Ratcatcher expected Hive to leap in the air or scale up the wall, hastening toward the top. But instead, the dragonfly hovered above the platform, all four of his wings flapping up and down so fast that they’d become invisible to a naked eye, and Hive darted up, flying past toward the fierce battle above. A sonic boom announced the beginning of Hive’s thunderous charge, and Ratcatcher wrapped her arm around the rigid plates of his exoskeleton, feeling how the flexible membranes beneath shifted them to let Hive change his direction.
The mechanical monstrosity above had held Elina in its hand, mercilessly slamming the girl into the remains of the control center and holding itself steady with the remaining three arms. Rowen floated in the air, panting from exhaustion. The boy threw his arm, halting the thrust long enough for Elina to pry one of the fingers holding her with a shockwave of explosion. She squeezed herself out of the hold, the fingers on one of her hands dangling like ropes, and Ratcatcher saw the reason why they hadn’t beaten the machine yet.
Elina and Rowen were strong. Unbelievably so, by working together, they had almost downed the battle mech meant to hunt combat tanks. Even after being ambushed, even after the thing had forced a fight at a wall surface upon them, the two held up, ruining the machine’s body. But it came with a caveat: each tore-out plate and each ruined limb has been threatening to fall down. On the platform below or at the prisoners below it. The fight has brought them to an impasse. The trainees had been strong enough to win, but win they couldn’t for the sake of the lives of others. Rowen used his own telekinetic power to collect the ruins of their foe, freezing them in the air.
And the cost of this was a wound. A careless swing had ruined the boy’s side. With a fingerless hand, the machine had punched through Rowen’s armor, shattering some of his ribs. As someone who already didn’t have the greatest stamina, the boy suffered greatly, struggling to maintain his breathing, enduring the pain of sharp bones scratching against his damaged lung, keeping himself in the air, and holding the torn wrecks from falling down. Sensing his hesitation with some animalistic intellect, the machine assailed him with rapid punches, turning to Elina at the last possible moment to ruin her hand with a counter slam landed a second before the girl could unleash her power.
The animated statue detected the Oathtaker, and two of its arms moved to swap the dragonfly out of the air. Ratcatcher heard a chuckle, and Hive streaked onward, his wings moving individually, bringing him past the three-fingered arms with great agility. Sparks and streaks of energy flashed all around the trainee, and a sound of tearing metal caught with her moments later. She looked down and realized that Hive had snatched the machine’s fingers as he flew.
Elina yelped in terror upon coming face-to-face with a hovering dragonfly, but the stalk legs had already picked her, throwing the girl into Ratcatcher’s embrace, who helped the girl sit. Rowen followed next; the boy was so exhausted that she and Elina had to hold him to keep him steady while he tried to keep the metal in stasis.
“Greetings everyone, Hive’s and Ratcatcher’s Express have arrived just in time! Our next stop is Beating the Bad Guy’s Arse! Please stay in your seats while my buddy, under my genius leadership of course, deals with the threat,” Ratcatcher joked.
“HALT A SEC!” Elina roared, and the dragonfly deftly lowered itself, evading a swing of the statue’s limb. “Hive!? As if the Hive?!”
With a single touch, Hive sent the first piece of suspended metal into the tower’s wall, and the metal broke through the concrete and stuck. Hive’s move flung the monster’s fingers next, and his limbs became a wall of thrusts, sending the damaged parts into the wall, away from falling at the people. Rowen sighed, almost slumping off the body. Elina quickly placed the teen between herself and Ratcatcher.
“Is he famous or something?” Ratcatcher asked, and Hive laughed, fluttering out of the blows’ way. The statues’ fury had torn new sections out of the ruined wall, but a single tap of a stalk-like leg sent the vast slab of stone and metal into the small tunnel of the ruined control center.
“Eliza…” Rowen groaned and reached for her shoulder. “Have you been hiding under a rock all your life?”
“In the tunnels, actually, but then we moved to a nicer place,” Ratcatcher explained, moving her ears. “Why do you ask?”
“I want to hit you,” Rowen said.
“What did I do this time?”
“It’s Hive!” Elina cried out. “As in Hive, the Champion! One of the ten strongest people alive in the entire world! A national leader and the greatest hero of the Oathtakers! How do you know him?!”
“He is my buddy,” Ratcatcher blurted out, and sized up Hive anew. Sure, the dude was strong—much stronger than she’d ever be—but one of the strongest? Nah. Lady Ashbringer, Captain Ivar, and that mech from the training in the Ravaged Lands. All of them were scarier than him. And Eugenia would’ve beat Hive with a snap of her elegant fingers.
“How did you move up in the world so fast?” Elina demanded to know. “I’ve been writing the Elites all my life, asking to be trained under their wing. How did you make a friend out of their equal!? We just arrived here!”
“Well, first he tried to bite off my finger...” Ratcatcher started explaining.
“I’m the last person to judge anyone’s degeneracy,” Rowen said, “but I don’t want to be privy to the perversions of your intricate can-of-worms relationships.”
“Don’t act as if you can hold a higher moral ground, Rowy!” Edward joined the communications; his voice came out of Rowen’s helmet. “You forfeited that right the moment you stood naked against…”
“I retract my remark,” Rowen said quickly. “You may proceed.”
“Yeah, go on, Lizzie; don’t listen to this unromantic oaf. Tell us everything—your first date and all. Did he buy you a dinner first, at least? Or was it a spontaneous feeling?” Esmeralda asked in an innocent voice.
“It’s kind of romantic, I suppose,” Elina joined the game. “No matter the species…”
“Wait! L-let me explain, please just let me explain! It is nothing like what you think it is! Shame on you for even thinking that!” Ratcatcher panicked. “He was a bug when I first met him!”
“And now he is a charming prince?” She relaxed, hearing teasing in Rowen’s tired voice.
“You tell me! Your best friend is a spider!” she said with a challenge.
“I am a human being, ya insensible rat!” Jumail’s mocked indignation boomed out of Elina’s visor.
At this point, it is no longer a grave. I have dug a whole bottomless pit. Ratcatcher felt her cheeks blush as she heard Elina and Rowen giggle. “Jumail, I am so sorry about my words!” she burst into laughter, happy that they were all alive. And this time, the teasing actually felt good. She wasn’t alone in the group, and no one was angry. But I’ll get better at it! I’ll show them next time!
Elina kept using her broken hand to help Rowen sit and reached for the belt with her good hand. A chord formed out of a smooth surface, and she connected it to Ratcatcher’s back before the girl could argue. A surge of nanomachines flowed from one girl to another. Elina’s armor shrank on her ankles, and Ratcatcher felt friction rising on her cheeks, as if someone were pulling a bag from her jaw upward really slowly.
It was a band-aid, for it would take hours before their armors could create enough nanomachines to repair the damage and restore all systems back to optimal levels. But it worked wonders now. A new helmet started forming over her head, and the girl grimaced when the nanomachines covered her nose, stopping the bleeding out of the ruined nostril. On the plus side, she no longer smelled the horrid stench and breathed in a full chest of clean and recycled air.
“Children,” Hive chuckled, his meat hooks clicking, producing the words. “Hold on tight, because we are about to go in a dive.”
“Dive…” Elina whispered and wrapped her arms around the other two, pushing them down. “You don’t mean…”
“Through the wall, yes!”
Hive shifted his dragonfly body, hovering in the air parallel to the mech, his wings behind him and the sharp legs folded at the belly. And he used all four of his wings to propel himself at the looming metal beast, shattering an arm raised in defense with a casual slap of a leg. And the rest went deep into the body, splintering the metal at the torso and piercing the head. The wings kept beating, creating a sound encompassing the entire tower, but the original thrust was enough.
The wall cracked, and a new tunnel formed behind the group. Hive’s sheer momentum propelled the debris outward, pushing it out of the tower in a torrent of steel, rocks, torn-shivering flesh, and exposed wires. Dust and smoke pouring out of the damaged robot had threatened to engulf the group, but were banished kilometers away by the mighty wings. Hive, his legs still piercing the opponent, turned again, letting the trainees see the moonlight above. And bounced, creating a sonic boom and sending the monster down. It flew the length of the tower, accelerating up and losing parts of its body before creating a crater dozens of meters wide and coming apart in an explosion of flame and steel.
“One down,” Hive said, his head twitching, focusing on something else. “One to go.”
“Thanks for saving us, Mr. Hive,” Ratcatcher said, looking down at the ruined statue. A head rolled out of the smoke, stopping against the statue’s foundation, just short of the bunker where they hid the unconscious Condemned. Strong. But not as strong as Eugenia. No way. The girl decided. “Wait, what did you say about the second…”
“What the bloody hell?!” Eliza screamed, and Ratcatcher saw. “This is what Carlos and Vasily were freaking out about?!”
Birchshell changed. Before, ghosts of ruins plagued its carcass, reminding everyone that people once lived here and that life flourished here. In the short span of time that she and the others were in the tower, everything changed. The grand bastion was burning; its length got penetrated by the holes the length of an entire vehicle, causing the entire structure to collapse under its own weight in several places.
Flames danced on the streets, melting down the ruins and devouring the Condemned’s tents. Destroyed vehicles and corpses littered the path from the bastion to the missing Factory. And in the Factory's place, a spawn of horror reigned, stomping across the molten sea of metal. Its legs were towers, supporting the round castle of grinding gears and thick armor plates. Weapons beyond count bristled on the bastions encircling the torso, spewing out energy beams, rockets, and rounds, tormenting the poor Birchshell and bringing low both the Condemned and the arrived Oathtakers. Hive’s wings moved, and he moved with athletic grace, swooping down in an arc, his legs swapping aside four rounds aimed at the tower, and letting a missile explode harmlessly in mid-flight.
He flew on, moving in a wide arc around the stomping mountain of death that announced its hatred through the roar of raging furnaces. So great was the body of this new foe that, at one point, it completely obscured the horizon from the trainees. Lines of crimson streaking from the glowing spot in its belly to the metal skull with its bright green lenses. Hive ignored this abomination, focusing only on saving lives. Never before had Ratcatcher thought to see a living being move so fast. They became an afterimage in the air; the anti-air fire speared the place the group had been seconds ago, and Hive had already traversed kilometers, evading laser fire by not allowing the weapons to lock on him in the first place.
His legs worked like spears, catching rounds and sending them away from anyone on the ground. Missiles ended up being cut in several parts and exploding harmlessly above the people. At one point, Hive grabbed a rooftop and threw it, sending the standing Condemned splattered against the other buildings. It killed a few of the soldiers and left others with broken limbs, but spared them from being pulverized by a series of rounds careering through the street.
Ratcatcher let the HUD bring her up to speed, struggling to make sense of Hive’s movements. He was too fast! Hive had done hundreds more deeds above the battlefield in the time it took her to take a breath. And he wasn’t fast, only in terms of movements. Not a single piece of shrapnel nor a blast reached his terrified passengers. The champion’s mind worked faster—tens, if not hundreds—of times faster than hers, calculating the trajectories of the flying rounds. His lightning-fast reactions gave the dragonfly ample time to weave in and out of even the most impossible blows.
Her heart got filled with relief at the sight of Carlos and Vasily, both buried beneath a pile of soldiers and the instructor who had tried to keep them alive. Instructor Augustus himself was wounded, but unlike her wounds, his was already healing.
Attackers… or were they defenders? Ratcatcher wasn’t sure. Allies! The Oathtakers still held the bastion, though it was now almost devoid of soldiers. A few trolls remained, darting from one automatic emplacement to another, with a single troll, who had two sprawling mechanical arms protruding from the back of her suit, commanding the operation. At the woman’s gesture, over two hundred heavy turrets, artillery guns, and missile launchers spoke, thundering their fury against the gigantic foe. Bunker bombs, can openers, heavy plasma rounds designed to open bunkers, and shells all lit up the metal corpus. The eruption compelled the beast to stop and look at the Oathtakers. In a single, unbelievably fluid motion, the thing stood up on its hind legs, leaving the brave people in the darkness.
The ground cracked, unable to support the otherworldly weight, and the creature sank ankle-deep into the concrete. Weapon cathedrals on its dorsal and side plates had suffered; the explosions shredded their numbers, filling the trainee with hope that the allies could potentially wither down this storm, shaving it layer by layer.
“No!” Hive cried out, stopping mid-air. The monster’s guns stopped all together. “No, dammit! Flee, fools! I can distract it, flee, and stay alive!” his screech washed over the town, snapping even the Condemned out of the trance. And the trolls on the wall tried to obey.
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A new star was born in the behemoth’s mouth, shining brighter than sunlight. A single line darted out, first linking itself to the ground, then drawing a molten river toward the bastion, and finally eviscerating it with swift movements, not so much slicing as melting the structure. The trolls found themselves engulfed in the overheated substance; several of their numbers evaporated on a wind beneath the beam’s power. And the bastion itself, this massive superstructure, collapsed. It was a chilling sight. A wave of tsunami calmed itself in the distance. And this wave was once made out of the toughest materials the Condemned could find to build their defenses. Flashes speared the glowing liquid, and Ratcatcher understood that this was ammunition setting off.
People. People died so horribly. So pointlessly. People who had families and loved ones back home. Her hands trembled.
“Exultation!” the being thundered; its cry of burning furnaces pulsed in Ratcatcher’s ears, threatening to deafen her despite her helmet. Even Hive shuddered, struggling to endure the wave of air driven by the moving sound. “Desperation! Praise me! Curse me! Resist in the face of the inevitability, or fall in line and accept thy place! The end is all the same! A triumph of Chosen Prince! You came here to take what is rightfully his. And you have found nothing but death.”
“Is this…” Ratcatcher swallowed. “Is this Chosen Prince?”
Her voice was barely a whisper; the hellish roar in the air that encapsulated everyone’s attention concealed it from both Elina and Rowen. But Hive heard her, and the girl felt his leg touch her knee.
“Would that be nice,” Hive said with hatred in the scratches produced by his legs. “He killed my friends and harmed my people. We have a score to settle. But no, buddy, this isn’t him.”
“How can you know that?” she asked.
“Because we are still alive and kicking. Chosen Prince can’t be alive,” Elina replied, noticing their discussion. “Liz, what do you know about Chosen Prince?”
“He could produce diseases.” Ratcatcher frowned, trying to understand Elina’s train of thought. He can’t be alive? She started listing the known facts about the former tyrant. “Chosen Prince, S-class Abnormal hailing from the northern wastes. His power lay in creation and…” Her eyes flashed. “Aha!”
“Exactly!” Elina gave her a pat. “We all got exposed to the shite he left in the air. And yet the cure worked, and our immune systems overcame the side effect, allowing us to think and speak clearly. Any damage to our bodies is purely the result of physical harm.”
“And if Chosen Prince were alive, his diseases would’ve adapted and changed themselves on the fly, turning us into incubators,” Rowen coughed. “Makes sense. But your theory has a flaw.”
“Yeah, what our biological enhancements are too good for the bastard to handle?” Ratcatcher supported Rowen.
“Easy! Damn!” Elina tried to snap the fingers of her broken hand. “You saw nothing! Anyway, the last time Mister Hive and Chosen Prince fought, Chosen Prince brought him low in minutes. The disease concocted by him had eaten Mister Hive’s bodies one after another. The fact that Hive’s body is still with us is proof enough that Chosen Prince is still roasting in hell.”
“Smart girl,” Hive forced a chuckle and darted down, sliced through the air, and picked up a Troll, tossing the Oathtaker away before the wave of molten metal could reach him. In a flash, he hovered up, facing the roaring monster. “But his trick won’t work again. My newer bodies are more resilient than before. And call me Hive, everyone; no need for formalities.”
Hive’s body? Bodies? Brought low? Ratcatcher found that a strange choice of words. Hive said something about mastering the insects earlier, and he himself was here; they rode him. How could’ve he died to Chosen Prince and still be here? Was he rescued by medics? Could you even perform CPR on an insect? What is she thinking about? Of course you can! The Insectoid Commune was living proof of it; despite coming from humans, most of them had changed to resemble more…
“You have come to take this wreck!” The steel monster stopped its mocking and turned its torse, bathing the tower in green light. “To save the incubators? Deluded fools. You have tasted death and despair by my hand. It is time to know futility.”
Flames spat out of the skull’s jaws, licking its sides. Veins of crimson ventured to the throat across the metal surface again, and Ratcatcher gulped. There’s nothing she can do. The bastard’s going to fire another beam, and they can’t do anything but watch, because it’s too big and too strong!
A ripple passed through the underground, lifting the ruins of Birchshell in a way a wave would lift a raft full of people. Ratcatcher hardly paid it any attention; her whole being was locked on the Ascension Tower. Strength. If she had been as strong as Eugenia, she could’ve saved those people. Power. If she had anything more useful than a stupid, worthless Map, then maybe she could’ve distracted the mech, and made it focus on her…
The ground before the tower erupted, and a new pillar rose up, one of chitin and outstretched claws, its giant mandibles pointing to the sky. It went on and on, no less than fifty meters in height, its segmented body cowered by chitin plates larger than a battle tank. Each segment of the newcomer’s body ended up with hooked blades, so sharp that the falling stones became bisected in two from contact with them.
A sand reaper. Here. A predator roaming primarily the Ravaged Lands and the Desolation, an almost unparalleled beast of might and fury. Where before they had been facing one monster, now two stood in the town, all too small even for one of them. An overheated beam left the gaping jaws, slamming itself against the rising body, licking each moving segment, and eliciting a screech of indignation and anger from the insect. The sand reaper arched its upper body, surveying his opponent with black eyes, and Ratcatcher had noticed something strange.
His carapace. It wasn’t fully black; or white, as it should be after molting. Almost through the entire length of the massive body, clumsy paintings and pictures made by children’s hands coated its surface. Rainbows, blue clouds, people holding each other by the hands, and animals—too many to count—were painted on the insect’s carapace. Despite the clear lack of professionalism in the making of these pictures, they all bore traces of genuine warmth and affection. Someone was having the time of their life painting the predator’s obscenely long body. There was only one problem. It was impossible to domesticate a sand reaper!
Iterna had a few of them in her zoos, and the last time she tried to incorporate these miracles of the New World in an army, an entire island disappeared underwater, and the sand reaper had to be recaptured by an Elite before it could feast on a city.
The flame licked away parts of the paintings, revealing darkness beneath. Splashes of heat fell to the ground, leaving craters the size of houses. And the mandibles twitched in challenge as the sand reaper held the tower safe behind it, shielding it from harm. The beam of heat stopped at last, and the behemoth tried to stand on all its limbs, roaring its challenge to the sand reaper.
The insect didn’t roar. It simply whipped forward, coiling around two lips, its mandibles already at the joint of an arm. The behemoth thrashed; it tried to grab the attacker, and more and more coils wrapped around his arms, scratching the armor and ignoring the defensive fire. A single move of a long body flattered a quarter of defensive installations, and another twitch sent its natural blades across the rear armor, pulverizing the rest. With a titanic snap, the sand reaper bit through steel alloy and energy chords and made the behemoth’s hand fall. It recoiled in pain and rage and brought its massive head down; its jaws opened wide. The sand reaper has noticed it and slithered off the opponent, leaving the skull to bite empty air. Without halt, the sand reaper bounced off the ground, raising a whole new swatch of concrete before the tower. His leap struck the machine chest, sending it to topple on the ground in an explosion of dust and sparks.
“Double bloody hell!” Elina screamed. “I didn’t know Hive had snatched one of them!”
Oh… So that’s why he’s one of the strongest people. Ratcatcher understood at last why the sand reaper had acted so out of character and attacked the machine, rather than leaving to find proper food. “Elina,” she said, licking her dried-up lips. “Do you know how exactly Hive’s power works?”
“Are you messing with me right now?” the other girl yelled, holding Rowen steady. The town suffered beneath them. New chunks of ground emerged from the ground as the result of a titanic struggle, only to be shattered by the careless swing of a mechanical arm or the movement of precise blades.
“Am not!”
“Yes, you do! How can you not know about Hive? Have you slept your way through the history lessons?!”
“A little, maybe,” Ratcatcher admitted. She knew she should’ve paid better attention to them, but the politics were so boring! Culture lessons were more to her liking.
“Calm, Elina, be calm; you are a stream, a stream in a hurricane!” The girl cried out in panic. “Okay, let’s assume you are not lying. One, I will make you read history books once we get back.”
“Deal!” Ratcatcher answered and hugged Hive’s neck segment tighter, afraid of being swept away by one of the shockwaves coming from the fighting creatures.
“And two! Hive’s power has the same name as he,” the other girl tried to outshout the thunderous battle. “It is an automatic sort of power. When an insect or a similar being eats a piece of Hive, his consciousness expands, taking control over the new body. As we are speaking, Hive is looking through the myriads of eyes and operating through the Planet only knowing how many bodies! And this sand reaper is also him!”
“Sort of like telepathic control?” Ratcatcher inquired.
“Negative! If the books are telling the truth, nothing can break his connection!” Elina glanced down.
Several trolls have pushed themselves out of the bastion’s molten mess. Their armor withstood the hellish temperature, and they dragged others behind them. But not all were as lucky as they were. A single crack on an armor of one of their number had led to a poor fellow being cooked alive within the confines of his armor, and not ever did his superior regeneration help to offset the damage. It was a horrible death. The trainee tried to convince herself that the person had died in an instant instead of feeling the molten sludge dissolve their body.
“Got it! Jumail, don’t eat any insects around here!” Ratcatcher quickly said to the other trainee, trying not to distract herself.
“It doesn’t work on humans, Eliza,” Jumail boomed. “But thanks for worrying.”
“Wait a second!” Rowen coughed. “Why didn’t you summon this thing to begin with? It can flatten any defensive formation with sheer size alone!”
“It is not a thing, buddy,” Hive answered. His mind was still on the fight, but if the question distracted the champion in any way, he didn’t show it. “The poor fella’s immune system is still rather weak after I nicked the control over him from Chosen Prince at Stonehelm. If my baby boy gets sick again, it’ll cost another fortune to flush Chosen Prince’s filth out of him. Way more money than it would take for even an army’s engagement. But the boy is helpful, even if he is still juvenile. So I was ordered to keep him in reserve and only to call him at a last resort!”
“This thing is a kid?” Vasily roared, linking his vision to theirs.
“Of course it is,” Augustus said, joining the discussion. “Vasily, you have seen an adult form on our journey before. Chosen Prince diseases couldn’t worm their way into their minds.”
The dragonfly swooped low, shifting its position to put all his legs forward. In a blink of an eye, Hive met a hill-sized chunk of stone sent by one of the fighters head-on, shattering its pieces before it could smash into the trolls. He took off to the sky once more, letting the trainees see the catastrophic destruction wrought by the two struggling monsters.
The sand reaper pushed the behemoth away from the tower and back toward the ruins of the Factory. He no longer coiled around its foe, but slithered across it at a crazy speed, guiding the direction of a battle with the well-placed rams of his mandibles. The insects’ bladed legs had left deep gashes across the steel corpus, but a single punch made by a steel limb had torn no less than forty legs off the sand reaper’s body, spilling bubbling ichor at the ground. At first, Ratcatcher had the thought that the giant insect must’ve suffered from some sickness, but she realized her mistake soon. It was the heat. The behemoth emanated uncontrollable heat wave after heat wave, losing control over its internal temperatures as one of its cooling mechanisms got cleaved into pieces. The ground melted, the pool of metal became liquid again, and the two fighters plunged into it. Two giant mountains of might bit, slashed, and hacked at each other. The behemoth used its remaining ranged weaponry, but their rounds harmlessly bounced off the carapace while it pierced one of the large chitin segments with the sharp stump of its bitten arm.
“Call him?” Ratcatcher asked Hive. “As in, not use, not control, but call?”
“My power is a bit more complicated than the little kiddo explained!” Hive responded. “I am not as much taking over the minds of insects that tasted my flesh as subsuming them. They become a part of me, but should my control waver, the original host can resurface for a short while. And the reason I said called…” Hive stopped searching for words. “Sand reapers are curious creatures. Almost on the verge of having the same intelligence as a human. I let the boy keep his sentience at all times in exchange for him behaving. He is a rowdy one. For example, right now he is pissed off.”
“No wonder. The fella lost several of his legs,” Carlos said. Seeing that Hive wasn’t answering, Ratcatcher relayed Carlos’ words. She noticed that the champion lacked a link to communications.
“Nah, not about that.” Hive scratched out the words. “See, doesn’t mind the fight itself, but he’s more confused as to why I’m hunting prey we can’t eat. He doesn’t exactly speak, but his emotions are roughly translated into: We can’t recoup the lost calories! And the poor boy doesn’t understand why we haven’t yet carved a breeding ground for ourselves by now. He thinks we are going to starve. But what he does understand…”
The sand reaper lunged at his opponent again. His head slipped between two limbs, biting one at its base. His long body twisted like a rope, turning around, and his legs charged across the behemoth’s dorsal plates. The machine had attempted to bite the center of the sand reaper’s body, but the mandibles closed at the nape of the titanic skull first. In panic, the behemoth reached back with its remaining limbs, and the sand reaper struck. He didn’t bite his opponent. Nor did he try to rend it asunder with the remaining legs.
Instead, his tail moved for the first time since the battle, revealing two blackened bone spears at the end of it. He stung the machine in the chest once, twice and cut a round circle around the glowing, flaming orb. The third thrust had collapsed the already weakened armor, and the tail pierced deep. The behemoth went wild; it tried to throw off the sand reaper; it spit fire out of its jaws; and it even grabbed the tail in an attempt to pull it off. The sand reaper let it do so, and his tail left the metal entrails, carrying the fusion reactor in its coils and shielding it from twitching metal fingers.
The green light turned dim in the lenses, then blinked again as the behemoth made one last, straining move to pick up the reactor. The mandibles closed, tearing through the thick neck without a worry, and the lights turned off as the head fell. The sand reaper arched its body, announcing his victory to the sky with a screeching roar, and started about dismantling the body, holding the still-hot fusion reaction in its tail with care. If the superheated air and heat bothered him in the slightest, the sand reaper made a good show of hiding it.
“Is how to work as a team and take advice, even if he doesn’t like it,” Hive said with fatherly approval in his voice. “Pity about mech, but the boy deserves his fun for preserving the reactor. Well, my Iternian friends.” Hive’s dragonfly head swinged, examining the trio. “LS told me you were supposed to go straight to Stonehelm, but I approve your actions on behalf of the Oathtakers and thank you for revealing to us the prisoners’ location. We had plans to destroy all such towers from afar, but this is no longer the case. So, what prize do you want? If it is something reasonable, I can help you with it.”
“It can wait! Set us down; there are people in need of help!” Ratcatcher said.
“No.” Hive pointed with a leg at the returning helicopters and a cloud of dust on the horizon. “Help is on their way, and the kids will not be involved in any more danger. Sit tight, or I’ll tie you up myself.”
“Join Iterna then!” Carlos fired, and Ratcatcher heard Augustus sigh. She told Hive Carlos’ request, anyway.
“Can’t do either!” The Oathtaker wasn’t the least bit offended. “My home, my people, and my friends are all here. To them I serve, and for them I live, using God’s given gift to help whoever I meet.”
“A photo!” Elina said. “No… Wait, the girls at the Academy can say that I photoshopped it… An autograph! Some proof that I met and worked with you, Mister Hive, please! It’ll help our future careers.”
“Oh, really?” Esmeralda asked. “Careers? And not a desire to show up, Linnie?”
“Get out of my head! The mission is over!” Elina panicked. “My emotions are private; get it?”
“Relax; we aren’t in anyone’s head. Too tired for it,” Edward told her. “You are that easy to read, Elina.”
“I’ll make a recommendation for you all to the first Iternian ambassador I meet,” Hive responded, and Elina cheered, almost falling off her ‘seat’.
“I’ve noticed paintings on the sand reaper’s body. Would it be too bold of me to leave some graffiti of my own?” Rowen asked carefully.
“Sure, why not? But save it until we get to Stonehelm.”
“Um… a question,” Ratcatcher dared to voice her own curiosity. “Hive, sir…”
“Just Hive.”
“Y-yes, Hive. You control insects by feeding them parts of yourself, right?” The dragonfly made a jerking nod. “But you do have a human body?”
“That’s not the question I want to answer.” Hive produced the words more quietly this time. “It brings up unpleasant memories that I would rather keep away from being known in history. Ask for something else.”
Ratcatcher dropped the subject. She had planned to ask for a trip above the clouds, but then she looked over the ruins of the city. Medics were coming out of helicopters, trolls helping their fellows dig trapped comrades out of the steaming liquid, or busy digging people out of the underground. The Condemned had surrendered, and the guards rounded up the survivors. Her eyes found a tower, and a cruel smile appeared on her lips.
“I have an idea.”