Dan’s feet hit the floor of the birthing chamber with a muted thud. In the distance, looming over the shapes of the Orakh eggs, he could barely make out the towering shape of an alien variant. It wobbled slightly before croaking loud enough to be heard over the sound of the battle on the floor.
He shrugged, weaving through the pony-sized eggs toward its hulking form. Behind him, Garnash smashed into the ground, his massive feet destroying one of the eggs.
“Human!” The Orakh’s scream filled the hatchery. “I will floss with your spine!”
That was his cue. Dan ran faster, doing his best to avoid the large, leathery eggs that filled the underground room. Behind him, Garnash crashed to the floor, shaking the entire hatchery.
A glance over his shoulder confirmed Dan’s suspicion. The giant Orakh held the glaive at ready, energy pulsing over its length as it watched him run away, reluctant to fire a shot that might harm the eggs.
It wasn’t even moving, afraid that it wouldn’t be able to move through the nursery without stepping on or crushing a cluster of eggs. He took advantage of its indecision to lengthen the gap between them, still jogging toward the gigantic Orakh he could barely make out near the edge of the chamber.
Finally, Garnash got over his reluctance and fired a bolt of energy from his glaive. Given the distance, Dan sensed the build up of mana with plenty of time to throw himself to the side and avoid the spell.
The darkness exploded to his left as a handful of eggs were turned into goop, and the floor of the chamber shattered under the force of the blow. Foul-smelling yolk and rocks pelted Dan, battering his stuttering spellshield, but not doing any damage.
He switched directions, still working his way toward the large Orakh, but focusing on a winding, serpentine path that would prevent Garnash from drawing a bead on him.
It only took a couple of seconds for his random changes in direction to bear fruit as another clump of eggs exploded, eliciting a scream of rage from Garnash. The entire room shook as the giant Orakh charged after him.
Evidently, the threat Dan posed to the nursery was too great for Garnash to let him have his way. It meant that, in addition to giving Dan time to replenish his flagging mana reserves, he was onto something. It might not be anything that would let him win this battle, but at a minimum, damage to the hatchery would likely be a gut punch to the Orakh war effort.
A brief, vicious smile flashed over Dan’s otherwise hollow face. William might have escaped, but he doubted it. He’d only caught a couple of the blows the Orakh landed on the man right before he’d jumped into the egg pit. There was a finality to the way those axes fell that he struggled to deny.
The least he could do was to return the favor, strangling the next generation of Orakh warriors in the crib. Dan’s sword flashed to the side, its razor-sharp edge slicing open the egg and spilling its foul contents into the winding pathway behind him. Then, he stabbed it to the other side, not slowing his pace in the slightest, draining another egg.
Garnash screamed in rage once more, and mana began to build up behind Dan. Just as it pulsed, he threw himself to the side. This time, he didn’t manage to completely dodge the blast of energy from the huge Orakh’s glaive.
The breath rushed out of his chest as the explosion next to him sent Dan careening through the air and darkness. For a fraction of a second, he tried to get his bearings, only to slam into and through yet another egg. Only a portion of the destructive mana glanced off of Dan’s spellshield, but it was enough to almost short out the mana reserves devoted to his defenses and leave his aching body covered in dripping, sulfurous Orakh yoke.
He stood up and took in Garnash’s huge silhouette. The Orakh was charging his glaive once again, the dim, crackling energy surrounding it almost the only visible source of light. The hole he’d jumped through and the meager light it provided was far behind him.
With a grunt, he started running again, always in the general direction of the shape he’d first seen when jumping into the hatchery. Explosions erupted around him as the Orakh commander tried to tag him once more with energy bolts from his heavily enchanted weapon, but Dan was too quick and the room was too dark for any real sort of accuracy.
Periodically, he slammed into an egg, but Dan didn’t let it slow him down, bursting through the leathery exterior to pull himself forward in his headlong flight.
Suddenly he burst forth from the forest of eggs into a dimly lit area occupied by the largest Orakh he’d ever seen. It barely even had legs, instead covered in quivering and wobbling flesh.
It moaned at Dan, a warbling and distressed sound as it tried to shift its massive bulk away from him. He didn’t hesitate.
His sword crackled with eldritch purple energy as he brought it down on the wall of flesh and blubber before him. The Orakh’s flesh parted with ease, barely slowing the blade as it passed through.
Viscera sprayed over Dan as his weapon hit a pouch of pressurized liquid. The broodmother warbled and screamed in agony, but made no move to defend itself, likely because the most threatening course of action available was to flap its tiny, vestigial arms angrily while calling for help.
Behind Dan, Garnash’s massive feet thundered as his actions broke the giant Orakh from its indecision. Until he felt another buildup of mana, Dan vowed to ignore the charging monster. Even with his longer stride, it would take the Orakh commander some time to get to him. Time he could use to cut down the variant that his foe so valued.
It was the least William deserved.
He stabbed again, drawing another burst of scalding fluid and, surprisingly, a torrent of mana. Dan frowned. The elephantine monster was clearly alive. It didn’t make sense that he was collecting mana from a still-living creature.
His sword rose and fell once more, and Dan accepted the mana, letting it flow into the parched and empty balls of energy in his core. He didn’t have the time to ponder over the philosophical implications that he was taking mana from a living being. Garnash would be there shortly. He could only take advantage of the mana rapidly refilling his reserves and make a note to investigate the cause later.
“Step away from the broodmother!” Garnash shouted. Dan barely paid attention. He was beyond the muscled monster’s screams and posturing. They would fight, and one of them would fall. There was nothing more to it. “Fight with honor, treacherous human!”
Dan didn’t reply, instead stabbing his sword deeply into the side of his target, gripping the handle with both hands and running behind it. The blade sawed through the Orakh’s tender flesh, eliciting a spray of scalding liquid as one fluid pocket after another burst under its razor edge.
As soon as Dan had the broodmother between him and Garnash, he began casting Railgun. With his mana reserves close to full, he could afford to burn the mana, and really, of all his spells, it was the only one that even had a fighter’s chance at injuring the giant Orakh.
The major concern was whether or not Dan could hit the Orakh. Railgun was slow to cast and hard to aim, making it more of a siege spell designed to take down fixed positions of or large and clumsy opponents.
Unfortunately, despite his size, Garnash was anything but clumsy. The projectile fired by the Railgun might move fast enough that dodging it was difficult, but under normal circumstances, the Orakh would be able to predict where Dan was aiming and juke to the side quickly enough that he would never be able to draw a bead on it.
Of course, they were under far from normal circumstances. Garnash was angry and presumably running in a straight line. For the moment, the big Orakh’s line of sight on Dan was obstructed, meaning he wouldn’t have a chance to observe the initial stages of the spell being cast.
Even when Dan stepped out into the open, past the heaving and bleeding broodmother, only the small amount of bioluminescence from the broodmother would give the Orakh commander an idea of what he was doing. Garnash, on the other hand, would be backlit by the weak light filtering through the crater in the ceiling.
“With any luck,” Dan muttered the words to himself, a talisman against the constant failures that had dogged his team since they stepped inside the Orakh ship.
The spell strained against Dan’s mind, the metal rails trying to pull themselves apart under the stress off the spell. Time seemed to slow as electricity began to arc through the bars of metal.
His foot hit the fluid-slick floor, and Dan dragged himself around the broodmother’s bulk. Energy from his spell pulled at the slug that was suspended just shy of the rails with his mind.
Garnash was maybe ten feet away, glaive crackling with eldritch energy as he peered into the darkness and tried to find Dan.
Dan released his hold on the slug. His mana reserves dropped notably as the massive electrical current running through the rails grabbed the hunk of metal and pulled it along their length.
A gout of plasma erupted from the end of the rails as the energy pouring out of the spell overexcited the air. For a second, the hatchery was visible in the flashbulb of expanding ionized gas.
It was massive beyond belief. A square, a little over a half mile per side, absolutely filled with egg cluster after cluster. Before him lay an army of Orakh ten times the size of the one that had already overwhelmed Manhattan. Enough to storm through the disparate and quarreling factions that were trying to carve up what had once been America in a matter of months.
Then, the projectile struck Garnash. Somehow, in the fraction of a second the Orakh had spotted Dan, it’d gotten its glaive around to parry.
It exploded. The heavily enchanted weapon’s runescripting was no match for a kilogram of metal traveling at almost three kilometers per second.
Dark energy writhed, coalescing into whips of violet lightning that pulsed and scattered around the chamber. One struck Dan’s spellshield dead on, and only the mana he’d stolen from the broodmother kept his defenses from collapsing entirely.
The broodmother itself wasn’t anywhere near as lucky. Its massive size seemed to attract the out-of-control energy, and bolt after bolt seared massive holes through the gigantic monster.
Garnash himself was thrown back by the blast, stunned by both the explosion and the sudden flash of light so near him. For the first time in the fight, the big Orakh’s face lost the smug look of superiority that had graced it.
Dan ignored the tempest of dark energy pulsing and lashing out from the spot where the glaive had been and began feeding mana into the Railgun once again. The previous shot had bent the metal bars, the amount of electricity running through them twisting and pitting them beyond the point of use.
The spell pattern for Railgun popped into Dan’s mind, impossibly complex, and he focused on the section that created the metal rails, letting his mana smooth and straighten the bars.
Garnash staggered to his feet dumbly, his defensive cloak in tatters from the force of the blast and covered in wounds. In some places, the shrapnel from the slug and glaive had penetrated deeply, gashing open muscle and spilling the Orakh’s brackish blood. In others, the metal had simply liquified, burning deep into Garnash’s flesh before solidifying.
A crackling whip of dark energy lashed past Dan and struck the broodmother. Suddenly, mana poured into him, more than he’d ever received for a single kill. The energy rushed past his defenses and began to overwhelm him.
Giddy warmth filled Dan’s senses as a light pink tint invaded his vision. Frantically, he tried to compartmentalize his mind, devote half of himself to finishing the spell while the other repeated his mantra and tried to retain control.
“APO!” Garnash screamed, distress and sorrow in his voice as he took a staggering step toward the deceased broodmother.
The Railgun fired a second time. The weakened metal bars shattered under the stress of the spell, only holding together long enough to deliver another metal slug to the Orakh warlord’s chest.
Something primal and savage inside Dan gibbered in joy as Garnash didn’t even try to dodge. Instead, the Orakh simply stood there, a single arm extended toward the cooling mass of flesh behind Dan, inconsolable loss in his eyes.
The slug punched through the Orakh’s chest with enough force to level a small building. Garnash’s ribs snapped like matchsticks and a fountain of gore sprayed out his back.
The Orakh fell to his knees, looking dumbly at the blood pouring freely from his chest and onto his hands as he sought to staunch the wound. Dan didn’t give him a second to recover.
In the flickering purple light, as the mana storm created by the destroyed glaive finally began to fade, Dan covered the twenty feet between them in a second. His sword flashed, wreathed in mana and fire.
A hand, almost the size of Dan’s torso, fell to the ground. He jumped, Gravitational Easing aiding his ascent.
The blade flashed again, and Garnash’s head followed it as an uncontrollable torrent of mana overwhelmed Dan’s defenses.
