Tifa Lockhart: Crimson Resolve by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Tifa-Lockhart-Crimson-Resolve-1306859789?file=1

Tifa Lockhart: Crimson Resolve ANIMATION

The Weight of Glass

Hojo’s trophies always looked better in the blueprints.

That was Tifa’s first coherent thought as the floor shuddered beneath her boots, a deep seismic groan rolling up through the foundation of the Sector 5 slums. She had come down here with Barret for a routine munitions audit—a favor to a ghost, some forgotten cache of materia that Hojo had catalogued and then abandoned. Now the air tasted of rust and formaldehyde, and something wet was dragging itself across the concrete fifty yards ahead, beyond the flickering safety of their utility lights.

“Tell me that’s a pipe,” Barret whispered, his voice a low gravel that seemed to make the darkness lean closer. He had his gun-arm raised, the three barrels already spinning a slow, preemptive whine.

Tifa didn’t answer. She flexed her gloved hands, feeling the familiar ache of knuckles against leather. Her eyes had adjusted to the gloom better than his—years of late-night returns to Seventh Heaven had given her a gift for shadows. What she saw made her stomach clench like a fist.

It wasn’t a pipe.

It was a spine. A luminous, segmented spine that undulated through a puddle of stagnant water, and attached to that spine were things that might have once been arms. Now they were scythes. Translucent, chitinous scythes that scraped the tunnel walls with a sound like wet chalk.

“Hojo’s Monument,” Tifa said, the name rising unbidden from a Shinra memo she had stolen years ago. “Project 0-0-8. ‘The Mother’s Mirror.’ He designed it to adapt. To learn. To… seduce.”

Barret snorted, but there was no humor in it. “Seduce? It’s a godforsaken horror worm, T. Ain’t nothing sexy about that.”

The creature paused. And then it turned.

Not its head—it had no head, only a throbbing bulb of pearlescent tissue at the front, veined with something that glowed a sickly violet. But the spine turned, curving back on itself like a snake considering a mouse. Two hollows in that bulb caught the light. Eyes? Or echoes of eyes? They fixed on Tifa with an intimacy that made her skin crawl.

She had felt that gaze before. On cold nights in Nibelheim, when Sephiroth had looked at her not as a person but as a specimen. This was worse. This was desire without soul.

“Barret,” she said, very softly, “do not let it touch you.”

“Wasn’t plannin’ on huggin’ the abomination, thanks.”

The creature lunged.

Not fast. Languid. As if it had all the time in the world, as if the terror it generated was a kind of anesthetic. One scythe-arm swept low, forcing Barret to leap backward, his gun roaring a single deafening burst that tore through the ceiling but only grazed the creature’s flank. Where the bullet struck, the translucent flesh didn’t bleed. It blushed. A deep, arterial red spread across the wound, and the thing shuddered—not in pain, Tifa realized with horror, but in pleasure.

“It likes it,” she breathed.

“The hell you mean it likes it?”

Another arm came at her. She ducked, rolled, came up inside the creature’s reach. Her fist connected with the bulbous front—a solid, bone-cracking uppercut that should have pulverized cartilage. Instead, her knuckles sank into yielding warmth. For a single, terrible second, she felt a heartbeat. Not hers. Not the creature’s. Something inside it. Something human.

She ripped her hand free as if burned, stumbling backward. The violet glow in those hollow eyes intensified, and a sound emerged from somewhere deep in the spine. A hum. A purr. A word.

“Tifa.”

Her real name. Not a mockery. A caress.

Barret’s gun spun up again. “How does it—”

“Don’t say my name,” she snapped, but it was too late. The creature’s attention shifted to him, and its spine flexed, revealing a row of vent-like slits along its underside. Each slit exhaled a fine mist—pale pink, cloying, sweet like overripe fruit. The mist drifted toward Barret, and though he tried to hold his breath, Tifa saw his eyes go wide, then soft.

“Barret, no.”

His gun-arm dropped. His shoulders slackened. “T… it’s so warm in here. Why’s it so warm?” He took a step toward the creature. Then another.

Tifa moved.

She had never been faster. The years in Midgar had honed her into something that was not quite human either—a storm in a leather corset, a ghost made of muscle and memory. She tackled Barret sideways, sending them both crashing into a stack of corroded s
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