The ground behind them vibrated with the Gem-Croc’s breathing. Territorial rage flooded the tether from the beast, a feeling that coiled in his own skull and focused on the impaled god below.

  Trenn pushed a counter-flow of manufactured calm into the link, a constant mental exertion against the creature’s fury.

  His sonar painted Ezy’s position on the clifftop. Her flintlock rifle, longer than her own body, rested braced on one of the Scrapper’s bone hands. He cast his sonar downwards, tracing the vibrations of Mara skidding down the cliff-face.

  The image shifted as the closest Husk disengaged from the impaled god. Its head, adorned with three man-sized horns, swiveled toward the source of the vibrations.

  Ezy pulled the trigger, making the rifle buck with a CRAKOW.

  The bullet flared against the Husk’s horned head and ricocheted into the distance. A surge of baffled frustration flared from Ezy’s tether.

  “Zeen, help Mara!” Trenn called. His own fear for her momentarily loosened his hold on the Gem-Croc’s empathic leash.

  Zeen was already working the action of his clockwork musket. His face masked by incandescent fury, he slid to the cliff's edge.

  A sharp, resonant CRACK of flames erupted from his soul-bound weapon. A puff of grey smoke momentarily obscured the gnome as a streaking torrent of incandescent, orange-gold embers shot across the battlefield.

  The embers crashed against the Husk's chitinous armor with a sizzling splash. They clung to its back, eating into the plates that shielded its wings. The embers smoldered, and the acrid scent of burnt chitin drifted up on the wind.

  It reacted instantly. The plating on its back whipped open with a mechanical CLACK. The violent motion flung the smoldering embers, revealing immense, translucent wings that began to beat with a low, threatening thrum.

  Every Husk disengaged from the giant dog and opened their wings. In perfect, unnerving unison, the four giant beetle-like insects took to the skies.

  The Gem-Croc’s focus immediately shifted to the flying insects, its territorial dispute with the impaled god replaced by intense, almost playful curiosity.

  The beast made a step forward, but Trenn turned from the cliff, his focus shifting from the desperate battle below to the living mountain of scale that stood behind them. He had to crane his neck to look up at its immense, jeweled head, its one good eye focused on the Armored Dog.

  He focused his will, attempting a delicate graft of intent. He took the Gem-Croc’s simmering territoriality for the dog and tried to splice it onto its newfound curiosity for the airborne Husks.

  The creature's ancient mind rejected the graft. The tether bucked. The Gem-Croc’s possessive rage slammed up the empathic line and into his own skull.

  A primal urge flooded him—an irrational, murderous hatred for the whimpering, impaled dog below. He recoiled from the psychic intrusion with a gasp.

  Below, the Armored Dog’s desperate thrashing ceased. Its body went slack against the impaling stake, its breathing reduced to a series of pained, ragged pants.

  A flood of pride came from Ezy as she angled her Scrapper’s arm to train her flintlock sniper up at a flying Husk. She shot again with a loud CRACKOW.

  The bullet struck the Husk’s left forewing and punched clean through the translucent membrane with an audible SNAP.

  Ezy’s pride mixed with satisfaction as the giant beetle lurched violently in the air. Its flight was destabilized, and it executed a spiraling descent, landing heavily on the turf below. The impact sent a shudder through its frame, and from the seams of its carapace, a dozen thick, beige larvae spilled out, writhing blindly in the grass.

  Mara uncoiled from her cover into a four-legged sprint.

  Her grounded opponent angled its helmeted head. With a heave that churned the earth, it threw itself forward in a battering-ram charge, propelled by the strength of its six insectoid legs.

  His sonar registered her form twisting inside the main thrust of its horn. A high-frequency shearing vibration followed as she slashed the rhino horn off the Husk’s head.

  The giant insect angled its head; its bull horn tore through her unarmored forearm. She scrambled clear as the beast’s thundering mass barreled past her position, churning the earth where she had stood.

  Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

  Thick, worm-like things spilled from the charging beetle as it passed, squirming at her feet. Their eyeless heads turned blindly toward the vibrations of her movements.

  The three flying Husks began a jarring, erratic flight pattern.

  They moved overhead with sudden lurches that shook larvae free from beneath their black plates of armor.

  They fell in the Scrapper, causing Ezy to scream in disgust. They peppered Zeen, who rolled down the abrupt cliff-side and sprawled below, his musket clattering several yards away. One fell on Trenn’s helmeted head. Skate became pliable and then immediately back to maximum density to catapult the disturbing creature away.

  A worm-like thing, the length of his arm and twice the thickness, hit the ground near his feet. Its maw opened, revealing rows of pointed teeth as it lunged for his ankle.

  Trenn smashed his club down on it.

  At his feet, a half dozen more of the larvae squirmed to reach him. Revulsion spiked through him. He crushed each one that snapped at him, his focus shattered. The structured calm in the empathic link collapsed into the Gem-Croc’s abject panic. The giant beast uncoiled.

  Its flank brushed the Scrapper aside as its foot slammed down where Zeen had been a moment before, pulping a dozen larvae. Its body rose on its hind legs, a two-hundred-foot tower of scale blotting out the sky, before it launched itself upward. It snatched a flying Husk from the air and crushed the insect in its jaws.

  A flood of larvae fell inside the Gem-Croc’s mouth. They crashed around its muzzle and bit at its golden, gleaming scales while others cascaded down its muzzle.

  A thin, reedy shriek tore Trenn's focus to Ezy. His sonar mapped her sprawled form and the single, toothy mass clamped around her right foot. The thick leather of her boot was disappearing into its maw, the vibrations a sickening, wet crunch against the stone.

  She hammered her skeletal Wolf Kin fist against its armored hide, each impact a dull, frantic thud that did nothing to slow its progress.

  Then, a new frequency reached him through his sonar—a high, grating vibration that resolved into a horrifyingly clear image. He perceived the larva's teeth grinding against the small bones of her foot, the distinct, sickening crunch of the metatarsals fracturing under the pressure.

  Her living hand scrambled for the toolbelt at her waist, fingers fumbling for a wrench as her body convulsed with each grinding turn of the creature's jaw.

  She directed her undead construct, its cockpit squirming with larvae, to the side of the cliff. At her command, it threw itself over the lip and tumbled down the steep slope.

  Near the bleeding, impaled god, Mara was slashing at the ground, slicing the worm-like monsters to pieces with her good arm.

  The Husk that had rushed her turned its attention to the falling Scrapper. With a dangerously fast thrust, it gored it mid-air with its bull-horns. Trenn's sonar pinged as the hit pierced clean through the metal plating, the wood reinforcement, and the skeleton, breaking both its shoulder and spine.

  The Husk was entirely focused on its impaled prize, attempting to pull the gored machine from its horns. Trenn’s sonar registered Almitad’s movement as she drifted over the cliff edge, pointing both arms at the Scrapper. One hand aimed down at the construct. The other snapped its fingers.

  A silent command shot from the necromancer. The skeletal frame of Ezy’s machine detonated.

  The explosion sent a concussive blast of bone, wood, and metal fragments into the Husk’s head. The chitinous helmet shattered, and the bone shrapnel pierced the soft tissue beneath. It died instantly, but its black armor continued to writhe as the larvae within pushed against the seams of its plates, their pale forms forcing their way through the gaps.

  Nearby, Zeen was scrambling to his feet and rushed towards his musket.

  The fliers overhead were about to drop another payload of their ravenous bombs.

  Trenn jumped, launching Skate from his head. He swung his club upward, meeting the slime with a clean THWACK. Skate rocketed away, a black blur aimed with his sonar.

  It struck the Husk in the flesh beneath its wing. A spray of glassy shrapnel ripped through its tissues and shredded its wing.

  Greenish-yellow haemolymph erupted from the wound as larvae rained from the seams in the creature’s plates. The ruined wing failed, sending the insect into an uncontrolled spiral toward the battlefield below.

  Propelled by the explosion, Skate slammed into the underside of the second flier. The dull THUD of the impact jarred the giant bug sideways in the air. The violent lurch shook its payload of larvae loose, sending them raining down wide of Trenn and Ezy.

  As the Purple Slime fell towards the ground, a streak of pink and yellow fluff dove from the clouds. Bomber snatched the quivering mass in its six furry paws and began the flight back to the clifftop.

  Almitad’s skeletal form drifted forward from the clifftop, her empty sockets fixed on the wounded Husk. She focused on the raw, bleeding mess where Skate had torn the giant beetle open.

  Her skeletal hands began to weave intricate patterns in the air. A sickly, black-green light pulsed from within the sleeves of her colorful robe, illuminating her bony finger as they danced through the air.

  She pointed at the wound, and its flesh blackened, necrotizing at a visible, unnatural rate. Its writhing larvae turned a mottled grey and went still, their brief lives extinguished by skin contact with the spreading, gangrenous tumor.

  The corrupted horned insect, which had been trying to push itself onto its legs, convulsed violently before crashing back onto the ground. The heavy crunch of its collapsing body offered a sliver of relief, a breath in the chaos.

  The reprieve lasted a single heartbeat. A wave of pure, agonized panic erupted from the Gem-Croc’s tether, a feeling so violent it nearly dropped Trenn to his knees.

  The larvae it had swallowed were chewing through the soft flesh of its mouth. It spat the mangled Husk from its jaws with a gargantuan roar of pain. Its entire body coiled, muscle and scale bunching in preparation for a single, sweeping motion. The tail, a weapon the size of a train car, was about to clear the clifftop of everything.

  Including Ezy and Trenn.

  Schedule:

  https://discord.gg/mhxDZjw4

  https://www.patreon.com/cw/RDDMartel