Even though he had been granted a temporary reprieve, the beasts’ behavior gave him a bad feeling. He suspected it meant that reinforcements were on the way. There wasn’t any reason for the bugs to hold back, unless doing so would strengthen their position.
But it also provided him with an opportunity to observe and analyze with one hundred percent of his attention, the raw ingredients Nick needed to form a fresh plan.
The matriarch wasn’t quite as tall as she had looked from up close, perhaps three times the length of the juveniles. Assuming that half of her body was immersed in the sand, the creature would come out to around thirty feet from end to end. She was still one of the most massive beasts that Nick had seen, heavy enough to crush him without much effort.
Her chitin armor was so thick that it made the matriarch look more like an armored vehicle than a living creature. Nick could tell at a glance that he had no chance of cutting all the way through with his sword. Even severing one of the thinner plates guarding her countless limbs would require considerable effort.
Her endless legs were as long as his body, ending in cruel scimitars of barbed chitin that could gut him like a fish. Not that Nick expected to live long enough for that to happen if he moved into her strike zone. Her wedge-shaped head was the size of a cart, ending in a pair of mandibles the length of greatswords.
Unlike the juvenile centipedes, the matriarch had a ring of eyes going all the way around her head, offering the beast a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree field of view. Or it had before Sophia had taken one out.
Nick turned his attention to the eye that was clouded with frost. A patch of ice that extended to cover the closest eyes on both sides as well, creating a narrow blind spot that he had no idea how to take advantage of just yet.
All in all, the flesh-render matriarch seemed effectively invincible. While Sophia’s wasps might be able to finish her off in a perfect situation where they could land repeated stings, Nick strongly suspected that even if he fired off his remaining spells back-to-back, then swung his sword until his arms stopped working, he still wouldn’t be able to land a lethal blow.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
He had the sense that piercing ray would be insufficient to penetrate those densely armored plates. That even if he tried, she would reduce him to paste before he had time to finish the spell.
Given the beast’s reach and blinding speed, trying to run past along the stone ring was a veritable death sentence as well. Crossing the sandpit was an even worse idea. Nick needed to come up with some trick to distract the towering insect, then slip past while she was preoccupied.
The problem was, he had absolutely no idea how he could accomplish such a feat. Meanwhile, every second that passed increased the odds that her spawn would come pouring into the chamber and drown him in a tide of bladed limbs.
Consumed with indecision, Nick took up his stance by Sophia’s side, hoping to hold out long enough for an opportunity to present itself in the fickle flow of battle. There has to be something we can do. Don’t give into your fear and focus with everything you have.
He spotted an opening only a few heartbeats later. Apparently, the patch of venom-spawned frost on the matriarch’s face was painful to endure, or at least cold enough to irritate the big bug. Nick let out a sigh of relief when she dipped below the surface of the sand, retreating long enough to tend to her wound. Or she might just be baiting you into drawing near, even still, this might be the chance we’ve been waiting for.
For a fleeting moment, he thought that they could use this opportunity to escape the renders’ hive. However, his tension spiked right back up only five seconds later, when Nick caught sight of three more juveniles emerging from the tunnel he had taken to get here, blocking their only avenue of retreat.
The bug waiting in the pit raced to meet its littermates, raising its head in a manner that made it look like it was relaying the events that had occurred in their absence. While the reinforcements were bad news, their meeting gave him a moment to gather his thoughts. Unfortunately, in this case, a moment wasn’t long enough.
Before Nick could come up with anything promising, all four beasts started surging for his position, the promise of murder gleaming in their chitinous compound eyes.