The Unbound Genie Ch. 09

He locked eyes with her, pointed down to the ground below him with one hand, used the same hand to gesture towards her location, then gave her a wide-eyed nod that implied he was asking her some kind of question. It took a moment for her to grasp what he was getting at, but she ultimately understood that he was requesting to cross the breach that led directly into no-man's-land and view of the enemy. She nodded, slowly lowered the pistol, crawled away by a few feet, pressed her back against the wall to her left, then brought her legs up against her pert chest and tightly wrapped her arms around her knees, not breaking her line-of-sight with the suicidal black man and his light-skinned companions for even just a moment.

Regardless of it all, something deep down whispered to her that he could be trusted. A feeling, a voice, maybe; she couldn't be sure. Maybe it was just the sincere, courageous look on his face telling her that he could keep her safe from the apocalypse happening around them. Either way, he still had to cross the gap and actually survive for anything to be certain, she knew.

The man braced his hands against the arm of a fallen soldier lying on the ground below and positioned his legs behind himself accordingly, quickly dashing out into the semi-exposed area between the two of them as the other men were both hard and fast at work in repairing the wall.

The small woman fully expected him to be cut down by a hail of machine gun fire; to get his head blown off by well-trained marksman who was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of him through their scope; to have a soldier charge down the shell-made slope and force a bayonet into the man's abdomen...

Unfortunately, she would have preferred any of those alternatives to what had actually happened next.

In a roaring blur of ground-shaking thunder, a mass of bronze shot through the opening and made direct impact with the brave soldier who had risked his life, slamming him into the opposite wall hard enough to knock down a layer of the topsoil above.

The woman had braced herself for something, but not that, she thought with a short scream, scrambling backwards and away over the bodies without a second thought. The creature that was upon the soldier appeared to be human at first, but she quickly noticed that there was something clearly wrong with her. His assailant was a woman, similar to herself in height and build, but was completely unclothed and sported a crop of short, bronze hair that glistened like fiery steel despite the suffocating darkness hanging over the trench. Her large, shark-like teeth were firmly planted within the older gentleman's shoulder while arms were wrapped around his and her fingers dug inches into the flesh of his back to ensure he wasn't going anywhere.

The mysterious, naked girl had one hand against the man's forehead while the other was firmly grabbing at his arm, the neck-to-shoulder space in between them was filled with her razor-sharp, shark-like teeth.

The man screamed at the top of his lungs for a few short moments as blood began gushing out from where she was biting down onto him, but both he and his wound quickly stopped producing their respective outpouring when his assailant's back arched and she began sucking him dry. Literally. She watched as the other woman drained the soldier's body of nutrients, down to bone. After several seconds, what remained of him was nothing but a skeleton that appeared as though someone stitched a thin layer of dark leather over it. His struggling limbs went limp, and as the woman pulled away, what was left of his body awkwardly tumbled to the floor; the paper-thin skin that was left tore at the seams of where his joints tried to bend, but they too fell apart and detached from one another. She removed her jaws from his lower-neck with a slurp and a long, serpent-tongued lick of her bloody lips, the dark, red ooze dripping down her chin and small breasts contrasting with the similar liquid holding her body together.

Once a golden-haired version of the terrifying being smashed through the partially-rebuilt side-frame of the broken trench wall to join her counterpart, ripping the head off of one of the visibly shaken and terrified soldiers with a simple bite and tug accompanied by her momentum, the woman in a blue uniform took off in a full-blown sprint in the opposite direction of the trench. She knew she had to get out of there, or else suffer the same fate as those poor bastards. She could visualize the cruel, unfeeling elements of the chaos from outside, inside and above the trenches around her, but what she'd just witnessed was something only her worst nightmares could've given birth to. The golden-haired and -eyed figure was just as terrifying as her twin at first glance, and the eager, gleeful smile on her shark-toothy face as she latched onto the top of a soldier's skull at mach speed and only taking his head with her into the wall, the rest of his body left behind to fall among the others, freshly laying beside with his then screaming brothers-in-arms...

Being that she'd made it past the right-leaning curve that lay about thirty-yards past her point of origin, the adrenaline-filled woman hoped, prayed that the two abominations of nature and God hadn't noticed her. Although a part of her grieved the loss of those men who were unintentional bait to aid her escape, she didn't know them, and she was too fucking scared to give a shit about their ultimate fates. She only had one, primal directive pumping through her nervous system and limited thoughts:

Run.

It wasn't long before she'd stumbled, her dirty, sobbing face falling into the continued mess and trail of bodies that'd been under her feet for the last mine-and-a-half. Every inch of her body; every single muscle and organ down to her beating heart and empty stomach, ached with a sharp, stabbing pain. The organ sky above had gone a deep, dark black, the smoke from cannon-fire and gunshots blocking out any sign of a star in the sky; the moon itself hiding behind the shadow, the fog of war.

She couldn't move. She was done. She was going to lay there until the moment she died, she'd decided.

She simply didn't want to exist anymore.

"Having fun, human?" A dark, booming voice spoke in a language she could actually comprehend, but with an accent that was strangely unfamiliar to her ears. His last word boomed unlike the rest, spoken through grit teeth and affecting the ground beneath the bodies enough to send a shockwave through it and them, causing her limp, virtually lifeless body to soar straight up into the air.

Once she'd attained a certain height, maybe thirty yards up or so, she stopped, but didn't fall back to Earth. Instead, she was upright as if standing, and face to face with a glowing, bright red giant, who's only human-like feature that kept it from looking like a steel mannequin after a blow-torch incident was a pair of wide, white eyes with large, flaming letter-E's in their centers.

She laughed, of all things.

Really. Of all things. First, she wakes up in hell. Next, she meets a few of the native demons. And then, at that moment, the Devil himself felt the need to welcome her personally into his domain.

What a day, she thought.

The Devil grimaced, then reached up to flick her with one of his red-hot index fingers, intending to have her flesh scorched from breasts to thighs and send out a mess of sparks and brunt skin glittering down onto the surface of Hell along with the entirety of her destroyed uniform.

Ding!

Fortunately, none of that happened.

The back of his fearsome appendage struck nothing but steel, although a mess of white sparks did spray out and shower down below on impact. Blocking her view of the Devil and intense heat radiating from his figure, was a thick, shiny disc of silver that stood static in the air, twice her overall height in its general diameter. It had appeared without notice, and without any form of momentary manifestation.

It was simply there now, to shield her from the wrath of a monster.

"That was... unexpected." The red giant chuckled, sounding more curious than anything. "You went through all of the trouble to build that elaborate maze for us to search through, yet you stayed behind with your new girlfriend. Have you truly gone mad, Theta? Or is it simply your sole mission to piss me off, at this point? Because, honestly, you are failing miserably. In fact, this is turning out to be a much more fun scenario than I anticipated."

She couldn't see what the Devil was doing behind the wall of silver as he spoke, but the roaring of wind from his body's movements and the sounds of his feet taking a few ground-shattering steps backward couldn't have boded well for her imminent future, she figured.

Whatever invisible force that'd been keeping her suspended above the carnage on the ground soon released it's hold over her, and the woman's heart jumped in her chest at the surprise of suddenly being in freefall.

After the first few seconds, she closed her eyes, listened to the air rush past her ears, felt its ever-strengthening flow throttle her hair and loose clothing, and embraced whatever fate awaited her on the ground.

Before the young woman realized it, she was laying down on her back and looking up into the darkened, abyssal sky that loomed above, feeling the cold, lumby masses of nameless corpses underneath. There had been no impact, the transition of experiences seamed together so flawlessly that it felt to her as though she'd just woken up from some bizarre, out-of-body experience. Bracing her hands against the surface below to sit up and rise, she found that her grimy hands and fingers touched down on soft, unsoiled dirt.

When completely upright, the sights before and beneath her were not what was expected. The length of the winding trench she occupied was completely devoid of the dead, and the abominable smells they had been producing were no longer present within the mix of gunpowder and oil that was soaked into the airspace. Although, the ground was not without litter; the multitude and vast variety of guns and melee weapons seemed to have been left behind from wherever the soldiers and their apparel had disappeared to.

Before she could even begin to think about her next move, the screams of banshees echoed throughout the black sky above and were piercing enough to cause the back of her mind itself to shiver and sting.

The next thing she knew, one of the two women from before came sprinting out from behind the corner down at the farthest length of the trench that was visible, the bronze one. She moved like a skinny, wild animal while she pulled herself along the ground at a rapid pace on all fours, as if someone had placed the mind of an attack-dog inside that of a young woman. When screams came again and erupted out of the shark-toothed beast sprinting towards her, she quickly realized that they had been coming from the copper and gold-haired savages from earlier, while the second origin of the shriek came from the opposite direction.

From right behind her, to be precise.

The blistering sound caused her vision itself to stutter and blur, her short red tips of her hair entering the corners of hre vision as the wind-tunnel force of Goldie's neverending, razor-pitched wail.

As the vocal current assaulted and paralyed the small, trembling woman with fear, while she was also forced to watch a blood-soaked monster approach at an unnatural speed through a haze of vibration, she never realized that her lips began moving and uttering words on their own.

"D-Designation... Zeta..."

The screaming continued, the bronze one grew closer, and the woman's head felt like it was about to explode.

"Executing bypass protocol... Golf... Romeo... Echo... Echo... D-D..."

The screaming stopped with maniacal, sinister laughter from behind just as the being up front was only a meter away and leaping towards them with a wide-open mouth of double-lined, pointy, bronze-tipped teeth.

Time slowed to a crawl for a split second, and every gruesome detail about the last moment of her life became examinable for just a few moments.

Everything shattered back to full-speed once the final word had been uttered, and while the woman felt none-less paralyzed from before, her body began to move on its own immediately after.

"Delta." The woman said, then smiled before simply collapsing onto her back as the bronze one jumped to attack.

Laying down flat, she looked up and softly chuckled at the horrified look on goldie's face as the bronzed bitch sunk her vicious bite into the center of the other's bare stomach.

"Coordinates, mark: E34, Q09, A66... Fire." The woman whispered through clenched teeth, staring up into the abyssal sky as a flicker of light sparked off in the vast distance.

She could hear the confused, panicked cries of the one who had been tackled and bitten, while the other was shouting her frustrations at the two of them, unaware of the power and ultimate authority that the woman now had over her golden-haired sister.

"Damn you Megan, you fucking traitor!"

"S-sister, I-"

"What is it?! Why aren't you on your fucking feet already!"

The thudding smack of bronze's foot making impact with goldie's stomach gash echoed throughout the sky and amidst the continued thunder of cannons and gunfire.

"AH!"

"C'mon! Repair yourself already!"

"I-I can't... She-"

Goldie was interrupted by the sharp, piercing sound of explosive steel cutting through the sky, and a very brief instant of suspended silence fell over the three.

"Die." Growled the woman in a dirty blue uniform, slowly rising to her feet, her body completely unaffected by the violent shockwave of the following explosion.

KA-BOOM!

Flames roared and touched every inch along the trench's inner length, engulfing, scorching, and melting nearly everything in its path.

After it was all said and done, the color of the woman's surroundings was almost indistinguishable from that of the sky itself. Everything was black and burned aside from the hot, molten steel and iron of the guns along the floor, and even the walls began to collapse and give out from the wooden support beams holding parts together having been turned into crispy, glowing cinder. The woman herself had been blacked and covered with soot and ash, as well, her uniform, hair, and exposed skin having survived but was irreparably soiled by the explosion, but she herself was ultimately unharmed.

She turned around to the crater of the expolsion's impact zone, meeting eyes with an infuriated, lone individual on her knees that was equally covered in vile, black dust, but had wounds all over her body that were both healing up and still burning simultaneously.

"Did you like that?" The woman asked, stepping towards her bronze-eyed assailant and raising the small, square-shaped pistol that'd been in her left grip since it was attained; her vicious, hungry smile never wavering. "I made sure that even you wouldn't be able to get up from that one so easily, sister."

"... How?" Was all bronze managed to ask. "How in the fuck did you know her lockdown code?!"

"Designation: Eta." She said, smiling from ear to ear.

This time, panic was on the bronze one's face, just as it was on goldie's, before she'd been eviscerated.

"God-fucking-damn you!" She screamed out, trying to rise from her knees from in the middle of the wide, smoldering crater she was in the center of. Sadly, each of her legs broke apart at mid-thigh, fiery embers erupting from the separation wounds as she tumbled down onto her chest. "Ahh, fuck!"

"Executing bypass protocol:"

BANG!

The woman had retracted her index finger against the gun's hair trigger, firing it off directly into the back of bronzie's hand as soon as it pulled to urge her body forward in a crawl.

"AH!" Bronzie coughed, fiery ash and blood erupting from her mouth.

"Sierra."

BANG!

"Lima."

BANG!

"Alpha."

BANG!

"Victor."

BANG!

"Echo."

Clink, went the empty pistol, so it was tossed to the side just as the woman now stood only a meter away from a slowly regenerating mess of gore.

"Die." She chuckled softly.

The boiling mass of scorched and shredded flesh and bones instantly ceased all movement, then quickly began to dissolve away with the gentle breeze that'd been constantly flowing throughout the battlefield into glittery, copper dust.

It was oddly beautiful, the woman vaguely noticed, staring down the obliterated trenchline just as the sun slowly began to creep over the horizon to illuminate and reflect off of departed's remains.

"Jack, if you can forgive me for this when it is all over... whatever bits of myself that remain will belong to you." She whispered. "Forever."

The moment was cut short when the Devil's foot came crashing down on top of the whole of her body, causing every inch of land within a twenty-meter-radius to explode with molten fire.

"I revoke my earlier statement." Up above, his voice shook the ground and made the glassed dirt in the air vibrate as it fell down towards the cracked, smoothed-out crater below. "You're doing a fine job of pissing me off! ... It's going to take decades to locate and replace those two, for Creator's sake."

The Devil dug and turned the ball of his heel into the crunchy, glowing soil right over where he'd stepped on the strange and defiant woman.

"Designation: Theta. Executing Bypass Protocol: Papa-Alpha-India-November."

The frown on his viciously displeased expression slowly shifted into a smile, for after he'd finished speaking, a large amount of thick, crimson ooze and a wash of steam sprayed out from beneath his mighty foot.

"Perhaps this is what I should've done from the beginning. Any of the men on this battlefield would've been a better fit for the late Theta's command than-... AHHH!" The Devil cried out in a fierce, agonizing wail.

Something similar to an large insect in size (in comparison to his own) had appeared on his shoulder in an instant, and then shoved its smokey, abyssal arm directly and completely into the side of its smoothed, earless head, sending him stumbling sideways across the battlefield and scorching the ground below.

He furiously brought up one of his giant hands up to swat at where his neck and shoulder met to crush his mysterious assailant, but the figure didn't budge under his force and the blistering heat of his powerful flesh, and it only continued to force its arm deeper into where Big Red's ear-socket should've been.

Just as it became shoulder-deep, it's arm was yanked out along with a grip full of white-hot, inch-thick wires and cables, followed by a ten-meter-long, jet-stream of bright, blue flame.

The being turned and slipped out of the Devil's grasp against his own neck, and the torch of fire exiting the wound in the side of his head managed to instantly incinerate and detach three of his four primary fingers.

Visibly, the Devil himself was shaken, and the large being seemed to go completely limp after that, silently collapsing down onto his back with an ear-splitting, ground-shattering...-

CRASH!

A few miles worth of the grounds trenches and camps were annihilated in the aftermath, and the sky became filled with fire as the surviving ditches and holes were engulfed and filled with flame.

The sounds and echoes of distant cannon-fire, nearby grenade detonations, soldiers screaming and fighting for the lives of themselves and countries and friends; everything became silent after that, after the fuels of hell had settled and their offspring of smoke and death masked the warming skies above.