Chapter Text
Attempt 12
A Predator's personal spaceship is not designed for your average hunt.
To be clear, it was not unheard of for such ships to occasionally have a direct role in hunts, specifically when hunting giant space-bound creatures. But considering said creatures were often the size of small (or large) moons, it would have been hilarious overkill to use such a spaceship to hunt a single terrestrial flightless bird.
Now, if one was being incredibly, extremely, frankly delusionally generous, an argument could be made that the stunt the Roadrunner pulled during the last attempt showed at least a low level reality-warping ability, against which a Predator's ship would be perfectly fair game.
However, the Predator was not following this logic. He was following the logic of 'I am 100% fed up with this shit and am going to end this hunt one way or another.'
Hence why he was currently flying his personal spaceship above the local desert and unleashing every weapon he had on the terrain below.
It was overkill. It was hilarious overkill. Rock formations and ravines and everything in-between vanished in plumes of fiery plasma, as the floating battlestation unleashed hell on the world below. The once vibrant desert was transformed into... well, still a desert, honestly, but a slightly rearranged one.
But most frustratingly of all, it was not working.
"Meep Meep!"
The Predator scowled, launching a series of missiles towards the speeding blur on the road in front of him. The blur casually swerved left and right, avoiding the explosive missiles as they impacted on the ground, before outright outspending the last one.
Another button launched a grappling hook into a nearby rock formation and application of the winch sent it toppling directly into the path of the Roadrunner. But the bird simply sped up and shot past the falling plateau before it could impact.
The Predator pulled levers and pressed buttons and unloaded a wave of destruction upon the landscape below, but his prey always remained one step ahead of said destruction. Always just that inch away from its death. Always out of the Predator's hands.
The Predator snarled and redoubled its efforts to destroy the bird. Weapons that were designed for slaying creatures 100x its size were deployed liberally, to ill effect. Tractor beams and gravity wells and various other complex Predator technologies were all deployed and promptly failed for one reason or another.
(If the Predator had being paying attention to the trail of destruction behind it, it might have noticed the coyote chasing after the ship, waving its arms and furiously shaking a sign with the word 'CHEATER!' written upon it.)
Eventually, after firing a cannon so large and so powerful that it temporarily shorted out his ship's own sensors, the Predator found himself unable to track the Roadrunner. The bird had disappeared into the dust cloud caused by the explosion and he was unable to tell whether it had evaded him or been outright disintegrated by the attack.
Then his ship's sensors picked up the cry.
'Meep Meep!'
It was standing in the distance, perched upon the tallest rock formation still standing in the desert- so tall that the Predator was momentarily confused as to how it had gotten there.
Then the bloodlust returned and he immediately shot a plasma blast towards it.
Or, at least, he tried to. He pressed the button to fire the plasma cannon on his ship and was surprised to find an error message come up. Apparently, he had fired the plasma cannon too many times in quick succession and now the barrels had overheated.
Oh well, a little frustrating, but he still had his missiles to-
Out of missiles.
Oh. Er… The grappling hook would make short work of-
The grappling hook launcher was currently reporting an unknown error and was non-functional.
Okay, what about the gravity well?
Jammed with debris.
The tractor beams?
Overloaded.
The flamethrowers?
Out of fuel.
In fact, the Predator realised to his mounting horror, it appeared that almost every single weapons system in his ship was either coming up empty or had broken down due to his madcap rampage across the desert.
He finally had the Roadrunner in his sights, but he no longer had the weapons to take advantage of it.
Unless…
Unless he used the ship itself as a battering ram against the creature.
The Predator laughed, an oddly hysterical thing even for the Yautja's own strange vocal patterns.
Of course! Of course it would end like this! Was there any other way it could conclude? Not with advanced weaponry or powerful explosives, but with the sheer adulterated willpower needed to finish his hunt! Ramming the bird was a risk, especially if he hit the rock formation, but it was a risk that no true Yautja would, nor could stay away from.
He was certain now. This was his path. This was how it would end.
And with that, he pushed the thrusters of his ship forward on a direct path for the small blue bird standing in his way.
It is at this point, dear viewer, that we must rewind to a few minutes before the Predator made his final glorious charge.
Specifically, we must stop and remind ourselves of the fate of the grappling hook.
See, while the ship's system had reported that there was an unknown error preventing the hook from being used, the Predator- his bloodlust too heightened- had not bothered to delve deeper and investigate what exactly that error might have been.
In actual fact, the error was quite simple.
The cause of the error was that the winch could not retrieve the grappling hook.
The reason the winch could not retrieve the grappling hook was because the hook itself was stuck fast in an object.
The object the hook was stuck into was a very large, very heavy boulder- one of the few that had yet to be disintegrated in plasmafire- that also happened to be situated precariously close to the edge of a very deep canyon.
All of which combined meant that when the Predator launched his ship forward towards the Roadrunner, the line connecting the ship to the grappling hook suddenly went very taut. And since the grappling hook line was built to be incredibly strong, it failed to snap. Which meant that, inevitably, the force of the spaceship caused the boulder itself to move perilously forward.
At which point, it toppled into the very deep canyon, bringing the grappling hook with it.
This was all information that would become evident to the Predator when, just as his ship was inches away from hitting the Roadrunner, it came to a very sudden and very worrying stop.
For about half a second.
Then it promptly went speeding back the way it came, very much against its will.
With the training of a professional Yautja hunter, the Predator quickly surmised what was happening and immediately slammed the emergency release button, disconnecting the ship from the grappling hook wire that was dragging towards peril. But he was too late.
Already, the ship had taken tremendous damage from being slammed into the ground and dragged across the desert floor. The propulsion system was offline, as was the anti-gravity drive. The controls were barely responding and it was clear the ship was no longer flight capable.
And worst of all, it was still sliding backwards, skidding from the force of its own momentum, and growing ever closer to the edge of that cliff.
The Predator frantically tried every emergency backup he could, anything to stabilise the craft even for a second and stop it from falling. But it soon became clear it was a lost cause.
He only had one option left. Abandon ship.
For various cultural reasons, Yautja ships were generally not outfitted with ejector seats, so the Predator was forced to open the entry hatch with his own hands, frantically throwing himself clear just as the ship sailed over the edge of the canyon and into the abyss.
It was almost too late. A single moment later and the Predator would've followed his ship. But he was just barely able to grasp onto the edge of the cliff in time.
Beneath him, he could feel the flare of heat and rush of wind as his ship exploded in the canyon below. His fingers gripped as tight as they could as the earth around him shuddered and shook from the force. It was all he took to simply remain there, dangling off the edge of the cliff, as the world rumbled around him.
Then, just when everything finally seemed to settle down, he heard it.
'Meep Meep!'
The Roadrunner was there, standing directly above him, its claws almost perilously close to where his fingers so desperately dangled. It stared down at him with its bright eyes and cheerful smile, but there was a sinister edge to that smile now.
Its claws edged closer to his fingers.
The Predator let out a sigh. So this was how it ended, huh? Slain by a dimwitted bird, due to his own arrogance and ineptitude. Not the way he'd wanted to go out, he had to admit.
Still, he'd be damned if he didn't at least try to take his foe down with him.
With the last ounce of effort he had, the Predator pulled him up just enough to reach over and press a button on his gauntlet.
Not just any button, mind. The self-destruct button.
The button that would activate the nuke concealed on his person, designed to remove all trace of the Predator's presence from the planet he was hunting on.
He would die, there was no doubt about that, but he would at least take the Roadrunner out with him.
The Predator stared up at the bird with a defiant look on its face, ready to face his doom.
Go on then, his eyes wordlessly said to the bird. Push me off the cliff. Finish it. Let's die together.
The Roadrunner continued to stare down at him, its claws drumming playfully across the desert floor. It leaned forward with its beak and, for a second, the Predator thought it was going to peck his fingers to force him to let go.
But it did not peck him. It did not even harm him. All that it did was reach down and carefully tug the Predator's mask off.
Then it gave a slightly muffled 'Meep Meep!' and sped off into the desert once more, carrying the mask with it.
Oh. Was that it? That was slightly disappointing, for what the Predator had assumed would be its final stand.
The Predator grimaced, flexing its mandibles, as it decided what exactly to do next.
First things first, he should probably deactivate the self-destruct, especially since he was no longer at risk of being pushed off a cliff. At the speed the Roadrunner was going, it probably would be out of range by the time the explosion went off.
Just as he was about to tap the deactivation code on his gauntlet, however, the Predator suddenly heard a slow whirring sound.
A familiar slow whirring sound.
Whiiiiiirrrrrrrr...
The sound of his rogue smart disc.
Heading straight towards him.
The Predator froze, unwilling to move even an inch as the flying silver disc came spinning his way. This wasn't simple terror, mind- although it was a little bit of that- but an actual plan.He had placed a program into it earlier that should cause it to adjust its flight and miss him, so as long as he kept still and didn't accidentally move at the last second into its path, then it should fly wide and miss him.
Just so long as he kept still…
True to his hopes, the new programming worked. The disc flew wide at the last second, missing the hunter completely.
And promptly sawed through the chunk of cliff that the Predator was hanging from.
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Boom.
Very Big Boom.
Epilogue
The Predator did not know how he had survived that last explosion.
Frankly, he should not have survived that last explosion. It was supposed to be a self-destruct, after all. Clearly, it wasn't a very effective self-destruct if it didn't, you know, destruct the self. He would be fully within his rights to demand a refund from the SpaceAcme store that he'd bought it from.
But, frankly, at this point, the Predator was finding it hard to care about anything.
He trudged through the desert, smoking, blackened, beaten and bruised, towards the rendezvous point he'd signalled his Yautja comrades to pick him up at. No doubt they would laugh at him for his humiliations, for his injuries and, most importantly of all, for the fact that he was giving up on the hunt, but he did not care.
He could not do this. Not anymore.
Hunting the Roadrunner was a fool's errand. An impossible task. Give him a nice simple, easy hunt against a MegaTyranno, rather than any more of this humiliation. He finally understood the pain of his fellows and, more importantly, why they had chosen to abandon their quests, no matter the shame it brought upon them.
Some things simply were not meant to be hunted.
As the Predator limped off into the sunset, a familiar coyote lounged back in a tattered old beach chair and watched him go, looking incredibly smug at his rival's misery.
The coyote took a long slurp of the glass of refreshing juice at its side, before holding up a sign with a few final words written upon it.
'WHAT A QUITTER, EH FOLKS?'
Meanwhile, as the sun finally disappeared into the horizon, the Roadrunner returned to the small cave that served as its home.
It was a comfortable little nest, with a fireplace and a lounge chair and various other odds and ends that you wouldn't normally expect to find in the nest of a wild animal.
However, the Roadrunner ignored all that, instead strolling casually to a small wall situated at the back of the cave. It lifted the mask that it had taken from the Predator and carefully hung it from a small hook that was jutting out from the wall there.
Then the Roadrunner took a step back and admired its work.
Perfect. It fit just right in with the dozen-or-so other Predator masks hanging from the same trophy wall.
As the Roadrunner settled into sleep, it hoped that it wouldn't be too long before another Yautja turned up. They were ever so much fun.