On hands and knees, Nora heaved in great gasps of dry air. Mika squatted next to her; a hand rubbing soothing circles along her back. White as a sheet, and pale as a ghost, his breathing was little better than Nora’s. Maggie stood over the both of them with the knowing look of an older sister watching their younger siblings make the same mistakes they once had.

  When Ellen saw the state her friends were in, she put down Mika’s golem and rushed to kneel before them, a hand rested on each of their shoulders. I based my concern for the pair on Maggie’s and walked over, put the golems I carried next to Maggie and went back to get the one Ellen left.

  I stood next to Maggie and watched Ellen tend to her friends like a mother hen over her chicks.

  “Mana exhaustion.” Maggie said with prompting.

  “Will they be fine?” I asked in return.

  Mana exhaustion, like regular exhaustion, was dangerous only when pushed to the extreme. A high Tier [Mage] could exhaust their mana for days on end and only suffer minimal damage. Strained mana veins, hairline fractures in their core. While painful, symptoms like that would heal with time and rest. If the [Mage] continued to push, however, they risked scouring their mana veins, immolation, mana cannibalization, or even soul mutation.

  “They will be. Nora’s worse off ‘cause she infused her aura into the spell.”

  “Ah.”

  “What about you? How’s the leg holding up?”

  “It hurts.”

  We’d cleaned and stitched the wound before Decay had set in and it was healing well; but Iona hadn’t seen a need to bless me with the Touch of the Black Hand and I hadn’t asked for it. So the dull throb of the wound had been a constant during the fight.

  “How are the stitches? Any breaks?” Maggie asked, a slight frown on her face.

  “Doesn’t feel like it. I’ll check before we go back to the queen.”

  “Got any notifications?” Maggie asked.

  “Not yet.”

  Even with the increased amount required to level a Rare class, I was sure I’d killed enough to satisfy that part of my class. However [Grove Guard] was at least partially tied to Ylena and my religion. My rites to her would happen only once we finished the job, and the was queen dead. So, any levels would have to wait.

  ~~~***~~~

  Mika screamed and dropped to his knees; his hands pressed to his eyes.

  “Gods damn it! Something killed my golem. Ready yourselves!”

  He and Nora were now only fifty feet away from the hive entrance. The two hours we’d waited for them to recover their mana hadn’t been enough to justify the extra mana coast that distance demanded.

  Ellen and I took slightly off centered positions from the hive entrance, the rest of Mika’s golems parallel to the front of the hive. I stared into the pale gloom of the hive interior and was just able to make it out as a shadow worked its way free from one tunnel.

  Cast in shadow as it was, I couldn’t make out the details, but the silhouette was familiar enough to make out that it was an avyd, but without a doubt, not a worker. It wasn’t until the creature ducked under the arched entrance and into the dim blue light of the moon that I saw it.

  The avyd queen had a misshapen upper half like a vestigial human torso. It’s six eyes, like glass beads, arranged in a semi-circle on what should have been a neck took on an ember like quality in the moonlight. Its mandibles clacked eagerly as it surveyed the corpses of its children. A skirt of odd carapace protrusions bounced off each other as it shuffled its massive thorax through the exit.

  I’d just settled into the ready stance of the Willows Wrath when another shape appeared behind the queen. Smaller than her elder, a second queen slipped out into the light. Thinner and shorter than the first, if no less deformed. This one had the same carapace protrusions as its mother. However, the pieces wove together like a basket rather than lay flat against her thorax.

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  While her elder surveyed the mire of death we’d created from her children, the younger scampered about behind her mother with eager glee. It’d been awaiting this, or at least something similar.

  So often in moments like these I feel the need to shout out the charge, alert the people around me that the plan had to be altered. That was a bad habit, beaten out of me when I was younger. It gave away too much. Let the enemy know you’re flustered.

  The problem with a charge was that we’d not cleared away the field of corpses in front of the hive. The plan had been to meet the queen at the edge, force her to fight with poor footing. Let her stomp the corpses of her children while she fought for life.

  Nora had briefly argued about what the point of that was, but I’d held firm on the point. Enlightened or not, it was a rarity for social creatures like the avyd to be unaffected by the death of their young.

  The youngest of the avyd moved towards me, but a shriek from the eldest held her back. The pair shared something in a glance of twelve dead eyes, some instruction, and the younger galloped to Ellen. Meanwhile, the eldest meandered her way through the mire to me.

  I don’t know why the elder sent her daughter after Ellen and faced me herself. Maybe she thought I was a better match for her skills, maybe she foolishly thought Ellen and I alone. It did not matter; I’d make her pay for the assumption.

  Without calling for it, I felt my bond with Ylena flood open at the same moment as one of the queen’s hardened legs pierced through an avyd corpse. The Grace Mother kept her attention elsewhere, but Iona used the bond to send the Howling Winds and Grace me with her touch.

  The jagged skin of her frostbitten hand felt real against the back of my neck as all but Stagnation fell away. Stolen by the Winds and freeze of winter, the pain in my leg ceased to bother me. The ember of fear I had about dying in the field before I could see Helena again cooled. The animal fear of being in front of a creature so deformed and massive died in its crib.

  All was frozen and fed to the Howling Winds.

  “Help Ellen! I’ve got this one!” I called out, my words not directed at anyone in particular.

  As she neared, the queen flashed the raptorial leg that capped her torso’s arm at me. The inside of the claw covered in small grasping spikes. I punched the arm away with the rim of my shield and followed with a hammer blow the queen avoided.

  With the backswing, I forced her to pull her other arm up, almost impaling the arm with the spike of my hammer. She leapt at me with a hiss. The force of her jump crushed the carapace of the corpses beneath her and splashed offal into the air.

  I sidestepped as a slash from the queen’s leg passed just in front of me. Up close, I pushed with my shield; the boss taking her in the place a human’s ribs should’ve been. The queen stumbled, not much heavier than I was. Her pointed legs struggled to find solid ground through all the bodies beneath her.

  I followed and with rapid swings brought my hammer down. Once, twice, three times. Each time, the queen swayed gently out of the way or deflect my hammer with her claws.

  The avyd regained her footing after she stepped into one of the few clear patches of mire and launched herself at me again. The Touch of the Black Hand removed all fear as I let her get closer before I sidestepped and again brought my hammer down.

  This time, I did not miss. My hammer took her in the back of the faux-human torso.

  Had she been human or any other anthropoid, the blow would have landed cleanly on her spine. Instead, I hit nothing but flesh. The force of the strike absorbed by the dense fatty tissue of the area. A patch of torn skin, the only sign I’d even hit the queen.

  Distracted by her anatomy, my split-second hesitation allowed her to grasp onto the rim of my shield with her raptorial leg. The spines on the interior pierced into the grains of the wood, sandy carapace a bright contrast against the paint and dark wood.

  In a move taught to me by a boy in one of the older trainee classes; I brought my hammer down on the rim of my shield. He’d called it hammer and anvil.

  The slightly rounded head of my hammer landed on the joint of her leg and three pounds of steel demolished the thin layer of protective carapace. Grey meat spurted from the wound, along with a brief geyser of blood. Forcing me to agree with the name.

  The queen announced her pain to the world with a hiss louder than I’d heard from her or her brood and shuffled back, climbing over the corpses of her children. I followed, the head of an avyd crushed underfoot, and swayed out of the way of a slash with the elder’s last raptorial leg. The one I’d injured dangled loosely to the side of her vestigial torso, connected only by a thin strand of tendon.

  A short stutter step brought me within the queen’s space behind her last strike, and I brought my hammer down on the point that connected her carapace to her boneless torso. Chitin cracked and wine-red blood seeped out. The queen back swung at me but I ducked under the blow and brought my shield to bare to block the blow I was sure would come.

  The queen took me by surprise and used her two front spider legs to stab at my chest. The thin ends of her legs didn’t pierce the scales of my armor, but the blow drove the wind from my lungs and sent me backwards. I tried to stabilize myself and slipped in between two corpses, sending me to the ground.

  The queen pounced, and her remaining raptorial leg crushed down on my left shoulder. It was only through providence that I swayed my head out of the way at the last moment. The sensations of the spikes on her arm as they dug into my skin were not dissimilar to the vines from the Order of New Growth, and while uncomfortable, my trainers taught me to tolerate that long ago.

  Unfortunately, she had my hammer arm pinned to my side. Putting as much force into it as I could, I swung the rim of my shield into the side of her legs. The rim was large enough to take three at the joint and fold them backwards like towels. The queen collapsed in a guttural howl of agony, half her legs broken. Her bulk either crushing or scattering the corpses beneath her.

  The queen’s diamond black eyes grew harder and with her unbroken arm she stabbed forward at my neck. The only thing that stopped a wrist thick spider leg from collapsing my throat was the edge of my shield and my armor. Breath fled me and winded, I traded jabs with her from my shield. Each punch landing on the spot that connected her abdomen to her thorax.

  I smiled up at the queen from where I laid pinned. It was a mirthless smile, a distraction taught to us early. I smiled up at her, surrounded by the corpses of her children, as my shield cracked, then pulverized her carapace. The queen reeled from me, hissed in pain, and let go of my arm. I launched myself forward, right arm limp against my side, but hammer held firm. I punched with my shield again as the queen stumbled on her broken legs and felt, more than heard, as her eyes pasted beneath the strike. Three of them now drizzled down the mockery of a torso. Chunks of their hard casing flowed within the stream.

  Half blind, half crippled, and part of her carapace cracked -her organs open to the air – the queen died shortly after. When I pulled my shield from her exposed organs, the queen locked up her kin. Her legs, the still working ones at least, curled up beneath her like a spider’s. Just to be safe, I continued to rain down blows on her corpse.

  When I looked up, I saw my party had taken the fight with the younger to the far edge of our mire. Battered and immobilized, Mika’s golems held her raptorial legs close to her chest in vice grips. Their claws pierced through the strange, bloodless flesh of her torso.

  Beneath her thin tendrils of red-tinged water appeared from the mass of bodies to grasp at her unbroken legs and hold them in place.

  Ellen stood behind the beast; her maul raised high overhead, like an [Executioner’s] sword. In a swing like driving nails, Ellen collapsed the queen’s thorax. The sound of an egg crushed under foot briefly rang out before the queen’s shriek swallowed the noise.

  The younger queen’s legs curled under her like her mother’s and Ellen followed up with another swing to the back of the human torso. Six inches of gore-drenched steel emerged from the front, covered in a cage of shattered bone.

  I guess their torsos did have them.