Hiran and Lila stormed through the habitation block, killing their way through wave after wave of aliens. Along the way, Hiran made up names for the different types of creatures that attacked them. There were clawers, the ones that had first attacked him and Lila when they’d entered the building. Then there were the stingers, the creatures that had hooked forelimbs and stinger-tipped tails.
The heavily armored brutes that thundered down the hallways or crashed through ceilings in their bid to swarm Hiran were rammers. The grotesque crosses between a dragonfly and a spider came to be known as buzzers, on account of the nerve-scratching sound their wings made as they swooped upon Hiran and Lila with their venom-coated mandibles spread and their compound eyes blazing with malice.
And of course, there were the gazers, the single-eyed diminutive aliens that hid amidst their more physically formidable kin and studied the Starforged and the Savant that had invaded their hive.
Hiran had killed the gazers as quickly as he spotted them, not wanting to find out what else they could do besides stare mutely at him and Lila. The Savant had harvested fistfuls of the gazers’ innards by the time they’d traversed three quarters of their route to the hive mind.
“Much of this is raw organic material,” she explained, as they strode through a lobby strewn with the mangled corpses of three dozen clawers, twenty stingers, and a quartet of rammers. “It will need to undergo heavy processing and refinement before it can be of any use. I estimate a hundred to one ratio of raw material and usable components, and I believe I will need a lot of usable components to fabricate a G-grade upgrade for your Empyrean Circuits of the Moon.”
“So… how many dead gazers is that?” Hiran asked, wincing at the notion that Lila would be stuffing alien body parts into him.
“I will need to harvest material from approximately thirty-four more ‘gazers’ before there is enough for me to work with.” Lila looked him straight in the eye. “Incidentally, I must comment on your naming methodology for these aliens. It is extremely uninspired and lacking in creativity. I would go so far as to say it is banal, even.”
“Wow.” Hiran frowned. “Really? That’s pretty harsh, don’t you think?”
“Harsh, but truthful. But given the circumstances, having quick references to the various organisms we have encountered so far will be a tactical asset.”
“It will, won’t it? When I say, ‘look out, a rammer is coming’, people will understand me more quickly.”
Hiran holstered his pistol and took his sword in a two-handed grip as the synthsteel doors at the far end of the lobby buckled apart, and a brutish armored monstrosity that stood ten feet tall even when hunched over lumbered into sight. The rammer growled and broke out into a charge, leaving foot-sized craters in the lobby’s synthcrete floor with every pounding step it took.
Hiran charged out to meet the creature, while Lila filled the air above its head with sheaves of buckshot, scything down a pair of buzzers swooped through the breached doorway. The rammer swiped out with its lumbering, armored fists as it approached Hiran. It was the first of its kind to do so. The others had simply charged headlong and gotten impaled through the skull by the nigh-unbreakable Azure Fang.
Looks like the hive mind is learning, Hiran thought. He hopped over the rammer’s arms, did a flip in the air, and plunged Azure Fang down through the top of the alien’s skull. He then twisted the blade to thoroughly scramble the rammer’s scant brain matter, before sweeping it out to bisect its head.
The armored alien groaned and fell forward, revealing a quartet of stingers that had been using its bulk as cover. Hiran had sensed their presence a while ago, so he was more than ready to spring their ambush. He dodged the lash of two stinging tails, took a glancing hit on his khigar scale breastplate from the third, and hacked the fourth off with a deft swing of Azure Fang.
Snatching his pistol from his holster, Hiran shot all four of the aliens to death, blasting apart the torsos of three of them and blowing off the head of the fourth. His pistol clicked emptily then, so he holstered it as he rode the rammer’s falling corpse down to the floor.
Lila swiftly reloaded her weapons, while striding toward Hiran, but he couldn’t do the same. He’d expended his final magazine. Any further killing would have to be done with his sword.
“I’m completely out of ammo,” he said. “How about you?”
“I still have sixty percent of the ammunition I brought in,” she reported. “Seeing as how we have covered over seventy five percent of the total distance to our destination, I believe I have sufficient ammunition to complete our objective.”
Lila then hefted the plasma blaster which she’d set to dormant and kept tucked close to her body. “I also have this, as you recall, though it can be fired only once.”
“Hopefully, we won’t run into anything dangerous enough to need that,” Hiran said, clambering off the rammer’s body and making his way down the corridor from which the alien had emerged.
The creatures had attacked in waves, each time seeking to overwhelm him and Lila from a variety of angles and with several different strategies.
Unfortunately for the aliens, Hiran could sense the Aether suffusing their flesh, so he was always several steps ahead of them. If he’d needed to rely on his other five senses, sharpened though they were by his Sun Circuits, things would become significantly more dangerous. In fact, he was pretty sure they would never have been able to make it this far with only a few minor scratches on his armor and a few rips on the hem of Lila’s frock.
No wonder those Ashen Guild fellows didn’t want anything to do with contracts like this, he thought. That mercenary Mirabelle wouldn’t have lasted longer than a few minutes in this building.
A horrific thought struck him, then. Lila had said that the Ashen Guild was no stranger to contracts involving these aliens. Did that mean they’d managed to beat the hive minds they encountered, or had they simply withdrawn and cut their losses, leaving the infestations to fester and grow within the boundaries of increasingly flimsy levy guardsmen cordons?
This hive mind is young, barely more than a week old, judging by its Aetheric density, Hiran thought, taking a moment to study another fleshy growth covering a section of the corridor wall. They’d come across many of these during their trek.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
The ones in the stairwell were there to soak in sunlight. Neither Hiran nor Lila could tell what job the growths strewn across the lower levels had.
The Savant paused next to the shredded remains of a buzzer and jabbed a needle-tipped limb into the corpse. She retracted it and looked at Hiran. “I now have a sufficiently large sample size to make a conclusion. These organisms contain mortal DNA, with Ghandarnian being the most prevalent. Shanian mortal DNA comprises approximately zero-point-zero-two percent of the samples thus far.”
“So basically, these aliens were made from the people who used to live in this habitation block?” Hiran grimaced and shook his head. “But how? Were they all transformed into clawers, stingers, and rammers?”
“No,” Lila said, her voice laden with a grimness evident even in its usual monotone. “The mortal DNA shows signs of it having been broken down or digested, before being reconstituted. The residents of this building were all eaten, and their biomass put toward the birthing of these organisms.”
“We already suspected that was the case. Now, we can be sure.” Hiran sighed. Along the way, they’d passed by many empty habitation cells. Most of them had their doors torn from their hinges. Claw marks were visible on walls and furniture. Dolls and toys were scattered everywhere, their owners dragged off to a grisly fate.
He hurled Azure Fang out, commanding the blade to soar down the right turn ahead of them and impale the gazer waiting just around the corner. The small alien squealed as it died, and Hiran called the Aetheric Weapon back to his grasp.
Killing these things will be trickier now that my gun is empty, and buckshot isn’t the best tool for hitting them when they’re hiding amongst the bigger creatures, he thought, as Lila harvested another clump of fleshy cables from the dead gazer.
Aether reserves: 56%
But he had another ranged weapon other than Azure Fang. He clenched his fist and looked down at it. I can cast Void Blast fifteen times at short range and three times at medium range. Sorcery is just another weapon in my arsenal. I’d be stupid to neglect it.
The night before, Bei Feng had mentioned how Hiran’s prowess in sorcery would increase with practice, even limited as it was by the failsafe measures Maruti had implemented in his Moon Circuits. The scholar had then gone on to rant and rave about how much promise the woman named Anika had and how useful she would be as a training partner for the Godbreaker.
Good thing Maxwell got him drinking heavily then to shut him up, Hiran thought. Otherwise I would have smacked him over the top of his head.
Hiran’s thoughts drifted briefly to Anika. She should be awake within the next day or so, Lila had claimed. He didn’t know what to say to her when she did. How did she even know my name?
“I am ready to press on,” Lila announced, withdrawing the limbs she used for extraction and snapping her shotguns out in readiness. “The ventilation chute is less than three hundred feet away from us. Hopefully, you would have figured out a tactically viable way for us to descend by the time we arrive.”
“I already have, actually,” Hiran said. “I’ll let you know when we get there.”
“For some reason, I am reminded of the time you drifted out into open space to ambush that Huntress’s spaceship,” Lila said, casting a flat stare at Hiran, who simply chuckled and gave her a nonchalant shrug in response.
More aliens surged to meet them as they approached the ventilation chute. Hiran tore through a swarm of clawers, kicked a dozen stingers to death with basic techniques from [Stride of the Conqueror], and used up four Void Blast spells to annihilate a pair of rammers.
During this time, Lila filled the air above his head with buckshot, ripping apart a seemingly endless stream of buzzers. Soon enough, her guns clicked emptily, so Hiran had to cover her with Azure Fang, using a variety of basic single-blade techniques from [Twinned Songs] to slice apart any of the flying aliens that got close to her. He took several hits on his shoulder guards and breastplate in the process, but the khigar scales proved to be impregnable against the buzzers’ mandibles, and his Starforged physiology easily shrugged off the effects of any fumes their venom gave off.
The last flying alien died, sliced in half from head to sphincter by a single blow from Azure Fang, and Hiran flicked the gore from his blade once more. Lila had finished reloading her shotguns by then. She gave him a nod, signaling that she was ready to advance, so they pressed on, pushing their way through another series of corridors and down four more flights of stairs.
Hiran considered the situation as he walked. The hive mind was truly aware of the threat he and Lila posed to it right now, but all it had managed to muster in its defense were its chitin-sheathed hordes. That meant that it was evidently capable of some strategy and tactics, but only to a very rudimentary degree.
His gaze drifted to another fleshy mound pulsing upon a section of the ceiling. As he walked past under it, he reached out with his senses to the Aether within the grotesque mass and took note of the hive mind’s age again. Presumably, it would become more cunning and formidable over time, time that Hiran had no intention of granting it.
But that also meant that if the Ashen Guild had allowed other hive minds to survive elsewhere in Pragha or anywhere else on Madhya, those would be older and far more dangerous.
“Lila, we will need to have a talk with the Ashen Guild’s leader when this is done,” Hiran said. “Can Bei Feng pull some strings for us to arrange a meeting, or even a call?”
“I do not know. Scholar Bei Feng’s status in Madhya remains an enigma to me. He is obviously extremely affluent, and he has disclosed the fact that he is a successful and prominent figure in the importation of Shanian goods to Madhya. However, he would not have attained such success without any political ties, especially to the Governor-Warden’s Court.”
“Yet at the same time, he is conspiring to overthrow the Governor-Warden… and all the Starforged. I don’t know about you, Lila, but I don’t trust him at all, especially not after he gave that little speech about not abiding by injustice in a realm that isn’t his own.”
“Scholar Bei Feng’s words are laden with no small amount of hypocrisy,” Lila agreed. “He profits greatly from the current socio-political situation on Madhya and throughout Ghandarna, yet he is seemingly adamant on its destruction, as you said. However, without his help, Loremaster Maruti would never have been able to bring you back to life, Hiran.”
“I’m grateful to the two of them for that, but I don’t have to play their game,” Hiran said, clenching his jaw. He turned a corner and hacked down a stinger that had been trying to ambush him from its perch on the ceiling.
More stingers swarmed down the corridor they’d been passing through. Hiran sliced his way through them, leaving a trail of broken chitin and twitching hook-tipped limbs in his wake. Lila lengthened her stride to catch up with him.
“I am aware of your priorities, Hiran, and thanks to protocol forty-seven, I am also bound to them,” she reminded him. “Still, you are very well aware that we still require Scholar Bei Feng’s aid, first with the matter of locating Keyi’s soul, second with managing Anika, and now, potentially with arranging a meeting with the Ashen Knight.”
“I am.” Hiran nodded. He frowned as he thought about Anika again. According to Bei Feng, now that the woman’s sorcerous powers had been fully awakened, sending her back to Anava without training would be tantamount to feeding her soul to whichever Void Entity deigned to notice her. He grunted irritably. She’ll get just enough training to keep herself safe, and then she’s gone, back to where she belongs. She doesn’t need to be involved in this.
Hiran walked into a large chamber. A massive synthsteel column sat in the middle of the room. Terminals lined the walls, all of their screens displaying error messages.
They’d arrived at the ventilation chute. The hive mind was fifty-six floors directly beneath them.
“Alright, let’s finish this,” he said to Lila.