The Radiant Bulwark caught the first wave whole.
Gold light snapped into a curved wall in front of Helios, wide enough to cover two of the soldiers crouched beside him, and the first three hatchlings that hit it bounced off with wet, furious shrieks instead of tearing through flesh.
The barrier held, humming, but Helios felt the cost of it immediately, a deep ache spreading through his chest like he’d just sprinted farther than his body could handle.
He hadn’t expected the shield to draw on something that felt this personal, this much like his own stamina rather than some abstract resource bar.
Every hatchling that struck it seemed to take a small, tangible piece of him with it.
“Grab them! Now!” Kaelen was already moving, hauling one of the unconscious scouts over his shoulder while a soldier took the other, both of them backing toward the tree line as fast as the terrain allowed.
More hatchlings poured off the Broodmother’s back, small but vicious, moving in erratic bursts that made them hard to track.
One of the trackers went down hard under a pile of three at once, screaming, and a soldier waded in with a spear to clear them off before the sound fully registered in Helios’s ears.
Blood, dark and glistening, sprayed across pale bark a few feet from where Helios stood, close enough that he felt it as much as saw it.
[Detected: Evo — Broodling, Newborn]
[Threat Assessment: Low, individually]
[Warning: swarm behavior detected. Aggregate threat elevated.]
The notification’s clinical tone felt almost insulting given what was actually happening a few feet away.
Individually low.
Helios understood the warning immediately, watching a dozen of them converge on the fallen tracker at once, snapping and clawing in a frenzy that made “low” feel like the cruelest possible joke.
A threat rating built for solo encounters clearly hadn’t accounted for what a dozen of them could do to a single downed person in the space of a few seconds.
“Bulwark can’t hold a full retreat and cover him at the same time,” Helios said, voice tight.
“Pick one.”
“Cover the retreat,” Kaelen barked.
“I’ve got the tracker.”
He didn’t wait for confirmation, cutting back into the swarm alone, blade moving in short, brutal arcs that dropped Broodlings two and three at a time. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
It wasn’t clean.
It wasn’t supposed to be.
Kaelen fought like a man buying seconds, not points, dragging the injured tracker upright by his collar and shoving him bodily toward the retreating line.
A Broodling latched onto his forearm and he tore it off with his bare hand, barely breaking stride, blood running freely from four small punctures he didn’t seem to notice.
The ground shook.
Not from the swarm.
From something considerably larger, finally deciding the intruders in its nursery had done enough damage to warrant its personal attention.
[Detected: Evo — Broodmother, Adult]
[Status: Aggro confirmed. Target: nearest threat.]
[Estimated Level: 22]
Nearest threat.
Helios almost laughed at the phrasing, if laughing had been remotely possible with his chest already aching from holding the Bulwark steady.
The Broodmother’s bulk surged forward across the basin floor, faster than something that size had any right to move, scattering its own hatchlings in its wake without any apparent concern for them.
Its target wasn’t subtle.
Every one of its too-many legs was driving it straight toward Helios, the only source of that gold light it clearly recognized as the reason its nursery had been breached in the first place.
The sheer scale of it, up close, made everything Helios had felt looking at it from a distance seem like an understatement.
“Helios, move!”
“Bulwark’s still up! If I move, everyone behind it dies in the next three seconds!”
Seraphina’s voice cracked through his mind in a burst of pure command energy he hadn’t heard from her before, some emergency channel he hadn’t known existed until it activated on its own.
“Hold position. Reinforcements are five minutes out. You will not survive five minutes against that.” Get faster updates on g.com.
“Define survive,” Helios muttered, watching the Broodmother’s shadow stretch across the basin floor toward him.
It was already close enough that he could make out individual, wet strands of ichor clinging to the joints where its legs met its bulk.
“Your Majesty, this is not the moment for jokes.”
“Then we’d better make it faster than five minutes,” Helios said, mostly to himself, because nobody left to hear it could do anything about the math anyway.
The Bulwark strained under a second wave of Broodlings, the gold light flickering at its edges for the first time since he’d raised it.
Behind him, he heard the last of the retreating party clear the tree line, Kaelen’s voice shouting something he couldn’t make out over the sound of his own pulse hammering in his ears.
[Radiant Bulwark: integrity 61%.]
[Warning: sustained damage exceeding regeneration rate.]
Helios stared at the number, doing the mental math and not liking any version of the answer it gave him.
He’d never actually tested how long the shield could hold under real, continuous pressure, and apparently the answer was not nearly long enough.
The Broodmother closed the last stretch of open ground between them, mouthparts working in a way that suggested it had opinions about small, glowing obstacles standing between it and its stolen young.
Its many eyes, if they could be called that, all fixed on him at once, and for one strange, suspended moment Helios had the distinct sense of being weighed by something far more deliberate than an animal.
[Radiant Bulwark: integrity 34%.]
Helios planted his feet, every instinct screaming at him to run, and didn’t.
Behind him, distantly, he thought he heard Kaelen shouting his name again, closer now than he expected, but there wasn’t time left to look and check.
“Come on, then,” he said, to a creature four times his level that was very unlikely to understand a single word of it.
He said it anyway, because saying nothing felt worse.
The Broodmother lunged.