I had interrogated Cami, full name Camilla Hernandez, relentlessly on the leader of her gang, this Jorge. I'd interrogated her on all the other gang members she knew of who were still around. I'd interrogated her on every aspect she knew of the philosophy behind the Foritios branch of Tango Blast that she was aware of. I'd have kept drilling for even more information if I hadn't been on such a time crunch at the time, so I handed her over to Nolan to help make something to ensure she didn't decide to try and pull a triple cross on us.

Everything I'd learned seemed to paint Jorge as a blunt simple, lazy, short sided, thug with a love for violence and Tango Blast as a largely defensive anarchic gang with Hispanic Christian leanings that dealt with problems by using shows of force and numbers. That meant that I likely shouldn't be seeing anything much more complex than some initial posturing and a bum rush of stupid boys who had failed to become men. I even had some hopes that if I could remove Jorge and one or two other problem members I might be able to pivot the remains of Tango Blast into something constructive and beneficial.

That would still require killing Jorge first though. Seeing as he had been described to me as an evolved twin headed brontosaurus hundreds of feet tall, that was still a tall order, even with the benefit of surprise. Still, in a lot of ways size on that scale left plenty of opportunities to take advantage of with a bit of planning. It's not like humans had a history of taking down creatures dozens of times their size or anything.

I did wish we had more time to prepare a welcome for them, but after six hours of frenzied work our lookouts reported sighting the shadow of something massive moving towards us.

Everyone not committed to the defenses had already been evacuated under escort to the Generic Motors assembly plant about a mile away. About forty people had remained behind to help repel the attack, though most of them I had sitting in reserve to hopefully do nothing more than chase down anyone who tried to run. Including the dozen people still around who helped me fight the boss, I trusted maybe a score of them to keep their heads in a fight. Hopefully if things went even close to how we were hoping it would go it should be more than enough.

"Looks like he's coming down Randal Mill," Matilda announced to everyone hiding in the massive underground tunnel we'd spent the past several hours digging. Relief flooded the bodies of the muck covered people waiting in the dark. "Looks like you were right Joe."

"I was pretty sure all those bridges over Thirty would be too much of a hassle for him to come from the north." I chuckled with nervous relief.

Then I began to feel the tremors through the ground, still distant, but powerful. Every footstep rang through my tremorsense like a ripple on a glassy pond, slowly painting a misty picture that grew steadily clearer as the source closed in. Even with Jorge still a mile out I was beginning to get a very clear impression of his form. Matilda had overstated how big he was, but not by nearly as much as I might have hoped.

Jorge was an absolute titan of a monster, standing approximately one hundred and twenty feet tall at the shoulder with necks that added another hundred or so feet to his height. When I'd been told that the man had two heads, I had been expecting something like Will, two heads emerging from the same set of shoulders. Instead, the man had a second head growing from the end of his tail giving him a full three hundred sixty degrees of vision as both heads slithered lazily through the air like seaweed caught in a current. His four bulky legs, that reminded me more of redwoods than animal biology, were nearly as big around as a limousine was long and I had to double check if our trap was big enough to even work on such massive anatomy.

Yes, just barely.

Jorge's next quake of a step revealed yet more of his familiar yet alien biology to my tremorsense. Muscles larger than most of the hatchlings, bones thicker than I am, two hearts the size of slug bugs calmly beating out a warsong. All major concerns, but it was the heads that gave me the most pause.

Each building-sized head was built like a battle ax, with towering vertical bone pillars running from above the giant's nose to below his chin that felt even denser than my own scales. Behind this formidable weapon was a wide crescent smile that seemed to split the head completely in two, the lips peeled back to reveal a mouth full of flat cube shaped teeth. The eyes were uncomfortably small on the massive head, perhaps only the size of a human skull, set deep into sunken pits making them appear like pin pricks of malice at the bottom of dark craters. Even through my tremorsense I could feel the malicious glee dancing in those eyes. Those two grinning faces alone would likely be enough to route the more unorganized or ill prepared groups. Somehow having an almost human appearance from the front that made those faces tumble down into the deepest depths of the uncanny valley.

The heads were poor targets, the brain wasn't in there, it was located in a thick bone bunker along the spine in the monster's armored chest cavity, with a second brain tucked in near the hips. Getting at the vital organs would be a trick, as the monster's ribs were like overlapping iron plates that slid past each other with each breath and movement. The entire chest cavity was shockingly well defended beneath the thick leathery flesh, seemingly built to withstand anti-structure attacks, likely out of a need to simply withstand the force of Jorge's own movements.

If I'd used that Trait Improvement token on size would I be big enough to fight him alone? I wondered as I examined the echoes of the fiend's biology for anything that looked like a weakness.

The echoes of the brute's next step reminded me that he was not coming to fight me alone. They were so small compared to the leviathan that was walking behind them I hadn't noticed the thirty smaller monsters sloppily marching in front of him. They tromped along in five lines of six being led by confident looking monsters, two of which looked to be evolved. The twenty five people wedged between their leaders and Jorge all looked to be nervous, casting glances back at Jorge or at their commanders. I vaguely recognized a few of them from the raid against the Veranda I'd interrupted. At a guess I suspected I was looking at civilian conscripts being herded along by the actual members of Tango Blast.

"I SEE YOU." a voice like an avalanche so low that it was more felt than heard rumbled across the sky. "COME FACE ME LITTLE SNAKE."

A quick doublecheck through my tremorsense assured me that he had not somehow spotted us, but was looking hungrily towards the stadium where Kyli, Cami, and Nolan were waiting atop a hastily constructed earthen berm. Through the massive echoes of Jorge's footsteps I could see the various reserve forces I had nearby looking ready to run. Even Nolan and my fellow boss killers looked to be wavering in their moral.

I watched as the first of Jorge's forces marched across our trap. Nothing happened. The last of the civilian conscripts passed, still the trap didn't activate. Tension in the tunnel built steadily as Jorge continued his leisurely approach.

"YOU TALKED SO BIG LITTLE SNAKE," Jorge rumbled his voice slathered with amusement, "ARE YOU FRIGHTENED OF M-FUCK!!"

There was a heavy crack as Jorge stepped on the section of street we'd spent hours undermining. His massive foot sank thirty feet through the ground to get trapped in a narrow pit. I could see him trying to stop himself, to bring his slow walk to a stop. Yet he was suffering the same problem I'd been dealing with these last two days, big heavy bodies like ours did not like stopping. I could see his free feet skidding along the pitted asphalt of the road as momentum carried them forwards. Through tremorsense I could literally watch as stress pressures built in the pillar of a leg caught in the tunnel until with a deafening crack the pillar of a bone split in half and plunged through ten feet of flesh.

Jorge unleashed a howl that made my vision darken and head pound. I might have briefly passed out as I tried to focus on the sudden panic spreading through Jorge's forces as the towering dino staggered and put his weight on his uninjured side. Before anyone could even begin to try to restore order I heard a distant shout of, "Smile for the camera!"

Even underground I could see the stark white flash of Kyli's Disabling Flash through the cracks Jorge's foot had bust in the roof. A fresh wave of cries rippled through the crowd above us as their sight was stolen from them, including a fresh howl from Jorge that caused my armor to rattle and jangle from the force of the sound. I watched through tremorsense as the formations above us began to rapidly break down.

Then someone else landed in the middle of the blinded crowd of monsters, a large toad with a coy smile as he said, "Hey, pull my finger." I couldn't see the resulting burst of poison through my tremorsense, but I could certainly see the way everyone on the street began hacking and vomiting. When a heart stopping hiss sounded from in their midst, delivered by Cami kept in line by the three explosive bees clinging to her back, everyone on the street broke and ran every direction seeking escape from the noxious gas and pants shitting terror. Which was absolutely vital for the next step of the ambush.

I didn't get to see it, but I certainly heard it. *WHUM-KRAK*

Jerry's Wind Up attack with his thagomizer had been capable of taking my multi-ton butt and flinging me dozens of yards through the air when backed by Focus. It was hoped that it would be enough to shatter another knee, I could see through my tremorsense that it was not.

It did however pop Jorge's knee out of its socket, which caused one of the legs holding up the entirety of Jorge's bulk to fold itself in half as who knows how many hundreds if not thousands of tons of brontosaurus to slam into the ground hard enough to likely register on the Richter scale. I could see the heavy overlapping bones of the man's chest compress and crack under the force, watch as the shockwave rippled through his body like a wrecking ball. One of his hearts acquired an irregular heartbeat, his breath was forced from his body as his massive diaphragm refused to draw in air, one of his heads wobbled drunkenly, clearly concussed.

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His chest was now positioned directly above me where it had broken into the tunnel we were hiding in.

"Open fire!" I shouted.

Michelle leapt through the air, her various claws taking on a wicked unearthly gleam as she rolled through the air flensing through feet of leathery flesh and dense muscle with an amused giggle, revealing the wall of damaged but still strong bone. The heartbeat she was clear Jack fired off a full salvo of his flame dipped stingers, smashing and cracking ribs feet of ribs in the resulting flaming explosion. Before the flames had even cleared Jeffery and his rot-brute lunged forwards. The brute seizing chunks of shattered bone with its mouth, tongue, and claws and fling them aside while Jeffery simply bit wildly at the wound, causing flesh to putrefy and slough away as it rotted weeks in seconds.

All of this provided me a nice clear hole as I Focused on Lunge, Fossorial Mutagen, and Sabertail Bloodline all at once. I felt the beginnings of a migraine and fatigue as I spread my Focus so thinly, but also felt the edges of my body hide hum, the shovel-like blade of my nose seeming to extend forwards into a long spearing blade as tension built in my body. Finally I took a deep breath as I poured what little Focus I had left into Leap and let it all fly.

I know I blacked out for this next part, the simple raw acceleration and over draw of stamina proving to be far too much for me to withstand as I rocketed into the wound before me like an angel tossed spear.

The next thing I was consciously aware of, my entire body was surrounded by warm bleeding meat crushing in on me from all sides. I tried to draw breath, but got nothing but a mouthful of meat and blood for my efforts. Pain rippled through me as the attempt aggravated what felt like dozens of broken bones all across my face. It all mixed together to nearly drive me into a mindless panic.

I fought down the urge to lose control, to thrash about in a wild attempt break free from my fleshy prison, to instead listen to the vibrations around me. A heartbeat, no three of them. My own, hammering with fear and need for air. A second, off to my left, struggling and frantic in its rhythm. The third, on my right, weak and slow, struggling valiantly to keep beating despite the massive me sized hole punched through it. From this hole blood flowed like a ruptured pipe through a ragged twisting tunnel forced through my flesh prison.

Examining the trail of destruction let me deduce what had happened in those few seconds I'd blacked out. I'd been right on target with my attack, ripping into Jorge like a ballistic harpoon into a whale. It wasn't just his heart I'd blown apart, but a lung, his diaphragm, liver, and spleen were all missing massive chunks with other nearby organs showing heavy damage as well.

Then I'd impacted his spine. The massive column of bone had suffered from our meeting, one of the massive vertebrae was blatantly shattered and shoved out of alignment, but I'd failed to penetrate it. I'd bounced off the spine, running down it until I'd impacted the boney bunker that housed one of Jorge's brains, cracking it, but again not penetrating. This second deflection seemed to have sent me tumbling around his insides like a bullet, destroying several other organs and getting tangled in a couple more.

This left me tangled around the man's large intestine, drowning in his blood and in a bit of a pickle. I could try to lunge backwards the way I came, but that was a solid wall of bone in that direction. Worse still with the way my scales and carapace was shaped, I was effectively a barbed javelin. Trying to go backwards would have me catching on the flesh surrounding me, reducing progress, exacerbating bleeding, and burning up a lot of unnecessary stamina.

I could always lunge forwards deeper into Jorge's insides, I even had the providence of being roughly pointed in the general direction of a gap in the thick bones protecting Jorge's torso. It just so happened that said gap was the man's anus. Worse yet was the raw agony of the broken bones in my face made me worry that attempting to go forwards would make me pass out from the pain. That was assuming that my entire head didn't simply get shattered trying to pierce the dozens of feet of dense flesh and organs.

Going back was denied by a simple quirk of nature, while the way forwards heralded only more pain and unpleasantness with a distant promise of relief, while remaining stagnant promised naught but an ignoble death. There was a message about life in there somewhere.

Dear St. Michael, archangel, I ask for your protection and intercession in this battle. I prayed as I gathered my scattered Focus for another Fossorial assisted Lunge, May your mighty sword defend me against the forces of evil and may your presence drive away all fear and doubt. In the name of Jesus Christ, I claim your protection and victory. Amen.

Feeling an odd calm settle over me I lunged towards my exit. My mind grayed out as I felt the bones in my face shifting and grinding against each other horrifically as thick cords of muscle and rubber hoses of organs slammed against me. I swear I could feel my brain rattling around in my head like my head was somehow suddenly a size too large for it. I wheezed and moaned in pain, longing for hands to try and massage my face together. I wondered if my eyes might fall out of my skull if I opened my eyelids.

I hacked and coughed at both the painfully cool air that was flooding my lungs and making my injuries feel like they were on fire. Feeling the thick rivers of blood oozing down my neck and off my chin nearly consumed my entire attention. I felt an overwhelming desire to drift off to sleep, and very much might have. But someone kept shouting my name.

"Joe!"

I blinked my eyes, finding it difficult to see past the thick clinging fluids that were trying to hold them closed. My eyes weren't focusing, and all I could smell was a drowning scent of blood and shit. My body was hanging limply in the air, everything above my chest dangling while the rest was crushed in tight suffocating heat. It was oddly comfortable, it'd be so easy to drift off, just for a moment.

"Joe!"

Images kept forcing their way into my head, a disorienting ghost of a ravaged body, impressions of animals being leapt upon by other animals, a snapshot of a giant monkey smashing a gangly reptilian thing into the ground with a hammer. The stench of everything hit me again and I vomited up a mass of something thick and dark, hacking at the taste and fresh wave of cold air that hit my lungs. It was so much easier to breathe now, maybe now I could finally relax and sleep.

"JOOOOOOO-OOO-OOE!"

A sudden jolt of energy slammed into me. Snapping me awake like I'd dunked my head in ice water and leaving me with a heady sensation like I'd just shotgunned a two liter bottle of Mountain Rain.

–You are no longer affected by |Daze|–

My eyes suddenly focused and I heard the insistent pinging of my status menu.

–Health: 335/470–

–Stamina: 11/110–

–Warlords Cry, Cripple, Slowed–

–Warning: Stamina Low–

No wonder I felt like shit, and it had nothing to do with a quarter of my body dangling out of Jorge's ass like a particularly large dingleberry. Taking a quick sweep of the battlefield I could now clearly see my people beating and capturing Jorge's people with almost laughable ease considering the number of status we had stacked on them. Jorge himself seemed half dead, literally.

The front half of Jorge's body was laying limp and unmoving where it was still stuck in the ground, tongue lolling out as the giant head made weak gasping motions that weren't drawing any air. His back half however had a frantic air about it, its legs grinding deep divots into the street as it tried to pull free of the pit, head whipping around like a drunk who'd just been punched in the face. Then the rear head seemed to focus on something Before beginning to rear back.

My eyes darted to where he was looking and I spotted Omar, a massive fleshy sac inflated on his throat as he stood over a very dead looking monster. He was looking at me with a wide toothy smile now that he saw I was awake and alert again, and paying absolutely no attention to Jorge.

Time slowed to a crawl as I could literally feel Jorge's muscles tensing around me to attack. I had no time to call a warning, I had to simply hope and pray I was fast enough to protect him. A quick and dirty Lunge tore me free of Jorge's body and sent me skidding across the ground. The second I felt myself make contact with the ground I fired off a Leap, feeling the overwhelming urge to pass out again. I pushed through it with raw desperation.

–WARNING! YOU ARE COMPLETELY OUT OF STAMINA!–

–CONTINUING WILL COST YOU HP!–

I don't care! I roared back at the system alert, Take it all for all I care! I'm not letting you kill my friend!

I slammed into Omar with the flat of my head, feeling bones break as he was knocked flying, a look of betrayed confusion on his face. Above me, I could already see Jorge's ax shaped head rushing down towards me. Even with my perception accelerated by my brain overclocking the hell out of itself in stress, the attack still looked fast. Tensing myself I poured as much Focus as I could into Bunker Down and Wolfram Mutation as I could in the instant before an ax blade the size of my childhood home slammed into me.

–You have taken 316 Crushing Damage–

–You have been afflicted by |Paralyze||Stun|–

All breath left me. I could feel myself being driven feet into the ground and then ripped free from the sheer force of the attack. All thought fled my mind as I simply lay there limply. I was absently aware of several creatures moving my way as my vision rapidly darkened from the edges in.

The last thing I saw was an odd pattern among the rocky wall of a nearby law firm that stuck out like a magic eye puzzle as the darkness took me.

IMPRESSIVE.