Fifty-Four

Bosch returned silently with a chunk of rock in her hand that radiated power. Her Squire squad broke from their positions around the edge of the rift and formed up on the woman. She tucked the double fist sized rock in a pack one of them offered her. The Squire shouldered the pack when she finished and everyone turned to look towards the Knight.

"Rift cleared. Any communications from Willis or McGuire?" Bosch asked towards Mathis. The big Squire straightened with her gaze on him. He shook his head, muffled words that Kon felt like he should be able to hear, but couldn't.

"Then we continue the hunt. On me," Bosch went to turn and Kon saw a new dent on her back. Black ichor painted the armor around the small dent and he couldn't help but wince at the thought of the nearly irreplaceable armor being damaged. Then he wondered just what could damage armor so heavily infused with energy.

"Lead the way," Mathis said to Kon and Diur as he waved his hand toward Bosch's retreating back. Both of them looked at each other, gave small shrugs, and took off to follow the older Knight. She led them through the area that had held the rift, which had collapsed with her taking out the treasure that had supported it.

Kon forced back bile as he took in the slaughter. The peak D-Grade they were following had hit the monsters who always guarded the entrance like a blender attacked rotten fruit. Bits of things were scattered everyone, gore splashed around in wild spray or pooling in deep puddles where the ground was depressed in thick slurries with chunks of bug inside of them.

"Smells," Diur said. It was the only word she had spoken in hours. She had grown quiet as Mathis had explained the situation amongst the survivors of the Dragon's Maw. That they were going to enter a den of instability was something that Kon didn't want to think about either.

"Nothing to do about it. Just keep my head down and don't stick out that much." The thought had hardly gone through his mind before he risked a glance back to see the squad of Squires struggling to keep up with Bosch's leisurely pace. Compared to Alice's rather reckless pace, Bosch was strolling along. All eight of the Squires were moving fast, their smooth, long strides that of people on the border of sprinting. They didn't quite tip over that edge as Bosch pushed them hard to try to make up for lost ground with the other knight patrols.

"How much stronger do you think you are than them?" Diur whispered to him as they ran. Kon shrugged in return. He didn't know the exact demarcation between cadet and squire, but he had to assume that the squires had at least a few functioning nodes.

"You are easily a peak F-Grade in energy currently. If not getting close to E-Grade. It's hard to tell with you humans, your power is harder to tell than cultivators. Your presence is more…muted," Diur explained as they ran. Kon just grunted and kept pushing as they closed the distance with the other patrols.

"They are closer to middle F-Grade if not, maybe, upper. They're much better trained than you though. Their gait is good, their discipline is better, and I have no doubt that they know how to use their weapons."

"Yeah, they should," Kon said, a little offended she had pointed it out like that. His ego did swell a bit with that. He could always train more to shrink the deficit between him and the squires in regards to martial skill. It'd be a lot harder for them to catch up to his base levels of energy. Between the expanded nodes and the rudimentary levels of body cultivation he'd done, he was setting himself a strong base to build upon.

"Don't let your head swell. I can see it from here already. Power is well and good and can be the difference maker in fights. But when you face an equal, it is skill, discipline, and practice that will see you survive." Diur's words hardly slowed him down as they accelerated. Something ahead had caught Bosch's attention and she had slowly sped up.

"Contact!" Bosch suddenly yelled, throwing herself to the side as a tree was hurtled through the space she had just occupied. Diur reacted first, grabbing Kon's arm and dragging him to the ground as the huge tree trunk flew above their head. A startled cry came from behind them alongside the mixed sound of bones and shattering wood.

Kon glanced behind him to see one of the near invisible squires had been caught by the tree trunk.

"Flank!" Mathis yelled, sprinting to the far left with two other squires on his hip. They ran fast while using the other trees as cover as they ranged far to the left. The surviving four squires went the other way, spreading out as they did so. Kon wormed his way closer to the ground as another tree was thrown in their direction.

Dirt fell on them as the tree sailed by, crashing behind Mathis's small fireteam. The older squire pushed his people hard as they disappeared into the foliage, their camouflage strong enough to hide them from his sight.

"We need to move!" Diur yelled in his ear before she rolled to the side and bounced to her feet. She kept low to the ground with her sheathed sword still in one hand as she ran in a zigzag pattern. Kon cursed and went to follow her, thought better of it, and went the opposite way.

A boulder clipped the tree he would have been behind if he'd followed Diur. Wood fragments burst out in a spray of shrapnel as the old tree groaned and began to fall. The round boulder slammed into the ground, bounced, and rolled to a stop, a trail of destruction left in his wake.

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"Holy shit," Kon muttered as he stayed low to the ground as he ran. Bushes tickled his skin as he ran, brushing across him as he followed after the second squire fire team. He could see the evidence of their passage, trampled bushes, footprints, and scraped loam where they had skidded to a halt. They themselves were still invisible to him.

More and more debris kept flying behind him. The crash of trees rumbled through him as the ground shook beneath his feet. Kon turned the corner and finally saw it was that was bombarding them.

It was the giant bug that had chased them off the plateau. A thick slime coated its entire body, weavings of thick silk strands over its carapace as long arms stretched out to snatch at anything close around it.

Bits and pieces of squires were littered around it. Carbon scoring covered its gleaming body as its multifaceted red eyes glared out in rage. Its lower half was wrapped up in a thick cocoon that was slowly unraveling.

"Oh, no," Kon muttered out loud as the thing opened its mouth wide. Pincers were on either side of its head, dark and gleaming with slime. Air rushed into its mouth, strong enough that the surviving trees shook.

It screamed.

Kon grabbed his head as his entire world trembled under the blast of air. His knees went weak and he slammed into the soft dirt as he looked around, drowning in pain. Tears dripped down his face as he looked at the monstrous insect as it continued to try to get out of its cocoon.

Bosch raced out of the cover of the trees, arms pumping as she closed the distance. A long, thin, cord unpooled from her forearm bracer, a thick hook on the end of it.She whipped her arm around her head and the long wire snapped taut as it spun with the weight on the end. With a hard flick of her wrist, the hook embedded itself in the insect's thorax in a burst of green blood.

Bosch dug both feet into the ground, then jerked savagely. Kon waited for the hook to come flying free of the body, but instead it was the insect that started its tumble to the ground. With its lower half trapped still, it couldn't anchor itself Kon realized. It crashed to the ground, ending its shrill scream.

"FIRE!" Bosch roared as a complex rune started to form around her. It came into being much more slowly than Alice had made hers. Line after line was slowly etched into the air in front of her with a ruby red aura. He hadn't seen any hints of her aura before she had started forming her rune.

At the same time she started to form her rune, she lifted her other wrist and a blue bolt of plasma leapt from the gauntlet and burned straight through the glistening carapace like it was paper. Kon had a moment to hope, but realized the plasma round had only poked a small hole on the titanic monster.

If that deterred Bosch, she didn't let it slow. She tracked her wrist across the beast's thorax, all in a tight grouping of shots. The crack of hypersonic rounds fired from the squires gauss rifles began to form a symphony. Burst of blood and chitin flew about as they set up a withering crossfire.

Kon sat there, stupefied, as he watched Bosch and her team try to whittle away the giant insect. A hand clasped on his shoulder causing him to jerk as he tore his eyes away from the monster.

"It's using a technique to mesmerize you! We have to move!" Diur yelled in his ear. Her aura was around her, billowing about herself as if there was a strong breeze that was trying to smother it.

"We're not running again," Kon growled. Anger blossomed in him like the morning sun breaching the horizon. He wouldn't run again. Never again. Not while leaving his fellows in the field.

Kon turned and fired his borrowed laser rifle, holding the trigger down. He tried to keep his stream of fire at the same area that Bosch was weakening. Chitin heated and popped, sizzling as it landed around it. The bug thrashed on the ground, digging trenches into the earth with its mandibles.

"We're coming!" the distant cry heralded reinforcement, but it was far away. Kon risked looking to where it had come from, but he saw nothing. He turned back to look at the bug and froze as it had disappeared.

Gauss rifle fire ended, leaving his ears ringing, and Kon slowly stood to his feet and walked cautiously to the site of the battle. Bosch stood there, her rune nearly completely finished, but fading away now. More squires came out of the woods, looking carefully before entering the clearing that the monster had been perched in.

Only now as he looked around, Kon realized it wasn't so much a clearing, as that the monster had cleared it. Holes were common where the beast had ripped trees out of the earth, roots and all. Kon slowly got closer, looking around to see how the giant monster had managed to disappear.

"The trenches," Diur had to yell for him to hear. She pointed to where the beast had swept its mandibles and Kon blanched at seeing the depth of the passage it had created. It had managed in the space of a few seconds to dig a hole large enough for itself to fall into, and then managed to wiggle its way into the earth and escape them.

"Mathis, report!" Bosch barked as they all clustered around her. Mathis shimmered into being as walked carefully, picking his way past the mounds of dirt and avoiding the deep holes that dotted the area.

"Grant's dead. Took that tree head on when the rift monster engaged. No other casualties."

"WILLIS!" Bosch roared as the other Knight finally arrived. His armor was covered in sap, vegetation, and dented all over. The Knight wasn't leaning over gasping, but it was clear he'd been running hard to get here.

"Where's McGuire?" Bosch asked immediately.

"We split up, he went West. He's on his way now. We ran into the beast while it was in its cocoon. I thought that'd be enough," the Knight trailed off as he looked at the torn apart squires who had died due to his poor calculations.

"I can't raise him on coms, can you?" Bosch asked. She had leapt with an easy bound to look over where the monster had been nesting. Her foot poked and prodded in the soupy ground, a mix of blood and slime from the cocoon mingling with the dirt into a soup that Kon could smell across the field.

"No…" Willis let the word slowly die out as he looked to the West and the silent Knight.

"Everyone, we're moving to regroup with Knight McGuire's team. From there we push to camp Alpha. Mathis I want you working the coms constantly. Alpha needs to know that there's a pseudo C-Grade on the loose."

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