Chapter 138

  Augustus stepped out in front of the barricades, wand in hand. Talia positioned herself thirty meters to his right, creating separation.

  Behind them, the other defenders mopped up the remnants of the last wave along the flanks. Thanks to the aerial team’s strafing run, and Sven’s ongoing fire tornadoes, the center was clear.

  Other than the two orangutans charging down the hill toward them.

  The turrets opened fire.

  Energy bolts streaked toward the charging orangutans. One of the creatures ignored them entirely, taking blast after blast to its chest and shoulders. Small burns appeared across its fur, blackened patches that should have dropped it. It kept coming.

  The second orangutan rolled over a corpse mid-lope, grabbed it with one massive hand, and hurled it toward the barricades.

  Augustus swung his wand horizontally.

  A blast of force connected with it in the air, shifting its trajectory and sending it crashing to the ground harmlessly to the side of the defenses.

  To his right, Talia placed her rifle on the ground. She reached into the air and drew her sword from nothing, the blade materializing in her grip as if it had always been there.

  Augustus raised his wand. Fire gathered at its tip, condensing into a bolt of flame. He thrust forward.

  The bolt streaked toward the orangutan that had tanked the turret fire. The creature saw it coming and dove sideways, rolling across the ground, but not fast enough. Fire caught its shoulder, burning through fur and into flesh.

  It snarled and kept coming.

  Talia swung her blade in a wide arc. The motion sent a crescent of energy racing toward the second orangutan. The creature twisted, taking the impact across its shoulder instead of head on. Blood sprayed. It stumbled forward two steps, then righted itself.

  Both orangutans split their approach. One angled toward Augustus. The other veered toward Talia.

  Augustus tracked his target. The creature was fast, covering ground with long, powerful strides. Then it tripped.

  One moment it was charging. The next its ankle buckled and it crashed forward, rolling across the packed earth before scrambling back to its feet.

  Augustus caught a glimpse of a thin cut near its ankle. Fresh blood welling from a slice that hadn’t been there a heartbeat before.

  The orangutan spun in place, head whipping from side to side. It raised one arm to shield against another turret blast, eyes scanning the area as if searching for something it couldn’t see.

  While it searched, his wand snapped out repeatedly, sending several more bolts of fire into the beast’s exposed back.

  It stumbled, turning back toward him, locking its gaze on him with anger. The orangutan rushed him.

  Augustus aimed and fired. Lightning arced across the distance, bright and crackling.

  The orangutan caught it in its palm.

  The blast discharged against its hand, energy dissipating across its fur. The creature didn’t even slow.

  Augustus’s left hand moved. The book materialized above his palm, pages flipping rapidly until they stopped on a specific entry. Runes glowed across the page.

  He fired again.

  The second strike was brighter. Hotter. It struck the same palm and the orangutan roared, shaking its hand violently as smoke rose from burned flesh. But it didn’t stop. It crouched lower and accelerated, closing the distance faster than before.

  Augustus smiled.

  His wand traced a pattern through the air. Three quick slashes, each one releasing a spinning disc of compressed wind. The blades screamed as they cut through the space between them.

  The orangutan leaped.

  Hands appeared around it mid-jump. Ethereal conjured palms closed from multiple angles, catching the creature’s momentum and redirecting it back down.

  The orangutan slammed into the ground with enough force to crack stone. Dust exploded outward from the impact.

  The wind blades connected before it could recover.

  The first carved across its face, snapping its head back, one eye erupting in a spray of blood. The second and third struck its shoulder and outstretched arm, cutting deep into muscle.

  It screamed and thrashed before getting back onto its feet.

  The creature turned toward Augustus and roared. Close enough that he could smell its breath, hot and rank with rot.

  Augustus conjured the ethereal buckler to his left arm.

  The orangutan froze.

  Blood ran down the air beneath its chin, pooling where nothing visible should be. Its remaining eye glazed over slowly, the rage draining from its expression.

  Draven materialized, features resolving from nothing as if he’d always been standing there, and stepped back, drawing the short sword free from the creature’s throat. More blood ran down its edge as it slid free.

  The orangutan swayed once, then began to topple forward.

  Draven yelped.

  The massive body fell directly toward him. A ripple passed across his form, barely perceptible, and the corpse fell through him—or him through it—as if he weren’t there and crashed to the ground with a thud. He stepped delicately, passing through the corpse, clearing it entirely.

  The ripple reversed.

  Augustus gave him a nod. The timing had been perfect.

  He turned to check on Talia.

  Her orangutan lay motionless, neck half-severed where one of her blade waves had struck. She was already walking back toward the barricades, sword vanishing from her grip as she dismissed it.

  Both down.

  Augustus glanced toward the hill. Nothing moved. No more shapes emerging from the treeline. No reinforcements charging down to join the fight.

  The gateway was clear.

  ***

  The orangutan raced beneath the canopy, swinging from branch to branch with practiced motions. Alexander pursued, weaving between trunks, drones fanning out around him.

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  It was fast. He’d give it that.

  The creature caught a pair of thick vines and used its momentum to change direction sharply, launching itself toward a massive trunk. It landed, spun, and leaped again before Alexander could close the distance.

  One of his drones cut in from the left.

  The orangutan twisted mid-air, caught the drone by its blades, and hurled it back at Alexander in a single fluid motion before landing on a branch. Its movement was impressive. The kind of thing that might have worked against a slower opponent.

  Alexander seized the drone with Metallokinesis. He reversed its direction and sent it spinning back at the creature.

  The orangutan’s eyes widened. It backflipped off the branch, barely avoiding the blades as they carved through the space where its spine had been a heartbeat earlier.

  It landed on a lower branch, already moving, already fleeing.

  It wasn’t grinning anymore.

  Alexander could have ended it there. A simple upward thrust with Metallokinesis and the blades would have carved through the great ape’s back before it could land.

  But he wanted to test the arm at full power.

  He sent a command, and the drones spread out, forming a loose cage around the orangutan. They launched attacks in rotation, shallow strikes meant to harass rather than kill. One would dart in, force the creature to dodge, then pull back before it could retaliate.

  The orangutan snarled and twisted, trying to find an escape route. Every direction it turned, a drone was there to cut off its path.

  Alexander followed at a measured pace, watching the creature’s movements. Analyzing.

  He thought about the cultivator that had taken his arm. That fight had been genuinely dangerous. The man had stood alone against multiple superhumans and nearly won. His strength had been personal, and his Will absolute.

  This was different.

  The orangutan was larger, stronger, and faster than any great ape should be, with cunning enough to lure and divide its enemies. It knew how to ambush and direct minions with impressive coordination.

  The defenders who had fallen to creatures like this one hadn’t lost because the beasts were individually superior. They’d lost because they’d been swarmed, overwhelmed, pulled down by sheer weight of bodies while the real threats directed the assault from safety.

  But in one-on-one combat, superhumans outmatched the beasts. Physical power alone meant little in the face of superpowers or technological advantages.

  Strip away the minions, isolate the commander, and what remained was just an animal. A clever animal, certainly. A dangerous one in the right circumstances.

  These weren’t the right circumstances.

  Alexander accelerated, zipping around a massive trunk, cutting ahead of the orangutan’s flight path. The creature was focused on the drones behind it, attention fixed on the harassment coming from that direction.

  It didn’t see him until it was too late.

  Alexander emerged from behind a curtain of vines directly in its path. He hovered there, arm already raised, palm open.

  The orangutan’s head snapped toward him. Their eyes met.

  For a frozen instant, Alexander saw recognition in that gaze. Not just animal awareness. Something deeper. The creature understood what was about to happen.

  He fired.

  Full power. Everything the arm had stored.

  The lightning bolt struck the orangutan square in the chest. Light flooded the dim forest, turning everything white for a blinding instant.

  The creature’s body seized mid-leap. Its fur ignited. Smoke erupted from its mouth, its eyes, its ears. The energy tore through it, more than its flesh could contain, and the excess sought ground the only way it could.

  The bolt erupted from both feet simultaneously, blasting downward into the branch below. Wood exploded into splinters. The branch shattered, fragments spraying in every direction.

  What was left of the orangutan tumbled through the air, limbs slack, fur still burning in patches. It hit the swamp water below with a heavy splash and didn’t move.

  Alexander hovered in the sudden quiet.

  One down.

  He checked the arm. No damage. No overheating. The capacitors were empty, already beginning their slow recharge, but the systems had handled the full discharge without issue.

  Good.

  Flexing the fingers, Alexander swept his senses over himself. He’d felt them activate shortly after the vine cut his cheek, the nanites responding to the scratch. Technopathy gave him a sense of their purpose, their activity. Some were acting as clamps, chains of them pulling the edges of the wound together and holding it closed. That was simple enough to understand.

  Others threaded deeper, doing something more complex. Weaving skin fibers together. He didn’t have the medical understanding to grasp how that worked.

  He’d been worried initially that the nanites would bond themselves to his flesh in the same way they bonded metal fractures and seams together, but either they were far more capable than he’d seen, or they’d interpreted his subconscious desire to not slowly be replaced by nanites one wound at a time.

  Either way, the wound had sealed itself already. It wasn’t instantaneous healing, but he’d take it.

  Through the surveillance network, he tracked the other fights. Maximilian’s chains had ensnared one of the remaining orangutans, wrapping around its limbs, its throat, pulling tight. The creature thrashed against the bindings, but the conjured metal held. As Alexander watched, a final chain punched through its chest and out its back. The thrashing stopped.

  Hjordis carved through the remaining greys without difficulty.

  The third orangutan had tried to escape too late. It made it perhaps fifty meters before Annie caught up to it.

  She didn’t bother with elegance, leaping up and biting through both the orangutan and the branch it swung from.

  Three down in under a minute.

  Augustus spoke across raid comms. “Gateway clear.”

  Raelene responded immediately. “The two targets?”

  “Dealt with,” Augustus confirmed.

  Julia’s voice joined in. “I got one. Plus minions.”

  “Three over here,” Alexander said.

  Silence stretched across the channel for several heartbeats.

  “That all of them?” Annie asked.

  Maximilian’s measured tone cut through. “Even if there are more, it only matters if we missed the one that owned the gateway.”

  “Good point. Let’s regroup and find out.” Alexander turned back toward where the others had fought, already accelerating through the trees.

  Moments later, he found the others waiting where he’d left them. They were all still. Watching.

  Vines stretched deliberately across the ground around them, dragging corpses toward the bases of nearby trees. The grey minions. The larger orangutans. All of them being pulled slowly, steadily into the undergrowth.

  The vines didn’t move toward the team. They simply worked, methodical and purposeful.

  Hjordis had her blade drawn and ready, waiting for an attack that didn’t come. Maximilian remained on the dragon’s back, expression unreadable. Annie had shifted back to human form, arms crossed, staring at the nearest vine as it coiled around a grey minion’s leg.

  Alexander reached up without thinking and touched his cheek where the shallow cut had been.

  The vines continued their work.

  “Symbiotic carnivorous vines?” Raelene muttered to herself.

  “They’re fucking creepy,” Annie said.

  No one argued.

  “Let’s get back to the gateway,” Alexander said. “Before they decide we’re food, too.”

  Annie didn’t need to be told twice. She leaped onto the dragon’s back. Hjordis launched herself into the air, flame wings igniting. Alexander followed, drones spiraling around him as he flew up.

  They rose through the broken section of canopy where the dragon had crashed through earlier, ascending into open sky. Below, the forest stretched in every direction, vast and dense. From this height, Alexander could see the patterns in the canopy, the way the trees grew in strange spirals, the vines connecting everything like a web.

  He didn’t look back.

  Julia rejoined them as the gateway came into view. The defensive line still held position around it. Bodies littered the approach, hundreds of them, but the barricades stood intact. The turrets had gone silent.

  The team stood in a loose group near the gateway itself. Alexander’s eyes swept across them as he descended. Augustus and Talia. Felix, looking tired but uninjured. Draven, eyes closed and arms crossed. Cash bouncing on his heels. Mirror standing slightly apart from the others. Sven and Lars in quiet conversation.

  They were all fine. Some bloodied, armor dented, clothing torn, but Felix had done his work. No obvious wounds remained.

  The dragon landed farther back with a heavy thud. Alexander, Julia, and Hjordis touched down closer to the gateway itself.

  Cash immediately fist-bumped Julia, grinning. Then he zipped over to Alexander, hand raised.

  Alexander raised an eyebrow.

  Cash’s expression fell, almost crestfallen.

  Alexander gave him the fist bump, causing the man to grin before he zipped away to fist bump someone else.

  “Good work!” Annie shouted as she ran past and threw her arms around Talia. Talia accepted it with one arm, patting Annie’s back.

  Hjordis walked toward Sven and Lars, joining their conversation.

  Alexander’s gaze found Mirror standing awkwardly at the edge of the group. Their eyes met.

  He gave her a nod.

  She hesitated. Then nodded back.

  Augustus stepped closer, turning to look up at the gateway.

  “All yours,” he said simply.

  Alexander closed his eyes and reached out.

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