“They are not ready yet.”
“Uh…” one of the soldiers muttered unintelligibly. All guns were fixed on the woman as she cocked her head at them. Jeremy stood frozen among them, eyes flicking between the woman and Mwai. The Staff Sargeant seemed too stunned to make an immediate decision.
“They are not ready yet,” the woman repeated with a sigh and shake her head. Her hair was as unkempt as her clothes, matted and knotted as though she were unaware or uncaring that it needed to be brushed. “But if you insist on seeing them already, I suppose you may. I need to dispose of this batch soon, anyhow.”
She waved a hand dismissively toward the cages. The gesture was disarmingly casual for the chaos that it intended to cause. With that sweep of her hand and a quick puff of runes around her fingers, all the cages opened. Then, all the imps that had been frothing at the mouth and shaking the bars swarmed out of the corner toward the doorway.
“Shit,” Mwai barked. “Formation.”
They had already half-formed one based on pure instinct alone, but now the soldiers lined up in a semi-circle around the doorway more deliberately. They sank into ready positions, guns waiting, and eyes focused. Jeremy stood behind them, watching in growing horror as a couple hundred of the little creatures charged toward them, stampeding over one another and making a great cacophony.
“These are diseased!” He shouted just before Mwai gave the order to fire, and all hell broke loose. The first volley of bullets tore through the imps, throwing them back into the surging crowd and creating a barricade of their bodies, which the rest quickly began to crawl over. Jeremy was not sure how well-versed a National Guard squad was at holding a line while being charged, but they seemed to be staggering their re-loads and doing just fine.
“This stupid place with its stupid walls is always working against me,” the woman wailed above the cacophony, leaning against the table with the look of a damsel in distress, although in reality, she looked nothing like a poor, little damsel. She continued to mourn her circumstances in an eerily understandable voice. Even with the gunfire and shrieking creatures, her words could be heard. Yet, she was not yelling. She complained of the walls, but it was as if her voice came from them.
Jeremy had not been told to do anything, and so far, the soldiers were holding the imps back without too much trouble, so he peered over their shoulders to get a better look at the woman’s array. It was bright yellow, much like his own, and she did not have a ring yet. Jeremy wondered how she came to be in this place or if she was created by it like they suspected the imps were. He thought back to McGraw’s words about a boss fight.
“I was created to manufacture a pestilence,” the woman explained dramatically, as if all eyes were on her performance, not the surge of hundreds of little poisonous creatures. The bodies that had built up beneath their stampede were quickly settling into gelatinous goop, splashing against the spindly legs and bodies of the live imps as they charged over the sludge. The smell slammed into the soldiers like a freight train, cloying and awful. Jeremy choked and coughed.
The woman continued. “And these horrible little creatures are what these stupid walls give me to work with.” She sounded every bit like a downtrodden, overworked cog in the capitalistic machine. “They just aren’t right for it. I cannot get it right. It must be something sporous, not gelatinous, but I can’t get the texture right.”
She trailed her finger over one of the bubbling beakers and sighed. Then she looked up and seemed to notice that her little army was getting mowed down by the soldiers, who were hardly even breaking a sweat. Not a single imp had managed to get within twenty feet of the door. Her face twisted with annoyance, suddenly looking skeletal despite her thick skin.
She waved her hand again, in their direction this time, and a shock of air slammed into them like a tsunami. It brought with it the horrid stench of the putrid, decaying bodies, but more concerning was the fact that it knocked everyone off their feet and back several paces. Some soldiers, including Jeremy, skidded down the main hallway, while others slammed into the stone walls of the right and left corridors.
Mwai, who remained closest to the door, got up on one knee before the crowd of imps spilled out of the doorway. Again, Jeremy could not help but think of a swarm of spiders suddenly breaking out of their eggs. It had to do with the way they crawled a little too quickly, and their thin fingers looked something like spider legs. He hated himself for ever having that thought. Mwai shot at the goblins, as did the other soldiers, as they started to regain their feet.
Except now they were fighting the imps off in the hallway, trying to fire in different directions as the goblins fanned out around them. Bullets reigned on the little green creatures, but they also bounced off the walls and flew in unpredictable directions. Jeremy shouted in distress and threw up a barrier between himself and the chaos. To his left, McGraw grunted and flew back, a spritz of red arcing in the air in response to his movement. He let out a pretty guttural, pained grunt and shifted his rifle to his left hand, then held his right arm stiffly against his chest.
Mwai was in the thick of it, shouting at everyone to get back into the main hallway. The soldiers tried to back up toward where Jeremy and the others who’d been blasted back into the main hallway already were. A imp suddenly leaped from where it had climbed halfway up the wall – again like some horrifying spider – and sailed toward Ashford, who was focused on a pair charging him from the ground.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Jeremy dropped the barrier in front of himself, then threw one over Ashford’s head. The imp belly-flopped onto it, arms and legs spread, and nose smushed into the invisible wall. It lay there stunned, leering down at Ashford while it tried to figure out how to claw its way through the air. Ashford glanced up at it, did a double-take, and then swore. He gunned down the two running at his legs so he could turn his rifle on the one above him. As soon as his aim was true, Jeremy let the barrier disappear, and the goblin took a bullet right to the face. It sailed back in an arc of green blood.
With that immediate issue taken care of, Jeremy turned his attention to putting a barrier across the crumbled doorway to stop the rest of the crowd from surging into the corridors so they could have a moment to regroup.
“That’s a neat trick.” McGraw huffed right beside Jeremy’s ear. In the lull, as everyone crowded back into the main corridor where they could return to a decent formation, he’d dropped his rifle and clutched his bleeding arm. Jeremy couldn’t spare the concentration to turn and see if he was okay. Imps were piling up against the barrier like stupid, mindless zombies. Pretty soon, the pressure would take down the barrier, if not just a time limit.
“Can’t hold it long.” Jeremy grit out. Mwai nodded. He frowned at the barrier, the crowd, and the woman beyond. He frowned like he had his thinking cap on.
“She’s a witch!” McGraw hissed as the grumpy soldier tried to get a look at his arm. Whatever injury he sustained must not have been too dire because he just got a huff and a shut up in response to his labeling of the woman. Jeremy felt a trickle of sweat bead down his temple. The longer he held the barrier up, the tighter his chest became. It was as though there was a muscle inside that he was flexing for far too long, like doing a wall sit. The longer it went on, the more it felt like his chest was screaming and shaking and his lungs refused to expand and his heart was going to explode.
“I can’t…” he grit out.
“Miller, you stay with Daugherty and McGraw. Hold this hallway and retreat to the main room if I say so,” Mwai commanded, working quickly to re-load his M4. “Ashford and Rossi with me. We will position in the left corridor and shoot across to the right as they come through.”
They barely managed to set themselves up by the time Jeremy had to let the barrier go. He fell to one knee and gasped for breath as though he’d been held underwater for longer than his lungs could stand. The grumpy soldier, Daugherty, grabbed him by the shoulder, pulled him upright, and then aimed toward the doorway. Jeremy took as deep a breath as he could to center himself and then followed suit, even though his arms now felt like noodles. All of him felt like a noodle.
They did not have to fire, though. The volley of bullets from the left corridor effectively cut off any imp that climbed through the entrance. The only downside to that was the immense pile of putrid goop accumulating in the center of the intersection.
“Phew.” Daugherty gagged a little bit. “Too bad they didn’t give us fucking gas masks.”
“Would that help?” Jeremy was caught between trying to take deep breaths to ease the tension in his chest and trying to breathe as shallowly as possible to avoid the awful scent. Daugherty did not answer, choosing to shoot one of the imps instead.
All this was fine, and it was nice that they apparently found another method of mowing the hundreds of creatures, whose numbers must be dwindling by now, down, but the entire reason they descended into a mess for a couple of seconds there was the witch. Who had not done anything since. Jeremy craned his neck to look through the entryway.
She was busy at the table, mixing different liquids and powders. Whatever she had in the curved, organically shaped beaker in her hand looked metallic, catching and reflecting light with a thick viscosity. He furrowed his brow and tried to see if there was any overlay on the concoction itself but was too far away to tell if there were runes floating in the air or if his eyes were playing tricks on him.
“That’s not good.” Jeremy nudged his rifle in her direction. Daugherty followed his line of sight and made a noise in agreement. Behind them, McGraw made a strangled noise and slumped to his ass against the wall.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about me. Just take your time.”
Daugherty cocked his head to the side. “Hey, McGraw. What happens if you kill the boss in the dungeon.”
“Well,” McGraw shifted and grunted. “It depends.”
“Typical.” Daugherty huffed under his breath with a shake of his head, then lifted his face shield.
“Woah,” Jeremy raised his eyebrows. “I don’t…uh…”
“Just cover our asses,” Daugherty told him. He raised his rifle so he could peer through the scope more carefully than he had been aiming while firing into the crowd of imps.
“Is that a good idea?” Jeremy asked nervously, torn between keeping one hand free to throw up a barrier if needed and putting it on his own rifle to raise it in case he needed to fire. Since the last barrier left him feeling about as jelly-like at the growing pile of rapidly disintegrating bodies before them, he decided to rely on the gun instead of his magic. A second later, an imp vaulted through the volley of bullets like some terrifying little ninja, only for Jeremy to shoot it point blank in the face, much too close for comfort when Daugherty had his face shield up.
Just to be sure, Jeremy tossed a little barrier at an angle between the soldier and the spray of imp brains and blood. The sludge splatted against the invisible barrier and then dropped to the ground when Jeremy waved it out of existence. His brain hurt after that one, blood pulsing in his ears.
“I mean,” he gasped. “Will a bullet even kill her? Her skin looks really…thick.”
“Yeah, well…” Daugherty took a deep breath and, on the exhale, pulled the trigger. The witch was not even looking in their direction. She had no idea what hit her. The bullet tore straight through her skull in a poof of red mist, lifting her body and sending it crashing onto the table and over the set-up of glass instruments. The beaker in her hand flew toward the fire, where it shattered amongst the flames. They shot up in a multicolored roar, sending sparks and bangs like a grounded firework through the room. The explosion lasted a second, and then the fire settled back down.
The gunfire petered off since no more imps climbed through the entryway. The witch lay still across the table. Liquid from the shattered instruments dripped to the stone floor in loud plops.
Daugherty lowered the gun and glanced at Jeremy’s dropped jaw with a shrug. “You don’t know until you try.”