Page 139 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

They were as big as tanks and hit just as hard, using elongated river-like arms to knock the hell out of anything in the vicinity, even as torrents of high-pressure water spewed out all around them, sweeping away anything they’d missed. Combined, Bodil was laying waste, which was needed as the rest of the overhead squad had started hitting down, just an endless falling curtain of them.

One that was being lit up before they even made it to the floor, this time by Pritkin, who had fought his way back over here. I stared because he didn’t have that kind of power. He didn’t have any power!

But Æsubrand did, and although he still looked pretty out of it, lying on the floor by Pritkin’s side, he was awake enough to cough up a cloud of energy just like Enid had on our chase. Only not just like. He had clasped Pritkin’s left leg with his right arm, and a wreath of sparkling silver-white light hazed the two limbs before climbing up Pritkin’s body. Where it was absorbed and came out of his extended right hand as a gigantic fire hose of flame.

It lit up the falling Horrors, turning some of them to ash in the air and causing them to flutter down like gray rain. It sent others to the ground still burning, giving me the surreal image of a curtain of living fire, writhing and screaming even as it fell before smacking down and sending sparks flying everywhere. Then Pritkin twisted around and sprayed more flames at the oncoming mass of creatures from the door, which had almost reached us.

Geysers of fire and water mixed and flowed, steam billowed and fought with blowing clouds of ash, and Pritkin yelled with a magically enhanced voice. “Go! We’ll hold them off!”

“That ‘we’ better not include me, white boy,” Alphonse growled, ducking under the fist-shaped tidal wave aimed at a flying creature swooping at him. And, when it went screeching into the void, he headed for the crevasse, where Enid was defending Bodil as she defended us.

But reaching her was harder than it appeared, as another of the creatures almost immediately fell onto him. It was one of the kaleidoscoping Horrors that kept changing form, or maybe my brain was just trying to figure it out and failing. All I could see were sharp edges and strange colors I didn’t have names for, but it must have had wings, as it and a handful of others had been circling overhead, looking for victims to pick off.

It jerked Alphonse off his feet and into the air, only to get a surprise when the big man tore free of those talons and then used them to somersault on top of it, despite leaving a lot of shoulder meat behind. And reminded me that he was the old-school kind of vamp who preferred jeans to a tux, didn’t know what all the forks were for, and didn’t have a sophisticated bone in his body. What he did have was a knack for putting a hurting on whatever was hurting him.

As he demonstrated by grabbing the thing at what might have been its middle and ripping.

Suddenly, it was a mass of green-tinged weirdness, which I supposed was caused by some kind of blood because it was spewing everywhere. Alphonse dropped ten feet back to the ground, and the creature fell on both sides of him into a puddle of its own ichor floating on the tide. And the circling things abruptly got more distant, screeching at each other in warning.

And watching as their fellow Horror kept morphing, squealing, fighting, and—finally—dying. Because, Ancient Horror or not, nothing survives being torn in two. At least, I hoped not, but I didn’t see what happened then because somebody grabbed me around the waist and started running for the crevasse.

It wasn’t Pritkin. He had set up a ring of fire around our small area, with the flames leaping five or more stories into the air, I guessed so that nothing could jump over them. But creatures could go through if they had bodies that could withstand the heat, like the one he was currently battling, which was nine feet in height with a hard, turtle-like shell, only what was inside wasn’t a cute Ninja.

What was inside was—

My brain skittered away in fear and revulsion as Æsubrand carried me forward while still stumbling from sleep and what must have been a massive magic loss. I wanted to ask what he thought he was doing, but then my train of thought, such as it was, cut out because something was burning me—from inside my armor. Something small and bright enough that I could see it through the silver scales as if a hot coal had been shifted under my suit and was now torching the bottom of a breast.

What the—

And then I remembered something I should have thought about before now.

“Put me down!” I told Æsubrand, who was hauling me bodily toward the fissure while waves crashed all around us courtesy of Bodil.

I think she was trying to clear us a path, but that’s a little difficult when you’re slinging around the equivalent of a raging river at the end of each arm. As a result, she was hitting us about as often as everything else. Waves slapped us, gushing into my mouth every time I tried to speak; the spray stung me like a thousand tiny needles on any part that wasn’t covered by dragonscale; and Æsubrand said something that my translator primly refused to interpret in reply and struggled on.

“Wait,” I told him, gasping. “I have to—”

He didn’t wait.

“Listen to me!” I yelled. “We have to go back—”

“Shut up!” he screeched, with whatever had been left of his princely calm in tatters. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

“Because I’m trying to tell you—”

“Shut up, or I’ll make you shut up!” he might have said more, but something came flying at us, and he thrust out a pike that he’d picked up somewhere, allowing it to skewer itself on the point.

And halfway down the shaft because its momentum caused it to just keep going. He whipped the shaft around as it clawed at us and tried to bite with a long, deadly-looking beak, even though that caused it to impale itself further. And the hideous thing was too far along the thick wooden pole now to fling off, forcing him to throw the weapon and its shish-kebobed addition away, sending it flying into the waves, still shrieking.

“The demon is right,” he added without missing a beat. “You have to survive! You and Bodil can go back, can talk to them, make them understand—”

“Like I could have made you understand?” I yelled. And then we were caught in the wash of foam on the edge of another massive, watery fist, but I was ready when he stumbled free, gasping, dripping, and shaking his head. “No one will believe us when we return—if we do!” I said quickly. “Not without proof—”

“Then make them!”

“Are you listening? They don’t trust me! And they hate you! We can’t do this, but if you get me to Pritkin—”

But Æsubrand could give a shit what I wanted, although he had finally stopped, but only because we’d reached the crevasse. It was now an upside-down waterfall shooting skyward to fuel Bodil’s fight, which suddenly wasn’t fist-shaped any longer. It was fey-shaped, as a mass of translucent manlikans sprung out of the crevasse in our faces, looking like seven-foot-tall crystal statues and leaving me staring at the carnage through their watery flesh.

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