Hellscape

Tom stood in shock for a short moment before shaking himself back to awareness.

'I suppose it makes sense. Something as big as this thing needs a heart that can handle it. Seems a little small, though. Do these Cragoloss have more than one heart?' Deciding to look for more organs if dealing with this one didn't work, Tom started studying the heart, both with his eyes and his psychic senses.

'A bit different from a human's heart. Looks like I can stop it by just…' Reaching out with his telekinesis, he tied knots in all the veins one by one.

It took a significant amount of effort, as each vein was about as long around as his arm. With that done, he aimed his Vega SV at the arteries and fired, using the continuous beam to cut through them and cauterize them.

After thirty minutes of this, and several reloads, he finished his task. Tom waited a bit, seeing if this would have an immediate impact. Extending his senses into the fleshy walls, he noted that there was still blood flowing through the veins within.

'Shit, I was right. More than one heart. Blood looks like it's coming from… this way.'

Going in the direction the blood was coming from, Tom weaved around a few more patrols, passed another two 'food cages,' and eventually arrived at another guarded room. Unlike the last heart's room, this one had only a single Cragost guarding it.

However, the black shell on the lobster, combined with its towering height of ten feet, denoted its rank as the strongest of the warrior caste, the Generals. These hulking brutes could tear five-inch-thick steel apart like paper, pierce through shields with their claws, and were as resistant to plasma as normal Cragost were to lasers. In other words, Tom's Vega SV had suddenly become useless.

Slinging his rifle over his shoulder, he reached out with his TK. Throwing up yet another sound barrier, he walked towards the Cragost. When it saw him, it opened its mandibles and presumably let out a shriek, although Tom wasn't a hundred percent certain due to the barrier.

When it rushed at him, Tom used his Tk to reach toward the muscles in the lobster's legs, before twisting and bunching them together. The Cragost let out what Tom assumed was another shriek and fell flat on its face, slightly shaking the corridor. Knowing he wasn't strong enough to directly hold the monster down, Tom instead pinched multiple nerves inside the Cragost, making it writhe in pain.

He did this long enough to find the thing's heart. Surprisingly, it had two. One was in its tail, and the other was in the chest, on the opposite side of where a human's heart would be. Crushing them, along with the brain, killed the Cragost. Its orifices leaked light blue blood. Tom stepped over the corpse and proceeded into the room it was guarding, before being stunned once again.

He was indeed right that the blood's flow would lead him to another heart, and that's exactly what he found. However, inside the massive room was also the Cragoloss' brain, a gargantuan mound twice the size of the heart. Tom grinned, happy that the end to this horrible stealth mission was finally in sight. Then he heard clicking.

Looking down, he found dozens of Cragost looking at him, the majority of them brown, with a few blues, reds, and blacks mixed in.

"Shit."

The room turned into a chorus of horrible, high-pitched shrieks, like a million toddlers upset that their parents wouldn't buy them a toy, mixed with the screams of hundreds of dying cats. At once, all of the two hundred or so Cragost charged at him. Sliding his rifle off his shoulder, he aimed into the crowd and started firing.

Of course, even his souped-up Vega SV couldn't do much to the Generals in the crowd, so he swiftly fell back to Plan B. Continuing to fire, he reached out with his TK and grasped the surrounding air molecules within two hundred and fifty feet. With a sharp jerk, he scratched the hydrogen molecules in the air against each other like one would do to ignite a match, and the entire room became a hellscape.

Fire erupted around Tom like a bomb had gone off, with him at the center. The fire quickly grew to encompass the entire room, burning the Cragoloss' brain and heart, along with the still-screeching Cragost. Tom was left untouched, sitting in a small safe zone he threw up with his TK. The Cragoloss they were inside started groaning, sounding like a whale scaled to the size of a city.

Of course, the three black Cragost Generals inside the storm were almost entirely unaffected and continued their charge. The pain from the Cragost mentally connected to them made them sloppy and stumbling like drunkards, however.

Two of them collapsed from the shared pain, the third trudging through the fire toward the general direction it saw Tom in. When it got too close for comfort, Tom crushed its hearts as he did earlier, before moving forward and doing the same to the other two.

Tom kept feeding the fire oxygen from outside the room. The fire at this point was clinging to the fleshy floor, walls, ceiling, and organs of the Cragoloss. Eventually, he cut off oxygen altogether, extinguishing the fire in a matter of seconds.

He observed the carnage he had caused. While the black Cragost were relatively intact, every other lobster inside was a charbroiled, blacked husk. Some twitched an eyestalk or a leg every now and then, but none of them got up. The brain and heart were blackened, the latter having stopped beating and the former looking like some kind of horribly burned egg.

The Cragoloss' whale song had become stopped at this point, and Fate felt a slight momentum downwards like he was in a descending elevator. Taking that as his cue to leave, he rushed back to the room containing his Shadow Jumper, the momentum slowly but steadily increasing.

Finally finding the room, he skidded to a stop, cursing. "I supposed it was too much to hope for, but man, am I fucked," he muttered.

The Cragost had destroyed his ship, bits and pieces of the walls and roof scattered around the hangar. The claw marks on what remained indicated that a General Cragost or two had done the job, but luckily, they were nowhere to be seen.

Swearing once more, he looked somewhat frantically around for a way to escape, before his eyes alighted on a Cragolo. Looking at the hangar 'doors,' he noticed that a hole was still open in the side. The Cragoloss must have died before it could close it.

"This is a bad idea, this is a bad idea," he repeated again and again, climbing onto the Cragolo with some struggle. Reassuring himself that his grip was sufficient, he used his TK to shove the rear of the Cragolo, forcing it to take off with a low keen.