They loaded up fast and pulled out. Ron took the wheel and swung the MRAP back toward the tree line while Hayes’ vehicle fell in behind.
Henry checked the RWS feed. The Gigolith hadn’t moved yet – still standing where it had risen, watching them drive away like a kaiju sizing up its options.
“Ain’t no way that thing follows us,” Hayes said over the radio. “Right?”
Sure enough, the Gigolith took a step, slamming its foot down hard enough to straight-up bounce the MRAP from half a mile away. One stride covered roughly half a city block, and the second step made it pretty clear they weren’t going to outrun it.
“Ay, jinx us one more motherfuckin’ time. One more motherfuckin’ time, Hayes!” Ron shouted, pushing the MRAP as hard as he could without losing control.
“Yeah… my bad.”
Henry keyed the radio. “Hayes, get the TOW spun up. If it keeps coming, send it.”
“Copy.”
He turned to Sera. “Grab our rifles – mine and Ron’s. Use the red. Pop the hatch and keep it on semi for now.”
Sera’s eyes lit up. She had both rifles slung and had the turret hatch open before Henry could say another word. He probably should’ve been a little more concerned about how excited she was, but honestly, he had bigger problems right now.
The next footfall hit even harder, heavy enough to rattle the gear in the back and knock his tablet off his knee. He glanced at the speedometer, which hovered around a measly thirty-five thanks to the fuckass terrain. At that speed, it was only a matter of time before the Gigolith caught up.
“Hayes, send the TOW.”
“Firing.”
The TOW crossed the basin in a few seconds and struck the Gigolith high on the chest. The shaped charge detonated on contact, kicking up a cloud of rock dust and crystalline debris and leaving a crater in the plating about the size of a manhole cover. Yet in the grand scheme of things, it had done jack shit. The Gigolith didn’t even break stride.
“Shit – no effect on target,” Hayes called out.
Henry had been hoping for better, but he wasn’t surprised. TOWs had performed decently against the Sentinel Lindwyrm. But against what was basically a mountain with legs, the jet couldn’t hope to get shit done.
They’d need a bunker buster to crack something like this – though honestly, given that he was staring down an actual kaiju, Henry would’ve much rather had a Jaeger.
Unfortunately, all he had to work with were the reds, a Switchblade 600, and a rack of TOWs that were apparently decorative against Tier 9 plating. They probably wouldn’t accomplish much, but to be fair, all they really needed to do was slow this thing down.
“Hayes, hit it with everything you’ve got. Sera, you too.”
While both of them opened up, Henry picked the tablet up off the floor and pulled up the Switchblade’s launch interface. The drone kicked out of its tube on the MRAP’s flank and climbed fast, stabilizing into a loiter above the basin. He brought up the targeting feed and started maneuvering it toward the Gigolith’s front.
The targeting feed gave him a front-row view of the combined fire, the results of which weren’t very encouraging. He hadn’t expected the .50 to do much to begin with, but he’d severely overestimated the reds. They punched through the outer layer, sure, but were wholly insufficient. They weren’t gonna take down something the size of a parking garage with bottle-sized holes.
For all the punishment they’d thrown at it, the Gigolith hadn’t so much as flinched.
The Switchblade probably wouldn’t do much better, especially considering the TOW’s performance. But if Henry couldn’t hurt the thing, he could at least try to blind it.
Too bad that plan came with its own problems. The Switchblade’s targeting package couldn’t lock onto a Bralnor any more than it could lock onto a literal boulder, which meant the drone wasn’t going to do anything useful unless Henry flew it himself.
Under normal circumstances that would’ve been manageable. But between the Gigolith hammering the basin floor every few seconds and Sera cycling rounds from the hatch above him, doing so was a hell of a lot harder than he expected.
In fact, the ride had turned into such a rollercoaster that Sera had already bent the hatch frame inward just from gripping it. Hell, she could probably pop his head like a watermelon if she felt like it, and right now every ounce of that force was going straight through his roof.
Eventually, he found an opening when Sera had to reload at the same time the Gigolith was between steps.
He swung the drone toward the face and sent it.
The feed cut on impact. Henry shoved the tablet into the dashboard cubby and swapped to the RWS, catching the tail end of the blast. The drone had left what amounted to an acne scar on the Gigolith’s face, chunks of rock tumbling down its chest and scattering across the basin floor. The head rocked back, and for about two seconds the creature actually stopped moving.
Then it roared – deep as fuck. The sensation was a lot closer to an earthquake than to anything even the Megaliths had produced. And as if shit couldn’t get worse, the Gigolith dropped its head as soon as it finished, and broke into a full sprint.
“Oh, fuck me,” Ron said.
“Henry – it is running!” Sera called down through the hatch.
Each footfall landed closer than the last, the interval shrinking fast enough that Henry didn’t need the feed to track the closure rate. He could feel it compressing through the floor.
Hayes fired a second TOW then.
Henry caught it on the RWS – not aimed at the Gigolith, but at the base of a tall rock formation between its path and their vehicles. The foundation blew out and the whole face came down in a cascading shear, slabs of stone and packed ice and frozen soil sliding into the basin floor and swallowing the Gigolith’s next three strides.
Eight stories of living rock hit the slide at a dead sprint and pitched forward into a field of its own geology. The impact rang loud enough that Henry’s ears kept ringing even through the hull, and the dust cloud that bloomed behind it swallowed everything past a hundred meters.
“Hell yeah! How ’bout that!” Hayes whooped over the radio.
“Good fucking thinking,” Henry said.
Nothing came out of the dust for a few seconds. Henry let himself believe, briefly, that they’d bought enough distance to clear the basin.
But of course, Murphy’s Law wouldn’t allow that. Dozens of Monoliths emerged from the rock formations on both flanks, pulling themselves out of random-ass landscape they hadn’t bothered to check. Two Megaliths followed from the far side of the basin, peeling away from the outcrops along the ridgeline.
The roar had woken the entire basin up, and the ones closest to the tree line had already cut off the road they’d come in on.
Through the thinning dust, the Gigolith had already started pulling itself back up.
“Plan?” Ron asked, looking at the mirror.
Henry pulled up the terrain on his tablet. “Fuck, we gotta go right. There should be a road that links back to Kharvûk on the other side of this valley – we just gotta get through a field of geysers first.”
“You bullshittin’.” Despite that, Ron still turned the wheel. “You want me to drive through fuckin’ what?”
“Geysers. Should be mostly open ground. Just, y’know, don’t drive us into a geyser.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Ron grumbled.
Henry left it at that and tapped Sera’s leg. “Sera, come down and close the hatch.”
She dropped in and pulled it shut. With Sera safe inside, Henry got on the RWS and brought the turret around to face aft.
Fourteen Monoliths had pulled out of the rock formations on the left flank alone, spread in a loose arc that curved toward the vehicles. Meanwhile, the two Megaliths trailed further back near the ridgeline. But where was the Gigolith?
As soon as he wondered that, he found the Gigolith, half-obscured by the dust cloud from Hayes’ rockslide, already rising to its feet.
So that answered that question. All that remained was determining how the fuck they were supposed to get out of this situation.
The Gigolith was obviously a lost cause, but the herd was something they could manage. Between the .50 and the Striker 40, they could at least prevent the smaller Bralnors from intercepting them.
“Hayes, you handle the right – if you get a cluster or the Megaliths close in, use the TOWs. Don’t waste ’em.”
“Yup yup.”
While Hayes handled the right, Henry swiveled the turret onto the closest Monolith on the left and let the .50 go.
He didn’t expect much, but the machine gun handled Monoliths about as well as he could’ve hoped. A sustained burst at two hundred meters punched through the plating and dropped the first one before it could close any further. The next few suffered the same fate.
It wasn’t instantaneous – each one took a good second or two of sustained fire to put down – but it was fast enough that they weren’t quite bullet sponges.
The turret work itself was straightforward enough once he found the rhythm. The RWS tracking kept the reticle relatively stable even when Ron hit rough patches, and the Monoliths were obliging enough to charge in more or less straight lines. He worked through four on the left over the next minute while Hayes picked off more on the right, and between the two vehicles they’d carved out enough of a buffer that the rest of the pack had dwindled down to those behind the boulder line – either cautious or just too far out to have caught up yet.
It was manageable, for now. Though given how the rest of the day had gone, Henry wasn’t exactly ready to call it handled.
“Holy shit,” Ron said, “you weren’t kidding about the geysers.”
As much as Henry wanted to take a look, the encroaching Bralnors kept him occupied. He swapped to a Megalith that had been gaining on the right and put two Striker rounds into it. The second one hit clean enough to buckle it sideways into a boulder. That bought some room – but before he could get back to the Monoliths, Ron called out “Brace!” and cut the wheel hard enough to throw his reticle off target.
Ron swerved like a madman, threading through something up ahead. Henry braced against the RWS console and waited for the ride to settle before swinging the turret back around.
Once the reticle steadied, what hit Henry first was not even the scale of the place, though that was crazy enough, but the fact that the tundra was just gone. It had been replaced by a geothermal basin so visually aggressive that for a second it barely registered as a real landscape at all.
Deep rusted oranges and yellows bled through the rock where the vents had stained it, almost too vivid against the gray and white they’d been driving through all day. Steam rose off the whole field, vents producing everything from thin hissing wisps to white plumes thick enough to blank out entire sections of the feed.
Henry had been to Yellowstone twice – once on a family trip as a kid, once during a cross-country drive after graduation – and he’d thought Grand Prismatic was about as dramatic as geothermal got. Turns out that only applied to Earth.
And of course, Gaerra didn’t just mean bigger and better; it also meant a hell of a lot more dangerous. A geyser erupted to the left, shooting a short-lived column of scalding water that pelted the side of the MRAP hard enough to hear through the armor. Before the steam had even cleared, two more went off closer to the Bralnors, bursting like pressurized pipes rupturing under the crust – possibly in a literal sense.
Given how heavy those things were, Henry wouldn’t be surprised if that was exactly what was happening.
On the bright side, he wasn’t the only one getting fucked over. Monoliths had started falling through the crust wherever the venting had weakened it, their own weight doing the work for him. One of them dropped mid-stride into a patch of ground that simply gave way, and every attempt to claw out just crumbled more of the edge and worked it deeper. Another hit a weak spot at a full sprint and went through so fast the steam was the only sign it had ever been there.
Too bad it wasn’t enough; he still had plenty left on his plate. Fresh Bralnors had started appearing from the rock formations flanking the field, and more still from the direction the Gigolith had come. They must’ve been drawn by the noise, or the roar, or just the general chaos of a stampede tearing through their backyard.
Between the reinforcements and what was left of the original herd, the Monoliths had enough numbers to keep charging without much regard for the ones that fell through. The Megaliths, at least, played it safer; they picked careful routes along solid rock and sidestepped the worst of the venting.
Naturally, the Gigolith didn’t bother with any of that. It had entered the field maybe thirty seconds behind them, like a high-rise wading through a parking lot full of fire hydrants. Hell, it didn’t even seem to care about the geyser blasts lapping against its lower legs.
The crust, though, cost it. Like wading through snow, each step bled the momentum from the last, and the thing never quite built back up to the sprint it had managed on solid ground.
Henry checked the range behind them. The gap had opened to nearly a kilometer, the Gigolith falling further back with every step. Although the field itself represented a decent stopgap, it wasn’t enough to stem the tide.
Henry put them down as fast as his aim could track. The field helped out, contributing a few mobility kills here and there. Every other sweep, he’d catch one thrashing around in a crater it couldn’t climb out of, legs scrambling against walls that crumbled faster than they could find purchase.
He nearly laughed at the absurdity of it all. Shooting bad guys in a high-speed chase through insane terrain? It was, without exaggeration, the most Call of Duty shit he had ever experienced in real life – and given the past few months, that bar was already pretty fucking high.
The chase continued for another few minutes until the geysers finally thinned out and the terrain gave way to a wide glacial plain, frozen and flat, with a river running parallel on their right. Ron gunned it the second the surface allowed, pushing them past fifty miles per hour for the first time since the basin.
It genuinely looked like they might finally lose the Bralnors, up until a new cluster of Monoliths emerged from a series of burrows along the western edge of the plain. More appeared further ahead, and by the time he’d tagged those, another group had already pulled itself out of the rocks beside the river.
Henry stared at the feed. The Guild surveys had tagged two populations in the area, but he hadn’t expected the two clusters to turn out to be an entire colony.
Between the river on their right and the clusters on their left, the only way out was through.
“Hayes, hostiles ahead! Use the TOW!”
“On it!”
Hayes put a missile into a group of three Monoliths that had bunched up about four hundred meters ahead. The detonation scattered all three – one killed outright, the other two knocked far enough off the road to clear the lane. Henry followed up with the .50 on anything that wandered back in, and between the two vehicles they carved a corridor just wide enough to maintain speed.
It worked, for about a minute. Hayes burned through four TOWs in that time. Same went for Henry’s grenades. For every Bralnor they put down or shoved aside, another two pulled themselves out of the ground to fill the gap.
Sera tapped Henry’s shoulder. “Captain, I hear water crashing ahead. A great deal of it.”
“Shit, she’s right – there’s a fuckin’ waterfall up ahead!” Ron yelled. “We don’t have a lot of room left, bro!”