Chapter 80 - See Old Friends

We didn’t get attacked in earnest until later that night.

Trix had spotted them massing on the north side of the fortress before the action really kicked off, and he’d set off the alarm to give us time to get ready.

In preparation of what was to come, Geddon, Bole, and I moved a few of the turrets from gate duty over to the north wall to help with what was going to be an action packed night.

“Gah! It moved! My damned back is going to be killing me after this.” Bole whined as he dropped his turret for the fourth or fifth time.

“The weight doesn’t bother me!” Geddon shouted from ahead of us. He was holding two at a time up there, one in each hand.

Bole put his turret down to readjust his grip as the barrel jerked trying to track a target somewhere outside of its range. “Hey! It’s not the weight so much as the moving! It shifts all the mass! And it pinches!”

I wasn’t having as hard of a time as Bole thanks to my restored Body stat, but I could see how the weight of the barrel, the magazine, and the heat sink jerking around in one’s hands might play hell on a guy’s muscles. I thought, briefly, of pretending to have a harder time, maybe putting my burden down for a moment to give Bole’s masculinity a little soothing, but…

Nah. It’s Bole.

“Make sure to keep your barrel pointed away from the fight until you’re ready to set up!” I ordered them both, remembering having to wrestle one of these things back into firing position while the horde closed in for the kill. “You think the arms pinch, wait till the action starts cycling near your face!”

“I will say again you’ve got shit magic, monk,” Bole grumbled.

“Well, you’re welcome to use yours to hold off an entire city full of monsters, Bole,” I invited, finally setting my turret down next to the others and engaging the anchor clamps.

Once I got my gun all set up and anchored to the floor, I went back for Bole’s. I didn’t just take it from him, but I did take some of the weight. He seemed both thankful and grumpy at the same time, seeing how easily I was handling it. I ignored his sour look and made as little eye contact as possible.

Just as we engaged the anchor hooks and activated the heat sink fans again, the scourge finally got up the courage to charge. Trix warned us a half second before the guns opened up and bathed the world in purple and thunder.

Not that I could see the scourge. I couldn’t see anything out there, beyond a few feet past the ditch, especially now that we had starlight streaming in all around us except for the shadows where the entire fight would be taking place. I could fix that, though. A quick summon of my arm cannon (new and improved), and I made sure I wouldn’t be fighting blind this time.

*FOOMP*

The thirty or so meter wide corridor where the scourge were pouring in lit up in plasma fire. The bottleneck was the only spot of shade that connected our little home away from home to the rest of the forest, making it function much as a causeway might in a medieval castle. It wasn’t perfect, though. If I’d designed it or had more time to work on it, I’d definitely clear the area so the turrets could have better line of sight. Only one or two were able to fire directly into the bottleneck, and I’d reprogrammed those for maximum penetration.

However, the trees we’d brought down on either side of the shadowed strip formed impromptu walls that provided cover from the more extreme angles into the fatal funnel, so most of our firepower was pretty much forced to shoot the monsters as they emerged into the inner perimeter. The result was a clogging mess of bodies directly in the ‘mouth’ of the bottleneck on our side that only the particularly nimble scourge were able to traverse quickly, though they died as soon as they crested the top. Meanwhile, the over penetrating ‘head on’ turrets were having a field day shooting through the mass of several monsters at a time.

It was those monsters at the mouth of the corridor that I was using as lights tonight. After the initial plasma blast, a good chunk of them were now burning on their own.

“Holy hell, they’re packed like sardines in there,” I observed to whoever was nearby.

Bole was the only one that heard me. “Don’t blame ‘em for staying in the shade. Had a friend that got lightburn once. His skin crisped up like paper, and he went mostly blind. That’s even after a trip to the church.”

I whistled at that, giving a sympathetic frown and remembering the time I’d been lightburned. Unpleasant stuff, even if you could heal from almost anything. It had taken me days, longer than any other wound I’d ever taken.

Experience messages flew by my consciousness.

Scourge Touched Undead defeated.

You have been awarded 30 experience points. [20 base (-18 level, +4 nemesis, +20 group,+20 chain, -16 non-combat class)]

Scourge Touched Pell defeated.

You have been awarded 5 experience points. [5 base (--4 level, +1 nemesis, +5 group, +5 chain, -4 non-combat class)]

Scourge Touched Goblin defeated.

You have been awarded 15 experience points. [10 base (-9 level, +2 nemesis, +10 group,+10 chain, -8 non-combat class)]

Scourge Touched Goblin defeated.

You have been awarded 15 experience points. [10 base (-9 level, +2 nemesis, +10 group,+10 chain, -8 non-combat class)]

Scourge Touched Pell defeated.

You have been awarded 5 experience points. [5 base (-4 level, +1 nemesis, +5 group, +5 chain, -4 non-combat class)]

Drops in the bucket really, but with the sheer number of them, packed so close that one bullet might kill two or three at a time, those drops were turning into a shower.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Even while dying at an industrial scale, however, they were pushing through. Soon, my candles (read: burning corpses) were snuffed out, and I was forced to launch another costly orb into the chaos.

*FWOOSH*

The advancing mass took another plasma round to the collective face, and a big burst of experience messages spurted through my feed. The advance halted for a moment as the horde dealt with a wall of burning flesh and fat too hot for the healthy members to step through without joining them in death.

Geddon nodded to me and took this as his cue. With a grunt, he vaulted over the side of the wall and took off running. The man was fast without his armor, his powerful legs eating up distance no slower than some vehicles back home. As long as you didn’t ask him to do it over long distances, the guy performed like an olympian… better even. They’d put him on posters back home as an athletic renaissance man, outside of the Exotic classes, of course.

“I don’t like it,” Bole grumbled.

I turned and gave him a look. “Don’t like easy fights?”

Bole spat over the side of the wall and looked around uneasily. “You said they’re getting smarter. Well, this isn’t smart. Not like the gresh or the ignarog. Those were real plays. This… There’s no misdirection or manipulation. They’re just throwing themselves into the sausage maker.”

“Hmm.” I turned, looking at the rest of the forest bathed in starlight so bright compared to the perpetual gloom that it was blinding. Beyond, there was nothing. Just darkness.

“I hate to say it,” Sissa half shouted next to my ear to be heard over the guns. “But I agree with Bole. This is too straight forward. The infected can afford the losses and still keep us encircled, but I’m afraid we’re missing something here.”

“Exactly,” Bole said. “If you’re not seeing the scam, you’re getting scammed.”

As soon as Geddon got into range, he took the stubby construct he’d been wearing off of his back and began to set up the tripod.

“Trix?” I called up to the sniper perch.

“I am keeping him covered. So far there have been several infected that have slipped past the firewall, but I have brought them down without issue,” Trix reported. “I concur with Corporal Bole and Sergeant Sissa. The nature of our fights up until this point may have biased me to expect the worst, but this seems too straight forward. It doesn’t represent an escalation of strategic thinking as we’ve observed.”

Geddon slipped the blocky ammo housing onto the tripod and engaged the fastening clip. Then, with great care, he reached into a pocket on the front of his shirt (stuffed with lots of extra padding at my insistence) and drew out a glowing purple core which he inserted into the turret. Once he got a few paces away and gave us the signal, I remotely activated the firing sequence.

The laser turret immediately began to bathe the battlefield in purple death, a firehose of disco light that made it hard to look at directly. I’d made the core a bit more robust this time, opting for a greater quantity of discharges over a shorter time period. The result was a solid waggling beam that doused the entire forest.

As its designer, I knew that the light show wasn’t a continuous stream of light as it appeared to the naked eye but a high frequency strobing effect, a rapidfire barrage of singular, low damage ‘attacks’ that came too fast to perceive. They caused no real harm on their own, but my bonus damage from Knife in the Dark certainly added up over the course of a few hundred hits, which targets accrued in less than a second

The attacks spewed out of the turret’s barrel, melted through the front ranks of the scourge like acid, and then penetrated beyond. The first ranks disintegrated almost immediately, melting into rainbow goo as ‘bonus’ damage tended to do. Those behind them fared little better, only taking a couple more seconds for their molecules to also lose cohesion. Then the rank behind them followed. It was like seeing a timelapse of a candle melting at 1000x speed. Ten seconds of tongue swallowing laser show, and the horde was reduced to its component parts along with a good portion of the fallen trees, the leaves on the ground, and anything else organic and unlucky enough to be there. Then the bottleneck was just mud, bordered by the half exposed metal skeletons of the trees, dripping oily ichor as their organic shells sloughed away.

The other turrets went silent once there was nothing left to shoot.

“They are retreating to the edge of the outer perimeter,” Trix sighed. “They’re still making that gods awful noise wherever they go. All of them. I’d choose gunfire over that at this point.” He appeared over the lip of his basket to flip over and slide down his climbing rope. When he got to the floor he paused to stretch his body to get the stiffness out of his shoulders.

Geddon was already on his way back to the fort, carrying the smoking laser turret over one shoulder. He was grinning ear to ear, that way he did when violence was the word of the day.

Movement.

I blinked. There was movement behind Geddon. Close behind. No light. What was it? I turned to the turrets and back to the figures. The figures were well in range, yet the turrets weren’t firing.

“Trix get back up there!” I shouted. “Something’s happening! Geddon!”

I summoned another plasma ball from my spatial storage and loaded it into my arm cannon.

Geddon tilted his head, confused for a moment. Then he checked over his shoulder. Whatever he saw there, it made him drop the turret right there in the dirt.

Then my attention was arrested by something else, beyond the starlight circle, up high. Something impossibly big. It wasn’t a tree. I knew that immediately. I followed the shadow of whatever it was up with my eyes up and up until I was staring into a great, burning pair of orange eyes above a fanged, hell mouth. It opened.

A colossal, terrible sound smashed into my senses, too deep to be properly appreciated by the ears, forcing me to my knees. It was a sound felt in your guts as it pulverized you from within.

The face in the trees twisted in rage and disgust as it vomited flames in a geyser down toward the ground. No. Toward the scourge. A swathe of tiny black silhouettes disappeared in the blaze, instantly reduced to ash. The ground cracked under the inferno to expose burning mendau roots that twisted and writhed unnaturally, sizzling as their sap ignited. The roots themselves sought out individual scourge, impaling them, wrapping their bodies tight, and squeezing them until they popped.

The fire illuminated only the legs of the giant, bark covered, gray, gnarled wood in the vague shape of a humanoid.

Sweet Constance, what is that?

Voices called my name.

“Ryan! Ryan!”

The deep, contrasting shadows concealed the majority of the monster, limited my perceptions to only impressions. Long legs, a tree trunk torso, whipcord arms that hung down nearly to its feet.

Something massive wooshed through the air, struck something solid.

“Fuck!” Bole screamed. Hands grabbed me and pulled me to the side as a truck-sized splinter of mendau tree slammed into the wall near where I’d just been. The wall itself took the blow badly, crumbling inward to spill shards of petrified wood into the courtyard.

“Ryan!”

I knew that voice. I scrambled to get Bole’s hands off of me, to look over the side of the wall… what wall that remained.

The tiny figures, the ones the turrets hadn’t fired upon. They were close. They were running with Geddon.

“Holy shit. Tiba?” I gasped.

She was waving her arms, the feathers on the head of Hunty’s spear orange in the firelight. She was-

“Ryan!” she screamed. “Hide!”

My mouth opened and closed.

Thank Constance, she’s alive. I didn’t lose her too.

The hellmouth started to turn ponderously toward us.

“Hide now!” Tiba begged from down below.

I blinked again, the realization hitting me like a blow to the head. I let my legs drop out from under me to get me below the lip of the wall. Then I rolled off the battlements to fall the fifteen feet or so onto our bedrolls with a *whup.*

My guts shook with the seismic force of the god’s footsteps, and my bowels turned to water, imagining it coming closer after it had seen me.

That face the thing had made… The shape. The character. I knew that face.

Kuul had stepped onto the battlefield.