Thirstfall - Memory of a Returnee

Careful with Eventide now. Higher consumption. Every second active is forty-five OXI I can’t get back.

After the Gargolite, I close the distance to the Coral Ripper at a dead sprint, scanning the ground around it for Oliver. He’s not standing. He’s not behind the beast. He’s not anywhere I can see.

The Ripper senses me before it sees me. Its mandibles click—that mechanical, metal-on-metal rhythm—and the massive body begins to pivot.

I don’t give it the chance.

I swing Eventide in a lateral arc aimed at the thickest plate on its left flank. The same carapace that stopped my blade cold during Phase One. The same material I compared to bedrock.

Eventide bites through it like shears through sheet metal.

The shadow-edge punches into the coral plating, cracks it along a fault line, and keeps going—three inches into the tissue beneath before the Ripper’s own mass rips the blade free as it recoils.

The beast screams. A guttural, vibrating shriek that makes the sand jump. It lurches sideways, trailing a spray of dark fluid from the gash, and crashes into a pile of carcasses ten feet away.

The same feeling as cutting through Gargolite...

Rank C blade against Rank D armor. One tier above. That’s the difference.

The Ripper clears the area. For the first time since the battle started, the ground around it is empty.

And there, in the blood-soaked sand where the Ripper had been standing, is a tower shield. Dented inward. Pressed flat into the ground like someone used it as a lid.

A warhammer beside it. Handle cracked. Head coated in dark fluid.

I drop to my knees and shove the shield aside with my good arm.

Oliver.

Face up. Eyes closed. Blood leaking from the corner of his mouth—the specific dark trickle that comes from internal damage, not a surface wound.

His chest isn’t moving.

I check his wrist. Nothing.

I look at the party HUD. Oliver’s vitals. The heartbeat line is flat.

No. Not now.

I flip Eventide in my grip, grab the blade by the flat with my damaged left hand—the shoulder protests with a bolt of white fire—and position the weighted pommel of the hilt over the center of Oliver’s sternum.

I hit him.

One sharp, downward strike. The pommel impacts the chest plate over his heart.

Nothing.

Again. Harder.

Nothing.

Third time. I put my shoulder into it—the bad shoulder, because the angle demands it—and the pain that shoots through my arm is so severe my vision strobes.

The pommel connects.

Fourth.

Oliver’s body jackknifes.

He sucks air like a man who’s been held underwater for a minute, his back arching off the sand, his eyes snapping open with the wild, unfocused terror of someone who just came back from wherever dead people go.

His hands shoot out and grab the first thing they find—my collar—and he pulls me down with the grip strength of a man who doesn’t know if I’m friend or enemy and isn’t taking chances.

"Easy—EASY. It’s me."

His eyes find mine. The recognition takes two full seconds. His fingers release. He collapses back onto the sand, chest heaving.

"Don’t scare me like that, you stubborn bastard," I say.

Oliver’s gaze drifts past my face. His expression changes. The confusion hardens into something colder.

The Coral Ripper. It’s recovered. Thirty feet away, shaking off the impact, mandibles clicking back into rhythm. The gash I opened in its flank is bleeding freely, but the beast is upright and angry.

"That thing sat on you," I tell him. "A full ton on top of a tower shield. You suffocated."

Oliver looks at the shield. At the imprint his body left in the sand beneath it. At the blood on his chin.

"Ready?" I extend my hand.

He takes it. I pull him up. His legs wobble for one second, then lock.

Oliver reaches down and picks up his warhammer. Both hands. The cracked handle groans under his grip.

He doesn’t look at me. He’s looking at the Ripper.

The sounds of battle around us are thinning. The Tide’s numbers are dropping—Lola’s scatter-shots gutted the reinforcements, and the surviving beasts are either wounded or spooked by the detonations that keep erupting across the backline.

The shield wall is stabilizing...

But the Ripper doesn’t care about any of that. Its mandibles click faster. It lowers its center of gravity and charges.

Oliver takes one step back. Plants his rear foot. Drops the warhammer low—almost dragging the head across the sand. His grip shifts to the base of the handle. Maximum leverage. Maximum arc.

I reach for Eventide.

I don’t need to.

"MOTORHEAD!"

The head of the warhammer splits open. A violent jet of superheated blue vapor erupts from inside the hammer’s core—OXI propulsion. A rocket exhaust that turns the weapon into a thruster, accelerating the hammer head in a rising circular arc with a force that has nothing to do with Oliver’s muscles and everything to do with whatever insane engineering is packed inside that handle.

The sound is deafening. The hammer cuts the air with a shriek that makes the ballistae crews on the wall flinch.

The Ripper’s charge brings its jaw directly into the arc.

The hammer connects with the mandible at the apex of the swing. The timing is surgical—not calculated, felt. The kind of precision that lives in the body of a man who has swung that weapon ten thousand times and knows its rhythm the way a drummer knows the beat.

The Ripper’s head separates from its body.

A forced disconnection. The entire skull detaches at the neck joint and launches skyward in a tumbling arc that carries it ninety feet into the air before gravity reclaims it.

The headless body staggers forward three steps on dead momentum, legs still firing, and crashes into a cluster of retreating Wivers, scattering them like bowling pins.

I stare at Oliver.

He stands there, the warhammer resting on his shoulder, the rocket exhaust still venting thin trails of heat from the split head. His chest is heaving. His eyes are locked on the sky where the Ripper’s skull is still falling.

"What the hell was that?" I ask.

Oliver shrugs. "You never asked about my skill."

"Motorhead? Seriously? Sounds like a drug addict’s street name."

He shoots me a look that could curdle milk. "I didn’t pick it. The system did." He watches the severed head hit the sand with a wet thud somewhere in the distance. "Besides... his head’s a lot ’higher’ now."

He laughs at his own joke. That man was clinically dead three minutes ago and now has decided that being alive is funny enough to celebrate.

I open my mouth to tell him exactly how bad that pun was.

A sound stops me.

Not from the battlefield. From somewhere close. Behind us. To the left. To the right. I can’t pin the direction because the sound doesn’t want to be found.

Click. Click. Click.

Wet. Methodical. The sound of a tongue—not mandibles, not metal. A biological mechanism built for one purpose: to locate prey in three-dimensional space without being seen.

Every hair on my body stands.

"Reef Stalker," I whisper.

I scan the air around us. Nothing visible. No shimmer. No chromatophore distortion. Just the empty, blood-soaked battlefield and a sound that shouldn’t be coming from nowhere.

But it is coming. And it’s close.

Oliver tightens his grip on the warhammer. The rocket exhaust hisses softly, cooling.

The clicking stops.

The silence that replaces it is worse.