The Hungry God

Session 07 - The Vegas Hive - Napalm and New Powers

Back at the Boss Voss facility, the team regrouped to face two mounting crises: a persistent insect infestation burrowing deep beneath Las Vegas, and the looming arrival of a world-ending entity — a former hero from another planet — expected to reach Earth in less than a week. Boss Voss revealed that his scientists had cracked the secret of transferring power juice between individuals, a discovery inspired by the tragic fate of the planet Terra, where all available power had been funneled into a single champion who defeated the entity but then took its place. The team was determined not to repeat that mistake, choosing instead to spread the power among themselves.

With Guy occupied coordinating assets against the incoming entity, Sammy was appointed to lead a strike team back to Las Vegas. He assembled a formidable group: Ronnie, Brittany, Jenkins, Thompson, and six security troops. The plan was straightforward — find whatever was spawning the endless tide of insects and destroy it. Ronnie, ever blunt, made his tactical philosophy clear from the start: the security troops would absorb the initial contact, preserving the team’s specialized skills for the presumed Hive Queen waiting somewhere in the depths below.

Before heading underground, the team reached out to S.C. Johnson, whose scientists arrived with three experimental chemical concoctions designed to kill the alien insects. Jenkins, Thompson, and Brittany were dispatched to capture live bugs for testing, and through a combination of effort and luck, the team secured seven specimens. After a rigorous series of tests, a blend of two formulas — designated B and A — proved most effective, killing the insects quickly and reliably. The team then confirmed the gas was corrosive to their suits after prolonged exposure, giving them a hard operational window of roughly two hours before their armor would begin to fail.

With the chemical weapon ready, the team turned to the thirty tunnel entrances pockmarking the desert around Las Vegas. They pumped the insecticide into three main openings and then fanned out to seal the rest. Brittany split herself into multiple clones to cover several holes simultaneously, while the rest of the team paired off to tackle the remaining entrances with rocket-propelled grenades and quick-drying foam, with sand and gravel brought in by dump trucks to bury what was left. The operation was brutal and efficient — until two of Brittany’s clone teams ran into a swarm of twenty bugs and found themselves badly outnumbered.

Sammy rushed to assist, firing a rocket into the mass of insects, but the shot landed behind the swarm, causing the bugs to wheel around and charge him instead. Jenkins arrived moments later, only to find three of the creatures closing in at point-blank range. With no room to maneuver, he fired his suit’s leap ability, launching himself backward into the air and releasing an explosive round at the perfect moment. The blast scattered all three bugs across the landscape, and the rest of the team converged to mop up the remaining swarm. By the time the dust settled, all thirty holes had been sealed, and the concentrated insecticide was trapped inside with nowhere to go.

Industrial fans were set up to circulate the gas and eventually clear the air enough for the team to enter safely. While they waited, a fleet of twelve surveillance drones was sent into the tunnels to map the hive. The drones descended through two levels of dead and dying insects before hitting a wall of newly constructed organic material — a wasp-nest-like secretion that blocked all further progress. Working with the S.C. Johnson etymologists, the team identified the optimal location to drill directly into the heart of the colony. An industrial drill sourced from a local oil company bored eighty meters straight down, punching through into a massive underground chamber below.

Six drones descended into the Queen’s chamber and transmitted footage that stopped everyone cold. The cavern was enormous, filled with thousands of eggs and patrolled by both familiar soldier bugs and a new horned variant never seen before. At the center of it all sat the Hive Queen herself — thirty feet tall, many-armed, and surrounded by her brood. But it was something else in the footage that truly unsettled the team: near a pillar of hive material guarded by three massive insects, a human figure was visible, restrained by organic, vein-like growths covering his body.

There was no time to deliberate. The team pumped concentrated insecticide gas down the drill shaft, filling the chamber with a toxic cloud that sent the insects into a chittering frenzy. Then came twenty-two barrels of homemade napalm — a mixture of polystyrene, gasoline, and benzene — poured directly into the hole. The screaming below was brief. When the drones returned, they found a smoldering ruin of dead insects and a charred Hive Queen. To be certain, two drones rigged with explosives were flown directly into the Queen’s corpse, finishing the job completely.

Jenkins and Thompson descended into the chamber to inspect the aftermath. They found the remains of the queen and countless dead bugs, but the human figure from the footage was gone — not a body, not a trace. Using the suit’s identification software to analyze the drone footage, Ronnie was able to pull a clear enough image of the man’s face to run a search. The result came back as Tan Jiang, a Chinese scientist. The team passed the information up the chain, noting that Xander’s earlier sale of portal technology to the Chinese likely explained how Tan Jiang had escaped the burning chamber without leaving a body behind.

Back at the facility, Sammy was brought to the obstacle course where a scientist administered the power juice via syringe. A warm, spinning energy manifested deep in his core, and when he slowed it down, he shrank — dropping several inches in height as onlookers rubbed their eyes in confusion. When he sped it up, the results were far more dramatic: Sammy shot upward to nine feet tall, his clothes shredding off his body as his frame expanded. His strength grew proportionally with his size, though the effort left him drained and hungry. He excused himself to attempt finer control in private, but the effort failed, and he returned to the cafeteria to eat an enormous meal and think through the implications of his new ability.

That same evening, Brittany arrived at Sammy’s door — but she wasn’t alone. Igor, the former lead scientist at Boss Voss, stood beside her. He had returned to resume his position at the facility, and with him came the revival of his relationship with Brittany. The announcement was delivered with polite awkwardness, and Sammy received it with characteristic indifference as the door closed behind them.

Meanwhile, Ronnie had been quietly pulling on a different thread. He tracked down the desk of Jimmy Johns, an R&D scientist linked to the sabotage of Guy’s suit, only to learn from a colleague that Johns hadn’t been seen since Miller had come by to speak with him the previous day. Ronnie went to Johns’s apartment, kicked the door off its lock, and found the room ransacked — the unmistakable signs of someone who had packed and fled in a hurry. In the trash, he found the charred remains of photographs showing fragments of a woman’s leg and hair. The conclusion was clear: Miller had been blackmailing Johns, and when Johns’s usefulness ran out, Miller handed over the evidence and told him to disappear — leaving Johns to look like the guilty party.

Ronnie took his findings to Paulie’s Bar, where he found Xander nursing a drink. Without ceremony, he slammed Xander’s head onto the counter and began asking pointed questions about his ties to China. Xander confessed readily enough — he had sold portal technology to the Chinese for one hundred million dollars, reasoning that the heat around the base had grown too intense to continue. Ronnie connected the dots immediately: that technology was how Tan Jiang had escaped the burning hive. He extorted Xander on the spot, forcing a transfer of fifty million dollars in exchange for silence, then warned him never to do business with the enemy again. The two shared a drink, and the matter was considered closed — at least between them.

Ronnie brought his theory about Miller to Sammy later that night, laying out the full picture: Miller had blackmailed Johns into sabotaging Guy’s suit, but the sabotage itself was too small a payoff for the effort involved. Whatever Miller had truly needed Johns for was already done. The two agreed that the fastest way to find out what Miller was really after was to go straight to the source. They made their way to Miller’s apartment, waited for him to emerge, and the moment the door opened, Ronnie kicked it in. Miller tumbled across the room and landed in a heap — but as Ronnie moved to pin him, Miller’s hand shot to his pocket. He pulled out a syringe and drove it into his own arm before anyone could stop him. Whatever was in that syringe, it was not medicine — and as the substance began to take hold, the confrontation hung on a knife’s edge, the outcome still very much undecided.