You know those days when everything just kinda fits into place? Where you’re just going about your normal schedule but everything hits just right? No traffic on the way to work and the boss is out sick. Your girlfriend hasn’t found something to get upset with you over and the first thing you see when you open your phone is 20 fresh buckaroos from the friend you spotted for dinner the other night. The hydra was having that kind of day.

  With no elite hunters to curb stomp it into the ground it was free to head straight for the conveniently placed place swamp train full of deliciously squirmy prey. It was practically the hydra’s dream come true.

  The monster leaned forward its heads all going level with the top of the swamp wagon as it exhaled a dark gas all over the top of the first segment. Dark wispy tendrils of promised death flowed up the sloped front of the train and curled around the defenders, they had all gone to the top deck to make their final stand, not knowing it would place exactly where the hydra wanted them.

  The screams began as Ozzy lost sight of the core users on top of the first segment, the dark gas enveloping them completely. Attacks went off all across the enshrouded segment, casting shadows up into the gas.

  Core users left the first segment in a stampede, leaping to the second segments top platform, throwing one another across, anything to get away from the encroaching doom the gas posed.

  They came across as ghouls, pale imitations of their former selves. Rot pockmarked their skin, their eyes bled, their hair sloughing off. They were like an army of the dead, and they moved from one sinking ship to another, abandoning the gas and inhaled death of their segment for the carnage of the other.

  Already crowded the second segment practically became in-traversable, and people were still jumping over from the first segment, all of them on deaths doorstep and of zero help to the defenders on the second segment, all save for Gustav.

  Striding out of the smoke like the Hollywood action star of this world he cut through equally horrid looking monsters. Standing at the edge of the platform, the gas still swirling around his lower half he cast off the panic and frenzy that drove his fellow defenders across the gap. Instead, he looked for those without options. Lifting up the dying and weak he healed them before tossing them across the gap. Several of the men and women he tossed across the gap collapsed upon their arrival, tripping the other defenders and turning themselves into prime targets for the monsters.

  Twice Ozzy watched core users get pulled from the deck and down into the water, once it was a root sucker, its barbed tentacle latching onto the head and chest of someone he hoped had already been. It shredded them, tearing the flesh from their face, torso and stomach as its barbs tried to gain purchase in the rotting flesh. It had to go for a second pull, where it finally got the body and yanked it into its gaping maw, crunching over and over again until what had been a core user was fully inside of its mouth.

  The second core user to fall was pulled off by the caiman looking dogs, it had been nowhere near as gruesome, they’d simply caught the defender by the ankle and pulled them to the floor. From there it was just game over. Six pairs of jaws made quick work of the already weakened core user, pulling them apart and then leaping into the roiling murk below.

  The sight turned his stomach, and yet he couldn’t look away. His very eyes held captive by the horrors unfolding on the platform. Slowly they managed to clear enough space on the second platform to begin a second evacuation, moving the wounded to the third segment where two of the firelights districts healers waited to heal them.

  It was far from enough. Though he had lost sight of the hydra he knew it was still there, stalking within the gas, feasting on the corpses that remained there. It was all they could do to retreat, however. No one held any reservation about hurting the monster, and though Ozzy would try it seemed very much in the same camp as the leviathan had been, more force of nature than actual creature. It was like staring up at a man as an ant, there was nothing you could do to them, maybe an annoying sting or bite might bother them, but all it would take for them to destroy your entire existence and home was a single step.

  With a roaring whoosh a field of flames flew out from Lucy’s emplacement and landed on the first segment, colliding with the gas that was slowly moving towards the second segment and pushing it out and off of the platform it had occupied, dispersing it instead across the top of the surrounding swamp water.

  To Ozzy and the rapidly growing put in his stomach the attack served two purposes for Lucy, it protected all of the defenders on her platform and ended the suffering of all still trapped within the gas. Which to Ozzy’s growing feeling of sickness, was nearly five people. They were hardly more than skeletons now, just blackened, steaming, bone. Among the bones were two of the hydras four heads.

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  The heads were unbothered as fire which had just charred meat off of bone in an instant flowed over them. They didn’t even bother looking at the second platform, instead they sniffed and pushed their heads against the platform’s stairs, as if they could still smell something living on the first segment. With growing horror Ozzy realized they could.

  Looking rapidly over the injured and rotted survivors of the first segment he realized there was one among them that was massing, a person that more than likely wouldn’t have retreated to the top deck at all.

  A hydra head smashed itself into the platform, using its head like a battering ram as it tried desperately to break through the reinforced segments roof. The other watched on in interest, crunching the charred skeletons in its mouth.

  Spells began to fly out at the heads from the second segment as the defenders gained control of their platform. All of them landing ineffectually on the hydra’s city bus sized faces. Only when a rock shard struck one of the faces up the nose did it snort, its face whipping around to face the defenders. All of the attacks ceased.

  It was clear the only thing staying the hand of their destruction was whatever the heads wanted to get at inside of first segment. It was also clear they would soon be getting it. The head that was repeatedly smashing itself into the platform was making ground, drilling deeper and deeper with each strike. Shattering wooden framing, rending iron, and tearing steel. Then as a single horrific scream rose into the air everyone knew it had found what it was looking for.

  The hydra’s head rose triumphant out of the first platforms guts, pulling with it a flailing, familiar, flabby man. It had Colber by the arm.

  ***

  Ozzy wouldn’t have called Colber a friend. He was more an ally than anything else. As he watched Colber dangle from the Hydra’s man, spilling blood and tears he knew that his designation of the man had been wrong.

  He was reminded of an uncle he’d had, Bart, the man had never been close to him or his mother and Ozzy had always thought of him as little more than a bag of tools. Bart wasn’t all that smart, he was even less friendly, and he smoked every day like it was his job to make sure the world ran out of cigarettes. Bart was there when he came home though, for those first weeks after the army’d given him the boot. Ozzy had been family to Bart, and that had meant something to the man.

  Watching Colber dangle from the hydra’s maw Ozzy realized he was about to lose one of the closest things he had to family here in this wretched swamp.

  BOOM

  The report of the rifle was like a funeral bell. The round struck true, nailing the hydra’s head that was holding Colber. It paused, it didn’t flinch, look upset, or make any indication of pain. It just turned to look at him. The creature’s massive black eyes appraising him. It amounted to an extra second of life for Colber.

  Snaking out of the water a third hydra head shot towards Colber’s dangling form like a missile, the first tried to dodge and yet it was too slow. The third head catching Colber’s body around the waist and tearing, pulling the swamp train captain in two, showing the water beneath him in gore and viscera as the heads threw the chunks of Colber back into their mouths, and swallowed.

  It was like silence stretched out before Ozzy and into the swamp. His vision tunneled, and he could see nothing but the monster. Not the allies beside him, not the fight for survival on the second segment, and not the bedraggled survivors on the third segment, who were now taking on a horde of monsters themselves. All he could think about was that monster. Killing it and knowing deep down that he couldn’t. He was standing on a circle that nearly tripled his power, and all he’d been able to do was bother the monster.

  It was a failure he’d never be able to best. He remembered the things he’d overheard Colber saying on the wagon, on occasion talking about children a wife. Colber had been a family man just out doing the job he knew to give his family the best life possible. Maybe he’d thought this promotion would land him on the safest gig he’d ever had. Surrounded by core users and thick plate steel walls. Hell, a root sucker wouldn’t even be able to scratch this thing, and yet death comes for us all.

  The rifle BOOMED as Ozzy shot the hydra’s face a second time. Making it twitch and look at him again. It was an easier shot now that it wasn’t moving, BOOM, the second shot struck home too. The head wincing slightly back, like it someone watching a stray ball fly their way. BOOM, he hit it again, the hydra screeching its annoyance at him as it turned from the second segment.

  “You need a hand there?” A kind man’s voice reached out to him, slipping through the cracks of his anger to reach past unhearing ears.

  Ozzy turned, a slight man, no taller than Lucy was standing spotless beside him. Everyone else on the top platform had backed away from the man, who Ozzy could tell was more than he seemed.

  “If you intend to hurt it, you’ll need my help.” The man offered again. “That was your friend?” He asked, tender as the first rays of dawn.

  Ozzy nodded, unable to find words.

  “Let’s get him back.” The man said, a smile crossing his face as he gestured for Ozzy to once again take up his rifle.

  Sighting back in on the hydra’s he could tell it was moving towards them, uncertainty gripped him but the means steadying hand on his shoulder slowed any fear response his body could have conjured. Through the hand power flowed into and out of him. It felt like someone had taken a massive pump and shoved him full of air near to the point of bursting. He could hardly stand it, but as the flow of power came to a close, a state of calm came over him.

  Looking through the sight of the rifle he felt like a new being, like a god reincarnated. He knew instinctively that there was little to if nothing that could not kill. The hydra was no exception.

  ————

  Ozzy’s eardrums shattered, his shoulder simply ceased to be, and his rifle exploded. Shards of magical steel and wood peppering his face and body as power never meant to be experienced by one such as him went wild.

  Though it all however, as his vision began to blur, he watched his round tear through the center of that godforsaken monster’s head, and send it tumbling back into the murk from whence it came.