Chapter 478: Hive Of Shapeshifters [II]

Tasmin hung from the ceiling shadows with her heart hammering against her ribs as her mind calculating at terminal velocity.

’This is a staging ground,’ Tasmin realized, her eyes burning with pure ambition. ’They’ve been tunneling beneath the eastern crags, watching our perimeter, waiting for the right moment to breach the mines and slaughter our workers...’

...This was it.

...This was the extraordinary breakthrough she had been starving for!

’If I exterminate this hive...’ Tasmin thought, a wild delirious smirk stretching across her face in the dark. ’If I wipe out this entire anomalous nest and lay the head of this alpha at his feet... I will prove myself to Lord Silas. He won’t just reward me. He will take me into his bed. He will—’

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The thought was violently shattered.

The entire western bedrock wall of the colossal cavern... a solid expanse of granite ten feet thick suddenly vibrated with a deafening bone-crushing shockwave.

KRA-CRUNCH!

Dust, shattered stone, and ice rained down from the ceiling rafters.

The hundreds of shapeshifting wolves froze in terror, their crimson eyes snapping toward the western wall.

The four-armed alpha leaped to its feet, letting out a deafening roar that rattled the stalactites.

"GRAHHHH!"

Tasmin clung to the ceiling shadows, her eyes widening in horror.

’What the—’

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

A second impact struck the stone as a colossal circular web of glowing crimson fractures violently spider-webbed across the ten-foot-thick wall.

The stone groaned, the internal crystalline construct screaming under an incomprehensible pressure.

’Fuck—’ Tasmin’s mind screamed.

KRA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The third strike detonated the wall!

The entire section of bedrock violently exploded inward in a cataclysmic shower of pulverized gravel, flaming rock shards, and howling pressurized wind.

Shooting straight through the pulverized breach, completely enveloped in an incandescent roaring aura of crimson battle-energy came a solitary figure.

It was Brida.

The Titan was hurtling through the air thirty feet above the cavern floor, her massive rune-forged tower shield held locked across her chest.

Her hair was wild, her crimson eyes blazing with battle-crazed joy, and a massive grin split across her face as she looked down at the sea of terrified monsters below.

Mid-flight, Brida channeled the entirety of her explosive mana into the face of her tower shield, the heavy alloy plate igniting with a blinding apocalyptic red fire.

She threw her head back, her voice echoing off the cavern walls like a rolling thunderclap.

"AEGIS CHARGE!"

KRA-BAAAAAAAANG!

Brida collided with the cavern floor like a falling meteor.

The explosion was catastrophic as a thirty-foot-wide crater blasted into the bedrock, sending a concussive shockwave tearing across the cavern that pulverized dozens of makeshift dens and launched fifty shrieking wolves bodily into the air.

Rock, dust, and flaming red mana rained down through the falling snow.

Up in the ceiling shadows, Tasmin stared down at the crater in brain-melting disbelief.

’Fucking hell...’ Tasmin’s eye twitched violently in the dark. ’Why the absolute fuck is Brida here?!’

The violent shockwave of Brida’s cratering impact was still tearing through the hollow, ripping jagged stalactites from the eighty-foot vaulted ceiling and sending them crashing like stone spears into the frozen dirt.

Dust, pulverized granite, and scorching crimson embers swirled violently through the draft bleeding down from the skylight, mingling with the slow perpetual drift of surface snow.

Up in the pitch-black seam where the cavern wall met the vaulted ceiling, Tasmin gulped.

Her throat felt completely parched and her nails dug into the spatial fabric of the shadows as her amber eyes went wider staring straight down into the smoking thirty-foot crater.

’She... she really just dropped through ten feet of solid mountain rock,’ Tasmin thought with a cold bead of sweat rolling down the nape of her neck. ’She didn’t perform any reconnaissance... Surprisingly, that’s just like Brida.’

Down below, the dense cloud of gray chalk and pulverized stone parted with an aggressive whipping rush of wind.

FWOOSH!

Brida stood dead center in the shattered crater, her boots planted knee-deep in the pulverized rubble.

Her hair whipped around her shoulders like untamed fire, and her heavy armor rattled as her broad chest expanded with a massive chest-rattling breath.

She threw her head back, her jaw covered in chalky white dust, and let out a booming unhinged bark of laughter.

"GWAHAHAHAHAHA!"

The sound was thunderous, echoing off the jagged basalt walls with enough concussive volume to rattle the teeth of the snarling beasts crawling out of the debris.

"I finally found you!" Brida roared, grinning with all thirty-two teeth exposed.

With a brutal flick of her wrists, she hoisted her massive thick-bladed Titan’s Cleaver from the crater floor.

She gave the colossal slab of tempered alloy a casual, one-handed spin, the oversized counterweighted pommel whistling through the air with a terrifying sequence of heavy air-splitting whooshes.

WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH!

The draft generated by the spinning cleaver literally blasted the hanging smoke away from her face.

Like every other woman who had pulled on custom leather harnesses and sharpened her tools in the courtyard at dawn, Brida had spent the entire morning wracked by an itch she couldn’t scratch.

The Lord’s morning decree had burned into her mind like a brand.

Silas had looked across the formation with those calm eyes and offered a reward to whoever brought home the greatest haul.

And Brida, whose devotion to the Lord burned with a feverish competitive intensity that was far more than the heat of Thora’s forge had no intention of settling for a handful of common mining credits.

’Everyone’s mining but I’m glad I ended up here...’

She hadn’t planned on ending up in an underground hive.

Her squad had arrived at their assigned sector three miles to the south, unlimbered their Phase 2 Golem, and begun chipping away at a shallow surface seam of basalt.

But then Brida’s keen instincts had flared as she had caught a scent... a greasy foul smell of rotten wolf marrow bleeding through a hairline fracture near the rear wall of their cave.

She had crept closer, only to spot a narrow spyhole bored through the rock.

Looking back at her through the dark had been a single milky-white eye set into the stolen face of a Blessed Land guard atop the gates.

The monster had been peeking. It had been crouched there, silently taking notes on their numbers, measuring their movements, watching the girls adjust their harnesses.

The audacity of it had set Brida’s blood on fire.

’Good times...’

She had simply planted her back foot, channeled every ounce of her mana into her right fist, and driven her iron-plated gauntlet straight through the stone wall, catching the peering aberration by its throat and crushing its windpipe into paste before it could blink.

’I didn’t have time to dig around for a connecting tunnel,’ Brida thought with her grin widening as she rested the blunt spine of the Titan’s Cleaver against her shoulder pauldron. ’I just barrelled myself through the walls in the direction where it came from!’

She had literally turned herself into a human battering ram.

Three miles of subterranean fault lines, collapsed fissures, and solid granite barriers, and Brida had simply lowered her shoulder, engaged her unyielding forward momentum, and smashed straight through the mountain roots like a runaway locomotive until she smelled a whole cluster of them rotting on the other side...

And now, she was standing in the middle of their nest.

SHKLK!

Without waiting for the dazed pack to organize, Brida exploded into motion.

She didn’t bother using a skill as she merely stepped forward with terrifying hydraulic power, driving the flat of her heavy cleaver into the chest of the nearest bipedal wolf.

CRUNCH!

The blow caved the beast’s ribcage inward like an empty tin can, launching the eight-foot monstrosity forty feet across the cavern where it smashed into a jagged stalagmite, snapping in half with a wet squelching thud.

From the cavern ceiling, Tasmin let out a venomous hissed breath.

’Like hell you’re taking this entire nest for yourself!’

SHSHSHK.

A patch of darkness detached from the eighty-foot ceiling, dropping like an executioner’s cloak.

Midway to the floor, the shadows snapped into physical reality with a sharp pop of displaced air.

Tasmin landed cleanly on the balls of her boots, dropping into a low crouch atop the crushed remains of a stone hovel, her twin void-black daggers sliding into her palms with a metallic hiss.

"Brida!" Tasmin snapped, her amber eyes burning with murderous competitive fire as she rose to her full height. "Keep your heavy, iron-plated paws off my targets! I spent twenty minutes tracking this nest through the stone seams! This is my operational sector!"

Brida paused mid-swing, the blade of her cleaver burying itself half an inch into the floorboards as she glanced over her shoulder.

She blinked, and then another loud mocking laugh tore from her chest.

"Your sector?!" Brida hollered back, stepping over a twitching corpse and casually crushing its skull beneath her steel-shod heel with a sickening splat. "Are you blind? Who broke the wall? Who dropped through the ceiling? Who made the entrance?! I found this place first!"

"You didn’t find it, you fell through a hole you made like a drunken ox!" Tasmin yelled with her figure instantly dissolving into a liquid blur of black mist.

SHING-SHING-SHING!

Tasmin reappeared behind a cluster of three snarling abominations.

Her void-black blades flickered through the gloom, carving three clean horizontal lines across their throats.

The armor-piercing enchantments on her daggers bypassed the creatures’ dense bone collars as if they were soft butter, severing windpipes and arteries in a single fluid heartbeat.

Black boiling ichor sprayed across the snow, but Tasmin was already sliding beneath the reaching sickle-claws of a fourth beast, her boots sweeping its legs out from under it. As the creature fell, she drove her reverse-gripped dagger straight down through its sternum, pinning it to the stone.

THWACK!

"I was already in the ceiling before your thick skull even touched the rock!" Tasmin barked, wrenching the blade free and flicking the black blood onto the dirt. "I mapped the alpha! I took out their forward sentry at the upper boundary!"

"Oh, please!" Brida yelled back, her cleaver whistling through the air in a sweeping two-handed horizontal arc.

KRA-SHING!

Two bipedal wolves that had tried to leap at her exposed flank were cleaved completely in two at the waist, their upper torsos cartwheeling through the air before splashing wetly against the rubble.

"Mapping isn’t killing, Tasmin!" Brida shouted, ducking beneath a sweeping bone scythe and driving her heavy elbow into a monster’s jaw, shattering its teeth into powder. "You were probably sitting up there admiring your braids while waiting for someone with actual muscle to show up and do the heavy lifting!"

"I was preparing an execution web, you oversized battering ram!"

FZZT-CLANG!

Tasmin flipped backward through the air, her twin chains whipping out from beneath her leather harness.

The dark enchanted links wrapped tightly around the ankles of a lunging aberration, hauling it backward off its feet.

She yanked with both arms, dragging the shrieking monster directly into the path of Brida’s backswing.

THUD-CRUNCH!

The blunt spine of Brida’s cleaver smashed through the beast’s cranium, obliterating it instantly.

"Nice toss!" Brida grinned, not missing a beat. "See? You make a decent squire when you try!"

"I am going to strangle you with these chains while you sleep, Brida, I swear to the Lord..." Tasmin hissed, but she couldn’t stop the fierce exhilarating adrenaline from singing in her veins.

For the next five minutes, the cavern was transformed into a slaughterhouse.

They bickered with every breath, trading sharp, biting insults with the easy familiarity of sisters who had bled in the same mud for months, but their combat synergy was terrifying.

Where Brida was an immovable roaring wall of destruction... shattering bones, detonating kinetic shockwaves with her shield, and crushing formations under the weight of her cleaver, Tasmin was the cold silent scalpel.

She slipped through the blind spots Brida created, her shadow-steps placing her behind every beast that flinched, her blades severing tendons, puncturing lungs, and pinning regenerators to the stone before their wounds could knit.

CRACK! SQUELCH! SHING!

Severed limbs, shattered ribs, and pools of boiling, acidic blood carpeted the floor as the makeshift hovels of the hive were crushed into splintered kindling.

Gradually, the chaotic noise of combat began to thin.

The howling shrieking horde of hundreds had been violently whittled down to a brutal suffocating crawl.

The two commanders came to a halt back-to-back in the center of the devastated clearing, breathing heavily.

Brida’s heavy plate was caked in black ichor and gray stone dust as her Titan’s Cleaver dripping with foul fluids and Tasmin stood lightly on the balls of her feet, her dark leather harness clinging to her sweat-sheened skin and her chest heaving as she spun her daggers into reverse grips.

Around them, barely a dozen creatures remained alive.

They had backed away into the shadows beneath the far rock wall, their sickle-claws trembling against the stone.

And towering directly in front of them, standing bathed in the pale daylight and swirling snow falling from the skylight, was the massive four-armed alpha.

Brida spat a mouthful of dust onto the ground, resting her heavy blade across her shoulder as she glanced sideways at Tasmin.

"Well," Brida murmured, her voice dropping the loud mockery, settling into a low appreciative hum. "Look at what’s left... Not bad for a couple of mining guards..."

Tasmin wiped a stray lock of dark hair from her forehead, her amber eyes scanning the surviving cluster.

"Twelve standard abominations," Tasmin muttered, her breath coming in steady controlled clouds of vapor. "Plus the big bastard in the center."