"So, uh, before anyone does anything that they might regret," I said, lifting up my hands. Several Doyen paladins were standing before me and the rest of Bravo Squad (and Vicky Smith, but I wasn't sure that she counted
yet
) and each of them had their psi-swords crackling and sparking. Behind them, the civilians were rapidly fleeing the interior city. Clearly, they knew what was supposed to happen when Paladins got a bit narky.
"Kill the imp-" one of the Paladins started.
My eyes widened and I thrust out my finger, pointing behind them. "What the ever loving
fuck
is that!?"
One of them looked.
That was why he lived. He flung himself to the side with a yelp as the front of the city exploded inwards with a spray of stone and plaster. Men and women of dozens of races ran screaming for cover as the remaining Paladins spun around too late to see one of the knock-off sandworms that peppered Vega III's vast deserts of petrified trees. It was not the
largest
of the Shai Hulud. However, it didn't need to be when it smashed its vast, bifurcating mouth down upon the Paladins, reducing them to a bunch of smeary bits of black blood. Like my first experience with a Paladin (who had
also
not looked behind him), Paladins without time to prep their shields or their warforms were dead Paladins.
"How the fuck did that happen?" Opal whispered.
"Pheremones," Vicky said, quietly. "The local worms use them when they're under threat. I started pumping them the instant we walked through the door."
I pursed my lips. "Well. Do you think she can stay on the team, guys?" I looked at the others. Ali gave me a thumbs up and then a huge, salacious wink. "...that's not a euphemism, Ali."
"Guys," Tycho snarled, her voice flat and her eyes locked on Tiny Hulud. The huge beast was wriggling and writhing, then drawing itself backwards onto its body like a snake looking around. It whuffed at the air with dozens of nostrils, swinging its head around as cowering civilians tried to find places to hide. It roared and Vicky frowned.
"Ah, right," she said. "It'll keep eating until it doesn't scent any more non-worm creatures. That was the downside."
"Now you mention it!" I shouted, collecting my warform as I charged forward and tackled the worm back out through the hole it had burst into. Irritatingly, being the size of a mecha only meant that I was
on par
with the worm, and the two of us tumbled into the vast forest of shattered, petrified stumps. Said stumps exploded into a haze of fragments as we tumbled over and over. My psionic arm was jammed into Tiny Hulud's mouth, keeping it from chomping down on my psionic head. Fortunately, it didn't seem to know that my actual fleshy body was in the chest.
Unfortunately, its tail had looped around me and was starting to squeeze.
I brought my other arm swinging around, focusing on creating a triangular stabbing psi-blade on the back of my wrist. It plunged into the side of Tiny's neck. And then I found out what happened when you stuck something with a psi-blade when it was too big to simply cauterize in a single sweeping blood. The blade dug into flesh and came into contact with gallon upon gallon of blood, pumped against the edge of the psionic field. That field, which cut by being super fucking hot and super fucking thin, immediately caused the blood to
boil
. Since the blade remained in contact, rather than just scything through a limb, it didn't even manage to cauterize. The superheated blood steam just...rocketed out of the creature's noses.
All, like...
Sixteen of them.
It was a bit like getting hit in the knuckles by one of those water hoses they use to dig for
gold
. My whole torso went twisting completely around, and if this had been my real body rather than my warform, I'd have been dead as
fucking
shit. As it was, the momentum simply flung my flesh form against the skin of my psionic field with enough force to cause the shoulder blade of my warform to distend like it was a piece of ballistic jello and the Mythbusters had fired an anti-tank rifle into it. The blue, semi-transparent skin that made up the edges of my warform held...
For a moment.
Pop
.
My warform fizzled into nothingness and yours truly was plunging towards the remaining chunks of petrified tree that sprawled beneath me. Quite a lot of those trees looked sharp as
balls
. I started trying to get my telekinetic field working again. My brain, too jarred by the sudden loss of my warform, only managed to make tiny sparkles at the tips of my fingers. I screamed in frustration - and then plunged into a huge mattress of warm, black fluff. My face mashed against the curling hairs and I breathed out a slow sigh of pure relief. Then my palms pressed to the hardened chiten underneath the fuzz and I realized I had fallen into a building sized spider's butt-fluff.
"Oh, stop screaming," Victory Smith's clicking, chittering voice was even more disturbing when it came from someone the size of a building.
When she had resumed human form, the rest of Bravo Squad had emerged from the front of the now wrecked city. They ran towards us, their feet kicking up tiny puffs of dust from the silty, sandy ground they charged along. I hugged Ali, then looked around to make sure the Tiny Hulud was really dead. And, as it turned out, even if you were a worm the size of a small train, having your brain flash-boiled by fifty gallons of blood turned into steam was not a healthy lifestyle choice. Tiny Hulud was sprawled in a massive, twitching mass.
"Oh Tiny Hulud, you died the way you lived," I said, slowly. "Really gross."
"Well, then," Tycho said, her arms crossed over her chest. "Lets go back to the ship." She snapped her fingers. A crackling portal opened and we started forward. I made sure to go last - it seemed like the right thing, considering I was in charge. And that was why I got to see Tycho step between the portal and Victory.
Victory looked bemused. "I need to go on as well."
"You know..." Tycho said, her voice soft as she clenched her fist - closing the portal with a crack. "When I took you up last, I was a
bit
distracted. And everyone else seemed to be pretty touchy feely. But you know what?" She put her finger on Vicky's chest. "No.
Fuck
no."
"Uh, Tycho-" I started.
"And you!" She turned to face me. "You might be the last man left in this squad, but that doesn't mean I'm going to just let you grab Fang's
spot
. You know, we are in a military, there is a chain of fucking command."
"I'm sorry!" I spread my arms. "But no one else looked like they knew what to do."
We were both nose to nose now. How had that happened. Tycho breathed heavily, her hands tightening slightly.
"But you're right," I said, looking aside. "I shouldn't have just assumed I'd be in charge, or just taken Vicky on with you. Vicky
was
working for the bad guy." I gestured to the spider-woman, who was rubbing her shoulder awkwardly.
"S-Should I give you two privacy?" she asked. "Your mating pheremones are-"
"YES!" Tycho and I both said before Vicky could expound upon that. Vicky inclined her head, turned into a cross between a bird and a scorpion with a hunger for ocular jelly, then flew off. As she buzzed away, I looked back at Tycho. She looked at me. In unison, we shuddered slightly. But that little distraction had done what was important: It had gotten us to calm down slightly. Unfortunately, for Tycho, calming down slightly was enough to get her to start crying again. She wiped at her eyes with her hands, her eyes closing as she tried to control the tears.
"Damn it, damn it, damn it," she whispered.
I slid my arm around her shoulder, then drew her in for a tight, tight hug. It was chaste as
fuck
. There had never been a more chaste hug in the history of chaste hugs. Because while we were both naked, and she was gorgeous as fuck, there was nothing sexy about her tears or her sadness, which I felt tingling and bubbling through her skin. I wasn't the same scale of empath as Opal, but I was still
somewhat
good enough. I took my first impulse - which was to try and suppress the sadness with my power - balled it up and threw it into the sun. Tycho needed hugs and empathy, not a brain-whammy.
