Chapter 91 - Terminal Velocity

  The monster surging toward me was about fifteen feet in diameter and looked for all the world like a massive pile of rocks with bits of fungus rising through the gaps between the stones. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what I was looking at. This was another fungus monster, one that had one hell of an armored shell.

  I couldn’t tell just by looking at the thing whether it was rock all the way through, with fungus threaded between the stones to move them, or if it was mostly fungus at the center with the rocks only around the outside edge like armor. Either way, it was big, fast, and looked like it could take hits.

  It was also tier eight, which made it one of the strongest creatures I’d ever run into.

  There were only seconds left before the thing smashed into me. I dug in my heels and turned my shoulder into the oncoming attack. If this thing thought I was going to be easy to shove out of the way, it—

  CRASH! With a sound like a pile of bricks dropping sixteen stories, the creature collided with my shoulder. I’d braced myself for the blow as best I could, but I was completely unprepared for the amount of force the impact generated. The monster had to mass over a ton. Between that and its velocity, I got a sharp lesson about inertia.

  I went sailing through the air, knocked back into the tunnel wall with so much force it bruised me even through my Natural Armor. Dazed, I fell to the ground, shaking my head as I put my hands beneath me to lever me back upright.

  “Cameron, what the hell?” Alex shouted.

  I didn’t have the time or breath to answer. The thing was dangerously close now, rumbling straight at me again. Right before it reached me, the monster’s front end rose up, and I got a good look at its mouth. That gaping hole was about three feet across and ringed with six inch teeth. If it landed on me, I was going to have a bad day.

  I rolled sideways just before the mouth crashed down right where I’d been lying. Thinking fast, I activated Flight, using it to boost upward from the floor. I drew my borrowed sword, darting through the air toward the creature and slashing at it. The blade drew sparks when it impacted the creature’s rocky armor, but I was doing more damage to my weapon than I was to the monster.

  “Lightning!” Alex called out. He fired a Bolt from his fingertips as he called out, and I joined him, launching a blast from my free hand.

  Both Lightning Bolts sang through their air, crackling and hissing their way. They smacked into the stone armor with enough force to move some of the rocks around a bit, but the monster didn’t appear perturbed by the spells. They got its attention, though.

  It whirled from me toward Alex, rushing forward to attack him instead. He tried to step back, but he was far too slow. I flew down to stop the monster, but I wasn’t going to be in time.

  Thankfully, the two of us weren’t alone. Clark and Johnson rushed up, passing Alex on either side as they closed with the beast. It struck, impacting each of them at about the same time. The blow had the same effect it had on me, sending both of them hurtling back into the wall behind them. They crashed to the ground, stunned.

  But they’d accomplished what they’d aimed for. Hitting them cost the creature most of its momentum, giving Alex plenty of time to dart sideways and avoid the monster.

  I spotted Marion and Ruiz moving forward to help the fallen, while Dara, Rodriguez, and Anderson moved up to join the attack. Dara tried to light it up with a blast of fire from her hands. The flames washed over the thing, but I got the impression it didn’t do much more than warm the stone armor surrounding it.

  How were we supposed to punch our way through that tough outer shell? I’d seen the bottom of the creature, where its mouth was. It reminded me something of a massive snail, except instead of a shell, it had covered its entire body in stacked layers of rock. Lightning wasn’t working. Neither was fire. What about my Drain spell?

  I cast it, firing a beam of black force straight at the thing. That spell landed, the magic flowing into the creature, sucking out a small slice of its life force, and returning it to me. The bruises I’d picked up from its first attack healed almost instantly, so the spell had clearly gone off just fine. I didn’t get a sense that the thing was badly hurt, though. It didn’t slow at all. It was like it had taken my best shot and simply shrugged it off.

  “This thing is tough!” I called out. “Some sort of serious tank. We’re going to have to pile on the damage to finish it off.”

  “Damage it with what?” Anderson shouted. He was beating on it with a sledgehammer. “Man, I can’t even crack one rock. I hit it, and the rocks just squish in.”

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  As I watched, he hammered the thing again, and sure enough I saw exactly what he was talking about. The sledgehammer hit dead center in the middle of one of the rocks, hard enough I was sure the stone would fragment. But instead, the rock he struck just moved in a couple of inches. The soft tissue beneath the rocks was absorbing the impact damage, preventing us from breaking the stones, and the rocky outer shell was keeping us from damaging the interior.

  I realized then what it was going to take to kill it. “We’ve got to flip it!”

  “What?” Alex asked, dodging sideways as the thing tried to crush him against a wall.

  I landed beside Alex. The others had the creature’s attention for the moment. We had a couple of seconds to talk. “When it reared back, I saw the underbelly. It’s got a huge mouth under there, but other than that, it’s alls squishy mushroom underneath. If we can flip it, we can hit the vulnerable belly, without having to punch through the outer shell.”

  “And how in hell do you figure we flip this thing? It has to way at least a ton,” Alex said.

  “Haven’t figured that out, yet,” I replied. The monster had turned back toward us again. I took to the air, blasting it with another Drain Life to draw its ire and attention away from Alex. “That’s your job, oh brilliant one!”

  I could hear him grumbling even from ten feet away, which made me smile. Alex was far and away the smartest one on the team. If anyone could figure it out, he could. I was strong enough to lift the thing up, but it was highly mobile, and it wasn’t going to just sit there while I grabbed it and flipped it over. Plus, there wasn’t much on the thing to grip.

  Still, I had to give it a shot. I darted in toward the ground, landing right beside the creature as it rushed toward Anderson. It smacked into him, knocking him into the air. I winced, watching the man’s body impact the nearest wall at high speed. That had to hurt!

  The impact slowed the thing’s movement, though, which gave me a few seconds to grab the base of its body, right where it met the floor, and lift. I had hold of a pair of large rocks, but instead of lifting the whole creature, all I managed to do was move the rocks to a new position higher up on its body. Other rocks flowed down and filled in the empty spot faster than I could react.

  Lifting it wasn’t going to be easy, not if there was no way I could grab hold of it. Maybe if we had a long pole, I could lever it upward and flip it that way, but it would have to be an incredibly sturdy lever. Something strong enough to lift a car. We didn’t have anything like that.

  “Well, that didn’t work,” I grumbled.

  “It was worth a shot,” Alex said. “Let me try something.”

  He cast a spell, firing off an Ice Blast. The javelin of ice rocketed through the air, smacking one of the stones hard and shattering. At first, I thought it hadn’t done much, but then I spotted little streaks of frost spreading across the stone he’d hit. Alex followed that attack up with a second Ice Blast, then a third. Each one hit, and spread another area of frost across the creature’s surface.

  It definitely didn’t like that! It turned, but it was moving distinctly slower. As I watched, the frozen area was already beginning to thaw, but Alex’s strikes had done more to stop it than anything else we’d tried.

  “Anyone else have ice spells?” I shouted.

  “I do,” Clark said, firing an Ice Blast. “Those lobster guys were good for something after all!”

  The Fungus Knight, as I’d started to think of it in my head, whirled to face this new danger, but Alex hit it with another Ice Blast, forcing it to turn its attention back on him. That last shot apparently ticked it off enough to take more concentrated action, because it stopped worrying about the rest of us and charged Alex again. I saw it start to move and rushed forward, trying to get near enough to stop it.

  It was faster.

  The Fungus Knight plowed into Alex, sending him flying into the wall a couple of feet back. Before he could get back to his feet, the creature reared back again, just like it had when I was on the ground.

  I knew what was coming next.

  I knew I couldn’t stop it.

  I flew in anyway, pouring on the speed, rushing with everything I had, trying to make it to Alex’s side in time to shove him out of the way. I moved faster than I’d ever gone before, pushing myself to my absolute limits as I tried to save my friend.

  It wasn’t enough. I reached Alex’s side just before the rearing monster crashed its toothy maw down atop both of us, swallowing us whole.