Chapter Fifty-Eight – Burn Silent Into That Good Night

Chapter Fifty-Eight – Burn Silent Into That Good Night

“There’s no such thing as an unprepared samurai.

What do you mean, that’s an oxymoron?”

–Longbow, to a new samurai, 2056

***

Walking towards mortar fire was… probably not the wisest thing I’d ever done, but so far the army had been pretty professional, and I trusted them to hit more or less where we told them to, instead of bringing down shells right onto my pretty head.

Gomorrah and I were at the front of the formation, which had stretched out to the sides with a pair of ‘wings.’ Some soldiers were running backwards towards the trucks and the edge of the forest. They were the ones laying quick traps with resonators behind us. Setting up a route that we could use to extract from when the time came to run the hell away.

I raised my Laser-pointer up and tapped a model four centre-mass with a trio of shots, which sent it flopping down, very much dead. Gomorrah and I were in the middle of the formation and a bit ahead of all the soldiers. They were moving at a very slow, steady pace. Gom and I were moving at a less steady, less slow pace.

“They make walking in the woods look so easy,” Gomorrah muttered.

I chuckled. “I know, right? Fucking roots, man.”

“Burn the whole place down. See how these bushes and stuff handle being turned to ash. That’ll be easier to cross.”

“Hehe,” I said. It wasn’t my most convincing chuckle. “Just… hold off on that until we’re through, yeah?”

“We’ll see,” Gomorrah said. She stomped ahead, and I jogged to catch up. I popped a few more rounds into some aliens that my augs highlighted for me. The light from the soldiers behind and from the pilot light on the end of Gomorrah’s flame thrower was useful, but it wasn’t exactly lighting up the whole world out here. Some aliens were sneaky enough that I only caught sight of them as they moved.

“You have any ideas for how to get rid of the hive?” I asked.

“I figured you’d want to bomb it,” Gomorrah said. “We don’t want to alert all of the other local hives to anything going on here, so I’m afraid we’ll have to be a bit more subtle with the bombing.”

“Right,” I agreed. Bombs could be subtle. Sure.

We crossed from the part of the forest that still had some vegetation into an area that was completely cleared of plantlife. Even the trees looked like they had been stripped of their bark, and a number of them had their branches pruned, with what looked suspiciously like little bite marks around the points where those branches met the trunks.

Gomorrah stopped, and I did the same a moment later. She raised her flamethrower, then fired a cyclonic blast of twisting flames into the branches above.

Usually, the antithesis were deathly quiet. It was one of those things that made them so obviously un-Earthly. They never made a sound. No noise, no screaming, no growling.

They squealed as they burned, however. Faint cries that I suspected were more about their lungs boiling than actual screams of pain, but it was still a surreal noise to hear while burning carcases fell from the trees.

I could almost, almost see what Gomorrah saw in those flames.

I raised my own rifle and put a few out of their misery, then I started scanning ahead. The fire wouldn’t go unnoticed. Not with the dark of night to contrast against the glowing tornado of flames and the now-burning canopy above.

Just as I suspected, some aliens took umbrage at Gomorrah’s actions, and the alert was sounded. Dozens of blurs started to rush out towards us. Some were covered in thin layers of fresh mud, hiding them against the ground as they slithered forwards.

I took aim, then started firing. A moment later, the area was filled with far more noise as the soldiers did the same. Their guns were equipped with large baffles on the end, and those did a lot to quiet them down, but they were far from perfect, there was a constant cracking sound, like a thousand whips going off at once as the first wave of the hive was annihilated.

“Hold!” the lieutenant called.

I put down a last dog-like model three, then glanced around. There were lots of dead aliens, most of them spread out ahead of us, but not too much else. The guns mounted to my shoulders scanned along with me, and I switched to infra-red, then to other forms of vision, just in case.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“Looks clear,” I said.