Chapter One Hundred Forty-Seven: ‘O, colossal tyrant...’

As they were making their way toward the back of the train, passing through another cabin full of comatose Rainlords, Hector felt Garovel shift abruptly on his back. The reaper had of course attached himself to Hector while the train was in motion.

Hector stopped walking. “Something wrong?” he said aloud, since there was no one conscious around to hear.

‘...Not sure. I thought I sensed the aura of death just now.’

Hector’s brow lowered. “Where?”

‘Back the way we came, on the other side of the train. But it’s not there anymore.’

“Hmm.” He turned around and started walking again, this time at a brisker pace. “Is it where the Blackburns are?”

‘Not quite that far, but close. At this distance, I almost missed it, but their reapers would’ve noticed it for sure, especially with how alert everyone is right now.’

Hector quickened his pace even more. First, he had to pass back through three more cabins full of sleeping Rainlords, but before he even made it to the end of the third one, Garovel spoke up again.

‘Hold up.’

He stopped. “What?”

‘Hector. Right now, everyone in these pods has the aura of death around them.’

Hector looked around with wide eyes. Each and every pod was already covered in the shields he’d made earlier. “What--? Why?!”

‘I don’t know, but--’ There arrived a pause, and Hector waited without breathing for Garovel to continue. ‘I sense a worm. About half a kilometer to your right and closing.’

Hector’s expression turned grim.

He knew the plan. The militiamen and Rainlords had made sure that everyone did. Each cabin had a compartment where the train’s defenses could be accessed. Hector was not trained in their uses, of course, but he knew that people who were would be arriving momentarily. His job would be to protect them.

Hector searched for the emergency lever in the floor and soon found it in the center of the cabin. He removed the metal screen in his way and yanked the lever in a hard clockwise motion.

A heavy thunk and metallic shifting noise followed, and two doors slid open, one on each wall of the cabin, both situated within a quite small space between all of the podded Rainlords that lined the entire cabin.

Hector entered the door to his left and found a very slender chamber therein. In size, it was little more than a narrow hallway, but it had windows and guns mounted into the wall.

Militiamen and Rainlords began to arrive and crammed into the chamber with him. Every gun found a gunner, and Hector was relegated to a far corner, standing in a space that was probably not meant to be stood in, judging by his uneven footing.

He had a view through a window, though, and that was the most important thing, he supposed. The gunner in front of him probably did not appreciate his presence very much, as he was practically hugging her.

Unlike most of the others, however, this gunner was not Hunese, probably because no Hun’Kui wanted to be so close to his misty armor. Hector had not had occasion to confirm it, but he was virtually certain that Zeff’s handiwork would hurt any Hun’Kui who touched it.

Instead, this gunner was a Rainlord, and one he could recognize without even seeing her face, too, because she was wearing one of the sleek, climate-controlled suits. There weren’t many Rainlords who’d been given one of those.

Sure enough, when she turned and looked at him through her illuminated visor, Hector saw the face of one Selena Elroy.

Or, wait, no. Zeff’s sister wasn’t an Elroy, was she? Her name was Joana Cortes. And that meant that her daughter here was Selena Cortes. Not an Elroy, but kind of.

He needed some kind of pamphlet to keep track of all these people.

“Hello, Lord Darksteel,” the young woman said with a smile. She seemed to be about his age, maybe even a bit younger, but she did have a reaper clinging to her shoulder.

Hector frowned, however. “Why aren’t you with your family?”

“Oh, you know who I am?” said Selena. “I am flattered, Lord.”

Hector only looked at her.

“If I stayed with my mother, I would never see any action,” she said. “And besides, you will protect me, will you not?”

Hector was not amused. Now was not the time for this. And indeed, a sudden bout of turbulence reaffirmed him of that notion.

‘It’s close,’ said Garovel publicly. ‘No more than a hundred meters. Can you see it through the window yet?’

Selena flipped a switch on her right, and a floodlight above the window knifed through the darkness outside. The Hun’Kui militiamen followed suit, as did everyone else along the full length of the train, and they soon saw more light than darkness outside.

Only a distant wall of solid rock was revealed, however.

Selena pivoted with her mounted gun, and her floodlight pivoted with her. Every light searched up and down, left and right.

And through the weighted silence, Hector felt something. An increased pressure in the air. All too familiar.

More shaking arrived, stronger this time.

‘It’s here,’ said Garovel.

And he was not wrong.

A hulking figure exploded out of the rock wall, and every floodlight went to it at once. Sludge and shattered earth flew toward the train, and every gun opened fire at once. It was the loudest thing Hector had ever heard as a wall of flaming bullets shredded the debris into gravel and convened on the monster.

The creature squirmed through the cloud of dust and smoke, still scarcely visible even as it kept pace with the train.

Then it leapt up and over the mayhem, followed by some of the floodlights but not all, and for a second, Hector got his first clear look at the worm.

It was spinning like a drill, and smoldering sludge splattered in all directions around it. Its gaping mouth was full of debris and crackling electricity as the giant worm dove headfirst toward the train, a few cabins behind Hector’s own.

But Hector was ready, and so must have many of the Rainlords been, because it was far more than just his iron that arose to counter the beast. He’d used the same flying technique that he’d developed a few days ago and attributed to an iron boulder, as large as he could make it--which admittedly, was not that large. It hit, to little effect, but combined with all of the many explosions, a moving wall of glass, and yes, a tidal wave, the worm was completely prevented from ramming the train.

That did not, however, stop it from reaching the train.

At first, it looked like the flurry of attacks cut deeply into the worm with deadly impact, but that was not the case, Hector realized. Instead, the worm simply split. Dozens of times. And suddenly, there was not one large worm, but a hundred smaller ones, and they all came spiraling toward the train like missiles, landing with an audible thud and splat. Gunfire managed to keep a few of them off, but once they were on the train, they were beyond the range of the guns.

One of the worms slammed into the side of their cabin, right against one of the gun windows, and Hector saw the metal and glass of the train begin to distort.

They all filed out of the narrow gunner hall, and Hector was the last to exit, so he got a good look at the worm’s acidic sludge eating through the train.

That was going to be a problem, he knew. But on the bright side, at least it wasn’t anywhere near as potent as, say, the Seadevil’s acid had been.

Tremors ran through the length of the train. He heard the screech of metal-on-metal and felt the train beginning to slow.

‘They’re gumming up the tracks,’ said Garovel. ‘If we don’t stop them--’

The whole train lurched downward briefly, as if an enormous mass had just fallen on top of it, but the train kept going.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked.

‘It reassembled itself,’ said Garovel.

Hector didn’t understand. ‘Wha--?’

‘It’s all one worm again,’ the reaper said.

Hector was still confused. Just like that? It was already--?

The cabin train heaved again, this time to the side and more violently than ever. Hector had a split second to brace not only himself but also all of the militiamen in the cabin.

They were the priority, obviously.

A network of iron harnesses materialized in an instant around every Hun’Kui in the room.

The cabin rolled, and Hector and Selena both went sailing into the wall, then back into the opposite one, then up into the ceiling, the floor, the wall again, over and over, until the train finally eased to a stop again.

A stop, he realized. The train was no longer moving.

That was extremely bad.

His arm, leg, and spine all needed time to realign, but he forced himself to sit up anyway. Things were only going to get worse if he didn’t move his ass, he knew.

The cabin was on its side, Hector realized, and the wall of podded Rainlords was above them, threatening to fall and crush all of the militiamen in the room if not for his complex array of iron keeping everyone and everything in place. He reinforced his work along the top with thick iron pillars and freed the militiamen as well. They were slow, but Hector was glad to see that they were moving. He helped Selena onto her feet and hurried out of the cabin with the Hun’Kui militiamen following.

With the vigor from Garovel pumping through his veins and muscles, Hector jumped up onto the side of the fallen train in order to get a better view of things.

A literal train wreck. Many of the floodlights were still working, at least, and they offered limited illumination of the surrounding environment. More people were appearing from the wreckage, but he didn’t see the worm. Not yet, anyway. He doubted that it had left them alone.

Someone was already trying to turn one of the cabins over, he noticed, and someone else was yelling. Oh, at him, apparently. And it was Asad, too.

“Hector!” the Sandlord was saying, while pointing with both arms. He was saying more than that, but Hector could barely make him out over the defeated train’s metallic groans. And the growing rumbling.

Rumbling?

Yeah.

There it was. That gargantuan silhouette, slightly lighter than the rest of the darkness in the distance.

Hector jumped down and tried to prepare himself. To concentrate. Against an enemy like this, it was difficult to imagine what he should do, what he could do. If there was anything at all, it had to be related to the recent breakthrough he’d made. That was the only thing going through his head.

He concentrated. The largest flying object that he’d made was a modestly-sized boulder, no bigger than himself, and throughout his testing over the last few days, he hadn’t been able to supersede that limit. But here and now? When it really mattered? Could he demand more of himself?

The answer was no, he discovered. As much as he focused, he couldn’t make the boulder larger. And he couldn’t make two boulders, either--not without decreasing the size.

He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, really. That would have certainly been too easy.

As soon as the worm became more than a silhouette, Hector pitched his boulder forward at cannon speed, along with a host of other projectiles from the other Rainlords.

The beast leapt up and over the assault, spinning through the air again and flinging sludge in all directions.

The Lord Dimas Sebolt was there to meet it, and the air in front of the man distorted it visibly as a gravity well caught the worm in midair, halting even its centripetal motion and suspending its acidic sludge as well.

Wide-eyed and mouth open, Hector just stared at the scene before him.

Electricity stirred in the beast’s mouth, crackling and bristling with power before it spewed out at Dimas, but the man avoided it easily enough.

Or seemed to.

The lightning arced around in a flash and caught Dimas in the shoulder, causing him to falter but not release his hold. Smote and smoking, Dimas circled around to the worm’s side, farther away from its mouth. It spewed more lightning, but it was entirely ineffectual this time.

Hector breathed again. For a moment, he even allowed himself to wonder if the threat had been neutralized.

Then the worm split apart.

The sheer force of it was enough to knock Dimas back, a shock wave that sent the man toppling through the air, and a hundred smaller worms spiraled after him like heat-seeking rockets.

Hector and the others intervened, and a storm of projectiles came to the man’s rescue. A cluster of explosions was the result, and smoke clouded the aftermath.

Worms began dropping like rain, splattering on the ground in blackened piles.

More and more fighters were coming out of the wreckage of the train now, and Hector could hear Asad shouting again.

“Hurry!” the Sandlord was saying, as entire cabins were being lifted up and realigned via platforms of quartz or other material that Hector didn’t immediately recognize. “To the tracks! Keep everyone in the train!”

And Hector saw what the man was doing, what he had pointed at before. The train tracks that they’d strayed so very far away from. Asad meant to get them back there, to get the train moving again.

Hector didn’t know how feasible that plan really was. The train was in pretty bad shape. But for the moment, he was more concerned with making sure that the worm really was dead. He rushed closer, only to see Dimas smashing the many worm husks into dust with gravitic pulses.

Yeah, they looked pretty dead, Hector decided. They? It? He still wasn’t sure what to think of everything he’d just witnessed, but he figured he should worry about it later and go help everyone with the train.

“Dimas!” Hector shouted over the noise of the man’s work.

And Dimas apparently heard him, because he stopped.

Hector was about to tell him that he should help with the train, too, since his power would potentially be more helpful than anyone else’s in that regard, but he didn’t get to. Because even though Dimas wasn’t stomping the worms into paste anymore, the accompanying tremors had not ceased.

‘I sense two more worms approaching,’ said Garovel.

‘As do I,’ said Iziol, who was attached to Dimas’ back. ‘Straight ahead. They’ll be here in under a minute.’

Hector might have complained if there was time for it. Instead, he and Dimas rushed back to regroup with everyone else.

Zeff had joined Asad in shouting out orders for everyone. When he noticed Dimas and Hector, he had a few words for them as well. “Dimas, focus on restoring the train. We will provide cover.”

“I should be defending,” said Dimas.

“No, our priority is getting out of here. Even after we kill these next two, more could show up. Understand?”

Dimas gave a nod of affirmation and flew off again.

“And you,” Zeff went on to Hector, “help with the train, too.”

‘Nonsense,’ came Qorvass’ voice. ‘The boy is one of the best distractions I have ever seen. Stay close to us, Hector.’

Hector supposed that was a compliment, but he honestly wasn’t sure how to feel about it.

Zeff looked as if he wanted to argue, but the increasingly violent earthquakes deterred him.

‘They’re here,’ said Garovel.

Hector saw someone launching attacks before he even saw the worms. It was Darktide, he realized, already using pan-rozum to propel mercurial javelins off into the darkness. They exploded on impact, illuminating both beasts momentarily.

They were bigger than the first one, Hector noticed, and different in skin texture as well. Where the first had been a bundle of wrinkles, these looked smoother, and he even thought he saw teeth this time as well.

The explosions kept coming as Darktide maintained his attack, apparently keeping the monsters stunned, and everyone else took the opportunity to hurl some of their own projectiles as they all moved up together, wanting to put more distance between themselves and the train but also not wanting to get too close.

Both worms erupted with bellowing roars, and all attacks against them ceased when the force of the shock wave knocked almost everyone off their feet.

Hector hit the ground and skid for a while before catching himself with an iron dagger in the rocky dirt. He’d nearly lost his grip on his shield and so was not surprised to see that many others around him had lost their grips on theirs.

As a result, he was one of the first to get back up, but what he saw next was not something he felt very privileged to witness.

Instead of two giant worms, now there was one, twice as large. Still in the midst of amassing, its skin crawled and writhed over itself, like a million glistening snakes all squirming in a pool of black tar.

His eyes widened as he began to comprehend the new creature’s size. ‘Garovel, you said they could only get as big as a blue whale.’

‘Well, to be fair, that’s two worms in one,’ the reaper said privately.

‘Garovel.’

‘Look, I didn’t know they had goddamn fusion powers. I’ve never actually hunted worms before.’ After a beat of silence, he added, ‘I’m sure we’ll do great, though.’

That did not fill Hector with confidence.