Chapter 464: Mines

Keres uncoiled out of his crouch with the explosive snap of grasshopper hind legs. He covered the twenty feet between himself and Ciel in less than a second.

Ciel fired and fired.

The first round skipped off the side of Keres’s chitin like a stone off a pond.

The second round took a chip out of the broken forelimb.

Neither of these things slowed down. Keres came down on him with his good forelimb already swinging that long, serrated blade of an arm.

Ciel, with pure muscle memory and reflex, twisted under it. The serration caught him along the outside of his shoulder. It wasn’t a deep cut but a long red line, instantly bright against his skin.

Ciel staggered back and fired again. He missed some, but still fired again.

Grayson was firing as he ran, covering for Ciel. The third one took Keres on the side of the head. It didn’t kill Keres, but it was enough to make those terrible bloody red compound eyes flinch sideways.

Enough to break the next swing.

BOOOMMM!!

A blast came from inside the house.

Grayson felt the shockwave before he heard it. It traveled through the soles of his boots and rattled the loose pebbles in the gravel drive.

Somewhere behind the broken east wing, a glass shattered. Dust rolled out from the second-floor windows.

Grayson turned his head just enough to keep Keres in his peripheral vision.

"What the hell was that?"

Ciel staggered up beside him, half-bent, one hand braced against his knee. Exhausted, he was panting hard through the mouth, ribs heaving.

There was a clean line of red running from his hairline down into the collar of his shirt.

"That, Ha- Haaa-" Ciel rasped, "was one of the nine."

"What nine?" Grayson asked, firing another shot at Keres.

"Anti-personnel mines."

Ciel spat once, sideways, and wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist.

"We don’t know when we would leave the living room or who will be left to keep the remaining people there safe, so we planted mine around. There was a total of nine mines around the perimeter of the living room. Only those who were in there knew about it. So whoever stayed inside would have a defended, safe zone. I pheromone-keyed to skip our people."

"With Lilianna?" Grayson asked, indifferently.

Ciel reloaded his plasma gun and said, "I don’t know about that. Ask Pete."

Grayson narrowed his eyes and gritted his teeth. "And one just went off."

Ciel looked at Grayson with a grave expression and nodded, "One just went off."

The cousins exchanged a look.

Ciel was the first to break it, turning his gaze back at Keres.

"Which means," he said, carefully, "the insectoids had already invaded the house."

"F*ck," Grayson cursed out loud. "That bad?"

BOOOMMMM!!

Hearing the second mine activating, Ciel’s eyes turned bloodshot, but he managed to reply, "That bad."

Keres moved thirty meters to their left.

"How long?" Ciel said quietly, firing as they ran after it, "Until reinforcements?"

"What reinforcements?" Grayson asked, surprised.

"What?" Ciel’s head whipped around so fast that a fresh line of blood started to drip from his hairline, confused.

"I tried to contact the outside before I came after this thing."

Grayson kept his voice low even as he watched Keres’s compound eyes track them.

"The barrier scrambles outbound signals. The Estate’s distress beacon is offline. I assumed we were all on our own."

"Thiago—"

Ciel’s expression changed, exhausted.

"Thiago got a call. Just before he went after Keres. He got an incoming call from outside."

Grayson’s pulse, which had been running cold and even, jumped once.

"Are you sure?" he asked in a serious tone. He didn’t want to cling to false hope.

"He told me himself while we were fighting this thing. People outside can ping in, but we can’t ping out."

For a long moment, Grayson said nothing. He let that information sink in his mind.

Reinforcements are coming. They just needed to survive before they got here.

Then he said, "Good. That’s good. That changes the plan."

Grayson began running a new plan in his head when Ciel called out.

"Brother." He said almost a whining. "I really don’t know how much longer I can keep going."

Grayson looked at Ciel, and Ciel couldn’t help but flinch.

Grayson looked at Ciel up and down with disdain.

"If you can’t last this long," he said, in a flat tone, "then you haven’t been maintaining your condition on your supposed vacation, have you, Colonel?"

Ciel went pale, trying to look away or focus his gaze on Keres.

"That’s—"

"I’ll take that as a yes." Grayson didn’t blink. "When we get out of this, you’re going to start your special training. You and Helena."

"Why Sis Helena—"

"I won’t take a no for an answer."

"Brother, please—"

"Don’t ’Brother’ me. You might look like a fourteen-year-old, but you’re over twenty, an adult. Get a grip in reality. This whining stops tonight."

Ciel’s mouth opened and closed, unable to muster a retort because it was all true. His shoulders sagged, hollow with regret at his talkative mouth.

There would be no taking it back nor negotiation taking place.

Now faced with a future six-week training cycle waiting on the other side of survival, somehow that future was almost more frightening than the huge, high-ranking zerg in front of him.

I am doomed, Ciel thought. Present or future, the end of the tunnel is bleak with no light to escape.

"Move," Grayson said. "Left flank. I’ll draw it. You hit the joint between the thorax and the abdomen. Those were much softer to hit."

Ciel moved.

Grayson stepped into Keres’s line of sight and raised one empty hand. Keres rotated, its compound eyes caught the moonlight in a thousand glittering refractions.

Grayson held his ground, counted to three internally, and then pivoted sharply to the right. He dragged Keres’s attention with him.

Ciel came in from the blind side. The flat of his short blade caught the joint between two chitin plates and bit.

Green blood sprayed everywhere, and Keres screamed in a disgusting sound and reared.

Grayson finally let himself look toward the side where Colonel Vane was fighting.

Just as he thought that he could finally get himself out of helping Ciel and help Colonel Vane or help the people inside the house, he noticed something odd.

Grayson turned back to Keres and noticed that it was deeply distracted.

No wonder it was easy to deal with earlier.

Chitin damage was nothing to a creature of Keres’s tier, a flesh wound at best. Its great segmented head was tilting.

What was it distracted by?

Its head tilted toward the corner of the building. There was a curved wing where the rooftop garden cantilevered out over the seawall.

But Grayson couldn’t see any further with his human eyes. He turned and observed those compound eyes closely.

It was following something.

What is it?

Grayson’s stomach dropped.

An interesting thing about an intelligent, high-ranking Zerg meant it was deeply attractive, edible, hostageable, or strategically usable.

The list of qualifying targets was supposed to be zero. Because what kind of object would qualify as that in the middle of the night?

Everyone living in the seaside estate and the premises were already accounted for. They were either in the basement, in the living room, on this lawn, or — like Neville — wherever that kidnapper had dragged them.

So what was this high-ranking zerg looking at?

Deeply disturbed, Grayson did his best to squint, but the flying dust hadn’t settled.

The night’s darkness was bad enough, barely illuminated by the twin moons. The estate’s grounds were designed for the soft ambient glow. For some reason, they hadn’t managed to light it up for emergency use.

But Grayson could still see the corner of the building. He could vaguely see the line where the wall met the hedge.

He could see a vertical shape against the moonlight that might have been a trellis or a statue.

Or a person.

But Zerg’s had better eyes in the dark. That was why humans had been losing the Cold War stalemate for hundreds of years of back and forth.

In open space and in low light, the Insectoid forces had eyes that the human iris couldn’t even register.

Whatever Keres was looking at, Grayson needed to know what it was. He hesitated because he shouldn’t use it.

Because what he was about to do was something that Thiago had explicitly forbidden him from doing.

Grayson exhaled and pushed his eyes to transform into his beastly form. This transformation came with a sharp sting of a thin wire that seemed to be drawn from inside his skull.

ACK!

Grayson groaned through gritted teeth.

At first, the pain was dull and could be tolerated, but then his secondary gland started to act up. The black mole on his nape that was barely subdued by the pearl bracelet started to burn. The surroundings of the black mole started to turn reddish, clearly inflamed.

One of the pearls in the pearl bracelet started to darken in color.