Gunfire rippled down the V as the pathfinders unloaded a volley upon the eradicator at extremely close range. The monster leaned into the storm of musketry and hunkered down behind its folding swords, the bullets sparking as they struck the armoured tibia of its forelegs. Their sclerites were angular and seemed to deflect most of the incoming missiles, and allthough handful still got through and tore chunks out of its underlying flesh the eradicator seemed unfazed.

Those pathfinders still equipped with Sharpstones began fumbling at their cartridge boxes or reaching for their own sidearms. The eradicator felt the initial volley slacken and shot out its folding swords, impaling a screaming rifleman in the abdomen before casually sawing him apart. Then it rocked from side to side on its legs, pausing to chew daintily on the gore-streaked teeth of its blades. Ven saw the opening through the forelegs and tried to track its tiny isosceles head with her iron sights. But it was almost impossible to get a clear shot at the nerve cluster with it moving so rapidly. The string of curses from the shoulder cannon crews on either side told her that they too were having difficulty sighting their cumbersome weapons.

“Sierck, Cooly!” Deschane yelled, emptying his pistol at the swaying monster, "Gimme direct fire, right fugging now!”

The shoulder cannons thumped one after the other, their oversized slugs killing nothing but air. Ven’s musket bucked against her shoulder and also went far wide of the mark.

Harmer’s didn’t, however. The markswoman struck the swaying isosceles dead centre, blowing some of its maxillae out the back of its head in a geyser of viscous mucus. The eradicator reeled as if punch-drunk, legs wobbling beneath it.

“No dice,” Harmer warned them, already busy tamping down another hexagonal bullet, “I don’t think it’s got a nerve cluster there!”

Sure enough the monster righted itself in the next moment and came for them again with redoubled swiftness. Only the steady stream of fire from the platoon’s eight Suppressors drove it back, one of the quicktimers putting out one of its eyes entirely. The eradicator clammed up behind its forelegs for protection, bobbing and weaving as the platoon pelted it mercilessly with everything they had. Ven had slung her Sharpstone and switched to her cycler at this point, the big pistol threatening to sprain her wrist with each pull of the trigger. But all it seemed to do was add to the clouds of smoke that were quickly obscuring everything in front of the platoon.

This is going nowhere, Ven thought. Nothing we have can hurt it. All it has to do is wait for our guns to run dry a second time, and then it will have us all for lunch.

“Pull back, but maintain contact!” Deschane ordered, having realized the same thing, “Bounding overwatch!”

“Stay in your quartets!” Pretty Boy roared alongside him, “I want a steady rate of fire! Ven, get your piddly arse back in here!”

The volleys slackened again as half the pathfinders either conserved their shots or paused to reload, alternating fire with the other half to maintain a sustained rate of fire while the formation performed a fighting retreat. Sierck’s grouping on the left peeled back first, covered by the other quartets. The eradicator skittered into the void they had left behind, seeking to run them all down, but the stiff resistance from the rest of the platoon meant that it only managed to snag the loader, hamstringing him with a flick of its swords. As the man toppled into a bush and rolled about screaming his head off, Sierck went back for him, tossing his shoulder cannon aside for the pair of riflemen to pick up as he slung his partner onto his broad back.

His bravery was rewarded moments later by the eradicator reaching in and skewering them both on the spot, nailing them together with its foreleg. It held them up and began to chomp on them like candied apples on a stick, its damaged mouthparts nevertheless shredding Sierck’s sealant suit with ease. The artillerist wailed nonstop as he was eaten alive. The triangular head burrowed into the widening hole in his back and bulged outward like a hand reaching into an obscene meat puppet. The other pathfinders held their fire, unable to bring themselves to shoot while the eradicator used their friends as living shields. That is, until Harmer put her next round through Sierck's brainpan and ended his suffering.

"Nothing we can do for em," the first sergeant said, "They've gone to the green. Blast on through!"

Sieck's body twitched and jerked as the platoon's bullets ripped through him, interrupting the eradicator's meal with a serving of hot lead.

Ven ran back to her quartet, propelled by terror and an equal sense of urgency. She found Tooms and Cooly scrambling to reload the shoulder cannon, Tooms scraping the barrel clear of dangerous debris with a worm screw shaft.

“Double time, ya motherless hoors!” Pretty Boy pleaded with them, hopping on his toes in his anxiety, “D'you want us to be next?”

“Shaddup, I’m doing it, shaddup!” Tooms replied. He slipped the worm screw back into the sheathe on Cooly’s backpack and reached for its companion stick whose end was kept in a sloshing canteen.

“Never mind the sponge, just fill her up!”

The sponge was meant to smother any remaining burning powder that could set the cannon off prematurely in a misfire that would very probably kill both the loader and his artillerist. But the eradicator was searching for another victim, and there was no time to lose. It shielded itself from the incoming fire with its left foreleg as it flicked the dead cannon crew over its shoulder, discarding them like trash. Deschane and Harmer’s quartets covered the retreating pair of riflemen with continuous shooting from their cyclers and Suppressors. For all their noise and fury, the onslaught did little more than stagger the beast.

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“Load charge,” Cool begged. Tooms turned the crank and stuffed the slug and powder charge into the breech.

Ven heard the ominous click of dry firing hammers as the Suppressor-armed pathfinders began to run out of ammunition. Deschane threw down both his spent pistols on the ground and drew his small sword with a snarl as the eradicator advanced once again. The two riflemen now turned and peppered the beast to buy time for Deschane and Harmer’s quartets to withdraw.

“Loaded,” Tooms finally confirmed, cranking the breech shut again.

One of Harmer’s troopers stepped forward with a Sharpstone and discharged a sulphur irritant round directly into the eradicator's face. It flinched in annoyance as its antennae tasted the orange fumes then cut the offending pathfinder down with a clumsy swing, stumbling slightly on its feet.

By some stroke of miraculous insight Ven saw what had caused it to falter: a single entry wound weeping green pus on the side of its abdomen just above one of its legs. She recognized it by its placement as being the very first shot that Deschane had fired earlier to test Greymoss’ hypothesis. The armoured front of the eradicator prevented the rest of the platoon from targeting it, but her quartet’s position along the V afforded them the perfect angle for it.

“Brace!” Cooly commanded, aiming for the swaying head once again.

“Braced,” Tooms confirmed.

“Wait,” Ven pushed down on the barrel of the cannon, “Forget the nerve cluster, hit the sternites.”

“The what-now?” Cooly gave her a bewildered look.

“The underbelly!”

“Do as she says,” Pretty Boy seconded at once, "Just do it!"

Cooly lowered his aim accordingly and fired, rupturing a portion of the eradicator’s sternites. Its legs buckled beneath it and the eradicator balanced itself on its forelegs, wobbling about like a cripple on crazed stilts. Sensing the tide turning, Deschane waved them on with his sword, crying:

“Pour it on! Assail em!”

“Assail em!” the platoon echoed the old war cry, their voices choked with fury, “Assail em!”

By this time the troopers with Suppressors had refilled their magazines. They let fly with another rapid-fire volley, targeting the gaping hole in the abdomen and scoring more hits. Twitching now in agony, eradicator abruptly turned around and tried to climb up a stand of trees, rearmost legs dragging uselessly behind it.

“Oy!” Pretty Boy sprinted after it with both blades drawn, “Leaving so soon? You’ve a butcher’s bill to pay here, and I mean to collect!”

He darted in and hacked at the joints of its working pair of legs with his heavy backsword, severing it at the femur with a single chop. The eradicator swivelled its head around in a complete 180, eyes glaring with unblinking hatred. It aimed a lightning jab over its shoulder at Pretty Boy, but the angle was awkward and the wily veteran hadn’t remained stationary for even a moment. Ducking underneath the monster’s bulk, Pretty Boy rammed his steel spike of a sword into the other leg right where it joined the side of the body. Other pathfinders who were short on ammo drew their machetes and swarmed in for the kill, jabbing their long knives in between the gaps of its armour to carve into its insides.

We have him now, Ven exulted. Praise the progenitors, but we have him now!

Her hopes were dashed moments later when the eradicator’s abdomen split open along a vertical seam, unfurling in a double set of wings that stretched at least ten meters across from tip to tip. These now flapped with such rapidity that Pretty Boy and the other the machete-men were blown off their feet by the enormous downdraft it generated.

“So what, it can fly, too?” Tooms was crestfallen, “You’ve got to be joking. Oh, that simply isn’t fair!”

The loader fired off the last of his magazine up at it in frustration as the eradicator took off despite amidst the hail of bullets they send after it. It hovered very clumsily above the canopy as if it were unaccustomed to the very concept of flight, but even then, it was clearly too swift for them to run down on foot.

“We can’t let it get away. Not after all we’ve lost,” Harmer was weeping with helpless fury, “It claimed four of us, Sollem. Four!"

“They shall be avenged,” Deschane promised her, picking up his pistols and reloading them methodically, “Though not by our hands.”

As if on queue there came over the treetops a line of drakenguard sweeping in from either side, whooping with mad glee as their hornblowers skimmed lightly over the bamboo groves.

“Here comes the fugging cavalry,” Pretty Boy said, this time with whole-hearted delight, “Hip hip, hoorah!”

Puffs of smoke appeared in the form of a huge crescent whose horns encircled the fleeing eradicator. Their carbines and shotguns shredded its wings into tattered sails that did nothing to soften its inevitable crash landing. Even from this distance they felt the tremors of the impact through their toes.

Greymoss led the triumphant pathfinders through the brush in a line until they came to the edge of a wide clearing. The soil had been scorched by a recent fire, charred tree trunks lying among the ashes and bomb craters where Shylo’s shells had been at work. It was, in fact, the very clearing where Deschane had planned to drive the eradicator and subject it to the wonders of gun powder.

The beast lay prostrate in the middle of the clearing surrounded by the curious drakenguard, its entire body pulped and shattered by the crash. It appeared to have inadvertently impaled itself on one of its own folding swords—both curved blades had plunged straight through its thorax and out the other end.

“That went easier than expected,” Captain Caitliff exulted, “We didn’t even need the artillery’.”

“Not so easy, I’m afraid,” Deschane said, sober and withdrawn, “My platoon took heavy losses, skipper.”

“We couldn’t have done it without them,” Caitliff said, a hollow consolation, “Every man and woman in your unit was nothing short of heroic today. You took this thing head-on despite knowing what it was capable of. I was wrong about you, Sollem. You have our gratitude.”

"Aye, whatever that's worth. Now, let’s have a look at this ere terror, shall we?” Pretty Boy said with customary insolence. He sauntered over to dead eradicator to have a good look at the specimen they had bagged. Ven thought it was in very poor shape for autopsy, truth be told.

But as it so happened, they were to have ample opportunity to examine the creatures whole and up close. For as they stood round the corpse and prodded it with their bayonets, three of the burnt logs at the periphery of the clearing quivered and slowly pulled themselves upright…