by James Hunter
The smooth floor of the cave ramped downward.
Checking my display, I saw that Loxo and Sophia had descended about half a mile and were still going steady. The rest of us continued on our way, sticking to the main passageway, which was wide enough to accommodate our animals and Phoebe’s steampunk suit. Corridors, however, branched off at every turn—this place was a maze of tubes, tunnels, and chambers. And somewhere in the vast caverns would be the Sower’s Glass. Not that we knew what it looked like.
Do you see anything, Loxo? I sent.
She didn’t respond. Checking the map, I watched as Loxo and Sophia blinked out of existence, then appeared a dozen meters back up the way they had come. Another flash, another teleportation, and they were closer to us.
The caverns seemed to be blocking our messaging system. And from the pattern of their movement, it seemed to me Sophia and Loxo were retreating. But from what?
“Dammit,” I said, drawing my War Blade with a schwick. “Heads up, everyone, I think our scouts are in trouble.”
Myrina and Antiope took off running, using their Burst Speed abilities. They disappeared around a sharp dogleg. I tried to message them, but as with the others, it was a great big no-go. Asteria in her black widow form followed. The rest of us hurried forward, creating a rumble and clatter that echoed around the cave. We rounded the corner and found Myrina and Antiope holding a shaking and bloody Loxo. The Huntress’ leather armor looked like it had gone through an industrial metal shredder.
Sophia was in one piece, though sweat ran down her face and her skin was oddly pale.
I bent and cast a healing touch to repair Loxo.
“Thanks, Boss,” she said. “Not sure how we’re going to get through the chamber up there. There are thousands of them. Thousands.” She trembled, pressing her eyes shut for a long beat.
Sophia stifled a sob of fear with one hand.
“Thousands of what?” I asked, though in my heart I already knew.
“Bugs,” Loxo whispered.
TWENTY
Temple of Doom
We moved deeper into the guts of the Caverns of Entomo, blue-tinged light beating down on us from the bioluminescent fungus covering the walls and ceilings. The smothering humidity quickly vanished, replaced instead by a damp chill that settled into my bones. I shivered and pulled my Mammoth Cloak tighter around me. As we threaded our way through a snaking passageway, I nervously ran a hand over the pommel of my War Blade—seeing my Huntress and my Teleporter so shaken up had left me anxious.
Seriously, the pair of ’em were about as tough as they came, so anything that could shake them had to be bad.
The godstone erupted in hot energy, and my apprehension quickly turned to fury. Someone had hurt my Amazons, and I was going to make them pay. I glanced at my gaming display; I’d regenerated most of my Divine Essence Points and was sitting pretty at 428.
Yep, something was gonna pay big time.
“Okay,” I said as we rounded a sharp bend, which quickly snaked away in the opposite direction. There was another curve just ahead, which—according to my map—let out into a massive cavern. That’s where the creepy-crawlies had sprung their ambush. “Based on our scout reports, we’re talking a thousand enemies, but they’re all in an enclosed space and I have the recipe for a hurt sandwich that I plan on feeding these buggy motherfuckers.”
Antiope and Ariadne exchanged confused looks.
Myrina nodded in sympathy. “He means he has an offensive stratagem to deal with our foes. There is no literal sandwich.”
I shot her a finger gun. “And the Battle Warden gets a cookie for her upgraded intellect.”
Myrina gave me an unimpressed look. I was used to those from her.
“And for the record, I like it better when you smile at me, Myrina. Now,” I continued, focusing on the rest of the crew, “we’re going classic MMO on this op. Loxo, Sophia, I want you two to post up in the rear. Cover our asses, make sure nothing stabs me in the back, and play medic if anyone goes down. Ariadne and Euryale, you two are on point. You ladies are gonna draw enemy fire. Make sure they’re focused on you while the rest of us do our work. Myrina and Antiope, you’re both in the vanguard too. Myrina right flank, Antiope left. Keep those insect bastards from getting behind our lines.
“Asteria, you’re our forward striker. Get out there and sow as much chaos as inhumanly possible. Phoebe”—I stole a sidelong look at the Rune-Caster—“you’re with me in the center of our formation. I want you laying down suppressive fire. Mow bitches down but avoid getting tangled up in a melee fight unless you have no other choice. Sabra, same. Stay close to me and focus on AoE spells. Slow our enemies down, build barriers, walls. Anything to funnel them toward our tanks. We want to create a choke point, understand?”
The Forest-Witch nodded, a soft emerald glow seeping from her eyes. Equal parts creepy and cool.
“As for me, I think I’ll be most effective laying down miracles by the truckload, so I’ll linger back. Now let’s get all Terminix on these things.”
Ariadne merged with Thunderfoot, transforming into the hulking battle-ax wielding minotaur of utter destruction who I’d come to know and love. She moved into position, hooves clopping on the stone. Euryleia, riding the ferocious Buttercup, slipped up beside the minotaur, followed by Myrina and Antiope, who posted up on the left and right.
Asteria shimmered, spidery limbs dissolving into silver goo as she morphed into a blue-scaled serpent. One so big that she made that basilisk from Harry Potter look small. Damn, but she was awesome. I eyed Phoebe, who tromped along to my left. She’d been tinkering with her steampunk suit. Using her Rune-Caster abilities, she’d taken the bronze armor from the dinomythics we’d been fighting and built an honest-to-god buzz saw. The damn thing was as big as a car tire and bolted to her left arm.
Along with her automatic crossbows—don’t ask me where her seemingly unending supply of ammo came from—she’d upgraded her mech into a melee monster. I shook my head in awe.
In anticipation of the battle to come, I slapped my hands together and cast Burning Aura on my troops. The familiar golden glow enveloped them, tongues of brilliant light casting strange, dancing shadows against the walls. Now, if something did attack us, they would take fire damage. Just one more layer of pain I could add to the hurt sandwich I was whipping up.
We hooked around the last bend and beelined down a short corridor which opened into a large cave as long as a football field and as tall as any arena in the U.S.
Inside was an underground jungle of towering mushrooms gleaming a bright blue. Big mushrooms, small mushrooms, fat mushrooms, thick mushrooms, some spotted, others shining a little too brightly. Luminescent lichen veined the walls and ceiling high above and water dripped down from curtains of sapphire-colored moss. A path cut between the forest of mushrooms, and though it seemed deserted, we knew better.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” I called into the cave. My voice echoed off the walls. Nothing moved. The water continued to plink down.
In the middle of the room, Boss, Loxo sent. That’s when they hit us. The assholes drew us out before attacking.
Ariadne and Euryleia hesitantly edged forward, entering the chamber itself, but still, nothing happened, nothing moved. Only the drip, drip, drip and the plink, plink, plink of water falling. No wonder Loxo and Sophia had been caught off guard. These things were deadly quiet and the impossibly thick fungal foliage all around offered perfect cover. But I wasn’t about to wander into their ambush for a second time. Nope.
I had a leg up because I knew they were in there, biding their time.
Which meant I could flush them out.
“Everyone into position,” I said, cracking my knuckles. “Things are about to get interesting.” Instead of drawing my sword, I thrust both hands out at forty-five degree angles, palms up, fingers splayed back. With a battle cry, I hurled Lightning Lances from each hand; bolts of blue-white death streaked across the room and tore into looming m
ushrooms. Chunks of fungus went flying, acrid gray smoke rising in plumes. Something chittered and yowled in pain as one of my Lances arced into darkness.
Instead of relenting, however, I poured out another two Lances, more mushrooms exploding and burning. More hidden creatures yowled in pain. Still they didn’t move, but that was fine. I could play this game. “Myrina, Lightning Javelin. Phoebe, make it rain.” My Warden hurled her magical weapon at the nearest mushroom tower while Phoebe sent a hail of bolts flying, peppering the shrooms to the right.
Something moved in the dark, and then something else skittered through a bit of moss. They were getting agitated. Good. I lifted my hands high and blasted the ceiling with another wave of lightning. The walls came alive as hundreds of moth-like monstrosities took flight. And they weren’t alone. As though governed by a single will, bugs poured out from between the mushrooms in a tsunami of fangs, pincers, and multi-jointed legs. The insects glowed with the same bioluminescence as the fungus, offering them perfect camouflage.
“By the hairy testicles of Zeus!” Myrina cursed.
I snorted and chuckled. The situation was totally unnerving, but the hairy testicles of Zeus was too good to ignore.
My laughter quickly died away as the cavern went from serene mushroom jungle to Nightmareville, population us. It was like the bug scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, only every critter was prehistoric and a hundred times too big.
The moths swept off the walls, each man-sized, each with hooked legs under their dusty wings that sent blue pollen-like particles into the air. Giant armored dragonflies buzzed through the pollen and dove toward us like living dogfighters. The dragonflies had wingspans of twenty-five feet at least. Huge mandibles chomped and gnashed, dripping saliva that splashed acid onto the fungus below.
Air support. Great.
But Phoebe and Loxo were already on it, bolts and arrows whistling through the cavern, each one finding a target.
The first wave of ground-bound creepy-crawlies converged on Ariadne and Euryleia, while more poured out from under mushrooms and behind curtains of moss. First up were armor-plated arthropleura—millipede-like creatures eight feet long and several feet wide. Behind them came pulsing larvae, each the size of a horse. All of these new monsters had killer mandibles and acid spit dripping from their mouths. And there were hundreds of ’em. Holy shit.
Last came the insect tanks: three car-sized, neon-blue scorpions. The clack of their claws snapping together made the ground shake. Humongous stingers swayed as the monsters moved; each stinger tip was as long as a curved scimitar and glistened with a green, venomous goop.
We definitely had our work cut out for us.
I raised both hands but didn’t act. Not yet. No, I waited for more of the buggy bitches to draw in nice and tight. That way, my miracles could take out as many as possible.
Meanwhile, my front-line Beastiamancers fought like mad, horns goring, claws slashing, teeth chomping, ax falling.
My Battle Wardens went to town next, projectile weapons first—Myrina used her javelins, Antiope her bow. Javelins and arrows pin-cushioned the moth monsters and dragonflies dive-bombing toward us. Euryleia, likewise, worked with her longbow while Buttercup handled the ground troops. Arrow after arrow streaked home into furry moth bellies. Myrina shot two dragonflies out of the air, clipping their wings.
More of the ground component was pressing in, trying to overwhelm Ariadne and Buttercup with their sheer force of numbers. But Phoebe wasn’t having that shit. She got her mech crossbows cranked up to fuck-you levels of full blast and mowed down millipedes and dive-bombing moths with equal ease. It was like that third Matrix movie, an iffy flick, but that scene on the dock during the Battle of Zion had been epic.
Her bolts damn near decapitated a writhing larva, then she aimed high, stripping the wings of a moth. The flyer smashed into the ground with a screech, taking out another millipede as it died. She took down dozens of the freaky insects, but more and more flung themselves off the ceiling and walls.
More for Asteria to eat. My Beastiamancer general was no longer in our ranks. She was slithering through the crowd, cutting them down like Death’s scythe itself. She rose up, pulling a low-flying moth from the air, then lunged, huge jaws unhinging and wrapping around a bloated larva. Her throat swelled as she choked down a wriggling body.
The insects shrieked in fury. The air swirled with tons of that glow-dust from those devil moths.
Ariadne wasn’t much for patience even when she was human. As a bull, she was even worse. She bellowed, threw her horned head side to side, and rushed forward to engage a wall of incoming arthropleura. But damn, what a mistake. There were simply too many of them. In seconds, the minotaur was covered in millipedes. Gripping her with a million legs, they slashed through her skin, ripped through her flesh, and burned her with their acidic saliva.
Sabra saw the danger immediately. She raised her arms and combat vines writhed out of the mushroom jungle, ripping some of the arthropleura off our minotaur, then hurled them away like children’s toys. Next, Sabra turned her formidable powers on the encroaching scorpion tanks, currently surging toward us like a trio of rabid great whites. The ground groaned and creaked as wrist-thick vines burst through the stone and dirt, wrapping around legs, pinchers, and deadly tails.
That wouldn’t hold them forever, but it bought us some time to thin out the rest of the buggy horde.
At the same time, Sophia and Loxo knew what they had to do. Even though the armada of creepers had hurt their morale, they weren’t about to let their sister be destroyed. In a flash of purple and stink, Sophia and my Huntress appeared next to Ariadne. The Teleporter hacked at incoming millipedes with her sword, and thanks to Burning Aura, she sliced through their armor as though it were cheap particle board.
One fat larva went up in flames as Sophia impaled it through its puckered face.
Loxo fought like wind and shadow, dancing and flipping through the enemy ranks, xiphos in one hand, hooked dagger in the other. In seconds, the minotaur was in the clear and on her hooves again, falling back into formation, her battle-ax descending in a rain of golden blood and severed limbs. She chopped an arthropleura clean in half before swatting down a giant moth circling overhead. She was clinging to life, her HP in the single digits, but you’d never know it with how ferociously she was fighting.
A dragonfly managed to drop down and seize Myrina in its jaws. It lifted her into the air, but that was such a colossally poor life choice. Not only did the insect catch fire because of the Burning Aura, but the Battle Warden drove her xiphos into the heart of the thing, then flipped back down, hurling her lightning javelin while she fell. Her javelin tore through its wing like it was made out of cheap toilet paper, and down the dread moth went, fluttering face-first into a mushroom, which promptly exploded in a cloud of spores. My general landed like a cat and continued to fight on even as blood poured down her armor.
Euryleia knew there was only one thing for her to do when faced with such overwhelming numbers. She leapt off Buttercup, somersaulted through the air, and came down as a motherfucking grizzly bear. Claws, fur, fangs—the whole nine yards. Thanks to the point in her Shift Form ability, she too could now shape-shift, though she was bound to one form for the time being. A thunderclap and a flash of opalescent light filled the cavern a moment later; three more war bears appeared, conjured out of thin air.
She’d used her Animal Summoning power to give the insect horde more targets to face.
All five bears engaged a fresh wave of arthropleura pouring out of the mushroom jungle. Hooked claws tore through chitinous armor and shredded whirring legs as ursine teeth chomped down on buggy throats. They slew the awful millipedes by the dozens, but the acid squirting out of the creatures’ mouths splashed onto their thick fur. Burning flesh smoked up in an awful stink.
Watching grizzly bears fight giant millipedes? That was every kind of epic!
My tanks had done their job. Now it was time for me to get
busy and do my thing. First, though, I had to crank up the hit points on my Amazons before I lost anyone.
I raised my hands and used Healing Touch to blast every one of my wounded soldiers with some much-needed TLC. Once wasn’t going to cut it, however. My people were taking too much damage too fast. I cast another. The godstone burned in my chest, my Essence plunging down to 264 in a matter of seconds. I swayed drunkenly—white starbursts skipping across my vision—but pushed on.
It was time to get biblical on their bug asses.
“Plague Locust!” I screamed, not quite sure why, except that it felt right. Like I was an anime character launching my signature move. The War Blade was sheathed, and my shield hung on my back, so both hands were free. Before, I’d channeled the energy screaming from the heart of the godstone through my weapon, but this time I did it from both my hands. My fingers turned translucent with jade brilliance and my entire body vibrated from the energy. A full ninety Essence Points left me, but the results would be worth it.
Isn’t there an ancient proverb about fighting monster bugs with monster bugs? If not, there should be.
Green mist merged and danced with the blue dust, quickly dissipating the azure moth pollen. The thunderous wings of the enemy bugs were nothing compared to the torrent of noise from my locusts. A cloud of three-inch-long emerald-colored insects materialized. Wings buzzed from their green backs as my plague went to work.
Moths and dragonflies were soon coated in wriggling suits of jade. They tumbled down and crashed into the unnatural foliage as my locusts ate through their bodies with their inch-long mandibles. The arthropleura fared better—the suckers were mini armored tanks—but the larvae were easy pickings, dying as the locusts bored into their blubbery bodies. And the millipedes were slowed down immensely as they tried to shake off the locusts clinging to their exoskeletons like leeches looking for a good meal.
