GUN SALAD

Charlie and the remaining members of his squad milled around the driest part of the vast chamber’s entrance, utterly paralyzed by their own fear and lack of imagination. Every now and then they’d look Gunn’s way–like children looking to their parents–before resuming their aimless pacing. 

Nobody offered any observations.

Nobody offered any solutions.

Thus, Gunn had settled in beside a large, wet rock to wait. He sat absolutely still, practically in a doze, awaiting the moment his feckless companions decided to form a single original thought. He anticipated that it would be a long time coming, but the Czar didn’t mind. A cavern as deep as this one was unlikely to host more than one route to the surface. Inkersoll was, for all intents and purposes, cornered.

“Any ideas, Czar Gunn?” Charlie finally asked.

Gunn just sighed and shrugged his shoulders. “It’s a puzzle, alright,” he replied, mustering every shred of patience he could. “One I know just how to solve. But it won’t do you any good to rely on me; if none of you can figure a way forward when you’ve got the luxury of time, how’re you goin’ to cope when we’re face-to-face with Inkersoll?”

The squad leader scowled, rubbing at the back of his neck. Gunn could tell he wanted to talk back–to criticize his sink-or-swim approach to leadership instead of rising to the occasion like a good little soldier. In the end he didn’t say a word. He just kept right on walking and swiveling his head around as if it’d get him somewhere.

Disappointing.

Just when he was about to give up hope, though, one of the survivors–a deeply tanned woman wearing a green headband–spoke up:

“The droplets,” she said. Gunn realized, to his dismay, that it was one of the two he’d failed to properly learn the name of.

“What about the droplets?” he coaxed.

The woman squinted up into the darkness and pointed. The lantern’s aura of light didn’t reach far enough to illuminate the ceiling, but he could see the droplets falling clear as day. “I was thinkin’ about how most of these puddles formed,” she began. “They’re fed by the drops of water fallin’ from the ceiling, aren’t they?”

Gunn straightened up, his interest thoroughly piqued. “Yeah? Go on.”

“...So if we keep an eye out for the puddles that have an obvious source,” she continued, “we’ll know which ones we can step in safely.”

With that, Gunn rose to his feet. “What was your name again?”

“Bridget, sir.”

“That’s some good thinkin’, Bridget,” he said. “If you make it out of this alive, you can have Charlie’s job.”

Charlie’s blobby, clean-shaven face went redder than a cherry tomato. “Hey!”

“Oh, don’t get all sore about it!” Gunn snapped. “I expect my leaders to lead. If you’ve got a problem with that, then shut up and draw.” He stared Charlie down for a beat or two, but, of course, the man showed no sign of a willingness to stand up for himself. 

Gunn broke eye contact and spit on the ground. “That’s what I thought.”

The Czar turned to face the cave’s unexplored reaches and stomped on ahead through puddle after puddle, allowing his troops to follow along behind him without further testing. As they went, they passed dozens of smooth, curving rock formations and deep channels of pooled water laced with bioluminescent moss. 

As a lifelong resident of the range, Gunn had scarcely seen such surroundings in his lifetime. It was tempting to goggle around at the sights, but he forced himself to remain on alert; after all, a single misstep could bring ruin to the entire team. He stared doggedly ahead, refusing to allow his attention to lapse for a single second.

…Sadly, not everyone in the hunting party was quite so disciplined as that. 

A sudden spray of water from the rear was his first warning, and the mangled body of an ex-rookie–the nameless one–colliding with a nearby stalagmite was his second. His eyes flew wide as the body slumped into another of Inkersoll’s puddles, rousing another ten-foot tentacle from the shallows to his immediate right.

“RUN!!” he bellowed. Any hope of slow, strategic advancement went out the window as the slimy limb flailed around in search of prey. Gunn was dimly aware of it seizing someone, but he wasn’t about to look back and confirm their identity; the sound of sickening crunches and snaps spurred him onward, sending him barreling down the earthen corridor as tentacles erupted from the water all around him. 

He sprinted over boulders and around tight corners, the lantern swinging wildly in his hand as he charged forth into the unknown. At some point, the flame within flickered and died, leaving him with only the subtle glow of subterranean flora to guide him. After a long, harrowing minute of this, though, Gunn finally stumbled onto just the terrain he’d been looking for:

A dry scrap of land. Or, at least, dry enough not to answer every footfall with a splash. 

He scuttled ahead an additional ten feet or so, allowing himself to heave a sigh of relief as the sound of writhing tentacles died away behind him. Even without the benefit of light, Gunn could tell he’d come into a more spacious part of the cavern complex. Every noise he made seemed to echo for several feet in every direction, and the ambient glow of the moss did little to dispel the all-encompassing darkness ahead.

Gunn reached into his pocket with shaking hands and struck another match, lifting the fragile flame to the wick of his covered lantern. He had no idea if anyone else had survived, and he didn’t much care; all that mattered now was finding Inkersoll and making him pay for the deadly goose chase he’d led them on. The Czar inhaled deeply and lifted his lantern to see what he could see…

…And found a pair of great, filmy eyes staring back at him.

Gunn’s breath caught in his throat. He hoisted the lantern higher to find that they belonged to a massive cephalopod–an enormous, beaked kraken looking down on him like an insect. And there, standing atop its elongated head, stood the very man he’d been chasing all this time:

Ocden Inkersoll.

“I was hopin’ you’d make it, ‘boss’,” said the skinny, bespectacled man. Numerous tentacles waggled into view all around as he spoke, drifting closer to Gunn’s position with every word. “You should feel honored. I ain’t never shown my ultimate technique to anyone before.”

Gunn was itching to put the man down then and there, but a few of the tentacles had moved to intentionally obscure him. The monster’s hide looked tough, too–tough enough to rebuff the impact of conventional weapons.

For the first time in a long while, Gunn found himself at a loss about what to do next.

“Well, howdy, Ocden!” he blustered, projecting confidence he didn’t have. “Long time no see. It’s an honor indeed to see Krakshot’s greatest trick–summonin’ a big, wet beast even uglier’n you.”

Inkersoll’s expression soured at that. “Joke all you like. By joinin’ my puddles, I’ve called up a monster even you can’t contend with… Now, be a good boy and stay still while I prove it!”

Gunn launched into action. The myriad tentacles lunged right for him, but his reflexes had always been a cut above; rather than coiling around his legs, they came in right beneath his feet, allowing him to come down on top of one and slide his way along it toward the bulk of the beast. It jolted upward immediately, of course, in an effort to flick him off, but he quickly threw an arm around another nearby tentacle and rode it up toward the ceiling as it lashed about.

He tried to get a bead on Inkersoll in the process, but the two tentacles reserved for his protection seemed to shield him from every angle. Gunn cursed under his breath, using every ounce of energy he had to keep dipping and swinging between tentacles while he waited for an opportunity to present itself. The kraken’s limbs slapped at each other endlessly in pursuit of him, reaching higher and higher as they endeavored to snag him for good. The acrobatics were draining, though, and the Czar felt himself tiring. At this rate, it would only be a matter of time before they got ahold of him.

That was when he saw it: a big, sloppy drop of water falling from somewhere high above. And in a cave like this, that could only mean one thing.

Gunn relied on the momentum of the tentacle he was swinging from to flip himself high into the air. He tossed his lantern as high as he could and took careful aim–he’d only get one shot at this, and about a half-second of opportunity before the seeking tentacles found their mark.

…But to Gunn–the fastest draw on the range–a half-second might as well have been an eternity.

The moment the light of his thrown lantern played across the surface of the gigantic, dribbling stalactite up above, Gunn opened fire. His hands moved too fast for the human eye to see, and Big Iron–his trusty pistol–dispensed dozens of shots within the space of a single eyeblink, hitting the base of the stalactite from a hundred angles at once. 

As anticipated, the massive rock formation fractured, cracked, and eventually came loose. Gunn watched it drop with a grin on his face. The kraken’s hide felt stronger than steel, but even steel was no match for a ton or so of sharp, solid rock hurtling down from on high. At the last moment, the tentacles coiled around his body, bracing themselves to tear him in two…

…But not before the stalactite split the kraken’s dome and crushed its master in one fell swoop.

Gunn had to perform some tricky maneuvering to get down without a scratch, leaping from appendage to appendage as they plummeted limply toward the ground, but he came out of his final roll to find Ocden dead at his feet. He straightened up and cracked his neck with a chuckle, looking over the twisted form of his former foe with satisfaction.

“Hate to let all this squid meat go to waste down here,” he quipped, giving the nearest tentacle a triumphant pat, “but I’m afraid I’m not much for seafood.”

Suddenly, a chime sounded in Gunn’s ear. He stood there blinking for a long moment, wondering what it could be, until it finally hit him:

“Shit! Right, the communicator,” he growled. “Been so long since he called I forgot all about it…”

He tapped at the earpiece impatiently, frustrated by his employer’s inconvenient timing. “Yeah, what?” he barked, “I’m about a mile underground at the moment. How are you even reachin’ me down here?”

“Turu is dead,” said the calm, measured voice on the other end.

“Is that all? I don’t give a–”

“Sarada killed him,” the boss continued, “I expect he’ll be on his way to Wesson next if he isn’t there already.”

Gunn raised his eyebrows at that. “Well, well… Isn’t that interestin’,” he mused, stroking idly at his mustache.

“I was just thinkin’ I could do with some new prey.”