Cole pulled more stone projectiles together from the dirt and debris scattered across the corridor floor, condensing them into a spread at his side. The Aberrants had begun their charge, but as usual, he waited for them to get closer first.
Once they reached the nearest storefronts, maybe twenty meters out, he launched the stones.
The projectiles punched through well enough, but the results were predictably insufficient. After all, these things were probably twice the size of the first pair they’d encountered. At the very least, though, the impacts sent them tumbling, which was all Cole really needed.
He channeled mana into his legs and burst forward, closing the distance before either one could regain its footing.
He caught the lead Aberrant first, driving the cutlass through its neck with the full weight of his sprint behind the strike. His momentum carried him past the carcass, so he planted his lead foot hard and pivoted on it, swinging his hips and core into the second cut. The rotation fed straight into the blade, catching the second Aberrant across the throat before the thing even had time to register what had happened to the first.
After briefly confirming the kills – which wasn’t hard to do, given the obvious decapitation – he jogged back to his starting position and scanned the corridor. Nothing else had come around the bend yet, buying him at least a few seconds to think.
Now, the tactical picture was painfully simple. There was only one approach: the corridor they’d come through. And since they hadn’t encountered a single Aberrant on the way in, he could make one of two assumptions. Either these specific mutants had been tucked away in one of the dilapidated restaurants lining the hallways, or – more likely – they’d caught the team’s scent the moment they stepped out of that Istraynian Macy’s and tracked them straight here.
And if two had picked them up, the rest would eventually do the same. Knowing his luck, it’d happen long before Graves’ ten-minute timer.
Miles shifted his grip beside him, eyes still fixed down the corridor. “How we gonna play this?”
“Let me think,” Cole said.
The obvious answer would’ve been their guns. Their revolvers and rifles could easily perforate any incoming swarm before it reached the halfway point. Too bad the easiest solution was also the most damning one. This close to the port compound, even a single gunshot might carry far enough to tip off the cultists overhead.
That left swords and magic, same as the tunnels.
The problem was that the corridor wasn’t actually narrow enough to hold the way a real chokepoint would let them. They might’ve pulled it off with the Celdornians, but they were obviously indisposed right now.
So they needed to either narrow the corridor down or make crossing it a terrible idea.
In terms of narrowing it, the options were limited – be it dragging furniture out of the nearby storefronts, which they didn’t have time for, or the inevitable piling of bodies as the fight dragged on.
The only real solution at that point was the latter, which could easily be done with fire. A sustained blaze across the full width should, theoretically, be enough to at least give pause to a fear-resistant, functionally brainless rat. Between the stores themselves and the dried gunk littering the floors, they had no shortage of fuel.
The only issue was asphyxiation. A sustained fire in an enclosed underground space would eat through the available oxygen fast. With the barrier behind them almost certainly blocking airflow, and the fire consuming whatever oxygen came through the corridor ahead, the only breathable air they’d have would be whatever was already in the corridor with them.
Of course, that whole problem assumed the sprinklers didn’t still work. If they did and the fire got doused, then they’d lose their barrier entirely – but actually, now that he thought about it, that might not be such a bad thing.
Depending on how much volume the system still had in it, there could be enough to freeze into a proper abatis – a field of ice spikes anchored to the floor, spread across the entire lane. If the rats were as stupid as their latest encounters seemed to indicate, their own momentum would do most of the dirty work for them.
So one way or another, they had a sure-fire method of keeping the Aberrants at bay. But going back to the original problem: if the sprinklers didn’t work, the fire would stay lit and the team would be the ones choking on it. Better to keep the whole thing in the pocket for as long as they could, and only pull it out as a last resort.
“We goin’ loud or what?” Miles asked.
“Nah,” Cole said. “Stick to swords and magic for now. See all that paper and debris on the floor? If their numbers get out of hand, we’ll light up the corridor.”
Five Aberrants rounded the bend just then, followed loosely by a trickle of reinforcements filing in one by one – just a handful for now, but that wouldn’t last forever.
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Cole spawned another set of rocks as the rats closed the distance. “If the sprinklers still work, we take whatever water comes out and freeze it into a wall of spikes across the lane. Let the rats skewer themselves. Only if shit really hits the fan – then yeah, we use our guns.”
Miles took a breath, set his back foot, and dropped his blade into a low guard. “Copy.”
The moment the cluster hit thirty meters, Cole let the rocks go. The volley staggered three of them long enough for him to close the gap, making it trivial to cut them down. He turned back to check on Miles and found the other two already dead on the ground behind him.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t call it a day there. The reinforcements reached them before they could reset.
They spent the next couple of minutes cutting through fodder without much effort. Of course, constantly hacking away without rest wasn’t sustainable, so Cole had Mack and Ethan rotate with them every minute or so. It was easy enough for now, though fuck if he knew how long this’d last.
As it turned out, not very long.
Initially, the gaps between waves gave them a comfortable second or two to reset, but those dwindled fast. Within a few minutes, the corridor ahead had turned into a near-constant stream of shapes rounding the bend. Their only saving grace was the growing pile of bodies at the mouth of the lane, forcing the incoming Aberrants to clamber over their own dead just to reach striking distance. It bought them maybe half a second per wave, barely enough to get by.
The rate showed no signs of tapering off, much to the growing agony of Cole’s arms and shoulders. They’d been at this for maybe six minutes – which, in sustained close combat, was a long time to be swinging a blade without a real break. The rotation helped, but it only stretched the math so far. At this pace, fatigue would start dragging their reaction times down well before Graves finished.
“Fuck it,” Cole decided. “Burn the hallway.”
He spawned a fireball and lobbed it at the pile of carcasses ahead. Three more sailed past him about the same time, all striking different sections of the debris field.
The whole mass started blazing almost immediately, flames jumping to the storefronts faster than he’d expected. Centuries of dried-out filth and rat fur didn’t exactly need encouragement, after all. Within seconds, the full width of the corridor had transformed into a wall of fire.
The Aberrants that had been mid-climb through the carcass pile when it ignited were immolated almost instantly. Their screeching spiked for a few seconds before cutting out entirely as the fire consumed them. The stench of burning sewer rat streamed through a moment later, straining an air bubble that was already struggling against the carbon dioxide buildup.
True to their intelligence – or lack thereof – the ones behind them didn’t get the memo. The first group to stubbornly brave the wall of fire came out the other side already melting and collapsed at the edge before they could manage a single step.
Shockingly, none of the others tried after that. Apparently, they were at least a tad smarter than Graves had initially given them credit for. That, or the flames were simply that hot.
Evidently, the heat was enough to trigger more than just the rats. The sprinklers kicked in after a good twenty seconds of rat BBQ. They sputtered at first, coughing out water like a fountain that hadn’t run in centuries – literally, in this case – before the pressure built up and the whole system burst to life.
The water, against all reason, came out clean – because apparently Istraynian plumbing didn’t degrade, either. Steam billowed up where it hit the flames, filling the upper half of the corridor with a haze thick enough to kill what little visibility he had left. The fire started dying in patches, the sections under the heaviest streams going first.
Cole glanced down and measured the water against his boot. It sat at barely an inch, too shallow to freeze into anything useful.
Fuck. They’d have to wait.
The first Aberrant pushed through the smoldering remains before he could dwell on it. Two more came right behind, followed by the rest of the crowd.
Cole cut the lead one down and fell back into the flow of battle, splitting his attention between the line and the rising water. Mack and Miles stepped up to cover while he checked his boots every few seconds.
After about half a minute, the water finally crept past the two-inch mark.
“Cover me!” Cole shouted.
While the others held off the nearest rats, Cole channeled his mana into the pooled water and drove it forward in a wave. Once it spread far enough down the corridor, he froze it – shaping the first row of spikes low and nearly horizontal across the full width. The Aberrants that were mid-charge didn’t even have time to react. They impaled themselves on the spikes, pinned in place, driven deeper as more rats crashed into them.
The first row held, but every rat that slammed into it added to the pile. It was only a matter of time before the bodies stacked high enough to give the next wave a ramp over the top. Cole pushed another wave of water past the first row and froze it into a second – steeper this time, angled to catch anything climbing above ground level.
It ended up being the right call; the first one to scramble over its dead jumped headfirst into another set of spikes.
The pattern was obvious at that point, so Cole built a final row of spikes, angling them up toward the ceiling to effectively seal them off for good.
“We’re clear on our side,” Ethan called out. “You sure that’ll hold?”
Cole reinforced the last row a bit more, piling on some more ice from the new water that had accumulated in the meantime. “Yeah, probably.”
He stepped back as the abatis racked up the kill count. He grabbed a potion from his belt and downed it, turning toward the barrier.
“Graves. How long?”
“Minutes, Captain. Two or three, yet.”
The screeching from the pinned Aberrants tapered off as the older ones bled out, though fresh arrivals kept the noise from dropping entirely. Once the volume dropped enough, Cole picked up a sound he hadn’t quite noticed before – or maybe one that hadn’t been there until now.
It was clearly chittering, same as the other rats, although pitched a lot deeper than anything they’d encountered thus far. According to basic biology, vocal frequency corresponded to size. So whatever made that sound was a hell of a lot bigger than a wolf.
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