Chapter 48 - 47 — Five Returned II
Forties, greying at the temple, a long-handled blade and the sort of gear that has been repaired rather than replaced. He had introduced himself to about six people in the staging yard, including me, and he had been perfectly pleasant about it.
When the wave broke, he was the one who went along the line asking people if they were hurt before the healers reached them.
I remember thinking he was exactly the kind of person you want in a bad Gate.
---
Nobody died.
That is what changed the mood. Renard ran an injury check and came back with four people cut, one puncture that needed proper attention, and nothing worse.
You could feel the whole cavern loosen.
Somebody made a joke about the smell while wiping his blade, and it actually landed, and two people laughed. The Tank who had checked her straps eleven times in the yard stopped checking them.
I could not get there with them.
Twenty prepared Players had just taken a wave of Level 18 predators in an ambush environment and lost nobody, and that was the thing bothering me, because I know how this ends and I still could not see the shape of it.
Fifteen people do not die to this.
---
The path narrowed between two broad pools, and the water on the left went still.
Completely still. Not a ripple on it, and no drip coming off the roots above that section either, which meant nothing was disturbing the surface from above or below.
I saw two of the ranged scouts stop looking at the ceiling and start looking at the front.
Then the first head came out of the water on the right.
It did not come straight up the path. It erupted from the pool *beside* the front line, and its jaws closed over the edge of a Meridian Tank’s shield and dragged him sideways hard enough to take both boots off the stone.
The neck kept rising.
And then more of it kept coming, and more, and the thing had a girth like a transport pipe.
> **[Amphisbaena — Level 29]**
>
> **[Elite Monster]**
>
> **[HP: 9,600/9,600.]**
Everybody turned toward it.
Which is exactly what it wanted.
---
The second head came out of the water *behind* us.
Not a second creature. The same body, looped around through the flooded channels under the stone shelf we were standing on, so that when the rear head came up it was already inside the formation’s back edge.
Its jaws went at one of the healers.
A ranged fighter got a shoulder into her and put her down flat, and took the bite across his own torso instead, and the head threw him into a stone shelf like a man throwing a coat onto a bed.
At the same moment the front head let go of the Tank’s shield and sprayed venom down the front rank.
Most of it hit a shield. The rest hit armour, and the armour started smoking, and one man was screaming about his face before anybody could see whether he had a reason to.
The formation stretched. I felt it happen. Half of us turned front and half turned rear and the middle went thin.
"REAR HEAD IS THE SAME ANIMAL." Renard’s voice cut the whole cavern. "It is one body. Do not split, ROTATE. Kessler’s half takes the front, Ide’s half takes the rear, healers stay exactly where you are and do not move for anybody."
He was frightened. I could hear it under the words.
He gave the orders anyway, and the orders were correct, and that is the entire difference between a captain and a man with a title.
---
I was nearer the rear head.
It came off the ranged fighter it had thrown and turned toward him again, and the healer was still four metres out.
I went.
Heel burst, up the flank of the neck, and I put a solar fist into the hinge behind its lower jaw, because a jaw that size has to open somewhere and that is where.
The scales blackened and split.
The joint did not break.
> **[HP: 9,600/9,600 → 9,182/9,600.]**
Then it whipped sideways, and I got the gauntlet up in time and it did not matter at all, because what hit me was the side of a skull the size of a car door.
The impact went through the gauntlet, up the arm, into the shoulder, and then I was in the air.
I hit the wet stone shoulder first and skidded.
> **[Health: 320/320 → 251/320.]**
The arm did not break. That is what the gauntlets are for.
But my fingers stopped working for about four seconds, and my breath had gone somewhere else entirely, and when I tried to push myself up my hand slid out from under me on the wet rock.
The head came around for me.
Gideon got there first.
---
I will describe only what I saw, because I still do not know everything he can do.
His whole body changed density. That is the closest I can get.
The mana came up over him and his weapon at the same moment, and his outline did not change at all, but the stone under his boots cracked in a ring when he set his feet.
The Amphisbaena bit him.
He did not dodge it and he did not counter it. He put himself between that head and me and he took the bite on his weapon and his forearms together, and he stopped it dead about a metre and a half from my face.
The head pushed. He held.
Two Meridian frontliners were on it four seconds later.
I got up.
I was not embarrassed about it. There is a version of me from six years ago who would have been, and that person is exactly why I had two clears and nothing else.
What I did instead was watch the jaw.
Every time it opened to bite, the scales at the hinge separated. That was where I had already burned it, and that was the only part of this animal that opened by itself.
"Push it left," I said to Gideon.
If he had any questions; he didn’t say.
He drove into the head with his shoulder and turned it, and the jaw came open, and I put everything I had into the same hinge.
Two Meridian fighters hit the opposite side at the same moment.
The joint cracked with a sound like a tree coming apart.
And then, the rear head shrieked.