Chapter 325 – The Nightmare’s Nightmare And The Pillow Thief

*Ding*

[DEN Quest Received]

[StarCraft - Living Nightmare - REMATCH!]

[Survive]

[Time Remaining - 11:59:57]

[Rewards] 

[10 000 Gacha Tokens or +10 Stat points]

"It was never about the rewards," John said, dismissing the window and surveying the dark canyon before him. 

The sun had just touched the horizon, bathing the land around him in a bright orange glow that starkly contrasted with the darkness ahead. He activated his Mental Mapping skill, giving himself an overlay of the surrounding region and marking any animals larger than a small dog with a red circle.

Thank you again, ladies, for gifting me your powers.

To the left of the canyon mouth was where he had parked the Vulture last time, where his broken-down body had slipped and fallen, never to stand up again. At that moment, a wellspring of emotions ran through him, and he gripped the handlebars tightly as he idled the bike toward the canyon opening. He was alive, yes, but that was only because DEN brought him back. Brought him back from death. 

One way or another, this ends tonight.

As he drew closer, several dots appeared on the edge of his map, skittering around, their owner hidden in the canyon's darkness. He thumbed a few buttons on his console, banked the bike to the side and pressed a few more as he surveyed his chosen battlefield. 

Swinging the bike wide, he circled back to where he started. Taking a few deep breaths, he activated his armour, pointed his left hand toward the canyon, and revved the bike's engine with his right. "Fireball!" 

A blazing ball of fire shot into the canyon, lighting up the darkness.

"CRRRREEEEEE!!!" A chorus of zerglings screamed, flinching back from the sudden brightness.

*Foohmp, Foohmp, Foohmp*

*BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!*

"CRRRREEEEE!!!"

Grenades exploded across the canyon, shredding the flesh off the monsters' bodies, making them scream out in pain. John adjusted his aim and fired again, using his Mental Map to guide the shots. A mass of red dots rushed toward him, more than a dozen, so he held down the grenade launcher's trigger and laid waste to the canyon's opening.

Despite the chaos, zerglings burst through the line of fire he was creating, screeching at him with violence and hatred. The beasts were terrifying to look at in the daylight, though slightly less monstrous than his nightmares had made them seem. Fangs bared, the nearly four-foot-tall, purple-skinned, demonic dog-like beasts charged towards his position, moving faster than they had any right to.

*Foomph! Foomph! BOOM! BOOM!*

He fired more grenades to either side of the throng, herding them as best he could with the few moments he had before they were on top of him.

*Crick-Chee. BOOOM!*

A powerful blast went off in front of the Vulture as one of the spider mines popped out of the ground and exploded, shredding three of the charging beasts in a wall of fire and molten tungsten ball bearings. Red blood sprayed across the other beasts, but they remained undeterred in their advance. 

John fired his grenades again, wondering for a moment if he had underestimated his weapons' power against these aliens as more zerglings charged his position. The 20mm weapons would have turned most animals into minced hamburger, but these beasts, these zergs, while bloodied, continued to rush towards the Vulture. 

Tough little bastards.

*Crick-Chee. BOOOM!*

*Crick-Chee. BOOOM!*

His second mine went off, closer this time, followed quickly by his third and last mine. The ground in front of him was littered with bodies, but still the tide continued to flow towards him. He eyed the rifle next to him for a moment, then drew his sword instead, funnelling all his pent-up rage into the powerful weapon.

It was time for some payback, and his anger wouldn’t be sated until the canyon was freed of this... this infestation, this manifestation of his nightmares.

Ten Zerglings

"CRRRRREEEE!!!!" They screamed. 

"ARRRGGGHHH!!!" He roared over them, his mana and Ki fueling his body as he leapt off the Vulture towards the swarm.

*Swish* 

His sword split the closest one in half as he landed, his Parallel Minds working in tandem with his Feral Instinct and Accelerated Reflex, pushing his new form to its absolute limits.

Nine Zerglings

He kicked off the ground with his left leg, pushing himself underneath the next zergling who had leapt towards him over one of the smouldering corpses. He plunged his sword into its softer underbelly, spilling its entrails behind him as he slid past. 

"CARrrrrr!!!" It screamed out weakly, its deathrattle sending shivers through his bones.

Eight Zerglings

Two more were nearly on top of him; With a scream, he kicked the closest one in the face, his armoured foot crushing its skull and killing it instantly. The second grappled onto his arm, its claws leaving deep gouges in his vambraces, its teeth snapping at his helmet. He drove the sword upwards, skewering its head with the weapon.

Six Zerglings

With his left hand, he grabbed onto the still twitching corpse and threw it towards a pair of zerglings to his right, causing them to dodge out of the way. He kicked off the ground with all his strength, leaving small pressure cracks behind him as he barreled toward another beast, plunged the glowing blade into its thick neck, and decapitated the zergling. Red blood sprayed over him, blinding his eyes for a moment, but he did not slow his momentum as he rolled past the corpse.

Five Zerglings

The two he caused to dodge leapt behind him, their animalistic minds believing they had caught their prey. Instead of his back, they slammed into a golden shield as he activated Divine Shield, causing them to bounce off it and become momentarily disoriented by the impact. 

He threw his sword like a spear into the left one, the blade thirsting for the blood of his nightmares, pinning the animal to the ground. "Rupture!" He said, activating the art as he punched the other, coating his gauntlet with Ki for good measure as he slammed his fist into the hard chitin on its back. It exploded from the impact as if a grenade had gone off inside of its body.

He took two steps and crushed the skull of the pinned one with his boot, ending its life. 

Three Zerglings

The remaining zerglings stood nearly twenty yards away, hissing and making a rattling noise like they were some overgrown rattlesnakes. He looked back at them, the red blood dripping off his armour in the golden energy surrounding him looked almost black. He roared.

It wasn't his blood, not this time.

"Crrreee!" They cried in unison, much weaker this time before turning back to the darkness.

"No you don't. Gae Derg!" He yelled, grasping the black and purple spear that materialized beside him, its energies sparking against his shield. "Spear Rain!" He shouted as he threw the weapon into the air. 

The spear split into five, then five more, and five again, raining death and destruction on the retreated forms, pinning them to the grown and turning their bodies into pin cushions. They screamed out in pain as the magic burned them from within.

Zero remaining in the light.

He pulled his blade from the corpse by his feet and let out the breath he had hadn't realized he had been holding. 

He did it. 

"I am powerful. I can do this." He said, flicking the blood off his blade then sheathing it. It was a bit sloppier than he would have liked, but he had grown enough in power to be able to take on these beasts.

He looked at his vambrace and grimaced. This suit was a mix of orichalcum and mithril, supposedly some of the toughest fantasy metals in existence. The fact that something as small as a zergling could leave gashes on the plating was seriously concerning.

"I'd hate to see what would have happened if it was something bigger. I'll have to rely more on avoidance in the future... oh... there are more." He said, noticing that there were more red blips on his mental map now. 

"Rage!" He said, turning into ogre. He walked over to the bike and patted it on the side a couple of times before he picked up the rifle and pocketed the spare mags. It was a good vehicle, but with its spider mines depleted, it would be next to useless in this fight. The lightly armoured craft was meant to harass enemy positions with high-speed passes; the canyon's tight confines would negate its only real defence. He didn't want to lose his fastest means of transport back to town just so he could fire a few grenades in a very narrow arc while they surrounded him. 

Slapping in a fresh mag, he walked towards the canyon, his helmet hiding the sadistic smile growing on his face. He still had eleven hours and forty-seven minutes to go. 

"They'll never know what hit them. Wind Walk!" He said, activating yet another Art. He disappeared from sight, leaving his idling bike alone amongst the smouldering corpses of his nightmares.

A change to the sound of the ship's engines stirred Aqua awake. She was lying on a small bed in a room that seemed much fancier than the rest of the spaceship she had seen so far. A red throw rug covered the floor, and a small desk sat on the other side of the room. Several shelves hid the metal walls and seemed full of random knickknacks that their former owner had collected over time.  

Sarah had brought her here earlier, before returning to the search after they hijacked this ship, giving her a chance to heal herself and organize her thoughts. She had fallen asleep, but she was pretty sure she managed to sort out these new memories from her old ones, though she still found it disconcerting to actually have about eighteen years of memories mixed in with her own: ten of her time in the Ghost program, of all the training, fighting, and killing they had to go through, and another eight with the Sons of Korhal. 

She had been a child soldier, but memories before the training had begun didn't exist, erased by the Confederacy as they moulded her and her cohort into the perfect covert operatives. She and Sarah, along with the other trainees, had been tortured day and night for years, implanted with exotic technology meant to control their minds, converting them into killers. They supported each other as best they could, an odd touch at night to show some connection, but otherwise kept apart during training. They saw what the instructors did to people who formed bonds, pitting them against the other, forcing them to fight or even kill each other.

After the training was complete, they had been given some more freedoms, the pair of them becoming a team who assassinated many of the Confederates’ enemies. Kerrigan did most of the wetwork, while she infiltrated security systems or found ways to draw their targets out in the open so Kerrigan could get a clean shot. They started when they were thirteen and spent four more years as assassins with the Confederates.

That changed when they were assigned to a research facility, where they were drugged and disabled while a scientist used their psionic powers to test how these new creatures, the Zerg, responded to stimuli. They were seventeen when that happened. 

A year later, they were rescued by the Sons of Korhal and Arcturus Mengsk, a very unlikely ally since they had joined the team that murdered his family while under Confederate orders, with Kerrigan personally decapitating his father. At first, it was a tentative alliance, but neither of them wanted to return to the Confederacy, mainly because the Sons of Korhal had all the implants that controlled them removed from their heads, and they realized just how rotten that government was.

They quickly proved their worth, expanding the Sons of Korhal's influence from little more than a pipe dream to a full-on threat to the Confederacy. Mengsk himself, a man of the same stature as John, but much more imperialistic, saw their value and promoted them to the top of his organization. They had killed Ghost assassination teams sent against him, hunted down the rest of their former team that had killed Mengsk’s family and ended them, ended them and the commanders who had given those orders. 

With the newfound freedom within the Sons of Korhal, she and Kerrigan had grown closer. Not as lovers, but sisters. Once, Sarah explored a relationship with a man, and when it soured, they held each other one night, drank cheap wine, and watched some bad movies. Since then, they had stayed close, supporting each other as best they could. They both had jobs that sometimes separated them for months at a time, but whenever they got the chance, they tried to have some fun and pretend to have something like a normal life.   

Thankfully, Mengsk has no interest in our bodies... every time he looks at us, all we feel from him is heavily veiled disgust. It's frankly incredible that we have such responsibilities in his organization when he loathes us so, but since it is for the greater good, he uses us. Just like we are using him. He is pretty incredible in his own way, no psionics at all, but he can school his mind enough that we cannot read his thoughts. When he speaks, people listen, devouring his rhetoric like it was the best-tasting food. 

She shook her head and recentered herself. The memories would be useful for the future, but right now she needed to get ready for their deception. The official magistrate was now in custody on the boarding vessel, the woman having no real ties to this planet, and would be held as a political hostage for her family's good behaviour on a world on the other side of the Confederacy. Another team had already scrubbed the records and changed her file in the Confederate database, so her name and looks should raise little question for the local government. 

"I just need to pretend I'm the Confederate representative on this planet for a few weeks, push some policies through to help with Kerrigan's destabilization efforts, hamper the crackdown on any protests, and try to keep the reports I need to send to Tarsonis clear of most of the issues until it's too late. Easy right? Just another scheme, and I love those... I just don't think I've ever worked one quite this big before. This is going to be fun!"

*Shhhickt*

"What's going to be fun?" Sarah said tiredly as she walked through the door. She had bags under her eyes, and her normally tight ponytail hung looser than usual. 

"Oh, just going over the plan again. Are you okay?"

"Just tired. I had to use a little too much energy earlier, and I haven't had a chance to recharge yet." She said, laying her rifle against the wall by the bed and starting to strip her armour off. "Now scoot over, I need to sleep, and after one look at the crew bunks I decided the captain's cabin was a much better option."

"Umm... want me to move? You can have it to yourself."

"Huh? Why? You need to sleep too. Just push that dropship you call a butt back and let me lie down." She replied, pulling the final piece off and leaving her wearing just a skintight black bodysuit. 

"Dropship? Are you saying my ass is fat? I'll have you know I have it on good authority I have a beautiful butt!" She replied indignantly.

Yes, it's round, but it's not massive!

"Oh? Did my partner finally catch the attention of a guy?" She said, taking out her hair band and letting her hair fall around her shoulders. 

"Umm... well... yes I have, but- OOPH!" Aqua replied, but was interrupted when Sarah slid in beside her and pushed her back against the wall. 

"See, I fit here just fine. Now, be a good little backpack and cuddle in and tell me all about him." Sarah asked, taking over most of the pillow.

And just what am I supposed to tell her? 

{You know you can tell me whatever you want. Wait, you didn't... It's not that new kid, is it? I know he is eighteen and very handsome, but he is just a kid.}

Aqua froze, her mind locking up for a moment as she processed the fact that she and Sarah had spoken in each other's minds just as often as they did with their lips. Buying herself a few moments, she wrapped her arms around the taller woman and pulled her in close.

He isn't the new kid, but he is tall, handsome, with broad shoulders and a great ass. He also has light grey hair and a well-kept beard. He is a fair bit older than us, but quite strong. 

[Ooo, a tall, dark and handsome older man. Have you been reading those fantasy books again in your free time? Because aside from Mengsk himself, there isn't anyone in the upper echelons of the Sons of Korhal that comes close to matching that description.]

No! Not him! Oh... a fantasy? Of course, cause he can also use magic and speaks to gods and goddesses like they are just normal people. When we met, he spanked my 'fat shuttle-butt' until it was red. The night we confirmed our undying love, he slid naked off a magical stag and made love to me in a hot springs high in the mountains.  He has many lovers but I am... I am the one closest to his body.

[You're such an incredible liar. Even in your thoughts, I almost believe you're telling me the truth. Well done. Now, let's get some sleep. I'm sure once things calm down, you and I can try to find a man again. See if we can live a normal life.]

I would have a much more normal life if you weren't such a pillow hog. Maybe I should find a set of pig ears and tail for you. Oink, Oink, here comes the pillow thief!

{Are you calling me fat?}

Seriously? Are you fishing for a compliment or something? I can literally feel your abs right now. Of course you're not fat. If anything, I want to feed you a sandwich.

{Well, we are fresh out of those. Only Confederate rations on this barge. Next time we get to an agricultural world, we should make some time to go get a proper meal. You can tell me more about this fantasy boyfriend while we eat steaks and drink wine. Good night, Aqua.}

Good night, Sarah.

Aqua laid there for quite some time, unsure of what to think, or even if she should think while beside this redheaded woman. Her divinity had always blocked anyone from reading her mind before, at least until she met John, and he rarely used that on her. Being close to Sarah was going to cause a whole host of issues if she wasn't careful. She eventually drifted off, cuddled close to the other Ghost so she could at least use the corner of the pillow for her head. 

Damn pillow hog.