“Hundreds of thousands of them, my Neb,” Umat sighed. “Perhaps millions.”
“Prepare yourselves!” Akhu shouted as he pulled the lever on the arm of his couch. He swallowed hard, hoping to swallow the knot in his throat and quell the rapid pounding in his chest.
Umat pulled her lever and the litter bridge snapped into place.
Akhu snatched a large tarpaulin from under his couch and dragged it to the center of the bridge as Umat set up an iron tripod.
The war elephants galloped forward as Akhu and Umat continued to work, busily sliding tubes, gears and large canisters – all from the tarp – into place.
Gahs let loose a powerful roar, which shook the ground beneath him.
Akhu looked up from his work. The beetles had taken flight and a dark, clicking cloud closed upon the litter bridge.
“I’ll finish assembling Ra’s Rain,” Akhu shouted, wiping beads of sweat from his brow. “Fuel the Horns of Sekhmet and the Steamsword!”
Umat was a blur, grabbing a large calabash from her litter and emptying its contents into vents in the helmets of the elephants’ barding.
Akhu hoisted Ra’s Rain onto his shoulder then tossed the long, iron barrel of the weapon onto the tripod, fitting holes bored into the barrel’s bottom onto the tripod’s hooks. The massive weapon locked into place.
A shadow darkened the litter bridge.
“The creatures are upon us, my Neb!” Umat yelled.
“I suggest you work a little faster, then!” Akhu replied as he screwed a tube into the spigot of a steel barrel that sat over a roaring flame.
The sulfurous stench of feces assaulted his nostrils. He turned his gaze skyward. The clicking, black cloud of beetles was descending upon the litter. Akhu snatched back the canopy and stood behind Ra’s Rain. “Fusii…Gahs…now!”
The twin war elephants raised their armored trunks skyward. A column of fire erupted from the nozzles connected to the barding covering each elephant’s eight foot long proboscis.
The Horns of Sekhmet proved effective as the flames engulfed the beetles, roasting hundreds of them and injuring hundreds more. The dead beetles – and their living kindred – fell to the earth, where Gahs and Fusii set about crushing the creatures under foot.
Umat tossed the Steamsword to Akhu with one hand as she pulled a large wheeled crate with the other. She pulled the heavy crate, which was filled with fist-sized steel balls, next to Ra’s Rain.
On the ground, the beetles crawled together with military-like precision, forming a hundred or so patches of blackness upon the grass. Each group of beetles then began to fuse together, writhing and clicking as their bodies became one. After a few moments, a hundred large, chitinous black balls lay upon the field of battle.
The clicking ceased. The balls were still.
Akhu brought his telescope to his eye and studied the balls intensely. “Gahs, please, do us the honors.”
Gahs nodded and then raised his right foreleg. He slammed his foot down, beating a small crater into the grass. The force of the powerful stomp sent a shockwave across the battlefield, sending the beetle-balls bouncing upward.
The balls fell back to the earth and then…no sound…no movement.
“Uh-huh,” Umat grunted as she rubbed her smooth scalp with the palm of her hand. “So…do we move on? Do we…wait for something to happen? Umm…”
“Perhaps the creatures are displaying a gesture of surrender. I guess we press on,” Akhu said with a shrug. “Brother…sister…please, take us forward and step on those things as you go.”
The balls began to vibrate; to quake. A loud clicking din rose from each ball.
“Or…not,” Akhu sighed.
“I knew this was too easy!” Umat spat.
“One can only hope, Umat. Load up Ra’s Rain, I’m going down for a closer look.” Akhu drew the Steamsword and leapt to the ground. He landed with a dull thud. “Send down a line!”
Umat lowered a thin flexible tube to him. Akhu slid the tube’s open end over a spigot on the sword’s leather-wrapped steel pommel.
“Give it some heat,” he shouted.
Umat turned a lever on the heated barrel that sat on the litter-bridge. A few moments later, the Steamsword’s blade began to glow with a reddish tint, heated by the hair-thin copper veins running the length of the flat sides of the weapon.
“That’s enough,” Akhu said, pulling the tube from the sword’s pommel.
Umat turned off the heat and drew the line back up.
“Get ready!” Akhu shouted.
Akhu leapt toward a beetle-ball, raising the Steamsword above his head. As he descended, he brought the tip of the sword downward, thrusting it hilt-deep into the ball of fused insects.
The ball burst into flames and the burning beetles separated with a loud series of clicks.
“I thought so,” Akhu shouted to his comrades. “The beetles are metamorphosing into something. We need to kill them now. Something tells me we do not want to be here when the metamorphosis is complete!”
A pulsing sound, like the pounding of an army of djembe drums on the horizon, rose from the field of chitinous spheres. The beetle-balls unfolded in unison. Within seconds, standing before Akhu was a platoon of hulking humanoid creatures with large, wicked-looking mandibles, razor-sharp claws and spiked, black, armored exoskeletons.
“Too late, my Neb,” Umat shouted.
Akhu rolled his eyes. “You think?”
The beetle-warriors charged forward.
Akhu and the elephants surged forward to meet them.
Akhu slashed fiercely with the Steamsword, setting beetle-warriors ablaze with each strike, as Fusii and Gahs butted, gored and trampled the monsters with abandon. Score after score of beetle-warriors fell under the onslaught of Akhu and his elephant companions.
The creatures suddenly broke engagement and retreated.
Akhu reheated the Steamsword and Umat refueled the Horns of Sekhmet as they watched the beetle-warriors – about an acre away – fuse into each other once more, their carapaces softening and melting into one another until all the surviving beetles had formed one massive ball, which sat taller and wider than Fusii, Gahs and the litter-bridge.
“Oh, no!” Akhu exclaimed. “Brother…Sister…Charge that thing! Destroy it!”
Akhu sprinted across the grass toward the monolithic ball. Fusii and Gahs galloped forward close upon his heels, sending chunks of rent earth flying behind them. Akhu closed within two yards of the massive ball and then exploded into the air, the Steamsword raised above his head.
The ball unfolded into a spiked, black titan, which towered over the party of stunned would-be liberators. The creature stood as tall as an elder eucalyptus tree and twice as wide as the great tree’s trunk.
Akhu thrust his sword into the creature’s foot.
The monstrosity snatched him with a claw and lifted him skyward. He screamed in agony as the crushing pressure of the creature’s claw threatened to shatter his ribcage. Akhu thrust the Steamsword into the giant beetle’s claw. The creature screamed a series of quick clicks and then released its grip, allowing Akhu to plummet toward the ground far below.
Akhu stabbed the Steamsword through the monster’s armored torso and sank the weapon deep into the giant’s chest, halting his descent. The creature clicked loudly, reeling backward from the pain in its chest.