Death exploded on an empty patch of floor.
Cal wasn’t where he made them think he was.
He stood in their midst, studying the Faeran queen.
Her skin was pale, almost as white as fresh snow. The symmetry on her disturbingly human-like face was perfect. She reminded him of Ms. Teacher and the Vitiator with her knife-like ears. The differences pushed her into the realm of the alien.
In addition to her striking human-like eyes, a pair of segmented eyes, like an insect’s, sat on her forehead. In lieu of hair, she had thin, filament-like strands that seemed to move of their own accord while pulsing with an inner glow from base to tip. A pair of long, delicate-looking antenna stood above the mass of strands like towers over a sea of grass.
Her mouth was frozen in a snarl, revealing sharp teeth. It would’ve looked just like a human’s had it not been for the mandibles at each corner. If she opened wide she could engulf his entire face.
The queen wore beautiful chitin armor covered with spiraling patterns that appeared to be grown naturally rather than sculpted by an intelligent hand. Aside from her head it covered her completely. Unlike the Faeran soldiers and workers, the armor wasn’t a part of her.
The anatomy of her legs was just like the rest of the Faeran. They resembled a grasshopper’s. Digitigrade to give her greater running speed than a human and the ability to leap great distances.
She had four buzzing wings on her back, like the others. Two large ones emerging from behind her shoulders and two smaller ones emerging closer to the small of her back. Both sets were protected by strong, thin carapaces that covered them like a sheath when not in use.
The queen was tall, between a soldier and a worker.
Cal floated about two feet off the ground so that they’d be eye to eye.
With a simple thought he sped up her perceptions.
Human-like eyes widened.
The queen’s gaze darted around her to her royal guard.
They were frozen, firing their organic weapons and casting spells at an empty space.
Streams of worm-like living ammunition sat frozen in midair alongside a dazzling array of deadly spells.
“You know that I do this sometimes just to look at all the pretty lights,” Cal said mildly. “Better than a fireworks show.”
The queen tried to snap a hand to his face.
He forced it down with a thought and seized it before she could cast the spell.
“I meant it. I’ll allow your people to leave.” He gestured toward the spire.
“Impossible. Release me.”
The Faeran Queen’s voice vibrated with command.
“Won’t work. I’m not one of your subjects and I’m too strong.”
“An alliance. Cease your attack. We will war on your enemies.”
She spoke as one unused to verbal communication.
Her tongue looked longer than a human’s and it tapered to a narrow point, which concealed a venomous stinger.
He found irony in the knowledge that the Bat People, who appeared monstrous while communicating in clicks and high-pitched sounds, were infinitely more reasonable than the Faeran, who appeared with an alien sort of beauty and could speak like he did.
Their respective methods of reproduction was what made coexistence possible with only one of the species.
“No. There is only a bargain. Now, make your choice. Save your hive or watch it be destroyed.”
The queen snarled. Her wide open mouth instantly pushed her appearance from alien beauty into alien horror. Her wings buzzed, straining against his invisible grasp. Her limbs, though immensely powerful, likewise failed her. The magic in her thoughts remained locked behind a seamless container.
“I can’t just kill you because that will drive many into a maddened rage. They’re too young to take your place.” He nodded toward a circular stone door adorned with a rich history carved into the surface by a master artisan.
She froze.
All struggle ceased.
“Yes, I know about them. The royal girls. Each one a potential queen to replace you or to spread out to the world to start their own hives. I also know about the royal boys.” He gestured to a second stone door on the opposite side of the cavernous chamber. “You know, I was a little surprised to learn that you guys didn’t eat the ones that couldn’t cut it or weren’t necessary.”
“We do not waste,” she said.
He had insulted the queen, as intended.
“Right, the royal strain is the only one that is capable of gaining caster-type classes. And they help with the hive mind. Take the strain off of you, like middle management, only actually useful. Plus they’re just plain stronger than all the other castes. The strongest soldier is no better than a middling royal.”
“You know much.”
“Yeah. They won’t leave unless you command them to. So, what’ll it be? Certain death? Or a chance at continued existence? For them, not you.”
“I am the hive. The hive is me.”
“The hive can live on with a new queen.”
“There will be war until one seizes triumph.” She gazed at the stone door hiding the girls with sadness.
Time passed in silence as the worm-like ammunition and destructive spells hung in midair.
Long minutes within a second.
The Faeran Queen, Zhax’hess’sesha, gave the only answer she was capable of giving.
“Shalindren will not surrender to meat.”
“Then all of you will die.”
“Foolish. You have revealed. You fear our death. You fear our madness. No aberrations. Only true Faeran. Slay me. Doom other meat within. Doom other meat without.”
“Yeah, you got me.” He held his arms out wide. “I can’t kill you first. But what about your precious royal heirs?” He slowly turned his head toward the chamber hiding the royal girls. “What’s more precious to the hive than the queen? A potential one.”
He released the seamless container around her mind, giving her back her magic and more importantly her connection to the full hive mind.
She reacted instantaneously, calling most of the Faeran to her side in order to protect the young royals. Few would remain outside the hive. Just enough to keep his allied forces occupied, slowing their advance.
The plan was working as intended.
All he had to do was keep their attention on him while the others got the captives out.
It was easier said than done since he had to split his focus.
The fight in front of him was just as important as listening to Eron and continuing the process of killing the Faeran eggs before they hatched inside the captives.
He made himself a visible target, floating slowly to the center of the cavernous chamber.
Hundreds of Faeran became thousands with no signs of slowing.
Hungry bullets and devastating spells splashed against his telekinetic shield.
A glance cut the organic tubes feeding ammunition from the Faeran’s body to the organic gun.
It must’ve been convenient to be able to carry and grow the ammunition inside themselves.
Wriggling, finger-size worms splashed to the stone floor within the gooey ichor.
He probed the unified hive mind and found it too strong defensively to simply destroy in one go. He’d have to take it apart piece by piece like eating an elephant, if that had been the goal.
Faeran assassins hiding inside the shadows emerged to plunged their blade limbs into his.
Penetration Skills bounced off the telekinetic shield lining his body. When those failed, so too did poison and bleeder Skills.
He pulled the dozen or so assassins from their hiding places and mashed them into a disgusting ball of crushed chitin and ichor that he hurled at a firing line down below.
A towering soldier pulled the improvised cannon ball to it with a gravity Skill. It had the strength to take the impact and push it aside. It lacked the strength to withstand the invisible hand that pulped it against the stone.
The same fate befell that entire section of Faeran.
An assassin emerged from his shadow, cutting and stabbing with its four blade-like limbs. Over twenty strikes in less than a second bounced off his shield.
The assassin had been high-leveled, he had almost not noticed it coming.
He pushed it away with a thought, then exploded it from within its dark, chitinous body.
As for its sharp blade limbs?
He sent them flying into the swarming Faeran.
They cut and thrust through multiple bodies before finally breaking.
A squadron of flying Faeran dived from behind a massive stalactite, dropping a unique bomb.
A modified soldier caste.
Its large body swelled with barely contained energy. Beige chitin and dark flesh showed glowing cracks.
The soldier ripped its own chest open with its fingered hands.
An explosion spewed liquid hot enough to melt iron.
He gathered it all into a ball before it reached him and sent it into the center of the flying formation as they banked around for a strafing run.
The flying Faeran weren’t as durable as the soldiers.
The liquid melted their thin wings in an instant, sending them plummeting into the ground-bound Faeran still massing on the cavern floor.
A trio of Faeran flew into what they thought was his blind spot.
Casters of the royal strain.
Anthropologists would’ve loved to study the Faeran.
They had no genders with the exception of the royals, who were distinctly male or female. Only a females could become the queen. Those that lost the right to leave the hive with a small contingent of followers to start her own hive had two options. Death or remain and serve the hive in a lesser capacity. It seemed like an easy choice, but for a Faeran female the desire to become queen was burned into their very beings.
Thus, male casters outnumbered female casters by a wide margin. On the other hand of the equation female casters were more powerful on average since they still held the remnants of a queen’s potential within.
Two male casters maintained the glowing platform the third stood on.
All three had wings, but it seemed that whatever the third was about to cast precluded her from flying under her own.
Her delicate fingers danced in front of her mouth and chanted words without translation.
She opened wide and spewed forth a hundred thousand glowing bees.
Cal pushed his telekinetic shield out, turning it into a bubble.
The magic bees stabbed stingers into the invisible barrier.
Each injected venom before exploding.
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He dived into the summoned swarm, scattering them in his wake.
The sonic boom thundered painfully in the enclosed space, bursting ear drums and knocking all but the strongest Faeran off their feet.
He reached the trio of royals in an instant.
The woman’s magic shield held for just a fraction longer before he shattered it into a million pieces.
Her scream cut out with the gaping hole in her chest.
The other two lashed out desperately with spells. One bright and burning. The other dark and hungry.
Both went wide.
He slammed the two Faeran together with a thought, pulping them.
A united hive mind didn’t remove personal fear.
Cal saw it in their wide eyes and trembling fingers.
More Faeran poured into the queen’s cavernous chamber.
Old sports stadiums could fit tens of thousands of screaming fans.
The chamber was larger still.
The air swarmed with biting and stinging insects of all sizes.
Normal wasps and bees that he crushed with a thought.
Giant versions that he crushed with a thought and used to bludgeon others.
Flying Faeran strafed him with the worm-like ammunition.
Ground bound Faeran fired in volleys.
The air was thick with death.
He weaved through and let his shield take the occasional hit.
The coordination the hive mind afforded them was impressive.
Not a single Faeran had been struck by friendly fire.
The poor insects weren’t as lucky.
A flaming skull spell chomped down on a thick swarm of bees after it just missed his legs.
He cut a wide arc, flying close to the ceiling. There was something he wanted just about to emerge from one of the larger spiraling holes.
A giant claw snapped out.
He caught it with his mind and pulled the giant scorpion out. He dived, towing it behind him.
Faeran blasted his shield to no avail.
They just didn’t have the individual firepower to penetrate it. Only a massed and sustained barrage would give him pause.
He used the giant scorpion to bulldoze the Faeran formations, while ripping the blade-like limbs from the bodies to turn into a rolling thresher in front of him.
Thousands dead in a handful of minutes.
Yet, the flow of replacements grew stronger.
The Faeran Queen glared daggers from within the bristling protection of her royal guard and soldiers.
He winked and threw the half-dead giant scorpion at her at the speed of sound.
It carved a furrow through the massed Faeran.
Packed formations were good for concentrating fire, but bad for getting it in return.
A flaw in their tactical doctrine.
They should be fighting in the late modern, pre-spires style of warfare, not in the Napoleonic era style of packed, orderly formations.
That was the mark of a people that had spent most of their time fighting monsters in the hive and not another sapient species with similar weaponry and classes.
Hell, they should be treating him like a boss monster.
A thought that he saw dawning within the queen and her royal strategists’ minds.
Well… he couldn’t have that.
He had been killing them in the physical world.
It was time to strike at them in the mental one.
He kept it simple.
Psychic knives cut through their rudimentary mental defenses.
What they had was an instinctive byproduct of the hive mind, not a deliberate power like his.
He sliced the royal strategists’ minds to ribbons, leaving them brain dead.
The queen cried out in anguish for she had felt them die in a way that none of the others had ever done before. The strength of her connection was a double-edge sword in this case. She had experienced their deaths as if it had been her own.
He sympathized for he had as well, but he had experience in dealing with the trauma. It was just a matter of shunting it all into a separate section of his thoughts to be properly processed at a later date.
The royal strategists fell into boneless heaps.
Their minds were emptied, no longer connected to the hive.
They rose as part of a new hive of sorts.
One with Cal pulling the strings.
He made their bodies attack the queen as one.
The royal guard acted swiftly and with perfect coordination, cutting each one down in an instant.
The queen didn’t move.
The air shimmered before her.
She plunged a hand into the tear and pulled out a scepter.
A gleaming ivory shaft about the length of a man’s arm from shoulder to hand topped by a dazzling gem with each flat face a different color.
Upon closer inspection, the ivory shaft was bone and the gem was clutched in a six-fingered hand. Like a human’s but much larger and with an extra thumb next to the pinkie.
Cal dropped to the ground to hide amidst the towering Faeran as soon as he sensed the magic in the gem awaken.
A thick beam of fire scorched through where he had been flying and drilled into the cavern wall.
Ten. Fifty. One hundred feet.
It burned through that much solid stone before stopping.
Faeran cut, thrust and bludgeoned at him with weapon-like arms of varying sizes and lengths.
Soldiers and workers had the equivalents to human melee weapons grown into their extra pair of arms.
“For Sran’sesha!” a champion soldier’s taunt was easily ignored in favor of punching the head off the royal caster it was trying to protect.
The champion hissed, firing an accurate burst.
Cal sent the wriggling worms into the Faeran behind him.
No luck.
They didn’t bite their own.
The worms simply flopped to the ground upon impact.
He danced through the thick press, answering each strike on his shield with one of his own.
They did nothing to him, while he killed with each touch.
The champion discarded its living gun and drew a gleaming blade, curved like its limbs.
The blade radiated magic power.
It blurred with a Skill.
The blade clanged off his shielded arm.
“Interesting.”
It had eaten a minuscule fraction out of his telekinetic shield.
Sure, he regenerated it easily, but prolonged contact wasn’t desirable.
The champion used another Skill to stab seven times with one thrust of its spear-like limb.
He countered by ripping its legs out from under it and stealing its magic sword.
It really wasn’t fair to kill the champion with its most prized possession.
He hefted the headless corpse and used it as a battering ram to bowl through the Faeran formation.
A useful and effective tactic, so he repeated it with hundreds of their dead.
The queen raised her scepter again.
This time a blue-white cone swept across her own people.
It pained her, but she deemed the sacrifice acceptable to bring down the greatest challenge her hive had ever faced. Indeed, she used a portion of the hive mind’s processing power to search archived memories for a similar opponent in the past. It was a desperate search for a solution with time dwindling for she was certain that the meat was toying with her.
The cold froze Faeran by the hundreds. Frozen fluids burst from their bodies.
It washed over Cal, freezing around his telekinetic shield and encasing him in his own ice sphere.
He parted the stone beneath his boots and dropped down, moving through like a fish in the sea.
The momentary pause in his fight would give him time to extend his attention back to the others and check in with their progress.
----------------------------------------
Howard emptied his SAW within a couple of minutes.
And that was with a backpack and a bag of holding full of drums.
Ammo always went quicker than expected. Even for someone that knew his way around a firefight. Granted he was much stronger than he had been in his long gone soldier days. He could spray from the hip and hit with more accuracy than a prayer.
Insect-based monsters piled up high in front of him.
Threnium armor completed that terminator feeling.
All the shot spines and burning spit couldn’t get through.
The bruises were already healing.
The mercs didn’t fare as well.
Old ceramic plates, iron or steel didn’t hold up like Threnium.
He kinda felt bad for them.
Bunch of graybeards and grayhairs.
Men and women on a thirty year deployment.
The ones that survived this to hitch a ride back to the old country weren’t going to find the same home they had left.
Couldn’t have been more than a few dozen American soldiers left.
Most of the company looked to be made up of locals and from the resemblances in some of the younger members, some of the soldiers had gone native.
Maybe he’d put in a word, old solider to old soldier. Pump the boss up. For his points there was no better way to live in the post-spires world than with the boss. Especially, if you had kids and shit.
Old America would just see the darker face of your halfie and send them straight to the head of the line for that eidolon experiment. Sure, she’d have a ten percent chance of gaining animal powers, but it was the other ninety that you had to pay attention to. Death was the better outcome, if one could believe it. He didn’t have any kids… that he knew of… but there was no way he’d let them get turned into abominations.
A deformed grasshopper-looking thing pounced on him.
Huge, powerful, all spiny chitin, cutting claws and gnashing mandible.
He jammed the barrel of his SAW into its mouth.
The shit was useless anyway, glowing red hot from putting a few thousand rounds through it, stopping only long enough to reload.
Sizzle and pop.
The monster didn’t seem to like it from the way it tried to pull away.
He tripped it with a kick and pressed an armored boot in its thin chest, continuing to feed it hot steel.
“How’s it smell?”
A couple of young mercs fired from inside their nearby foxhole.
A few of the old soldiers had a handy Skill.
Nearly instant foxholes regardless of the terrain, which in this case was shit-hard stone.
Combine that with one that was an earth mage who could shape terrain with his magic and you had a pretty good fortification from which to pour fire into the horde of random monsters coming out of the spiraling tunnels.
“Like shit!” A girl that looked way too young to be handling the same kind of SAW as him spat.
Sure she had it on a bipod and had a young man feeding the ammo belt, but it was still fucked.
Kids her age should’ve been like the boss’ kid and his annoying little friends.
Learning to fight and shit, while still having kid fun, like sneaking beers and making out where you thought no one could see you.
“Damn.” He stomped until the monster’s chest was pulp. “Had some fried grasshoppers once in Thailand, tasted pretty damn good.”
“Incoming!” the girl’s feeder screamed.
Shit!
Howard had made sure to quiz the mercs in his area to get a good idea on their capabilities.
The young man had a Danger Sense Skill.
A large tunnel loomed about fifty yards away.
He switched his helmet to thermal.
The HUD lit up with a bright spot that kept getting brighter.
Rising temperature readings meant that it was going to be a close thing.
Shit… he could heal, the kids couldn’t.
A huge glob of burning liquid erupted out of the huge monster beetle’s asshole.
Howard leapt like a jungle cat, grabbed the backs of the kids’ plate carriers and hurled them out of their foxhole back toward the second line of defense.
The glob splashed over him and the foxhole.
Impressive accuracy for a butthole-launched attack.
His HUD flashed red, blaring temperature warnings.
Monsters swarmed out of the tunnel, taking advantage of the momentary lull in fire.
Burning gunk clung to his armor like slime.
“Waste not, want not,” he muttered.
The boss had talked to him before about taking unnecessary risks.
This seemed necessary.
Someone had to stem the tide lest they breach the first defensive line.
He used the helmet’s speaker to make sure the mercs could hear him over the cacophony of battle.
“I’m going in! You fuckers better not danger close my ass!”
He roared, plunging into the swarm.
Fists and feet flew, though he let the burning slime do most of the work.
He laughed like a wild man.
The boss’ brother wasn’t the only one that could go around melting shit like he was the heart of a forge.
Now… how far was it to that flame-sharting monster beetle?
“Crazy motherfucker,” Malachi muttered.
He focused his power.
The blue came from his eyes.
He had to gather it in his hands or it’d spread wildly, going wherever it felt like and that would be bad.
Last thing he wanted to do was put friendly fire into the backs of the mercs.
He stood in an elevated position.
A ten-foot tall mound of raised stone and earth with a short wall that he could duck behind on occasion to avoid incoming monster fire.
Spines stood out of said wall and mound like a porcupine, while acid-like goo sizzled as it slowly ate away it.
The fire goo was a new thing.
Hats off to the wild man for going to take care of that particular monster.
Malachi wasn’t alone.
The handful of snipers with him tried to take out key threats.
He could snipe too, but he had a different job for this Quest and he wanted to impress.
Redemption and opportunity.
Or was redemption the opportunity?
He hadn’t found out about the fishmen using unwilling women to breed until much later when he was in to deep to leave or at least that was what he had told himself at the time.
The Sactown people he had fought for years didn’t see it that way and he couldn’t blame them, not if he was being honest.
So, if it took stupid dangerous Quests to earn the chance at a better life, then he was going to do whatever they asked.
“Clearing Quadrant 3. Mind your eyes,” he said into the small mic the mercs had given him.
The blue blazed out in an eye-searingly bright beam as thick as his wrist. He guided it across the battlefield. Force and heat. Or like a laser with a punch as he liked to describe it.
Insect monsters were smashed, burned and burst as he carved a trench deep enough to come up to his neck into the stone.
The blue swept across the entire quadrant, marking a line of death a hundred yards long.
That’d give them a breather before the next wave.