But then the Rhino turned and made to leave. It took two steps before a pair of Atticus’ warriors leapt from concealment near the mouth of the ravine and began to bellow a wordless, primal challenge to the creature.
The Stone Rhino turned with surprising—no, with terrifying!—speed and agility as it locked onto the Tracto-ans with its reddish eyes. It blasted a pair of breaths into the dirt as it lowered its head and began to paw the ground. Each time it did so, the creature’s giant feet tore huge, half-meter-deep grooves in the rocky soil as though it was nothing but light mud.
The Tracto-ans continued their bellows and brandished obsidian-tipped spears in the creature’s direction, with one of the warriors even hurling his spear like a javelin at the Stone Rhino. The tip of the spear struck the creature’s skull squarely between the eyes but skittered harmlessly off before becoming entangled in a patch of the beast’s deadly razor-sharp, hair-like fibers. It was then that the creature accepted their challenge and it began to charge toward them.
Lu Bu felt her pulse quicken as the two men turned and ran full-out toward the pile of meat, and she silently urged them to outrun the creature before it caught up with them.
Halfway to the pit’s location, one of the warriors lost his footing and nearly sprawled out on the ground, barely managing to keep his momentum moving forward as he scrambled to keep pace with his companion.
That momentary lapse proved fatal, as the Stone Rhino lowered its head and swept its vicious horn toward him when it had closed the distance between them. The Tracto-an apparently realized the Rhino was within striking distance, because he rolled quickly to the side and attempted to dive for cover behind a small, rocky, outcropping. But the Stone Rhino leapt through the air with what looked to be impossible grace and swept its head side-to-side as it did so, just barely catching one of its splayed tusks on the Tracto-an’s thigh.
The man cried out in pain and tried to scramble away, but the Rhino drove its powerful, cloven foot into his back before he could do so. There was a sickening, wet, crunching noise followed by a muffled scream as the Rhino eviscerated the warrior with a single swipe of its horn. With another pair of swipes with its massive head, the behemoth had dismembered the once-mighty warrior and turned its eye to his companion.
The other warrior had already crossed the pit trap and was still bellowing his primal challenge at the hexapedal monstrosity. The beast turned its attention from the ruined corpse of the Tracto-an it had just slain and pawed the ground in anticipation before charging toward the man.
The Tracto-an hurled his spear at the Rhino, and Lu Bu saw several of Atticus’ men come out of their concealment at the mouth of the ravine with spears of their own. These warriors were wearing armor—an eventuality which Lu Bu had considered, but hoped would not come to pass since it would make the confrontation’s outcome less than certain.
The spear lodged itself in the Rhino’s thick, razor-sharp hair as the beast lunged across the divide separating it from its prey. It had apparently not noticed Atticus’ group, as it seemed focused on finishing off the raucous human.
Lu Bu raised her hand to signal to her band that it was nearly time to spring their own trap. The Stone Rhino charged across the narrow ravine, with the Tracto-an who had acted as bait continued to goad the creature into its doom.
All around her Lu Bu’s group depressed each of their devices’ manual activation buttons and she began to count backward from three, knowing that the makeshift grenades would require an additional two seconds to reach their targets.
The Stone Rhino crashed into the false ground and attempted to prevent its roughly ten meter fall to the spear pit below, and for a brief instant Lu Bu feared it would do precisely that. If it managed to extricate itself from the trap, it would turn on the assembled Tracto-an band and several of the Pride’s newest warriors would fall to the beast’s savage fury.
But the creature’s momentum proved too great, and it merely managed to slow its descent for a split second before plummeting, head-first, into the spiked pit below.
Lu Bu’s count reached zero just as a cheer went up from the assembled Tracto-ans, and she stood to her full height to lob her makeshift grenade into the backs of the unsuspecting Tracto-an javelin hurlers beneath her. Her team did likewise, and the smashballs soared through the air in a unified, picture-perfect arc—an arc which did not behave as one would expect of an object under the influence of normal gravity.
The gravity generators built into the smashballs increased their apparent mass until they each weighed a hundred kilos precisely five seconds after activation, with the increase in mass beginning at the three second mark. The group had practiced extensively with this throw and other variants, and as their missiles fell upon the Tracto-ans like mortar rounds, Lu Bu and her companions leapt over the stony ledge. Her people sprinted toward their quarry with nothing but short lengths of rope hanging from their belts—rope they would use to bind the Tracto-ans as soon as they closed to grips with them.
The smashballs fell upon their targets with all but one striking true. Bernice remained atop the ledge, ready to launch a smashball against any target which was not quickly subdued by the strike team. When the smashballs impacted against their targets’ backs, each Tracto-an was driven forward with the equivalent force of a thirty five kilometer per hour hover car collision. Each of them was driven into the stone ledge behind which they had hidden and, of the seven warriors present, four were rendered unconscious by the double impacts of smashball and stone.
Lu Bu and her companions remained silent as they sprinted down the shale-strewn hillside, with only the skittering of gravel to mark their passing. The lone, untouched Tracto-an whirled around just in time to see Lu Bu launch herself through the air with her knee aimed squarely at his square, comically-dimpled, chin.
She drove her knee into his face with such force that his head snapped backward violently enough that Lu Bu briefly wondered if she had killed him. But his eyes rolled around as he flailed in a vain attempt to regain his balance, and she quickly sunk a deep chokehold around his neck. In just a few seconds, he was unconscious and she took the cord from her belt which she used to bind him in place while her band moved on to his cohorts.
The Tracto-ans beneath the javelin ledge were roaring with victory, but thankfully they did not appear to notice the absence of their now-unconscious companions. Lu Bu knew that would not last long, so she quickly checked to see if her team had subdued and bound the javelin squad. She noted with a primal, barbaric, glee that they had done so and she knew they could now proceed to the next phase of their plan.
Kratos met her gaze with his lone, smoldering, eye and he nodded as he and the others picked up their smashballs to reset the timers as she had instructed them to do.
Bernice made her way down the scramble, careful to avoid making undue noise as she did so, and Lu Bu waited until the effectively one-armed woman had joined them on the rocky ledge before signaling to her team of Lancers that the next phase was upon them.
She knew that even if they landed each of their smashballs, there was little chance that the impacts would render any of the armored Tracto-ans of Atticus’ war band unconscious simply due to the fact that there would be no double impact like there had been with the javelin throwers.
But they might buy themselves a clean approach with the improvised, single-target, grenades and that was enough for her. Once they closed to melee range, she knew that her people would have close to even odds.
She made eye contact with her team and gave the signal to activate the smashballs just as Atticus’ team began to make beckoning calls in the direction of the ledge. She peered around the rocky outcropping which provided them visual cover and saw that they were all still in their positions around the pit, and when her count reached two seconds she drew her arm back, throwing it precisely as that count reached three.
Her companions did likewise and, almost as a single entity, they flowed around the rocky ledge before sprinting t
oward their quarry. They were unarmed and unarmored, which Kratos and Cassius had agreed would prevent Atticus’ people from using deadly weapons. But just to be certain, she had been taught a strange word that she should lead her team in bellowing which would invoke a non-fatal conflict. Even so, she fully expected the affair to become, at the very least, potentially deadly—at least between the leaders of the two groups.
Atticus’ eyes, and those of his band, sighted in on Lu Bu and her people just as she bellowed the strange word at the top of her lungs. She was joined by her teammates, and the looks on her opponents’ faces was one she had not expected to see: grudging respect mixed with eager anticipation.
Atticus barked a command and his people made to throw down their weapons just as the smashballs crashed into their targets. Unfortunately, only four of the balls hit their targets, and of those four only two were sent to the ground with the other two suffering glancing impacts that did little more than unbalance them.
Lu Bu found her voice mixed with those of her teammates, who were screaming a savage battle cry that transcended social, political, ethnic, or linguistic barriers, and for a perfect moment they were precisely what she had hoped they would be: a team.
Then, as is known to happen at such times, all hell broke loose.
A small creature which looked like a grotesque, four foot tall wasp with delicate, human-like hands, leapt up out of the pit snare and crashed into one of the Tracto-ans in Atticus’ band. The creature wielded a tiny, cutting device which Lu Bu recognized from her mission briefs on Bugs to be capable of slicing through even power armor in short order.
Her group skidded to a halt as Atticus and his warriors scrambled to collect their weapons, and all eyes were on the creature as it sank its cutting-wheel weapon into the first Tracto-an’s neck. A shower of blood sprayed out from the wound, but to his credit the warrior did not panic. In what was almost certainly his final act, the warrior gripped the Bug’s arms in his massive, powerful, hands and splayed the creature’s arms out to either side of its body. With a herculean effort—and accompanying, bloody gurgle which should have been a defiant roar—the warrior tore the creature’s weapon-wielding arm completely from its body.
A short spray of green, viscous fluid shot out of the Bug’s empty arm socket and some of that liquid landed on the warrior’s face. Had his throat been intact he would have screamed in pain, but instead all that came out was a short, muffled, wet sound that Lu Bu could not even call a gurgle.
Atticus was nearest to the man, who had fallen to his knees as the Bug began to back away, chittering madly as it did so. With a brutal, cleaving stroke of his iron sword, Atticus neatly bisected the creature diagonally across what Lu Bu took to be its torso.
His blade seemed to smoke from contact with the acid, and both he and Lu Bu briefly exchanged looks which promised that when they had dealt with the interruption they would return to the business at hand.
But then a chittering erupted from the mouth of the pit trap, and five of the larger, two meter tall Soldier Bugs emerged. They each looked vaguely like a humanoid mantis, with heavily-armored arms ending in long, crab-like pincers. Each of them had apparently suffered significant injuries which had not yet healed, but they moved with surprising speed and fluidity as they descended on Atticus’ group.
Lu Bu looked around for a weapon but saw none, until her eyes settled on a smashball. She dove for it just as Atticus’ warriors formed up into a line and received the Bugs in formation.
Atticus wielded the largest sword of the group, and he laid into the Soldier Bug before him with controlled ferocity. His eyes were alight as he and the vicious-looking creature attacked, countered, parried and feinted. Meanwhile, to either side of him, his men did likewise and Lu Bu pressed the manual activation button on her smashball as she saw Kratos pick up a spear which had been, until that point, lying on the ground.
Two more of the smaller Bugs crawled out of the pit, and Lu Bu made directly for the nearest of them while Kratos moved to intercept the other. Without armor—or at least proper weapons—it would have been suicide for any of her people to engage the Soldier Bugs, and she saw Cassius and the other three pick up nearby stones and sight in on potential targets.
Lu Bu counted backward in her head as her chosen target appeared to realize she was approaching, and it skittered toward her faster than she had expected. It swiped with its cutting wheel at her midriff and she easily spun around the attack before kicking out at the creature’s spindly legs with enough force to break an ordinary person’s shin.
But the creature deftly ‘rolled’ with the attack, allowing the force of her kick to twist its leg into an impossible angle—impossible for a human, anyway—while it seemed not to lose its balance for even a second as it brought its cutting wheel up for a follow-up attack.
Thankfully Lu Bu had anticipated this, and she brought the smashball—which was only about fifty percent ‘charged’—into the creature’s back and sent the deceptively frail-looking creature to the ground. She pounced on it and grabbed the weapon it was wielding, wrenching it from its grip with her superior strength. She was enraged when it deactivated as soon as she gripped it, but before the Bug could get its feet back underneath itself she began to bludgeon its near eye with the body of the tool-like weapon.
After the third blow the Bug began to twitch violently, and after the sixth it no longer moved with any coordination at all. The tenth blow saw the entire side of its ‘face’ cave in before her bludgeoning effectively decapitated it, and the last signs of life left the disgusting creature’s body. She quickly retrieved her smashball and activated the manual play clock as she counted down from five once again.
As she did so, she looked up to see that Kratos had endured a wound to his leg, but it did not appear to slow him as he gave the Bug he had fought an emphatic stomp between what Lu Bu took to be its shoulders. The creature’s carapace ruptured and its acidic innards began to ooze out, but Kratos deftly avoided getting any of the foul substance on his skin as he stepped carefully away.
Lu Bu then looked over at the Soldier Bugs which Atticus was battling just in time to see the Pride’s War Leader cleave through his enemy’s arm, with the force of his blow lodging his sword in the Bug’s upper torso. The Tracto-an Lancer tried to free the weapon, but the Bug made a quick, stabbing attack with its remaining arm and nearly skewered the towering Tracto-an while he tried to extricate his weapon.
After dodging the attack, Atticus unexpectedly released his grip on the weapon and kicked the Bug squarely in the ‘gut,’ sending it sprawling back toward the edge of the pit trap. Lu Bu’s count had already reached three, so she gripped the ball like an Olympian grips a shot put and launched it at the Soldier Bug with everything she had.
The ball came up short by several feet and she cursed her poor timing. She saw one of the other Bugs fall to an expertly-coordinated attack sequence executed by a pair of Atticus’ Tracto-an warriors just as Kratos hurled a smashball into the Soldier Bug facing Atticus, eliciting a vicious, cracking sound as one of its legs snapped from the artificially enhanced force of the smashball’s impact.
Atticus produced a dagger from his belt and drove it between the Bug’s eyes, sending the creature into a spasming heap that saw its limbs contract after their motions had ceased.
Hearing a thunk from her rear, Lu Bu whirled to see a javelin sticking out of a Soldier Bug’s torso—a Soldier Bug which had only been a few steps from her. She realized it had been coming toward her, and she looked up to the ledge to make eye contact with Bernice, who had already retrieved another javelin and was attempting to sight in on another target.
Another Bug fell to the efforts of Atticus’ warriors, leaving only one Soldier Bug standing. It began to backpedal away from the armored warriors of Atticus’ war band, and for a brief moment Lu Bu thought the creature looked afraid. Then the warriors made a series of feints, causing the Bug to flinch just enough to create an opening for a spear-wielding warrior. He dr
ove the weapon through the Bug’s torso and then pushed it into a nearby rock as the Soldier Bug’s pincers clamped down on the spear’s shaft and snapped the wooden weapon with little apparent effort.
But the opening had been more than enough; just as the spear-wielder released his grip on the shattered weapon two of his cohorts swung their blades at the Soldier Bug with one aiming high and the other aiming low. The Bug, predictably, ducked the high attack—but the price it paid for avoiding decapitation was the removal of its front legs.
The Soldier Bug put up a good fight, but it was only a matter of seconds before Atticus and his men had savagely dismembered the thing and reduced it to a pile of disparate body parts. It’s slowly leaking bodily fluids burned anything and everything they came in contact with, but the demonic-looking creature was most certainly dead.
Lu Bu moved to her left and picked up a smashball she found there, her thumb hovering over the activation button as she strode purposefully toward Atticus.
The large Tracto-an removed his helmet and burning rage was clearly visible in his eyes as he matched her step for step.
“You foolish child!” he bellowed, and Lu Bu could almost feel her teammates fall in behind her as Atticus’ men spread out into a defensive formation. “You could have killed us!”
Lu Bu was actually stunned to hear him say that, and immediately fired back, “Yes, I could have!”
His eyes narrowed as he threw his dagger to the ground, prompting her to drop her smashball. “You know that is not my meaning,” he roared as he cocked his fist and prepared to fire a devastating punch at her.
But she had prepared for exactly that moment while drilling with Kratos earlier in the day. She intercepted his incoming wrist with her hands and pulled her body ‘up’ his arm as she snaked her legs around his limb while attempted to secure a blood choke using her legs. She had learned it was called a ‘triangle’ choke or a ‘figure four’ choke by her fellow Lancers aboard the Pride of Prometheus, and Atticus appeared to realize his mistake immediately. He attempted to redirect her body’s momentum and smash her—head-first—into the nearby stone.
Up The Middle (Spineward Sectors: Middleton's Pride Book 2) Page 10
