Is he loading that glaive with bullets? she wondered, dazed.
Once he had loaded half a dozen shells into the barrel of the glaive, he flipped the hand guard closed and twisted the shaft just under the blade of the glaive, causing it to make a ratcheting, metallic sound internally.
He chambered a round, Demi realized. How does that thing even shoot? It doesn’t have an open barrel.
It appeared that she would have the opportunity to learn the answer to that question firsthand.
The blightwood seemed to roll and undulate as the sound increased.
And then, at the edge of the wood, right across the high road, something emerged from the mist. It was huge, easily twenty feet tall, and broad and deep and heavy. At first she got the sense that it might be a titanic bear based on the way it moved. But then she made out the shape of a massive set of antlers.
Is it a deer? she wondered, confused. If it was, then it was vastly larger than any deer she had ever seen outside of the Deep Wood, including moose.
But then it lurched forward again and she could clearly make out the shape of it.
Except that she couldn’t.
She could not fully understand what it was because what she saw did not make sense.
It was a bear. It was something like a massive, shaggy bear standing solid on four huge paws that terminated in sharp, curved claws. Its fur was mottled and matted, with an unwholesome green cast to it. It looked as if powdery mold was growing all over it.
But where the bear’s head would have been there was instead a thick furry shaft as broad as a tree trunk. She didn’t want to call it a neck, not even to herself. It did not make sense as a neck because it appeared to be another fully formed body.
Like some kind of failed experiment to stitch two different animals together, or an absolutely horrifying centaur, where the bear’s head ought to have been there was a huge bull elk, fully formed, with legs, a head, and a massive set of antlers. The elk legs hung in front of it, folded at unnatural angles, as if they had joints where they should not have had joints. Every once in a while, one of the legs twitched as if it was having a seizure, in a strange, jerky movement that almost looked as if frames had been dropped from its animation. As she looked at it, Demi suddenly realized that the elk body had three pairs of legs. There was a third set directly underneath what would have been an ordinary elk’s hind limbs. They seemed to move even more strangely than the other limbs, curious and almost noodly, as if they had no bones at all, but instead were tubes filled with gelatinous fluid.
Due to the way the spine of the elk was connected to the spine of the bear, the head of the elk was pointed up at the sky, its antlers strange and malformed, looking almost as if they were melting. The eyes of the deer were rheumy and sightless, and its tongue lolled out of the side of its mouth, coated with a strange, thick foam.
And then the monstrous thing reared up on the hind limbs of its bear half, rising even farther into the air, and this movement somehow felt as if it had not only given the awful creature height, but had also inexplicably shrunk them. There were almost a dozen black, pulsating nodules on the belly of the bear, some small, but some nearly as large as a basketball. Demi realized what they were even without consciously thinking about it.
They were parasitoids in their late larval stage, nearly ready to detach and burrow into the skin of another large animal. They were like the thing that she had pulled off of Aelfric.
Then there was an absolutely sickening sound, a wet, meaty sound of flesh being ripped apart, and the belly of the elk split down the middle. The whole elk split apart as if butterflied, and it opened.
Inside the horrible new orifice were dozens and dozens of misshapen, needlelike teeth.
This was the thing’s mouth.
It screamed, and the sound came out like a hiss that could shatter glass.
As if it were not yet clear enough, huge red words appeared in her field of view as a system message.
ENEMY OF THIS PLANET
When it moved, Demi realized that its back half was tangled in thick, dark vines, and for a moment she hoped that it had somehow gotten tangled in the dense undergrowth of the blightwood. But then she understood that the beast was not tangled. It was grasping at the trees of the wood and drawing them into itself.
It was growing larger, absorbing all of what existed in the blightwood into itself, which was why the whole forest was heaving and shuddering.
While Demi had been staring dazed at the awful horror that had staggered out of the blightwood, Aelfric had not been idle.
Seeing that she seemed transfixed by the monster, he had sworn, and then thrown down a barrier in front of her. Spelltext had gleamed in the air before her, and a bloodred magic circle had flared to life, and then another and another, until there were four circles worth of protection standing between her and the horrors of the blightwood.
On the ground, spelltext raced away as Aelfric completed a second spell, and the ground underfoot lit up in a circle four hundred feet across.
Then Aelfric had dashed away, circling the beast along one side.
He did not close, but instead relied on his long guns, firing shot after shot at the monster, each bullet glowing with enchantment. He was agile, but there was a weight to all of his movements, as if he was building momentum inside of his body, engaging chains of muscles, directing the kinetic energy through the length of his spine. His steps sounded like gunshots each time his feet struck the hard stone of the road.
He seemed to be a master of the run-and-gun technique, never staying in any place long enough to draw concentrated attack. He was always on the move, running and striking swiftly, shot after shot after shot, and with each step he built external momentum, moving faster and faster.
He never stopped. The most he did was redirect himself as his speed and the power behind his movements continued to build.
One of the most incredible things to see was how he used his Airstep. He did not fly, he could not, so far as she knew, but somehow he gave the impression that he did, like a gymnast or an acrobat gaining altitude as he kicked off footholds made of nothing but seemingly empty air. Each of his steps and jumps from the Airstep footholds rang in the same way as when his feet hit the ground, propelling him farther and faster. Because of his ability to find footholds in the air, he never ran out of road. He could always go up, and he did.