26 Vault of the Rampager

(Handsome Jack POV)

"DEAD?!! HOW?!!" Jack shouted to Blake, sounding as though he didn't believe that Nisha and Wilhelm were actually killed by someone from that wasteland.

"We don't know, Sir. But their corpses were just handed in for the bounties on their heads on Themis. We couldn't find out who turned them in, but the bodies were that of Nisha and Wilhelm without question." Blake stated plainly, his words causing Jack's mind to short circuit for a few seconds.

'What the hell is going on?!! First Angel, then the attack on Helios, and now Wilhelm and Nisha!!' Jack thought, his mind racing over the possibilities.

Roland and Lilith did come to mind, but they didn't come close to being able to pull something like this off. He had thought they might have been the ones to kill Angel, but now that he thought about it, that seemed less likely to be the case.

Whoever had done it would have needed to have been able to breach the defenses of the Satellite guarding Angel, and the defenses of Helios.

As good as they seemed, Lilith and Roland just weren't that good. Not to mention they couldn't hold a candle to Wilhelm in a fight.

'No, there's someone else responsible for this...' Jack thought, trying to figure out the hidden piece to the puzzle.

As far as he knew there shouldn't be anyone else out to get him, save for maybe a few of the previous board members of Hyperion, but most of them were 6 feet underground at the moment, and the ones that weren't were so scared they didn't even dare mention his name.

"Can we bribe those idiots on Themis to turn over who collected the reward?" Jack finally asked, hoping to get a read on who the unknown assailant was.

"I'm afraid not, Sir. The Dhal officials declined any offer we made, so we tried hacking into their servers, but we didn't get anything that could help us. Either they don't know who claimed the bounties or they're doing an excellent job of keeping us from finding out about them." Blake stated, his words causing Jack to lash out and throw a chair at a worker's head, knocking him out cold.

"How long before we can get the Moonshot cannon back into working order?!" Jack asked, trying to keep himself from losing his mind.

"The damage was excessive, and most of that whole sector was destroyed. The estimated time is about a month and a half if things go well, but I would expect 2 months. We're still trying to recover from what we lost in the R&D division, but things are going slow there. I'd estimate we'll never fully get back from that loss." Blake said, not holding back anything and causing Jack to go on another temper tantrum.

'This is going to be my whole week...' Blake thought tiredly, deciding now seemed like a good time to get back to his duties.

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(General POV)

A little over a month had passed since Brick and Mordy had come to live with Kane, and things were honestly going better than Kane would have thought.

For the three weeks they had been on Pandora, Brick and Mordy completely behaved themselves, at least to a degree that was possible for them.

For the most part they spent their time in the pool, gun range, and the gaming room Kane had built, though it was a style of gaming Brick loved more than anything.

Basically you entered a room wearing a bodysuit and helmet, and the room would construct real live scenarios for you to face. Brick had already massacred enough virtual bandits to have wiped out all life on Pandora twice over, and held a few records, just not the shooting scenarios.

The game didn't take into effect the powers of a Siren, but that didn't really matter to Kane. He held most of the records, and had even conquered a planet or two in the simulation, granted the planets were no longer capable of sustaining life, but he had still conquered them.

Other than that, Brick and Mordy had gone out to have some fun near Sawtooth Cauldron and Thousand Cuts. Kane and Maya had joined them a few times, and a small group was making a name for themselves.

Kane was already a monster among monsters to the people of Pandora, be it bandit or otherwise. No one really knew what he looked like beneath his mask, but didn't really matter to the people of Pandora.

As far as they cared, he could look like a disformed pile of shit and it wouldn't change the fear they felt towards him.

Kane had entered a town once, and a few people had gotten together to try and kill him in an ambush. It failed. Miserably.

When Kane left the place, the head of every person who had anything to do with the ambush had been severed from their bodies before the bodies themselves disappeared, leaving nothing but the heads as proof of their deaths.

Kane of course fed the corpses to his pets, but leaving the heads behind was a good reminder to all of them that that would be all that would be left of them should they try to come after him.

Needless to say, it worked. The bandit clans wanted nothing to do with him, and all of them were terrified to earn his ire.

Anyway, before Kane and the others left Pandora, Kane created a small base of sorts with all the comforts of home for Brick and Mordy.

Despite how good they were doing, he couldn't bring himself to leave them alone for the time he was going to be off planet considering Brick's track record and the fact that he had no idea how long they'd be.

Everyone, including Tannis, would be leaving with him this time, and he didn't feel like it was a good idea to leave them home alone.

He had asked if they wanted to come with him, but despite everything that happened with Roland and Lilith, they wanted to hang back for a while and make sure that Jack didn't do anything to surprise them.

They were both monsters, but Kane couldn't think of better monsters to have for friends, that was for sure.

They should be just fine until he got back though, because he did leave them with a stock of dry rations, weapons, explosives, shields, video games, ammo, some turrets, two vehicles, and a jet, though the jet was for emergency use only. With all of that, Kane didn't feel too bad about leaving them.

Once he had left Pandora, his first stop had been somewhere he could cash in on the bounties of Wilhelm and Nisha.

Nisha had only been worth a few million dollars, which was kind of low considering Brick was worth $99,999,999,999.99, but then again, Brick's was for 'killing everything that moves'.

Wilhelm on the other hand was worth a tidy sum of $666,666,666,666. More than double Kane's own bounty, but he hadn't been at this even close to as long as everyone else had been. Wilhelm also had enough kills to make up the population of a very large country, so there was that.

After that, the destination was simple. Open the vault on Promethea.

When they got to the planet in question, believe it or not, it was worse than the last time Kane had seen it, not that he thought that was actually possible.

I mean it could have been Pandora level of shitty, but that should still be a few decades for Promethea before it reached that level of crap.

"This is so exciting!!" Tannis exclaimed, thrilled to be off of Pandora for the first time in years, and to go and open a vault!!

"I know, right!! I'll finally get to see what a Vault looks like!" Maya said, equally as thrilled as Tannis was.

"Eh. I'm more interested in the loot than the Vault itself." Kane stated, not sharing the enthusiasm of everyone else.

Hell even Radar was more enthusiastic than he was, and she had been depressed since they left Dusty behind on Pandora.

That had been hard for her, but Dusty belonged to Brick, not her. Plus Brick would take care of her, so hopefully things should be alright.

"Where is the Vault?" Angel asked, ignoring the hype from everyone else. Honestly she was pretty excited to face what was in the vault as well, but she was a little scared too. Still wouldn't stop her from venturing down inside to see what all the excitement was about.

"Under the city, I think..." Kane said, sounding a little unsure. Thinking back to the game, he remembered traveling downwards through all sorts of tunnels, subways, and the like, but he wasn't completely sure on where exactly that led him in the game.

They had to do a few scans of the area and hack into a few terminals, but eventually Radar found what looked to be Eridian ruins inside a classified zone that had been blocked off.

"It's safe to assume that's where it is." Kane stated, locking in the area into his ECHO device, then pulled out an armored vehicle from nowhere before everyone got in.

It took a little over 4 hours to make their way down into the area where the ruins were, at which point they ran into the Eridian guardians.

They had to dig down beneath a slab of concrete that had blocked the way to the main tunnel, but in the time that would have taken days to get through something like that in his old world, Kane got through it in minutes.

The guardians were almost exactly like the ones from Pandora, but there were a few small characteristics that set them apart. They were robotic in nature and were made in the image of the Eridians themselves, but Kane thought they still looked creepy as hell.

The guardians were dealt with in relative ease, at which point they found themselves in a massive alien room, which had an archway for the vault completely intact compared to the one on Pandora.

It looked very similar to what Kane remembered from the game, but there was a lot more writing on the walls that he didn't remember seeing.

In fact, he didn't remember seeing any writing on the walls, let alone the giant mural, showing an image of what the Vault monster looked like, what it was called, and why the Eridians sealed it in the first place.

Tannis, Maya, Angel, and Luna had a field day going over everything in sight, taking pictures, writing everything down in books, and scanning anything that looked new to them.

Meanwhile Kane and Radar were busy setting up a welcome ceremony for the Rampager when they opened the vault. If you were given the opportunity to cheat your ass off, go hard or go home!! That was Kane's thought on the matter anyway.

Maya had wanted to open the vault right away, but Kane had looked at her like she was a moron for a good minute before he walked past her.

It didn't matter that they were already more than strong enough to deal with the monster, with a little bit of preparation, he could turn what might be a good fight into a one-sided slaughter, and honestly, why not? It made the most sense in his opinion.

In less than an hour the preparations were complete. On either side of where the portal would open, there were large contraptions that would shoot out large metal spears that were electrified.

There were enough explosives lining the ground to give God a bad day, and a 3 ton anvil hanging from the ceiling. The anvil seemed a little cartoony, but Kane had always wanted to try something like this.

Everyone looked at him like he had gone senile at everything he prepared, but he didn't care. What was the point of having all of this shit if he never used it?!

Ignoring the looks everyone was giving him, Kane ushered everyone to the far side of the room away from the Vault entrance.

Once they were all behind one of the giant pillars, Kane placed the key into the pedestal, which promptly sank into the ground.

Kane was already back with the others at the other end of the room before the pedestal was gone from sight, and they all watched as the archway lit up, opening a portal to another dimension.

Scarcely had the portal stabilized had a hulking monster jumped through it, smashing two powerful fists into the ground, then roaring loud enough that everyone had to cover their ears, save for Radar, who simply looked on with a smile.

The beast was still roaring when the spears shot out, skewering it with over 100 spears. When they retracted themselves back into the contraption that shot them out, the beast looked to be in a great deal of pain, but not dead.

Kane pushed the button, shooting the spears out once more, retracting them, then repeated the process 2 more times before dropping the anvil.

It looked very much like how a grape burst when you squished it between your fingers, though in this case it was a 3 ton anvil and the floor, with a 15 foot tall monster as the grape.

The walls were coated in a yellow liquid, which everyone assumed was the creature's blood, because there wasn't anything else that could be blood.

Kane was a little disappointed that weapons, ammo, and cash didn't come pouring out of the beast like a fountain, but that was just wishful thinking on his part.

However when he removed the anvil from what was left of it's corpse, Kane did find a few chunks of Eridium, only these ones were more dense than the normal Eridium he was used to dealing with.

Compared to a regular chunk of Eridium of equal size, the stuff here weighed about 100 times more, and was so dark it was bordering on black.

Tannis had a theory that it was what the beasts fed off of, and they would need large quantities to live. It seemed they condensed the Eridium together to make this.

Kane didn't care too much about the reasoning, but he was more than happy to pocket the Eridium for himself. In his mind he was thinking of how it made a bit of sense how Tyreen got so powerful from absorbing this thing in a weakened state.

She had essentially just absorbed all this Eridium in one go, which was pretty ridiculous in Kane's mind. He wasn't even close to being able to absorb even close to this much.

"I told you it was too much! You didn't even need the explosives!!" Maya said, sounding like Kane had done something wrong.

"Oh spare me, wonder woman!! There was no telling how that thing would have handled the spears or the anvil beforehand!! There is nothing wrong with being prepared!! You plan for the worst, but hope for the best!! I'm not about to risk my life when I could spend an extra 20 minutes on a defense that could save me! If your fucking Order of the Impending twats would have done that, they might have actually been able to put up a resistance!! But they didn't!! Because I was prepared!" Kane stated, irking Maya, and making everyone else keep whatever they were going to say to themselves.

They didn't like Kane's lectures, mostly because he was usually right or just didn't care about their opinions and said he was right anyway.

Ignoring everyone else around him, Kane quickly grabbed the explosives around him and stored them back inside his inventory with the Anvil and the spear machines, then made his way towards the portal which was still glowing strong.

The others all followed a few steps behind him, none of them hesitating in the slightest to walk through after him. It felt like walking through a film of water, only the feeling ended just as quickly as it had begun.

Once they got into the pocket dimension that had been the Rampager's prison, everyone was in awe of what they saw.

The background looked a bit dark and dreary, but there was a bridge going out over what looked like the abyss to a floating island. On the island was a giant statue of an Eridian, which gave off a dark red glow, which was what was lighting the place.

The bridge was lined with smaller statues of Eridian warriors, and though they looked cool, they weren't anything special.

Walking to the floating island, there were a number of stone statues surrounding the place with lines of text beneath them, but no one could actually read them.

Tannis could read bits and pieces, but she couldn't read everything. As she looked at that, Kane and everyone else was looking at the weird object floating slightly above the extended arm of a statue.

"The Eridium Resonator... What do you think it's for?" Angel asked, reaching out to touch it, but stopped herself midway, mostly because someone else beat her to it.

Before anyone else could, Kane grabbed the Resonator, then hooked it on his wrist before walking towards 1 of the many clumps of Eridium strewn about the place, then swung his fist hard, smashing the Resonator into it, causing the Eridium to explode into hundreds of tiny pieces.

Everyone gaped at the sight, all of them knowing just how hard Eridium actually was.

"That's just one setting!!" Kane stated, admiring his new toy. He got the gist of it from the game, but really it didn't go into detail on what this little contraption did.

It had always bothered him how he still had no idea how to shape the unknown ore that made up the Pearlescent Weapons, but seeing the Resonator and the condensed Eridium, he had a little idea on how to finally do that now.

He had a little theory of his own that the unknown ore of the Pearlescent weapons was Eridium that had been condensed to a degree that it was no longer Eridium.

It would take a bit of tinkering, but he couldn't wait to try building something with this thing.

Holding that off for now, Kane went around the room punching Eridium into smaller pieces of Eridium. There were even two chests caked in Eridium which Kane was more than happy to clear of the stuff.

Inside the chests, Kane found items of the same quality in which he wanted to make. A Pearlescent sniper and shield, both things Kane snatched away with a big shit eating grin on his face.

He wanted to just start shooting to his heart's content, but he knew this was neither the time nor place to do so.

Finally the last thing of note that he uncovered from a mound of Eridium, was an energy conduit that linked the vault with a second vault on Eden-6.

Tannis nearly orgasmed when she found out about it, and Kane wondered if her obsession over the Eridians was healthy.

Still, the Conduit actually gave Kane a few ideas for opening portals of his own, though it would be more akin to opening a gate between two areas in which he had marked or something, similar to how the Eridians had done here and on Eden-6.

He wasn't sure if it was possible, but so far the only limitations on his power had been his imagination, and lack of power, but he was doing a bang up job on fixing the latter issue.

"So we're going to Eden-6?" Angel asked curiously, looking towards Kane for an answer.

His vote was really all that mattered considering he was basically in charge of this whole shindig. That wasn't to say no one else had a say in where they went, only they would have to run it by Kane beforehand.

"It looks like it. Honestly I'm kind of looking forward to this trip!!" Kane said, smiling like an idiot.

"Why?" Angel asked curiously. She had done some research on the planet, and there really wasn't anything special about the place other than the fact it was run by the Jakobs Corporation.

"I've always wanted to eat a T-rex!" Kane answered, getting weird looks from everyone.

"Why in the world would you want to do that?" Maya asked, wanting to know what everyone else did.

Looking around at everyone staring at him expectantly, Kane shook his head in disappointment. "All the dinosaurs feared the T-rex! Now they're gonna fear me instead!!"

The only one who expected an answer like that was Radar, who simply laughed at his words, while everyone else nearly facepalmed. It was such a Kane answer, yet for some reason they expected an explanation that mere mortals couldn't comprehend.

"You're just a man-child!" Tannis stated in annoyance, though she did smile at the same time.

After that, everyone scanned what they could of the room, and Kane took all of the Eridium and a few pieces of the Eridian artwork, then they left the vault.

Once everyone was out, the glowing pocket of space that was the Vault seemed to wink out of existence before the pedestal rose from the ground, depositing the Vault key for Kane to grab and store back inside his inventory.

"This vault was almost as fun as the last one!" Luna started cheerfully, jumping up and down in excitement.

"What?! You were at the Vault on Pandora?!" Maya asked in disbelief.

"Oh yeah!! Kane took me that time too! That's when I turned into a Siren!" Luna answered, remembering that day like it was only yesterday.

It was after all a day that had forever changed her life. So was the day she met Kane, but that one was less pleasant.

"You know what that means, don't you? Me and Luna are 2-1 in hunting vaults over you guys!" Kane said, trying to start something, but no one seemed to pay him much mind.

They knew how he liked to start shit like this, and trying to compete with him was ridiculous in and of itself.

"Whatever!" Maya said, sounding as though she didn't care, but the look of annoyance on her face said otherwise.

With that done, everyone made their way back up to the surface before boarding the Arcadia and launching into orbit.

Their departure did raise some red-flags across Promethea, but any defenses that had tried to shoot them down were destroyed by two very large turrets that came out of the Arcadia's underside.

"Nice shooting, Radar! But you missed that turret near the coast." Kane said, only getting a smile from Radar.

"No I didn't!" She stated, which was punctuated by a very large blast that was hard to miss at their altitude. In his defense, Kane didn't bat an eye at the scene, having expected something, after all, Radar had yet to miss anything when it came to killing someone.

"That's why she's my best friend!" Kane stated, stating something everyone already knew.

I mean really, he had spent billions of dollars already on a project to create her perfect the body and didn't bat an eye about it, and the project wasn't even done yet.

You'd be hard-pressed to find someone that would be willing to go through such great lengths for even a family member, let alone an A.I. that already had hundreds of bodies it could jump into.

It took a few days, but eventually they got to the orbit surrounding that of Eden-6. It looked very green from what they could see from space, and Kane estimated it was the exact opposite from his old life's earth, only many times bigger.

75-80 percent landmass, while the rest was covered in water, though from Radar's research, it wasn't salt water.

"Eden-6... A primeval wilderness, left mostly untrampled by the boots of industry. The Jakobs Corporation seems content to share reign with the wildlife, only settling the planet enough to support the logging operations that supply Jakobs weapons and their fine wooden features. Travel-review on the ECHO.net sites has described Eden-6 as "moist" and "Aaah, it's got my leg!!" They're only slightly better than Athenas, which isn't that big of an accomplishment." Radar stated, getting a chuckle from Kane and a frown from Maya.

She had always thought Athenas wasn't so bad, at least before she met Kane. After traveling all over the galaxy, she had learned how backwoods Athenas actually were, but that didn't mean she didn't enjoy it. Really it was a breath of fresh air compared to the other planets out there, especially Pandora.

"So I take it you don't want to be here for too long?" Kane asked, though he already knew the answer.

"Not really, but I won't complain if you want to stick around for a while. I already hacked into one of their satellites, so I should be able to occupy myself anywhere on the planet. Plus I have my sweet little Angel, so I won't be bored at least." Radar answered with a smile as she turned to look at the woman in question, whose face was now flushed red.

"We're so weird..." Maya stated, thinking about their little group.

Four Sirens, a mad scientist, and perhaps the world's most deadly A.I. all together in one little group.

That wasn't even mentioning how one of said Sirens was the only recorded male siren in history, who was having intercourse with two of the other sirens on a daily basis.

There was also the fact that the A.I. could get off from one of the Sirens, which was downright creepy on a good day. Honestly... Maya wasn't sure what she thought about their group.

Don't get her wrong, she enjoyed the hell out of it, especially her sex life, but it just seemed weird from an objective point of view.

"I wonder if Eden-6 is going to be around when we leave." Luna asked humorously, though there was some genuine concern mixed in her voice as well.

"Whatever! Let's go find a dinosaur!!" Kane said, all too excited to show the planet who was the dominant predator.