Chapter 16: Choices
The alarm’s echo died, leaving a silence that was worse. It was the kind of quiet that felt like the cavern itself was holding its breath. Everyone was staring at Trixie’s screen, at the pulsating red glyph snaking its way across the map, a venomous line pointing right at their front door.
Kord broke the silence. He leaned in, his massive blue head blocking the screen’s light. “Propagating? You mean like… growing?”
“Yes,” Trixie said, her voice tight. Her fingers flew, pulling up spectral graphs. Waves of toxic-looking crimson energy rippled outward from the point of Nacho’s disappearance. “It’s not a residual signature. It’s an active tracer. He didn’t just teleport; he left a homing signal in the biosphere. Every second, it gets a little stronger, a little clearer. For anyone with the right receiver.”
“Which Blakk definitely has,” Eli finished, his jaw set. He looked from the map to the curved, reinforced walls of their home. The cozy neon glow now felt exposed, like a beacon in its own right.
Pronto wrung his hands. “A signal! Pointing… here? To the sanctum of the Great Pronto? The audacity! We must flee! Immediately! A strategic repositioning to a location not broadcasting our coordinates to the entire underworld!”
“He’s not wrong,” Eli said, turning to face the room. His eyes were shadowed. “We’re lit up. This place is compromised. We move. Now. Grab the essentials.”
The order hung in the air. It was logical. It was what his father would have done. Run, fight another day.
Fred didn’t move. He was staring at the line on the screen, but he wasn’t seeing energy signatures. He was seeing the cold smirk on Nacho’s face, the calculated professionalism. A good first round. This was the second round. Forcing them to run. Making them abandon their home.
A slow burn started in Fred’s gut, different from Scorch’s fire. This was the stubborn, grating heat of an engine pushed too far, of a gear refusing to strip.
“Running’s the smart move,” Fred said, his voice cutting through the panic. Everyone looked at him. He kept his eyes on Eli. “It’s what they expect. We cut and run, we’re telling Blakk his tactic worked. He spooks us, we abandon our base, we’re on the back foot, living out of packs in some damp hole. He wins without firing another shot.”
Eli’s brow furrowed. “So your plan is to sit here and wait for the army that signal is gonna bring? That’s not brave, Fred, that’s stupid.”
“I’m not talking about sitting,” Fred said, stepping closer to the console. He tapped the screen where their hideout icon glowed. “I’m talking about standing. Right here. We hold the ground. That signal isn’t just a target. It’s an invitation. He thinks he’s calling the dance. So we change the music.”
Trixie watched him, her analytical mind warring with something else. “The tactical disadvantage is enormous. They’ll know the terrain of approach, they’ll have force composition data from the drone fight. We’d be defending a fixed position against an enemy with initiative.”
“We’d be defending our position,” Kord rumbled, a thoughtful look on his broad face. He crossed his arms, the muscles bulging. “I spent two years reinforcing these walls. That entrance corridor is a kill box. The stabilizers on this mushroom could take a direct hit from a fusion charge. This isn’t just a hole in the wall. It’s a fortress they don’t have the blueprints for.”
Pronto squeaked in protest. “A fortress currently advertising itself! This is not the time for macho posturing! This is the time for the discreet, glorious retreat!”
“And go where, Pronto?” Fred asked, not unkindly. He swept a hand around the chamber. “Seriously. Think. Where’s left? The Eastern Reaches are crawling with ghouls. The Crystal Trenches are too open. The Deep Fungus would eat our gear in a week. This is it. This is the last best place. We lose this, we’re not just homeless. We’re done.”
The truth of it settled over them, cold and heavy. The cozy hideout, with its mismatched chairs and Kord’s tool-littered workshop and the smell of yesterday’s synth-stew, wasn’t just a base. It was the last piece of solid ground in a cavern that was increasingly sliding into Blakk’s shadow.
Eli ran a hand through his hair, his gaze distant. He looked at the red armchair, at Burpy who was perched on the back, glowing a soft, steady orange. He looked at Trixie, at the worry etched beside her eyes. At Kord, a mountain of loyal stubbornness. At Fred, who met his look with a steady, unflinching grit.
“You’re asking me to gamble everything,” Eli said, his voice low. “To bet all our lives that we can weather whatever he sends at us because we’re too proud to leave.”
“No,” Fred said, shaking his head. “Not pride. Promise.” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “I stood in this room a few hours ago and told you I was part of this crew. That I trust it. So I’m trusting it now. I’m not just saying I think we can hold. I’m saying we can. All of us. Together. I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe it, down in my bones.”
Trixie felt a surge of emotion, sharp and bright, cutting through the dread. It was more than attraction. It was a fierce, validating pride. Here was this rough-edged gearhead, who communicated better with a wrench than words, laying his absolute faith in them—in her intellect, in Kord’s strength, in Eli’s spirit. He wasn’t claiming he could do it alone. He was saying their circle was unbreakable.
Eli was silent for a long time. The only sound was the hum of the console and the faint, ominous pulse of the red line on the map.
“We vote,” Eli said finally, his voice firm. “All of us. Not just me. That’s how this works now.” He looked at each of them. “Move. Or stay and fight. Pronto?”
“Move! Evacuate! Preserve the legends-in-progress!” Pronto said, waving his arms.
“Kord?”
The big troll scratched his chin. “I built this place to hold. I say we let it.”
“Trixie?”
She looked from the tactical nightmare on her screen to Fred’s resolute face. The numbers said run. Her heart, for the first time in a long time, screamed something else. “We stay. We turn their signal into a trap. We document the whole thing and blast the footage across every cavern channel. It’s the better story.”
“Fred?”
“Stay.”
Eli took a deep breath, closing his eyes for a second. When he opened them, he looked at Burpy. The little Infernus gave a confident chirp and did a small, fiery flip. Eli almost smiled.
“I think my dad would have run,” Eli said quietly. “He was smart like that.” He looked around at his team, his family. “But he also taught me that some ground is worth more than tactics. I vote stay.”
Pronto groaned, slumping against the wall. “We are doomed to be heroes! The most cumbersome fate!”
The decision was made. The air changed. The paralyzing dread evaporated, replaced by a crackling, focused energy. They had a direction. They had a fight.
“Alright,” Eli said, clapping his hands once. The leader was back, but a different kind. Sharper, more collaborative. “Trixie, I want you monitoring that signal. Give us every scrap of data on its strength, any fluctuations. The second it peaks, that’s when they come. Kord, you’re on fortifications. Anything that isn’t essential structure, turn it into a weapon or a barricade.”
“On it,” Kord grunted, already hefting a sack of spare reactor plates toward the entrance tunnel.
“Pronto,” Eli continued. “Inventory. Slugs, food, water, medical gel. I want to know exactly what we have to last a siege.”
Pronto puffed up, important again. “A task of monumental logistical import! Leave it to me!”
Eli finally looked at Fred. “You and me. We’re on trap design and interior defense. You know breach points. I know slug synergy. Let’s make this place a nightmare to walk into.”
Fred nodded, a grin touching his lips. It was the kind of work he understood. “Give me ten minutes with the schematics. I’ve got ideas.”
For the next several hours, the hideout was a hive of controlled, purposeful chaos. The whine of Kord’s plasma cutter echoed as he welded heavy plating across the interior curve of the main door. Pronto’s voice chirped from the storage nook, counting slugshell rations. Trixie’s console chimed with constant updates, the red line on the map throbbing like an infected vein.
Fred and Eli hunched over a rough sketch, their heads close together.
“Webs can rig the ceiling of the entrance tunnel,” Fred said, pointing with a grease-stained finger. “Weight sensors here, here, and here. Trip them, and the whole corridor gets wrapped in steel-strength webbing. It won’t stop them, but it’ll slow ‘em down, bunch ‘em up.”
“Perfect,” Eli said, tapping another point. “That’s when we hit them with area denial. Burpy and Scorch on overlapping fire patterns to soften them up. Then, when they push through…” He grinned. “That’s when Bulk and Hammer meet them in the doorway.”
Fred returned the grin. It was brutal, efficient, and exactly what the hideout’s architecture allowed. They worked in tandem, Fred’s practical knowledge of pressure points and structural weaknesses blending seamlessly with Eli’s instinct for slug capabilities and combat flow.
As evening crept through the caverns outside, casting long shadows from the giant fungi, Fred took a break to check on the forge. He needed to calibrate his blaster’s chamber alignment after the fight. He found Trixie there, not at her console, but running a sonic cleaner over the lens of her camera. Her movements were precise, but her shoulders were tight.
“Signal’s getting pretty loud, huh?” Fred said, leaning against the anvil.
She didn’t look up. “It’s stabilized at peak intensity. It’s not growing anymore. It’s just… screaming. They’ll have a lock. Probably already do.” She finally met his eyes. The fearless strategist was still there, but beneath it was a flicker of the 18-year-old girl about to be attacked in her home. “You really believe we can do this?”
He didn’t offer empty comfort. He nodded toward the main chamber where Eli was explaining a tactic to Kord, using salt shakers and a piece of jerky as props. “Look at them. The greatest slinger in history’s son. A cave troll who can build a reactor out of scrap. A Molenoid who once tracked a Crystal Crawler through a mud flood by smell alone.” He stepped closer, his voice dropping. “And you. The smartest person in any cavern. You think a guy who turns living things into batteries and sends creepy enforcers in suits has anything that can beat that?”
A slight smile broke through her tension. “That’s a pretty good speech.”
“It’s not a speech,” Fred said, shrugging. “It’s just the specs.”
He reached out, hesitantly, and brushed a strand of vibrant red hair away from her data-goggle imprint. The contact was electric, simple. Her hand came up and caught his, her fingers interlacing with his grease-darkened ones. They stood there for a moment in the warm light of the forge, the coming storm held at bay by the simple pressure of palms.
A sharp, terrified shriek tore through the moment.
It was Pronto. He stumbled out of the storage nook, his face pale. “The void! It consumes!”
He was pointing at Trixie’s console.
They rushed over. The main map was gone. The screen was a static-filled mess of red and black. In the center, a single line of text pulsed, not in the common cavern glyphs, but in stark, blocky Standard.
BEACON ACKNOWLEDGED. PACKAGE INBOUND. ESTIMATED DELIVERY: DAWN.
Then the screen went black. All the lights in the hideout flickered once, dipped, and then hummed back to full power.
The silence returned. But this time, it wasn’t uncertain.
It was the quiet of a hammer drawn back, waiting for the fall.
Eli picked up his blaster from the table, checking the chamber with a soft click. “Well,” he said, his voice calm. “They’re polite enough to give an ETA.”
Fred squeezed Trixie’s hand once before letting go and moving to his gear rack. He started methodically checking his bandolier, his fingers tracing over each slug capsule—Voltage, Scorch, Zero, all the way down to Thorn on his back. He loaded Hammer into the prime chamber of his blaster. The weight felt good. Final.
He looked at the curved doorway, at the shadows stretching down the entrance tunnel. They had the night. They had the ground.
Let it come.
Let it come.
The remaining hours of darkness were spent in a strange, hyper-efficient quiet. There were no more debates, no second guesses. The plan was a living thing they’d built together, and now they moved through it like parts of a well-oiled machine. They gathered in the main chamber under the cool blue glow of the emergency lights, the primary illumination shut down to avoid offering silhouettes.
"The webs are rigged to the pressure plates in the first thirty feet of the tunnel," Trixie said, her voice low. She pointed at a hand-drawn schematic on the table. "The triggers are sequential. The first one just makes the ceiling sticky. The second unleashes the full enclosure. It’ll buy us at least ninety seconds."
"Burpy and Scorch are on overlapping arcs from the east and west catwalks," Eli added. He nudged two salt shakers representing their positions. "They’ll cook anything that comes through the main choke point after the webbing. Kord, you’re with Bulk at the inner door. You’re the stopper. Nothing gets past you."
The massive troll cracked his knuckles, the sound like snapping timber. "They can try. Be like tryin' to push a mountain."
"Pronto and I will be on the upper gantry with Splash and Shrapnel," Trixie continued. "Crowd control and anti-armor. We cover your flanks and drop anyone who tries to climb."
"And me?" Fred asked. He’d been checking the seal on Zero’s capsule for the third time.
"You’re our eyes," Eli said, meeting his gaze. "You take the high spot on the roof. You see everything. You call the shifts in their approach. And you pick the moment it starts." He didn’t say it, but they all understood. Fred had the coldest blood. He’d wait for the perfect shot, not the first one.
The five of them went over the plan one last time. Fred went into the back storage to look for anything useful. The room was a tomb of forgotten gear and obsolete parts, smelling of dust and stale ozone. His headlamp beam cut through the gloom, bouncing off cracked lenses and empty slug cages.
After a moment, his eyes lit up. An old sniper, rusty and covered in cobwebs, but still functional. He hoped. It was a long-barreled Slag-Spectre model, the kind used by cavern militia before personal blasters took over. He pulled it from a rack of broken tools, the weight substantial and reassuring in his hands. The mechanism was stiff, but the glass in the scope was uncracked.
He took it out to Kord, whose face lit up in excitement. "A Spectre! Oh, the harmonics in this barrel…" He took it with a reverence usually reserved for sacred objects, his massive hands suddenly delicate as he laid it on his workbench. The hum of his tools and the scent of solvent and hot metal filled the next hour as Kord worked, muttering about torque calibration and recoil buffers.
An hour later, it was fully repaired and repainted. The rust was gone, replaced by a matte, non-reflective grey. Kord had even added a subtle Shane Gang emblem—a stylized 'S'—near the stock. "Harmony’s perfect. It’ll sing a single, very loud note," Kord said, beaming.
Fred thanked him and took it up to the roof along with his slugs. The cool, pre-dawn air was still, the giant fungi of the surrounding forest standing like silent sentinels. He lay down on the padded mat he’d dragged up, the moss-dusted shingles firm beneath him. He propped the sniper on its bipedal legs, and made himself comfortable. The position felt natural, his body fitting into the landscape of the roof.
He calibrated the scope, the world narrowing to a crystal-clear circle of glowing amber moss and dark stone. He aimed it at the beacon before settling. The corrupted patch in the clearing was a throbbing bruise of dark energy even through the lens. The wait began. It was the deepest part of the night, the time when sound travels farthest and thoughts grow teeth.
He keyed his radio. "All positions, sound off. Ears on."
"Catwalk Alpha, ready." Eli’s voice, steady.
"Catwalk Beta, locked." That was Trixie.
"Main door. I’m not gonna say ready. I’m just here." Kord’s rumble.
"Gantry Prime is… present!" Pronto, trying for bravery.
Silence reclaimed the frequency. Fred rested his cheek against the cool stock, his breathing slowing. He watched the faintest hint of phosphorescent algae begin to glow on distant cavern ceilings, the slugterran version of dawn. As the sun was beginning to rise, Fred saw the beacon begin to glow. It wasn’t a pulse anymore. It was a constant, malevolent throb, like a heart pumping poison.
He radioed in to the gang, who were hiding at the clearing’s edge. "Get ready. It’s warming up. Standby."
They replied in the affirmative, tense clicks on the channel.
The beacon flashed one more time—a searing, painful crimson that bleached the color from the world—before shooting a beam of deep crimson into the sky. It lanced upwards, piercing the fungal canopy, a declaration of war visible for caverns in every direction. When it died down, Fred whistled in amazement through his teeth.
Dr. Blakk and Nacho stood on top of the beacon, which had now faded to black. They looked untouched, unhurried. Blakk adjusted his cuffs. Nacho scanned the tree line, his red eyes lingering for a fraction of a second on the hideout’s camouflaged roof. Around them, hundreds of henchmen stood in formation. They materialized out of the shadows between the trees, row upon row of them in mismatched armor, ghoul-blasters held at port arms. There must have been just under a thousand.
The gang radioed in to Fred, saying they were ready. Trixie’s voice was a controlled whisper. "We have visual. They’re not advancing yet. Orders?"
Fred’s world shrank to the crosshairs. He let them drift from Blakk’s smug face to Nacho’s boots, then to the ground exactly between them. He exhaled, his finger taking up the slack in the trigger. This wasn’t about killing. It was about messaging.
He loaded Thorn into the chamber, aimed, and fired.
The crack of the shot split the morning silence. It was a different sound from their blasters—sharper, lonelier, a stone dropped into a still pond.
Blakk and Nacho looked up to see Thorn in his velocimorph form flying towards them. He was a whirling helix of thorn-covered vines, silent and swift. The Vinedrill slammed into the ground between the two men, burrowing deep. For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the earth erupted.
Thick, woody vines sprouted up like serpentine lightning, wrapping around the two men’s hands and feet with brutal efficiency. They weren't restrained for long—Nacho’s claws were already slicing, Blakk was barking an order—but for one perfect, frozen moment, the two most dangerous men in the caverns were pinned by a single, well-placed slug.
The fight was on, and it was going to be glorious.
A roar went up from the army, a thousand throats shouting as they surged forward like a dark tide. From the tree line, Eli’s voice was calm on the radio. "Hold. Hold. Let them hit the tunnel."
Fred saw the first rank of henchmen disappear into the shadowed entrance of the hideout’s approach. He waited, his heartbeat a slow drum in his ears. He saw the faint, almost invisible shudder in the fungal growth above the tunnel mouth.
Then he heard the sound. It was a thick, wet, ripping thwump, followed by shouts of confusion that turned into muffled screams.
"Webs are deployed," Trixie reported, her voice clinical. "Primary entanglement successful."
"Light them up," Fred said.
The world exploded in fire and sound. From the hidden ports on either side of the tunnel entrance, two spiraling comets of flame—Burpy and Scorch—screamed into the choked passage. The heat washed up to the roof, the air tasting of cinders and burnt synth-fabric. Screams echoed, sharper now.
The vanguard of Blakk’s army was melting in the kill box they’d built.
Fred shifted the Spectre’s scope, looking for the next play. He saw it immediately. Groups were breaking off from the main force, scrambling up the sloping sides of the giant mushroom their hideout was built upon. They were going to try and scale the walls.
"Trixie, Pronto. Climbers on the western cap. Eight… no, twelve of them."
"On it." A moment later, a geyser of high-pressure water shot from an upper window, blasting three men off the fungal stalk. They fell into the gloom with short, fading yells. Then the shattering crump of Shrapnel’s explosions filled the air, spraying the side of the structure with lethal stone fragments.
It was working. Their plan was actually working. A fierce, wild grin spread across Fred’s face. He scanned for a target of his own, his finger resting on the trigger guard. He saw a henchman setting up a tripod-mounted blaster cannon, aiming it at the main door.
He was about to call it in when the roof beneath him shuddered.
Not from an explosion outside. From something hitting it from inside. Right below his position.
A fist of cold dread punched through his gut. They weren’t just outside. They were already in.