#Akuze

[painterofhorizons]

It‘s a long way getting over something like Akuze, and it‘s no one-way-street.

Reda Shepard, earthborn, sole survivor of humanity's first contact massacre with the Big Angry Space Worms. Find out more Akuze related writings, musings and art in my Akuze-masterpost. Long fic for the illustration is currently WIP. Starting quote is from the 20 times Akuze almost gets Shepard fic. Commission by the most wonderful @drawinglinestoconstellations! I am beyond words in appreciation for the incredible art and brilliant work with Marty. 14/10, do recommend!

[laelior]

In the end, getting off Akuze alive comes down to math.

The equation is simple.

One broken distress beacon, shot through and shorted out by a random, panicked bullet. One shattered M-29 Grizzly, armor plates cracked and smoking with corrosive acid. One malfunctioning Kessler II with a single thermal charge left, blinking out glaring red warning lights. One blood-spattered medi-gel pack.

Three kilometers to the landing zone, where the only working radio on this fucking planet is.

Forty-nine dead marines, and two dying ones: Bethany Shepard and Marian Luo. Both are as close to death as they have been to each other since the day they met in basic training. Luo is closer, but only by meters not by miles.

Only one of them makes it out, minus the medi-gel pack and the pistol. 

Shepard has to live with it afterward.

Luo doesn’t.

[mass-effect-galaxy]

Sole Survivor: A Mass Effect Fan Film

[fuckheadz]

[grusik]

Akuze... by colourourcity

[squigglysquidd]

Juxtaposed Snippet

The wind wails with the sound of faceless screams. A foreboding miasma she doesn’t remember settles above the ground like a thick shroud, gripping their legs as they trudge through. 

It seeps into their bones with its icy touch. 

They are fifty-strong, but nothing more than toy soldiers in the hands of some unseen force with an unbreakable hold. It guides them ever forward against a nagging sensation prickling at their skin that whispers warnings and demands that they turn back. 

Duty, they call it. They feel more like slaves to the controlling force and its frightening curiosity than men and women moving of their own accord and bravery.

Akuze isn’t the budding colony as its reputation would have anyone believe. It’s a ghost town full of shadows and questions, instead. 

Prefabs watch them pass with darkened, lifeless eyes that reflect back into houses bereft of families to fill its empty, yet furnished rooms. Life filled this place only moments before the distress signal that brought them here was sent out. 

All that’s left is a vacuum from the sudden disappearances that seems to call to them to sit down, relax, and become one with the eerie peace of purgatory that now surrounds the colony. They don’t fall for the ruse, though, too afraid to become prisoners to the mystery that’s taken hold and brought them here.

After searching the entire colony for clues, they grow tired of scouring through the bones of the colony. Then comes the time for them to make camp for the night after they grow tired of searching. A storm is rolling in to interfere with their extraction’s visuals so they can’t call for it to free themselves of this place until the sky clears. 

They are restless, but that nagging force that calls itself ‘duty’ grows ever stronger despite each and every attempt to convince a majority decision to leave despite the storm.

They are here for a reason. They have to see things through.

They station themselves at the base of an incline leading to the surveillance station just outside of the colony’s extended perimeter. It was the last of their most obvious sources for clues.

The failure of being no closer to an answer to what happened here wears on them. It seeps into their very core. Their nerves have whittled down to nothing more than needle-thin strands straining against the burden of their overall weight. 

Many of them can’t seem to get their armor off fast enough. They sigh out into the thick air when they’re released from their confines but it doesn’t completely free them of the stifling feeling of their surroundings.

She just wants to sit for a moment, losing herself in the effort to breathe slowly and shrug off the eeriness of Akuze. 

Her shotgun lays in her lap like lead, impossibly heavy and cold enough to leech through her gloves. She moves her hands from it and leans back. 

Holding herself upright, she drops her head back with her eyes closed and wills herself to calm the fluttering of unnecessary anticipation in her chest. The still, deadly silence within the moment between breaths is comforting like a warm kind of suffocation wrapping itself around her.

That’s until she hears the piercing scream cutting through the air like a knife. 

It stabs straight into that trembling part of her that’s been so ready to jump forth and flee.

Snapping up to her feet, she watches the squad that has set up camp further down the incline and closer to the colony disappear beneath the corrupted fog with horror flooding her veins. She freezes until another sound splits the sky and the surveillance station begins to crumble far too close to her position. 

Stumbling away from the building as it comes crashing down, her feet catch on her abandoned shotgun and she falls. She lands perfectly positioned to watch as her own squad leader is caught beneath the rubble. 

Its jagged teeth slam down over his legs and steal an anguished howl from his lips.

Someone shoves her aside as they rush forward and fear’s tight grip around her is shattered. A now panicked sense of duty springs forth in its wake. 

She rushes to aid her fellow squadmates in trying to pry open the debris’ jaws around their leader’s legs but it’s too heavy and their grips are too weak to free him quickly. The sounds of his pained grunts and sudden bursts of cried agony send bolts of burning cold through her hands. It numbs her fingers, whispering of the futility of freeing him while so much noise echoes behind her from the others as unseen horrors engulf them.

The ground suddenly shakes beneath their feet, jostling the rubble further, but their minds are lost in the inhuman shriek that rattles their bones and freezes them with terror. 

Dropping the lid of her leader’s coffin and spinning in place, her eyes widen at the way the ground buckles. It jerks violently enough to send the ground’s thick shroud into crashing waves. 

That fearful thing within her springs to life and she abandons the fallen. She runs alongside the few others of their number who are quick enough not to be swallowed up by whatever beast splits the sea of thick smog, cracking open the rocky surface of Akuze with a massive quake that nearly knocks her off her feet.

Guilt washes over her when the song of gunfire rings behind her from the few who stand their ground. She doesn’t have the strength to turn around, face the fear, and defend her fellow man, though. She follows the cowardly into the colony and through the streets that now feel narrower than before. 

The prefabs crawl in around them the further from the beast they run like a trap readying to close with a deadly snap.

Dread washes over her as the ground begins to roar and tremble beneath her feet. She can’t stay out here to wade through the miasma that clings tighter to her legs and holds her in place for the beast barreling towards her. 

Glancing over her shoulder in hopes of seeing any faces, she locks gazes with what remains of her squad. They all silently debate what fate may befall them. They could die fleeing into the nearest prefab, like some of the others, or they can try to get close enough to their only means of escape, which is the communications station that’s a frighteningly far distance away.

A scream builds in her throat, rising with the violent ways the ground bucks beneath their feet. Terror quickly chokes her as she spends her last strength on reaching the station, though. 

Bolting up the steps and into the building—barely having the mind to leave the door open for her squadmates—she doesn’t stop running until she trips over a chair thrown down from its desk. She crashes down onto her hands and knees and finally lets the scream surface as the deafening sound of destruction sings in a nightmarish duet.

She sucks air into her burning lungs and waits for the end. She knows it’ll be their own shelter that will come crashing down beneath the beast’s wrath, but it doesn’t happen. 

Opening eyes that had been clenched shut, she looks around a room left abandoned save for the few survivors of their escape. 

She recognizes some faces. Despite serving with them for a long time in a life far from these past hellish seconds, she can’t place their names. Confusion clouds her mind as she watches a man step forward and offer a hand, his eyes glazed with fear and a tremble shaking his grip.

“What do we do now?” Someone asks, but everyone seems too scared to answer. 

No one wants to acknowledge death as it waits just beyond the door, looking for the key that will unlock it and let it in so it can destroy their desperate sense of safety. 

She looks around the room, inevitably drawn to the window of the prefab where she can gaze out on the devastation. The glass is clouded with grime, but she can see the stillness of the colony has returned with only the faintest cries of gunfire ringing out in the distance, but it might as well be an entirely different world away. 

She can almost imagine the buck of a weapon in her hand, yet it was left far behind in that other place. She has only a pistol on her hip now and its strength is incomparable to whatever lay within the rocky ground below.

Muddled speech surrounds her, trying to break through the repeated sounds of the screams from man and beast ringing in her ears, but she doesn’t hear or acknowledge them until her name is called out. 

The sound is sharp and urgent. 

Looking back to the others, she sees a woman missing her chest piece. 

“What do we do now?” the woman asks her as if she holds any authority. At her confused look around the group, she sees some older soldiers and realizes the question isn’t asked based on age.

Another person speaks. “You’re the senior officer here now that ….”

She knows what he means and looks away, eyes inevitably moving back out to the dead waiting just outside. 

She isn’t meant to lead, not here and not now. Against an unknown, she has no idea how to proceed or how to keep those still around her alive. 

Eyes moving back to them, she sees nothing but frightened animals, huddled together just outside of the reach of the window and world beyond. She wishes she could be one of them, nothing more than a burden seeking direction and saving, but she can’t be.

There is still enough left in her to care enough about another life, even if she’s already proven herself a coward before.

[snappingthewalls]

[bearlytolerant]

Fandom: Mass Effect

Rating: T (swearing and canon typical violence)

Character: Zero Shepard

Word Count: 610

Reflection

All her life she’d hated being a number. Despised the way her mother had trained her to be a weapon and not a person. Loathed the label, ruthless.

The thresher maw had killed them all. Every one of her fucking comrades. Jones. Miller. Even Toombs was gone. Hell, she was almost certain the blood splattered across her armor was Jones’. She dug her fists into the dirt and wanted to drown out the screaming. They were all still screaming in her head. But she clenched her teeth and crawled forward, a painstakingly slow process, eventually wedging herself between two rocks. She closed her eyes and remembered.

“Get up,” her mother commanded. “Quickly!”

She was ten when she finally had the guts to jump to her feet and do a sweep, watching as her mother fell on her face. She’d smiled, thinking mom would be so proud. But her mother just grabbed her leg and knocked her straight on her ass. No mercy. No pride.

“You’re pathetic,” she’d spat, looming over Zero. Then she’d turned on her heel and left while Zero laid there, the metallic taste of blood on her tongue.

Shepard opened her eyes again. Pathetic. Blood was on her lip. She was tired of its taste.

There was an explosion and she jumped, peering out from behind a rock, she saw one of the soldier tents go up in flames. Her chest squeezed, pretty sure Millers’ body was still in there. Or pieces of it anyway. One, two, three—ten. Counting to keep back the bile. Counting an inhale and exhale of breaths.

The ground shook beneath her.

“No, no, no, no, noooo–fuck–you’re not gonna get me you massive fucking bastard,” she muttered.

She dared to peer around the rock. Putrid green acid splattered against it just an inch from her face. The smallest drop splashed onto her cheek. It sizzled and sputtered as she held a gloved hand there, hissing a string of curses.

“You fucking asshole!” she screamed and lit up the thresher with explosive rounds. It screeched for a minute straight before diving back into the earth.

She sprinted for the landing zone. She counted her paces.

Ten—

Twenty—

Thirty—

A crack splintered beneath her feet and she stumbled.

“Can anybody hear me!” she shouted through her earpiece.

There was static.

The whoosh of the shuttle dropping to her level was the sweetest sound she’d ever heard.

“Dad. Thank the fucking stars,” she whispered.

The shuttle came to a stop. Ground trembling beneath him and he was stepping out and she was stepping on. Eyes wide and the word no, slipping off her tongue. What the hell was he doing? Time stopped within a second frame. She clung to the I love you from his lips as she watched in horror. The great maw snapped and he disappeared into the ground. Taking off in the shuttle with tears in her eyes, she numbed herself to what her mother would have to say about it all.

It was fitting, she supposed.

For her first real mission to go down like that.

She made it back but at what cost?

Nothing except everything that mattered to her.

They congratulated her.

Interviewed her.

Praised her.

Fifty dead and that’s worth a monument?

Her mother had scoffed and disowned her. Which was fair and she was too numb to care. And even if she could muster a feeling that resembled care, her mother had never been a mother.

And she still hated being a number.

Zero sucked but one was worse.

The fucking loneliest number.

She was the sole survivor and she wished she could go back to ground zero.

[painterofhorizons]

"How's Giles doing?"

It's a macabre question to ask, but it cuts to the chase.

Shepard shrugs. The answer is as simple as fucked up.

"Better."

Well, obviously Giles isn't better. There's no way he can get better, because he's dead. He's rotting in the dirt of Akuze, eaten alive by thresher maw acid, cowering behind a rock right next to Reda. He's taken most of the hit, and she hasn't (still got enough damage to need a trachea transplant and eighteen percent third degree burns on her skin, but she's alive and he's not, so that's that).

Corporal Giles won't get better.

But he stopped haunting her every single night, and every single minute of the day, and every single art therapy session. Because he's the only thing of Akuze she remembers and while she's bad at drawing, she's apparently gifted in the horror genre, and she's gotta draw something.

Maybe she'll draw something else tomorrow.

Or maybe she won't.

Because Giles is better, but he's still dead.

[seithr]

remembered that my shepard/spacer shep has a still alive mom in the alliance according to ME2/3

also remembered that that character (katrine/caia) always has a sister uninvolved in the family's career military history

remembering she had to mourn her elder sister who just Disappeared for two years, and would have spent even longer knowing shepard isn't alive bc their alliance mom probably can't just tell a civillian doctor,

[kaidanalenkosprmanager]

Sophie Shepard & Kaidan Alenko (ME3) 1/?

MIRA'S MORE CANON ME3 "You're real enough for me." AKA: The tango. :) Mass Effect 3: Legendary Edition (2021)

[the-cryptographer]

Am only an hour into ME and can already see why Ashley so hated. Aggro issues xenophobia woman with an annoying voice? Basically on the fandom kill-list for life. Fortunately or unfortunately I'm going to have to choose between her and slightly passive aggressive nice 🙂 guy, and since it's me choosing between someone who brings all the explosive interpersonal issues to the game and someone who brings very few, haha- I think we all know who's going to end up dead.

[grusik]

AKUZE instagram.com/akuzer/ by wiredforlego

[socialprawn]

I had a creepier image in my head… I’ll try later

[snappingthewalls]

[oso-nan]

my mass effect 1 shep