CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE - THE SILENT HORDE

The swarm struck first. It was significantly diminished, thankfully - the blast had evaporated most of them, the shock waves had pulverised even more, but there were always, always more. Most were shambling failures, mutated from consuming their brethren as they fell, bumbling into the soldiers and doing whatever they could before becoming immobile. Tanner shuddered as a brown-black cloud of bodies clustered around them. Spiders with wings, moths with erratic feathers, flies with heads made of nothing but compacted eyes... things so mutated she couldn't even tell what they were meant to be. The detector on her waist began to click faster and faster, registering higher contamination, edging into utterly unsafe levels. The bodies clustered around her mask, and while she felt nothing, she could see them pattering against the glass lenses, tearing themselves apart in an attempt to blind her. The Rekidans grunted in irritation, and a handful dropped to the ground and rolled like animals, crushing the bodies and... more often than not, fusing them into their own flesh by accident. Tanner watched as the insects swarmed all over her coat, nibbling, clawing, chewing, stinging ineffectually... agonies of suicidal intent, pulping themselves to do any damage. With a shaking hand, she dragged the bodies away from her mask, from the filters, from anything vulnerable. Shook herself like a dog to remove a few from her coat.

A few gouts of flame lit up the swarm. Bodies fell away from the fire, tiny comets in the brown-black storm. When you amassed enough bodies, everything took on the consistency of liquid. The swarm would devour itself, she watched with muted horror as bodies swelled with contamination, anything to propel them onwards for a few more precious seconds. In front of her eyes, a centipede was forming. A fly with keratin chitin snapped down on a smaller, weaker, useless fly that had mutated until it could no longer do what it must, gnawing and... with a wrench, it ripped the other fly's head off, and plugged the stump into itself, forming another segment. Then it did it again, finding a spider with too many legs to function, but now it snapped at the abdomen, plugged the weeping abscess into the headless fly, all with mechanical precision and absolute detachment, no fury, no hunger, nothing recognisable. And now it had two mouths, could grow larger at double the rate, and then it began to grow in four directions as more insects were added at cross-sections, forming a lattice of bodies, a shivering, immaculate lattice that glistened with contamination like dew and were yet possessed of absolute, absolute calm. Angular limbs. Precise movements. No noise whatsoever. Might as well be machines - might as well be evolving into them. Swore she could see a cigar buried in the mass, a living cigar where the tobacco had reanimated, unfurling into cloying, translucent leaves that wept paralytic venom and caressed her fingers...

She crushed the centipede lattice.

It died immediately. The unity was gone - and other lattices moved to consume them. Tornadoes of fire in the unnatural night. Glimpses of red sky through it all. The Rekidans shook off a few more, and some were exhaling clear, glistening fluid from their mouths that evaporated immediately, killing the insects before they could make contact, making them swell with tumours and flail wildly as their mouths and legs swelled shut, as their eyes slithered back into their sockets and never returned. Many were marked with stings, red marks with oozing centres, that could've been eyes, could've been the remnants of kisses, could've been nipples. One of them roared happily, and the others laughed at whatever joke he'd made - his hands were full of great black masses of pulped insects, chitinous snowballs that he cast aside lazily, wiping his hands on his legs and leaving long black stains that his body immediately integrated as mottled patches.

...come to think of it, didn't grasshoppers turn into locusts under the right conditions? Some sort of ravenous hunger awakening in them, a longing to breed and spread and devour?

She saw locust-spiders, locust-ants, locust-flies. Saw that same hunger awakening in each and every one of them.

Tanner had never loathed insects. Never liked them. But now...

Well. She was just glad insects didn't tend to work together, not across species.

The swarm began to die. Their last battle was done - the Rekidans squashed them, the flames consumed them, and a few managed to get inside the city to... do nothing. The filters on the bunkers were resistant to mutant insects, so these things would probably just exist to perform reconnaissance, to nibble at exposed flesh, to be a constant source of pressure. Mutants imitating the properties of winter - turning the world into a place where the only fate was slow, destructive entropy. A place where a human was on a time limit whenever they stood outside, a limit that counted down until they had to lie down and fall into an endless sleep under the snow.

...gods, these things alone, they'd... there must be insects in the city, ready to be mutated. Must be more insects yet to come. Infesting everything. Could see them, even now - termites crawling into the carbonised remains of the colony. They'd need to burn it all down to the ground, need to purge things over the course of years. A moment of attack, and now the colony's existence had become significantly more difficult for... quite some time. Could imagine the future - food being devoured if it was left outside, people needing constnat protection if they wanted to avoid stinging, every house needing to become a bunker. Perpetual irritation, perpetual annoyance, perpetual stinging. Even sleep would be interrupted by the nauseating whine of malformed wings. And... lichen, fungus, that too was spreading, dripping from the bodies of buffalo-mutants who'd long-since replaced their fur with strings of mould, had lost all their flesh in favour of spongy green-grey matter, had skulls protruding from the central mass... not a buffalo at all, just fungus that had figured out how to texture itself into muscle.

Even if they survived this attack, they'd be dealing with the consequences for a very long time indeed. Colony might become completely unviable. The crisis might never end. The swarm, with every street it took, with every building it infested, was extending the crisis. And with it... her duty. She'd promised to step down when the crisis was over. Now that day might never come. She'd... been prepared for the end of the mutant tide to be the end of her role, she'd had that spectral date in her mind. Now it was receding so far away, she could barely tell when it might come. Difficult, continuous, complicated work, piling up and up, long-term issues suddenly becoming her problem, and not the next governor's. She imagined being as tense and unrestrained for years... the prospect wasn't one she wanted to think about. The terror wasn't just that she'd be compelled to do it. The terror was that she'd do it for years, years, years, and by the end there wouldn't be anything left. That the snow would've somehow infected her, more than it already had. And Tanner the warlord would have lived longer and harder than Tanner the judge, to say nothing of Tanner the girl. Could already feel this superior Tanner's hands, calloused and thrumming with muscle, pressing around her shoulders.

The future loomed. Horrible and vast.

With a sudden pulse of anger, she crushed a handful of insects, watching the ichor drip between her gloved fingers.

And the tide came.

Bayai's roars were senseless in her ears. Numbers and names and positions and plans. Soldiers stumbled, swatting at insects that couldn't get through their uniforms, but could block up lenses, muffle filters, deafen ears... could make the air thick and strange, could devour the sky, could turn the city as unfamiliar as any other wasteland. Alabaster stones covered in writhing bodies. A world beyond turned to fused glass and carbonised wood. The hills where stars had bloomed, and gouged out craters that still glowed, like the remnants of extinct volcanoes, and the exposed entrances of obsolete tunnels seemed to be the entrances to vast insect mounds. The wind thrummed with bodies, but behind it was an acrid stench of... of sulphur and scoria, wind hard enough to be confused with pumice. The soldiers rushed, prepared their flamethrowers, some of them still hissing when insects made contact with the hot metal and immediately charred. Orders to restrain fire, save fuel came down the line, and the brief fiery tornado-geysers faded away, leaving them only with the storm.

The mutants in the horde ahead moved unlike any army she'd seen. Nor did they move like a swarm or a liquid, like she expected. They were too unique for that, they weren't designed for swarming. They were... mechanical. Precisely articulated. Never bumped into one another, never trampled, never shoved. They were exactly where they needed to be at any given moment. Less like insects (too whirring and chaotic), less like birds (too liquid and smooth), more like buffalo stampeding, if the stampede was done in a calm and orderly fashion rather than a panicked scramble. They almost never moved straight forwards, preferred to move in swerves and twists, navigating the complex landscape without diminishing their speed by a single jot. Never straggling, never obstructing, never moving counter to the great flow. A single vast animal staring them down, moving with the same unreflective obedience to instinct. Felt like they were staring at the end of an assembly line, watching finished products rattle towards them. Behind the products, the chaos of machinery and steam and power and half-finished products and waste. But the final result... the final result was unbroken, unyielding, unstoppable. None of them resembled the others, all of them were utterly unique in their deformities, and... deformity was the wrong word. Those had been sheared off. What remained was what worked, and they moved with startling delicacy, stepping around heaps formed by dead mutants, the insect swarm keeping a regulated and respectful distance.

They were already perfect. They had no need for contamination infused with the matter of others. They wanted the pure product - their shapes were perfect, now it just required further, regular elaboration.

The General snarled behind her, his eyes bulging with eagerness.

The march came closer.

The air burned.

And...

The flamethrowers ignited, one after the other. Fuel tanks gurgling like living things, like happy infants.

Cones of flame washed downwards, almost liquid.

Tanner couldn't help but stare. Even as her vision clouded over with dark spots, the brightness too much to bear... she had to watch.

A small number of mutants formed the tip of the spear entering the city. Huge, thuggish creatures, most of them plated with armour, plundered from ships and glued on with organic tissue. Malformed faces stared up emotionless as the great wave of heat crashed over them, and they dug huge, gorilla-like arms into the ground to steady themselves. Even in this, there was uniqueness. One was shapeless beneath layers of metal, yet meandered in an oddly cow-like way, and a pair of comically small horns protruded like teeth from the armour, budding with smaller horns that laced into the armour and held it in place. Another seemed to be shaped like a salamander, and had no armour at all, just layer upon layer upon layer of thick slime that shimmered faintly like oil, and a long, metallic sail protruded from its back. And yet another was what she could only describe as a clay-metal bear, a bear with long bones, fusing together in unnatural points to form a hard lattice around which nodules and tumours could linger. Everywhere there were points of exposed bone, nothing was symmetrical, it was a bear which had chosen to shift to having an exoskeleton, and upon this exoskeleton hung metal plates themselves reinforced by bone. The head was shapeless and bizarre, hairless and with no eyes she could see. Pale, girdled by bone, snout splayed wide by a frill of ossified matter.

More besides.

But the sight of them - the pig-creature, the shambling thing with an enormous snail shell, the thing which seemed to move through extending long, pink tongues out of a vast carapace - was lost to the fire.

The cow-creature was the first to go. Giving way under the tide of flame that it voluntarily soaked up for its kin, not running from the fire. That alone made Tanner feel a deep well of unease, even under all the adrenaline rushing through her veins. It tried to resist... but the heat was too much, the horns began to melt, and for a second she saw the creature beneath, as metal peeled free from a network incapable of holding it on. Underneath was a cow, a domestic one, but... horns had sprouted from every part of its body, sculpted like an elegant topiary, the limbs kept clear enough to move, and allowed to form a kind of armour rack. The face was utterly invisible behind the horns, which curled inwards into the eye sockets, curled to wire the mouth shut, curled to form proboscises for draining contamination, curled to turn it into something austere and idol-like. It didn't make a sound as the horns melted and popped, and it kept trying to move as the liquid fire splashed and stuck to it. The skin of the creature, what remained of it, snapped as the heat dried it out too much, fat melted, contamination steamed away to be devoured by the hungry swarm, and the horns started to blacken, turning the colour of firewood, glowing faintly red underneath as the burning continued...

The creature cooked in its own armour, both the metal and the horns. Soon it was an immobile black statue, laced with veins of pure red. Silence. Utter silence from it. It died with all the passion it had lived, it had charged, it had gone to its doomed sacrifice. There were sacrifices that went willingly to the altar, but at least they wanted to die, were eager to die. This thing... it moved until the muscles were ash, and then it just stopped.

Machine winding down.

It was one that fell.

The rest...

The rest soaked up the flames, blocked up the Breach. Gave the others time to move...

And then their attack began. No surprise, no hesitation, only smooth adjustment to their changed circumstances.

One of the soldiers howled as something black dove out of the sky fast enough to make the air pop. Something... faintly bird-shaped, but it was almost impossible to tell anything more precise than wings large enough to carve a deep furrow through the swarm, claws sharp enough to snap the man's helmet like an egg, a strange lankiness that... unnerved her, made her feel like the creature had squeezed out every unnecessary organ in favour of speed and power. And, of course... a long, long beak, gleaming black-blue in the firelight. Stork-like. Without any warning, it stabbed through a lens of the man's gas mask, and... no gore. None. No squalls of blood or oozing ocular fluid. The beak was too large, too precise, too quick - it staunched the wound it created. But the man let out a series of strangled gurgles, the bird-thing swirled the beak around with derisive swiftness, the gurgling stopped and was replaced by wet choking, body operating on instinct alone, still figuring out that it was dead. Hands hadn't even dropped the flamethrower, finger still on the trigger, propelling flame at a mad angle into mutants that were grimly shouldering through the heat.

Then he slumped to his knees, and the flame stopped.

And that was all. The bird was gone before a single flamethrower could turn to face it.

Bayai bellowed for people to stay in line, to keep firing, redirecting a group to watch the skies and sent up a few gouts of flame to clear the swarm. The bird didn't return.

But there was one soldier, just... gone. Another soldier glanced down at the body, and Bayai shouted at him, and Tanner watched as he reached down to unclip the weapons from the man's back, removing the sloshing canister of fuel... then kicked the body over the edge of the barricade, sending it into the inferno.

Good.

Safer, that way.

Worthwhile, conserving fuel like that.

...took her a second to realise she'd seen a man get his brain switched off by a beak plunging into his eye and swirling, like someone stirring milk into their tea. A man had died in front of her. Taken barely a few seconds, the shadow of the bird already gone. The... casual brutality of it was what made her skin crawl. The simple removal of a human life, like subtracting a single number from a total with the click of a button.

Already the body was gone. Would be ash soon enough, then... nothing at all. Crushed underfoot.

Cracks of gunfire began to echo around. Flamethrowers were good - but they needed to peel armour from the front mutants. Tanner watched mutely as enormous rifles tore off chunks of metal, revealing flesh that could carbonise in seconds... but the shambling still continued. Not sure what they expected to achieve, they were large, but not remotely strong enough to break the barricade down. But... no, no, she could see. They had comet trails of burning ground behind them, shielded from the direct fire of the flamethrowers. And things were moving across this ground, dancing through the flames with detached ease. Shadowy figures that flickered and faded, sheltering from any reprisal by using their still-melting brethren.

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Tanner braced her axe.

A twist in her stomach made her think something was coming, and...

And there.

There it was. The bird was being kept at a distance by jellied fuel that would shred its wings and render it immobile, but other things were trying to get to the walls. She barely saw it before it launched upwards, propelled by a haze of vapour emerging from pores along the legs.

Vaguely human.

But distinctly other.

It catapulted to the wall, moving with unnatural grace, leaping to a tremendous height - far above the fires. It kicked her in the chest, driving the air out of her, making her ribcage strain under the pressure. She stumbled...

Fell from the barricade.

Weightless for a second. Too surprised even to flail.

Towards the muddy ground, churned up by uncounted boots, filled with innumerable insect bodies that squirmed wetly in the muck, incapable of drowning yet incapable of moving.

Her axe never left her hand. Let her move downwards faster. Anchor towards a sea of mud.

The man-thing landed nearby, already rushing over to finish her off.

Tanner barely managed to swing her axe, all the strength gone from her limbs as air struggled to wheeze inwards. Her mind was crazed with adrenaline, her nose was full of the stink of roasting meat and burning fuel. Her eyes felt bloodshot - they had to be bloodshot, and she was no longer conscious of blinking, in her mind she couldn't blink. She swung wildly, the creature weaved back, animal grace and confidence making a mockery of her untrained form. She gritted her teeth, wheezing air through them, forcing herself to straighten...

Almost looked like a man.

But... she had to try and shock herself back to reality. Hallucinating, must be. There was no...

Not hallucinating.

The man was porous. His face was a vacant crater, ringed and pinkish and shimmering like the inside of a seashell. From the darkness inside the hollow emerged long, thin, red, whip-like tongues that played around the edges, tasting the air, tasting for her. There were no eyes. There was no hair. Not even any ears. The body, too, was porous... and the creature moved towards her, air whistling into great, leering absences carved into the frame. Holes around the legs which wheezed vapour, holes around the ankles which hissed gently, holes in the torso that moaned an odd, alien tune as air played across it, like wind across a flute's mouthpiece. Even the spine was perforated at regular intervals, and these holes puckered and shivered and contracted and relaxed. She knew insects moved this way. That insects had holes in their bodies, and air was dragged in through them, sent out through them, that there were no lungs at all.

This man had no lungs. She could see the place where they'd once been - skin wrinkled where it'd detached from the organs beneath, sagged out, then been snapped back by some sort of new ligament. The swarm of insects flew into the holes, and freely gave him contamination, healing a few stray burns he'd taken on the way in, hard, scaly tissue covering the red marks.

He rushed.

Tanner flailed with her axe desperately, still trying to get air into her lungs, even as each breath banished senselessness, and with sense came the pain of being kicked, the pain of landing. The man had bone spurs coming out of his heels, his thumb, his wrists - sharp blades that could stand up to intense force. He was moving, he was winding up for another kick, and she could see how it would shred her coat... the vapour whined, pneumatic force generating...

Tanner shifted her axe. Almost on instinct, her limbs moving on their own.

And the force of the kick sent her skidding backwards across the mud, the haft of the axe shaking so badly she thought it might break.

Creature kept moving. Faceless and impassive. Just another number to remove from the total.

Tanner gritted her teeth again, harder, even to the point it being painful, and her numb hands struggled to swing once more. If she'd been smaller, weaker, she'd be dead. She'd have dropped the axe, would've failed to get to her feet in time. Buy a few more seconds, just...

A Rekidan slammed down.

Crushed the creature beneath his weight.

It was... it was Mr. Horn. The one with the gnarled nest of growths on his back, large enough to serve as her steed at one time. The porous thing didn't remain still, of course. Not for a moment. Air hissed, limbs whirled, and it was slithering out from beneath the Rekidan's foot. Some bones broken, but contamination-infused insects slithered into his many, many pits to revive him a little, to contribute matter for regrowth. And it was already moving, leaping like an ape towards the rooftops, where other Rekidans waited to pursue.

Mr. Horn looked at her.

Patted his chest, and smiled faintly, tilting his head to one side.

Tanner nodded back. Incapable of answering in his own language.

She'd be fine.

Just... needed to get herself back in order.

Mr. Horn was gone, clambering back to join his brethren. The battle continued. The single luxury of fighting mutants was their uniqueness - just as it was their most effective weapon, it meant that once she confronted something, she wouldn't confront it again, not in greater numbers. That porous man was the only one of his kind, a revolutionary choice that couldn't be repeated. But he had escaped, she thought. Maybe going over the walls, taking a few with him.

The bird. The porous man. The living barricades against their fire.

They were going to be pushed back. She knew it. She could tell.

The barricade would fall, and... the question was, was it worth it, to have the soldiers perish here to hold a pointless position, or to retreat, split up, force the enemy to lose their cohesiveness and split up as well. Or would that just make them more vulnerable and easier to pick off. She scrambled back to the barricade, spitting out a little blood as she went, the droplet of matter lingering in her mask and stinking of copper - just from the kick, that was all. She felt a sudden surge of anger at herself - weak. She was meant to be able to tear things limb from limb, she'd almost done that with one of the Rekidans, she could do it again. Come on, get... get herself back together. No more regrets, no more thoughts, return to the furious bright calm which allowed her to move so effectively, to fight without a scrap of hesitation, to use her muscles as they were meant to be used. Not just a struggle to survive - too passive. A struggle to win. To gain territory, not just preserve it. To conquer the enemy, rather than just endure them. To make the enemy squirm.

Bayai stared as her as she emerged.

"...gods, are you alright?"

Tanner grunted.

"Fine. What did I miss?"

"...not much, you were... seriously, that thing didn't... tear out a lung?"

"No. Almost killed me, though."

"Luckier than most. Right - we're still pounding them from up here, but..."

"But they're getting troops close. Think..."

"I think we're too bunched up. The barricade's not a lost cause, but the longer we stay, the more time they have to try something nasty. Gas, acid, disease, explosions-"

"Explosions?"

"Heard about it, heard about it. Used to..."

He crouched down suddenly, eyes twitching frantically. Tanner lowered herself down as well... nothing came over the walls, but they were pressed more against the stone, they had a little more silence, a little more shelter. Tanner kept her eyes on the sky, fearing the bird coming back down. The fire was immolating everything it could, but the mutants would prepare for fire first, it was the most common weapon used against them. She glanced up quickly - the crowd below was wavering slightly. If she was going to guess... they were tearing off enough armour, they were gradually weakening the living shelters, and once those went, the troops behind them would fail. A tiny, mad part of her wondered if one of the soldiers, or the Rekidans, would be willing to take a few canisters of fuel and jump behind the living shelters, explode, taking their own life, and sowing chaos. Hard to just... ask, and... no, another glanec. They'd waste huge amounts of fuel in a single attempt, it'd destroy one of their troops, it might not succeed, and the mutants were too numerous. It wouldn't really do anything, just... make everything a bit more chaotic. The bulk of the mutants remained outside, waiting quietly, observing.

They were just trying to pick off people. To gauge strength.

This was a probe.

The hellish pit of fire forming in front of her eyes was a probe. Already creatures were moving about the scorched earth beyond the walls, hunting for contamination, and... other things were moving over the hills, larger, slower, more vulnerable things. This was keeping them distracted and pinned, while requiring a minimum of force for them. The Breach worked both ways - it funnelled the mutants, but if the humans wanted to attack, they'd be funnelled in turn. So...

Did they stay, and try to hold the barricade as long as they could, try and run off only at the last moment?

Or run, and hope for the best?

Grenadoes were being hurled over the walls by soldiers and Rekidans alike, bursting into little storms of shrapnel and liquid fire, spreading over mutants that didn't care as their flesh burned. One of them actively tore itself to pieces, to let one part burn away completely, while the rest was politely repurposed by others. Any death was preceded by, succeeded by, and was simultaneous with harvesting, and yet not a single cry issued out. Not one. The only noise was flame, burning, crashing... and when a soldier fell, they fell with a minimum of force, and a swiftness of execution that denied anything more than a brief howl.

The mutants were silent. Only soldiers screamed.

The bird remained above, but the porous man was driven over the edge, where he smoothly avoided the streams of fire and returned to shelter behind the exoskeletal bear. Immune to reprisal. The fuel was running dry - they couldn't keep this up. Needed to be more surgical.

Guns cracked all around, smoke rising from overheating barrels.

Grenadoes ruptured.

They sowed chaos. They wounded and damaged. But creatures learned to strike back. They shot long spines of bone that threatened to pierce the fuel tanks, they hurled up great clods of earth to send soldiers scuttling back, the porous man even grabbed a grenade and launched it back over the wall with dismissive simplicity, and it took a soldier's kick to send it away into the city, where it burst and send up a haze of alabaster dust.

The swarm of insects was never-ending. Their whine was perpetual, and underlaid all other noises, augmenting them, turning them sharp. Explosions. Calamities. Gunshots. The flames were declining, Bayai was ordering more rationing, the nozzles of the flamethrowers physically couldn't handle this much heat for a protracted period, they needed rotating and slow, careful cooling to avoid warping the metal. Meaning now they were pounding away with enormous rifles, capable of making great chunks of flesh vanish. Each time a rifle kicked, the swarm parted, a tiny line of clear air where no insect, no smoke, no steam, nothing lingered, and then a hand would disappear, a muscle would snap like a string, a bone would crack so quickly there was no sound of a snap, only a dim crunch as the creature collapsed. They fired and fired and fired, Tanner staring with gritted teeth, lashing out with her axe against anything that seemed a threat, that seemed to be approaching with malign intent. Creatures that scampered lizard-like up the walls with lamprey-mouths gaping wetly, bat-creatures with the heads and tails of rats. Even the airship-jellyfish were returning, drifting vaguely, and a gunshot brought one down like a hot air balloon, milky-white ichor leaking from the bulging surfaces. The chaos was incomprehensible in its wideness, yet each individual act was utterly sound and reasonable.

Simplicity building on simplicity building on simplicity until insanity emerged.

There was no sense.

The ground burned, and overheated mutant blood squirmed away vaguely, before insects could lap it up and return it to the greater mass. Warfare was an act of economy - they had a resource to spend, contamination. Their losses, thus far, were not enough to warrant a retreat - so they did not. Recycling minimised losses, and so long as the recycling continued, Tanner's forces were only punishing them with delays, lengths of time to commit to repair. They fought, and they punished them with time. While the mutants punished them with time in equal measure. Every day they wasted on repairing themselves was a day of bunkers, gas masks, slowly rising wails from the detectors. They fought to extend their own siege, when breaking it was out of the question. The mud was foaming with gore, with vanquished enemies, and sometimes the mud would erupt in geysers as explosions went off, the ground puckering like a sphincter and expelling a gout of brown-black-red-white matter, a blended soup of all that had fallen, all that had fired, all that had moved. Tanner's ears were ringing, her mouth had an evil taste in it, and she smashed another lizard-creature down back into the inferno. They couldn't burn them when they got too close, the smoke could choke the soldiers, the heat would undermine the barricade, they had a safe zone in which to fire, and beyond that it was the business of gun and axe to deal with them all. She hacked and hacked, felt like she was chopping wood, tried to imagine it like gutting fish...

Aim for the spines.

Aim for the centres of mobility.

Aim for things which would take time to replace, and until replaced would immobilise the begin.

Do not go for the brain, she learned.

She tried, once. A thing that had once been human, one of the simpler mutants, was clambering up on long, ape-like arms, a face burned so thoroughly it couldn't be recognised as anything more than a red-black coal of scaled meat... she'd plunged the axehead through this matter, which felt like snapping through a pile of dried twigs, and she felt sure she'd split the brain, like she'd done with Lyur...

But the creature kept moving.

Intelligence dwelled in all of it. The contamination drove it to continue - so it did. She had to sever the spine to paralyse it and send it below, to be torn apart and repurposed by the others. Her arms didn't ache - they couldn't, she wouldn't let them. But she found that her eyes were stinging, she saw soldiers gripping guns that were starting to melt into their gloves, such was the heat from the barrels. She saw geysers and chaos and endless, endless foam as the mud was whipped into a mire.

People yawned when they died. She realised that, as she saw the occasional wounded being dragged away. Most of them were weeping, or paralysed, but... they yawned.

Could pretend they were just going to sleep.

They didn't lose many. They had defences, they had weapons, they had the luxury of waiting for the enemy to come to them.

But their victory was based on resources they couldn't recover. Fuel. Ammunition. Territory. Bodies.

Whereas Tanner could see the mutants calmly scavenging their own dead for parts, as the scorched plain beyond the wall filled with more and more bodies, watching calmly, like tourists staring at a monument, detached from its meaning, content to admire without comprehending...

And just as suddenly as it began...

It stopped.

The huge barricade-mutants, more of them lying dead, just... turned around and left, their entourage fleeing before them. There was no call to retreat. No despairing moans from the mutants.

They just... left.

The crimson tide faded away in a calm and orderly fashion, no panics, and no charges. They just... left, in unison.

Tanner stared.

And slowly, carefully, murmured to Bayai:

"Is this a trap?"

Gods, she could barely hear her own voice... Bayai's voice was a muted rumble, and he had to yell to be heard - didn't need to ask him, which probably meant he was going as deaf as she was. Tanner had no idea what was happening. She felt like she was in a dream, like none of this was truly real. The battle hadn't felt real, it'd felt like... like a slurry of chaos, too sharply distinct from the week of monotony for her to process anything. It felt like it'd gone on for days, but realistically, it was probably... more like a few hours, if that. Probably less. Maybe even one hour. One hour, and she'd seen men killed by increasingly inventive biological mechanisms, been kicked off the barricade by a man made mostly of spiracles, swung her axe more times than she wanted to think about, and... saw years and years of work piling up in a matter of moments.

It might've been less than an hour.

And she felt like death.

"Don't... think so, Tanner. Just a probe."

"How long?"

Her voice was a whisper, and she had to force it to increase until Bayai could hear.

"How long was it?"

"...maybe... an hour and a half."

Gods.

"You said... they might explode. How? Is that a risk?"

"Oh. That."

A pause.

"They used to beach whales. The things would blow up, think it was... internal gases. Flung contamination and guts everywhere, good weapon of terror. Read about that, anyway."

Tanner smiled desperately.

"Wonder how they're getting a whale out here."

"Maybe they'll get it to grow legs."

The image of a whale with enormous human legs appeared in her mind. Enormous hairy human legs - just two, right above the whale's stomach. She paused. Tried to get the image out of her mind. She was surrounded by the wounded and the dying. She was looking at a sea of crawling mud. The smell was unbearable. Her ears were ringing. It'd been an hour and a half. This was a probe, a little act of reconnaissance, this was a test of their defences before the real battle could start. Mutants were never exhausted, mutants never slept, they could attack over and over for days, so long as their contamination held out. The colony's fuel would end before theirs did. And there were so many... there was a brutal simplicity to it. Send in the metal-armoured creatures, send in the flameproof behemoths, then use them to shelter nimble creatures that flowed in to assassinate, to sow terror, and all the while the insects gnawed, spread contamination, created work.

...she might've just...

Maybe it would've been kinder to just die in her sleep to a mutant's thumb-spike plunging into her throat.

Maybe the colony would've died in one night. Not...

However long this would take.

She swallowed.

"I'll... talk to the theurgists. Get more weapons."

Bayai nodded, then froze suddenly.

"...would you like to talk to the men?"

Tanner stared.

Why would she want to...

Because she was leading them.

She slumped on her axe, barely capable of standing. She wasn't charismatic. She had no charisma. She didn't do good speeches, and she was terrified, propelled onwards by momentum alone, by the fact that she'd moved too quickly early on and now couldn't stop herself. The blood of Lyur crackled over her skin like lightning, fuelling, sustaining, driving her. That was all. That was all she had.

Couldn't... share that with them.

Could she?

She looked around - the soldiers were stunned. Some were frozen at their posts, just staring into the mud, like they were expecting more mutants. One was just clicking the trigger of his flamethrower over and over, though nothing came out. Some moved mechanically back to their posts, and stood rigidly, waiting for orders, abrogating the responsibility of decision-making to their superiors. Easier than operating on their own. Tanner wished she could join their number.

Her voice rose.

Barely heard it herself.

"Well, we've melted four hills, we've turned an army of mutants into glass, and we've turned the Breach into a pit of mud and contamination."

A pause.

"...see you all tomorrow."

Another pause.

"I need to look into some things. Take a nap, all of you. See you... see you when they come again."

She waved slightly, wearily. And shambled off, using her axe to move. She could hear mutterings - mutiny, no doubt, had to be mutiny, questioning her authority... she passed by a pair of soldiers muttering to one another, and...

Oh.

"I saw her get kicked off a wall."

"Saw her fight off that thing with an axe, if she hadn't been interrupted by that redhead freak..."

"She was fighting them on the walls, no gun, no flamethrower, she's like Tenk..."

"Now she's doing more work? What's she made of?"

Meat!

And fear!

And terror!

There was no part of her made of anything but meat, fear, and terror! And hair, on top. And she was big, she soaked up damage well. And she was losing to that porous man, he'd got the jump on her, she'd lost. If that bird had gone for her instead, she'd be dead now, and that'd be all. And she... stop comparing her to Tenk the Ravager. She was moderately fond of the plays, but he wasn't even her favourite character in them, she wasn't remotely similar, she was just big and had an axe... oh, gods, she was tired. If she slumped and fell on her face, that'd be it. Authority gone. But embarrassment... oh, gods, the embarrassment. Dying in combat was one thing, fainting after combat was another, the former was at least an ending. The latter was just humiliation. Couldn't humiliate herself, not unless she was dying in the process, she couldn't bear the idea of people laughing behind her back, laughing like Eygi, dissecting her back down to a series of poisonous impressions she could never rectify, undermining everything, making her squirm in her skin...

Those soldiers were flukes. Definitely flukes.

Couldn't be anything but.

A whooped cheer from one side of the wall made her freeze.

Oh no.

Run. Run.

No, shuffle.

No, the cheer was spreading a bit. It was weary and ragged, but there was something in it, and... and...

Raise a hand and wave. No, no, not working, her fist was too tense, it physically couldn't unclench.

Wave a fist?

No, no... raise a fist as she was walking away, that way they couldn't see how terrified her eyes were.

The cheer rose higher.

The moment she turned a corner, she shuffled with a pulse of terrified adrenaline that even the mutants couldn't conjure.