Beyond What's Known

Chapter 6

Alana, Trixie, Kord, and Pronto all tensed, watching their friend with impossibly wide eyes as he aimed his blaster at them. Alarm bells were ringing in Alana's head, and she knew she had to move, had to run, had to do something, but her body was still catching up to the knowledge that the person she felt the safest around was now ready to attack her and the rest of her friends.

"Eli," Alana said hesitantly, gulping and carefully grabbing her blaster. "Don't do this."

Already, her thoughts were moving at lightning speed. Her ankle was fine, but she still had slow-bleeding punctures on both shoulders. Pronto had just made an incredible sprint through a contracting portal, and Kord had just finished fighting an enormous ogre.

Of all of them, Trixie was probably in the best fighting shape, but one person wasn't enough to take down the Shane even when he wasn't possessed and armed by ghouls.

Eli gritted his teeth and for a moment his face twisted into something akin to pain, then it disappeared. He grinned wickedly, in a way that seemed so wrong for his face, and fired the Grimmstone. The gang scattered, dodging the ghoul as it slammed into the ground, cracking the solid rock beneath them with ease.

Alana rolled and dug her heels into the ground to stop herself. She fired her Phopshoro, who tried to release a burst of fireworks in front of Eli, but the Shane reacted inhumanly fast. He fired a Bubbalash that swallowed the Phosphoro up, forcing it to return to protoform. Alana hurriedly fired her Armashelt at the ground and slid into the dip it made, desperate for cover.

Kord fired his Rammstone, and Eli just barely dodged to miss the bulk of the hit. The slug did catch his side, sending him momentarily dropping to the ground. For a normal slinger, even that clip would have been enough to cause them to at least slow down, but Eli didn't hesitate to stand back up again and continue to fire.

Alana remembered how the Dark Slinger had taken several hard hits, but had seemed completely unfazed. If the Goon was just possessing the slinger, was he able to just keep puppeteering the body through pain that would normally cause him to stop? What if the Goon kept pushing Eli too far?

That thought caused a desire to try to go easy on Eli, but when the explosion of a Greneater shook the ground and caused curses to sound out from Trixie, Alana shook that option out of her head. If they tried to lighten up, someone could get killed.

Visions of the West crumbling in flames flashed through Alana's mind. Yeah, she was pretty sure Eli would understand if they bruised him up a bit if it meant saving the 99 Caverns.

"Do we have a plan?" Trixie called, firing her Arachnet and narrowly dodging a Bubbalash.

"Try not to die?" Pronto suggested.

"That's always the plan!" Kord called, aiming to try to leap on Eli from behind. But the possessed Shane easily slid out of the way in near-fluid movement that suddenly reminded Alana of how Twist had easily avoided Kord in the hideout.

Was Eli always able to do that, or was the Goon able to see enough of his thoughts to know how to avoid the cave troll?

Alana fired a Jellyish that spat out a string of slime attached to Eli's blaster and yanked it upwards just as Eli fired, sending an Amperling up at the cavern ceiling. Luckily the ghoul's electricity did little more than send dust falling down.

"That's probably Joules," Alana mumbled, her mind racing. "Wait- where's Burpy? And Doc? Those are the two we need to watch for!"

"Oh. About that," Pronto laughed nervously, stopping with a shriek as he dove into the ground to avoid a Grimmstone.