Ch. 6: Thresher Maw

The Mako landed on the rocky landscape of Edolus with a bounce.

"Eitri said he'd be using an 'archwing' what are th- nevermind, Eitri just flew out of the Normandy with wings attached to his back and a giant cannon in his hands." Garrus said.

"That's freaking awesome!" Tali said excitedly.

"Thank you. It's something I made based on other archwings and other things. I call it Hyperion. It has adaptive inertial dampeners that account for acceleration so I can accelerate omnidirectionally without having to worry about g-forces or get launched in another direction by a laser meant to cut through ships without getting nauseous. I added some artillery turrets to them too, so I can blast heavy fighters during space battles and aerial bombardment during ground missions where a bit of collateral damage is allowed" Eitri said.

"Glad we get some air support." Shepard said.

"I got Ordis remotely scanning things with my archwings from the Rift, so we'll be able to spot anything strange. I'll go scout ahead and look for the source of the distress call."

"You do that."

Eitri flew towards the source of the call and found an intact transmitting beacon, a broken tank, and a bunch of bodies in a large, flat area of land. He reported it over the comms.

"Shepard, there's a perfectly intact transmission beacon next to a shredded tank and a bunch of dead bodies. Nothing else here. Just a giant, round, and flat patch of land " Eitri said.

"Scans show a series of tunnels underneath and something huge traversing them." Ordis said

The Mako, which had been trailing behind, suddenly stopped.

"Ow! Why'd you stop?" Garrus said, rubbing his head that was slammed into the turret.

"Ordis, did you say that there is an undamaged beacon sitting next to a destroyed tank?" Shepard said with anger in her voice.

"Yes Commander. There are also tunnels below it." Ordis said over the comm.

"Garrus. You drive. I'm taking over the turret."

"Wait. What's going on?" Tali asked, confused.

"That, my quarian friend, is a thresher maw lair. And someone's been luring people to it." Wrex said.

"So it's a trap? Why don't we just avoid it?" Tali said.

"I witnessed my entire squad get killed on Akuze when we got attacked by several maws at once while investigating the disappearance of the pioneers there. We found the settlement intact, but no one was there. We decided to set up camp in the settlement when the maws attacked. They took us by surprise and all 50 of my squad died and we couldn't get most of the bodies back. I always thought it had been a setup, since thresher maws are usually more likely to eat each other than hunt together and the settlement was way too intact for them to die to the maws. This is the same. Someone lured that squad to the maw. If we don't kill the maw and bring back what we can of the dead soldiers, I won't be able to sleep at night." Shepard said.

"Good enough for me. You want me to distract it? Kill it?" Eitri said.

"Kill it if you can. One less maw in this galaxy makes it that much safer. Be careful since even if you can fly, they could still hit you with their acid spit or leap out to bite you or slash you with it's scythe arms." Shepard said.

"Wait, so you're saying I'm about to fight a giant subterranean abomination with scythe arms and acid spit? Next you'll tell me it came from spores carried on asteroids and has a habit of sticking its head out of the ground at random places to attack before retreating back underground." Eitri said amusedly.

"That is how they spread and how they attack. How did you know that?" Shepard asked.

"You've gotta be joking. Seriously? Then I know how to fight it. I've fought something really similar, just smaller and with legs and three torsos."

"You'll have to tell me about it later. For now, let's kill the maw."

"Roger that." Eitri said, flying over the clearing and activating the six modified Arquebexes hidden in the main wings of the Hyperion. He aimed them at a part of the clearing where the tunnel system seemed weakest and held his nonexistent breath.

'Time to see if the inertial recoil nullifiers work as planned. Voidrig can only use two of these if it locks itself securely in place. Plus, these are modified for higher power in every way, so firing this many would normally launch me a hundred meters backwards.' Eitri thought to himself.

Eitri tensed and fired a shot from all of the turrets. The archwing shook slightly, but didn't move from its hovering position. The people in the Mako saw twelve dark glowing projectiles streak towards the ground, then a tremor they could feel through the Mako hundreds of meters away. They then felt an even stronger tremor as a giant worm-like beast with scythes for hands burst out of the ground.

"THAT'S a thresher maw?! I'd heard the horror stories of quarian soldiers sent to investigate possible colony worlds, but I thought they were exaggerating about the size." Tali said.

"Ha! They can get much, much larger. Thresher maws only get bigger with age. That one's probably around 1000 years old, barely an adult. It's a lot smaller than the ones on Tuchanka." Wrex said. "Shepard's survival on Akuze even reached us Krogan. She managed to kill five adult maws by the time she was rescued. To put it into perspective, I was the first one to kill a thresher maw without mounted artillery among my kind in several thousand years during my rite of passage into adulthood and I became a legend."

"The rumors don't take my squad and resources into account. I'll tell you the story when we get back. Garrus, when we get over the hill, start evasive maneuvers to avoid the maw's acid and scythes. Use the booster and vertical thrusters when you need more maneuverability to dodge." Shepard said.

"The tremors stopped. What happened?" Ashley asked as the Mako drove over the crest of the ring of hills surrounding the thresher maw nest. When they leveled out and looked at where they last saw the maw, they all gasped in shock. The maw seemed to be frozen in time mid-lunge while Eitri drew what looked like a massive energy blade and wound himself up to swing. They saw him turn into a blur as he spiraled around the maw. He appeared at the back of the thresher maw, putting the blade away. He noticed the Mako and flew over.

'I may not be able to do it as quickly as I could with Umbra, but it's a hell of a lot more satisfying as Limbo' Eitri thought as he flew out in front of the Mako, held up his hand, and snapped his fingers. The thresher maw continued its lunge… or at least the top had did. The half of the maw roared in rage as it reached the peak of its lunge, then started falling into pieces on the way down. Eitri did a theatrical bow and flew off to the distress beacon.

The Mako stopped next to the beacon and everyone got out.

"That was amazing! How did you do that?!" Tali asked excitedly as she walked over to Eitri, who had detached from his archwing.

"You know how I said I could send others into the Rift? There's actually three 'zones' of the rift: the Border, where you can see and touch everything in this dimension, but can't interact; Proximity, where you can travel through space and through physical objects, but extra dimensional forces like gravity still apply; and the Deep Rift, the space between dimensions and universes. The arsenal you guys saw is in a pocket of Deep Rift, for example. As Limbo, I have complete control of the Rift as long as I have the energy to manipulate it. With the maw, I banished it to the Border and used my abilities to put it in Stasis, similar to the biotic ability of the same name, but I can do it to however many entities in the Rift as I want, with the energy requirement increasing per volume. I probably could've killed it without stasis, since it would've been stuck since it couldn't move the ground it was digging through, but I wanted to show off a little. Also, the maw was getting a little too close to the wreck and my artillery would've destroyed everything there."

(AN: I'm making up the lore about the Rift as far as I know, but the Rift is canonically the space between dimensions.)

"How did you do the blade thing?" Ashley asked.

"Oh that? I just used the speed of my archwing and my skill with the blade. I was using an archmelee, which are giant weapons meant to slash, chop, or smash enemy fighters and ships. This one is based off of something in one of the old holovids my father showed me as a kid. 'Star Wars the Old Republic: Zakuul' or something. Very good movie, if you ignore the heavy Orokin propaganda that was required in every holovid during that time. It creates a void energy field that is basically the sharpest thing in the universe. The void energy also absorbs all forms of energy, allowing it to bypass all kinds of shields."

(AN: it's based off of the Onderon energy cutlass in SWTOR. Photoshopped archmelee and comparison in chapter comments)

"First, we are going to watch those movies. Second, there's a squad to identify and a beacon to disable here." Shepard said.

"Didn't take you for a Star Wars fan. Then again, there weren't many good examples of movie fans in the active battlefields where I spent most of my time, so I wouldn't know what to look for anyway. As for the squad, they seem to have served under one 'Admiral Kohoku,' if I'm reading this right. Also, the transmitter seems to be jamming all other communication and tra in the area. This was definitely a trap, one that was supposed to have multiple victims. I'll put it in storage to study and try to figure out its source."

"I don't know what Shepard went through in biotics training, but Star Wars was a big part of mine. One of the human trainers showed us the movies as examples of what biotics were capable of. The entire group seemed to learn faster on those days. We also loved watching Star Wars as it was the only time we didn't have to worry about being hounded by the alien instructors." Kaiden said.

"The training was basically the same, as far as I know. Different instructors and more reasonable curriculum, but still." Shepard said.

" Do you want me to take the bodies too, so they can be buried?" Eitri asked.

"Please do."

"Operator, the black box of this Grizzly talks about the team being reassigned without the Admiral being notified. He's likely looking for them through Alliance channels." Ordis said.

"Guess we have another reason to go back to the Citadel after this." Ashley said.

"We still need to find Dr. T'Soni." Shepard said.

"I'll put the bodies in Stasis until we can get to an Alliance base. That being said, do you have a way to contact the Admiral from the Normandy?" Eitri said.

"When we near an Alliance communications relay, we can talk to him. Garrus, can you call for Joker from the Mako so we can get out of here?" Shepard said.

"On it. But you're telling us the story about Akuze while we wait."

"Fine. Better to know who you're fighting next to. In exchange, I'm gonna ask about all of your tragic backstories. I've already heard the basics of Eitri's frankly terrifying past and it'd be a good team building exercise." Shepard said. "About six years ago, back in 2177, I was sent down to Akuze with a platoon of soldiers, engineering and demolitions personnel, adepts, infiltrators, and vehicle specialists. 50 of us in total. I was in charge of the adept squad. The Mako was still in development, so we arrived in 10 Grizzlies, five with cannons for defence and the others for scouting and communication. We were sent there to investigate the two week silence of a scientific settlement that was supposed to judge if the planet was good enough for colonization. We came across the intact and almost pristine settlement with no sign of the scientists, just a few markings on the walls of the habitation modules. The Captain told us to set up camp in the habitation modules except for the drivers, who were to sleep in the Grizzlies due to the lack of beds.

The Captain and us squad leaders slept in one module. I woke up to screaming and a collapsed room. The Captain and two other squad leaders were crushed in their sleep and the lead engineer's legs were crushed under the rubble, putting me in charge. The lead engineer handed me his dog tags and his Omnitool, saying that he knew he wouldn't make it. He showed me how to summon and control his rocket drone and turret that the demolition specialists had equipped. When I crawled out of the rubble, I could see two thresher maws slaughtering the others, not that I knew they were thresher maws since that was the Alliance's first known contact with them.

I had one of the surviving communications Grizzlies send a distress signal detailing the attack and had the remaining scouting Grizzly bait the maws while the tanks shot at them. It seemed to work, since we killed the first one, but we had just managed to kill the second when two more burst out of the ground, destroying both the scout that was bait and the tanks. We managed to take them down with my biotic squad holding them in place with Stasis while the engineers used their rocket turrets and drones to bombard them. Then the final maw came, about half a size bigger than the others. Targeting the engineers first, it managed to take down everyone on the ground due to all of us biotics being exhausted from stopping the maws in place. The only ones left were me and the man in the final Grizzly, who started firing the machine gun mounted on the vehicle while I tried to keep it in stasis and used the Omnitool I had to control the drone and turret at the same time. I tried to get over to one of the fallen engineers to take his Omnitool so I could potentially use two turrets and two drones at a time, but the maw broke free when I picked up the tool and managed to spit some acid at the Grizzly before I got it under control. I spent what felt an eternity keeping it frozen while the turrets and drones bombarded the maw until it finally died. I fell unconscious when I saw an Alliance ship entering the atmosphere. I had overcharged my biotic amp and went into a coma for a few months. When I woke up, I was treated as a hero, someone who had surmounted impossible odds with little more than a scratch. In reality, I was just the lucky survivor of a massacre, just like when I was a kid on Mindoir when the batarian slavers attacked. I took leave to personally visit the families of all the soldiers who died. The family of the chief engineer insisted I keep his Omnitool. So I bring it everywhere now, both as a tool and a reminder of those that passed."

As Shepard finished talking about her time on Akuze, the Normandy leveled itself off as close to the ground as Joker could get without landing. Seeing this, Shepard had the rest of the group get in the Mako and boost up the cargo ramp. Eitri just bullet jumped aboard.

"How did you… never mind. Just gonna put that in the 'cool shit Eitri can do' file" Jenkins said as he watched the squad enter the ship.

"Got worried for a second there. You guys disappeared from comms and our scanners once you neared the beacon. So… any luck finding our target?" Joker said over the intercom.

"It was a trap. The signal came from directly in the middle of a thresher maw nest. We weren't the first to find it either." Shepard said, getting out of the Mako.

"Shit, are you guys okay?!" Jenkins exclaimed.

"We're fine. Eitri cut the maw to pieces, anime style. Gigantic sword included. We only got there in time to see it happen." Kaiden said.

"That's so cool! Please tell me you had that recorded."

"The Mako has a camera to record footage or scouting purposes, so probably." Ashley said.

"Operator had sent me down to investigate the wreckage, so I recorded the entire fight." Ordis said.

"Awesome!" Jenkins said.

"Where next, Commander? There's three more planetary systems in the Artemis Tau cluster. Athens, Knossos, and Macedon. Knossos is the closest, followed by Athens." Joker said.

"We still don't know where Dr. T'Soni is, so we'll have to do a thorough search. Set course for Knossos." Shepard said.

"Yes, ma'am!"

(AN: shorter chapter, was working on my research papers and schoolwork, so I had little motivation to write.)