Chapter 99: Fifty
The shield wall is breaking.
Not in the middle—at the flanks. The Phase Two beasts are heavier than anything the flat formation was designed to absorb, and they’re not trying to breach.
They’re shoving.
Another Drenodor with the mass of a small truck hits a shield at full stride and the man behind it goes airborne—armor, shield, and all. He lands ten feet back, rolls, gets up. But the gap he left is already filling with teeth.
The backline is scrambling. Healers already overwhelmed with their duties. Support casters overlapping targets. The coordination from Phase One is gone—too many variables changed at once and the chain of command can’t keep up.
My fault. Chaos Theory reshuffled the deck and nobody got the new cards.
I check Oliver. He’s still fighting the Ripper. I can hear the warhammer connecting—a dull, heavy rhythm that sounds like effort and accomplishes nothing against that carapace.
I check the front.
There!
Between our shield wall and the Tide’s push, there’s a strip of ground littered with bodies. Monster bodies. Hit by ballistae, hit by Lola’s scatter-shot, hit by the initial clash.
Most are dead. Some aren’t. They twitch. They bleed. They make small, wet sounds that the chaos swallows.
The system doesn’t register a kill until the thing stops breathing.
Those are free souls. And Eventide is two away from something I’ve never seen before.
I can’t go over the shield wall like last time...
The left flank has a gap where two soldiers got thrown—a six-foot opening between shields that Boris’s officers are already trying to plug.
I hit the gap at a full sprint before it closes, turning sideways to squeeze through the space between a soldier’s shield and the body of a dead Gargolite wedged against the formation.
I’m through. Wrong side of the line. Behind the Tide’s push, surrounded by the backs of creatures too focused on the shield wall to notice one man slipping past.
The ground is a horror. Meat, sand, blood, broken spines—nothing is level. My boots find purchase on something solid and I don’t look down to check what it is.
Nine feet to my left. A Coral Wiver on the ground, three ballistae bolts buried in its thorax. Its legs are still moving in slow, directionless circles. A low rumble leaks from its body—the sound of something dying but not yet aware of it.
I cross the distance and put Eventide through its skull. Quick. Clean. The blade punches through chitin and the rumbling stops.
[Devoured Soul: 49/50]
One more.
A shadow falls over me.
One of the Wiver on the front rank has turned. Eight spider-jointed legs redistribute its weight in a single, fluid shift. Now its full attention is on the thing that just killed its dying ’cousin.’
It’s bigger up close than I expected. The magenta glitch pulsing across its cat-like carapace strobes in the dark, making the thing look like it’s phasing between two versions of itself. The legs are each as thick as an axe handle, tipped with bone points stained dark from use.
No time for a plan. It’s already moving.
I tap comms while scrambling backward. "Hold on, Oliver. That’s an order. You don’t have permission to die."
A choked laugh comes back. Then a grunt of impact. Then nothing.
He’s too busy surviving to talk.
The first leg stabs down where I’m crouching. I throw myself sideways—graceless, ugly, pure survival. The chitin tip punches into the carcass I was kneeling over and sticks there for half a second.
I use the half second. Eventide comes up in a short, vicious ascendant arc and takes the leg off at the second joint. The severed limb drops.
The Wiver doesn’t scream. It adjusts. Shifts its weight onto the remaining seven legs and drives two more at me simultaneously—one high, one low, a pincer attack that leaves no clean angle to dodge.
I block the high one with Eventide’s edge—the impact jars my wrist hard enough to numb my fingers. The low one I avoid by collapsing my knees, letting it scrape across the top of my shoulder guard instead of through my chest.
I cut the low leg on the way past. Same joint. Same angle. The Wiver lists hard to one side—two legs gone on the left, its balance compromised.
I step into the gap.
Drive Eventide upward into the soft tissue between the thorax plates and wrench the blade toward the head.
The Wiver’s body convulses. Every remaining leg fires at once—a spasm of dying nerves trying to kill whatever killed them.
I see the leg coming. Third from the right, whipping in from my blind side. A bone-tipped spear of chitin aimed at my chest.
I twist. My torso rotates. The leg misses my heart by six inches.
It catches my left shoulder instead.
Eleven inches of Wiver leg punches through the deltoid and exits the back. The chitin tip grinds against bone on the way through.
The pain whites out everything. My lungs empty. A sound comes out of my mouth that I don’t recognize.
"Fucking shit!" I scream.
Then I stop.
I grab Eventide’s hilt with both hands—the left barely answering, the shoulder sending voltage through every nerve it can reach—and twist the blade inside the Wiver’s body.
Wrench upward. Put everything behind it.
The creature splits open. Goes rigid. Goes quiet.
I stagger back. The dead Wiver’s leg is still in my shoulder—an inch and a half of chitin embedded through muscle, the broken tip protruding from the back of my jacket.
[Devoured Soul: 50/50]
A notification flashes in my HUD. Gold. Urgent. Pulsing with a frequency I haven’t seen before on any system prompt.
I dismiss it.
I look thirty feet to my right. Oliver is backed against a buckling section of the shield wall. The Coral Ripper looms in front of him, mandibles clicking, its carapace unmarked by anything his hammer has done.
The notification pulses again.
Later.
I tighten my grip on Eventide—the right hand solid, the left shaking, blood running down my arm and dripping off the fingertips. With a precise blow, I finish severing the leg trapped in my shoulder.
I can’t take it out now. I’ll bleed out.
[OXI: 874/1,600]
[Status: Low-grade bleeding]
"Oliver... it’s you or me. Hang in there." I mutter.