The chaotic terror flooding the empathic tether from the Gem-Croc began to recede. The maelstrom of fear was mixing with the predatory focus of a hunter.

  Its immense body shifted. Stalking footfalls shook the ground, but the vibrations were a distant, meaningless drone in Trenn’s mind.

  His world had narrowed to his left hand. The outer edge was a ruin of mangled flesh where his fingers had been. The initial, violent gush of blood had subsided, but a steady, hot weeping continued, soaking down his sleeve.

  Shock gave way to a surge of adrenaline as a grinding pressure clamped onto his boot. Another larva was chewing through the thick leather. His club came down with a THUD, crushing the creature’s head into a paste of chitin and fluid.

  The Husk carried Almitad's impaled form away. The Gem-Croc, gleaming in the pale sun, padded hesitantly after it.

  His sonar swept the chaos, locking onto Skate lying in the grass, regenerating its obsidian shell.

  Adrenaline burned through the pain in his mangled hand. His ruined hand refused to grip the club’s haft. I can’t swing, but I’m not letting you have her, he thought, staring at the flying beetle that had skewered Almitad.

  He broke into a dizzy sprint toward the slime pet. His run ended in a pivot, his entire body uncoiling as he put every ounce of fury into his foot and kicked.

  Skate launched, a black projectile screaming across the battlefield. A surge of desperate hope shot through him as he tracked the projectile with his sonar. The trajectory was perfect, an arc closing the distance to the Husk’s head, to the soft tissue just beneath its opened wings.

  But the Husk banked as the Gem-Croc closed on its flank.

  The obsidian shell exploded with a concussive CRACK on the creature’s armored underbelly. Glassy shrapnel sprayed upwards, gouging shallow furrows into the thick chitin plates. The giant insect lurched sideways, slowed down but unharmed.

  "No!" he screamed, startling Ezy, who was yanking a strap tight around her calf.

  The last of his strength gave out. He crashed to his knees.

  He pushed the raging helplessness from his scream down the empathic tether. The Gem-Croc’s confusion seized upon the raw emotion, giving its instincts a direction and a target. The psychic noise in the link collapsed into a spike of predatory instinct.

  It worked?

  A deep, rhythmic thump vibrated through the turf, jarring the catatonic Bomber where it lay in a limp heap. Thump-thump. The rhythm accelerated, the ground shaking with the charge.

  A golden avalanche of scale and muscle stretched in the sky. The Gem-Croc’s immense jaws opened and clamped down on the flying Husk with a sickening CRUNCH.

  Greenish-yellow haemolymph erupted from the wound. Larvae spilled down its mouth, and the giant predator shook its head, flinging them to the ground below and flinging Almitad off the scarab’s massive rhino horn.

  The maws of the golden crocodile closed again. Its teeth ground into the Husk’s chitin, breaking it into pieces. The Gem-Croc uncoiled itself and swallowed the chewed-up remains of the giant insect, along with its remaining larvae.

  Through the empathic tether, the furious purpose he had pushed into the creature abruptly dissolved. The psychic noise of its rage was gone, replaced by a dull, sated languor. It slumped across the battlefield.

  Trenn’s attention, freed from the immense weight of the god, snapped back to the sky.

  Almitad’s skeletal form struck the turf with a dry, clattering impact. It tumbled, a chaotic spill of limbs that scattered smaller, fractured pieces of bone across the grass before coming to rest in a broken heap.

  He met Ezy’s gaze as she hauled on the ends of the leather strap, twisting it tighter to garrote her leg.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “I have to get her!” he shouted.

  Her eyes, feverish with pain, didn’t turn to him as she gave a single, sharp nod. “Go!” she gasped.

  His sonar locked onto Almitad’s exact location amidst the scattered remains. He jammed his bleeding hand into his armpit and ran, his boots finding clumsy purchase on the torn-up earth.

  Zeen scrambled into a kneeling position, the soul-bound musket already pressed to his shoulder as its clockwork mechanism clicked into place. He pulled the trigger.

  A sheet of incandescent embers erupted from the barrel, washing over the larvae that swarmed toward Mara. The ground hissed. The creatures sizzled and popped, their bodies curling into blackened, smoking crisps.

  The main swarm recoiled, a frantic, churning wave pulling back from the heat. A scorched line scarred the turf, a temporary barrier between her and the two dead Husks, whose armored plates still pulsed as a fresh tide of larvae writhed within.

  The musket's clockwork began its reloading cycle, each click an agonizingly slow beat in the chaos. Undeterred, the larvae spilled around the edges of the smoldering embers, resuming their single-minded advance on Mara.

  Zeen surged to his feet, reversing his grip to wield the musket as a heavy club. He planted himself over Mara’s body, a desperate, circling guard.

  A hard swing with the ivory stock sent one larva tumbling back. A kick from his steel-toed boot knocked another from her hair. He stomped and shoved, his clumsy blows herding the squirming creatures away from her, forcing them into a single, concentrated mass.

  The final, satisfying CLICK echoed from the musket as the mechanism seated a new payload.

  He took two quick steps back, creating a clear firing lane. He leveled the barrel and fired again.

  A second, wider blanket of flame engulfed the concentrated swarm. The frantic writhing ceased, replaced by the hiss and crackle of burning chitin.

  Trenn dropped to his knees beside Almitad.

  She was propped on a single, trembling arm, her spine twisted at an unnatural angle. The entire right side of her thoracic cage had been obliterated, leaving a gaping hole where the glowing, runescribed ribs should have been.

  The steady hum of the Mana Bloom was gone, replaced by a discordant static that leaked from the break and vibrated in his teeth. The flower itself pulsed weakly within the ruin of its cage. Three of its necrotic petals were gone, and its remaining bloom drooped, shedding a faint, failing light.

  With his good hand, Trenn picked up a piece of broken rib glowing through the grass.

  Uncertain, he angled it toward the tear in the flower’s cage, trying to match its splintered edges to the breaks in the glowing circuit.

  Her free hand, which had been scraping at the dirt, went still. Her skull turned, her empty sockets tracking his attempt to puzzle the bones back together. He found a match. A splintered curve slotted against a corresponding fracture with a dry grate.

  Almitad lifted a hand and twitched her fingers.

  A thin black thread snaked around both sides of the broken rib and bound it back in place. The effort caused the necrotic bloom to dim further in her chest.

  She doesn’t have long.

  Her empty sockets swept across the battlefield. A profound slowness afflicted her movements; each gesture seemed to require immense, delayed effort.

  “Trenn… Your fingers…” said Almitad, her usually strong voice drifting in the breeze.

  He forced himself to look down at his stump.

  The stubs of bone were pearlescent white against the dark, pulsing blood. It was not his hand. It was a piece of carved meat someone had attached to his wrist.

  A wave of nausea washed over him, and the world tilted. He shifted his weight to keep from falling, his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps.

  His vision swam. He planted his boot on the shredded hem of Almitad’s robe to hold it fast. With a grunt, he yanked, ripping a long, dirty strip free.

  He tried to hold one end of the strip with his ruined hand, to pinch it between thumb and… nothing. The cloth slipped from the mangled stump, instantly soaking red.

  A growl of fury vibrated in his chest. His jaw clenched. He pinned the bandage to the turf with his knee, laid his bleeding hand on top, and began to wrap. His good hand worked clumsily, looping the fabric around the mangled flesh.

  He seized the blood-soaked cloth between his teeth, clenched his jaw, and ripped his head back. The knot cinched tight, and a fresh wave of agony lanced up his arm.

  Almitad’s skeletal hand shot out, its grip an iron clamp on his wrist. Her skull locked into position, her empty sockets aimed at him. Her other hand lifted, trembling with effort.

  It gestured weakly back across the battlefield, in the direction of Mara and Zeen.

  A single word, a sound like dry leaves skittering across stone, drifted on the breeze.

  "Bones..."

  Bile rose in his throat. His sonar painted the distant wreckage of the Scrapper—Ezy's machine, built around the skeleton of a Beaver Kin exorcist. One of Almitad's own people.

  The bones were now embedded in the chitinous corpse of a dead Husk. He looked from her desperate, fading form to the distant carnage. To save her, he would have to dig through one corpse to desecrate another.

  "Hurry..."

  He met her empty gaze and gave a single, grim nod.

  I suppose I’ve done worse…

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