Salvador, Gaige, Maya, Axton, Zero... and me, for some reason; the six of us came to be known as the newest generation of Vault Hunters, the heroes this shithole planet needed, but most importantly, the most sought-after gofers in Sanctuary. Practically everybody was asking us to run errands for them. It wasn't like any of them complained about the work though, they were left pretty low on cash and weapons after you-know-who's attempt on our lives.

But when we were tasked with tracking down the leader of the Crimson Raiders and potentially saving him from the deadliest bounty hunter known to the Borderlands… well, that was a serious, six-vault-hunter job. And with all of us working in tandem, we cut through the bandit camps of Frostburn like hot butter.

We were making steady progress through a mess of lean-to's situated at the bottom of the chasm, gunning and slashing down any Bloodshot or pyromaniac that stood in our way. "This is almost too easy!" Axton laughed over the copious gunfire. His turret chugged away as it chewed through another flaming psycho. A bullet must have struck one of the incendiary grenades strapped to his side, because as soon as he fell dead his body burst apart in a fiery explosion. Far enough not to hurt any of us, but close enough for me to feel another bloom of warmth in the icy cave.

"Right? I've been watching a livestream this whole time!" Gaige called. She didn't even look up from her ECHO device as she followed along. Her robot, however, was zipping to and fro through the shoddy buildings, slashing and burning through their reinforcements with ease. I just had to get in on the action of course.

With a maniacal cackle I charged past the cyborg teenager and leapt for one of the balconies the bandits were taking cover in. With one arm I swung myself up there and perched on the railing. The four of them stared at me like I was imminent, blundering death.

"You guys, there's a HUGE psycho up ahead!" I heard Maya call over the sound of the screaming bandits I was hacking apart. Comfortingly, I knew she wasn't talking about me. As soon as their shrieking came to end I peered past a metal wall in morbid interest. Sure enough a hulking, skull-wearing maniac with a stunted arm was swiftly making his way towards us. The sight of such a big kill got my other half's full attention.

My boots hit the ground with a heavy thud and I charged again. Spit flying out of my mouth, axe raised in preparation. There were plenty of other bandits skittering through the camp, but they just weren't as exciting as the big one. "I'LL KNOCK YOUR SKIVVIES HELTER-SKELTER!" came my challenging shout.

The psycho answered in turn with, "BLOOD AND ASH FOR MERCIFUL MOMMY!" Moments like those made me question how different I really was from those psychos. Did they have small pieces of their former selves, trapped within their broken minds and forced to watch as they became mutated killers?

I didn't have much time to ponder that existential tidbit again, since he was soon close enough to start swinging at me with a giant pipe. My own weapon met his with a metallic scrape that sent sparks flying. The pipe came right back around, but me never being one to dodge I took another swing at him at the same time. He got a gash in his shoulder, while I got a blow to the ribs that had me seeing stars.

"Fuck yeah, take 'im down Krieg!" came an encouraging shout from Salvador somewhere behind me. I could hear the gunfire around me as the vault hunters focused on picking off the rest of the Bloodshots. I took a moment to blink the skull-wearing psycho back into focus, but he didn't need the break. He cackled and slammed forward, cracking his skull right into my mask so hard it sent me toppling backwards. With my axe still buried in his shoulder, the jittery brute jumped to pin me down and press the metal pipe down on my throat.

Even with the disorienting pain and lack of air, my hands reached for the handle of my axe. When my fingers brushed along the wood I locked it into a vice-like grip. I choked and gagged but I still pulled downwards, dragging my axe blade into his chest at an agonizingly slow pace. I could feel his warm blood dripping on my body, but he didn't let up at all. The pipe only crushed my throat harder as he giggled behind the cracked skull.

My lungs were starting to ache, and so was my head. I could hear the feverish whispering in the back of my mind, the telltale sign of me reaching the breaking point. Just as the muscles in my arms started to spasm unnaturally, there was a flash of blue and a rush of air. The weight on my neck and body lifted. I started gulping down fresh air like it was heavenly ambrosia. Above me, the psycho was trapped in another one of Maya's godsent phaselocks.

Zero's voice cut above my labored gasping, loud but still monotone. "Weakness analyzed, the iliac arteries." When there wasn't an immediate response, he added, "Shoot him in the dick." Then began the gunfire. I could only watch in oxygen-deprived awe as six guns and a turret unloaded mag after mag directly into the floating psychos groin, in a display that would make the average man keel over and barf. The mutant's cargo shorts were absolutely decimated by the time he hit the ground, and his body was still.

"That might've been a little excessive." Maya commented. Finally able to breathe normally again, I crawled forward and got back to my feet. The five vault hunters stood behind me, reloading their guns as they checked for any more bandits. Part of me was feeling pretty grateful that I didn't end up going full mutant in front of them.

Gaige snickered uncontrollably. "Hahahaha, hasta la vista psycho weiner!" My other half seemed to agree with her, letting out a wheezing growl as I bent to yank my axe out of the dead psycho's body. Moments ago I was choking to death and about to shift into a horrible monster, but it seems I shook it off pretty quickly.

With that camp cleared we moved forward through the chasm, with Gaige talking loudly the whole way about starting an underground psycho wrestling ring. "You were getting wrecked back there but I still think you'd have a chance to be a big star!" she assured me. "Unless you were pretending to lose, then that's even better! With that kinda acting talent we could fix SO many fights!" Her enthusiasm was amusing.

Don't you have to let your opponents live with wrestling? I don't think I'd be very good at that, kid.

"I drink caffeinated lizard farts on a DAILY BASIS!" my other half shouted back, matching her exuberance but not the topic at hand.

"Hell yeah dude! You-wh- why are we stopping?" Gaige dropped it mid-thought to scowl at the other vault hunters' backs. Sure enough the group of them had stopped waking. They were staring at the way ahead, which was split by a large rock formation and branching in two very different directions.

"A crossroad ahead, our path to the Firehawk split, but which is correct?" Zero mused aloud.

Axton took several steps ahead to peer down the scope of his rifle. "Huh... no trail marker bodies. More encampments either way."

"How about we split up three and three? Scout em out and report over the ECHOs." Gaige suggested. The others murmured in agreement "Cool! I'll take Maya and Sal." she pointed animatedly to the path on the left, "Thataway!"

I noticed Axton giving me an apprehensive look at the prospect of being grouped with me, but he didn't argue. Zero probably wasn't thrilled either, I couldn't tell though. The others split off in the correct directions, but I lumbered over to follow Maya, ignoring the planned teams. She looked back at me and raised an eyebrow. "Krieg, the other way." I halted just to stare at her dumbly.

Come on you lug, do what she says.

"Nah it's cool, I'll switch sides." Gaige offered with a shrug. As she walked past me to join the other two she grinned at me, tilted her head towards Maya, and winked.

Uh…

I was unsure of the meaning of that, but no matter. I couldn't tell if Maya was annoyed by the roster change. She didn't hesitate in leading the way down the icy decline. Salvador walked at my side, though he had to quicken his pace to keep up with my long strides. It took a few moments before we could no longer hear the sound of Gaige talking excitedly on the other side of the formation.

"Maya! See those domes up ahead?" Salvador piped up suddenly.

"Yeah?" she responded. I peered at what he was referring to as well, seeing the large, porous mounds situated around the camp ahead of us. I'd definitely seen ones like them before.

"Spiderant nests. Be ready to shoot some bug asses." he advised, "It's the one place they aren't- oh! Is that who I think it is?!" Salvador was distracted by something; he veered off in a different direction and jogged away from me and Maya. We watched him approach some kind of large, bloodstained bulletin board. Nailed to the bullet-ridden wood was a line of bounty posters, featuring some all-too-familiar faces. Mugshots of Salvador, Maya, Zero, and me stared back at us, bordered by our listed crimes and rewards for capture. It wasn't an unexpected sight, but it still left a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Maya wandered over to stand beside him, while I stood awkwardly in place and fiddled with my buzz axe. "Look, we're popular! I've never had a bounty this high!" Salvador exclaimed as he pointed to his own poster. Well, two posters, since they couldn't fit all his crimes on one. Maya started reading them aloud.

"Manslaughter, arson, theft, trespassing, can… cannibalism?" she gave the man a very serious, very concerned look. He only blew a raspberry with his lips and waved it off.

"Yeah. They always say you're gonna get charged for cannibalism, but nine times of ten they're going to look the other way." he stated casually. Maya still looked disturbed, and I understood why. I also understood just how overcrowded Pandoran prisons would be if they actually tried to arrest all the cannibals out there. She blinked and shook her head before turning her attention to her own poster.

"Seven hundred billion, now that's a bounty! He really wants you dead!" Salvador rumbled encouragingly as he fist-bumped Maya's tattooed arm. She didn't seem quite as excited.

"For being a siren, of course." she muttered in disdain.

"A murderer, a douchenozzle, and a racist." Salvador shook his head disapprovingly and tutted to himself. Maya made no further comment as her eyes trailed to Zero's poster.

"Political assassinati-oh my god he actually spells his name with a zero." A snicker-snort escaped her at the revelation it was in fact Zer0, not Zero. I made a mental note of that.

"Agh, mierda!" Sal threw his arms out to gesture at my own mugshot, the one I was hoping they'd ignore. "Kreig beat me out for second place by like, nine billion!"

At the mention of my name I craned my neck higher. No longer content with just watching the two, I trudged towards them to see what they were so interested by. My crime was printed in bold below a picture of myself I didn't remember taking, plain as day.

Property of Hyperion

I immediately felt nauseated, like my entire world was tilting to an uncomfortable angle. Maya eyed me as soon as she'd read it. "Property?" she echoed, fixing me with her searching gaze. I couldn't bare to meet it.

Even if I could talk to you, it's not worth talking about.

The thought was punctuated by a sharp pain in my temple. My head jerked suddenly like I'd been punched with an invisible fist. "HAYSEED BABYEATER RIP-SCRUNGE!" came rasping out of my throat, and out of nowhere I was lifting my axe high above my head.

STOP RIGHT NOW WHAT DO YOU-

The spinning blade struck wood, not flesh. Splinters flew through the air as I carved a huge gash into the bounty board, tearing the poster with my picture on it in half. Maya and Salvador stepped far away from me in their surprise. Again and again I drove my weapon into the wall, messily scoring it until all of the posters were torn to shreds. Then for good measure, I knelt down and started shoving the ripped paper under my mask and into my mouth.

Fuck, don't scare me like that! And stop eating paper!

Regardless of my orders my other half chewed and swallowed every poster piece he could get our calloused fingers on. It tasted better than raw varkid meat, but it still wasn't good .

"Well, at least all these bandits we killed can't ID us anymore." Salvador offered, ever on the positive side of life. Maya didn't respond. I could feel her eyes on me, watching and wondering about my odd behavior, questioning the words on the poster. I hated the feeling. "Egh. Let's get moving." Mercifully, Salvador shuffled off and drew one of his guns to get back on task.

She finally turned away from me to follow along. For a moment I just sat there and watched them leave, hunched over and still chewing on paper. The words on the poster were currently being broken down by my own stomach acid, but I still couldn't get them out of my head.

Property. That goddamn sociopathic shitstain of a-

I had to stop myself. Just thinking about it stoking my anger, bringing back thoughts I didn't have the time or energy to try to remember. I gulped down another piece of chewed up poster, as well as the lump in my throat.

Get up. We have a job to do.

I got back to my feet and stumbled forward to catch up with them. Back to work. Out of sight, in my stomach, out of mind.

The other two were approaching the camp slowly when I reached them. I followed Maya's suspicious gaze to the ramshackle buildings ahead to realize myself that they seemed… strangely abandoned. No bandits to be seen in the watchtowers or the foldout chairs situated around a long-dead fire.

"Something's not right." Maya almost whispered. She and Salvador kept their guns drawn as they made their slow approach. I expected the bandits to start emerging from their little homes at any moment, but none ever did. Soon we were standing in the middle of the settlement, glancing around in confusion. Salvador froze so suddenly I nearly tripped over him.

"Did you guys just feel that?" he asked quickly.

"Feel what?" She glanced between Sal and over her own shoulder. I wasn't sure what he was referring to either, but my grip tightened around my axe handle.

Then, I did feel it. The ground vibrated, like something huge was moving just beneath us. To my right I saw the icy earth burst open, pierced by two enormous, dark claws. They were quickly followed by the crested head of a truly monstrous spiderant. It shrieked at the three of us with vicious, flesh-eating intent.

"AW FRIG, they moved their burrows over here!" Salvador shouted way too loudly for his own good. The spiderant's eyeless face zeroed in on him and it charged, immediately. They opened fire on the beast, but their bullets simply lodged in the thick exoskeleton of its head. It wasn't slowing down.

"Oh-h shit!" Maya did the intelligent thing and darted to the side to avoid being trampled, but Salvador held his ground, holding the triggers of two SMGs down as he stood right in the creature's path.

"HIT ME WITH YOUR BEST SHOT YOU SON OF BITCH!" he screamed above the thundering of his guns. I had my doubts before, but this confirmed it; Salvador was not much saner than I was. The spiderant raced past me, which seemed to deeply offend my outer self. I howled and slashed at the thing's armored leg right before it barreled into the much, much smaller Pandoran.

The man had to have just taken the hit force of a train, but his guns kept firing. He was plastered across its head like a bug on a windshield, yet he still screamed defiantly and unloaded bullets into its exoskeleton. Maya and I could only watch in horror as he was swept away by the stampeding spiderant, right into one of the domed masses of insect nest. His yelling was abruptly cut off; he and the beast disappeared in a cloud of dust and a huge chunks of nesting material.

"SALVADOR!" Maya shouted. She started to run towards the collapsing dome, only for the ground in front of her to start shifting and breaking apart. More of the bloodthirsty insects emerged from the ground surrounding us, two, then six, then a dozen. They shrieked and growled at us from all directions, forcing Maya to stumble backwards to stand next to me.

They made an absolute mess of the earth. It shifted dangerously beneath our feet, loosened by the spiderants digging and borne down by their weight. I could see the dirt sinking in multiple places around us.

Get us to stable ground!

My urging came too late. With a massive cracking noise, the earth lurched and collapsed. Suddenly I was falling. My arm shot out to hold on to Maya in the confusion, but I only grasped at thin air. It took longer than I expected for my back to hit something solid, but by the time I did I was staring up at the edges of the 12 foot hole we'd just landed in, swarmed at all sides by spiderants that were either falling in too or hissing from their perch.

I sat up to see Maya had landed closeby. She had her shotgun shoved against a slobbering spiderant's underside as it loomed over her. I jumped to my feet immediately, but before I could take a swing at the oversized bug she blasted its thorax open with two well-placed shots. She grunted in disgust as she pushed off its remains and stood up again.

The members of the swarm that hadn't fallen into the hole were quickly descending to meet us again. Around us were a number of entrances to tunnels hollowed out in the dirt, and a distant rumbling suggested that even more spiderants were skittering over to investigate the noise. It seemed we'd had the misfortune of falling right into their underground tunnel system. Maya cocked her gun, glanced over her shoulder at me, and nodded determinedly. Despite the immense danger we were in and the fact one of our teammates might've just died, I felt myself grinning behind my mask at her.

"NOW THAT'S A RIP-ROARING LIVER CHUNKER!" I shouted as the bugs closed in. At the sound of insectile chittering to my left I abruptly swung around to see myself clout a spiderant in the side of the head with my massive axe. The force of the blow sent it reeling, just so I could go for the next one coming to take its place. Soon a handful of them were snapping at me from all sides, so I started swinging in wide arcs. With each gouging crash came sickening squelches, flying fragments of exoskeleton, and cyan-hued bug blood. As more emerged from the tunnels they jumped at me, only to be roughly thrown off or pinned down and eviscerated. I was less focused on keeping track of the violence my own hands were inflicting, though. What I was really listening for was the comforting noise of Maya's gunshots nearby.

I lost count of all the times I heard her shotgun fire, just like I was losing count of all the spiderants I was hacking to pieces. Over time the blast of her shotgun turned into the ringing bangs of a pistol, and that into the rapidfire of a combat rifle. Meanwhile my hands were chopping, punching, and ripping apart every spiderant that came close enough. I was collecting a number of deep cuts and bites as I went on, but I didn't stop swinging the axe. The man in control was content to kill until we dropped, while I was dead set on getting Maya out of that pit alive.

"Shit!" I heard her curse over the constant noise of the swarm. There were several seconds with no gunshots, which could only mean one horrible thing; she'd run out of ammunition.

Draw them away from her!

I couldn't tear my focus away from the spiderant I was digging my blade into, like watching it shriek and suffer was more important than anything. I heard the unnatural, shuddering inhale of Maya tearing a dimensional rip. The tunnels were cast in blue light, which finally drew my attention to her. Amidst the clamoring bodies I could see her hand, reaching up and glowing, trapping not one, but four of the insects in a phaselock. They were thrown against a nearby wall so forcefully I heard the crack of their exoskeletons.

The display of her power distracted me a second long enough for the spiderants to take advantage. I felt the weight of one crash into me, accompanied by the pain of its legs digging into my back. They were overpowering me; I couldn't reach Maya or even see what was happening to her. I could feel my heart beating alarmingly fast as absolute panic constricted my chest. Once again I felt the dull pain in my head that grew with my mounting frustration.

She was out of ammunition, her powers had to be sapping her strength, and there were still dozens of the beasts to get through. I had to lose myself to the building anger; I saw no other way. She'd seen plenty of my ugly side. I suppose it was only a matter of time before I revealed my even uglier side.

Keep her safe. Keep her safe.

I urged repeatedly and firmly, but the voices were already starting to drown me out. Their whispers picked up to savage, growling shouts. I felt the excruciating pain of my flesh moving, pulsing, shifting, like horrible worms digging beneath my skin. All of my strength pooled in the arm that held my axe, all of my mind bent on the impending slaughter. In a sea of voices screaming for bloodshed, I was the only one hoping to every power out there that she wouldn't be caught in the crossfire. I tried my best to shout above the crowd scrambling through my head.

LISTEN TO ME! KEEP HER SAFE!

My hazy vision zeroed in on the nearest spiderant, its huge, eyeless head tilted up and drooling. I could barely hear the revving of my buzz axe over the beat of my heart and the din of the voices, but I watched in shock as it came crashing through the beast's thick dome of a carapace.

"LET THEIR EYESHAPES SQUIRM, LET THEIR CATERWAULING JOIN THE SYMPHONY!" my voice poured out in a demonic roar as the rotating blade dug deeper, spattering my body with blue fluid and shattered bits of exoskeleton. The spiderant convulsed violently before it slid off of my blade and crumpled to the earth. I was on the next one in an instant, slashing through segmented legs, letting it fall just to stomp down on its abdomen till it burst like rotten fruit. A sharp leg clipped my ribcage as another leapt at me. I slammed the side of my axe into it so brutally it went flying.

My axe halved another spiderant, dug into another, it left gashes of oozing blue everywhere I looked. Darkness was creeping in on the edges of my awareness but I didn't slow for a second. With each bug I tore through I only seemed to be gaining momentum. I saw myself slashing through a thorax, then the next second I was ripping one limb from limb, the next I caught a glimpse of Maya's yellow armor before more reeking fluid sloshed over my face. I blinked and saw a dripping pair of fangs right before my eye, only to fade out yet again.

I came back to the distant groan of one of the insects and the muffled sound of my own blood rushing through my head. My fuzzy vision was focused on the ground, littered with spiderant corpses and all the disgusting viscera they contained. I felt… proportional again. My wounds had healed somehow, but I was still dazed. My breath came out in heaving pants that hurt my lungs. Before I could bask in the relief of the silence I realized what had just happened.

Where is she?

My head swung around like a tranquilized animal's, searching through the dark tunnels around me for something that wasn't a dismembered spiderant. There several seconds of agonizing worry before my gaze fell on Maya. She was braced against a burrow and breathing heavily, staring at me in unblinking shock.

We panted and watched one another in silence, me coming down from the high of my killing spree, her trying to process what she'd just witnessed. I could cry out of relief that I hadn't hurt her in my frenzy. At the same time, she'd just seen how much of a mutant I could be. I could only imagine what must've been going through her head. My breathing only seemed to speed up as I thought about it. An insect organ that was wobbling on my shoulder slid down my chest to land on the ground with a wet plop.

"Woo, what a bloodbath!" Salvador's jovial voice echoed through the chamber, making Maya jump slightly. The two of us turned our heads upwards to see the gunzerker himself leaning over the edge of where the ground had collapsed, grinning down at us. "I feel so left out!" He was covered in dirt, grime, and patchy blue stains like we were, but besides that he didn't look much worse for wear.

"Sal! You're okay!" Maya finally breathed out.

"Hell yeah I am! How about you two?"

"READY FOR THE REMIX!" I belted out, my voice back to its usual grating scream.

"Yeah…" Maya threw a glance my way and nodded. "Yeah we're okay." I still couldn't quite read her expression.

"Let's get you out of there, yeah? Friggin' reeks."

It took some rope and a bit of desperate scrabbling over spiderant corpses to bring us back to the surface, but luckily Salvador was even stronger than he looked. I was honestly shocked that he'd managed to haul my giant self out of there after Maya. And all the while he spun us a yarn about how he'd gunned the massive spiderant into submission, rode its back like a bucking bronco, and 'punched it so hard it exploded everywhere'. Once we were out the three of us put a great distance between ourselves and the caved-in bandit camp before we took a moment to breathe.

"We must've dropped into the mother of all spiderant nests. I landed right on my ECHO too, it's totally busted." Maya let out an exhausted sigh and plunked herself down in the wet snow. As soon as she made contact with the ground she winced in pain. "Ahhh-yep, that's a bruise."

"Don't get too comfortable." Salvador chuckled, "The rest of them found a cave leading deeper in, they're waiting for us there." The siren let out a groan.

I stared down at the snow in interest before I let myself fall face-first into it. It was unpleasantly icy and compact, but that didn't stop me from rolling around in it while babbling incomprehensibly. My body left streaks of putrid blue wherever it touched. Maya spoke as I wallowed in the slurried mix of snow and blood.

"Alright. I'm just gonna check around the camp first." My face was still shoved in the icy ground but I heard her get up and walk off.

"Don't go falling in a giant hole again!" Salvador called after her.

"I wooooon't!"

She returned after a short while, with an armful of ammo she distributed between her and Salvador. After that we were off, the gunzerker leading the way this time as we went back the way we came. It didn't feel great to get so horrendously sidetracked, but at least the three of us had emerged from it relatively unscathed.

Speaking of Maya, I noticed her hovering closer to me while we walked behind Sal. "Hey." she said at a somewhat lower volume. I felt a tiny thrill over the fact she was trying to get my attention. My mask turned to her as I narrowed my eye. She was looking up at me, and it took me a second to realize she was holding an object out to me. It was an ECHO device, a bit beat-up but still functioning. "I found a couple of these. Pretty sure the owners were eaten by spiderants so…" I only stared at her offering blankly and left her hanging.

Don't be rude. She's giving you a gift.

"You should have one too, in case you get separated." She tried again. The simple gift made me feel a strong… emotion, I couldn't quite put my finger on. A sappy burst of optimism for the first time in a while. Before that day I saw myself as something akin to the vault hunters' badly-trained attack skag, but in that moment I realized she considered me a teammate. The gesture probably didn't have a profound meaning to her, but it did to me.

Finally I took the device from her with a surprising gentleness and held it up to my mask to smell it. It wasn't food or something to kill, so I can't imagine my other half would find any value in it. Hell, it took me months to convince him of the value of pants. She looked to me and pointed at her own ECHO, before demonstrably clipping it to one of her belt loops. I took the hint and did the same. A moment silence hung between us two as we followed Salvador. The stocky Pandoran was half-singing, half-mumbling a song in his native tongue.

"I guess we're 2 for 2, on the skin-saving thing." Maya commented, glancing up to smile at me again. Suddenly I felt very aware of how sweaty I was. Even with spiderant spittle in her hair she was strikingly beautiful. "Thank you."

It's… the least I could do. Or he could do, technically. I didn't have much of a hand in it. I don't know why I'm saying this. You can't hear me.

What came out of my mouth was only slightly more embarrassing than my anxious internal rambling. "I'LL STITCH THE BLADE WITH MEAT-LACE AND EGGNOG!"

Instead of confusedly trying to interpret my nonsense words she just laughed and turned her gaze back to the path ahead. "If you can do that giant arm thing again when we meet the Firehawk, I think we'll be in good shape."

"STRIP THE FLESH!" I belted back.

"Only if they aren't willing to negotiate." She smirked at me, and suddenly I felt light enough to laugh, or to burst into song with Salvador without even knowing the lyrics. Of course I wasn't able to do either of those things. But for a moment, I got the crazy belief in my head that someday I could.