The
trip there took only a few minutes. The evidence of our battle was
obvious; the valley where we'd fought was littered with the dead.
Only a few lingering hives hung on, and we could see a handful of the
nightkind flitting among them. Gina looked over to check on Ray, who
was nodding and wearing a bitter look. Then she turned, and shouted
back over her shoulder.
"Incendiary
rounds! Let's mop up!"
She
waved Ray over to the main controls, pointed out a few details, and
then stepped down a few stairs from the bridge onto a balcony
overhang. I walked back along the length of the ship, Ulla pacing
behind me and growing with each step, and found what I was looking
for.
The
fight got started when the zeppelin was about fifty feet above the
leading edge of the towers. The remaining hives were shredded and
burning in moments, and the remaining nightkind immediately started
to form up in swarms. Which made them easy targets for the guns, and
for Gina, who had a few choice words picked out for them.
As
we came over the towers, I cracked a set of bomb bay doors, shouting
to Uncle Harry to shut them after me, and jumped out. I aimed for my
landing site, curled my toes and fingers, and felt my extremities
shift claws sliding out, just as I'd been practicing with Ulla. A
few stray nightkind veered away to intercept me. With my new
reflexes, I caught the forearm of the first one in one hand, and
swung to land with my clawed feet on the chest of another. Kicking
off left that one with some interesting chest wounds, and crackled
the shoulder of the one I was still holding by the arm.
Everything
was so slow, now. I let go of that arm with a spiraling
twist, and I was now in the wrong place for them to hit as they came
by. A quick look upwards confirmed for me that Ulla had also shifted
her fall from any kind of predictable trajectory with a choice hit,
though she did have a cut on one side of her face. I split two wings
– one each on two different nightkind – as I dropped out of their
group, and took a look at myself for injuries. I had a red line
stretching a good six inches up my thigh, as it turned out. Nasty,
but I could attend to it later. Ulla and I hit the pillar-top; I
compressed and rolled, while she just compressed.
Whoever-this-was
had topped off their pillar with a decorative park. And while they
likely had never even seen or consciously considered their pillar,
the effect was impressively beautiful. I paused for a moment, with
Ulla, to appreciate the deep surrealism of the scene. Grassy hills
under a bright night sky, towers made of jumbled buildings, burning
clamshell-shaped wasps nests of immense size, devil-looking creatures
breaking and fleeing from what was basically a heavily-armed blimp.
Then
I got to work. The point of jumping down hadn't been purely to prove
that I could, or test out and show off my new abilities (though of
course that had added to the appeal). The point was that I expected
at least a few of the fleeing nightkind to go burrowing into pillars,
and that they'd need to be chased down and rooted out, in the end.
Moving to the edge of the pillar, and watching for it, I saw two
small flights do exactly that. One group went into a pillar that had
been almost entirely covered in hives, and was now a blackened ruin.
The other group dove into Patricia Malkin.
I
tensed down and shot out, touching down on a stretch of gravel
rooftop on another pillar on the way, and then out again into space,
and into through a broken picture window. A Grandparent's home, if I
was any judge. Three nightkind, who had seemingly been hard at work
clearing some floor space for a few moments, spun around in shock. I
hit the leftmost – hands driving into his collarbone, then feet
arriving as I balled up on impact, and landed in a crouch on his
chest. Ulla took the the rightmost, though she brought her teeth
into play. The nightkind in the center had time for a swing, and
took it; I was knocked askew, and tried to kick off the one I'd
spiked into the floor to regain some footing. Instead, I hammered
myself into a wall, making a bit of a dent.
The
nightkind that had smacked me braced itself to charge. Ulla's
foreclaws hit his shoulders as he took his first step, and his neck
was broken, in her jaws, before he hit the ground.
I see we
need to work on recovering balance, and rolling with attacks.
"Yeah,
yeah. You're very observant."
We
walked to the window, dragging our kills, and I flung them out. It
looked like Gina had spotted the other flight for refuge; the
Zeppelin was dropping lines into the ruin, and I saw her descending
with Abe. Good enough; she could have that one. Maybe a minute had
passed, and we were pretty much done. I dropped out the window to
the grass below, and made my way over to the ruin.
