At least five thousand warriors stormed toward the city and Tiet’s ambush. Kale readied his pulse rifle and his blade. The coalition would need every bit of firepower they had, but it probably still would not be enough.
The enemy forces poured into the village square, coming around the fountain as they advanced. Kale heard the command from his brother, “Fire!” and the battle was on. All of the Castillian soldiers blazed into combat from their hidden positions. A massive wave of pulse laser fire erupted against the advancing Baruk. Immediately they scattered and sought cover from the onslaught. Many were cut down as the laser fire punched through the symbiotic exoskeletons.
Kale noticed, once again, the strange life signature of moving lines as he peered through his ocular lens. They were moving very close to the Castillian position now. It’s almost as if they were underground! But the thought occurred to Kale too late. Just as he rose from his position, amid the return fire from the Baruk warriors, the hurutai erupted from beneath the ground.
Kale had seen them once before, but had only vaguely remembered the capabilities of the huge worm-like creatures. They moved very fast. As their heads pushed upwards through the surface they caught the Castillian soldiers completely off guard.
Around the neck area of the creatures were hundreds of long spines shooting forth in every direction from the vesicles which produced them. Kale saw ten worms emerging among the troops as he leaped behind a barrier. Soldiers around the creatures were hit by the spines. Each one contained a fast acting neurotoxin to quickly put down their prey.
That was what Kale had remembered the most. The hurutai paralyzed the voluntary skeletal muscle functions of their prey so they could feed on fresh meat without a struggle. He had seen one eat up to ten men at once, holding them within its long wormy body for a slow digestion over several days. As Kale peered back at his previous perch he saw it pierced with poison needles all around. He remembered his brother, searching for him amid the chaos.
Tiet fired his pulse rifle at every target he could find. The Something blew up out of the ground nearby. He turned from his crouched position to find a huge worm-like head pushing through the ground. He had never seen anything like it.
Tiet’s men fell around him as needlelike spines erupted from a colored ring around the creature’s head. Tiet raised his weapon to shoot, but his arms became limp. He looked down as the pulse rifle fell out of his hands and saw a spine fixed in his lower left abdomen. He pulled it out as his vision went blurry and the buildings and terrain began to spin. Tiet felt the ground smash hard into his face as he tumbled over helplessly. He tried to cry out for help but could not.
The beast reared its head around and slammed into the ground, bringing more of its body out onto the surface. It opened a huge orifice allowing long tentacle-like tongues to issue forth across the ground. The horrid beast latched onto several Castillian soldiers lying on the ground and quickly pulled their paralyzed bodies into its own hulking mass, consuming them alive.
Tiet could see it all, but he could not move. He tried to use the Way, but he was too dizzy and disoriented to concentrate. It looked like this would be his end-eaten alive by these monsters of the Baruk.
Around him, soldiers he had trained personally from among the Castillians and the Vorn were being pulled into the gullets of the creatures. He would have wept for them if he could, or risen to save them, but it was no use. He could see laser fire still being exchanged with the Baruk. He saw more of the creatures, like this worm, spraying their venomous darts at his soldiers as they tried to fend off what was quickly becoming a slaughter.
In the near distance Tiet saw the approach of the Baruk as they made their way up the slope. If the worms didn’t take him, the Baruk certainly would. A coiled tentacle swept over his body as the creature moved its head in his direction. The horrid appendage latched onto Tiet’s leg and began to pull him toward the gaping maw of the creature. It leveled its head to his position as the tentacle pulled his limp body through the dirt.
This was it. It was over-a brand new coalition of Vorn and Castillian people working together for peace and safety, with him as their king. Now it was going to end. The Baruk were winning. They had lost most of the Vorn cruisers trying to prevent the ground war which now would probably destroy the Twelve Cities. He was ultimately responsible as their leader.
A blur shot across his visual field and suddenly the tentacle was hanging from his leg, severed. From above the head of the great worm beast, Tiet saw a lone figure coming down upon it with a Barudii blade. The warrior drove the sword straight into whatever brain the beast might possess.
The creature reared up as the soldier drove it deep again. Then the beast gave up the fight. It’s head crashed with tremendous force into the ground near Tiet’s paralyzed body. Without warning, the soldier picked him up, almost as if Tiet’s body had levitated onto the man’s back. Then they were off and running. He heard a voice as the scenery changed before his paralyzed eyes. “Don’t worry. I’ll get you out of here, brother.”
It couldn’t be. Kale? But he was in detention at Baeth Periege. And suddenly, with the realization, Tiet felt no anger, only relief that somehow and for some reason his brother was here to save his life.
He heard Kale as he called for a retreat of their soldiers to behind the defense wall. “Abandon your posts and return to the city immediately, by order of the King!” Tiet was glad Kale was taking charge. His men were getting slaughtered and Tiet would have called the retreat himself had he been able. Hopefully, the remaining civilian population had been able to get behind Wynn’s ten mile front by now. They had been nearly out by the time the defense cannons were set to auto-track and left running.
Kale joined other soldiers who were now in full retreat from the advancing Baruk. They had to reach the access portals quickly to get inside the wall before the enemy caught up with them. Fortunately it appeared that the hurutai were still busy feeding, leaving only the Baruk warriors on their trail.
Baruk weapons could be heard all around, pounding the surrounding buildings, taking down more Castillian soldiers attempting to retreat behind the defense wall. Of five hundred elite warriors, which had come to the battlefield with their king, fewer than a hundred remained standing.
Kale tried to put as many structures between himself and the advancing Baruk as he could to block the storm of weapon’s fire around them. It was difficult to evade all the gunfire with his brother hanging limp across his back. He was supporting the majority of Tiet’s weight with his mental power, but his movements were still cumbersome.
Some of the other soldiers had already reached the wall and accessed one of the portals leading through. One of the soldiers stood at the doorway, waving warriors inside. Kale followed them through the passageway that took them beyond the defense wall into the city. Several of the soldiers guarded the portal until they could see no other Castillian soldiers. Then they followed the others through, sealing the doorway behind them.
The Baruk were locked outside of the city now. As Kale came out into the open, he spotted a place where a med station had been set up and left for anyone that might be wounded in the battle. The other soldiers were congregating around several of these stations.
Kale laid his brother down and examined him. He passed a med-scanner across his paralyzed body, determining that he was alive, despite the neurotoxin from the hurutai. He took one of the needle leads from the scanner and pushed it into Tiet’s deltoid muscle. It may have hurt him, but Kale had to do a neuro-muscular scan in order to determine how best to treat the poison. The scanner ran through a series of tests over several minutes. When it had finished, instructions came across the screen instructing Kale on what medication combination would be effective in reversing the paralytic effect of the hurutai neurotoxin.