Chapter 174: The Boss Fight Part 2
The tide hit and broke.
Lyra’s first volley was merciless—three arrows in a fan at kissing distance. The front rank of hatchlings crumpled under the impacts, limbs knotting, bodies flipping. Inigo met the next line with short, economical bursts; the M4 spoke in staccato, each report a clean punch through chitin. Smoke bit his eyes; heat licked his cheek. One hatchling got close enough to smell him—chemical, oil, steel—and he stamped it flat, boot crunching through head plates.
"Right flank!" Lyra warned.
He pivoted, dashed—a blue smear through heat shimmer—and skidded low under a leaping pair, shooting up into their bellies. Black ichor rained. He came up running and slid behind a boulder that was rapidly turning into a boulder-shaped oven.
The Broodmother forced herself forward two dragging lengths, the floor stuttering under her, legs scraping for purchase on a melting, treacherous web of her own making. Blind eyes found nothing; the ruined eye wells bled slow and thick. She oriented by heat and vibration now—and both told her the same thing: kill the bright, loud pain in the room.
"Inigo, above you!" Lyra’s voice cut clean through the noise.
He looked up. A hatchling bigger than the rest—armored like a captain spider—dropped from an upper strand, angle straight for his face. He went backward in a no-step lean, felt the air of its fangs on his nose, and fired from the hip up its throat. The thing shook, thumped onto his boots, jerked twice, and stilled.
"Thanks," he said, breathless.
"Don’t die," she shot back.
"Working on it."
The room’s geometry changed again. A load-bearing sheet of silk overhead flashed to vapor; a tongue of ceiling stone broke loose and fell like a guillotine. The Broodmother staggered, took the hit across her back plates; cracks spidered—fittingly—across the carapace. She answered with a spit fan—wild, wide, a tantrum cut loose. Acid hissed everywhere. A droplet caught Lyra’s bracer and smoked; she ripped the leather off with her teeth and flung it.
"Eyes on the seam," she said, pointing with arrow-tip to the head-neck gap now studded with her shaft. "It’s widening."