Exposed core

{This ending is part of the Finish the Story Contest, the 15th contest so far. Click here to see the contest…}

The Prompt

As the Kunst Meister tried to move with caution, the twist brought him a chorus of pangs along the neck, till exploding within his head its white vowel of pain.
Far away, to the south, the white smoke of the stalled hoverbike no longer stood out from the purple sky.
Everything in that cursed place was wrong and the black powder was a whisk, shaken by the suffocating wind of a perverse and tireless djinn.

Now he had the certainty that all those stories whispered by candlelight were not only true, but also a pale and dull representation of the deafening truth in front of his eyes.
At every shallow breath, the macabre dunes of the Obsidian Desert reminded him of the long distance covered.
Since he had left the hoverbike behind him, he had tried to taunt himself about the creeping and imperceptible movements of the sand. By now, however, it was no longer possible to ignore it: the dunes had definitively assumed the shape of deformed faces. The Meister struggled not to look at them but could not ignore those soulless empty orbits, which peered his every uncertain step. Those mounds were reproducing his face, multiplied in a kaleidoscope of abomination.

Among the dunes, madness used to arrive well before dehydration.

He almost did not notice that the Tesseract 19 could be seen to the naked eye, right at the horizon. The column pierced the black sea and challenged the streaked clouds. The awareness of his distance made him wince. That construction was huge, that artifact was Moloch's sharpest tooth.
The warm wind delivered to him, intertwined with dust, an imperceptible howl: the wail of the monolith, an omen of death.
The man waited, an immobile exoskeleton bent over the black sand. The helmet laying abandoned beside him. Soon everything would be accomplished, one way or another.

The Ending by @theironfelix

Now the Meister chose to unholster his canisters and took a swig of both water and rum. Picking up his helmet that lay dormant on the ground, he began the long track to Mulloch’s tesseract. Reacquainting the helmet to his head, he activated the scanners to spot any defenses that could jeopardize the inevitable today, none were standing on these blackened grains of death... yet he picked up activity from the skies.

Scanning once more, he spotted a few ærials and didn’t bother to pay attention. Then the tesseract bolted a high current arc of lightning towards them. They were eviscerated out of existence, no ash to commemorate the death and the deafening sound coming mere seconds later. Now it made sense why there was no defenses on the outside...

So he began to trudge carefully towards the tesseract, trying to scan for any underground structure he could drill in. There was no near-surface tunnels but he did saw tunnel worms, and he noticed they weren’t being shocked despite being in the danger zone and approaching the tesseract. Taking the chance, he took another swig of rum and water and began tunneling down to the closest worm tunnel.

Bracing for the fall, he landed and rolled unto the ground. He turned on the lights on his helmet and inspected himself, finding nothing but a flesh wound, but equally recognizing he left the gauzes and rolls in his damaged ride. Swearing to himself, he trudged on after determining that it wasn’t bleeding, now his mission needed to be completed.

The trudging was long and narrow, but he reached the end to see an exposed core. He would’ve straight up exploded it by now if there weren’t two problems: the defense team and the tunnel worms that was trying to consume such. Knowing his helmet was of no use here, he scanned the environment for the best path to get to the core. And he was about to commit to a suicide run if weren’t for the tunnel worm tunneling into and exposing the rear defenses.

Taking the chance, he bolted towards the exposed entrance. Bullets and worms often rearing to close for comfort, but he inched away from death everytime. Now he reached the dead tunnel worm and hopped onto it, immediately going into cover and unholstered his pythons to begin reloading them while inching closer to the core. Yet the patrollers made it hard for Meister to keep his cool, and he snapped into a gore-filled rampage until he reached it.

He grinned and kicked the doors, by then rushing down the terminal but suspicious of what was around the corner. Then he got to the core, he planted the explosives on each corner and armed himself with the trigger when running towards the exit, but the exit was blocked. Thinking it was the end, he pulled the trigger and a ‘splosion followed. All was dark... serene... and calm...

Then he coughed blood out...

The End

Cited posts

@f3nix - “Finish the Story: Week 15”