’s shoulders.

  There were so many of the Guardians on our asses as we booked it to our fallback position in our escape pod, in the hopes of being able to use its hatch as a barrier between us and the loose collection of teeth, limbs, fangs, claws and tentacles that were currently chasing us. And of course, being hauled by the guy in charge of taking up the rear, I had front row seats and no distractions to watch the incoming tide of flesh.

  They said this was a Class 7! How are there so many of them?! Why are they so huge?! Whoever didn’t include nightmare fuel in the list of things that can make a world uninhabitable needs a kick in the ass!

  I was jolted out of my rant as Alex made a tight, near 180 degrees turn and our group hid in a small alcove just beyond a turn on a T intersection. Our pursuers turned to follow us, but then appeared confused at us having taken our chance to hide while out of their sight.

  I don’t know what’s worse, how gross they all are, or how different they are from each other.

  And that was the thing, it was as if we were being chased by a collection of the greatest hits of all movie monsters ever conceived. Some of them resembled large wolves with six legs, others were more like bears, and more still had a body plan along the lines of those prehistoric land crocs Alice had once told me about. There were also some that looked like dinosaurs, a few apes with oversized arms that walked on two legs, and even some insectoid ones that looked ready to take revenge on every windshield that ever hit one of their kind, along with the person behind that windshield and their whole extended family.

  The only common trait shared between all of them was their sickly, slimy brownish green color, and that they all had varying numbers of flailing spike-tipped tentacles that seemed hell bent on getting a taste of everyone and everything around them, which just made them all the more horrifying. As if this wasn’t enough, the underside of those tentacles were lined with uncountable wriggling insectoid legs for an extra dose of ‘fuck no!’ that was, honestly, completely uncalled for.

  As if to reignite the panic that I had just barely managed to put under control, I suddenly found myself in free fall, and later lying on the ground face up, absolutely drenched in the ever-present slime that covered everything in here.

  “All right, princess! Time to step up! Where the fuck are we?!” Alex demanded immediately after dumping me on my ass. I worried that those creatures would hear him, but apparently Chloe and Curt had made sure they were gone before allowing anyone to kick up a fuss.

  Not that that information had any chance to stay in my brain, given my current state, and being given permission to scream by Alex leading by example, my mouth simply had to make my thoughts known.

  “WHAT THE FUCK ARE THO-“ I cut off as Alex grabbed me by the shoulders and pinned me against a wall and, apparently having noticed his previous mistake, whispered his next words in a tone that made them come out almost like a hiss.

  “Listen. Those are the Guardians we’ve been avoiding all this time. Even if this is a class 7, there’s enough of them that an open fight would be too big a risk. Now, with how we took off, none of us has any clue where the fuck we are, so we need you to get us a quick path to the pod. Can. You. Do. That?” He ordered, more than asked, but that had been what I needed to put a lid on my growing panic and channel all of my flowing adrenaline into something productive.

  “Right… Right, ok… I can do that.” I said, more to myself than anybody else, before opening up the bit of holographic software that I had been using to keep track of our position. The program could trace our steps without the need of human input, but it fell on me to make sense of the information it recorded, by marking the size, height, distinguishing features and any off-shoots in the tunnels we moved through, and I was also responsible with tracing our steps whenever the mothership’s orbit prevented it from being fed the telemetry it needed to triangulate our position. Luckily that hadn’t happened this time, or we really would be doomed, but my inspection revealed something slightly problematic.

  “So, we are not far from the pod as the crow flies, but since the monsters came from a tunnel we had already walked through and forced us to run in the opposite direction…” I explained to the group, with Curt being the first to recognize the problem, putting it in his own words. “You’re saying we are in uncharted space.”

  “Right,” I continued. “So, we can either keep going in roughly the direction of the pod and we might get there before getting spotted again…” I let that hang in the air for a second, in case someone had a way of making it work and sparing us from having to go with my plan B. When nobody spoke up, I sighed and shared it. “Or, we could blast a hole through the wall here, which would put us in a tunnel I’ve already mapped, giving us a path to follow that is guaranteed to get us there.”

  “That would also put them on our ass from the start.” Commented Alex, immediately pointing out the big issue with this plan. “We’ll have to run with our feet getting caught in the slime, and I’m not carrying you the rest of the way.”

  “What’s stopping us from moving further up this tunnel and making a hole once we are closer to the pod?” Asked the captain, raising a valid point that I unfortunately had to shoot down.

  “Two things. First, we don’t know if the path ahead actually runs closer to our destination, so walking further down it could be a waste of time, or worse, we might have to backtrack.” I started, and Curt also added his own thoughts. “Right, and anything that’s actually tracking us instead of just looking randomly will have found this place already.”

  “We don’t know if they are actually tracking us! We’ve been going around this place for a week and a half and nothing batted an eye.” Pointed out Fae, but the captain quickly shut down all speculation, saying: “We have no choice but to act under the assumption that they have some way of tracking us, or we risk getting caught off guard.”

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Second,” I continued. “Making a hole near here would put us on a relatively straight path to the pod, with a few turns but no need to get off the first tunnel we enter. If we were to move further, we might have to either blast several holes into different walls or take a winding path with many sharp bends, where going down the wrong intersection could easily lead to a dead end.”

  “I don’t think I have that many bombs left…” Complained Curt, and that pretty much decided our course of action.

  “Alright then, Alex, take the charge, Curt and I will make sure there are no hostiles around. When we give the signal, everybody take cover and blow that thing open. After that, we book it. Alex, you are our battering ram, I want you at the front. I will be right behind you, followed by Mike guiding our path, then the rest of the science crew, and Curt watching our backs. Are we clear?” Ordered the captain, with the confidence of an experienced leader that bolstered our spirits just enough to make this mad dash to safety.

  To whatever cosmic entity that heard my complaints that this whole trip had been getting even more boring than life in that empty rock, you can go fuck yourself!

  For as long as I live, I will make sure that no one ever finds this out, but the truth was, I was this close to losing my shit. It was only the fact that Mike had crossed that threshold just a second earlier that had made me keep it together. Now, however, now we had a plan, and that plan involved going hard and fast and making sure that whatever tried to get in our way, didn’t. And I could work with that.

  It didn’t take long for the scouting duo to give us the signal, so we quickly got into loose formation behind cover and hit the button to detonate the charge.

  FOOMP!

  The sound was that strange one I had heard all those other times we used one of Curt’s fancy bombs that were designed to throw around minimal shrapnel while still blasting an opening in the surface they were attached to, along with any unfortunate souls who didn’t get the memo to stand back. Hearing my cue as the head of our formation, I took off in the direction Mike had indicated, confident that the rest would follow closely behind, and no sooner than I did, the entire place seemed to come alive with an echoing screech that shook the walls and had no origin point that I could locate, not that I really tried as I focused on moving fast and making sure nothing got to those in our group that hadn’t trained for a fight for days on end.

  It didn’t take long for those creatures to start showing up.

  The tunnel we were sprinting through was relatively wide, but didn’t have all that many openings that could connect it to others, which meant most hostiles would be coming at us from either the front or the back, and that explained the captain’s decision to place me and Curt in those positions. Especially me at the front. There weren’t many gardenworlders that saw fit to pick a fight with a human, and those that did wouldn’t try it against one that weighed over 150 kg at over 2 meters tall, most sapient life originating in low gravity gardenworlds and therefore being physically weaker than one would expect had a tendency to discourage such things.Though, to be fair, not many humans would either, so despite the danger, that it would normally be frowned upon, and having to remind myself not to lose sight of my responsibilities, this was actually a bit of a dream come true for me. Having the opportunity to barrel through an opposing force that could do little to oppose you was many kids’ fantasies, and while playing with the pipsqueak was fun, the slippery little shit didn’t make it easy.

  I opened fire with my gatling gun when I saw the approaching tide of flesh, which got them to scatter and slow down somewhat, but failed to stop them. That was fine, we were only carrying space rated ammunition designed to not punch holes in the hulls of ships that would start venting atmosphere. I eyed the leading creature with a combination of nervous and anxious anticipation. It was one of those six-legged wolf things.

  Alright freaks, time to learn what happens when you get in the way of- OOMPH!

  I had to quickly catch my breath, as the thing that I was planning to lift and use to ram its companions met my charge. And actually stopped it.

  What’s worse, it had me outgunned, with strength that I couldn’t just shove aside, an additional pair of arms ending in nasty claws, and dangerous looking fangs that it was all I could do to keep away from my face, not to mention its tentacles that were bracing it against the walls and ceiling, but could turn and skewer me at any moment.

  It was at that moment that I began to think I might have fucked up.

  Luckily for me, as I was holding its jaws at bay, a black spike emerged from my blind spot and skewered the thing through the throat, before emerging out of a new hole at the top of its skull. The thing was dead instantly.

  The captain stepped past me, not bothering to clean the brains off her stick before using it to slap the face of some velociraptor looking creature that was darting towards us. Its momentum carried it past her and she took that opportunity to grab it by the neck with her other hand, causing its body to sail past and whip back, painfully being struck by inertia as its head was halted in her arms. She pivoted to place the creature at her back, between her and the approaching hoard, and gave me a knowing look.

  Understanding what she meant, I grabbed her meat shield by what I guessed passed for its throat with my right hand, tossed it at the approaching creatures and opened fire on it with my left. At point blank range, the effect was much greater than the last time I had tried this, but it still failed to turn the wave of creatures into so much Swiss cheese like I had expected it. But that was fine. All I needed was to stop them from mobbing us.

  Working together with Captain Chloe, we managed to slowly, painfully but surely clear a path that got us closer and closer to our destination, and from the sound of powerful gunshots going off behind me, I would imagine the pipsqueak was having a similar time of it. I had to curse these things for not letting me get a look at how he wrangled his oversized rifle like he had something to compensate for, but my hands were more than full at the moment, so I had to settle for punching my problems alongside the captain, who hadn’t even bothered using her handgun after seeing what my own gun had done, or more accurately failed to do.

  “Who the fuck said this was a Class 7?!” I asked, needing to vent as I started running out of breath.

  “Me.” She responded, the hint of a smile in her face revealing she knew that was not what I had meant, but she still went along with her joke for my sake.

  Eventually, through literal blood, sweat and tears, we got close enough to our pod that we could finally see it, our bodies at that point battered, bruised, slashed, bitten, stabbed, and all around not having a good day.

  Just as we got almost close enough to touch it, however, something happened. I say something, because I truly have no idea what it was. All I know is that something had come at me from the side and knocked me on my ass, then wasted no time in pinning me down.

  With the curse of hindsight, I realized that in order to get to the pod, we had to make a blind turn into a T intersection, and already having our hands full and so close to our goal, we didn’t bother to check our corners, and that negligence had come running to beat me senseless.

  I barely got a look at the captain avoiding a large creature like the one that was on me before another one caught her and slammed her into the ground. Immediately after that, I felt the pain of something heavy smacking me in the head, and my head then smacking into the ground before my world went dark.

  [SUBJECT COMPROMISED. MEMORY RECORDING STOPPED]

  seven main characters from the start, it was already hard enough keeping track of who's who before I started describing everyone's individual clothing, hair/skin/eye color, birthmarks and other distiguishing features, but I might have been thinking about it backwards.

  Chapter 5: Caught and broken