Climb! <FishyManArtist)
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Lora ducked past the leaking pipe as she, Jak and Armin moved slowly through the abandoned plant.
“How’s our scanner looking, Armin?” Lora looked rearwards at the two canids following closely behind her. Armin shook his head, tapping the scanner’s screen. “No dice. All this concrete and metal is blocking everything.”
Jak scanned the rafters above, rotted by acid and rainwater that had been trickling down through cracks in the concrete for decades. He spotted what appeared to be bright, pink residue on a catwalk, glinting in the faint, red light of the hallway.
He tapped Lora’s shoulder, pointing up at the bent up railing. It took another moment for him to type on his communicator.
*RESIDUE. SHOULD WE FOLLOW IT?*
The lioness squinted, her HUD picking up the small pink splatter. “Good eye, wolfie. Armin! You ready for a good upper-body exercise?” The fox froze, looking up at the ladder leading into the yawning chasm.
“Ladies first.”
The trio climbed into the rickety catwalk, and turned their helmet lights on. The ladder seemed to go on for about a hundred feet. Lora spotted a sign off to the side, bolded letters exclaiming: **DANGER. CONFINED SPACE. USE PROPER ARRESTING GEAR AND AIR MONITORS.**
“Check your air filters, you two. It’s gonna be a long climb.”
The knights retrieved their lanyards from their belts and checked their sensors. Then, one by one, they climbed. First Lora, then Jak, then Armin. They started to really feel the climb as they reached fifty feet up the tunnel. “Lora, I’ve got a question.” Armin piped up, looking past Jak’s tail.
“Yeah?” Lora replied, not stopping to look back at the fox.
“Suppose our voidling *is* up there. What’s our plan for getting back down in a hurry?” He looked down at the ever increasing distance between them and the ground. Who designed this tunnel anyway?
“Good question. I, uh, haven’t thought that far ahead. Jak? How much rope do you have in your pack?” She stopped to let him type.
**FIFTY METERS. NOT COUNTING THE LANYARD. IT’S A LONG FALL. BUT I CAN TIE SOMETHING UP THERE IF YOU GIVE ME SOME TIME.**
She nodded, and was about to continue, when they heard scraping. Armin looked at his scanner. It was glowing now. “Armin! Where is it?” Lora called, her voice a little more frantic now than it had been before.
“Uh…!” He looked down beneath him, the tunnel’s mouth only illuminated by the hall light below. His helmet light could only reach so far.
Until it passed the unmistakable mandibles of their quarry. Its claws scraped the concrete as it stood up on its hind legs, just reaching into the mouth of the tunnel.
It spotted them.
Armin felt his tail pin itself to his leg. “Move. MOVE, START MOVING!”
The three began to quickly scramble up the ladder. They had fifty feet left. Lora could see light from the chamber above. The voidling climbed the ladder, its large frame barely avoided scraping against the sides of the tunnel as its long limbs clung to the ladder’s rungs.
“HURRY! JAK, LORA, MOVE YOUR FAT TAILS OUT OF THE WAY!” Armin shouted as the voidling came closer and closer.
“IM MOVING AS FAST AS I CAN ARMN!I” Lora shouted back, only twenty feet from the exit. Jak looked past armin, his pulse picking up as the voidling chittered with an almost gleeful sound. Its residue left a bright, neon pink trail behind it.
Jak stopped, and typed a message on his communicator:
**ARMIN. CUT THE LADDER.**
The fox wasted no time. His plasma blade extended from its shroud, and he swiped at the ladder below him. The voidling screeched as it fell, the ladder scraping and sparking off the sides of the tunnel.
It landed on the ground with a violent crack, its carapace shattering with the impact, bright pink and purple viscera spiderwebbing from under it.
The trio made it up and over the end of the tunnel’s exit, piling into one exhausted heap. Lora huffed as she caught her breath, looking out at the chamber around them.
More tunnels. Just what they needed. But at least they solved their voidling problem. Getting back out was the next problem.