Dead Weight {MCSM}

Fallout

Everything was painfully silent.

The chaotic ambient noise of the world had been dulled to a high-pitched hum that rang ceaselessly in my skull, broken occasionally by the deeply pitched, sudden collision of the Wither Storm's dissected body against the ground around where I was sprawled out, stiff, motionless, void of all energy I had before the explosion.

I could see faces above me. Blurred-out, familiar faces. Faces kneeling over me in concern. Their lips moved rapidly. No words left their mouths.

I pressed my hands against the earth below me, in a futile attempt to boost myself off the ground and back up onto my feet. My strength had vanished between the explosion and then, and my efforts to do something so simple as stand up resulted in my arms buckling below me, sending my face right back to the dirt.

My hearing had cleared up a little by then, enough to recognize from voice that the large arm hoisting me off of the ground and throwing my arm around their neck belonged to Axel.

"You okay, man?" he said, clear concern in his tone of voice.

'Okay' was a subjective thing then. I had just survived a deafening explosion, with every one of my senses nulled to nearly nothing, and I was fatigued beyond belief. That sucked. But I wasn't dead.

"Yeah," I mumbled. "I'm okay."

The senseless chatter had petered out by then, with the final chunks of the dead Wither Storm ceremoniously falling to the ground. All that was left of the beast were piles of withered, putrid black flesh and purplish viscera. Its tentacles were sprawled silently across the grass, and all three of its lifeless heads had gone slack-jawed and dull-eyed. The center of its body was licked by the occasional bit of scorched grass, warming the air around its now-exposed chest cavity, with its crooked rib bones jutting upwards like twisted skyscrapers brushing against the sinking sun.

It was a gorgeously grotesque sight.

"It... It's actually dead," Olivia breathed. "We killed it."

She was right. It was dead, lifeless, mutilated and festering on the ground after taking a bite out of the Formidi-bomb, completely motionless, giving off not even a pitiful dying twitch. It was finally gone. It was done. We did it.

"I just can't believe you actually... got it," Lukas stuttered. "With everything going on, all the beams, the distractions, and such."

"And get out of it ALIVE, at that!" Axel raved, his grip on me loosening just a little bit. "...for the most part."

That one statement was a shock to me. Alive. I had accepted my fate as the one to bomb the Wither Storm, being almost 100 percent certain that the best possible outcome would be the group finding my dead body in one piece. But there I was, alive, and still whole, at least as far as I could tell.

Which was more than I could say for some of us.

As quickly as the triumphant feeling had come, that coveted moment of victory, it had disappeared. The peaceful chatter faded back to the droning ambience of burning grass, steady breeze, and uncertain silence, broken when I finally managed to squeak a word out of my aching mouth.

"...where's Magnus?"

The celebration quickly came to an unceremonious halt, as the group fixed their gazes on me, then on each other, then back to me.

"Last I saw him, he was charging back towards that tentacle," Axel uttered.

"Was it the tentacle that was stuck in our first distraction, our second one, or a different one entirely?" Olivia questioned. "It all happened so fast, it feels like the last few minutes were nothing at all."