Chapter 39-The Centipede

Chapter 39: 39-The Centipede

Through the frozen dirt of the ditch floor, something long was moving.

Because its shell was the exact same color of blue as the snow, Sol hadn’t seen its outline.. until he spotted the twelve-feet line of tiny purple dots pulsing two feet under the gravel right in front of the concrete pipe.

Not twelve separate beasts.

Twelve pairs of toxic glands running down the flanks of a single, segmented body buried in the silt.

"Back up!" Sol roared, spinning around and shoving Valera squarely in the chest with both hands.

The gravel where Sol had been standing a quarter-second ago exploded upward.

It wasn’t a mammal.

Twelve feet of interlocking, slate-gray chitin erupted out of the frozen ditch like a whip made of rusted iron plates.

A Level 1 Peak Blighted Centipede, thick as a man’s torso, with forty pairs of scythe-like yellow legs that clicked horribly against the stones and a pair of curved mandibles.

Where its eyes should have been, a jagged cluster of glowing purple lunar crystals grew straight out of its head-plate, leaking a thick, sizzling green venom down its jaws.

When a drop of that venom hit the frozen limestone at Sol’s feet, it didn’t freeze, it ate a smoking, bubbling hole straight into the stone like concentrated battery acid.

HSSSS-KLICK!

The giant centipede reared five feet into the air, towering over them in the narrow ditch, and struck straight down at Sol’s chest before he could regain his balance from shoving Valera.

Sol had no sword to parry and no axe to block.

If he put his bare forearm into those dripping mandibles, the acid would eat through to his bone before his fire could burn it out.

So Sol didn’t block up high.

He threw himself flat onto his back in the gravel, kicking both boots straight up into the underside of the centipede’s chin-plate as its jaws snapped shut an inch above his throat, showering his coat with stinging droplets of green venom that immediately began eating smoking holes through the wool.

Using the centipede’s own downward momentum, Sol bicycle-kicked his legs, launching the front half of the twelve-foot monstrosity right over his head into the ditch wall behind him.

"The tail!" Valera shouted.

As the rear half of the centipede whipped around in the narrow ditch to drive its two venomous rear-hooks into Sol’s ribs while he was on the ground, Valera lunged in.

She didn’t have her spear for reach. She had to get right inside weakspot of the thrashing legs.

Ducking under a scythe-leg that sheared a lock of pale hair right off her temple, Valera slammed both Night-iron gauntlets down onto the centipede’s rear segments, locking her fingers under the overlapping edge of a chitin plate and dumping a violent blast of her pure moon frost straight into the joint.

CRACK.

The ice locked the last four segments of the beast’s tail into a rigid, unbending plank.

The centipede shrieked, a sound like two pieces of corrugated tin being dragged across each other and then it coiled back on itself like a spring, swinging its massive, acid-dripping head around to bite Valera in half while her hands were gripping its frozen tail.

"Let go of it!" Sol yelled, scrambling up from the gravel and ripping his venom-smoking coat off his shoulders in one motion.

Valera tried to jump back, but one of the centipede’s middle legs hooked the heel of her boot, dragging her down onto one knee in the dirt as the dripping purple jaws lunged down at her face.

Sol didn’t have time to pick up a rock.

He wrapped his burning,venom-stained wool coat around his right forearm like a padded sleeve, stepped between Valera and the descending head, and shoved his wrapped right arm straight sideways between the centipede’s open mandibles like a dog-handler feeding a bite-stick to a hound.

CRUNCH.

The two curved hooks slammed shut on his forearm.

Even through four layers of heavy wool and his newly consolidated high-stage bone density, the sheer crushing power of the insect made the bones in Sol’s forearm bow inward with a sickening creak.

Worse, the purple acid-venom poured straight out of the beast’s fangs into the cloth, soaking through to his skin in half a second and eating two deep, sizzling trenches into the meat of his wrist.

"Sol!" Valera scrambled up from the dirt as Sol dropped to one knee, his teeth bared in a silent snarl as he held twelve feet of thrashing, clicking chitin off her with one arm.

"Under the chin!" Sol choked out, black smoke and green acid-fumes pouring off his trapped right arm as he flared his core to eighty percent capacity just to keep the venom from reaching his main artery. "The plates on its back are too thick! Hit the soft spot under the jaw!"

The centipede tried to thrash its head sideways to rip Sol’s arm out of its socket.

Sol planted his boots six inches deep into the frozen gravel, reached up with his bare left hand, and grabbed the jagged cluster of purple lunar crystals growing out of the top of the centipede’s skull.

Holding the beast’s head in a two-handed headlock, one arm inside its acid jaws, the other gripping its crystal crown Sol wrenched upward with every ounce of his High-Stage Ash-Forged back muscles, forcing the centipede’s head back and exposing the pale, pulsing gray membrane beneath its throat.

Valera didn’t waste the opening.

She didn’t have a blade, so she turned her own body into a spear.

Channeling a terrifying, condensed cone of absolute zero frost over the knuckles of her right Night-iron gauntlet until the black metal grew a six-inch spike of diamond-hard blue ice, Valera stepped in and drove an uppercut straight up through the soft membrane beneath the centipede’s chin.

SHUNK.

Her gauntleted fist went in up to the wrist, driving the ice spike directly into the beast’s nerve-cluster right behind its crystal crown.

"Freeze it!" Sol roared, his right forearm smoking violently as the centipede’s jaws spasmed, biting another fraction of an inch deeper into his bone before the frost took hold.

Valera twisted her wrist inside the wound and unleashed her Ice Sculpture skill at point-blank range, not across the whole twelve-foot body, but entirely inside the head capsule.

Snap.