Starbound: A Space Odyssey 20 The Erchius Mining Facility Incident 8

It was a young man, he was wearing some kind of orange and yellow clothes, and a heavy mining hat with a flashlight attached at the top. In his hands, there was only a key looking object and a pistol on the other.

John looked a little more and discovered that the young man had killed himself. There was blood on the muzzle of his pistol and there was only one wound that was able to kill in the body, it was at the side of the head.

John depressingly sighed. He was able to tell that the miner had killed himself because it started to lack food and water after sometime.

John took the body and laid it on the ground. He used his fingers and closed the miner's eyes.

He took the key looking object and the miner's ID card and left with Lenny.

"...What have you taken?" Lenny asked John, trying to initiate a conversation to shook John away from the depressing mood.

"Don't know..." John inspected the object and he soon saw some words written on it, "It appears to be the key to control the Mining Laser Cannon of the facility." John then looked at the ID Card, "We are probably going to need the ID to open some kind of door, or activate the elevator, I think."

Both of them continued to walk deeper into the facility until they arrived at a huge and open s.p.a.ce in the subterranean, beneath them was the platform where the work elevators were, they just needed to take a stair to go there. The problem was...

"How many of those things are there?" John asked in wonder.

"Don't know..." Lenny also looked.

The platform beneath was filled with pink monsters slowly and blindly walking around with no apparent purpose. It looked like they were guarding the elevators to prevent people from going down.

John walked a little further forward and stopped by the handrail, "I don't think we can deal with so many of them."

"Yep... This Hyperion Sniper here takes 20 UE per second and I have only 1800 UE in my storage." Lenny observed the situation below. In his counts, there might be more than 100 Moontants there.

"Why do you have so much storage?" John asked.

"My Tier 1 Heavy Armor gives me about 600 UE. The rest comes from my upgraded PIPS."

"Oh..."

"So... What do we do?"

"From what I can see we have 3 options. Option 1, we go like crazy and bypa.s.s all of them and enter the elevator..."

"Sorry, but I not in the suicidal stuff."

"Option 2, one of us stay behind and create a distraction so that the other can go to the elevator..."

"Who is going to stay behind?"

"The one with the better shooting skills." John seriously said.

"Then you stay behind."

"Wasn't you the better one?"

"Was I ?" Lenny shamelessly asked.

John rolled his eyes, "Option 3, we attract them toward the hallways and wipe them out, slowly, one to three at a time."

"Hmm..." Lenny started to think about it.

John looked at his inventory and started to rain around searching for something that might be useful. Suddenly he felt a killing intent locking on him.

"Watch out!" Lenny jumped toward John and both of them fell backward.

*Bang*

A gunshot echoed in the open s.p.a.ce. It was difficult to hear from where it came. The bullet hit the wall that was behind John, the trajectory was aimed at John's head.

John pushed Lenny back and both of them started to roll around in the ground, dodging the incoming bullets.

*Bang, bang, bang...*

*Ding*

A bullet had hit right at John's back while he was rolling. Even though he had armor, the bullet was made of metal and not energy, it made a dent in the place where it hit.

"s.h.i.+t!" John jumped backward and retreated toward the entrance from where they came. Lenny also followed along.

*GROWL!!!*

They soon were able to hear the growl of tens of Moontants that had started to climb and walk up the stairs toward them.

"f.u.c.k. Connor, I think we need to go with Option 3!" Lenny shouted while running toward the entrance.

"Let's go!"

They entered the claustrophobic hallway and backed up a little until they were deep enough into the corridor.

*Growl!*

Hearing growling sounds fastly coming toward them, made John sweat. He reached for his other pistol in his inventory. With one weapon in each hand, he aimed at the entrance. Lenny also readied his sniper.

*Growl*

Soon enough the first Moontants started to pop out in the entrance. John recklessly pressed the trigger on his both pistol.

*Bang, bang, bang, bang...*

While he was shooting the huge amount of Moontants that were coming, there were times one or another mutant would survive John's barrage of fire and approach them. It was in this times that Lenny took the opportunities to fire.

Both of them seamlessly cooperated. As they kept their barrage of fire, the pink monsters would climb at their companions' dead bodies just to get closer at John and Lenny.

John and Lenny slowly retreated while keeping their pace in maintaining their barrage, the hallway in front of them was filled with dead bodies belonging to the Moontants, but it didn't seem to have ended, the noise they are making was enough to make the Moontants from all over facility to be attracted to their place.

"This isn't working!" Lenny shouted over the sound of gunshots and the siren.

*Bang, bang, bang...*

"I think we will need to blow them up!" John shouted.

*Bang, bang, bang...*

"But the pa.s.sage will be blocked!" Lenny disapproved.

*Bang, bang, bang...*

"There must be another way toward there! That sniper that was shooting us might have taken another route!" John shouted.

*Bang, bang, bang...*

"Alright! Do it then!"

John reached for the Core Fragments in his inventory and threw more than 3 of them in the monster horde.

"Fire!" John shouted.

Lenny aimed carefully at one of the Core Fragments and pressed the trigger.

*BOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!*

The whole base shook with the explosion. John and Lenny were thrown hard backward. They were sent flying for more than 20 meters before they hit a wall.

"*Cough, cough* Are you alright?" Lenny asked the bloodied John.

"I'm... Fine. Just some scratches..." John weakly responded.

Lenny looked at the hallway and saw that it was now blocked with the debris that fell from the hallway, "Now, what?" Lenny asked.

"We go back to the Overseer's office..." John weakly got up, "There must be a map there."

"Then... We better get going..."