Ainōryoku Sentai Nightmærangers #27 (Patreon)

The Statement Of Jaselle Alhambra, Part 4

Jaselle had always thought spiders were smooth. The small spiders she'd seen around the corners of the house had seemed so, and even the few larger palm-sized ones that had her mother shrieking and calling for one of the males in the house to deal with it seemed like they had a hard shell and limbs.

Up close, the giant spider—the Gagambuhala, a name which was both a mouthful and childish—was covered in fine hairs that all fell in the same direction, creating the illusion of smoothness at a distance. Its body was the size of a bus, its legs all at least three times that in length. It was smoking, some of the hairs curling and getting shorter like they'd been stuck into flame. She saw this from below, through the lens of an obsidian shard that had come to rest on some debris that had been woven into the nest. Her plasma was blind, barely able to make out hazes around her, and most of the light she saw were either the sun or herself…

Jas pulled herself together, the plasma that made up her form clumping together unnaturally as she pulled in the heat that she'd released. Plasma turned to lava, and she was blind until she remembered to make obsidian shards float on her surface so she could see. She let a heat radiate around her. It was only the heat of molten rock rather than the fire of a star, but it was still enough to make the Gagambuhala move away from her, its hairs all smoking. Jas instinctively rose up, forming limbs and a head for herself, moving her volcanic glass towards that head.

They had fallen into the middle of the street, the asphalt bubbling under her, the nest smoking but not actually burning. It looked like someone had set a headful of hair on fire, its shape slumping and collapsing from the weight of the debris covering it, the parts closest to her curling up and shriveling from the heat. Some of the decorative plants in the island in the middle of the street had been crushed, or were flapping and wilting in the rising heat. There was no smell, since she had no nose, but Jas suspected it wasn't very flowery.

The street seemed… wider, somehow, than it had from above, and Jas realized why as the Gagambuhala tried to climb the building across the street as it kept putting distance between itself and Jas. The Gagambuhala moved with the sudden burst of speeds of its smaller kin, but even though it wasn't that far away, it never seemed to reach the building, seemingly stuck eternally between the road and the narrow strip of sidewalk, even as its legs moved in large, ground-eating strides. The fact her eyes wanted to ache despite the fact they were made of volcanic glass told her this was Ku—Magenta's powers at work, warping space to too keep it from reaching the buildings and leaving it stuck on the ground.

It suddenly stopped moving, as if confused. Then it turned and started skittering down the street in the direction away from Jas, who was standing upright again, her lava solidifying so she wouldn't have to concentrate to keep her shape. Jas could have killed it instantly, but that wasn't an option in a populated area, or even an unpopulated one without Magenta to redirect the stream and possibly something to absorb the heat into until she could draw it back. Beam-like streams of her hottest plasma were impressive but not safe. Not for this.

The fire within her burned, filling her with excitement, eagerness, and glee. Her hand came up and turned to plasma, heat and matter gathering there, building pressure so she could fling it forward, pointing towards her enemy—

She grabbed her forearm with her other hand and wretched it upward, even as she pulled in all her heat and willed the plasma back to volcanic rock. There was resistance, and while she was able to draw in heat, a brilliantly glowing stream of plasma shot upward into the sky, the very air in its path burning apart from the shear heat. Above her, the remaining strands of web from which the nest had hung started to curl, shrivel and burn,

Distantly, she heard the exclamations from the others, perceived through the little bit of herself she'd left behind with the bits of them, felt vibrations shaking up from the ground to her legs as if trees were falling on the road. She struggled to pull in the massive amount of heat, tried to force the plasma back into lava. She pushed back at the fire within, tamping down on the urges filling her, willed the stream to stop.

Slowly, the stream weakened as she forced the fire back inside herself, ripping the heat from the atmosphere before it could spread, forcing plasma back into gas. Jas felt like she should be panting, but there was only the heat that she had to control and the fire she had to reign in. She'd needed to burn, but this was too much!

Finally, the pillar of light at the end of her hand cut off, and she forced her hand solid again, the volcanic rock glowing red before she managed to pull the heat from that as well. The lava inside her chest churned, occasionally flashing into plasma and back again, and it made a good substitute for the racing heartbeat she felt she should have.

Jas shook her head, even though it really didn’t do anything to clear her mind, and forced herself back to the present. She'd lost control again. The embarrassment and mortification of the harm she could have caused managed to drown out the excitement and eagerness, leaving her with a relatively clear mind.

"I'm fine!" she managed to say through the piece of herself. "I'm fine! I'm in control again!"

"Good, because your little deathray is waking up the military," At—Yellow said. "We need to either finish this or retreat again!"

Jas looked around, trying to find the—there! Further down the street, across a distance that seemed to shift and grow farther and closer from moment to moment, the decorative plants growing from planter boxes in front of buildings and decorative trees growing at intervals along the sidewalk had grown. Originally thin and a bit sickly, they had become engorged, trunks growing to pillar-like thickness as they tried to entrap the Gagambuhala. It struggled in their grip, ripping some still-spindly trees out of the ground only to have them continue to grow and try to wrap around its body, managed to squirm out of the grip of one only to find itself being wrapped by another. In the shifting, squirming mess of increasingly thicker wood, the Gagambuhala was just managing to squirm through. One leg became entrapped, and it seemed to roll up on itself and bit through its trapped limb to get free, blue blood-like liquid dripping from its wound.

"I can't grow trees fast enough to catch it! It's climbing on them!" Green cried.

"I'm getting my main part into position! I just need to get bigger than sand!"

"Well, hurry up!"

From the top of the building next to the Gagambuhala fell a torrent like a water fall. But instead of breaking up and dispersing, it remained a single, flowing stream, looking deceptively like syrup. At the last moment, the water turned into a mass of ice, and it slammed into the giant as a literal weight, knocking it down like the itsy bitsy spider, and back onto the road. Jas felt the impact of it vibrate through her legs as she tried to run towards them, forcing her heavy body to move but not daring to turn back into plasma lest she lose control again.

"No Red, stand back!" Yellow called. "They've got this. Hang back and get ready to deal with it if it gets loose, but they can handle this now!"

Jas wanted to protest, so say she was back under control, but the spark of defiance from that very impulse made the fire roar as it diluted the embarrassment holding it back. "Understood," she said, coming to a staggering, skidding stop as she bled of the momentum her she'd built up. there wa no mention of how she'd lost control, but she could feel it there, hanging in the air like the threat of grandmother's wrath.

She watched, feeling useless as the ice collapsed into water, flooding the street under the Gagambuhala as it struggled to get to its feet, some limbs hanging broken and bleeding from the impact as it lay on its back. One long limb reached out, touched a metal guard rail to keep pedestrians off the street, and two long, deceptively small hook-like claws protruded from the mass of hairs, hooking onto the vertical metal bars. As the water surged up as if erupting from a spring, it ripped the length of fencing out of the concrete sidewalk, bringing the metal feature to its mouth. The surging waters splashed among the hairs on its back, soaking into them and hardening into ice as the Gagambuhala's limb-like mouth parts seemed to open wide, biting into the metal.

Sounds of metal being torn and twisted filled the air as the beast seemed to chew on the fence, the ice beginning to grow, hanging from its hairs. The ice flowed down, touching the water on the ground and the two fusing together into more ice as the piles of wood heaved, moving with ponderous purpose towards the Gagambuhala, wood crashing as branches and roots moved unnaturally to get the whole trunk to roll along. Jas felt the fire surging with impatience, but she remained firm, locking herself in place like a pillar, focusing on keeping heat in and her substance to at least stay liquid if not solid…

The limb the Gagambuhala had been holding near its mouth moved, there was a rapid staccato of impacts, and the ice that had been trying to weigh it down broke apart. Jas stared in confusion at what the beast was now wielding.

"Is that a harpoon?" came Magenta's voice, sounding as confused as she was.

The metal fence looked like… well, like it had been chewed on a lot be a giant monster. That didn't explain how the square length of fencing now had its mass compressed to a long, relatively straight shape that looked like a needle with an angular hook at the end, looking wickedly sharp for something that had been chewed on. Parts of it were sizzling slightly, and some kind of liquid dripped from it to the ground, where it smoked on the bare concrete and asphalt. It had chipped at the ice like a pick at the end of a piston.

It swung the limb with the harpoon, hooking a lamp post. The lamp post bent as the gagambuhala used it as leverage to pull itself upright even as the few bits of ice on its back started to grow and the water beneath it froze. With a grown of twisting metal the lamp post folded over completely and the Gagambuhala pulled the remains towards its mouth with another one of its limbs even as the limb with the harpoon at the end of it curled under and around its body, quickly chipping off ice as it used its remaining limbs to almost delicately step away from the mass of wood rolling and crashing towards it and started ripping the pedestrian fencing and lamp posts around it.

"I hate this stupid bug, it's so bullshit!" Green raged, sounding completely unlike her usual cheerful self. "Kill it, kill it, kill it!"

"Soldier incoming and tanks moving," Yellow announced. "They're keeping their distance, but if Magenta doesn’t do something it's likely going to start raining mortar shells around you guys! I'm tapping into their ears, they're freaked out by Red's deathray, they think the Gagambuhala might have made it or something."

"Wait, you're doing what?" Magenta said.

"I'll explain later!"

The Gagambuhala's functional limbs were moving in a strangely quick flurry, bringing the fences and lamp posts to its mouth as it dragged itself away from Green—or maybe her drones— even as it kept using the harpoon on one limb to chip at or drag out of the way the ice that Blue kept making to try and obstruct it, all while it chewed and…

"Oh, that's bullshit!" Green exclaimed.

At first, Jas was confused. The Gagambuhala had chewed some of the metal into a spiral shape and brought it to its rear. Something erupted from its backside, smearing a strange fluid on the spiral and it snapped the spiral onto one of its broken limbs…

It had made a splint for itself, Jas realized, feeling unsettled as she watched the spiral somehow tighten, keeping the two halves of the broken limb more or less aligned, letting it move the limb again to some degree. It gave it one more limb to propel itself while ripped out more metal street fixtures to chew on, making more spiral-shaped splints for its broken limbs.

Green hadn't been idle herself, however, and all the trees she'd been controlling had started to clump together, the disparate woods fusing together into a patchwork of different-colored barks into an initially spider-like shape, long curving trunks acting like legs as more limbs began to extrude from the central tangle, soon looking like a large, hairy ball. Thorns began to extrude from all its limbs, some long and needle-like, some of them short, curving hooks, some just covered in barbs. The leaves had almost all been stripped off, leaving it looking like a tangle of brambles, the distance giving it the illusion of smallness. From deep within the tangle came a hollow-rage-filled roar, and Green's drone—or possibly Green herself— partially scuttled, partially rolled forward to throw itself at the Gagambuhala, thorny tentacular vines flailing at it seemingly randomly.

"Aaannnddd Green's gone full kaiju," Yellow sighed. "That's not good. The military heard that, I think they might be calling an airstrike. We might have fifteen minutes before helicopters get here, twenty for jets. Maybe, I'm not sure about military response times— Magenta, you might have artillery mortars incoming! You know, in case getting hit by those is something you guys who aren't made of meat care about…"

Jas stood helpless, watching as the two clashed, Blue's water surging up around the monstrous thicket. Inside, the fire's excitement and fascination grew, but it didn't seem to be trying to get her to intervene. Jas was thankful for that, because she didn’t' know what she could have done that wouldn't have hurt Tammy short of bodily throwing herself at the monster. At first, it seemed like Green would overwhelm the Gagambuhala, since she had far more limbs, but even with splinted legs, it was able to move agilely enough to avoid her clumsy, angry attacks as it chewed on its makeshift harpoon. Suddenly the limb with the harpoon flashed, and one of Green's limbs went flying. It arced and crashed to the ground with the impact of a heavy tree trunk, twitching momentarily before lying still.

"It has a sword?!?!" Green cried. "Ugh, this is such bullshit!"

The thorny vines writhed and long thorns grew from their tips, clearly in imitation, and they curved down to stab down at the Gagambuhala, but it scuttled out of the way, and Green screamed in frustration as it lashed out and cut off another one of her limbs. Green threw itself forward in a sort of awkward hopping roll, as if intending to crush the enemy with her bulk, but it sidestepped nimbly and pounced on her despite Blue's efforts to weigh it down or compromise its footing with ice. Something began extruding from the Gagambuhala's rear as it began climbing on a violently flailing green. The Gagambuhala moved with agility, stepping on limbs after they stop moving or were in the process of drawing back to strike, even as more and more fluid extruded from the giant spider's rear, which was solidifying into thick threads.

"Green, I think you're being cocooned," Yellow said.

"Gee, ya think?!"

Yellow was right. The Gagambuhala was wrapping Green in web, tangling her limbs with increasingly thicker and stronger strands and binding her limbs to each other, restricting their range of movement. From below, the water surged upwards, becoming a ball that tried to wrap around the half-entangled form of Green, wrapping around her and becoming a ball of ice.

"Uh, thanks Blue, but now I can't move," Green said, suddenly sounding closer back to her usual self as the Gagambuhala leapt away from the now-frozen ball. "Help me get all this off and—what the fuck is it doing?!?!"

The Gagambuhala had picked up one of Green's fallen limbs and was chewing through it as it ripped out more lightposts. The wooden limb snapped, becoming shorter, and the spider's limbs became a frenzy of movement, masticated metal and fluid the fluid that became web from its posterior coming together and—

"I think it just made itself a prosthetic leg," Yellow said as the Gagambuhala attached the lengths of wood now held together by metal goings, drying web and spiraling metal onto the stump of its removed limb. As a sort of finishing touch, it somehow attached the blade-like tool it used to cut Green's limbs onto theend of the prosthesis, the bate metal and random splotches of paint still attached to it contrasting strangely with one another.

"This bug is bullshit!"

"Yes, Green, we can see that."

"I can't control that piece anymore!"

"Probably using whatever power it has beyond being big on it. We have to wrap this up soon boy and girls, the military's closing in. Magenta, we forgot to cover the underground parking garages and pedestrian tunnels, as soon as they realize they can't get at us overland they might start thinking of going through those. We need to finish it off or abort."

"We can't abort! Not again! This is the fourth time!"

"I've got this," Magenta said. "I'm in position and I've got mass! You all back off! If I can't finish it, then we need to go!"

From the top of one of the buildings nearby, pink sand suddenly rushed over the edge. Then the air seemed to warp, and instead of a falling straight to the ground the stream twisted and turned, somehow remaining straight and flowing even as it contorted to aim straight at the Gagambuhala. The giant arachnid moved, feet scuttling, but the air around it twisted, pink bits of sand and insects in shades of gray with pink dust on them surrounding it. The stream of sand slammed into it unerringly, coating it's hairs, wrapping around it…

And that was when the huge, house-sized pink rock that all the sand was coming from slammed into it at terminal velocity. There was a wet, pulpy sound as the Gagambuhala's body split open like a rotten fruit that had been stepped on in a spray of bluish fluid. Its limbs flailed and scrambled, but the weight of the stone was more than they could move, and all the Gagambuhala managed to do was tear itself apart as different limbs tried to stumble away.

The stone began to flow, moving almost like her lava as it began to engulf the large insect, and for the first time, a sound came from it. It was a high-pitched, panicked-sounding roar, one that seemed to make the fire flare brighter, and she could feel the shift in the urges that heralded it wanted to shift from spectator to participant, feel the hunger, the urge to devour rising…

"No!" she said aloud reflexively. "No, we're not doing that! We're going to get ready to leave!" A petulant, defiant urge came over her, but petulant defiance was something she was familiar with as the eldest child of eight, expected to keep the others disciplined. "No! None of that. We're leaving!"

Jas deliberately turned around and started walking away from where Magenta was wrapping around all the parts of Gagambuhala like thick syrup. She shed all of her obsidian, blinding herself to the sight as the giant spider was completely entombed…

Instead, she determinedly, deliberately forced herself to become plasma, and the world became an indistinct haze around her. Mentally gritting teeth that weren't there, she generated plasma at her feet, and with a burst propelled herself upward among the high rise buildings, keeping her heat in, forcibly keeping her plasma's temperature as low as possible. There was nothing to be done for her light, a brilliant, blinding radiance that reflected off the innumerable windows around her, turning the street into a corridor of crimson illumination…

The fire burned, and she let it… but only to a point.

Rising into the air, Jaselle Alhambra touched the sky, the fire inside her sullen and banked, burning with willful petulance.

Behind her, barely seen through eyes of plasma, the pink stone collapsed into sand around the corpse of the dead spider.

––––––––––––––––––

When the others returned to the rooftop with their circle of drones, they found Jas there sitting naked in the flesh, her back to a wall and her legs curled up to her chest to preserve her modesty, ever if she suspected they'd seen her through their drones when she'd landed and changed back completely. Her fists her clenched tight and her legs and knees ached from holding the pose for the time it had taken them to arrive. Wordlessly, she looked up to find Ate Sanny there, holding a pi—magenta cube, one a small round coconut, and a ball of ice. She met the impassive, expressionless gaze of the tall woman's compound eyes.

A slit opened at mouth level. "Time to go," she said, voice surprisingly gentle. "Unless you need some space?"

For a moment, Jas had a weird vision of being alone in an empty void, herself the only source of light…

She rapidly shook her head, both to dispel the vision and as an answer. The flame inside her still burned, and she let it spread, let her body turn to lava, let it collapse down and shrink, let it cool into an irregularly shaped lump of obsidian, the insides glowing red with the fir.

Jas sat there on the roof.

Seemingly hesitant, Ate Sanny stepped forward and knelt to pick her up. Yellow fingers reached for her slowly before gingerly touching her, as if they expected her to be burning hot.

There was only cold volcanic glass.

Ate Sanny's form shifted and collapsed, growing smaller as it spread wide wings that buzzed as they took to the air.