Chapter 641: The Dead Company (1)
Rodion cut him off, stepping between with calm inevitability. Anterior plates flared like overlapping shields. The creature’s swipe crashed harmlessly against the alloy-root composite, sparks spraying. Rodion didn’t budge.
A piston hissed. The construct’s right arm telescoped, elbow joint popping, and hammered down in a sledge-stroke. The creature splattered against a pillar—lumpy bark bones cracking like kindling. Not finished, Rodion’s forearm rotated, panels separating to reveal a bank of tiny eel-blue emitters. With a soft FWOOMP a lattice of shimmering silk shot out, blooming mid-air into a net. The strands wrapped another attacker that had been mid-leap, freezing it like an insect in amber and pinning it to the wall.
<Neutralized.> Rodion’s voice glided into Mikhailis’s earpiece, sounding smug despite its monotone.
"That’s my boy," Mikhailis muttered, adrenaline sharpening every syllable. His heart hammered so loudly he worried the Hollowguard could hear.
But the swarm was gathering. More shadows slid from alcoves: a hunched figure with two torsos fused at the spine; a crawling thing whose hands were sprouting leafy antlers; a stretched silhouette whose every movement left wisps of grey mist swirling behind. They drifted over the floor without footsteps, disturbing only skeins of dust.
Too many, Mikhailis thought, eyes darting. Need a field equalizer.
He plunged a hand into his coat, fingers searching until they found a cool, curved vial sealed in wax—psycho-gel, loaded with pheromonal cocktails cultivated from the chimera ant queen herself. One crack against the floor released a sticky, translucent plume that crawled outward like living fog.
The nearest ghoul inhaled—if that rattling chest-cavity motion counted as breathing. Its head cocked, mandible-roots twitching. Then it screeched, a sound half hiss, half rusted hinge. Instead of charging, it shuffled in circles, as clumsy as a newborn fawn, distracted by conflicting signals its corrupted nerves could not parse.
Thalatha capitalized. She flowed past Rodion, cloak snapping like a banner. Her foot hooked behind the creature’s ankle, dagger flashing up in a tight arc to sever the spine just below the skull. With the same momentum she pivoted, dagger reversed, and rammed the hilt straight into another monster’s sternum, dislodging fungus-riddled ribs. Bits of rot flaked away in her wake.
Behind her, one guard loosed a narrow bolt of pale-green energy from a wrist wand. The blast carved a furrow through a lurching abomination, dissolving its shoulder into mush that splattered against the walls. Another guard covered the flank, spear spinning to keep distance, but sweat shone on his brow—they were trained for raiders, not nightmares.