Welcome back to FRIGHT FIGHT FRIDAY! Today is the first round of our Alien bracket semi-finals! Introductions will be shorter; fights will be longer! (For longer intros for our fighters see their first-round fights!) To get familiar with the rules, click here! To catch up on past fights, click here and type in FRIGHT FIGHT FRIDAY!
Today’s fight involves two of my favorite horror movie aliens! One is a highly trained and extremely dangerous hunter with a warrior’s spirit, in possession of some of the deadliest technology imaginable! The other is an entity so lethal, it could wipe out the entire human race almost effortlessly without any conventional weapons. Ladies and gentlemen, The Predator VS The Thing!
PREDATOR
Also known as the Yautza or the Hish-Qu-Ten, the Predators are a brutal race of warriors. Like the Spartans of Ancient Greece, they train as children to be fighters and hunters. Their entire culture is based around hunting the deadliest enemies they can find and then killing them. Defeat is humiliation and unacceptable in the Predator’s culture. It’s weakness? It can bleed, and if it can bleed it can be killed. Just ask Arnold. Intelligent and highly advanced, the Yautza are not to be taken lightly. In any circumstance. Ever.
THE THING
By its nature alone, The Thing is one of the deadliest beings in all of cinema history. Period. It doesn’t pack a bunch of badass weapons. It doesn’t have crazy combat skills or any special training. No, The Thing isn’t that type of deadly. The Thing assimilates other beings. It changes the very fabric of those beings into something else, something horrific and grotesque. It functions at a cellular level meaning, if you aim to kill it, you must completely eradicate it. Not a trace can be left behind. It seems to be weak to fire and especially strong explosions. Good luck!
FIGHT
He had been to this planet before. A few times, in fact. He even had the trophies on his ship to prove it. Coming back, however, was not in his plans. There was no challenge for him here. It was boring. Packed full of little humans with big guns and bigger egos.
A dull hunt, in his opinion. Yet, here he was. Back on this ball of dirt and water and all because he volunteered. Of course, all he knew at the time was that some new life form had been discovered and that it was supposed to be incredibly deadly. The planet it was on wasn’t divulged until he had already agreed to go. Earth. Meh…
He looks over the cold terrain, scanning it with his Bio Helmet. No signs of… anything. At least not anything alive. Never mind dangerous. After a few more minutes of traversing the desolate, frozen wasteland a building comes into view. He switches his helmet to tech vision and scans it.
This is the place. Time to see if their information is any good. He engages his cloaking device as he approaches. His seasoned eyes search the environment. Beside the door was a keycard reader, the words “AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY” are written across the top in bold, black letters.
The Predator inspects the device for a moment. His helmet gathering information as he sticks his arm gauntlet into the card reader.
“ACCESS GRANTED”
He enters the facility and looks around the room. There’s a broken vial on the floor, a few bloodstains, but no bodies. Something happened here. He walks over to the computer and after hacking into it, uploads the video files from the security cameras to his helmet.
With the information he gathers watching the feed he concludes that the target is masquerading as the scientist who runs the facility. Or, at least was at the time of the recordings. The cameras cut off shortly after her demise. The last activity logged on the computer was an email sent from her to her boss. This thing is pretending to be her.
His thoughts are interrupted by the sound of voices outside. The Predator re-engages his cloaking device and hides in the darkest corner of the room.
“I don’t care what the Big Man says, we’re checking on the scientist and her “experiments” and we’re getting out of here.”
“You heard him. We need to take the hard drive and bring it back to him.”
“Yeah well, I didn’t sign up to steal some woman’s life work. I came to make sure everything is nice and quiet and ask why she isn’t returning any more emails. Once she answers him, it will all blow over anyway.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then you can take the hard drive.”
The card reader beeps, and the door opens allowing sunlight to spill into to otherwise dark room. The two men enter, assault rifles aimed and ready. The infra-red beams crisscross as they search the room, growing brighter as the door shuts on its own enveloping them in darkness.
“Switching to thermal” says one of the men as he presses a button on his goggles.
“Heard,” replies the other as he does the same. He looks back over his shoulder and suddenly pauses. “Uh, John.”
John was inspecting the computer station. “What?”
“Something is… watching us, I think.” He points to the back corner where a heat signature in the shape of a large man is standing, unnaturally still. John sees it immediately upon turning and raises his weapon.
The Predator’s eyes flash for a split second as both of their bodies burst like cheap balloons. Their two wholes now four halves as the round blade returns to the Yautza warrior’s hand silently. He returns it to its place on his hip without wiping it off. The blood quenches the blade, tempers it.
The door at the far end of the room opens and the light comes on. The Predator turns his head immediately, his senses honed from decades of battle. It was her. His spear flies through the air effortlessly, and with the accuracy of a homing missile, it connects with her chest, piercing all the way through with a sickening squish sound.
She falls to one knee, blood pouring from the wound like a faucet filling a bathtub. Then, with a primal scream, she pulls the spear from her bosom slowly, tearing pieces of flesh along with it. It falls to the cold floor with a clang. Her body changes and mutates as the Predator watches. Her arms become weapons, sharp and jagged. Her bones contort into a shape even less human than before.
She stands up and charges toward him. Fast. He dodges, but the Thing sprouts another, tentacle-like limb that wraps around The Predator’s left arm.
A scan of the tentacle reveals it to be potentially infectious and absolutely lethal. Trained his entire life for moments like this, he makes the hard choice. The right choice. His right arm gauntlet pops out with a shinkkt and before he can second guess himself,he removes his left arm at the elbow with one clean cut.
He howls, welcoming the pain and the rush of adrenaline that comes with it. This is what it means to be alive!
The Thing charges again, intent on piercing one of its sharp arms into the flesh of its wounded enemy. The Predator’s plasma cannon moves into place as he lines the shot up with his eyes. Baboom!
The close-range blast sends them both flying backward. The Predator is first to his feet. Knowing he is losing blood at a fast rate; he engages his cloaking device and blasts a hole through the wall of the lab.
He disappears through the hole and heads back to his ship, camouflaged less than a quarter click away. Inside he rips open a medical kit and pours the contents on his bloody nub of an arm. It burns as it cauterizes the wound, fusing the flesh together via chemical burn.
Whatever that thing is, it didn’t like the plasma cannon. He ponders this for a few moments while looking over the readouts his bio-helmet took on the creature. With no idea where it came from, what it wanted or how it got here he realizes he does know one thing. Maybe the most important thing.
He stands up and heads into the weapons locker of the ship. So many beautiful choices, but he was only interested in one. He walks to the far wall where he keeps a few extra sets of armor with varying bio-masks. These were earned and they were displayed like a badge of honor. There were four suits. All functioning. He removes the wrist device from all of them, along with the plasma cannons. He leaves the bladed weapons. They would be of little use.
He knew his time was short, so he worked fast. When he was done, he would reengage the creature and get it to follow him here. He was sure of it. In fact, he was counting on it.
He hacks into the software and connects all four of the cannons to his bio-helmet. A trick he picked up in the Xenomorph war. He mounts one to his other shoulder and places two of the others in the back corner of the cabin. It was a small space, about the size of a large bedroom.
He then heads to the bottom of the ship, to the bowels where the fuel cell is kept. His ship was small, only made for planet-hopping and to access the fuel cell you must first go through a crawl space.
He places the four wrist devices, aka smart bombs, around the fuel cell. Each bomb the equivalent of a small, localized nuke. The fuel cell, however, that’s the real party starter. One blew up years ago while on a mission, vaporizing the entire ship and everything on it. They didn’t find a speck of dust. Not a trace. He stops briefly, thinking how he only has two payments left until the thing is paid off. Damn it. He places the last plasma cannon in front of it and heads back to the cabin.
He opens the outside door and turns off his cloaking device. He walks back to the lab, not bothering to cover his tracks in the snow. He blasts another hole in the wall, hoping to get his enemy's attention.
It works, but the Predator is taken off guard as The Thing attacks from behind. Its wounds now fully healed. The Predator is quick and before the blow lands, he sweeps it’s leg out from under it.
It’s back on its feet fast as the Predator walks backward slowly, coercing the Thing to chase. It attacks again and the Predator punches it full-force, knocking it back and agitating it further.
They reach the ship and as the Predator approaches the doorway the Thing lunges at him, knocking him back into the ship.
The Thing pounces and as its unnaturally sharp arm comes down toward his chest, the Predator rolls to the side avoiding contact with the freakish monster. Back on his feet, he lines up a shot. Baboom!
It connects, hitting the left shoulder and blowing the appendage clean off. Blood shoots in all directions and as the Predator lines up another shot, the arm grows back, longer, thicker, and sharper than before.
The second shot goes off. Baboom! This time the shot hits the soft spot where the neck meets the chest, taking the head clean off the body. A body that use to belong to a scientist, but no longer.
The head hits the metal floor with an audible thud. Limbs shoot from the top of the cranium and it flips itself over, crawling towards the bewildered Predator like some kind of malformed spider.
He brings his foot down on it hard, squishing it beneath the force. The skull breaks into fragments as brains and flesh shoot from around the sides of the Yautza’s boot.
The body, relatively unharmed; runs toward him. The two cannons in the back of the cabin erupt at the same time. Bababoom!
The Thing falls to its knees, the remaining arm hanging by nothing but a piece of frayed flesh. Like a rope that’s seen way too many years of use. Its chest is torn open by the blast, exposing its ribs. Still, it comes forward relentlessly, straight at the Predator.
A net shoots out from his gauntlet, encasing The Thing completely and incapacitating it. It glows with electricity, lighting the dark room as it sparks blue. The Predator approaches slowly, careful not to underestimate his opponent. He picks up a spear on the way.
The Thing struggles to get free as the Predator removes his own wrist device. He wraps it around the hilt of the weapon, and from the corner of his eye, he sees something lunge.
His severed arm, now twisted and bent into some forsaken monster, had found him. He knocks it to the ground and with a blood-curdling battle cry plunges his spear through the damned piece of himself, half expecting it to hurt.
He heads for the exit, running as fast as he can considering his injuries until he comes upon a cliff. Without thinking about the frozen water below, he jumps while his helmet targets the fuel cell, sending the command to fire.
BABOOOOM!!!!!!
A small mushroom cloud rises from the crater where the spaceship used to be. Everything within a 300-foot radius is completely evaporated, leaving an almost perfect ring of destruction around the crater. Pieces of the ice break off and collapse into the ocean, small ones at first, then larger and larger until the building is swallowed into the chaos.
After a few moments, all is quiet. As if nothing had ever happened. In fact, if anyone were to pass by, they would never know a building stood here only minutes ago. Fluffy white clouds pass slowly through the blue sky as order is restored.
The Predator washes up on the frozen shore, exhausted and barely able to pull himself up with one arm. He claws his way out of the cold, unforgiving water and collapses on to the ice. His thermal body netting warming him quickly. He lays on his back, watching the same clouds as he lets out a sigh.
Now, how the hell is he supposed to get home…?
THE PREDATOR
The Thing is one of, if not the most dangerous beings ever imagined. Here’s the problem. It’s dangerous the same way a disease is dangerous. It will wipe out civilizations with little effort if it isn’t stopped. However, when it comes to a fight, it has little to work with.
One on one with a seasoned Yautza warrior? It has no good means of attack. Is it going to use its melee style weapons against a plasma cannon? No. The answer is no.
Let’s not forget The Things weakness. Fire and explosions. Predators LOVE explosions and have freakin' mini-nukes on their arms! They are very well equipped for this particular battle.
The Thing assimilates others. It’s dangerous on a cellular level. So, sure. If one snuck up on a Predator (who’s senses are extremely honed, by the way) it could easily win. It could even infect the entire planet by assimilating that Predator, gaining its memories and then flying home. I could have written that story. But I didn’t.
I think that if a veteran Predator was aware of its weakness, that is all it would take. Plus, the Predator is smart enough to retreat and assess the situation. Which is what happened here. (If he hadn’t removed his arm when he did though… )
So, that’s my take. While The Thing remains the most dangerous being to other life forms, it is not necessarily the most lethal in combat. The Predator has few peers in this department. What do you guys think? Am I way off here? Yell at me in the comments and be sure to upvote your favorite fighter!
See you next week for the 2nd round of our Alien bracket semi-finals, CRITTERS VS SIL (SPECIES)!!! Until then, keep on geekin’ on my friends!
Joshua “Prometheus” Scafidi
Follow me: @JoshuaScafidi
