Chương 12: Fight For Your Life

When Malachi woke, he ached all over. He had slept briefly, but soundly, but no part of his body was at all happy about sleeping in armor on solid rock. According to William's phone, several hours had passed. Malachi's phone was back at the base. They'd slept in shifts, at least theoretically. Malachi was pretty sure several of the people on watch had napped during that first shift. About a dozen mantises were still scrambling about down below. Another dozen had gone dormant, hiding in the nearby rocks.

For now, at least, they were safe. He did a head-count. There were thirteen of them left. There should be fourteen. They'd lost Corporal Booth during the run to the mesa, then several more before and during the fight. But he'd counted before he went to sleep. He found Nicole, who was pacing about on the far side of the mesa.

"You get some sleep?" he asked.

"Some," she said.

"What happened to our fourteenth?" Nicole made a finger gun and pointed to her own head, then jerked her head toward the cliff. Malachi peered over the edge. There wasn't much of the body. The mantises had mangled it and barfed acid all over it, so it was a lump of corroded steel and flesh.

"Fuck," he said. He'd slept through the gunshot.

"Anything else I need to know?" Nicole shook her head.

"The doctor wanted to see you." Malachi looked over at another edge of the mesa. Dr. Chavez was holding Nicole's sniper rifle. Every so often he would raise it up and look through the scope at some distant thing.

"I've changed my mind about the clouds," he said as way of greeting.

"Bad news I assume?"

"The only kind. See the streaks over there? That usually indicates rain. But there's some sort of discolored cloud forming on the ground. Water doesn't do that."

"Is that what you called me over about?"

"No," Chavez said, setting the rifle carefully on the ground.

"This is about magic." Malachi shook his head. In the distance, there was another band of mantises roaming over the hills, a zilla stalking about with them.

"Doesn't matter anymore."

"Maybe not. Maybe it's the only thing that matters right now. I tried talking to some of the others, and they don't want to hear it. I get it. Cameron's thinking about their brother. Nicole's ready to join her children. Reed is—""What are you talking about?" Dr. Chavez looked at him, and suddenly he was looking at Malachi with pity.

"You'd die for them, but you don't even know them, do you?"

"Fuck you," snapped Malachi intelligently.

"You don't know anything about me." Chavez harrumphed.

"Of course not. But if I had to take a guess, you've suffered. And not just from the invasion. And I do know something about you. You dedicated yourself to furthering human knowledge. The Portal Wiki—""I get obsessed with things," Malachi said.

"It didn't mean anything. If I was smart, I would have listened to my friend—" He thought of FeNyx. He hoped they'd be alright. Likely, they'd already figured out that he wouldn't be coming back. They were smart.

"—and stayed away from all this shit."

"And if everyone did the 'smart' thing, there'd be no one left to defend our cities. You're right. It probably doesn't matter. Ever since the portals opened, I've been spending every waking moment studying the damn things. Those octahedrons—the one we had in that machine—those are what allow magic to happen. Nothing else.

No matter what we did with the wands or the staffs or any of the other magical items—items we know for sure were magical just a moment before they were taken off a portal creature—they did nothing for us. Every known form of electromagnetic radiation, particle bombardment, exposure to different elements, to different proteins, to biologic samples taken from the captured wizards—it all did nothing. And yet, give a wand back to one of the wizards and they can use it.

The glyphic octahedrons, what we called 'Magical Cores,' activate access to some sort of magical system." Chavez paused, looking up at the colossal room.

"I say magic, because it violates so many laws of physics. But sufficiently advanced technology and all that. If we're to resist these invasions, we need more of them. And we need to collaborate. The United States was keeping all our research secret. But that's not going to work. If any one of you makes it back—you need to tell the world. You know what happened to the indigenous people of the Americas?"

"Yeah, I took 5th grade history," Malachi said, voice full of disdain.

"A bunch of autonomous nations and peoples all thought they could play each other and come out on top. By the time they realized they needed to unite, it was too late. We've stayed too divided—you get the point. These invaders, they'll tear us apart. See, all the prisoners we've taken, they all discuss another entity. The Maatugivi Empire. They've never come through a portal that we know of, the same way the Spanish Kings never needed to visit the New World to reap the piles of gold.

But it's more than just haphazard invasions. Just like magic—there's an intelligence behind it. Economics factors. Debt systems. There's key resources, the best translation our linguists have come up with is 'dungeon,' that are associated with magic. It's a war that can't be won with what we're doing." Malachi sighed.

"You seem like a smart guy, but that's a child's understanding of politics.

'Ah, if we all just unite.' Grade school bullshit. Anyways, it doesn't matter. You're the big-shot that goes on TV. I'm a nobody." Chavez sighed.

"You remind me of my older brother."

"I'm sure he'll say nice things about you at your funeral," Malachi said.

"He won't, because he died when I was ten," Chavez said.

"He stood up to a bunch of gangs in our neighborhood in LA. Brave as hell. Anyways, I went to therapy so now I tell people I got over it." But you never forgave yourself, Malachi knew. He closed his eyes.

"I don't see how we're going to get out of this."

"Take a look over at that closest pillar, through the scope. Wait until the lightning flashes." Malachi looked reluctantly at the sniper rifle. He decided to humor the scientist. He peered through the scope at the base of the pillar sticking out of the mountain. There was a dark shadow at the base. The lightning flashed. Malachi blinked and lowered the scope. He looked at Chavez.

"Is that… a wing? Covered in… eyes?" Chavez forced a smile.

"The lizardfolk tell us the Magic Cores come from beasts of great power. Beasts that live in dungeons. Maybe that's where we are."

"Don't we need some sort of… machine?"

"If the—excuse my language—fucking goblins —can figure out how to do magic, I don't think that machine we built is truly necessary. I hypothesized a biological interface, but my research in that direction was largely stymied by office politics. Until it worked. For the record, it was specially synthesized proteins and RNA sequences that got the glyphic octahedron to activate." Malachi turned his gaze back to the mountain. He raised the rifle to peer through the scope again.

"We can't get there," he said. There were mantises all over the mountain and all over the path to the mountain. Some of them had hunkered down, trying to blend in with the rock, while others scurried back and forth for some inscrutable purpose. If they were magical summons, they didn't need to eat.

"What's summoning them?" Chavez shook his head.

"What do they want?"

"They dove after that activated Magic Core. But that's a response to an anomaly. Whenever we remove all the mantises from an area, more appear. Perhaps they're some sort of guard construct. The lymphoids and macrophages of this realm." Malachi ground his jaw, staring at the mountain. Lightning flashed again. The longer we wait, the weaker we'll get. With no food and water, we're on a short time limit. Chavez was looking in the opposite direction.

"Well, we're about to find out what that cloud is. It's moving this way." Malachi set the sniper rifle down, starting to wonder how much more time for a rest they even had. He spotted William, who was sitting over by the crevasse ramp. Malachi went and sat down by him.

"You doing alright?" The other man shook his head.

"Shoulda listened to my momma," he said. They sat there for a while. Then, William tried to smile and change the subject.

"Man, this place is crazy. You think aliens built this shit?" Malachi had been turning it over in his brain. He'd read a thousand portal reports, but never heard of anything like this. All the videos and accounts of what was on the other side of portals were all things like primitive lizard hamlets or junk-covered goblin caves with no sanitation. The desert lizards lived in big packable tents. The elves lived in fancy treehouses. Other than the magic, there was no indication they had any advanced technology.

"We're missing something," Malachi said. He thought of what Chavez had said about the Maatugivi Empire. A few people on the portal wiki had tried to tease out how the different species and factions related to each other, but it wasn't clear that the blue-portal naga were even in contact with the gray-portal goblins. He hated an unsolved mystery.

"Yeahhhh," William said.

"Can't say I'm going to miss the place when we escape," he said, winking at Malachi.

"First thing I'm'a do when we get back is take a shower. But after that? Park barbecue. Whole neighborhood's invited. You ever do that as a kid? Some of my favorite memories." Malachi contemplated that.

"One place I lived, we had these block parties sometimes. We'd have these epic water balloon fights, and they'd bring out the bouncy castles. Then we moved again." There was an unavoidable tinge of bitterness in his voice. He looked back at the cloud approaching them.

"We need to get moving. If there's a way out, it's up there."

"Yessir," William said, giving him a mock salute. But he wasn't being sarcastic. For whatever reason, they'd all decided he was de facto commander. As Malachi began to gather the others, William helped out spread the word.

They stood assembled by the crevasse in the mesa. Every single piece of armor they were wearing was already damaged, either with dents or acid damage. They had no more grenades, and Jane, the soldier who'd been trained on explosives with Cameron, had died in the mad scramble to the mesa. No more C4 either. Some soldiers were entirely out of bullets, and a few of the assault rifles had also suffered from corrosion from the mantis acid.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. Malachi had gone over the plan. It wasn't complicated. They would move in formation towards the mountain, then wind their way up the side of it in places where it looked like there were natural switchbacks. If a zilla attacked, they'd dump their remaining bullets into it. Nicole still had a few rounds left for her rifle. Otherwise, it was spears only. Juan finally ditched his swiss-cheese shield for one of the extra spears.

Below, a dozen mantises still swarmed, but they could handle that, especially now that they weren't on the brink of exhaustion.

"Alright," he said.

"One each. Then again when the sleeping ones charge us. Ready?" Grim faces stared back at Malachi, but they nodded. Malachi still wasn't sure why everyone had decided to listen to him. He didn't like leading. He'd always pushed off leading raid groups to Rob. I wonder how that dumbass is doing, he thought wistfully. A pang of regret briefly went through him. He'd been mad at the guy, but maybe he'd been too much of an ass about it. Can't change it though, he thought.

"Alright. Let's go." They assembled at the edge of the slope running through the crevasse, the one that had been blown up and now had an eight-foot tall cliff at its base. The mantises were nicely assembled down there, still clawing at the rock. It didn't seem they ever tired.

"Three. Two. One. Drop!" The first group leapt down, smashing down on the tops of several of the mantises, splattering them in a shower of sparks and globular blood. As they did, the second group turned and dangled from the ledge, then dropped down, then spun and got spears ready. It only took a moment of coordinated stabbing, and then the first group of mantises were dead.

By the time the second group of bugs had awakened and attacked, they had their spears out like a sea urchin, and the second group was quickly impaled.

"Let's move!" Malachi called, and they started on a quick walking pace, keeping in two columns with three soldiers in the lead. Nicole brought up the rear. Chavez, who had also picked up a spear, was in the middle of the two columns. His light composite armor resisted the acid better than the steel, but it wouldn't do much against a blade-arm. Lightning flashed, and this time, it had more of a deep rumble to it. They glanced up. The cloud Chavez had spotted was above them now.

The pitter-patter of rain began to sound around them.

"Mierda!" Juan called out.

"This stuff burns!" Someone made the mistake of looking up as he said that, and immediately shut his eyes and started swearing as a drop landed in his eye.

"Great," Nicole said.

"Literal acid rain." The acrid smell that had been omnipresent since they arrived had faded into the background as they'd gotten used to it, but now its intensity increased and Malachi's nose wrinkled as droplets began to hiss and bubble on his armor. It wasn't like getting hit by mantis barf, but it still stung, especially on his exposed cuts.

"Fuck," Cameron said.

"What do we do?" Malachi looked around, but he already knew the answer. There was nowhere to shelter.

"We keep moving. It's all we can do." They increased their pace, but as they did, Malachi noticed that there was a haze growing on the ground. It reminded him of science lab when they'd watched dry ice cascade over the table, except the cloud was thinner and had a greenish tinge to it. Chavez had noticed it too.

"That can't be good," he said. Where the cloud was coming into contact with the metal on Malachi's greaves, it was causing the metal to darken. He could feel a stinging sensation in his feet. Chavez said, "The cloud from the acid has a higher density than the air, so it's sinking. If we can reach the mountain slope, we can avoid the worst of it. But we need to hurry." Someone groaned. Another person was still swearing. Twice more, a small group of mantises attacked.

Everyone was still tired, but they'd at least had a moment to recover. They slaughtered the mantises with no losses. Malachi began to feel the faintest spark of hope. He tried to smother it. No point deceiving yourself, he thought. Maybe it was because he'd thought of Rob, but he suddenly remembered his last raid against Sunbreaker. He remembered that feeling of determination. It had been a hopeless fight, and yet he'd done it.

He let that feeling of determination settle over him, just as another group of mantises came down at their flank.

"Form up, left flank!" Nicole called, and with the flash of steel glistening beneath a sky of lightning, they butchered the attackers again. Malachi felt the shock of his steel spearhead piercing the body of another mantis running through his arms. He felt the sting of the acid rain all over his arms. Paired up with that determination, though, was a growing feeling of dread. The acid wasn't soaking through their apparel, but little by little, it was dissolving it.

If they had to endure this too long, it wouldn't matter how many mantises were on that mountain. The beam of fire came out of nowhere. One moment, they were jogging along, the next, Juan and another soldier were just dead, faces burnt to black char in an instant. Nicole was the first to react, her rifle coming up and landing a shot right through the beast's head-thing. It had been hiding behind a rock, crouched down so that they hadn't seen it until they'd rounded the corner.

"Fire, fire, fire!" Malachi shouted as he brought his own rifle to bear. He emptied his gun into it, then reloaded—his last magazine. All around him, rifles roared out in deafening fire. Malachi let his rifle drop and picked up his spear. A giant scythe-arm came swinging down, and slicing the head right off one of the HQ-37 guys. Blood fountained out of him, hissing from the acid as the body toppled over right next to Malachi's feet. He screamed and charged.

Another scythe-arm came down and Malachi leapt to the side. He felt the spray of rock it kicked up on the side of his face. Then he was beneath the creature so the arms couldn't easily get to him, screaming and stabbing. Violet globs of blood rained down on him. One of the creature's long legs kicked at him. His fast reaction time saved him, and this time, he swung his spear in an arc, aiming for the tendons on the back of the limb.

There was another spray of blood, and then he jammed his spear straight into the back of the zilla's leg. The leg crumpled, and the beast leaned over, its next beam of fire going wide, scouring the rock of a distant hill. Malachi twisted his spear inside the leg joint, then yanked it out, then ran behind the creature and did the same to the other leg. As the beast toppled over, he leapt on its neck and stabbed, over and over and over and over as he screamed. It took him a moment to realize the zilla had stilled.

He looked over at the rest of the group. Two more people had been cut open by those scythe arms. Cameron's eyes had glazed over, and their pale face was now staring at the ceiling. Each drop of acid that fell on him hissed and bubbled as acid rained down on him. The zilla had opened up a gouge right through his breastplate and carved out a slice of his torso. Malachi took a moment to catch his breath. He couldn't think about that.

Couldn't start thinking about all those times they'd sat next to each other at the dining hall of the station, both comfortable with silence. Couldn't bear to see Nicole, who was kneeling over Cameron, holding their face in her hands.

"Ammo status," he said, because that was what he was supposed to say.

"Empty," called William, and a chorus of more "empty" calls followed.

"One," said the last HQ-37 soldier. They were down to three magazines. The one Juan and the other burned man had been carrying had cooked off, which had caused a bullet to graze another soldier in the arm.

"Okay. Fuck. If another one of those comes on us, use rock cover if it's at range. If it's close, we get under it where it can't use those blades and take out the legs," he said. He looked back at Cameron and Juan's bodies and swallowed hard, then tore his gaze away. When he next spoke, it was like his own voice was coming from a distance.

"Back in formation. Let's move." There wasn't time to talk about it. Everyone here had seen these sudden losses, saw a person they'd fought and dined beside just struck down in a moment, but it had never been like this. Even William had stopped cracking jokes, which was probably the most dire sign yet. The sting of acid around their feet started moving upward. In another half-hour, it was up to their knees. It felt like someone was pouring pineapple juice over a bunch of cuts. The mountain loomed.

It was just in front of them, and yet, far too far. Malachi wanted to order the pace increased, but he also didn't want them to run into another ambush. Ten minutes later, another group of about a dozen mantises attacked them. By then, they were nearing the base of the mountain, but the acidic fog was starting to reach their waist. Everyone was gritting their teeth as their genitals began to burn.

"Almost there," Nicole hissed. Then, "Shit, another group. Looks like twenty." Malachi thought of their almost depleted ammo. But they also didn't want to try to fight with two to one odds.

"Soften them up," he ordered. Nicole nodded, and her rifle cracked out. A mantis dropped. She cycled the cartridge, then fired again. Two down. Then a third. Then a fourth.

"Out," she said, and dropped behind the formation. The mantises hit them dead on a moment later.

"Shit!" he heard William say. When the fight was over, he checked. William had a nasty gash across his forearm. It wasn't too deep, but it was bleeding a lot.

"Bandage it. Wrap the hell out of it," he said to one of the soldiers who he'd assigned the medic's supplies to. The man dutifully used two rolls of gauze, but Malachi could already see the acid dissolving it. The mist had reached their chest. They could summit a nearby hill to escape it, but then they'd be stuck on that hill until the acid storm was over and the cloud dissipated. There was no way to know how long that would be. Best case, it would be hours. Worse case, a lot longer. We have to risk an ambush.

"We jog the rest of the way," he said. No one had to be cajoled. They ran. They were almost there when one of the soldiers stumbled. It happened so fast. He fell to his knees and took in a lungful of the acidic air, then immediately collapsed all the way to the ground, making this terrible wheezing noise. Malachi made the cold-blooded assessment: there was maybe a hundred meters to the beginning of the mountain slope.

Even if he could hold his breath to pick up the man, even if closing his eyes could prevent it from blinding him, the fog was now nearly to their neck and rising fast. They were too far to carry him. He could see the mist running down off the mountain slopes, piling up here deeper and deeper. He kept moving. So did the rest of them. His skin felt like fire ants had been all over. The acid was starting to sting his neck. Pieces of his armor were falling off him, just corroded away. His greaves were entirely gone.

He kept his eyes on the ground, but the fog was making it hard to see where they were stepping. Malachi felt his ankle twist slightly on a loose rock underfoot. He kept his balance, but it had sent his heart racing. Almost there. And then they were making their way up the start of the mountain slope. Once they were a few dozen feet up, they took a moment to catch their breath. Malachi's skin still stung and had blisters in the places he could see it, but at least they were out of it.

A chunk of his breastplate, already weakened from the earlier battles, clanked to the ground. Now that they were on the mountain slope, they couldn't see the peak, but they could see that colossal pillar rising from the center of it into the ceiling. More violet lightning crackled above. Slowly, they trudged their way up the slope.

"You all climbed a mountain before?" he asked.

"Some of the smaller ones," Nicole said.

"Mount Si, Mailbox Peak, you know."

"Fuck no," William said. Most of them had, at least. Malachi had tried to estimate the height of the mountain. Three thousand feet of elevation gain felt about right. Given how tired they were, the dehydration, the rough terrain, and the fact that they'd likely be attacked by mantises a few more times, he thought, at least four hours to get to the top. It wasn't much like the hikes he'd been on. The mountain was nearly bare, it only had a few of the weird coral-like plants and slimy looking fungi-things on it.

There were no trees to block the view, so as soon as they were higher than the nearby hills, they could see for miles whenever the lightning illuminated the world. He looked back to see if there were any swarms pursuing them. The lightning flashed. That's strange, he thought, because it looked like the landscape had shifted briefly. He stopped, fully turning so he could look out across the landscape. The hills were obscured by the darkness, and by the haze of the acid rain.

There was some sort of ambient light in this place, though it wasn't clear where it was coming from, and didn't do much to illuminate anything too far out. The lightning flashed again, and Malachi's heartbeat accelerated, and his eyes went wide. For a moment, he didn't think about the sting of the rain on his skin.

"Fuck me," he said, and that got the rest of the team to turn and gaze out at the landscape. Another bolt of purple electricity arced above, this time crackling longer, and they could see it clearly: starting about two miles out was a swarm of mantises unlike anything they'd seen so far. They'd seen groups of dozens frequently, and groups of hundreds often. While on the mesa, Nicole had reported seeing what she estimated to be a thousand moving out in the distance.

This swarm covered the hills, and stretched from one end of the horizon to the other. There had to be hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions. They were all swarming in their direction. They'd be at the base of the mountain soon.

"Oh hell no, this is some bullshit," William said. Malachi could feel it, the palpability of the dread growing on the mountainside. Beneath the low rumble of the constant thunder, Malachi could hear it—the distant sound of a million feet marching across stone. He looked up the slope again. Either they would find salvation there, or they were dead. They were probably all dead anyways.

"Climb," he said, nearly choking on the word. Their small band of eight turned and started climbing up the slopes.