Ilyana was as stunned as everyone else when the whistling mass closed in. It cast a shadow deeper than the trees and the whistlings quickly became cackles and screams as it neared.
A bubbling meteoric mass of red and black destruction.
She only barely noticed as Brontë all but teleported onto the scene with Mend in an electrical haze.
It was all she needed to see. They'd been together long enough for her to know how severity looked on him. In the way the weather changed around him and how he got big eyed and looked like his old self before the midnight sons, homicidal brothers and life as a leader of X-Kind.
It always broke her heart a bit. The Royal Demi-god was ultimately just as human as anyone. In ways. But it was also motivating. He was man. He felt fear. And still he fought onward.
As did she.
The moment she saw him, flying in with a dozen lizard-people to be saved, she got to work.
Instead of trying to blip back and forth before the meteoric mass hit, she opened the teleporting disc beneath her feet. She'd done it a million times. She once did it so many times she fell into Limbo in her sleep.
It used to hurt. It made her nerve endings burn and her vision blur.
It felt that way again as she opened the portal and expanded its radius to swallow the entire clearing.
She didn't have time to motivate herself or siphon some extra burst of strength. She simply had to perform.
The floor turned blue.
It felt like all the wind in the world was pulled to hover and coalesce over Bronte.
The meteor hit with a hideous pop and scream.
They all fell into Limbo.
***
The screams became warbling demonic howls and echoing cracks of a magically archaic world.
Brontë stood on a familiar cliff side overlooking the world of demons all declaring loyalty to their queen.
Brontë spun around and found everyone behind him looking just as disoriented— if not more so.
"What was that?" Ilyana asked.
"Meteor….. but… I don't know. It was off." Bronte said.
"What do we do now?" Gabbie asked.
"Let me out." Bronte said quickly.
"W—"
"There's still lizard-people out there. We didn't get them all. That thing could've been there because of us. Even if it isn't, I'm the only person with the power to do something." Bronte thought back on the one who helped him.
"You just had your counter-arguments ready, huh?" Laura asked.
Brontë nodded and eyed Ilyana, "I'm out."
"Not without me."
"You tripping or what? If you come with me, the demons here come after everyone else." Bronte said, referring to the scared and confused lizard-people.
"Then it sounds like another Queen is needed." Ilyana tossed her sword.
Laura caught it and immediately transformed. Instead of her skin turning charcoal grey like Ilyana's demon-queen form, Laura gained dark splotches or stripes resembling a tiger. The bones in her face thickened as she gained larger and sharper canines and her eyes shifted to amber feline slits. At her back, massive hawk-wings unfurled and at the left side of her forehead, a ram horn spiraled.
Laura growled as she shook and let off heavy steaming exhales.
They all waited. Tense.
The fires of the Soulsword shifted from blue to yellow.
"What are you waiting for, hermano?" Laura huffed.
Brontë popped his claws.
Ilyana's skin turned to steel— resembling her brother Collosus.
She summoned her teleporting disc to re-enter the Savage Lands.
As they fell, a blur from behind crashed into Bronte, causing him to come tumbling out on the other side with none other than—
"Logan."
But Bronte wanted to say Wolverine as the beastly mutant took a defensive stance and roared at the rising mass of black and red slime.
Quickly, Bronte got up. At the same time, the slime took solid form— many forms.
Wild rhino-headed lions, massive flightless birds, monstrous men, giant serpents and more.
"Welcome to the Savage-Hunt!" They all said in hysterical and howling laughtered unison.
"Do you recognize this?" Ilyana said as she stood beside Bronte.
"Yea. They're Symbiotes. Get the kids. They're underground and in the trees."
"Got it." Ilyana said.
"G—"
Logan growled, "C…..CARNAAAAGE!"
All hell broke loose.
The symbiote swarm charged.
Brontë sent a focused blast of wind sweeping across the ground with so much force that a number of the Symbiotes lost their legs.
The denser ones simply tripped.
Brontë took advantage and closed in, running his flaming claws into the face of a rhino-headed lion construct.
The thing slid in the grass as it held on with his claws in its face.
The symbiote skin bubbled and shifted like blood mixing with water. It's eyes looked up at him.
"Was that supposed to hurt?" The beast shook its head, breaking free of Bronte's claws before charging and sending him crashing into a tree.
Before he could hit and lose his wind, a teleporting disc had him changing direction, traveling through Limbo and reappearing beside Ilyana.
"Carnage is immune to fire." Ilyana said. "He's Venom's offspring."
"Symbiotes get stronger every generation." Bronte remembered, "So physically, at minimum, he's stronger than Mend…. and Raze."
A horrifying thought considering there were thousands in the jungles and more coming somehow.
Before they could formulate a better plan, red and black serpents burst out of the ground.
Symbiote serpents.
One swallowed Bronte. It's insides were endless rows of teeth and poisonous barbs that stabbed into his skin and expanded there, tearing him apart from inside.
"DELISHISSSS!!!!! GOOD CRUNCH!" The serpent hissed as Brontë raged from the inside.
He roared from the pain. At the same time, a lightning bolt fell from the storm cloud overhead and exploded the symbiote construct.
Brontë hit the ground steaming right as three Symbiote gorillas came running after him.
With the little time he had, he inhaled once and roared deafening winds.
The gorillas were atomized.
In the distance, Ilyana battled a pack of symbiote wolves from attacking three lizard-kids while Logan fought a symbiote pteradon through the canopy.
Ilyana was a blur of blinking discs and steel skin. She was everywhere and nowhere by the command of her own mutant abilities. All at the same time, she grabbed up and transported casualties and natives.
No sword, no magic. Just steel and speed.
But.
"I thought I heard more…" He considered distantly on the small number of lizard-people remaining that he was seeing.
Brontë would've been more appreciative if another serpent didn't come out of the ground.
He sidestepped it and blew iced winds along its body, freezing the construct before slashing it a dozen ways zapping it out of existence.
Another gorilla. This one had antlers that it used to try and run Bronte through.
His Vibranium weave suit had other plans, causing him to simply be knocked into a tree.
From the canopy a dozen symbiote monkeys descended.
He activated the kinetic build up in his suit, sending a Vibranium shockwave outward in all directions.
It was loud. Forceful.
The monkeys were erased.
The gorilla charged on with its antlers now sharper and denser to try again.
"Someone request kebab!?" The gorilla laughed.
Bronte jumped up and flipped over the gorilla, sending its antlers into the tree where it got stuck.
From there, he slammed his claws into its back with a vicious downward slash.
A severed spine fell from the opening.
Followed by a lizard-woman.
The symbiote slithered off of the flayed corpse.
Another set of Symbiote monkeys swung over to Bronte and landed surrounding him in his shock.
"What? Cmon, hero!" One of the monkeys pressed. "Why won't you fight us?!"
"I think he's scared!"
"That's fine. We'll cover for ya! GAHAHAHAH!"
The monkeys tore into eachother like savages using tooth, claw and tail in ways Bronte had never seen.
He moved quickly, sending bursts of wind and ice to try and separate them.
Where he succeeded, they began to tear into themselves.
By the end of it, they were all dead. It happened in seconds.
And the symbiote remains slithered away revealing children. Lizard-people children. Mauled and mutilated. Ones he'd only just seen playing with Gabbie and Junior.
Bronte's eyes went wide.
A bullet fired off in the distance and hit Bronte right between the eyes.
He hit the ground limp and unmoving.
In the distance, another wearer of the Carnage symbiote crouched in the trees with extra limbs holding the branches to stabilize him and extra eyes formed in the mask to maximize his vision as he aimed down the barrel of his sniper— reinforced and made worse in design by his symbiotes biological integration.
He was a horrific hybridization of predatory aspects across species.
His symbiote skin was a shifting collage of leopard spots, tiger stripes, scales and shingled metal armoring. His mask was sometimes tactical, sometimes beastial.
Everything was joined under the aspect of the hunt. Of an apex predator.
And the chaos that followed.
The mask slithered away revealing a grizzled man with greying black hair and a thick beard. He was missing an eye and entire cheek on the left side of his face, revealing black gum and sharpened teeth.
When he spoke, he did so with a heavy Russian accent.
"When hunting the worlds most dangerous predator— the hero, it's best to break their heart first. Many will rage— they grow dangerous. Like a cornered cat. But so too do they grow predictable."
It started to rain suddenly.
Hellish thunder shook the earth as lightning whitened the sky.
The man's mask returned and carnage took over, "GAHAHAHAH! This one's scary! I was tired of slaughtering— I MEAN HUNTING.. the same village bozos and dinosaurs all month. This hunt is what WE needed! This is the challenge we've been waiting for!"