The Bridge (Part 4)
Somehow still audible through the din of the ongoing melee, Idris heard chittering and clicking in the darkness toward the town.
“You hear that?” he said.
“Uh huh,” Eana said, voice strained with concentration, “Kal?”
But Kaladrian had moved off already and was talking with the townsfolk with stretchers. They immediately began moving the wounded in the direction Kaladrian indicated. Which seemed to be just behind the line of the main fighting force.
“I need a break,” Eana said, backing away from the man she was healing.
“I think he could use one too,” Idris said nodding down at the man thrashing under Idris’s firm grip. Without Kaladrian there to calm him he was literally foaming at the mouth as he raged at Eana.
Suddenly Eana screamed at something behind Idris. But when he turned there was only teeth and gaping jaws.
Completely without thought Idris raised his arms to protect himself as the thing bit down. Sharp teeth sank into the flesh of his arms but when Idris regained his head enough to see he wasn’t dead, he realized his Toughness was too much for the thing to bite through cleanly.
It clamped down harder and Idris let out a groan, its fetid insect breath cascading over him as slime oozed out of every part of the mouth, burning slightly as it contacted his skin.
With a shout Idris invoked Psych Up and began pressing outward with his elbows. After a moment he created space for his hands and pulled himself out of the literal jaws of death he had been trapped in a moment before. The Eater continued trying to bite down but even the unusual strength of its jaws was still lower than Idris, who, hands now gripping either side of the jaw, wrenched outward with a bellow.
He tore the thing nearly in half and dropped it to the ground, lifeless. Eana was there in a moment, wiping away the acidic saliva that still burned him and was causing his health to tick slowly downward. She cast Recover as she worked, but there was no time for anything else.
Idris manifested his hammer and Eana brandished her staff as out of the darkness the bug men came at them.
But before the line of drones and eaters could reach them, they suddenly collapsed in on themselves. With a sickening crunching noise and a spray of wet bug parts, the group of creatures was gone and Kaladrian was there, armor glowing with power and hand outstretched.
“Get to the center,” he said.
Idris was almost disappointed the fight was over before he had had a chance to do anything but decided now wasn’t the time to complain. He was going to sling the hurt man Eana had been healing over his shoulder but saw him halfway toward the center already, moving at a slow limp.
“Watch for attacks from behind!” Kaladrian bellowed at the growing group in the center.
“Idris!” another voice called from the melee, “Get some light up!”
Idris sent the ball of light over the churning melee in front of the bridge but he wasn’t sure what it was supposed to do to help. Everything was more visible, the adventurers could see better what they were doing but at the same time the view across the bridge snatched away whatever hope of victory and escape any of them may have held.
It had been nonstop slaughter since the node first tore open and yet there seemed to be no end to the creatures streaming along the other side of the river to cross the bridge. Despite the increased slaughter on the Irondale side of the river, the amount of bug men that could cross over into the meat grinder didn’t seem enough.
And if it came down to a battle of attrition, the humans were done for.
Jibs hopped off a small stack of debris and came running over. The usually surly man looked even more grim than usual and without words held out his hand to Eana. They were a bloody, torn mess of flesh and the red stains on his bowstring showed how long he had been firing continuously in spite of it.
Eana cast Minor Heal several times in succession and, to his credit, Idris only had to hold out a restraining hand at the very end before the man finally shook off the effects of Eana’s healing and returned to sending volley after volley of enhanced arrows into the hoard pressing in on them.
Kaladrian suddenly ran up to Jibs, yelling, and shoved the man when he failed to acknowledge him or stop firing.
“The hell is your problem?” Jibs growled, looking murderous.
“You’re killing the bridge builders!” Kaladrian yelled back, pointing out at the river.
“You’re mad cause I’m killing bugs?” Jibs said, knocking another arrow, “Screw off.”
Kaladrian’s eyes and the symbols on his armor lit with power as the arrow disintegrated. He gripped Jibs by the shoulder and the man’s expression changed to one of blank confusion.
Kaladrian growled, “They’re forming chains on the water to get across. More of them over here, is less over there, and we can break out. Clear the Chaos taken bridge!”
And Idris could see it now. He had been right about the amount of bug men crossing the bridge - the adventurers couldn’t kill enough of them quick enough to ever clear the bridge.
But now they were mad with the desire to cross the river. The drones were linking limbs, even biting onto each other and dropping into the water, still gripping the shore and other drones behind them. Slowly, they were chaining together as a massive, living carpet that floated on top of the rushing water.
If they were allowed to continue the press of bugs getting to their side would surge as the entire surface of the river became a bridge that only they could use. But that would mean there were fewer coming across the bridge itself, the only place the humans could get across.
And that would mean an opening.
The bugs coming from behind had already begun to increase in number. Far from being removed from the fight at the “center” Idris found himself fighting almost continuously. Drones and Eaters came charging out of the night, looking like nightmare shadows backlit as they were by the flames of the burning Irondale.
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“They’re going to surround us,” a voice called above the din of the melee, one that Idris knew. He wrenched his hammer from the chest of a drone and looked around to see the voice’s owner. His father.
The people of Irondale had been fighting in a reserve capacity, supporting more than actually fighting at first. Now though, as the insect bridges were forming and the press of hoards of bug men was forming from every side, there was nobody left not fighting.
“He’s right!” Eana said, “What are we doing? What do we do?”
“Close up!” another voice called out, deep and commanding. Conrad. “Let them flow around, bring it in!”
The command was clear, the idea in Idris’s head made total sense. But nobody listened. The townspeople just kept fighting. Idris saw the woman with the bottles swinging wildly at a drone and wondered, crazily, how she had made it this far without them breaking.
And then one smashed into pieces, spraying liquor over the surrounding Drones and the woman herself. A fallen torch sputtered into renewed life, sending rivulets of fire coursing over the ground, the Drones, and the shrieking woman. Her remaining bottle quickly caught fire and exploded, sending glass shards and fire into everything near her, blasting it all to the ground and creating a brief space of fiery death.
Despite it all, the adventurers just kept moving around, finding whatever space they could to best use their own skills.
Conrad yelled again and again to form up, but the fight was quickly devolving into a chaotic orgy of tiny battles. The press of insects on both the town and the river side was growing - Hive Soldiers, head and shoulders above the rank and file of Drones and Eaters now beginning to grow in number.
The only way out now, back toward Irondale, was fast closing.
“We have to press across the bridge now,” Kaladrian called.
“There’s too many!” a voice called out.
“Seekers! Karno! On me!” Conrad’s voice called out.
Karno disengaged from taking a Soldier’s blows on his shield for a couple of newbie adventurers. The two terrified fighters tried to stand their ground like everybody else was. The Soldier slammed a fist forward into the jaw of the first, dropping him to the ground like a ragdoll. Drones darted forward and dragged him into the mass of pressing insects.
Making absolutely no effort to save his friend, the other scrambled to follow Karno, turning only to strike off limbs of drones that tried to drag him away to the same fate that met his friend.
Without Karno on the flank, what line there had been holding the hive monsters back began to collapse inward.
Like it or not, everybody was now moving together into the middle in a disorderly collapse of resistance. Townspeople were the first to break, but seeing nowhere to run, most of them just stood, aimless, far enough back from the fighting to be momentarily safe.
Idris saw his father fall back when the adventurer next to him was suddenly dragged bodily into the mass of insect men.
He reacted instinctively and instantaneously, sending his ball of light as fast as he could to distract and delay the closing monsters as he charged forward.
“Dad!” he called.
Graham began to run but tripped on a fallen drone. The thing, not totally dead, began immediately to grapple with the man.
Idris’s father was no slouch. Years of hard manual labor had hardened his muscle and boosted his strength to almost the same level as his son. He broke away easily, but the delay gave time for his pursuers to catch up.
Graham swung desperately with his mace, breaking limbs and continuing to pull away like a man struggling through chest high water.
Whether it was a stronger drone, a Soldier he hadn’t seen, or just an unseen rut in the ground Idris couldn’t be sure, but one moment his father was struggling away from the massed bug men grasping onto him from all sides, and the next he was face down in the dirt.
Idris screamed, his voice sounding to him oddly distorted as he invoked Adrenaline Rush and pounded forward with everything he had. Hammer imbued and swinging he blew apart the first few bug men that stood over his father. Imbuing a second time he swung again, his movement so fast the first set hadn’t finished spackling their friends with the chunks leftover from his attack.
A second set fell and Idris kept swinging, but in between strikes he looked down expecting to see his father getting to his knees just in front of him. Maybe wiping some insect goo off his face and looking up, grateful, at the son who would not be a miner.
But he was gone.
Shock froze Idris mid windup. He had been right here. Where was his father?
Out of the press an armored foot shot forward and thudded into Idris’s chest, sending him reeling backward.
Idris stood face to face with a Hive Soldier. It shouldered its way past the drones who reflexively gave it space to fight. Idris tried to see around it for some sign of his father but there was no sign, nothing except… his weapon lay there where he had fallen.
All around Idris the battlefield had closed in, lines collapsing, men and women screaming and dying as their defensive area shrank to the size of the Inn. But for Idris there was only the Soldier.
“Give him back!” he roared.
Imbued Strike was almost off cooldown and time had returned to normal with the elapsing of Adrenaline Rush but Idris was not about to wait. He invoked Psych Up and charged.
The Soldier invoked a skill of its own, some sort of clicking shout that almost froze Idris in his tracks, but such was his momentum that Order itself would have to upend the rules of the universe to stop him.
He swung with every ounce of his enhanced strength, bellowing as he did, “GIVE HIM BACK!”
The Soldier raised its arms defensively, fast enough to protect itself, but not strong enough to make a difference. The heavy head of the iron hammer, powered by unnatural and skill enhanced strength practiced over more than a decade of breaking rock and metal ore smashed the arm, pinning the pulverized remains of it onto the monster’s shoulder. The remaining force of the swing sunk the hammer into the carapace of the Soldier like Idris was driving a hard wedge through the frozen surface of a lake.
It collapsed to its knees. Any human opponent would be finished. But Hive Soldiers were created for a singular purpose in which it had no room for cowering or pain. Until every last vestige of life was driven from their insect hearts, petty things like overwhelming force and mortal wounds did nothing to divert them from their goal - to kill.
The Soldier reached out and grabbed Idris’s shoulder with its uninjured hand. With a gutteral series of clicks it pulled, unable to move the man, it instead brought its head up with Idris as its point of leverage and slammed its hardened skull into his nose.
Idris stumbled back, but it was dismay at a setback, not fear that brought a choking snarl from his throat. He was wasting time. His father needed him!
“Get out of my way!” he yelled, imbuing his hammer for the killing stroke.
Unlistening, unthinking, the Soldier came at him. Insect blood spattering and chunks of broken carapace falling from it, it swung - too slow - and was met head on by the magically enhanced hammer blow.
The dead thing hadn’t yet hit the ground before Idris was shoving it aside and swinging desperately at the encroaching Drones, killing them in swathes.
“Dad!” he shouted, voice hoarse, “DAD!”
It was another arm, firm but not aggressive that did what all the strength of Chaos’s monsters could not.
It gave Idris pause.
The creatures in front of him shied back as the pale blue glow of magic shone out from behind him.
Conrad stood behind him, pulling gently as Kaladrian stepped forward, hand raised, magical light bursting from him like the glow of the sun.
“Put it on cooldown, Idris. All of it,” Conrad said as a burst of energy expanded out from Kaladrian’s outstretched hand, blasting forward and leveling several ranks of the monsters in a conflagration of death.
Despite the carnage, further and wider than Idris could ever have managed at his level, there was no sign of his father.
And then Eana was there, small arms around his waist as Conrad gave him one final squeeze before running back into the fray.
Idris wanted to tear her away from him, to run forward, there could still be time!
But the insistent strength of her arms, the gentle irregular pulsing of her chest as she cried into him told him in symbol what no words could ever have convinced him of.
His father was gone.