Xenomorphic

Chapter 41: The Xenomorph Goddess

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The bottom of Asteria's feet slammed into Cain's chest, and the larger hybrid took two steps back before countering with his clubbed tail. Asteria ducked, a spike barely missing the top of her head. Her own tail whipped up, and, with precise targeting that from her superior eyes and reflexes, severed the club at the muscle. The club sailed into a tree, shattered through it, and imbedded in rock. Acid jetted from Cain's severed tail, the Predator hybrid roaring, not in pain, but in exhilaration.

He bull-rushed, and Asteria leaped over him, flicking her tail again, but Cain used his own to parry, and the bladed tail stabbed into the ground. Asteria lighted, tried to retract her tail, but had it grabbed instead, and suddenly she was being slung through tree after tree, splintering the bark of organisms that had been alive for decades. Then she was firmly planted into the ground with enough force to rattle her bones.

Her super-enhanced bones.

Then she was yanked forward by her tail on a collision course with Cain's wrist blades. When she got close enough, her arms snapped out, her hands going around Cain's wrist, and her feet planted on his pectorals. She intended to snap his arm off, but Cain reacted to her counter by hauling his arm up, supporting her entire weight, and then slung his limb. The force was too much for Asteria, and she was thrown away. Midair, she was struck by twin bolts of energy that smarted terribly and shot her back faster into a rock with enough momentum to crack the ball of minerals.

While hurting, the pain was ignored in favor of darting away into the woods. A frontal assault was not the answer to this battle, as Cain was too physically superior, but he was not mentally superior. As Asteria darted through the trees, changing her tactics, she felt Cain thundering after her, firing bolts of energy, lighting the forest on fire. She dodged each shot, and when Cain got close enough, his longer legs and more powerful muscles propelling him further and faster, she snapped out with her tail again.

Cain's reflexes were superb, and he caught the blade in his hand, but then winces and roared when there were ten sharp impacts across his front. Asteria's claws, embedded deep in his body. The tail was ripped from his hand, the blade biting through his skin and spreading his acidic blood across the forest floor.

Cain looked up and saw a fist that smashed his face in, sending him sailing through a tree. He didn't get a chance to run into something else before he was hit again, sailing in a new direction. And then he was hit again, and again, and again, being pinballed through the burning trees until there was a jarring impact to his lower jaw that sent him up, and then another jarring impact, this one much more powerful than the former, that put him four feet into the ground in an eruption of dirt.

He rolled out of his crater just in time, but he still caught several punches to the face and head, before a well-timed block created an opening that allowed him to rake his wrist blades across Asteria's sternum, to which he received five deep gashes across his chest, and he responded with an upward slash that took an eye out, and the reciprocation was twin sets of claws buried knuckle-deep in abdomen. Cain ended by stabbing Asteria.

Locked, she hissed, he clicked, and the flames burned around them. Then Asteria spewed acid in Cain's face, ripped out her claws, clapped her hands on his ears, and got kicked in the chest, slammed into a tree, ducked under a couple of plasma blasts, grabbed the toppling tree, and slapped Cain three hundred feet in the air with said tree. Asteria dropped her tree, extended her dorsal tubes with a snap, and willed the energy that made her wings into existence. Like a bullet from a gun, she was up and in Cain's descending face, grabbing him and slinging him up higher.

And now she had the advantage. Up here, Cain had no control; he was in freefall, tumbling over himself, unable to aim properly with his cannons, unable to get a good trajectory for his tail, the club having grown back. Unable to do anything but swipe and take hits as Asteria flew in from every angle there was on a three-dimensional plane. Her claws and tail raked across his body, tearing deep gashes, spilling pints of his blood. Still, for all her damage dealt, Cain recovered from all, his healing factor just as great as her own.