The Core: The Dark Enemy

40. Oh, Daughter of Mine

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Chapter 40!!!

Only around 15 more chapters to go till this book and series is done!

Thank you all who are still hanging in there. ^_^

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Ess descended like an indigo falling star, jaws flared wide, spewing fire that washed violently over the tightly curled form of the spider. I, still focused on tracking down the many remaining Void Seedlings, only noticed her as she began her kamikaze attack. Her entrance was impossible to miss—the sudden brilliance of something igniting in the distance before erupting into a massive jet of flames aimed at the creature on the edge of the battlescape.

"Ess?" I whispered, pausing my work to watch her violent assault. Cracks split her scales down the sides of her body, and flames jetted from within, making her look like a leaking and flaming war pilot resolved to end everything by taking the enemy with her. She was hurt!

My pause in crushing the Seedlings gave everything space to recover from its locked state of fear. The first to twitch was the massive spider, writhing from the pain of its burning limbs. It shuddered and flexed in a vain attempt to smother the flames, only spreading them further across its body. Its many eyes were revealed from behind its limbs, all gray from its fright state, but quickly recovering as the inevitable happened:

Ess blasted into it like a runaway train.

She hit hard, jaws clamping down on the nearest limb, her flexible teeth latching fast before she coiled and snapped forward in a violent ripple—like a slinky cascading down stairs. Her body whipped past with such force that I gasped as the spider's limb tore free, ligaments shredding, muscles splitting, before she flung it into the distance like scrap.

Only then did the size disparity strike me. Ess, enormous as I remembered her, had grown, but still she was dwarfed by the spider's ever-expanding bulk. Against it, she might as well have been a wolf set against a grizzly bear. The disparity only widened as the spider, shocked by the pain of losing a limb, extended its many others in a threatening posture, its reach spanning vast distances.

Ess spun in place, using the momentum of flinging the limb to hurl herself back into striking range. One of the spider's flexing, searing limbs grazed her in passing, and at that instant all its eyes fixed on her. The beast's mind snapped into focus, driven to its one delight—attacking and feasting on prey within its reach.

Panic clutched my throat as the clash unfolded before me. For a heartbeat I forgot my purpose, my chest jolting as the two behemoths tore at each other for blood. A painful hiss dragged me back—a Void Seedling pressing against my arm, sizzling and straining to force itself into the shell encasing me. I smashed it with my palm, its body erupting in a burst of power. My lapse had given the swarm of evil lights time to converge, and I spun in place, crushing them in desperation before they could burrow inside.

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Helvlad rebooted his connection to the armada. The disturbances were sharp but brief, lasting barely a second. Rebooting was nearly instantaneous, and now—after tracing the cause and duration of the failure—he was able to program a secure cycle. Future disruptions would register as his own system resetting, not as an external cut severing his link.

"What a pesky effect," he muttered, his eyestalks tracking the frozen human in the distance. He had only until that pest clapped again to issue his next commands and slip the workaround to Q'tell, bypassing the interference.

Notifications scrolled across his vision as his limbs directed the fleet into formation. The arrival of a Leva was startling enough. Stranger still was its black and white scale coloration—and the fact that it bled fire. For once, Helvlad had no frame of reference. Its bone structure marked it as a juvenile, though larger and healthier than any he had ever cataloged. But breathing fire? Not even the Leva King nor its dead mate had ever displayed such a trait.