Variant Strain

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Everything seemed to stop momentarily, but then the immense, now crimson Rhino bellowed and everything began happening all at once.

Peter took a deep breath. The air filling his lungs was redolent with the Hydra scents. Here was the sickly carrion sweetness he knew best, then the acrid ozone tang of the Russian variants, the dustier older scent of the low grade infections that the Thunderbolts sported, reminiscent of Hank Pym... and newest of all. The copper laced, blood-rich scent coming from Harry. The one that lingered on the mound of biomass that had once been the infected mob and on the massive Rhino they were facing.

Everything expanded in that moment. Peter's perspective exploded from beyond his body. Unexpectedly taking in the awareness and senses of everyone in the room. He saw through Cletus's eyes. And Donna's. And Cain's. And MJ's. Ten pairs of eyes scattered throughout the room, interpolated by a single mind. His prioproception... his sense for his body and its position expanded to include even Petruski, Schultz, and Bradley, positioned as they were closest to the doors, guns firing at the Rhino. The rest of the Thunderbolts were just beyond the doors, continuing to push May, Gwen and Anna down the driveway to the gates of the estate.

Reflexes mingled with the conscious knowledge and awareness of range of motion, physical calculations. How everyone and everything in the room would move.

How they could move.

How they would react.

Motions projecting forward in time, interacting with instinct and reflex. Imposing shadows of movement and intersections of those motions.

Every moment shaped.

Every movement plotted.

Sto d'zan che'ir.

Peter raised a hand as the roiling biomass surged. Tendrils filled the air as it reached out for him. He caught a handful of tenrils all across his forearm. The rest, Peter simply allowed to strike at him. The tips of the tendrils were capped with bone-shards that either raked against his skin and clothes, or caught on his body.

Where the tendrils embedded, the flesh closest to his skin began to boil. Stringy, rust-red flesh seeming to ripples away from the points of impact, chasing its way up the tendrils. The rust deepened to a darker brown, then to nearly black, the color of a hardened scab as those tendrils closest to him lost their flexibility and began to crumble. The dark color and hardening spread down the tendrils that had made contact. Flesh seethed and seemed to writhe away from the blackened portions, but it surged up the tendrils, causing the main body of the infected mass to try to pull itself back, rolling vaguely up the stairs and away from Peter.

With the distraction of the mass of flesh and the tendrils pulling away, the Thunderbolts and the rest of Peter's... selves? Friends? And MJ... began a far more coordinated attack against the crimson-skinned Rhino.

No one actually spoke as they moved and Peter knew at some level they'd all already agreed upon their roles. Knew how everyone needed to place themselves and what had to be done to handle this quickly.

MJ and Donna aimed higher. Donna's rifle chattering as it traced a line across the Rhino's face and brow, finally intersecting with it's left eye. At the same moment that MJ's more carefully aimed pistol shots took out it's right eye.

The Rhino clapped both hands over the ruined sockets as it threw its head back and bellowed. Glowing crimson gas leaked from between its fingers as it seemed to struggle. Peter knew fresh flesh would be boiling into those sockets even now, rebuilding the damage.

It would only take a moment.

But they had already accounted for that moment.

Bradley, Petruski and Schultz all knew that they had to stop shooting at that moment and run.

Cain and Cletus both dashed in closer. Cletus had a knife in hand, low and leading. He used his speed and threw the entire weight of his body behind the blow for the momentum to drive that knife into back of the Rhino's knee.

Peter idly noted that Cletus was keeping up a string of obscenities in a half dozen languages as the knfe went in perhaps an inch. Barely past the Rhino's skin, but enough for a gout of crimson to spurt from the injury.

Once planted, Cletus almost daintily stepped aside as Cain arrived. Heavier. Stronger. He slammed the butt of his rifle into the hilt of the knife with his own full weight backing that second blow.

The knife sank deeper, deep enough to cut into a few of the massive tendons the meaty part of the Rhino's knee. Definitely deep enough to be well past the relatively thinner armored skin there.

The Rhino's bellow changed in pitch and it swung blindly around itself, trying to get to those that had hurt it. It spun on it's injured leg, wobbling slightly as massive arms swept through the area just recently vacated by Cain, who had stepped back and Cletus who had nimbly continued away.

This now had the Rhino facing away from Bradley, Petruski and Schultz.

Schultz was smaller, faster and nimbler than Bradley or Petruski. He'd dropped his gun as he reached the Rhino and instead had unclipped a baton from his belt. The tip of it sparked with bluish white electricity.

The electrical arc slammed into the exposed sliver of metal that the knife had showing just past the Rhino's red armored skin.

The bellow turned into a howl as the leg that it had used to support itself spasmed, dropping the immense creature onto its back. Schultz grunted as the leg's jerking movements dislodged him and the baton, sending him sprawling back.

But he'd played his part. The Rhino was down on the ground with it's mouth wide open.

Bradley arrived a fraction of a second later, planting a heavy army boot on the thrashing Rhino's forehead as he slammed the corner of his riot shield into the open mouth, wedging it between now cracked, too white and flat teeth, forcing that mouth to stay open.

At almost the same instant, he and Petruski unloaded their guns into the wide open, unarmored mouth, angling their shots down its throat.

The repeated hammerblows as the bullets tore into the Rhino's soft flesh inside its mouth, beneath its armor were almost unbearably loud to Peter, hearing it through six sets of ears.

It thrashed even harder, throwing Petruski and Bradley off just as their guns clicked empty. Crimson gas spurted out of its nostrils and mouth now, making its already disturbing appearance even more terrible. It seemed to struggle to right itself, rolling over towards the stairs.

It was reaching for the biomass, obviously needing it to assist in its healing, but Peter was between it and its salvation. Lured into the right positions.

Perfectly placed.

Sto d'zan che'ir.

It ripped the riot shield out of it's mouth, showing a shattered gap in it's upper and lower set of teeth where Bradley had planted it. It was hurt. But still formidable.

But also far more vulnerable.

It charged blindly forward. It's eyes were still weeping red gas, still insufficiently repaired.

Peter pulled his fist back, the arm reweaving itself in a blur of black and red tendrils, becoming a massively oversized parody of itself. There were bright crimson threads woven through the muscle.

He stamped his foot down as he shifted his weight. Doube. Triple. Quadruple.

He cracked the floor beneath him, driving the almost comically oversized fist, a bludgeon of spiked, hard white bone and black, ropey muscle, towards the charging Rhino.

The collision sent a shockwave out that floored everyone else in the room. Peter's fist flared red. The charging juggernaut had flared its own crimson skin reflexively at the moment of contact. Unstoppable force met immoveable object and everything broke.

A column of faintly wavering red erupted, centered on them.

The floor closest to Peter and the Rhino completely shattered, collapsing beneath them. There was some sort of flooring further down, but that was ruined as well. The ceiling above them was smashed upwards first, the broken ceiling and parts of the second floor and the third floor above floating for just a moment.

Everyone stared in that moment of weightlessness as Peter lost his footing and the flooring, with the wreckage floating down around him, the Rhino broken and floating lazily against his fist.

He knew he had just enough time to say one word.

The moment was passing.

"Run!"

Then he plunged downward.

The wreckage crashed down on top of him.

As he tumbled downwards, he got a confused mass of impressions.

Running.

Stumbling.

They were on their way out.

MJ having to be dragged away as she tried to jump down into the wreckage after him.

Harry Osborn... or was it Dr. Essex? Either way... the Dorrek's mouthpiece... Giving a surprised expression at the section of ceiling that crashed down on him.

Wreckage raining down on the biomass that had been on the stairs.

Running out.

They were going to be fine, Peter reassured himself.

Now he had to deal with the Dorrek.

By himself.

And... he stirred in the darkness.

He was also pinned by wreckage.

He wasn't entirely sure what had happened to cause that destruction, but he supposed it was some kind of interaction between the way he had used his mass shifting clashing against the Rhino's. Something useful if he could cause it to occur on command... he could almost make out just how to do it... a matter of shaping the direction of a Pym particle burst into-- but at the moment...

He squirmed, managing to free an arm, getting it scratched up badly in the process. He could feel his flesh weave the injuries shut almost instantly. Trivial now.

Given that he was in the mansion's basement and likely several sublevels down, he noted to himself, seeing only the faint light above him past the mass of wreckage above his face... using something like that again in this situation would probably have been a bad idea.

The calculations still whispered against the back of his mind, quietly smug and certain that it would prove useful. Teasing whispers threatening to get louder once he started listening again.

He shook his head. He was trying to destroy the place after all, wasn't he?

He frowned then as his body began to break down into writhing tendrils, the smaller threads of his own body weaving their way free of the wreckage that had him pinned.

"Am I supposed to be destroying this place?" He asked aloud, not really expecting an answer, but prodding at the statement in his head to make sure it fit right.

It didn't not fit right? It was difficult to say for certain. He could still remember his own disassociation from himself. His... counterpart? The other Peter who'd spoken to him in their consensual hallucination had said that his powers would be reawakened. Peter had assumed it would also include synching back up with the other mind. His other self.

Somehow that hadn't happened. He knew that consciousness still existed. He could faintly feel it. Distant and watching.

He could also hear faint musical Chitauri whispering against the back of his metaphorical skull. Carefully walled off. Ready to begin screaming at him if he allowed it to.

Ready to begin screaming regardless if he paid attention to it for long enough.

Not much time, but he had a certainty that he wouldn't need much time.

He didn't have much time. That thought fit right, he considered.

There were no answers in that singular voice in his mind. Nevertheless, it was oddly comforting in its own way.

What had been the other voices in his head remained silent. They were in their own bodies now. He knew he could interface with them, but it wasn't the same as before.

Nothing was what he'd expected.

It really should have felt more odd to feel so lonely in his own head.

His body finished reforming itself. He was standing now. Off to one side of the mess. Free of the wreckage.

His eyes burned faintly, the darkness fading away as he felt his eyes reshape themselves to accomodate the lower light conditions.

The walls were plain cement grey. The undamaged parts of the ceiling were accoustical tile. The floor some sort of ceramic tile. Like cheap bathroom flooring. All very bland and unimposing. There were beds all around, shifted out of their neat rows by the crash. The place had the look of a budget hospital room. No privacy curtains, but a lot of empty beds.

The ceiling was a collapsed in wreck. There was a jagged hole where he'd fallen through. Much larger than he thought it should have been. Probably widened by the debris from the floors above crashing down into it. He was at least four or five levels down from the ground floor. He could hear the way the air was shifting between levels.

He was swimming in the coppery scent of the Dorrek's Hydra infection. It amazed him that he hadn't caught this scent in the mansion, but if the area had been as airtight as he suspected, that would probably have disguised it.

He had no doubt that this was the Hive. He was in the middle of it. There were sounds of movement and heartbeats and breathing all around him. The levels of the basement closes to the ground floor however felt... emptied out.

That must've supplied the mob.

But there were more down here.

So many more.

The wreckage near him shifted and a red glowing fist punched its way up and out of the mess.

Its skin was covered in a red haze and Peter noted dully that the Rhino had also survived the fall and was pulling itself free. That had been no surprise.

Its head pulled free, its features were a bloody ruin. Where the nose should have been was a squashed mass of flesh. The whole was practically glowing red with the gasseous haze leaking from its eyes and mouth.

It shifted and moved, and the wreckage beneath it kept shifting with it, preventing it from getting purchase or leverage. It wouldn't be trapped for long, but Peter supposed that would be long enough.

It opened its mouth intending to bellow its frustration, only to find Peter's hand jammed into its open maw and down its throat, silencing it before it could even make anything more than a strangled choking noise.

"Hush now. That's enough," Peter murmured softly to it, in what he realized was its native Russian, "Teper' ty mozhes otdohnut' " You can rest now.

Peter's flesh unfolded and consumed the Rhino from within. There was only a brief series of sparks of memory... tiny, pinprick flashes. Nothing overwhelming. It hadn't had enough mind left to remember much.

The memories settled quietly into his mind and gave him the layout of the Hive.

He walked to the door and set out to find its heart.

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