Monster Hunter Bloodlines - eARC Larry Correia (all ebook reader .txt) 📖

just kept hammering. He got hit hundreds of times and was shredded down to what looked like a flaming wire skeleton before the Drekavac collapsed and disintegrated back into the fog.

“Gutterres wasn’t kidding about it getting tougher as the night goes on,” Earl stated flatly. “That’s nine.”

That had been scary impressive, and we still had four to go. “How’d mankind handle these things in the old days?”

“Send a thousand pikemen,” Franks said. “Expect to lose nine hundred.”

“Or they gave them what they wanted, and then hid in their huts hoping for suckers like us to come along,” Earl said. “Milo, status?”

“Status level awesome,” Milo exclaimed. “Okay, guys, go ahead and activate the other turrets and put them on standby in case he hits the other walls. Watch the cameras. Hey, Julie, would you warn everybody to yell as soon as he pops up? There’s no way he’s getting in here now.”

I know Milo was really giddy about being able to play with his new toys, but I wasn’t feeling as confident as he was. “You got an ammo counter on those things?” I asked Vivier.

“That used about half of one and three quarters of two’s belts,” he said. “And the only way to reload them or clear a malfunction is manually.”

“Don’t worry, Z,” Milo said. “We’ve got defense in depth. That’s just the first layer. Like a big lethal onion of doom.”

Franks was squinting through the gap in the steel shutters, studying the fog. I’d thought that once it had broken through the fence it had filled the whole compound, but from this vantage point I could see that the fog hadn’t covered everything yet. There was a clear circle around the base of our building, like the substance was being held back by something, either Tanya’s runes or maybe the warm lifeblood of all the Hunters inside, but something was keeping him from appearing right at our door.

“You feel that?” Franks asked me and Harbinger.

All I was feeling was unnaturally chilled to my core and a sense of unease.

But Earl said, “Yeah . . . He’s not in the fog. He is the fog. It’s got weight to it. It’s where his physical forms are coming from.”

I grasped what they were getting at. “It congeals, becomes solid. Like how things work in the nightmare world, only he’s doing it here on Earth.”

“Kind of like what we saw at the Last Dragon.” Then Earl looked out over the vast area covered by the soupy substance and frowned. “He’s got a lot of material to work with still.”

Then I spotted where the fog was swirling together. The circle was huge compared to what I’d seen before. The Drekavac was returning to the exact same spot he’d just died, probably to continue heading right for our front door. “He’s coming back even bigger.”

“We’ve got to burn off some of this fog fast, deprive him of mass . . . ” Earl said. “Milo! Did you get your sprinklers hooked up?”

“Sure did, Earl. I switched the pipes over this afternoon just in case.”

“Time to water the lawn.”

Milo leapt up from the computer, went to a nearby table, and started flipping switches.

“Is that like a metaphor for spilling blood or something?” I asked, because I’d missed this part of the plan visiting rats and had no idea what they were talking about. Except then below us, the compound’s sprinkler system came on. So Earl had been speaking literally, which made me even more confused. The sprinklers were a relatively new addition. When I’d started working here, everything had just been dirt, gravel, and natural plant growth. Only Julie had gotten tired of looking at that mess and declared that we could afford some real landscaping.

The Drekavac stood where he’d fallen just a moment before. He was still wearing the coat and hat, but they seemed stretched over his now hulking form. He had to be fifteen feet tall and broad as a bus. He started for the front door.

Then I smelled the gas fumes.

Milo wasn’t watering the grass. He was soaking it with gasoline. Sprinklers were spraying all the way around the main building. I didn’t know how big our system was, but it had to be pumping hundreds of gallons a minute.

Julie got on the intercom. “Everybody move back from the windows. I repeat, move away from the windows.”

The Drekavac drew his sword. It was long enough to slice an elephant in half. In his other hand was the blunderbuss, the muzzle of which was now big enough to drop a bowling ball down. He started toward the front door.

Milo’s turrets started blasting the monster. Shockingly enough, the impacts didn’t ignite the gas. The blue sparks flying from the Drekavac’s wounds weren’t real fire, and the turrets were far enough away from the lawn that their muzzle blasts didn’t ignite the rapidly expanding fume cloud yet.

However, when the Drekavac lifted his blunderbuss to take out turret two, all hell broke loose—because his lightning was flammable.

A lot happened in a few seconds. The turret was ripped apart in a violent flash, and it still had a bunch of grenades inside of it. They rapidly cooked off in a chain reaction of explosions. It was a good thing our headquarters building was basically a hardened fortress, because that would’ve ruined our night otherwise.

The lawn ignited. A rolling wall of flame rapidly spread across the grass, consuming everything in its path. The sprinklers turned to flamethrowers, spinning twenty-foot streams of flaming hot death. Within seconds the main building was surrounded by a ring of fire. The Drekavac’s fog actually shrieked as acres of it were burned away in a flash.

The Drekavac’s glowing eyes could be seen through the wall of fire, glaring directly at our window as it turned to ash.

Ten.

“He sensed where that order came from somehow . . . ” Earl warned. “Put your killer robots on autopilot and then everybody out of this room.”

“Even the Claymore Roombas?” Hinerman asked hopefully.

“If you can do it in less than thirty seconds, then sure, whatever that is too,