Pharah: Skyborne Protector by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Pharah-Skyborne-Protector-1292867441#image-1

Pharah: Skyborne Protector ANIMATION

A Venomous Altitude

The sky above the Mediterranean had bled out, leaving behind a bruised canopy of deep violet and storm-swollen gray. Wind screamed through the jagged teeth of the Ilios gorge, a hollow, agonizing sound that mimicked the lament of forgotten gods. I clung to the weeping limestone cliff-face, my gauntlets scraping desperately for purchase against a surface slick with sea-mist and ancient, decaying moss. The Raptora Mark VI armor, typically my impenetrable shell, my second skin, felt like a rusted iron maiden slowly closing its spikes around my ribs. Far below me, an abyss of churning obsidian water waited to swallow the careless and the dead. Above me, the cliff-face assault course—a brutal vertical labyrinth of blind corners, erratic jet thrusters, and hollowed-out sniper nests—loomed like the fossilized spine of a gargantuan beast.

I was not alone on this bleeding precipice.

A single, piercing beam of crimson light danced across the wet stone inches from my cracked visor. It moved with a languid, almost caressing slowness, a phantom finger tracing the contours of my mortality. It did not immediately snap to the center of my forehead, where a swift death awaited. Instead, it traced the armored curve of my shoulder, sliding intimately down the plating of my chest, lingering with terrible precision directly over my racing heart.

"Such a loud, frantic heartbeat, little bird," a voice purred through my internal communications network. The encrypted military frequency should have been an impenetrable fortress, yet Amélie Lacroix bypassed it with the elegant ease of a ghost walking through glass. Her voice was spun silk soaked in liquid nitrogen, heavy with a French cadence and an unnatural, terrifying calm that made my blood run cold. "It echoes against the wet rock. Boom, boom, boom. A dinner bell for the spider."

"You talk entirely too much for a phantom, Amélie," I replied, fighting the tremor in my jaw, forcing my breathing to steady against the rising tide of panic. I engaged my secondary hover jets, a low, controlled burst of thermal energy that pushed me upwards into the obscuring shadow of a limestone overhang. "Are you going to take the shot, or simply critique my pulse rate?"

"A swift kill is a tragic waste of a perfectly agonizing canvas," she whispered. The audio was flawless; the sound seemed to originate not from my helmet speakers, but from the rock itself, a maddening stereo effect of pure paranoia. "I want to watch you struggle to fly first. I want to see the creeping terror peel the arrogant gold from your wings. I want to dismantle you from the inside out."

I propelled myself violently upward, thrusting past a jutting, razor-sharp crag. The exact moment my silhouette broke the safety of cover, the sky cracked open. A high-velocity, armor-piercing round screamed past my cheek, shearing a micrometer of cerulean paint from my helmet and leaving a scorching trail of displaced air in its wake. The concussive force alone made my teeth rattle and my vision blur. She wasn't trying to hit me. Not yet. She was establishing dominance. She was herding her prey.

The cliff itself seemed to breathe in tandem with her malice. Hidden industrial thrusters, built into the canyon walls by some unseen, sadistic architect, flared randomly with deafening roars. Tongues of blinding blue plasma erupted from concealed stone grates, designed to instantly incinerate anyone who lingered on a handhold for a second too long. It was a vertical meat grinder, a labyrinth of fire and stone, and the spider knew the rotation of every lethal gear.

"Why this place?" I demanded, swinging by one mechanized hand onto a narrow, crumbling ledge, my metallic talons digging furiously into the chalky rock. I scanned the vertical graveyard, my thermal optics straining through the storm mist. Blackened scorch marks scarred the entrance of a nearby sniper nest—a hollowed-out cave that looked uncomfortably like a screaming mouth frozen in agony. "Talon doesn't operate in this dead sector. There are no strategic assets here. Nothing but rotting rock and howling wind."

"Oh, sweet Fareeha," Widowmaker sighed, the sound impossibly intimate, as if her cold lips were brushing against the delicate shell of my ear, sending a shudder down my spine. "Do you truly believe every beautifully choreographed dance requires an audience or a stage? Some symphonies of destruction are played solely for the private, exquisite pleasure of the conductor."

I moved cautiously
...(more at https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai).
For more supergirl, chun li, batgirl, tifa, lara croft, wonder woman, rogue and much more, please visit my page at www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai - Thanks for your support :)