"Scott, sorry for the late call, but I just saw that you refueled the engines. Only a quarter full, but it should be - AAAAAH!." Hammond cut off, before he screamed as I felt something try to slam against my mind.
"Hammond, are you okay?!" I shouted, not remembering this from the game. He didn't answer as he kept screaming before falling to the ground and holding his head. "Hammond!" I shouted again, catching Millie in the side of my eye, watching our surroundings as I grew worried about what was going on. Eventually, Hammond stopped and held his head as he breathed in ragged breaths before clumsily pulling himself back to his feet. "Hammond, are you okay?" I asked, and he shook his head, painfully hissing as the action likely aggravated something.
"I'm, fuck, I'm fine, Scott, just...Something felt like it was screaming in my head," He answered as I saw some blood flow from his nose. "Look, you know what to do, just...just get it done while I, while I take a second to recover," he said before ending the call and making it clear something is going wrong.
"Scott?" Millie asked, and I looked at her.
"Millie, I don't know what's going on. Hammond never screamed like that before in the game," I said before actively calling Daniels. She picked up, holding her head, still looking sane, it would seem.
"Scott, fuck, did you feel that just now?" she asked, and I lied and nodded.
"Yeah, I just got off the call with Hammond, who dropped to the ground because of it. How are you?" I asked. And she shook her head, wincing just like Hammond, but no blood from the nose.
"Fine, just a little migraine is all, look, I'll check with Hammond while you keep up the repairs, okay, we need to fix it if we're gonna have the time to look for another way off this ship," she said before cutting the call before I could even answer. I sighed and looked to the ground.
"What was that? Why did it happen? Was it the marker? If so, what set it off?" I thought to myself in a spiral. I felt my walk grow more hurried as we walked down the damaged hallway after exiting the decontamination zone to the centrifuge.
"Shit, Scott, what the hell made that happen?" Millie said, but I was too caught up in my own mind.
"Should we bail? Cut our losses and hope that 'exit stage left' completes without our intervention in the story? No, we still need a ship, actually, to get the hell out of here, and I wasted our points on being able to survive longer to get more points! Why didn't I just buy a fucking cheap two-person spaceship and get the hell out of here!" I mentally shouted out, missing Millie's worried look.
"Scott?" she asked too softly for my roaring mind to hear.
"We've passed another clear ambush point, and not a single fucking necro to see! Why? Where are they!? The marker would never let us walk around without being attacked; it doesn't make sense!"
"Scott!" Millie shouted, putting a hand on my arm and tugging hard, making me look over to the Imp. She had unlatched her modified protective gill to the side, and I could see her glass-covered face. She looked worried, but still held a firm, defiant look in her eye. "I can tell when someone's letting thoughts cloud their mind. So do yourself a favor and bounce off what you're thinking. You said shit is going wrong, right?" she asked, and I nodded, sighing while pulling my own grill up and taking a second to think.
"Yes, maybe? I don't honestly know, but maybe the marker is being more active than it should," I said.
"Active how?" Millie said, letting my mind start to focus to give her an answer.
"We've passed by a few clear areas that are prime real estate for an ambush, but nothing has even tried. Not one necro," I said. "That in itself made us both worry after the constant attacks and prods. Yet at the end of the day, that just likely meant a bad ambush was on the way. Yet after Hammond screamed like that? It tells me the marker isn't following the script that I know to a good degree. Which means we might be flying truly blind now, or worse, the gloves have come off and we're about to get swarmed by more enemies than either of us can handle."
"What do you mean, the gloves come off? weren't they already?" Millie asked. I tried my best to explain when I heard the groans and screech of metal being ripped apart, making us both flick our current weapons backward to see a pulsating tendril the size of a tree trunk snake its way towards us from a hole it had ripped open previously. I cursed myself for forgetting about the damn thing in Hydroponics after Hammond freaked out on me.
"Fuck, dodge!" I shouted out as I left to the left and Millie to the right as the tendril flew through where we were both standing, not a second later. As my side crashed against the side of the hallway floor, I spun around and looked for its weak point. Thankfully, it was still present and started to shoot. "The glowing bit is a weak spot!" I shouted as I fired, earning a scream of rage from the flesh tentacle. Millie joined me in firing a pulse mine into the spot, earning us a spray of flesh, blood, and pus as the limb detonated. It wasn't ripped apart yet, though, as I quickly found myself being slammed against the wall as it started to twist and whip around the hallway. The suit did its best to mitigate the force of the blow, but I felt something snap as I dropped to the floor.
"Scott!" Millie shouted, having dodged if she was able to, fearing for my own well-being. I took a breath and knew it was a rip from where the pain came from, and how potent it was as I tried to keep breathing. Still, I also felt sweet adrenaline flood my body, numbing the pain in an animalistic way for me to run from the threat that caused it. Cursing, I rose to my feet, injecting a stem-Gel, hoping Body tune up made the rib heal correctly as I fired into the limb before finally ripping the damn thing off. With another shriek of pain, the limp pulled away, leaving what I had sliced off of it on the ground between us.
"Shit!" I gasped as I felt the gel still patching the wound. Millie leapt over the limb to me, in the hope of checking me over, I assumed. Yet, we didn't have time as we both heard absolute hell from where the limb retreated. Looking down the hall, we saw tens of necros swarming out of the hole in the wall. And then another ten after them. "Fuck, agh! No time! We need to move now!" I said, gritting my teeth as I ran further into the hall and to our next destination. Millie didn't question, merely covering our rear with two more pulse rifle mines. Barreling through the two doors to the centrifuge, Millie reloads and sets down a few more pulse mines before switching to her Ripper as we both gaze at the wide open space. It's a two-floor setup with the centrifuge dead center, two arms extended outwards to generate power.
"It's Zero G before we activate the centrifuge," I say while making sure the door from the hall is locked, though that will only slow down the fuckers as there are plenty of vents in here to begin with. "See the two arms?" I asked Millie, and she nodded. "They both have generator modules attached to them on rails. Right now, they are both separated and need to be reattached to the center power converter. Hit it with Stasis and then Telekinetically pull them in place. I'll go high, you go low," I said quickly, letting Issacs's knowledge come out unedited as I was in full panic mode.
"Got it!" the Red-skinned imp said before every single vent in the room exploded out, sending Necro after Necro into the room like ants. Cursing, I launched off the floor, Millie close behind as we both started to fire out into the swarm of death that was crawling out of the walls. We still went after each gravity stabilizer that I shouted out, as that needed to be done. Yet, we both found actually getting it done extremely difficult as the necros started to leap off the walls right at us in the air. I shifted the power in my suits' thrusters to allow me to both dodge and spin, giving me the ability to fire at the flying necro. Killing it off in the process. I then burned Stasis packs I had stored up as I fired into the walls over and over, freezing necro after necro in patches to stop the tide of them flinging themselves at us.
Explosions sounded out nearby, and I turned to see that Millie had gone from just the ripper to dual-wielding her two guns in a quick blitz of power to kill off a few more necro while also burning stasis at every moment she could. I quickly looked back around to see another five necros flying at me. I cursed and activated my suit's systems, taking a moment to pull power from the new shields I just got for me and Millie, and pumping extra power to my Kinesis module, allowing me the ability to actually grab one of the necros and ramming it into the other four. Then sending it back at the constantly crawling mass of necros on the walls. Then, with barely any time, I flew to my mission and froze the module before pulling with the overclocked Kineses to ram the thing home fast. It locked in, thank god, but cost me as a necro slammed itself into me.
I felt pain again as the damn thing stabbed me in the side and chest. I gasped as I pulled my plasma cutter around and sent a few rounds through the threat in a desperate, haphazard attack that thankfully sliced through the thing in a way that took its arms off. Still, I felt the burn of my heart as I knew it had nicked the precious organ with the chest stab. Quickly, I activated another Stem Gel, the most potent one I had, feeling the pain subside fast enough to dodge the next necro. "One done, now I just hope Millie got hers," I thought as I flew to the control screen of the centrifuge.
#####
Millie
"AHHHH!" I shouted out as I fired the last of my plus rifle ammo into the necros flying at me. My ripper was fully activated as a saw blade shot out and spun hot, allowing me the time to both stop and slice apart the necros I missed with the pulse rifle. Quickly throwing the gun behind my back, and feeling it magnectly lock in place, I started to send blade after blade into the walls, pinning a few necro here and there, but ultimately failing to whittle down the numbers. Breathing heavy after taking a moment to dodge the next necro, I reloaded while making sure I flung myself toward my generator module. I then started to zig-zag as more and more necro flung themselves at me with abandon. The first few I managed to fly by without getting hit, but there were just too many.
One, two, three, five, seven, twelve. Each dodge brought the pain of a new, deep slash into my flesh and muscle. I could feel the spray of my black blood flowing out into the zero-G room. Still, I pressed on as I sent more and more blades out into the flying threats, staving off the worst attacks that I could see. When I got to the module, I reloaded again, earning me a deep slash to my back as I missed the neco flying from behind. When the same necro stabbed me in my leg and threw me against the stabilizer, I screamed. Looking down, I saw that it hadn't just stabbed my leg, no, it had cut it off completely from just below the knee. I cursed as I took the chance to hit the module with stasis, before leaping off and swinging around to kineses the thing right into the centrifuge. At the same time with my weapon arm, I sliced apart the now floating necro, after it used its momentum to fling me against the fuge. I then sent the last of my saw blades at the next few flying threats, getting a call from Scott just as I slotted the damn thing in.
"Millie, I'm done," he started, but paused as he fired into the crowded room. "I'm by the controls, shout out when you're all set, then get clear because I'm activating this thing, and hopefully sending most of these fuckers to a permanent grave!" he shouted.
"I'm done," I said, feeling the pain of the lost limb in my voice. Still, I flew away to where the suit's HUD told me Scott was. Black blood pumped out of my lost limb, but soon closed up as I activated one of my most powerful Stem-Gels, earning me relief as the wound sealed up and new skin covered the stump. When the room started to hum, I knew Scott had activated something and thankfully saw him firing away with what was likely the last of his own ammo as he kept the necros away from the controls. I dodged again as more and more necro flung themselves after me, clearly in panic as the centrifuge started to spin.
"Millie, quickly, the bottom will pop open and suck out anything in the air when this thing starts to spin!" Scott shouted, "Get to a platform and hold onto the rail." I paused in my rush to get to him at that news, and instead, pushed left to the upper railing I was close to as the centrifuge lurched into motion. Just as I touched down, and a few necros rushed from the walls to meet me, the room shook, and the air pulled with such force that it made me feel welded to the railing my back was to. The necros about to attack me were lifted off their feet and sent into the spinning arms of the fuge. Then one by one in a mass exodus, the walls covered by necros were pulled off and flung into the fuge. Like a blender, every single one was torn apart as they were smashed by the fast-spinning arms. It didn't last long as the air left rapidly, but it was long enough, as now only Scott and I were the last remaining things alive in the room.
"Millie!" Scott shouted over our comms. "Millie, are you alive!" He shouted out again. I pulled myself off the ground with the railing. And turned to see him by the controls. He caught the movement and sighed in the comms. "thank god, look, you're by the door, so just stay there and I'll come to you."
"I don't worry about that," I said with a grimness. "I'm not much for moving at the moment." He paused in his walk at that and turned to me again. I made to show the missing limb, and he took a breath in.
"Damn, well good enough reason to use it," he said, making me raise a brow before I shivered in pleasure. From the healed stump of my leg came the rapid growth of fresh bone, muscle, and red skin as my leg was back, though without a suit to protect it. Thankfully, I assumed the defense that made breathing pointless, made a space suit a luxury, as the vacuum was just unpleasantly cold, then deathly freezing. "Used one of the two heals basic defense gives us if we buy both resistance and immunity," he explained.
"Thank Lucifer for that," I said as my man made his way to me.
#####
Scott
"The marker is supposed to use Isaac," I said as Millie and I walked back from the centrifuge. " During the whole game, it slowly eroded Isaac's mind with the constant attacks, making him see his dead wife when she was not there in the first place, and anything else to break him. Everyone else is also supposed to die, leaving him alone and completely isolated, so no one can pull him out of his delusion. By the end of it, Isaac was an insane mess that was given the blueprints to build a new marker after this one gets destroyed."
"Which it can't do now," Millie says as she walks alongside me with a soft slap of skin and then thunk of a boot from her damaged suit. I nod as I explain why we just went through hell. The whole plot of the game was Isaac falling into insanity, so that the marker could have him become the builder it needed to reach the masses of Earth faster. It's why Isaac never met anything he couldn't handle throughout the game. I've watched the movie and played enough of the series to know that if the marker wanted you dead, then you would be dead. So that made Isaac important. That made me important.
"Mental Immunity, it knows that it can't reach into my mind. It knows that it can't use me to build the next marker. It knows that we are two people that it can't perceive." Millie grew wide-eyed, picking up what I was saying.
"So that makes us more of a threat than an opportunity," her demonic background helping her understand what that entailed. "But wait," she said, giving me a look of confusion, "Why now, why not when you first showed up?" she asked. "You had the mental resistance before you even set foot on the ship."
"Exactly, I had a resistance to being mentally fucked" I chuckled darkly. "Keyword, resistance, Millie. To the marker, I was just a hard nut to crack, but still crackable. Now, though, after getting the immunity upgrade? It knows we can't be cracked at all."
"And so the gloves came off and it went for the kill," Millie muttered as she looked down the hall and back. "Well, fuck us then," she says before sighing and looking down the newly grown limb. "Do you think that was all of them?" she asked.
I snorted while shaking my head. "Fuck no, all I saw were the weakest of them. Things that we fought before. Trust me when I say there is a fucking plethora of necro yet to be seen. I'm talking eight-foot, five-hundred-pound fuckers. Ones that separate into a crawling mess of limbs. Bloated ones with little insect-like necro inside, ready to come after you. Plus a suicidal bomber who rushes you. Just a real fucking mess of them we have yet to see."
"But if the gloves came off, then why didn't we see any of these special ones?" She asked, and the answer came easily.
"Because while they exist, they aren't as easy fodder to throw at a problem," I said. "I think this was a panic attack from the marker, grabbing everything nearby that could really move. And out of every necro, the weakest ones are the fastest." Millie hummed at that as we walked back through the decontamination room. "That being said, I doubt it could pull this off again, as it likely blew almost every common necro it had in reserve. I think we will still see a common necro, just that they want swarm like this again. Just not enough bodies to do it."
"Alright, then we keep going," Millie said as she held her ripper while we got into the elevator, taking us back to the engine control room. I nodded and breathed a sigh of what's next, what fresh hell would happen as we continued to survive.
#####
Daniels
"What the fuck..." I whispered as I watched the video of what I thought would be the end of Scott and this mystery woman he had met. After I called back in, I had been watching from every camera I could to keep tabs on my three remaining teammates. Hammond stayed in the captain's nest, Johnston looked more and more jittery in the tram, and Scott and this 'Millie' were casually walking through the engine room, completely safe from any threat. Which was weird to say the least. Something the two on screen thought as well, given the paranoid movement they both adopted the longer the peace stayed with them. Then, the scream happened, and I nearly fell on my ass. Thanks to the Neuro suppressor I took, I knew I wouldn't be going crazy, but that didn't stop something from nearly frying my brain as it screamed in rage and damnation.
Scott soon called after asking if I was okay, wasting time on pleasantries I didn't need, and thankfully, he took my advice to keep fixing the engine. I did pull up Hammonds' camera to see the man sitting down and holding his head, whispering something I couldn't hear, given that the security cameras couldn't record audio. I didn't call the man as he didn't seem insane just yet, and thus wasn't a threat to me or the mission. Still, I made sure to keep watch in case that changed. Johnston was completely passed out with blood coming from her nose in a thick line. She was breathing, though, so I took that as a win, I guess. Finally, I went back to the only two, trying to keep us all alive.
That was when I saw hell rain down as every fucking mutated crewman on this thing attacked them, after a fucking giant ass limb whipped out to kill them as well. Then I proceeded to catch just the beginning of what I assumed was going to be a slaughter as they entered the centrifuge. Crewman after crewman swarmed through the vents until the cameras were covered in limps, blood, and the occasional morphed face. Again, I assumed they were truly fucked, until thirty minutes later, the computer showed the fuge was reactivated, and the cameras caught the blurry image of hundreds of necro sucked away and ripped apart by the machine.
"How did they survive that?" I whispered again. "They couldn't have, an engineer couldn't have survived that," I said as a dreadful thought came to me. Was I not sent alone? Was Scott back up? No, then I would have been told. We would have planned together before we left for the Ishimura. That only left a worse option, "He's clean up..." I said as I watched the man walk down the hall with his new friend. A friend who didn't show up anywhere on the ship's roster. A friend who appeared not once in any of the ship's security video archive. An archive that had recently erased videos, which traced back to the same station that Scott was on when we first walked into the Ishimura.
"Those bastards set me up," I said, feeling the rage building in my body. They sent me here to get the marker, and then made sure we had an 'Engineer' who I would think is some broken man. Someone whom I thought I could control. I had let my guard down around him, had actually felt sorry for him, and even helped feed his delusion of seeing his dead wife. Yet it was all a ruse, as no Engineer could make it out of what a trained soldier would consider the end. I slammed my hand down and looked at the screen, seeing the two enter the elevator. Taking a breath, I calmed down and pulled up the lock for the Fuel Storage room and disengaged it. We still needed to fix the ship, and all that's changed, really, is planning for my escape.
"You all wanted the marker? Fine, but it's gonna cost you ten times what I wanted, you fuckers" I said as I triggered my comms to call Scott. My head throbbed, but I pressed on.