Chapter 63 - Riding to the Rescue

  Not content to just lay on the ground waiting for the next Lightning Bolt to fry me, I strained to raise my head. There was the Karabos with the Lightning Bolt spell. He was just a few feet away. If I could stand, I could be on him in a flash and end the threat, but my muscles were barely obeying my commands.

  Sparks flashed between his claws. I knew what that meant. These spells all had cooldown periods, and for some spells it was longer than others. His timer was just about up, and he was getting ready to pelt me with another jolt of lightning.

  I wanted to move out of the way, to hit back, to do something! But my body wouldn’t respond to me at all. Even my magical powers seemed like they weren’t answering my call. I couldn’t even make a decent last-gasp wisecrack.

  The Karabos summoned his mana and electricity crackled purple between his claws, then shot across the short distance between us. I braced myself as best I could. This was going to hurt no matter what I did. All I could do was hope I survived the shot…

  But a Peristera dove from the sky, hitting the pavement right in front of me and taking the spell directly to his chest. The Bolt hit him hard enough to throw him backward, and the avian’s smoking body crashed into the ground not far from where I lay. He didn’t get back up.

  Frustrated, the Karabos chittered to his allies, and they returned to pummeling me with Ice Blasts. Some of those hit with bruising force, but their rank was too low to pierce my Natural Armor. I covered my face with my arm and forced myself back to my knees.

  That Peristera had given his life to save mine. I didn’t know why. We’d never met, as far as I knew. But he’d sacrificed himself to save me. I couldn’t allow that to have been in vain.

  I reached out with my mana and this time, my spells responded. I still felt shaky, and every muscle in my body was on fire, but I could reach out with my left hand and use it to project a Gust of Wind.

  The burst of air sprang from my palm and rushed toward the Karabos with the Lightning Bolt spell, bowling him over. He tumbled backward, crashing into two of his fellows behind him. He wasn’t out of the fight, but casting the Gust bought me another precious few seconds to recover.

  All at once, I realized the Karabos around me were ignoring me. I heard a series of shouts and yells. They were battle cries, from a mix of human and avian voices.

  My regeneration had kicked in enough that I was able to lift my head and look around, and what I saw astonished me. My human allies had left their barricades and barriers, jumping over them so that they could rush forward and assault the enemy directly. The Peristera had already taken down most of the crab riders, which left the crabs as more of a confused battlefield obstacle than a real adversary. Most of them were trying to rapidly scuttle their way as far away from the fighting as possible.

  That left the center more or less open, and scores of men and women armed with spears and spells rushed into that gap to attack the Karabos infantry. Above the humans, the Peristera launched their own air assault, using a combination of spears and spells as they struck back at the Karabos forces.

  All of that meant the Karabos suddenly had a target-rich environment. They had a lot more enemies to worry about than just little me, and since I was only laying there on the ground unmoving, they must have figured I was already out of the fight. I needed to prove them wrong about that.

  With a grunt, I dragged myself back up into a crouch. The Karabos nearby noticed the movement and came at me, spears flashing. One of their weapons stabbed at my side and practically exploded with the force of the attack, but my Natural Armor held. I reached up with my left hand and grabbed the second spear to come at me, yanking it from the creature's hand and then hurled it back at its former owner, killing the creature instantly.

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  Then I was on my feet again. One of the enemy came at me and I picked him up, throwing him at another that was preparing a lightning spell. Both of them went down.

  I stared at the body of the Peristera on the pavement beside me. He wasn’t breathing, and the burn wounds to his chest were severe enough I knew he was dead.

  It was a strange feeling, mourning someone I didn’t even know. If that being hadn’t rushed in to save me at the last minute like that, the Bolt that killed him would have struck me instead. Given the damage I’d already taken, it was even odds that strike would have left my smoking body lying there instead.

  He’d saved me. He’d jumped in front of a proverbial bullet to keep me alive.

  The humans rushing toward the Karabos were doing the same. If I went down, there was no chance of a win against that giant crab, and all of them knew it. They were putting their own lives on the line to save mine. As I watched, one human fighter went down under Karabos claws, then another. The humans were vastly outmatched in this fight, but they came on anyway.

  A grim determination overtook me. I was done playing games with these things. The last time I’d felt this much rage was around Amanda’s death, but in some ways this was even worse. These people were giving everything they had to stop the enemy from killing me, which laid their deaths on my conscience.

  I let the rage fill me up as I stood again, Regeneration healing my wounds and my anger covering up the incredible exhaustion I felt.

  Tired or not, it was time to finish this.

  I rushed the enemy again, but this time I didn't repeat the mistakes I'd made before. I kept myself constantly moving, never staying in one place for more than a second or so. I zipped from one Karabos to the next, taking them down, one after another. The constant motion left them unable to nail me with their attack spells, and by taking them down from inside the middle of their ranks, it disrupted their battle formation enough that the humans and Peristera were tearing them apart on the front line.

  We were doing it, I realized. We were winning this fight. I snatched up the smoking remnants of a ruined car from where it had sat on the street and hurled it into the middle of a batch of the Karabos. A couple of them saw it coming and scattered, but most were crushed by the impact. Like that attack was a signal, the rest of the Karabos turned and started to run back down the hill.

  For a split second, I thought that was it, that we'd done it. Maybe they’d decided this invasion was costing them just too much, and it was time for them to retreat?

  But when I looked down the street, I saw something that chilled me. That titanic crab was still marching directly toward us. That's where the Karabos were fleeing. Not back to the ocean, but to rally under the protection of their leaders. They’d failed to punch through our wall with the first two waves, so they were consolidating their troops for one massive push, and that mega-crab was almost on us.

  The Karabos had recovered control of a half dozen of the smaller crabs and still had at least a hundred of their infantry. But it was the monstrous crab and its riders that worried me most.

  A wing of the Peristera rushed them, but that’s when the Karabos riding the creature proved they were a serious threat, too. They opened up with a series of spells, mixing Ice Blasts, Lightning Bolts, and even a spear that looked like it was made entirely of water. A few of the Peristera who’d rushed in escaped, but most fell under the burst of magical attacks.

  “Retreat!” MacGregor called out, from a position atop the low wall we’d built. “Pull back! Retreat back to the wall!”

  The humans who’d rushed in withdrew, running at top speed back to the frail barrier. That wall wasn’t going to be enough to stop the massive crab. I knew it, and they did too. But they ran there anyway, hunkering down as best they could behind whatever protection they could find.

  The Peristera flew back as well, dodging yet more spells as they escaped the deadly hail of magic spewing from the Karabos leaders’ claws.

  In seconds, there was nothing between the monster and our defenders except for me. I crouched behind the shattered hulk of a dead car, letting my Regeneration finish restoring me while I recovered as much mana as I could.

  My allies had forced the enemy back, but not defeated them. They had spilled blood and lost lives to pull me out of the fire. Now I was the only thing standing between them and the oncoming horror show, and I didn’t have the faintest idea how I was going to stop this creature and the powerful beings riding it.

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