We didn’t have much time to have a discussion about it either because the problem with fighting a hive mind (or at least a central intelligence that coordinates all the others) is that it constantly sees the big picture.

The big picture in that moment was that it had us off-balance and it was time to capitalize on it.

We’d destroyed the ones holding Jody, but now all the rest of them had charged in while we were doing it, trampling the bodies of the ones that we’d killed.

It wasn’t just the tendril monsters either.

In the chaos, the Fungus Collective had managed to move a few prime clones and blobbygators into position to threaten our less physically powerful members.

Two prime clones and a blobbygator were coming at Amy and me as tendril monsters leapt upward, sticking to the ceiling Spider-man style and reached in with their tendrils to grab at the inside of our group.

The good news was that we weren’t complete pushovers. Sean moved his circle of ball bearing death straight up to the ceiling, turning the tendril monsters into fungus confetti.

While that was great in theory, it also meant that Sean was no longer using his circle as offense—which meant it wasn’t in the way of any prime clones that might be acting as the point of the spear when attacking the group.

I couldn’t complain about that, but it meant that Amy and I would take the brunt of it—and we did.

A prime clone rushed me, moving and swinging as quickly as the original. There was no way I could dodge the punch, but I’d seen it coming in enough time that I could stand sideways and let it graze my chest.

The force was closer to the actual Prime than I’d hoped it would be, but I didn’t take much of it and was able to take a step back and remain standing.

Taking me out wasn’t his goal though. He’d been trying to get past me and take on our ex-mayor or Daniel—at least that was my guess because he didn’t try to stop to take me on. He kept running forward even as his fist brushed my chest.

If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

I did the obvious and hoped everyone else was paying enough attention to adjust. I wrapped his arm in my right arm and pushed him forward with my left, twisting my body as I pushed him around me and away from our group, stumbling as he went.

As I let go, I fired on him with my laser hitting him in the back of his neck, burning a hole through it and out the front.

Jody blurred forward then, slashing through the remaining part of the prime clone’s neck, beheading him. I let go of the body to watch it careen into a group of tendril monsters and still continue to to punch anything it could reach.

The head rolled into the oncoming monsters.

Meanwhile, the blobbygator had crawled up and grabbed my legs with its long, rounded head.

Even if the fleshy, rounded mass of its body wobbled as it moved, whatever passed for teeth in its mouth were hard and its grip was strong enough to throw errors in my HUD.

It had twisted its head sideways to grab my legs, so when it tried to make its head level again, I turned sideways, falling toward the concrete floor. Ignoring the oncoming legs and tendrils of all the creatures coming toward me, I pummeled the blobbygator’s body, grateful to punch a hole in its side.

Bending sideways, I got a grip on the blobbygator’s jaw and ripped the upper jaw off, throwing it into the crowd of monsters.

If it hurt any of them, I didn’t notice.

I was too busy scrambling to my feet. As I did, Dayton slipped in, cutting the body in two with his knives.

Ahead of me, they appeared to be endless. We needed space. Knowing I had only a finite amount of juice for the laser, I decided that this would be a good time to spend some of it. I didn’t stop there. I also fired off a series of boombots, shooting them over the front line and into the crowd so that the explosion could hit them from behind as my laser hit them from the front.

It didn’t go perfectly, but it went as well as I could expect.

I aimed the lasers at the legs, hoping I could cut them off, and in a few cases I did. In other cases, I cut halfway through—which was almost as good.

I could see the half-cut legs wobble as the prime clones stepped forward and then fall over as a wall of fire from my boombots exploded behind them.

Dayton and Jody darted out, chopping up the fallen and the wobbling.

I’d bought us a few seconds to come up with a better way to handle this, but wouldn’t be able to do it forever. I only had a certain number of bots and if I didn’t have any left when we got to wherever the central brain was, I’d regret it.

I looked over at Amy as she grabbed the Bloodspear out of the air, “Any ideas?”

“Yes,” she said, “but it’s going to take a lot out of me.”