Note: I'm still trying to get back into work, so I'll probably take next week off as well. Hopefully I'll be back for an uninterrupted summer.
The round connected dead center, snapping the head back with enough force that the body should’ve followed. The torso barely rocked at the hip, legs planted as though bolted to the floor, completely indifferent to the impact.
Without any muscular effort Cole could identify, the head drifted back to its original position, as though the round had been a minor inconvenience. A massive void sat in the middle of its face, where its eyes, nose, and mouth once were. Dark, slimy gunk dripped from the top of the hole into itself, gradually knitting itself back together. It was, without question, the most viscerally revolting shit he’d ever laid eyes on – and he’d seen plenty of gore throughout his ops.
The cavity closed in about three seconds, writhing into a solid mass before finally restoring the lost facial features and the skin’s color. Well, to some extent. Though the complexion nearly matched the surrounding face, it still remained a shade off.
Now, he’d dealt with mimics before. Hell, they’d fought several on their first night in Celdorne, only those went down with enough damage. It had taken a few solid hits to ruin their disguises, leaving behind some half-formed mutants that only barely looked humanoid. And to top it all off, none of them had ever healed a wound, let alone reconstructed an entire face from scratch.
This thing, on the other hand, operated so far above the baseline that Cole couldn’t even call it a mimic anymore – not without slapping ‘Alpha’ in front of it, at least. If he had to guess, this new threat had to be on par with Graves or Vale, if not both combined. As such, it’d be a real bitch to deal with.
Its freshly restored face regarded him the way a sommelier might regard someone who’d just ordered a beer.
“How uncommonly ill-mannered.” The demon had dropped the Fernal act, replacing it with the most insufferably haughty snobbishness Cole had encountered thus far. “I had gone to no small trouble in preparing a familiar countenance for your arrival, and the least –”
Unfortunately for the shapeshifter, nobody present had the slightest patience for standing around like anime protagonists while the villain finished monologuing. Cole shot it in the mouth mid-sentence, followed by the rest of the team lighting the bastard up before it could so much as close its jaw.
The team continued firing, hammering round after round into the Alpha Mimic’s frame in a sustained barrage that had the thing jerking around like in an action movie. Yet for all the punishment it took, the creature refused to drop. Each round punched through with a flat, wet splat that sounded more like slapping a water balloon than shooting a living target.
Upon firing the last round in his mag, Cole reloaded. “Cease fire!”
Cole peered through the thinning smoke, already fairly certain of what he’d find. The demon hadn’t moved an inch, its torso, arms, and legs riddled with entry wounds that oozed viscous, gelatinous goop. The material clearly wasn’t dense enough to stop impacts; in fact, most of the energy had passed right through the body and ended up in the walls and floor behind it. All they’d really accomplished was burning through their ammo and redecorating the concourse – without, as far as Cole could tell, actually hurting the damn monster.
The demon, apparently deciding that talking shit took priority over wound repair, reformed its face before so much as closing a single hole. Its body from the neck down still looked like Swiss cheese, but the mouth worked just fine.
“You insolent little wretches – have you no manners?!”
Six tendrils erupted from the mimic’s open wounds, fanning across the concourse, with tips that hardened into hooked blades as they extended. The lead tendril closed on Cole with the speed of a fastball, forcing him to catch the hook across the body of his rifle before it took his head off. The impact drove him back a full step, the blade scraping along the barrel hard enough to gouge the finish.
He secured the rifle in its sling and drew his blade. “Blades out! Swap to blades!”
The demon’s voice rumbled from all around them, coming from the dozens of orifices popping up along the tendrils. “You shall attend me properly, lest I become markedly less delicate when I induct you into my collection!”
Cole barely had time to raise his blade before the first one came for his head. He caught the hook on the flat of his blade, then sidestepped a second strike that nearly took his throat out. The third he redirected with a parry ugly enough to earn a lecture from the real Fernal, had he been present.
The enhancement and multicasting drills Lady Verna had put them through back in the capital were, at this particular moment, quite possibly the most valuable training Cole had ever received. His actual swordsmanship left a lot to be desired, but the enhancement carried his speed and reflexes well past what his technique alone could’ve managed, letting him track the tendrils’ movements faster than any unaugmented human had a right to. In hindsight, though, he really should’ve just spent more time drilling the sword.
The tendrils withdrew briefly after the third parry, which gave Cole just enough of a window to check on the others.
While the Celdornians suffered little difficulty with their share of the tendrils, having decades of practical blade experience to draw from, the rest of Cole’s team compensated for the gap in technique by pushing their enhancement harder than usual. Nobody had gone down, which, given the circumstances, was good enough for him.
Unfortunately, he didn’t get to enjoy the reprieve much longer; the tendrils resumed their assault.
Cole timed his next parry and followed through with a clean cut that sliced the tendril at the midpoint, dropping a solid chunk of the mimic’s mass to the floor. He watched it for a second, half-hoping the damn thing would stay put.
Naturally, it didn’t. The lump shuddered once, flattened against the tile, and slid right back into the mimic’s body like it had never left – reabsorbed so cleanly that the main mass didn’t even ripple.
That ruled out conventional blade work – unless they could destroy the separated gunk before it slid back in. This made the task herculean as fuck, but not impossible. The only question was how long that’d take to whittle down the demon. Hopefully the bombardment could distract the cultists until then.
Cole cut off another tendril on his next opening and incinerated the chunk with his wand before it had the chance to move. The mass charred black and stayed put, even after a wave of goop washed over it in an attempt to reclaim it. So heat was the answer.
The next course of action was obvious. He then tried scaling things up, shaping a fireball on the wand with enough juice to actually threaten the main body. He’d barely gotten a second and a half into the buildup before the mimic drove a tendril straight into the fireball, wasting the entire spell.
The Alpha Mimic, for all its insufferable grandstanding, was no idiot. As such, any spell that needed real casting time would just get the same treatment.
Well, that was fine by Cole. If he couldn’t go big, then he’d just go efficient.
Channeling heat through his blade until the edge shimmered, he cleaved through the next tendril in a single stroke. The stump hissed and blackened at the boundary, cauterized and therefore unable to reform.
Cole finished cleaning up the severed material and turned to call the next move, only to find the team had already worked it out for themselves. Good shit, honestly. Competence like that wasn’t something he took for granted, even if he never said it out loud.
The mimic, evidently unwilling to keep getting carved up piecemeal, started bleeding a thick fog off its mass. Within seconds, it had flooded the entire concourse, dropping visibility to about five feet.
Naturally, that was when a pile of goop rose from the tile in front of him, resolving into the shape of a man. The figure wore Vale’s face, identical to the actual guy in every detail except for the arms, which from the elbow down had been replaced with paired straight blades.
It launched an uppercut before he’d finished registering the sight, one that would have taken his lower jaw clean off if he hadn’t thrown himself backward on instinct. That was too damn close for comfort – close enough that he’d felt the wind off the swing as it passed.
Cole parried the next attack with his blade. He had to admit, the copy had decent form and strength behind its strikes, but the technique behind it was nowhere near what the real Vale could put out.
Still, even with the technique gap working in his favor, Cole couldn’t afford to settle into a real exchange. The longer this took, the more likely some random-ass tentacle would land a hit.
So he feigned his focus on the tendrils and let the copy come to him. And it did just that, committing its right blade to a low thrust. Once it got closer, Cole snapped a thin barrier into existence directly in its path mid-swing, angled to deflect. The blade skidded along the surface, the copy’s forward momentum leaving it wide open for a counterattack.
Cole flared a short burst of flame off his left hand into the copy’s center mass – as much power as he could dump into that timeframe, and hopefully enough to destabilize the construct a bit. He then stepped through and cut across the midsection on the way past, the searing blade cauterizing the wound as it opened.
The upper half dropped behind him with its severed edge seared shut, denied any chance to reform. The lower half lost cohesion the moment the cut finished, collapsing into active slurry that immediately began pulling away across the tile to rejoin the rest of the mimic.
Cole pivoted back to the upper half and put another burst of flame into it before it could be retrieved, the gelatin charring black under the heat until the construct stopped twitching entirely.
Whatever else the mimic had been planning stalled after that. Nothing else came at him for a good moment; the thing must’ve pulled back to regroup, or to cook up something new under the fog.
Cole held position with his cutlass up, reduced to the role of some poor bastard in a horror movie waiting to get jumped. Nothing churned an operator’s stomach like being blind in a room full of hostiles with no fix on their position, and he was no exception.
Mercifully, the situation didn’t drag long enough for the horror-movie analogy to hold. A sudden gale tore through the concourse and stripped the fog away in seconds, dumping the room back into clear visibility. Had to be Mack, given the violence of the application.
Clean as it was, the reprieve barely lasted a second. Stripped of its concealment, the mimic shifted tactics on the fly. More goop came at them in waves, the demon apparently deciding to overwhelm them through sheer volume.
A Mack copy surfaced at his right elbow in the same instant a cluster of four whip-thin tendrils came hammering in from his left. The timing was too clean to be accidental; one of the two had to be a feint, and given the relative effort involved in producing each, the copy was almost certainly the real commitment.
Cole sold the tendril dodge anyway. He juked off the line just enough to make the read believable, then pivoted hard into a cut at the Mack on the recovery. He got ready to burn the separated material, but couldn’t finish the spell in time.
An Elina copy had already surfaced behind him, her sword in the upswing. Cole spun around to defend, but he knew damn well he wouldn’t make it. So instead, he dumped every ounce of mana he could muster into a half-assed barrier. The impact hit hard enough to seriously rattle the barrier, but the trick worked.
Too bad it came at the cost of an aching headache from mana fatigue.
Tired as he was, the battle was far from over. The moment the copy pulled back to wind up for another strike, Cole dropped the barrier and attacked. He drove for the opening and cut her across the midsection the same way he had the Mack copy.
Before the Elina copy’s remains had finished hitting the floor, though, a Miles copy had risen on his opposite flank. Unless he could actually deal some real damage, this shit would just keep repeating in perpetuity.
He hadn’t suffered an injury yet, but a quick glance at the others revealed he was the lucky one. If this boiled down to attrition, his luck wouldn’t last long enough to matter.