Mika was diligent in reporting what he saw as he piloted his golem deeper into the earth and the avyd hive. He regularly came across what he called dumping grounds. The bones of small animals left to fester and rot in small piles. The deeper into the tunnel he went, the more he saw. Fifteen minutes in, he found an orange moss he’d never seen before enveloping most of the piles.

  “Don’t worry about the moss. It’s harmless. All avyd colonies cultivate it. Avyd eat the stuff. They can’t digest bones, so the moss breaks it down for them.”

  “Noted.” Mika said, though Nora looked like she still had questions to ask.

  Whatever they were, she held them in check and Mika continued his exploration. We only had to wait another five minutes before he announced he was coming up on a large room. Then let out a long whistle. The sound was quiet, barely above a whisper.

  “Found them. They’re all sleeping together in a pile.”

  “That’s the barracks then. All the workers should be here. Can you count how many there are?”

  “Hard to tell. There could be more of them in the center, or they could be sleeping on a big rock.”

  Maggie’s face remained studiously blank, even as she scribbled notes down in her journal. I would’ve put money on her knowing, but not wanting to spoil the surprise for us. There was a lull in the conversation as we all waited for Maggie to say something, so I filled the gap.

  “You have command Mika. How do you want to do this?”

  Mika didn’t answer, and I guessed he’d left the barracks to scout some more on his own. I watched him closely as he did and searched his expression for any hint of what he saw. While Maggie still had a large influence on how we approached things, given this was our first campaign and she was our steward. This was still going to be the clearest look I’d had so far into how Mika operated while in command.

  “Give me a moment. I’m going to check the other tunnels first.” He finally spoke after a minute of silence.

  Maggie raised an eyebrow in response, but said nothing. Out of caution, I assumed there was a threat he’d just exposed us to, but not a large enough one to actually warn us about. Still, I took precautions, stood, and adopted a defensive posture in front of Nora and Mika. My thought was that if Mika had alerted something, then at least I’d already be able to do my duty to the party.

  Mika found nothing for a long while. He was being cautious, careful not to expose his golem too much or move too fast. However, the central tunnel was nothing but a long, winding hallway into the earth. One that took Mika ten minutes to get to the bottom of.

  “Center’s the egg chamber. Anyone care if I destroy these things?”

  He meant the question for Maggie. She was the only one with actual knowledge about the avyd. For a moment, I thought she would hold back and allow us to find out what would happen on our own, but she shook her head.

  “Hold back. The queens can always tell when one of their eggs dies. We’ll have to come back once the adults are dead.”

  I could tell a part of her wanted us to find out on our own, but clearly something about alerting the queen early made her hesitate for us.

  “Alright. I think I can guess what’s in the right chamber. Anyone care if I just go back to the workers?”

  Part of me wanted to insist we check out the last tunnel, but Maggie revealed all the workers would be in the barracks, and her hesitance around the queen made me raise the danger level in my head above the usual den raid.

  ~~~***~~~

  It took fifteen minutes for Mika to backtrack into the barracks, the massive pile of asleep avyd visible once more. We’d strategized in the meantime. Nora told us she’d workshopped her mist spell some and wanted our permission to test it out now.

  The part of me that had grown up in a regimented military order wanted to refuse and tell her to stick with what she knows. Yet, this quest was her time to shine and adventurers were not members of a military. The nature of the craft made adventurers individualistic and irregulars. To demand she hold back now would stunt her growth and stunt my own later, when I wanted to try something but had to follow set precedent.

  “Everyone get in position, one minute until I wake these things.” Mika commanded.

  I got into my agreed position. I was at the center of our formation, directly in front of the hive entrance. Mika had said the idea was for them to break against my shield and redirect to him and Ellen. A tactic that was pretty common back home: one squad as the anvil and two as the hammers. While we waited for Mika to begin his work, I felt the water get pulled from the air.

  Teles was already a dry place compared to the humidity of the forest. Whatever magic Nora worked sapped all excess moisture out of the air to shape it into a fog at the center of our semi-circle formation. As the mist grew denser and obscured more of the tall prairie grasses, I felt my lips get chapped, and the skin of my hands tighten as they dried.

  By the time a rapid tapping of heels reached my ears from the hive, a dense layer of fog a foot and half thick, and nearly opaque, covered the entire space between us.

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  The avyd came forward in a wave. Mindlessly, they fought with each other to be the first out of the hive behind Mika’s misshapen golem. I stood straighter, exacting as much height from my frame as possible, and banged my hammer against my shield. A battle hymn already escaping my lips. Against a hive defending itself, I needed to be the most dangerous predator before them. The person who needed to die first.

  The first swing of my hammer demolished the carapaced head of an avyd and the follow through impaled the underside of a leaping drone. It curled in on itself, red blood leaked from shattered carapace, and its mandibles clacked together in a weak chitter. Like a mourning dirge, the drones that still fought to leave the hive took up the sound. Bouncing hollowly off the vacant interior of their above ground hive.

  It took seconds for the avyd to organize themselves and stream out of the hive in pairs. Their bodies pressed tight to one another as they squeezed through the entrance. I stomped and crushed the abdomen of one, took a step back, and pierced the head of another. Another step, and punched a drone out of the air as it leapt towards Ellen. Another step backwards and a golem ripped a drone off my leg where it ineffectively tried to get past my armor.

  I caught sight of the first mist construct as I used the spike of my hammer to drag a drone off of Ellen’s back. A wake in the mist trailed the thing as it circled a group of three avyd. Three snaps, like twigs broken for a fire, and the beasts stumbled. Each with a broken leg. Three hollow thumps, and the beasts fell to the floor. Three cracks, like nuts beneath a mallet, and gore sprayed into the mist.

  Nora’s spell was not loud. It did not flash with streaks of lighting, or decorate the night air with bursts of flame. Like the predator she modeled her constructs after, it was silent. Her spell was deadly, but it never announced itself. When death came for the avyd, it came like a pack of sharks. My vision was restricted to the outer layers of avyd, and Mika and Ellen, but occasionally I spot spurts of blood from near the hive entrance and look up in time to see two or three avyd disappear and be swallowed by the press of bodies.

  As more avyd poured out of the hive, I stopped worrying about killing the things and focused on keeping them contained. The press of bodies pushed the mist upwards, the collected water flowed over the avyd like waves at sea. Through those waves, ripples passed as Nora’s constructs surfed over the avyd press and left bodies in their wake.

  To my left Ellen swung her hammer in massive sweeping arcs, and thrust forward with the butt of her maul like a spear. She too had given up on killing them all and focused on containment. Mika was the only one who still tried to kill. Even then, he restricted that to the misshapen golem while the rest danced around the edges of the line, and pushed or injured wherever possible to hold them back.

  It began as a trickle that expanded into a flood until mist poured from between our legs and into the circle of avyd. Nora did her best to bury the avyd in mist and by the time she stopped drawing more, a layer of fog a foot thick rested on the backs of the pressed together bugs.

  Avyd workers are not large creatures. The tallest of them stood only two and a half feet at the shoulders, but they still dispersed the mist as they moved. As they raced out to the front to attack, the mist swirled behind them and rejoined the denser section, which totally obscured the center of the pile.

  That close to the hive entrance, all the avyd could do was push against each other, fighting through the mist and past the corpses of other avyd to reach us. I did as best I could to monitor what was going on in the mist as with what was happening before me.

  Every once in a while, I would notice a ridge at the top of the mist that would vanish before a sinkhole in the mist opened. As I watched, more and more of those sinkholes opened, always preceded by a slight bump at the top of the mist.

  It wasn’t until I saw one happen near me that I understood. Maggie directed one of her constructs up to the top of the mist, then, like a water hammer, drove the construct down onto the back of an avyd below her.

  Without fail she struck at the joint between the head and body, and without fail the attack always set the avyd to convulsing before it died. Like sped up rigor mortis, its legs flailed in rigid patterns and it clacked its mandibles as fast as it could in panic.

  I began the hymn anew, never missing a beat, as I turned my attention back onto my duty. Opposite me, an avyd from amongst the press was smart enough to climb slightly up onto the face of the hive and back behind our line to ambush Ellen.

  “Ellen behind!”

  She turned, but the drones in front of her all launched themselves at her, forcing her to turn back. Rather than attack fruitlessly like all the other drones before it, this one took the time to climb up her back towards her unprotected neck.

  The rim of my shield took it in the side of its head before it could clamp its mandibles onto Ellen’s spine. But as I felt the brief resistance shatter, I felt another pair of mandibles latch onto my neck. Its pronged pincer fought to get through my chain mail and pierce the artery it had perfectly latched onto, but my armor held.

  I dropped my shield and let bounce against my chest. The strap attached to my shoulder kept it from falling. With my free hand, I reached up and grabbed the thing by the head. Through the leather palm of my gauntlet, I felt small hairs poke into my palm, liked I’d gripped a meal comb instead of an animal.

  Rather than take the risk and rip the thing from my neck, I squeezed. Every point of strength and every year of training focused on crushing this thing’s skull. The first to cave was its eye. My little finger struggled briefly to crack the gem-like orb. The hard outer surface gave way and the rest of my finger pierced into the soft meat of its eye and into its head up to the third knuckle.

  The metal finger tip of my gauntlet shoveled through its brain. Convulsively, the avyd shook like a dog with a bone, and savaged my neck. It couldn’t get past the chain mail, but the shift in weight pulled me out of position just long enough for another beast to get behind me and climb. With a contemptuous toss, I threw the corpse back amongst its fellows, and reached behind me to grab a hold of the avyd that ineffectively bite at my armor.

  A quick squeeze broke the thing’s neck, and it joined its companion in the crowd. My distraction caused Ellen to pick up some of the slack. She was keeping the avyd from reaching her. A skill of hers created an echo of her maul head a second behind the real one that caught any of the avyd that she missed on her swings.

  I took a half step towards her, grabbed my shield from where it rested on my chest and swept back four of the bugs to give her time to recollect herself. To my left Mika’s golem performed admirably, though two of the golems had avyd latched onto them. The bugs slowly chipped away at the stone with their mandibles. I couldn’t do anything directly without the risk of further damage to his golems, so like with Ellen, I stepped forward and with my shield pushed the front rank of avyd away from them.

  Claws turned back on the avyd and two hissing bugs landed in front of Mika’s golems, blood frothing from three holes in their carapace like an over boiled mug. Mika brought his golems back, apparently content with leaving them to die. Nora wasn’t, however, and as soon as he was away from them, two constructs shot out of the mist to cave in the dying avyds’ heads.

  Back in proper position, I could finally see that Nora had pulled back her mist from the hive entrance to reveal a pile of dozens of avyd dead. Their legs curled beneath them like spiders. Each of the avyd dead had dozens of small dents in their carapace the size of a crab apple. Spiderweb cracks raced between the dent to create mosaics of death.

  An avyd leaped at me from the crowd and I pinned it to the ground with my hammer spike. I had to fight with the hard packed earth to get my hammer back and when I looked back up; I saw Nora’s constructs plunge towards one of the avyd at the rear.

  She’d given up on the pretense of her constructs as sharks within the mist. Instead, she launched them at the thing’s head in almost musical rhythm. Each construct pulled back only far enough for the other two she wielded to strike and to gain speed when it came back. When the bug died seconds later, it was not with the mosaic of cracks in its carapace that marked Nora’s kills so far; she simply caved in its head.

  Nora’s construct beat at the last rank of avyd similarly. She attacked to a beat only she heard. As time passed and more dead piled up, Nora had to drop the number of constructs she used. First to two, then to one, and finally she released the last construct and let the mist dissipate.

  The mist didn’t fade into the ether or fade back into the wind. It hung in the air like a dense cloud. A foot off the ground and interspersed with piles of corpses. Eventually it started to rain. The process began slow. Small droplets of water splashed into the blood and viscera that painted the front of the hive; and eventually became a downpour that turned the killing ground into a bloody mire.

  Each step became a fight with the earth as it sought to keep us rooted in place. We’d killed roughly thirty of the things, and Nora another fifty, but those that remained fought desperately to escape the clutch of the mud and the press of corpses to get at us and keep us from their queen.

  I brought the rim of my shield down and separated the head from the body of one of the last avyd. Beside me, Ellen brought the head of her maul down on the mouth of another and split it in two. A stomp collapsed the underbelly of an avyd flipped by one of Mika’s golems. Offal and viscera fought to enter my boot as I watched Ellen kill the last of the things.

  The last of the drones dead. I wiped the mud and blood from both my hammer and shield and put them away. With Ellen, I picked up Mika’s golems – which he’d powered down minutes ago – and we headed back to where the rest of our party waited and regained mana.