Xenomorphic

Chapter 25: Showcasing

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August 18, 2006

Southern British Columbia

The man screamed his lungs out as if it would magically save him from death. It didn't. It just got his head sliced cleanly off, abruptly cutting off his scream.

The rest of the hunters, a large band of 39, all came sprinting from wherever it was in the surrounding woods they were, rifles up high, dogs barking, and breathing ragged, drawn by the desperate call of their comrade in arms. The reason for these men and older teenage boys to be hunting en masse like this?

Sightings of a demon straight from the bowels of Hell itself...and several headless family members.

There was one group, one that was closest to the rest of the teams, that was hit first. An older man, maybe in his late forties, along with another that looked remarkably similar (brothers, perhaps), and twin boys of maybe nineteen, twenty, or twenty-one, were making a mad dash for where they heard Leeroy yell.

Something dropped right on top of them, literally. One of the twins was crushed by the thing's massive weight, and panic ensued. Whatever this thing was, it was entirely transparent...like a moving heatwave. The living twin didn't even get to react before there was a hole in ribcage that went all the through his back.

By this time, the father and his brother had registered what was happening, somewhat, and reacted...too slow. The brother's gun was brazened across his chest in mid-aim, when something large and powerful slammed straight through the wood and metal, sending the brother rocketing into the dirt, his bones turned into powder.

The father hadn't even paid attention to that, his mind solely focused on killing the distortion in the air. He fired his trusty weapon, both barrels spitting fire and smoke. The next sound was that of an annoyed clicking, followed by the sound of blades extending, then tearing flesh.

The father's fear-stricken visage would forever remain on his severed head, impaled on the not-quite invisible blades.

The clicking was heard again, and the distortion became wholly visible as the filters along the exoskeleton allowed for the absorption of light-wavelengths once more. Subject-3 Beta was revealed in his six-foot, heavily-muscled, dark-green-and-black exoskeletal glory. The head of his latest trophy impaled on his extended wrist-blade-bones.

Ah, those were quite the ingenious biological creation, the wrist-blades. That cancerous-like growth on each of his forearms served as the sheath, with fourteen inches of ultra-thin, ultra-powerful bone, neatly carved and sharpened, hiding within. The blades were connected to a thick cord of muscle at the back of the sheath, and could be extended and retracted with just a thought...much like the flexing of a muscle.

S-3 Beta clicked once more, his mouth never parting but his mandibles trembling. He removed his newest trophy from his blades, and dropped it right into his own in-built head storage.

That was also quite the novelty. Along with the lower dorsal tubes, the massive, powerful, clubbed tail, and the upper, curved dorsal tubes, there was another added edition the back of S-3 Beta. A series of protruding spines, with the first one sprouting up above the tail, curving upward, and the rest parallel to each other, curved toward the one directly across from it, travelling up along the same path as the dorsal tubes.

With this next head, that made five trophies contained within the neat space that served as his mobile game-sack. The bottom spine kept the five skulls from falling out, and the spines along the sides kept the skulls from tumbling away. And that five skulls had been added, the fifth skull at the top triggered a nerve located at the top of the spinal cord that caused another spine, one like the spine at the bottom, above the tail, to extend forward, sealing all the skulls within an organic, morbid basket.