"Halt! You're trespassing on Iron Centurions territory!"
The voice ran out on a megaphone from the treeline as three [Warbred Raptors] came bounding out on the other side of the crevasse. The dinosaurs and their riders were armored: bronze and leather barding on the dinosaurs, full-face helmets and halfplate for the humans. IRON armor, thick enough to stop a bullet from anything smaller than the junk turret. Which we'd left behind. All three of the riders had rifles.
"Angel, get to cover. We've got company." I snarled and moved away from the anchor and the taut rappel line to draw their attention away from it. "The Cents are early."
The ground shook as something big - something REALLY big - thundered its way up the hill behind the other riders. A striking albino allosaurus, who nosed his way through the trees, lowered his head, and bellowed as his rider kicked him forward.
"Dermal amor time." I let my tentacles unfurl around and above me like a nest of hydra heads and put my flank to them, hissing. The display brought the forward scouts to a standstill, guns raised uncertainly as Lulu flowed over and around my body. The rider of the allosaurus did a double-take.
"Shit! It's that fuckin' Reaper!" A familiar Liverpudlian voice, as harsh as a crow's, rang tinnily from behind the helmet. Sergeant Vade. "That means his pet whore isn't far away. Gun it down and don't fuckin' miss, you cunts!"
The squad raised their rifles, but Lulu and I were already in motion - flying toward them as I plugged my tentacles into Lulu and picked Shadow Cloak. All moves Soul Drained from Lulu were Psionic moves, and so far, that had made them more flexible than a default move of its type. So rather than drop the cloak over myself, I focused on the firing squad and directed it at them.
A 20ft globe of darkness fell over the three raptors. The dinosaurs screeched and scattered, but the globe of darkness clung to the central rider and moved with him. That was one gunner out of the fight. He accidentally kept one of the other riders in the dark as he spun his mount to back away from the edge of the cliff, and the woman yelled at him - a shout drowned out by a shrill curdling screech from within the jungle.
"What the fuck was THAT?" I threw myself down and rolled to avoid a gunshot, bouncing up to my feet just in time to see-"AAAAIEEEE!! WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT!!!?"
The Greater Legion galloping toward us was straight out of my worst nightmares. Half a dozen whip-like tentacles slithered and coiled in the air around a disturbingly human-like, armless torso mounted on four insectoid legs. It was spiny and black and had WAY too much going on, drooling poison from a hooked, fanged jawbone that looked more like a chainsaw than a mouth.
[You have identified a new S-type Legion: Whiphorse (Spirit/Blood/Poison.]
[This creature… it is maybe not actual horse.]
“No fucking shit it’s not an actual horse!!” Somehow, the broken English in Chorus’s informational sub-routine made it worse. But Whiphorse didn’t care. Whiphorse didn’t give a shit as it sprung over the crevasse like a cricket, screeching a raspy knife-on-a-glass-bottle scream.
Vade was trying and failing to get a bead on us while his mount thundered up and down at the edge of the crevasse. The allosaurus wasn't able to leap the gap, but a ghostly fox-like Cute raced out from behind its legs. It flew after the Whiphorse, sailing effortlessly over the abyss. The [Kitulyst], wreathed itself in whirling blue flames, skidded to a stop in front of us - and transferred the [Ghost Orb Aura] to the Whiphorse.
[You have identified new A-Type Legion: Kitulyst. This powerful dark spirit legion is channel the power of the-]
"Shut the fuck up!" I yelped at Engrish-Chorus. Straight ahead, the Whiphorse ignited like the goddamned Ghost Rider. A flaming insectoid nightmare straight out of Hell.
"Stop that Reaper!" Vade roared. "If you can't catch it, kill it!"
"Actually, you know what? Screw this. I’m out." I bolted in the opposite direction.
There was a shriek of rage from behind me. Arrows and bullets zinged past my sprinting form, clipping Lulu and sending a plume of slime into the air just ahead of my face. A shadow appeared over my back. The Whiphorse. Instead of trying to turn and grapple with the flaming demon-bug, I ran to the edge of the rock, grabbed the edge of it, and swung down under the overhang in the desperate hope I'd find handholds.
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There were no handholds.
"God... DAMN IT." The load of explosives in my Inventory really came to bear while I swung back and forth, flailing with every one of my many limbs for something to grab onto. That impressive-looking stamina meter of mine began to drain real fast.
"Eeeeek!" Lulu tensed around my body, thinning out and tightening around my ribs, and lashed out with most of her body mass at the underside of the rock shelf. She stuck like one of those jelly handslapper toys you could buy at gas stations.
"SCREEEEE!" The world suddenly refocused on the Whiphorse, standing right above us on the edge of the cliff. It didn't try and haul us up. Instead, it reared on its back two legs and stamped the burning black spike points of the front ones down on my clutching hands. It didn’t need a face for me to read its expression. Long live the king.
“Oh you piece of-!” They didn't pierce all the way through, but they did piece. I yowled, slipped, then lurched out into empty space.
A hundred feet looks like a lot when you're at the top looking down. It's a real short distance to fall. I jettisoned the napalm barrels in sheer desperation, sending them sailing down toward the valley floor where Angel fought a running battle against the main caravan now advancing from the east. Several of them hit the roofs of the armored wagons, shattering harmlessly against their giant turtle-shell roofs. Lulu did her best to keep us glued to the rocks, but even with my load shot all over the ground, she just wasn't strong enough. Still... she arrested our fall, a bit, tearing from the overhang like a wax strip and sending us careening toward the cliff wall. I hit the mushroom-covered rocks with a smash and a wet squelching sound before pitching down into the bushes at the base of the wall. For a couple of dizzy moments, I just lay there, stunned and covered in glowing mushroom goop.
“Angel…” I muttered, swaying up to my feet. “Where the hell is Angel?”
"HYENA BOIIIII-YS!" Angel had never heard a hyena, so she imitated what she'd seen of their crazed expressions and let out a discordant, off-key laugh while she sprinted out of concealment toward us. She moved like a woman possessed, rifles braced against her ribs. The weapons hummed with energy as she fired at the caravan that had come to a dead stop in the middle of the road. While under the influence of Guns Akimbo, ammunition wasn’t a problem. She gunned down three startled Centurions and sent the rest scattering for cover.
"So, first of all, I'm really sorry." I wheezed as I got to my feet, coughing. Lulu had managed to save my life, but my HP was over half down. "Second of all, holy fuck was that badass."
We were severely outnumbered. There were four wagons, at least thirty soldiers, and four triceratops down here with us. Above us, I saw the Whiphorse and his foxy companion making a mad dash along the edge of the crevasse, Vade and his goons following on the other side. Distantly, I heard his voice roar out. "Get down there! Get the fuckers!"
“Noodoo! Infoonoo boo!” Lulu squeaked.
I didn’t argue, just let her make the call. She shuddered as I plugged my tentacles in. Time slowed and the world turned grey, the caravans looming large in my vision while I selected Inferno Ball.
“HRRAH!” I snarled as I ripped my tentacles free, channelled the pain into rage and the rage into power. “EAT SHIT!”
The ball formed ahead of me like a small meteor. It hit the jelly-soaked caravan at the front of the line. The roof exploded, then I heard a whomph of ignition. Terrified triceratops bellowed and struggled against their traces – and the wood-and-shell wagon went off like a car bomb inside of the tunnel formed by the crevasse.
The blast was so intense that it blew Angel off her feet and set me staggering back a step. A familiar smell roiled out from the core of the explosion. It was rum.
“Whoa,” Angel signed. “What the hell are they transporting in those things?”
"It's alcohol." My muzzle pulled back from my teeth in a weird grin as I abandoned thoughts of running away. "Hold onto your panties, boys and girls, because it's about to get steamy."
The teams of trikes were going mad now: bellowing, thrashing hard enough they tipped the third wagon right over. Kegs shattered and rough-smelling liquor poured to the ground, joining the conflagration of wood, bracken, burning poisonous mushrooms, explosive gel and corpses. The Centurions were armed and equipped for a raiding party. A three-quarter ton monster falling from the sky, showering them with napalm like some kind of Anarchist Fairy Godmother, had not been on the morning briefing.
"Centurions! Form up, form up!" An officer shouted from the chaos, cut off as a triceratops brayed, reared, and smashed their front feet down onto his shoulders and crushed him to the ground. Only the rearmost wagon was still intact, the drivers cursing as they got their anxious beasts to back up. It worked until the left-side trike took a piece of shrapnel to its parrot-beaked face and spooked. The beast let out a piercing trumpeting cry and veered to one side, smashing all three horns into the cliff... where it got stuck and began to panic.
"I… actually feel kind of superfluous at this point." Angel fell in beside me, pushing her bangs up with one hand as we watched the Centurions battling one of their own triceratops. They were now down to fewer than fifteen men. "We should probably do something. Before we run out of fire."
"... probably." I got to my feet and flipped my tentacles, spreading them out as I braced to sprint. "Okay, Lulu. Let's eat some grass and kick some ass before Vade, his fox, and that fucking Whiphorse find a way down here."
"Eeeeeeeeee-!" Lulu screamed the whole way as I charged into the fray.