I’d deliberately chosen to be our right flank, knowing that I’d be in the front line. As they came toward us, I opened up with sonics, trying a medium width beam and aiming for their legs.

My plan? Slow them down.

While imperfect, it worked okay. Though a wider beam might not do as much damage as a narrow beam, it allowed me the luxury of poor aim. I wasn’t terrible at aiming, but I was running, trying to keep aware of my teammates’ positions, and also trying to point the sonics under each arm at something useful.

The sonic beams crossed the legs and tendrils, causing them to drip liquid and sometime splatter bits of flesh. That had the intended result. Their front line of tendril monsters slowed down and the monsters behind them had no choice but either run into them from behind or stop and force everyone behind them to do the same.

It didn’t take down any of them, though, so you could reasonably argue that I was merely delaying the moment where they’d overrun us.

That, of course, was only inevitable if I were alone and I wasn’t. Sean took advantage of how they’d smashed into each other to reduce his circle of ball bearings to maybe five feet in diameter and cycle through them like a lawn mower, spraying bits of mushroom like grass clippings.

Jody, despite the terror below the surface of his mind, darted out from the group, slashing with his monomolecular blade, cutting a tendril monster to a pile of ropey bits and a humanoid trunk in mere seconds.

At the same time, Amy kept on throwing her spear into the crowd, leaving shriveled mushroom monsters in its wake.

That left Dayton and Yellow Mask to chop off the longest reaching tendrils and ready their weapons for when the tendril monsters finally did get close.

I couldn’t help but note that Bouman wasn’t doing much more than stare at the army of tendril monsters that stretched to the back of the room and the many more that appeared to be coming down the ramp from the level above.

It’s not his fault, Daniel thought at me, all he’s got to work with is telepathy and they don’t have much in the line of brains.

Can’t he try to contact its central brain or brains? He seemed to be okay at that when he was working for it, I asked.

He’s trying, Daniel said, that’s pretty much the only thing he’s good for right now. Oh, wait…

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He stopped talking to pay attention to what was going on at the front of the group where it wasn’t going as well as it was with fighting tendril monsters.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. That’s where all of our heaviest hitters were.

In addition to Izzy’s scream, she was shooting forward to slam into the nearest prime clone and throw him backward over and into his own people. Jaclyn and Logan were doing much the same. Even Prime was pitching in, shattering his clones with single punches from his right arm even as his left swung uselessly at his side.

The problem was that Izzy and Jaclyn were the closest they had to the ability to attack more than one person at a time—which meant that there was no option to clear cut a group of prime clones and blobbygators out of existence.

Izzy and Jaclyn might be able to grab and throw one of the prime clones or blobbygators back a few rows or even over the heads of the whole army, but it was only one person when they needed to be throwing five or ten people at once.

Plus every now and then one of the prime clones would grab Jaclyn, Izzy, Logan, or Prime and then one of the others would step in and and rip that prime clones’ head off. That worked well, but it meant that two people had stopped to fight the same person instead of fighting two, slowing us down as we moved toward the the side door.

On one of those slowdowns, the tendril monsters charged in, getting close enough to reach us. Yellow Mask, Dayton, and Jody all went into action, chopping off limbs and leaving tendril monsters in bite-sized chunks.

Sean and I also fought, but in that moment they’d surrounded us on three sides. Sean’s circle of balls had its work cut out for it. A group of tendril monsters were trying to reach in from our left while others were extending their tendrils from the right, creating a real risk that they’d be able to pull someone out of the group.

Bouman and Yellow Mask were at the biggest risk of this since they weren’t protected by the Duke’s evil sparkles, but the tendril monsters were still trying to attack the rest of us. Plus, it might have been my imagination, but we might have had less sparkles on us by then.

Either way, two tendril monsters grabbed my legs and tried to pull them off the ground. I raked my laser’s beam across one of set of tendrils and drilled a hole through the tendril monster behind them. Using my other hand as a blade, I hit the tendril monster’s body with literal tons of strength, cutting the tendril monster in half. As it fell apart, releasing grayish-white goo, I realized that a group of three tendril monsters had successfully grabbed Jody.

His knife lay on the ground, having lost the distinctive sheen on the edges of the blade that meant that it was active and capable of cutting through almost anything—a good design feature.

Pulling away from the dead monsters I’d been fighting, I kicked the tendril monster that had grabbed Jody’s left arm and encircled his neck.

My kick went straight through the tendril monster’s torso, breaking it in two. At the same time, Amy stabbed the other one, the one that had grabbed his right arm and wrapped three more tendrils around his chest.

It turned into greasy ash as the Bloodspear hit, the runes on the dull metal body pulsing red.

Jody bent down to grab his dagger and backed deeper into the group.

Amy and I looked at each other. I didn’t know for sure what she was thinking, but I suspected that she was thinking what I was—we couldn’t keep on going like this.