Jackie stood brave and fired round after round into the zealot who charged directly at her, barely stumbling as each lethal dose seared through his body. She growled and kept pulling the trigger. “Just die already!”
Her battery pack chirped as it emptied. Jackie’s eyes suddenly went wide.
The suicidal warrior cackled and charged for her.
Wulftone leapt over her shoulder and turned his back to face the bomber who detonated the explosives. He shielded her from its fire with his thick lycan hide. The blast threw him forward and on top of her and the two collapsed to the dirt. His backside smoked where his pelt had burnt and chunks of flesh had been blasted away.
Jackie’s protector whined like a beat dog as he rolled off her, grinding gravel into his black and bubbled skin. He barely remained conscious, and Jackie couldn’t reach a replacement battery pack in time: another team of zealots charged for them.
“I got you,” Chira yelled, stepping over to them. A battery pack hung on a sling over his shoulder. It whinnied through its rapid recycle rate, powering the minigun the soldier had commandeered elsewhere. The rapid fire cut a swath of through the line of doomed vyrm. Bolts cleaved limbs and chopped them down like a hedge mower.
Still, the zealots crawled towards them on bloody stumps and snarled through their blackened burns, moving ever forward.
Chira cocked his head and adjusted his aim upwards slightly. He targeted the munition packs they wore instead and detonated them with his stream of deadly energy. They exploded in a chain-reaction, like dominos, leaving nothing behind but charred wreckage and smoldering bones.
“Thanks for the assist,” Jackie said, crawling to her knees.
Another group of soldiers ran ahead and retrieved the tower shields. They reactivated them and restored their section of the protective wall.
Jackie slapped her lycan friend’s exposed rump where the detonation had blasted it away. It had already healed significantly, even though it smelled like burnt hair.
Wulftone groaned and slowly pushed himself up on all fours.
Jackie rubbed his back affectionately. “Come on, ya big baby. We’ve got more reptiles to kill!”
Chapter 25
Bithia curled her nose at the stench. The air reeked with fresh sulfur from a recent firestorm but they quickly went nose-blind to it as they crawled up the outside of the pyramid. They reached the ledge just in time to peek over and watch Akko Soggathoth take ahold of his puppet once again. Skrom released the man and the gathered crowd of humans and vyrm shouted at him.
Akko Soggathoth blinked and looked around. “I see you have my book. Where is Theera?”
Jacob Sisyphus jabbed a finger into his chest and screamed a mouthful of threats. The wizard waved the empty codex in his face. “I threw your little pet over the side after burning him to a crisp—and you’re not getting this thing back.”
Akko Soggathoth looked neither surprised nor worried by him. He shrugged. “As you wish.”
Zabe made a motion for Bithia to cover him from behind the base of the nearby obelisk. He skulked around the side as their enemies argued and commanded Akko Soggathoth to complete the ritual.
“Now!” Zabe howled, jumping out from behind a different spire. He leapt into the circle while Bithia laid down a canopy of blaster fire.
The mortals leapt for cover while the Darque Heralds sneered and deflected the laser bursts away. Zabe snatched a fistful of shards from his pouch and chucked them at Akko Soggathoth; the shrapnel bounced off of his skin as the beast assumed his goatman form. The mystic ingots clattered to the floor no more threatening than common gravel.
“It is too late,” he taunted. “Six of them are already chained to the eldritch fetters. Only few forces in existence can stop what has begun here.” He pointed skyward with his six-fingered hand. The stone ring rotated like a funnel cloud overhead, draped in arcane hooks and chains.
Zabe stole a glance upward. His stomach panged when his sensitive eyes realized it wasn’t made of stone… but of a massive collection of bones. Zabe roared and lashed out with the Stone Glaive.
Akko Soggathoth recoiled from the cleaving blow and ducked the second. The beast whirled around and grew a set of long razor-like claws from his hand.
Caivev popped up and screamed, dumping a barrage of lasers in Zabe’s direction. The werewolf ducked and rolled behind the body of Akko Nuggezeth who appeared altogether disinterested. The monster’s body absorbed the brunt of the damage and Akko Soggathoth stepped wide in order to get an angle on his prey.
Suddenly everyone stopped at the distinct clink sound of a grenade landing on the stone floor. Akko Soggathoth looked down and leapt back; the explosive rolled to his feet, right next to the bloody heap that was Akko Quarnyk.
The device erupted in a ball of napalm fire that rocketed the tumorous creature from its spot. Eldritch chains tethering the creature held it fast in the fire. With a dreadful “skreee!" the caustic flame ate up the flesh, reducing it to ash and burning away the bloody sigil, launching the inky, cloud-like spirit from beyond its prison.
Akko Quarnyk dissipated in a puff of smoke, eluding his celestial chains. The churning, hellish halo overhead cracked and groaned in the sky.
“Where did he go?” Percival Wainsmith shrieked like a child. “I’ve sacrificed so much—this can’t be happening!”
“Calm your whelp,” Akko Soggathoth snapped to Sisyphus. “He merely needs a new pile of flesh to house his spirit. I will find him as soon as we kill these interlopers.”
Suddenly the whole pyramid shifted beneath their feet with a micro-quake… as if something inside it had exploded. Zabe and Caivev locked gazes: neither was sure whose side caused it—but hopefully, it meant reinforcements would arrive at any moment.
***
Shandra roared and smashed her way up the stairwell with her battle hammer. She shrugged off a glancing blow to her armor and returned a more precise one that sprayed vyrm blood against the wall.
Fighting had gone mostly hand to hand inside the narrow, winding halls of the Kith Temple where the vyrm defenders had retreated to. Hers and Tahnak’s teams had been the first to make it through the gauntlet and charge through the pyramid, entering the Darque.
As soon as they’d breached it the vyrm marshaled their forces back inside the Lost Temples of Kith and Koth. They dug in to make a defensible last stand, preventing any others from reaching Koth.
The room ahead sprawled wider and Tahnak cleared it with concussive charges that momentarily shook the entire pyramid. He charged through the smoke and fired a quick burst of blaster fire before his team secured the perimeter. The cleric's team joined them a few seconds later.
The doors on either side were meaningless to the crew—they only knew that they needed to go up. “Didjee,” Shandra barked to one of her clerics who’d been trained with psychic abilities. “Where are they—can you sense the princess?”
Didjee pointed up. “I can sense her, but barely through all of that evil… it’s…it’s difficult to cope, but she burns like a candle in the night.”
Shandra clapped the bald woman on her shoulder as a sign of gratitude. “Two paths up, Tahnak. Which one do you want?”
He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “We’ve got the stairs—you take the other way up.”
Shandra nodded and muttered. “Race you to the top.” She hurried towards the mouth of the long hallway Zabe and the Princess had used. Her team followed hot on her trail.
Exiting the mouth she swallowed her trepidation as she looked skyward to see the turning portal that threatened to loose the Great Annihilator if they delayed. The sounds of battle echoed behind her but she didn’t dare look back or consider helping Tahnak—her destiny was at the top. Shandra couldn’t spare time enough for a backwards glance.
***
Idrakka hissed as his soldiers pushed their way down the stairs towards the lower chamber. They’d clogged up the passage so perfectly
that neither side could move. Neither vyrm nor human could get in or out of the passage that had become a clogged maze where warriors used whatever was at hand—including the fallen—as barricades.
He halted his group of warriors and sent them back to the next landing and to the rooms above before sending down a final soldier who mowed the hallway clear with a rapid-fire minigun. In the first three seconds, he cut down his own men, burning hot fire through their backs before razing a line of intruders.
A grenade rolled over the floor, blowing the artillery gunner to pieces. Seconds later, the landing filled with the advance team from the Prime as they pressed forward.
Their exit at the rear suddenly iced over and the temperature plummeted, trapping them within the ice-box. Then, the front of the tunnel froze over as well.
Idrakka taunted them from behind a clear pane of ice. The glacial wall resisted the blaster bolts and the scorch marks refilled almost immediately.
The frostmancer smiled wickedly as the rear hall’s ice floe grew to envelop Tahnak’s men like some kind of giant single-cell organism. The ice wall crept closer and closer to him, leaving only Tahnak remaining in his tiny ice prison.
“Oh,” Idrakka promised, “this will be fun.”
***
Akko Soggathoth ducked under the werewolf’s weapon with uncanny speed, almost playfully. Zabe kept moving and angling his position so that he kept the monstrous goatman between himself and the shots Caivev tried to target him with.
Behind Zabe, Bithia continued looking for an angle to either take out their enemies mortal forces or suppress their attacks against her fiancé. The Stone Glaive had to work—it had to! The way Akko Soggathoth avoided it suggested the weapon might actually wound the creature. Some kind of forcefield within the circles where the others were stationed, however, protected the heralds from the blade.
Zabe looked back, catching an impulse that Bithia had sent him psychically. He could feel her mental thumbprint all over it—something he’d experienced before, but wanted to verify before attempting such a dangerous maneuver.
Bithia winked at him from behind her cover and Zabe threw himself to the ground, tucking and rolling just over Akko Soggathoth’s thigh and exposing himself to the full brunt of Caivev and her elite forces. They lit him up even as Akko Soggathoth whirled to deliver a massive blow to the foolish, careless lycan.
Suddenly Shandra leapt over the lip of the flat-topped structure and brought her mystic hammer to bear with a ferocious scream. She smashed the monstrous beast in the spine with her weapon, hitting him so hard that it knocked the ethereal spirit from the man’s body like stuffing from a ragdoll.
Akko Soggathoth’s disrupted spirit shimmered and shuddered like a writhing ball of blackened vibrissae. The man screamed when he collapsed in pain, crippled by the spinal injury.
Shandra turned and panicked momentarily, caught in the open with nowhere to go for cover as Caivev screamed, “Open fire!”
Zabe jumped to his feet and snatched Shandra up in a huge embrace, protecting her from the deadly blasts and yanking her to safety. They scrambled behind the nearest obelisk and Zabe shot Bithia a fatigued smile as he rested for a few moments to let his body heal the damage his hide had taken.
“Did we do it?” Shandra buzzed with adrenaline. “Did we stop the Awakening.”
“We’ve only just delayed it, for now,” Zabe wheezed. “But you did good.”
The rest of Shandra’s team caught up with her and peeked over the ledge, returning fire shot for shot.
Caivev’s voice screeched above the din. “You’re just delaying the inevitable!” She mashed a button on a remote and the pyramid rumbled slightly. “My reinforcements will be here momentarily.”
***
The tunnel had no light—it barely had air—but that’s where they found each other, and neither creature needed those things anyway. Wordlessly they communicated—in the same manner they used to… before the mortal denizens of the Darque crawled up from the primordial muck.
I’m glad I found you here, brother—I’m glad you did not return immediately.
Akko Quarnyk didn’t respond immediately. Like his brothers, he did not experience fear—but that did not mean he couldn’t be reluctant.
Tell me brother Quarnyk, do you want to play a game?
The spirit shimmered. The last time we played, brother Soggathoth, I was eaten. Why should I play with you again?
That was so many millennia ago. Come, now. I miss our fun. And I’ve had so many opportunities to mature since then.
I do miss our games, Quarnyk said. What kind of game is it?
A game of revenge… and of mischief.
I do like those things.
Excellent.
Akko Quarnyk had never been very bright, but Akko Soggathoth found himself in need of an accomplice he could control in Theera’s absence.
Excellent. I will tell you exactly what to do, brother Quarnyk. If he could have giggled in this form, he would have.
***
Zabe and Shandra hid behind an obelisk. It crackled under the intense barrage that had them pinned down. They looked over to Bithia. She experienced the same—with their locations flagged, they were sitting ducks. Only their crack marksmanship kept the vyrm from rushing them.
"They are down two heralds," Zabe muttered. "They can't complete the ritual without them." He scowled at the opposition. "We've got to regroup."
“Agreed,” Shandra said.
Zabe gave a retreat signal to Bithia who nodded.
The two access points on opposite sides of the temple suddenly swarmed with vyrm reinforcements that intensified the assault on Shandra’s team. “Fall back,” she ordered, sliding over the edge.
Zabe tossed a tiny disk near their obelisk as they fled. He answered Shandra’s questioning look. “One of Respan’s new gadgets—an AV spy device so we will have eyes and ears on top.”
***
The remote detonators blew the doors off the time-locked stasis chamber and Caivev’s army poured out from it as fresh as if they had just entered. They found the stair upwards blocked by ice and they fled deeper into the pyramid, back towards the Kith gate, and found a second stairwell that led upwards via the opposite side of the structure.
Her army burst through the roof access at the same time as the remains of Idrakka’s and they peppered the ridgeline with lethal doses of energy. Caivev gloated as the intruders turned and fled down the side of the pyramid and she congratulated herself on the foresight to stash a group of forces within for emergency contingencies.
She ran across the cleared platform to join the Black and arrived in time to see a few Guardian Corps casualties slide down the side of the building. The rest escaped through one of the four access points leading back inside the facility.
“Don’t just stand there! Pursue them.” A large force charged over the side; the rest stayed at the top to protect their mission—and the vyrm continued coming from their hidden cell.
Caivev sneered. She’d nearly forgotten how big the army was.
***
Jackie and Wulftone pushed their troops ahead even harder and split a wedge through the vyrm troops. A well-placed grenade cleared a room and widened the gap just long enough that they had a shot at reaching the darquegate.
“Let’s go,” she screamed, leading the charge.
Wulftone and the troops sprinted after her and down a small, turning hall that descended into the heart of the temple. Right behind them, an explosion blew a door off its hinges and a new wave of scaly reinforcements flowed from deep inside the base, filling in the gap. Wulftone spat a curse—Chira and his group had been following just behind them. There wasn’t likely to be anyone watching their back for a while, now.
They paused inside the innermost chamber where the giant doors dripping with wet blood. A badly burned vyrm walked out from them, shambling on dead legs and dragging a long, crusty string of entrails that ha
d gathered mud and dust from dragging them through the soot and dirt of the floor. His hollow eyes didn’t even look at them and they let him pass. Theera collapsed atop a pile of corpses lying in the corner and breathed in ragged gasps.
Jackie aimed her gun at him. “I’ve got him.” She pulled the trigger, thinking she’d put him out of his misery, and then she followed Wulftone and the rest into the Darque.
***
Skrom watched the broken human who had been the avatar struggle to his feet and wondered if he ought to grab the wailing man. If nothing else, he was tempted to end Quintin Hall’s pained moans with a quick stomp. But the doomed man stood and looked directly at him and his eyes turned black as coals. The tarkhūn knew their missing herald had returned, following the cleric’s meddling.
He groaned slightly and shook all of his appendages back into place. The cultists kept a distance but their eyes waited with reluctant expectation. Finally, he said, “The Awakening begins… Akko Quarnyk has found a new body and our final member shall be here shortly.”
A few seconds later, dripping with melted frost, the possessed body of Tahnak walked onto the rooftop.
"No more games, Akko Soggathoth," Sisyphus spat. He clenched the handle of his khopesh in one fist, and a backup vial in the other. "Finish this and fulfill your destiny."
The herald within Tahnak easily overrode the man’s will. He opened a vein with his own teeth and then made the binding sigil of Akko Quarnyk on the sooty floor.
Sisyphus oversaw the action to make sure that it was done properly. He nodded. “Now you, Akko Soggathoth.”
“Gladly,” Hall giggled and almost skipped over to his station where the bloody mass had been incinerated, earlier. The beast dragged a jagged fingernail across his wrist and slicked his hand with the pulsing stuff of life—the required sacrifice of his dark king and lord. He bent down and made his sign—the only one that Sisyphus had never seen before, though he no longer had cause to commit it to memory. Soon, nothing of reality would remain.
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