He mistook it for part of the pyroclastic decor, at first. It might have saw him through the gloom, tasted his body heat, or possessed senses able to peek into various states of ultraviolet waves and bio-electric discharges. Six in one, Seydon thought, and half a dozen in the other. A moot detail. As he stepped along frozen pools of hardened volcanic glass, it woke up. A serpentine pile of rolled, scaled knots uncoiled itself and rose. It's chosen bed were the remains of an old and kingly sarcophagus, once a pristine cast of blue meteorite steel and forged to resemble a tall, emptied throne. The seat was toppled over and the coffin split wide: a sad, tiny bundle of red-gold insect silks garbed around a pulverized skeleton were all that remained of the unknown monarch.
In design, it was
an elegant monstrosity. Nine heads swaying atop long, sinuous necks, frilled with spikes and bones, thirty-centimetre horns protruding above wide nostrils. They connected to a complex socket arrangement on wide shoulders, arms laced with bone-plates and thicker than most Yavin trees, hands webbed and broad, ending in talons sharp enough to rake through duraplast. Its torso was two meters long, the pelvis wide to accommodate an unpredictable centre of gravity, framed by broadly muscled digitigrade legs curling into arched footpads. The toes were more talon-digits: browned from caked Mandalorian gore. Flapping a pair of wide but ultimately vestigial bat-like wings, the dire-beast shuddered out of its rest, and swung all eighteen eyes forward to regard this intruder.
The effect was hypnotic. Calm bundles of spaced, black-on-red pupils that undulated subtle muscle rhythms. Its hot breath snorted as vapour out its snouts and mouths. Standing opposite across the grotto chamber, the witcher could hear three distinct heartbeats drumming monotonously. He observed its chest, and how every breath displaced and stretched its ribcage. Blood pressure must have been enormous to keep up the staggering effort of maintaining nine skulls, their interlinked consciousness, the necks, the body and all it's functions. Even at rest, Seydon thought, he's going a thousand miles an hour, so alive and insane. He'd never seen a Hydra Beast come close to this many heads.
And then it loosed a simultaneous, stereophonic roar that quivered his skin, and shuffled its bulk forward. Seydon split into a run, Winterfang still in his right hand, a tied up palm-bomb bouncing in his left. Its stalking weight, the way it swung its feet about and planted down for purchase, kept shaking the ground out from under his boots. He fought from tripping, focused on its surging direction and how long each of those serpentine throats were, how fast it managed to sprint as its tail swayed as a counter-balance. They closed in: the grey majesty of its rippling scale-hide versus the curl of powerful muscle pressing against his cool, matte skin. Six meters now, Seydon counted off, and each centimetre neared was just that much more risk playing into the Hydra's reach.
Three heads lashed forward and bit at empty air, a half-second after the witcher rolled the bomb out of his hand. It tumbled once and bounced off the wave-head of some cooled sand-glass, before spilling open with light. Samum: a primitive but concussive explosive that ripped the air open with a blast of nova illumination and a bang that could temporarily deafen. For a long, ear-splitting beat, the grotto was lit with a hard, pale wash and sharp, checkerboard shadows. Seydon felt his own ear-drums shiver but hold. He'd tensed his eyes shut against the detonation, hoping his night vision hadn't been soured. Somewhere behind him, blinded and deaf in every head, the Hydra was careening in rage and panic.
It squatted low and lashed out, clipping its tail-axe through a dull, milky rhombus of crystal. Chalky rubble dusted across his shoulders. The tail swung back, level with his waist. If the sharpened bone protruding from its extended vertebrae connected, it would open up his belly and tickle the meat of spine. Seydon jumped and tucked up his knees, turning a neat roll mid-air, Winterfang cleaving under him, the tail-trunk whistling past below. A sharp, trumpeted shriek of pain – the tail-end went flying free and clattered aside. Brackish gore flowed down Winterfang's fuller, the silver-plated steel drinking in the agony of its enemy.
That enemy collected itself in the next ragged breath, turning on Seydon. Too many dancing, carmine eyes bobbed in the pitch black-and-blue dark. He blinked, trying to get his night vision to return. Damn it. The Samum bomb went off too close and too soon. The Hydra could see him just fine now by way of body heat and pesky bio-electrics. The head second to the far right came around, jaws folded open. Briefly, he could smell gut-rot and septic saliva, a full, nauseous exhale that took his breath away. And there: a bright, milky glisten. He made out the close definition of a jaw full of lathered, calcium-yellow fangs. Winterfang came up, slashing through a tight guard-pattern of intercepting cuts, shuddering blows up through the skull. Faster, his mind roared, faster! A second head snapped at his face, a third and fourth in staggered but quickening succession, cycling through all nine swinging necks. It's bulk bore down. Seydon was a hacking blur, backstepping as his sword rang with blows.
A massive foot came in through the dark and swatted him. He felt a talon rip into his triceps and another open a mean cut across his hip through the sleeveless tunic. The blow caught him and threw him for a dozen meters, feet going over his head, end over end. Gravity took over in the next moment. His backside met a hollow cavepearl and he finally smacked into solid tephra, skidding into a low drift of gypnate. The Dunaan collected himself as quickly as his aching frame allowed. The vials: his fingers stripped the last three glasses from his rigging and he downed each in rapid succession. No time, he knew. The Hydra was coming, churning over the sand-glass and chert. His anti-toxin immunity would have to deal with the sudden onrush of potions.
Squall, with Stormbolt and Hawk. A torrid, wicked heat in his skin made Seydon's eyes water and his mouth dry out. The Squall would speed his nerve-reaction times. Before, he might,
might have the speed to catch a bullet. Now, he could pick one out of the air with a calliper. Hawk: a healing factor amplifier. His taken wounds were already fast clotting as bridges of closing platelets swarmed and patched in mottled scabs. The Stormbolt, in short, was a temporary strength enhancer. The specifics eluded Seydon but it was a combination of endorphin rush, lactic acid blocker, and a surge of blood. Sclera filled with red, pupils an oval of dilated black, the grotto appeared as a blending of visible and ultra-violet colour. A gently hallucinogenic side-effect of the toxicity. He saw hues, shades, and tones without name. The Hydra Beast appeared as a tint of stomping grey scales edged in a coat of iridescence. Seydon collected Winterfang back into his grasp, stood, and chucked another palm-grenade.
It had more kick than the Samum. A Caseshot bomb: the small hissing bundle of leather and twine plumed into a cone of hosing shrapnel. White-hot flecks spun into the air, a brief storm of wafting, incandescent petals, sticking and burning through the Hydra's scale hide. The hiss of cooking blood reached his ears. The beast briefly lost its sense of physical coordination, necks and skulls lashing against one another, helplessly trying to rub off the caustic shock of pain. It ignored the Dunaan. This problem was immediate and extremely vexing. It made the Hydra's bulk momentarily useless as it was caught at rest, stamping from side to side, dancing from the shrapnel digging its way deeper into flesh and muscle the more its body twitched about. It couldn't feel the bootsteps running up its spine, the witcher now poised behind its nest of writhing of throats, balancing where its batwings stuck into shoulder-blade sockets.
“Do you remember Sergeant Fries?”
If he had to, Seydon could lift over his head almost four thousand kilograms of solid weight. He didn't know the calculation model that put that strength into force, only that it equalled out to
a lot. The Stormshot numbing his joint tissues and tendons amplified that strength potential. Time had slowed. The Hydra whipped about lethargically. The Hawk drink was promising to hose the contents of his breakfast out through his nose, while the remnants of the dashing Squall shot was pressing pins and needles in behind his eyes. Seydon thought of Piter Fries screaming in his comatose dreams. The way Rosa did, clinging to sheets and pillows, waking only to cry herself tired all over again. He cut, torquing with the whole of his torso, twisting at the waist. At the mid-point of percussion along its blade edge, Winterfang glided through a pair of Hydra necks and took them off at the shoulder.
Shrapnel wounds became forgotten. The Beast felt the loss in it's cognitive functions, unable to correct the decapitations with anything in its instinctive repertoire. Blood hosed in arterial gushes. But even with seven heads, its fighting potential was staggeringly lethal. It managed to coil a pair of jaws around to bite at the weight it now felt dancing along its spinal scales. He split the first through it's snout so deep, candy-pink brain matter showed through a wedge in the skull. The second jaw, the fourth head, retreated, gnashing hopelessly, feeling it's consciousness being picked apart one blade hack at a time. Seydon backpedalled three steps down the snaking set of backbone. He knelt down, clamping his thighs against a raised nub of cartilage, bone, and blood vessels. The nodule in the spine where the Hydra split it into its nonuple crowns.
The Dunaan raised Wintefang like a spear, a hand beneath the crossguard, the next clenched firmly over the blade itself. And then drove it downward in a crippling stab. The sword-peak pierced and cracked a protective scale like egg-shells, sliding into a sheathe of gristle, running deep. Dark blood welled around his knees. He rechecked his grip, then wrenched brutally to the side, and felt the crucial nerve conduit go. The connection was cut. It was like witnessing a switch being thrown in the Hydra's body. A long, abrupt twitch sounded from its severed tale up to what remained of its multiple-heads. Then a drawn out exhale, coughing and dragging phlegm. Death rattle. Seydon leapt clear as it rolled over and died, necks thrumming like slack rubber, throwing up a cloud of pulverized chert and glassy shale.
Momentarily, Seydon got to his boots only to steady himself against his knee caps, staring at the corpse twitching on the grotto floor. There, he thought. Sergeant Fries could maybe rest easy for a little while. Alec Rekali would be vindicated. The besmirch done against their clan honour was hopefully washed away. And thankfully, neither of them were close about. In the next breath, the witcher was on his hands and doubled over. Alchemical poisoning wracked cramps in his stomach and forced one violent heave after another. The price of pushing his toxicity threshold. Another hour and his bloodstream would neutralize any unwanted elements, would regulate and return homoeostasis, normalize. For now, watery vomit spattered onto his pants and tunic.
