Buck

Buck started running towards the sound of terrified screams. He recognized the voice as belonging to Recruit Miller, who should be patrolling the area behind the men’s barracks. Buck made it halfway across the tarmac before he realized that the strange girl was running alongside him. 

He should order her to stay back. Except he had no idea how he would go about doing that, seeing as how she couldn’t understand a single damn thing he said. Then he saw what had made Miller scream, and it was all Buck could do not to scream like a maniac himself. 

It was a spider. 

But a huge one.

Like. It was a spider the size of the barracks. And it had Miller in its mouth... pincer... things. The recruit dangled a dozen feet in the air, seconds from becoming a snack. 

And all Buck had by way of a weapon was a piddly little handgun, because he’d given his recruits the big, reassuring guns. 

Buck froze, staring in abject horror. 

The girl, though, kept running. Right up under the giant spider’s head. And she had drawn a sword from someplace. Even though Buck was damn sure she’d been unarmed a second ago. And it was a weird sword, too. He’d never seen one that looked like it was carved out of crystal with flames twisting and licking up the blade. 

He had to stop her! No way was a bitty girl like her going to stand a chance in Hell against a monster like that with nothing but a pointy bit of sparkly rock in her hand. He reached, missed, slid on some viscous liquid that was probably giant spider drool, and could only stare as the girl attacked. 

She never paused in her headlong run. She jumped right for its face, sword leaving a brilliant white trail across Buck’s vision. 

Well he couldn’t stop her but he could back her up. He aimed his gun and he fired every bullet in the clip, right into its eyes. He might as well have been flinging rubber bands for all the thing took notice of him.

It surely noticed the little girl, though. 

It noticed when she landed on one mandible next to Miller, and raised the sword high. It really noticed when she slammed the sword down where the mandible met the rest of what passed for its face. 

What the Hell did she think she was doing? That sword looked fragile enough to snap at the first hit, and even if it didn’t, it wasn’t going to do any more harm to the damned thing than Buck’s bullets had!

She stabbed the thing hard where mandible met face, and swung from the hilt like a little kid on monkey bars. There was a screech from the monster and more screams from Recruit Miller, this time because he was plummeting to the ground. The mandible, severed, landed a few feet away, barely missing Buck. 

The girl landed between Miller and Buck and held her hands up, palms splayed out as the spider thing brought one of its massive legs down in an effort to stomp all of them flat. Buck screamed as a bell like chime sounded through the area and the thing’s leg bounced off of empty air. 

The girl kept one hand up, the other hand scrambled through empty air like she was swatting the mother of all flies, and then stopped as lightning crackled from her hand along her arm and up to her shoulder. She turned her head up to the spider and shouted something, taunting it maybe. It peered down at her with eight beady, blood red eyes.

She made a tossing motion, and the electricity that crackled along her sleeve formed into a single, devastating lightning bolt. It struck the spider thing right in what remained of its face, and it reared up, shrieking loudly enough that Buck was shocked his ears weren’t bleeding. The spider landed, once more slamming into the invisible force between it and the girl and his recruit. Buck aimed his pistol, which he’d reloaded without even realizing he was doing it, but didn’t fire. The spider reared again, and then backed away into the mists.

Jader, Garrett, and Tanaka arrived then. They’d been running pretty fast, and they hadn’t hesitated. It had all happened so fast, that the time it took them to realize they should run and the time it took them to arrive was long enough for the battle to end. 

“Is... is it gone?” Recruit Jader asked.

“Not sure,” Buck said. He stepped forward, most of his attention on the technicolor fog. What was gonna come out of that stuff next?