Nguyen

Screams of pain and terror echoed in her ears, as blasts of magical energy ripped through the air and explosions rocked the ground beneath them.

Nguyen pushed the sounds of battle out of her mind as she shifted her position and refocused on another target. She strafed across it with a continuous barrage of fire from her rifle, each beam striking true as she mowed down zombies one after another. But still more came rushing in, tearing through any obstacles that stood in their way.

She squinted through the rifle's sights at her target and her fingers were clamped tight and white around the rifle's trigger as she set Charged Shot. The hum of energy slowly rose until a blazing beam of red light shot from the barrel and quickly shifted to a brilliant green. A deafening explosion rocked the battlefield as the tree she had targeted erupted into splinters. The monsters around it were sent flying by the force of the explosion, their bodies pierced by deadly shards of wood.

Though she’d just killed a half dozen zombies with a single shot, that number wasn’t even a drop in the bucket.

“They’re pushing through!” someone shouted.

Nguyen had been trying to take out as many of the hell-cursed army as she could with each shot since the northern army had charged them. But even with her new skill cards, it was an overwhelming situation. Thousands of the monsters had moved forward shortly after Archimedes and the strike team left the base. The turrets had alerted the base to the move when the enemy came into range, and the hell-cursed had been making headway ever since.

Their sheer numbers were a powerful weapon in its own right, and the moat that Nguyen and the others had hoped would be an effective defensive measure quickly clogged up with the corpses of their enemies, creating a makeshift bridge for the rest to pass over. The albino crocodile made quick work of some of the undead in a scene reminiscent of Ms. Pac-Man devouring ghosts. However, the delay was only temporary. The army literally had bodies to throw at the problem, and soon the moat was filled to capacity, and the hell-cursed army was able to march on without impediment.

At their head were a new breed of hell-cursed, a variation of the crystal brutes that were twice as tall as a zombie. These peculiar creatures held wide crystal shields.

Nguyen took a shot at the creatures just to test their mettle, hitting one of the crystal shields, which shimmered as her laser hit it and sent out intense rays of blue and green energy as it absorbed a laser shot.

"Damn," she cursed and then turned to the closest sniper with a ballistic rifle and shouted, "Mustardman! Target that crystal brute with the shield! Lasers are a no go!"

The sniper quickly got into position as Nguyen and the rest of the team held off the horde. With practiced ease, he loaded his rifle with special bullets designed to punch through anything. Taking aim, a second wave of energy surged from his rifle as it crackled, and its muzzle glowed a fiery orange.

The shot hit the crystal shield like lightning, sending out arcs of electricity that ran up and down its length. The crystal began to tremble, shifting in a wave-like motion until it shattered in an explosion of light. The monster behind was revealed, a stony-faced abomination that looked like something out of a nightmare. But it was too late for the thing now. One well-placed shot had done what seemed impossible mere moments ago.

Nguyen chuckled as she watched the soldiers adapt and focus their ballistic shots on the shield carriers and their lasers on the other hell-cursed. Another batch of the creatures tried to charge the coral wall, and Nguyen shouted out, “Chris! Toss another one! North wall, 200 yards out!”

The tall blond rugby player shouted back, “Here we go, love!” Then he put his hands together and formed glowing red energy into an oval shape. The energy solidified into a rugby ball, and with a swift kick, Chris launched the glowing projectile over the wall and into the path of the charging monsters. The creatures ignored it, at least until Nguyen shot the ball causing it to burst explosively, blowing a hole in the line of crystal shield bearers as it killed them. The turrets and fire from the soldiers on the walls cleaned up the rest of the charging force as their protection broke.

But one small victory didn’t win their war.

Nguyen heard screams from the eastern wall and dread filled her heart as she raced in that direction. Instead of the hell-cursed at the gates as she’d expected, she saw soldiers screaming for joy.

On the battlefield, Nguyen saw that the army of giant insects had finally made their move, flanking the hell-cursed. The sight was like something out of a dream—as if a host of bug-shaped angels had descended from the heavens to do battle with their foes.

The giant ants ran forward in a single line, their mandibles clacking and clicking as they raced toward their targets. The multitude swarmed over hell brutes and zombies, devouring their flesh from head to toe with no mercy or hesitation, leaving their bones scattered across the battlefield.

As they did so, enormous spiders with needle-sharp legs emerged from the shadows. Their long legs scurried over the ground, and they shot out thick strands of webbing to ensnare any zombie who dared cross their path.

The medium-sized flying scorpions flew in formation above it all, darting down in waves to devour and implant eggs in hell-cursed soldiers foolish enough to try and charge them.

As she watched the insects, Nguyen spotted a familiar figure and cursed, “Oh shit, I didn’t think I’d ever see that crazy chick again. What did they do to her?”

In the middle of it all was Candy. She hovered in the air, her wings blazing like a comet. Her fiery red hair fanned around her face and shone like a halo. She pointed a rapier forward and released a stream of fire that cut through the zombie horde, burning them to ashes. Below her, the giant insects marched forward, their chitinous exoskeletons clattering in time to her every movement.

The sight was so strange and unexpected that Nguyen could do nothing but stare in wonder. Candy looked like a queen, flying over a hill of carnage with the wind blowing through her red hair. But the real surprise was the swarm of giant bugs that were flanking either side of her, some crawling on the ground, others flying freely in the air. They were terrifyingly beautiful, and their multi-hued wings shimmered in the sunlight as they surrounded their commander protectively.

Yet for all the damage the insectoid army was doing, they were little more than a distraction for the tens-of-thousands-strong army of the hell-cursed.

The colonel shouted, “Let the insects take the eastern flank of the enemy to the north. Manual turrets and soldiers, focus on the army crossing the moat! Lasers fire, burn down high-value targets: conscriptors, brutes—anything they can use to break through our defenses!”

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The soldiers did as ordered, and the tide of the battle shifted, the manually fired turrets lit up the charging horde just beyond the coral wall. Their high-explosive rounds blew apart the undead, shattered the protective shields, and shredded zombies by the dozens with each shot.

Nguyen swept the barren battleground, her sight amplified by her Monocle of Sensing and her skill Sight Beyond Sight. Heat signatures appeared in her vision, until she homed in on a cluster of conscriptors cowering in a trench far away. She quickly turned to the six snipers surrounding her, shouting orders.

"Alright Byrdie, you take out the first one!"

Byrdie grinned and winked at Nguyen as he took aim. "This one's for you," he said before squeezing the trigger. The conscriptor's head was instantly gone, its skull reduced to a shower of black blood and brain matter.

"Eagle Eye," Nguyen barked, her Aimed Shot already trained on the next target.

"I got it," he replied. His bullet streaked through the air, punching through the torso of the second conscriptor. Nguyen quickly finished it off with her Aimed Shot.

Before any more could be taken out, a wall of undead flesh interposed itself between them and their targets, providing a hundred zombies as cover for their escape. "Looks like they got away," Nguyen sighed, shaking her head. "We'll get 'em next time."

Patches of chaos within the enemy ranks arose from the deaths of the two conscriptors. The hell-cursed they controlled either died or went berserk, but order was quickly restored as other conscriptors seemed to take over the berserkers, and the loss of a few hundred monsters was hardly noticed.

“What the hell is that?” a soldier shouted, a finger pointed at a gaping chasm that had opened the midst of the hell-cursed formation.

Nguyen’s eyes widened at the sight, something she’d seen several times before, as she muttered, “The dvixians?”

As a hundred undead troops tumbled into the chasm's depths, her guess was confirmed as a stream of glowing orb-like creatures emerged and began to detonate in the center of the hell-cursed's neatly arranged lines. Amid the chaos, the unmistakable figure of Dvixian Princess Buttercup emerged, riding atop a colossal kaiju molepede that cut down swathes of the undead with each swipe of its claws.

The disarray caused by not one, but two armies joining the battle to attack the Demonic Faction finally broke them, and the rushing charge of monsters across the corpse-clogged moat slowed, and more of the hell-cursed troops were diverted to deal with the new threats.

A glimmer of hope sprung up in Nguyen’s heart, and she cheered along with the soldiers on the wall that saw the dvixian army appear.

Then she heard screams from the west wall.

“They’re coming in from the west!” someone yelled.

Nguyen's heart lurched as she heard the news and she mumbled, “Just what we needed.” She abandoned her next shot and spun to see a sight that burned away any hope. The western hell-cursed army had finally moved. Ten thousand more troops marched on them, nearly a thousand zombies already flinging themselves into the moat on that side to clog it with rent flesh even as they were cut apart by the crustacean creatures that were in its depths.

“Damnit,” Nguyen cursed, closing her eyes for a moment as she tried to deal with the stress of the ever growing threat as the horde overcame one of the only major impediments to their path removed and the enemy army advanced beyond the moat.

Brutes leapt through the air and smashed into the coral wall, tearing it to pieces even as tendrils flung them back and lasers cut them in half. The soldiers on the wall filled them with lead, but only the ice ballista seemed to slow the army down, and even that was fractional. Groups of hell-cursed were flash frozen, and the army diverted around them or crushed them outright.

Nguyen fired into the mass of the enemy, their lines so thick she did not have to aim to hit. The air was filled with smoke, bullets, and lasers as the defenders unloaded everything they had, and yet the army marched on past the destroyed coral walls right to the thirty-foot-tall wall she stood upon.

Brutes pounded its concrete paneling as the manually fired turrets sent round after round into their midst, and for every monster killed, it felt like there were five to take its place. Nguyen aimed right over the walls and activated Burst Shot, sending out a blast of five laser shots in a short blast, taking out a handful of zombies. But before they even hit the ground, more were already tearing at the walls. Soon, the structure started to break from the relentless assault, and she could hear the metal of the walls screech as they were torn asunder.

“Reinforcements!” someone shouted.

“Of course there are fucking reinforcements,” Nguyen grumbled, thinking the person was talking about more hell-cursed, only for her brain to catch up a moment later as she turned her head to see what they were talking about.

Nguyen saw an army of people to the south across the river. It took her a moment to recognize the black armor of Brad’s army. Rage flamed up in her heart. She gripped her rifle tightly as she used Sight Beyond Sight to find the bastard that had beaten her and tried to enslave her.

She spotted Brad, dressed in a chestplate that was made of solid steel, decorated with intricate golden patterns that glowed in the light of the setting sun. His shoulderplates were enlarged to make room for the furred cape which draped around his shoulders. The entire suit had been polished to perfection so that it gleamed even in the dim light.

He was talking to someone as he pointed toward their base. She wanted nothing more than to put her rifle to her shoulder and burn a hole through the bastard’s head, but the screams around her called to her, reminding her she faced a more pressing threat.

Nguyen fired point blank into the face of a whip-tailed brute that had leapt up to the top of the wall and tried to climb over. The surprised expression on its face was almost comical as its brain was leaking from the thumb thick hole burned through its skull. Then it fell back off the wall.

Suddenly, a crash staggered Nguyen and nearly sent her tumbling to the floor. The wall broke, and the enemy poured in. Nguyen, struggling to regain her footing, saw Lucy in the courtyard leading the melee defenders they’d placed there. Lucy glowed red, her two swords spinning as they cut through zombies and brutes alike. She fought beside that blonde Australian amazon who held a shield nearly as tall as she was, pushing back the zombies that tried to overwhelm them. The Aussie’s shield glowed as a brute hit it with a two-handed club, and the woman staggered backward. Then the shield’s glow turned red, and the energy exploded outward, knocking the brute back and killing a half dozen zombies beside it.

“That’s RIGHT! Bugger the fuck off and get a dog up ya!” The Aussie girl, Isla, yelled at the top of her lungs as she followed up her attack by bashing the staggered brute in the face.

“I have no idea what the fuck you said, but yes, THAT!” Lucy exclaimed as she beheaded one of the zombies before turning to fight a hell-cursed brute.

The Australian rugby team fought side by side with ferocity, cutting down monsters even as they protected one another with their shields. The otters on the northern wall saw what was happening and fired into the breech trying to plug the wall once again with frozen corpses, but there were too many bodies pressing through.

Then Nguyen saw Lucy go down, the barbed end of the brute’s tail puncturing her thigh and pulling her legs out from under her. Nguyen sent her rifle to her inventory and leapt from the battlement, a spear appearing in her hands as she fell. The tip of the spear punched through the shoulder of the brute making it turn, and before she even landed on the floor, Nguyen had let go of the spear. A bone ax appeared in her hand, and she swung at the monster’s tail, severing it.

“FUCK!!! IT HURTS!! I’m TOO FUCKING SOBER FOR THIS!!” Lucy was screaming as she tried to get the piece of monster tail out of her leg.

“I got ya, Luce,” Nguyen said as she quickly took off her jacket, ripping an arm off it and wrapping it around Lucy’s wound to stop the bleeding until Lucy’s healing skill kicked in. “I got ya.”

“Thanks . . .” Lucy said, the words escaping her gritted teeth. “I’ll— I’ll save you next time.”

“Just stay alive, and we’ll call it even,” Nguyen said, helping Lucy stand back up.

As Lucy struggled to her feet, Nguyen saw her ripping off and eating a piece of monster flesh before jumping right back into the fight beside the Aussie amazonian. Unable to get back to the wall, Nguyen stood her ground and joined the chaos as she fought for her own life, the growing mob of zombies surrounding her.