The afternoon practice session was just as uneventful as the morning session, until it wasn't. Damon had the three crews broken up to practice battle tactics. The men were all lagging and discipline was starting to slip. They'd already been through all these maneuvers and the heat and humidity were trying their tempers. He knew the men were beginning to think this was pointless, which was the point. He needed them to follow orders, even if it was stupid, even if it meant they suffered for doing it, especially if it meant they had to die because of it. He was working the pilots harder than all the rest, making them take turns at point, at calling out battle maneuvers, giving them harder and more difficult scenarios. When they were at the jungles edge preparing for a simulated spider mink attack everything fell apart.
Approximately thirty of the fast moving minglers came out of the brush cutting them off from the other battle crews. Samuelson and Blain couldn't come to his aid as they were dealing with their own wave assaults. Damon called for a wedge attack. He took point and put Galadriel and Frasier beside him with Stanton and Faber tucked behind to cover their ass.
Together they charged into the line of the minglers. Damon used his ax blade to split the heads of three minglers that came out to meet them. He was knocked sideways by Galadriel and had to parry a mingler tail, he stepped inside the tail's reach and jumped onto the back of the spinning creeper. His feet slid on the gooey carapace, but he managed to drive home his pike side blade deep into the monsters thorax and into the ground. He used the pike for leverage, catapulting off, into a mess of three more clicking beasts. He realized too late that he'd broken rank and was cut off from Galadriel and Faber. He turned and took a mingler claw to his chest; he stepped back and took off the creepers tail. Galadriel and Faber linked up. They cut through a thin line of minglers and broke into a mad dash towards Blain and his embattled men.
Damon whistled six staggered notes, ordering Blain to link battle groups. The two parties synced up in an assault formation then moved forward cutting into the minglers that encircled them, in an attempt to join with Samuelson. Damon repeated his whistled commands, but Samuelson ignored them. Instead of fighting towards Damon and Blain, Samuelson was taking his battle group in the other direction, running for base. Damon aborted the attempt to link with him and called for a defensive march. They all closed ranks and the troops on the perimeter deployed their pikes. The men in the center did the same creating a strong square of sharp points, only then did the formation press forward. The minglers didn't attack instead they surrounded the wall of thorns with a sea of creepers. They clicked menacingly giving ground but holding their long sharp tails up over their heads ready to strike.
Damon's teams made some headway, but the minglers didn't break their envelopment. Damon began to wonder what the evil brain that organized these monsters had in mind. A loud crash in the distance seemed to answer his unspoken question. On the far side of the meadow beyond the base, the minglers were drawing a giant masher. Samuelson was just reaching the compound and his men were filing inside, Damon didn't think they'd be safe there for long.
Squads of Minglers were throwing themselves in front of the masher, sacrificing themselves to entice it toward the base. It was a stroke of genius. He was at a standoff; just trying to limp back home, but now that home was being taken away. His men would have to make a last stand knowing they'd be picked apart. Damon decided a desperate situation required desperate action; he deployed a wedge attack at triple speed with a rear defense. The men slowly picked up speed the ranks spread apart and the pike and ax started to spin end over end. It wasn't long before they were in a full out run cutting down all that was in their way. There was a terrible clacking and then the flanks of the minglers parted revealing a formation of their own a long deep concentration in front of the base. Damon had no choice but to plow into it. All around him there was the crush, men fighting for their lives in a desperate flurry. He'd seen it before; he wondered how long his men could last. They couldn't sustain an all out assault, no matter how well they were conditioned. The man to the left or the right would fall, someone would stumble over them, then get taken by the swarm, the whole formation would collapses and then there would be nothing left. If no one fell and the formation held, then eventually the weakest man would begin to fatigue, his adrenaline spent, he would continue on only because he didn't want to be the first to give up, but then he would, and all the others would fold and then everyone would be eaten alive.
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Damon had seen something like it when fighting other men in his youth; a point came when you stopped trying to win and just tried to lose without shame. The minglers had him in a desperate position, and they didn't care about shame, or mercy. He let out his war cry and poured out his last: hacking, dodging, spinning, killing.
His hands shook, he clenched his pike, blood oozing through his fingers, before him there was a mass of minglers still standing, beneath his feet were the tremoring dead. He whistled and deployed full defense, half speed. If he felt like he was drowning then his men would be just as spent.
The masher was still crashing forward closing in on the base. Damon was about to call out to Samuelson, an order to enter the fray and to assault the Masher when the gates opened and Mickelson led four men out. They were Samuelsson's crew and bruisers all. They didn't come to link with Damon. Instead they swung out around the base. They cut down the contingent drawing the masher forward and then set in on the masher itself. Damon could see Mickelson crawl on top of the monster's carapace; somehow, he'd hacked his way through and found a way up between a gap in the thousands of stroking legs. He was walking along the long carapace stopping at the elbow where it rose up high into the air. Randall climbed up beside him and they hacked at the masher, like two loggers trying to fell a tree.
The base was going to be safe, but there was still a wall of creepers blocking him from reaching it. Damon decided these minglers had come too close to ending them. He couldn't let them get that close again. He looked back and scanned the jungle for any sign of the diabolic brain. In the corner of the meadow a squad of dark minglers stood in formation, the leader had gotten sloppy, overconfident, he'd given his location away thinking he no longer needed to be careful. Damon longed for a troop of archers. He had to catch the freak before it could take to the sky. He gave the command to deploy two men from the center of formation. Galadriel and Frasier spun off breaking for the jungle and he followed. The black drones, tried to defend the brain to give him time to fly but Galadriel and Frasier cut through them. The white ball of meat hovered up above the heads of his drones. Damon threw his pike like it was a spear and knocked the white ball into a mess of long branched ferns. Galadriel and Frasier cut down the remaining drones while Damon waded into the ferns and stood over the screeching mess of tissue.
It had thin wings like spider silk and long tendrils coming out from a stalk at its base. It was covered in its own gore. It was rare to ever find a brain let alone to kill one. They spent their existence up in trees or hovering in concealment, directing their battles from the sky. Its clicking commands came from a sharp beak below two large round eyes. The relay of clicking drones made it impossible to track the brains calls, but this one got arrogant, it came down from the heights, maybe it needed to witness the destruction from a better vantage, maybe it wanted a snack. Damon had no pity for it now as it oozed its fluids and blinked up at him with its sad childlike eyes. Damon had more important things to worry about. He hadn't even started the mission, they were still in training, and it felt like he'd been at this for a whole season. Tomorrow was their last day and they had to practice maneuvers with the angel wings, but those were all just minor details because tonight he had to tend to the wounded then put down a traitor.