16. Dash #2
Silence crashes in. Not true silence. The Wastes groan and tick and hiss constantly, cooling slag contracting, vents releasing pressure, the deep subsonic vibration of the earth doing something unhealthy far below.
But no birdsong. No wind. No sound of a woman laughing in a walk-in cooler with buttercream on her jaw.
I dismount. Unstrap the broadsword. Draw it slow. The blade is four feet of blackened steel, heavy enough to require two hands for any creature without Orcish bone density.
The ground beneath my boots vibrates.
Not from a vent.
Something underneath is moving.
The slag crust shatters six feet to my left.
Forty feet of segmented black chitin erupts from the ground like a launched torpedo, spraying razor-edged rock fragments in every direction. A slab catches my forearm and opens the skin. Green blood, hot and immediate. The pain barely registers.
The rock crawler's head is a nightmare. No eyes.
Just a broad, flat skull plated in overlapping iron rust armor scales, crowned with two massive mandibles that scissor open and shut with a sound like shears cutting through sheet metal.
Her body coils upward, segment after armored segment rising from the burrow hole, each one bristling with barbed legs that grip the broken ground and churn it to powder.
The stinger tail curls overhead. Eight feet of segmented weapon tipped with a translucent barb that weeps yellow venom in thick, slow drops. Wherever the drops hit slag rock, the stone dissolves with a wet hiss and a curl of acrid smoke.
She's bigger than forty feet. Closer to fifty. The Slagworkers' Union lowballed their estimate, probably because nobody survived long enough to take proper measurements.
Good.
I charge.
No strategy. No flanking assessment. No weak-point analysis. Just boots on broken ground and a broadsword already swinging.
The first strike connects with her lower mandible.
Steel meets chitin and the impact travels up both arms like I've hit a boulder.
The blade bites a quarter inch into the armor plating and sticks.
She screams. The sound is not a sound. It's a pressure wave, a subsonic shriek that turns my guts to water and makes my broken tusk ache down to the nerve.
I wrench the sword free. Strike again. Same spot because that's what discipline would dictate, widening the wound, exploiting the fracture.
But my second swing drifts wide. Three inches to the right.
Sloppy. Because between the backswing and the follow-through, my brain fills the gap with Magnolia shoving the gold back into my hands, her fingers so small against the leather pouch, her brown eyes swimming with something I was too much of a coward to name.
The mandible catches me across the ribs.
I fly.
Eight feet, maybe ten. I hit a slag ridge spine-first and the rock crumbles behind me. Something in my left side goes crack. A rib, probably two. The pain is a white flash, then a deep red throb that syncs with my heartbeat.
Get up.
I get up.
The crawler lunges. Her entire front section rears and slams down like a battering ram.
I roll, but not fast enough. Not close to fast enough.
Her armored head catches my left shoulder and drives me into the ground hard enough to leave an Orc-shaped crater in the slag crust. My jaw snaps shut.
I taste copper. No. Green. I taste my own blood, metallic and warm, flooding from where I've bitten clean through my lower lip.
She pulls back to strike again and I swing from my knees.
Desperate. The blade catches three of her barbed legs and shears them off at the joint.
Yellowish fluid sprays. She shrieks and rears, her massive body coiling back, the stinger whipping overhead in a wild arc that whistles through the air above my skull.
I scramble upright. My left arm isn't working right.
The shoulder is dislocated or cracked or both.
The broadsword suddenly weighs twice what it should.
I switch to a one-handed grip, which is stupid, which is suicide with a blade this heavy, which is exactly how Magnolia looked at me when I walked away, like I was doing something incredibly, unforgivably stupid.
The crawler circles. Fast for something her size.
Her segmented body flows over the broken terrain like oil over glass, those remaining legs churning in terrible synchronization.
She's learned the range of my sword and stays just outside it, her mandibles clicking in a rhythm that sounds almost like counting.
I don't wait. I throw myself at her.
No guard. No defense. Forward momentum and a blade and the simple primal math of hit-the-thing-until-it-stops.
My sword opens a long gash across her flank.
Chitin plates split and yellowish ichor sprays my face, burning where it touches skin.
I don't care. I swing again. Connect with the joint between two body segments, and the blade sinks deep.
She thrashes. Her body whips sideways and a section of armored trunk catches me square in the chest.
The air leaves me completely. My feet leave the ground. I crash into the slag and skid, rock tearing through my vest and the skin beneath. The broadsword tumbles from my grip and clatters across the broken ground, spinning to a stop fifteen feet away.
I reach for it.
She's faster.
The crawler surges over me. Her full weight drives down through six barbed legs that pin my arms, my torso, my thighs against the scorched earth.
The chitin points puncture through clothing and into muscle.
I can't move. Can't breathe. Her mandibles click inches from my face, close enough that the wet heat of her breath fogs across my skin.
The stinger rises.
It arcs up behind her, silhouetted against the gray sky. The translucent barb catches the dull light and glows amber, venom pooling at the tip in a single fat drop that stretches, elongates, holds.
The only thing in my head is vanilla.