Blue Hell And Alien Fire (Middang3ard Book 4)

by Ramy Vance

  The largest T-rex cleared its throat and spoke in a deep voice. “Ah, we’ve come across humans. I believe we should expedite this, so we do not lose track of our current prey.”

  The T-rex’s scales broke apart, showing a level of techno-organic symbiosis Suzuki had never seen before. It was as if the tech and the skin, the organs, the entire creature were gone. The scales of the T-rex gleamed like liquid steel as its fangs grew larger and sharper, the whole creature bulking up yet slimming down as tech rippled across its body, opening its jaw and firing a stream of plasma as it roared.

  “Goddamn it,” Suzuki muttered. “Why isn’t anything ever easy here?”

  10

  Streams of plasma tore across the open clearing, cutting up the earth and leaving huge scars across the ground.

  It was all the Mundanes could do to avoid the onslaught of energy cutting through the air, leaving a steely sizzle as if it were not meant for this plane. Suzuki found himself scuttling across the ground, trying to get to his feet as fast as possible as the T-rexes rampaged toward him. The rest of the Mundanes were in similar situations.

  The rexes were fast.

  Faster than Suzuki would have imagined creatures that large could move.

  Suzuki managed to get to his feet just as a T-rex brought its foot down on where he had just been. Hardly taking a moment to aim, Suzuki tossed his axe at the T-rex’s right eye. It landed with a sickening thud, and the T-rex screeched in pain as it thrashed.

  Before Suzuki had a chance to celebrate, the T-rex reached up with its stubby paws and rubbed the axe out of its eye. Then the wound began to heal; Suzuki could see thousands of nanofibers stitching the T-rex’s eye closed. What the hell? Suzuki thought. He had seen that kind of healing before; it was the same way Chip reattached parts of her body that had been lopped off. He’d never seen Chip heal this fast, though. Within a matter of moments, the T-rex’s eye was fine. If the T-rexes healed that fast, the Mundanes were in for a difficult fight.

  Across the battlefield, the rest of the Mundanes were struggling as much as Suzuki. Stew had only just gotten to his feet before he was smacked in the chest by a stout, scaly tail. The impact of the attack sent him soaring over the rest of the Mundanes until he skidded across the ground and slammed against a tree.

  Two of the T-rexes looked at each other. The larger turned to the smaller and said, “The big chap—we should address him first.” The other T-rex nodded and they both took off after Stew, who was getting to his feet and trying to shake his head clear.

  A plasma bolt whizzed past Stew as Chip and Diana came chasing after the T-rexes, Chip firing her plasma cannon, trying to catch the dinosaur’s attention but failing.

  The rexes were zeroed in on Stew. For some reason, they had identified him as the primary threat and were working in tandem to separate him from the rest of the Mundanes.

  Suzuki could see this from afar. He also noticed the T-rex he had squared off against was doing its best to keep Suzuki from getting closer to the rest of his party. Within a couple of seconds, the T-rexes had figured out Suzuki was the one issuing commands, while Stew’s main position on the field was to absorb and dish out damage.

  They’re smart, Suzuki thought to himself. I’ll give them that.

  Suzuki recalled his axe back to his hand and sent it flying at the T-rex. The Rex dodged the axe, but that wasn’t important to Suzuki. He just needed room to breathe. The most important thing was that he get back to the Mundanes. He wasn’t worried they couldn’t take care of themselves, but he knew the closer he was to the rest of the Mundanes, the easier it would be to coordinate attacks. If the T-rexes were working in unison, that meant the Mundanes were going to have to as well.

  Ahead of Suzuki, the T-rexes were launching streams of plasma at the Mundanes, who had gathered around Stew.

  Diana was busy trying to heal Stew, who had been knocked unconscious and was bleeding from the head.

  Beth had whipped out her shield and was using it to deflect the plasma bolts. Whatever the shield was made out of was strong.

  Chip had converted both of her hands to a large shield that unnervingly looked like flesh.

  Even though it seemed to be different tech than whatever the T-rexes were made of, her shield still held up. Stew finally came too, and Diana turned her back to him and started casting defensive spells.

  Suzuki was closing on the Mundanes when he felt the heat on his back. He didn’t need to look over his shoulder to know what was coming; he just hoped he could avoid it as he flung himself to the right. Plasma seared the ground to his left and he hit the ground, rolling, then quickly getting to his feet and sprinting ahead without breaking his stride. He focused on his axe, raised his hand, and caught it as it came flying toward him. Behind him, the T-rex roared, and Suzuki hoped he had managed to at least wing the giant dinosaur. Then he leapt toward one of the T-rexes accosting the Mundanes.

  The T-rex turned to face Suzuki at the last minute before contact. Suzuki brought down his axe on the T-rex’s head between its eyes. He didn’t wait to see if the attack made any difference before leaping off the T-rex and landing next to the rest of his party. “These guys are moving like a fucking wolf pack!” Suzuki shouted. “We need to regroup and put them on the defensive.”

  Diana whipped her wand and sent a firebolt flying at one of the T-rexes as Suzuki called his axe back. “They’re healing too fast to do any damage!” she cried.

  Suzuki looked around to assess the situation. There wasn’t enough time to think, though. He pointed to the jungle and shouted, “Haul ass back to the trees!”

  The Mundanes didn’t waste any time heading back to the trees. They booked it, plasma bolts screeching behind them as the T-rexes roared and quipped to each other. Suzuki was glad he was out of ear’s reach and didn’t have to hear them gloating. He pointed up to the trees and ordered, “Chip, Beth, you two get up there with Diana. Me and Stew will draw their attention, and you take care of the rest. You feeling up to it, Stew? You got your ass handed to you pretty hard.”

  Stew smiled as he ran. “Just got caught off-guard, that’s all. I’ll make them regret not putting me in the fucking ground.”

  The Mundanes exited the clearing and reentered the thicket of the jungle. Beth and Chip soared into the air and landed easily in the trees while Diana levitated up into the canopy leaves. Suzuki ran until he found an area where the trees didn’t crowd as much.

  The ground shook from the heavy trampling of the T-rexes as Suzuki and Stew turned to face them. The T-rexes looked at each other greedily as they licked their lips. Just as Suzuki had expected, part of their natural instincts had been displaced by their intelligence. They were doing something natural T-rexes would never do: toy with their food. That was just the edge Suzuki needed.

  As the T-rexes closed in, the largest one grinned—a toothy, frightening image—and chuckled. “It looks as if we have scared off the other two. Three? No matter. Two humans are not much against us and our sophistication.”

  Suzuki was going to act. He hoped the Mundanes above got the drift of his plan. “Yes, we are!” Suzuki shouted, causing the T-rexes to stop in their tracks. “I’ve never come across such a well-led group before. Your tactics are unbelievable. How? You have to tell me before I die!”

  “The gifts of the Dark One are numerous. If only you would allow yourself to embrace his grand designs, you too could be elevated to our level.”

  Suzuki was still sizing up their weak points. The techno-organic flesh made them more resilient, but it didn’t make them immortal. Anything could be severed if you hit it hard enough. He remembered how easily his axe had sunk into the soft spot between the T-rex’s eyes. That was probably their safest bet—go for the kill spot and keep hacking at it until it’s over.

  “You can hulk out now,” Suzuki said to Stew. “Try not to get killed, all right?”

  Stew cracked his knuckles and his body began to swell, his muscles growing larger, his legs and torso stretching to give
him nearly an extra foot of height. He turned toward the T-rexes as he tossed his axe in the air and caught it. Then he threw his axe at one of the T-rexes before sprinting toward the creature, his two swords in hand. The axe he threw went straight through the T-rex’s leg, completely severing it, and Stew slid under its leg, slashing the other one.

  Suzuki ran his finger over his axe, enchanting it with the fire and lightning runes he had etched into the hilt. A flame spread over the blade, and lightning crackled. “Aim between the eyes, and don’t stop until its dead!” Suzuki shouted as he leapt.

  The T-rex Suzuki was aiming for opened its mouth and shot a plasma bolt at him. The blast hit Suzuki square in the chest and sent him flying. His skin burned and he felt like he had been hit with a truck, but he knew he could keep going. He climbed to his feet, and his axe came flying back to him.

  From above, Chip fell from the trees, slapping her hands together, fusing them to create a larger cannon than usual. She fell onto one of the T-rex’s heads and fired a massive blast between the dinosaur’s eyes. The plasma tore through it and exploded out of its neck. As the dinosaur toppled, Chip leapt into the air, splitting her hands apart and firing shot after shot with deadly accuracy. Each blast tore farther into the T-rex’s head until there was nothing more than a bloody pulp.

  Beth leapt from the tree along with Diana, who was freefalling, firing arrow after arrow as fast as she could at the T-rex’s eyes. Her arrows landed true, blinding the dinosaur as Diana raised her wand. A bolt of lightning cracked through the air, hitting the soft spot between the dinosaur’s eyes. The dinosaur went down, but Diana did not relent. She aimed her wand and another lightning bolt hit the dinosaur, jolting its body as its legs convulsed.

  At their side, Stew had thrown his weapons away and was ripping into the T-rex’s head with his bare hands, punching until the skin was nothing but pulp. He didn’t stop there. He kept going until he hit the skull, and then he felt the bone shatter and the soft, squishiness of the T-rex’s brain explode. By the time he stood, covered in blood, all the T-rexes lay dead.

  Suzuki walked up to Stew as he shrank back to normal. The barbarian warrior was covered in blood and sweat. The rest of the Mundanes converged and took stock of what they had just killed.

  The T-rexes looked to be a perfect amalgamation of flesh and machine. It was difficult to tell where organic life began and inorganic life ended. The difference between the T-rexes and Chip was noticeable immediately. When Chip’s body contorted and took the shape of her alien tech, the machinery was noticeable. It looked as if corruption had set into her body, which was not the case with these hulking creatures of the past. There was no distinction. The transition in their bodies was seamless.

  Stew knelt and looked at the busted head of one of the T-rexes. “This would probably be terrible to eat, huh?” he asked.

  Diana pulled out her notebook, jotting notes as she paced around the dead dinosaurs. “Bad would be an understatement,” she explained. “It would be like eating a microchip.”

  “Shame. I’ve always wanted to eat something that’s extinct.”

  “Looks like whatever that leech did, the old Stew is back. I think I’m glad.”

  Suzuki looked in the direction they had run from. “We should go and see if we can figure out where they stampeded from,” he suggested. “I know the Dark One’s forces have to be on the island, but, as far as we’ve seen, they’re pretty sparse. But these guys got me a little interested. The cat that attacked us earlier seemed like something that was sent to get us. Maybe a patrol or something. These guys, though? It seemed like they were concerned with something before us. We just happened to be here, so they attacked. And, not to sound cocky, but they didn’t know who we were. From what I’ve been able to gather, we’re on the Dark One’s shit list, so why didn’t they recognize us?”

  Diana nodded her head. “That’s a good point,” she assented. “They could be out of the loop. Maybe this island is something like a dark spot for communication. We have them as MERCs as well. People stationed out in places that are too remote to get in contact with. That would be surprising for the Dark One, though, seeing how he has the tech to be able to communicate between realms.”

  Chip raised her hand, her skin breaking apart into sections of organic tech. “Not too unreasonable,” Chip said. “Looks like there’s leaps and bounds in the shiny things the Dark One dabbles in. These fuckers make me look like a bucket of gears out the Jurassic period.”

  Suzuki nodded his head as he took a closer look at the T-rex Stew had pummeled to death. The hole in its head was sizable. When Suzuki looked closely, he could see that the nanotech that made up to T-rex’s skin had already been trying to close itself. The stuff worked fast. Luckily, Stew had managed to reach the T-rex’s brain, killing it and any hope of healing. Still, it was impressive to see how resilient the creature was. “Hey, Chip, do you think you could interact with the Dark One’s tech?” Suzuki asked.

  Chip’s hand returned back to normal as she shrugged. “Ain’t been raring to try, to be honest,” she confessed. “Last time I interacted with dark tech, I blew my ol’ flame to pieces, only to have him come back and haunt us later. Not sure it’s such a good idea for me to go around touching things.”

  Suzuki could see the pain in Chip’s eyes despite the unaffected persona she was trying to put on. Chip’s language had generally fascinated Suzuki. It didn’t belong to any specific region or fantasy trope he could understand. Instead, it seemed like a hodgepodge of different idiosyncratic dialects and linguistic ticks. Suzuki had figured out they were directly related to what Chip was feeling at the moment. Sometimes she was hiding behind words. Other times she was using them to bolster her own confidence. And there were times her syntaxial tricks fell apart and Suzuki could see how fragile she really was.

  Diana was the complete opposite.

  No matter how hard Suzuki tried to get a read on her, he drew a blank. She was always professional, always held the air of one who was knowledgeable of what was going on, and it didn’t matter what situation.

  Even hallucinating from magic beetles did nothing to her demeanor. Suzuki still felt uncomfortable with what seemed like her stepping back and letting him take charge of the mission—if you could even call it a mission. All they had to go on was a volcano had started smoking and they had been attacked by a group of ultra-intelligent dinosaurs. He had no idea what José was getting them into.

  Stew was observing the dinosaurs as well—another wildcard Suzuki needed to keep an eye on. Even with Stew seeming to have returned to normal after the leech bite, Suzuki felt like something was still off. It wasn’t something he thought was cause for immediate concern, but he had been caught off-guard by how quickly Stew had been taken out earlier. Not too surprising, though. Stew had been known to rush into skirmishes unprepared. What had surprised him more was how quickly Stew had taken care of that T-rex.

  Suzuki knew Stew was capable of enormous amounts of strength, but he had never seen Stew fight methodically before. Suzuki was surprised he hadn’t thought to take the legs out from under the T-rexes. But not only had Stew figured that out with his gut, but he had also torn into the dinosaur’s skull with nothing other than his fists.

  That was the part that troubled Suzuki.

  It was no secret that Stew was strong, probably stronger than any of the other Mundanes. And there was a level of savageness he threw himself into battle with. But what Suzuki had seen earlier was different. He had only caught a bit of it out of the corner of his eye, but there had been frenzy on Stew’s face. He wasn’t all that surprised Stew had torn that T-rex apart with his bare hands.

  Then there was Sandy.

  Suzuki still hadn’t had a moment to try to grasp what Sandy had signed up to do with José. He hadn’t asked any questions, but he wished he had. Now she was gone, off to whatever plane the Dark One inhabited with the ghost of a dead man. What the hell else could go wrong?

  The only stable thing Suzuki kne
w he could count on was Beth. She had meshed instantaneously into the flow and rhythm of the Mundanes.

  And she was picking up new skills.

  It wasn’t that Suzuki felt he couldn’t depend on the rest of the Mundanes. It was more that he realized there were multiple variables at play in a mission he didn’t even comprehend. He hadn’t even started to take his own role into account. Probably better not to. He was already spending too much time up in his head.

  Suzuki held up his hand, and his axe returned to him. “The dinosaurs had to have come from somewhere,” Suzuki started, thinking out loud. “And I think it’s a safe bet they weren’t sharing space with the herd we saw stampeding. The herd looked freaked the fuck out. So, I’m gonna say the T-rexes had come as a surprise. The next step is finding out where they came from.”

  Diana clicked her tongue as she paced around the fallen dinosaurs. “You think they might have a different natural habitat?” she asked. “That’s why the other dinosaurs would have reacted that violently?”

  “Something like that. I don’t know what it was José was trying to point us in the direction of, but that volcano and these rexes are the closest things we have to a clue. We might as well start by checking it out. That sound good to everyone?”

  There were no disagreements, so the Mundanes prepared to leave. Before they disembarked, Diana decided it would be a good idea to retrieve some samples from the T-rexes. The only bit of the Dark One’s tech MERC had any access to was Chip, who refused to be a test subject. MERCs had tried to send a few parties into the Dark One’s broken defense rings, but after the fall of the Viceroy, the Dark One’s forces had scrubbed the place clean. This would probably be the only chance the MERCs were going to get to study whatever it was the Dark One was creating.

  As Diana and Chip dissected pieces of the T-rexes off, Beth came up and crouched beside them. “You should send some of that to Hyatt,” Beth said, referring to her former platoon captain. “He could make some good of this.”