Your hand reaches the hilt of your great grandmother’s sword just in time to be absolutely useless. Before you can come into reach of the wyrm in front of you, its great claws slam into you at full force. The momentum from your charge is reduced to nothing as the impulse of the collision takes its full effect on your arm, which had absorbed the brunt of the trauma by snapping like a twig. A part of your mind registers the pain for a single, screaming moment before you disengage from the thought. You don’t have time for pain as you hit the ground, looking up in satisfaction as you see that the wyrm’s nearest limb has been rather badly mangled by the impact, and the wyrm isn’t as determined as you are to ignore pain. Its shrieking scream resonates in your teeth and along your spine as it reels back from the pain.

You take advantage of the moment to grab the sword and draw it as you leap forward again, this time with the sweeping cut already in progress. You barely record the spray of blood in your memory as you make your way straight through the wyrm’s neck. What does stick with you is the ease with which the sword cuts. Naturally, it would immediately after being drawn. The plasma scabbard had a handy side effect of heating up the blade. Nevertheless, the sword feels unnaturally natural in your hand, despite the pain screaming through your arm even as you can feel the bones repairing themselves as you push yourself further into full glow, the hauntingly emotionless harbinger of death that exists there coming nearer and nearer to the surface of your mind as your left foot hits the wall.

At the sensation of the event, your eyes glance out the door lazily while your leg kicks you out of the small passage, your hand grabbing the edge of the doorway as you pass through it, twisting you around the corner and against the wall just to the side, the frame of the door bending outward beneath your fingers as you spin around it with a force well beyond the structure’s design limits. As your legs brace against the wall, you take in the scene before you. It seems that you made a slight miscalculation in the number of wyrms outside your shelter. In addition to the not twelve but instead eighteen wyrms in the main lobby, there are eight more making their ways in and out of rooms in upper floors, their massive bodies squeezing into the doors like rodents.

The wall collapses slowly as your feet plunge into it, and you take one last moment to plan. Then, before the sweeping claws of the nearest wyrm reach you, your legs kick off again, this time compressing the marble wall to at most half of its original thickness, the energy produced through the action sending you tearing toward the top of the lobby at a ridiculous speed.  Utilizing this time, you extend both arms, the microwave beam emitter cooking the brains out of two wyrms in the time it takes you to fire five bolts each at two others’ faces utilizing your armor’s built-in bolt launcher, their heads turning to mush beneath the force of the plasma slugs.

You tuck your body into a ball, kicking your legs out above you to catch the ceiling as you reach the top. Just as you do, one of the ice wyrms that had been crawling about up there took a swipe at you, catching you straight in the chest. Your armor protects you from any damage beyond a few cracked ribs and a loss of breath, but you’re thrown entirely to the far wall. You hit the wall with considerably more speed than really works in that position, so instead of bracing, you roll it out along the wall, catching the lip of a walkway about a floor down with your left hand as your right brings your sword to meet the nearest wyrm’s horrible maw. As the end of the blade emerges from the beast, your feet kick off again, sending you spiraling back down to the ground floor, where you can feel Keri moving toward a wyrm with the same stealth she used to follow you on your first day in the city. You land directly on the head of another wyrm, and you kick its roaring head into a forceful roll with enough of an impact to twist its spinal column out of alignment, its vertebrae snapping with a sound like the crack of a bolt of lightning. The remaining twenty wyrms must hear it, too, because the shriek that follows is too uniform, too simultaneous, and entirely too much like a war cry for your comfort. One of the wyrms is quickly silenced, however, as Keri’s own microwave emitter aims straight up and cooks its brain like steamed korn. You hold out your own and boil the life out of the two that had just turned toward her.

 

‘Seventeen left,’ you hear her say into her own mind. ‘I can get…’ There is a pause as she fires a bolt straight into the eye of an approaching wyrm. ‘Seven.’ She turns to you and calls out over the wireless, “Can you get these ones next, please?” A series of ten target identifiers appear on your screen, each corresponding to a different wyrm.

In response, your hands go out, and two of the designated wyrms die within moments, the work of your emitter and bolt launcher. Before you hit the ground, still riding the head of your earlier kill, the wyrm that struck you earlier drops toward you from the ceiling, sweeping its paw toward you with more foresight than you would normally expect. It screams as you start to dodge, and it swings its tail wide, realigning its motion with your own. You twist about, pressing your hand into the flesh of the dead wyrm beneath you to change your direction again, but you can’t find a good grip, and now it’s too late.

The wyrm’s massive fin strikes you with the force of a high-energy repeater blast straight to the back, breaking the sound blaster sitting there. In response, the other wyrms shriek victoriously and move in, their aggression renewed now that the sound inhibiting them has been eliminated. You can feel their malice as they move toward Keri, who has just taken out another wyrm. You try to move out toward her, but the wyrm has you pinned, its massive jaw trying to close over your head. It’s all you can do to give your neck the strength not to break, the light in your helmet almost obscuring your view of your screen completely. You hear a scream over the wireless that sounds entirely too little like a wyrm as Keri turns toward the approaching thirteen wyrms, who are stampeding toward her with a speed she hadn’t seen before.

“No,” you whisper to yourself, tears trying to force their way out of your eyes. The world turns dark as you pass completely into full glow out of desperation.