Chapter 125: Chapter 120

The yarsps ripped into me, several more times as I defended Doofus, but I simply crushed them to keep the suit charged and focused on keeping the dog safe. My wounds didn’t matter. I barely even reacted to the pain, just the stimuli telling me where to attack next. Teeth grit inside my helmet, I ripped them apart as they ripped me apart. Fair trade.

As we walked between fights of our own, I watched the battle at Silken Sands intensify on the Fumble-Bees. Rayna had called for gunners to mount the wall and defend each batch of spear hobbs. They lunged and hacked, killing as many yarsps as possible as quickly as possible, but the front edge of the primary surge arrived. Thousands of yarsps at once rushed forward and slammed into the walls like a tide of writhing claws and mandibles.

They rushed over one another, slid and scrambled in a tumble of limbs to reach the wall top and mount it. Rayna called for the grenade launchers, and the desert in front of the walls erupted in fire. The Russian grenade machine gun clattered and thumped as it sent a line of high explosive directly into the primary bulk of the yarsp charge.

Yarsp limbs and body parts flew into the air from the explosions, knocking the momentum out of the horde's charge. The gunner turned to pump more grenades into the main mass of the horde, aiming for larger clusters, and doing their best to make each shot count. The desert burned and blasted apart as my hobbs fought for their lives and our home.

“BuyMort! Sell ALL dead yarsp!” Rayna screamed. The swarm of pods in the air hovered in overhead, staying out of the firefight below. They began warping out great swathes of dead insects, price per unit be damned. The main rush of yarsp simply fell, as the mountain of crushed, impaled, and skewered hive-mates below were sold at market.

Hobbs and humans on the wall opened fire, in coordinated pushes, to clear out the yarsp that had made it over, and the process began again, with rifles in the action. Spears were still stabbing, breaking, and being replaced, but now the primary bulk of the killing was being done by rifles.

Streaks of light lanced into the swarm, turning back the initial rush as the grenadier squad reloaded. Clusters of yarsp began building up again almost immediately, and Rayna began running between them to direct sales, as Tollya kept her safe with her shotgun. Humans and hobbs lined up on the wall top, lances of rifle fire streaking out into the sea of razor limbs and exploding grenades.

My breath caught and I faltered as I saw a bolt of golden light splash into the horde from the wall top. Molls was present, in her glowing armor, helping kill yarsps with her mother’s hard-light bow. Jada was at her side, heavy mace crushing any yarsps that managed to breach the wall.

The image flickered as a bomb went off over the compound, flashing light and allowing the defenders to see what they were up against for a brief instant. The desert crawled, a carpet of angry, swarming yarsps. Near the wall they rode each other in a rising wave of dead bodies, scrambling to get to my people.

The gates popped open with a scream of metal, and the tide lowered as the rebar filled hallway took the bulk of the insects. They charged and died, skewered, burned, and shot, filling the hallway with their corpses. Within moments the tide of dead was rising again.

Rayna ran the wall selling entire swathes of dead yarsps, but they piled up so quickly she was getting overwhelmed. Some yarsps began to make it over the wall.

More hobbs with nightsticks and rudimentary shields flooded up from the underground hatch, some carrying household tools as weapons. They ran after the breaches like a mob, all running to surround and silently beat to death any yarsp that made it over the wall. None of the hobbs shouted or screamed, they just did the work of keeping the wall safe, even those in rags.

The hobbs in my ear were breathing heavily, or sometimes shouting orders or urgent needs, like medical retrieval, but none of them screamed. None of them died either, the yarsps that breached the wall didn’t stand a chance, the vast majority were either shot dead or beaten and crushed the instant they set foot atop our mud-crete.

Rayna clicked something in the comms and suddenly I couldn’t hear any of the other hobbs. “Boss! Tyson!” she wheezed, out of breath. Tollya started shouting sales commands in the background.

“Too many. Holding for now, won’t last,” Rayna grunted. Another bomb went off overhead, flashing the valley with light. She wasn’t kidding. The horde had finally exited the valley fully, and was folding around the compound as it tried to climb the walls. Our squads were getting stretched thinner and thinner, and responding to the different breach threats would eventually cause a systemic failure. Only a matter of time.

I could see it from the Fumble-Bee aerial footage, and so could Rayna. She looked at me and breathed heavily. “Only chance is you threaten queen.”

“We’re close. Hold on,” I said, picking up the pace.

Doofus had started out the expedition into the cave a little skittish. He was by no means a chicken-heart dog, I’d seen him plunge head-first into Sleem to save me. But underground and dark was a tough ask for him. As the battles went our way, and he suffered no injury, he began to enjoy the fights more and more.

We plowed our way through another batch of warrior yarsp, with Phyllis again using her plasma-thrower to roast the entire tunnel before they became a threat. Doofus wagged his tail and happily barked at a pile of yarsp ash, scattering it against the nearby wall with a sonic blast. Then, in a long, fully tiled descent tunnel, we entered the hive's egg chamber.

A massive chamber opened up beneath us, with descending spirals of hard, tiled yarsp excretion forming gently sloping ramps. Tucked into the walls in hexagonal compartments, spiraling away into the dark abyss below, were eggs. Hundreds of thousands of eggs.

I blinked at the gold mine we had just walked into, raising a hand to Phyllis, as hulking yarsp warriors charged toward us from above. “Hold on Phill, we need to be careful. We want the queen alive, and these eggs are probably worth a fortune.” I glanced over at her as she lit another joint, nodding in a plume of illuminated smoke. “A fortune for us to split.”

The queen herself was hung from the ceiling like a bloated chandelier, her bulbous, egg laden thorax dangling into the darkness. She hung from a web of tiled excretion, filling the bottom of the cavern with more eggs. A trail of yarsp drones brought the oversized queen a constant buffet of vomit along a catwalk in the ceiling, each of them dribbling jellied meat from their mandibles into hers.

Phyllis swapped her weapon to the regular cannon and started taking careful aim at the incoming yarsps. They were swarming, coming primarily from the queen’s upper scaffolding. Phyllis aimed and fired, splattering a warrior, and scorching a hole in the tiled ceiling. The yarsps tucked their claws into the spaces between tiles, effectively scuttling across the ceiling and walls.

One dropped nearby and I hurtled toward it, sword slashing. With the tall ones I faced them at or above the level of my own head, so I just swung for limbs. Any that came within range were clipped off, grabbed and crushed, or torn off. Depends on if I needed to charge or not. Behind, beneath, or on top of my charging opponents, my cartoon starfish continuously danced.

Doofus barked at the incoming insects, sending them hurtling back, or crushing them against the stone walls. Eggs burst as Phyllis fired over and over into the oncoming rush, blasting holes into the nearby and distant walls alike. Ichor rained down over the chasm, and the queen bellowed and writhed, trying to get her distended lower portion out of danger.

Fortunately for her, Phyllis switched to the plasma blade as the warriors closed the distance. The fight was over shortly after that. Dead yarsps smoked and twitched, as Phyllis shut down her weapon and sighed in contentment.

“A day’s work well done,” she said. I heard the distinct sound of a joint being lit from inside her helmet, and soon after acrid smoke puffed from its vents. “Still plenty of eggs too.”

You are reading story BuyMort: Rise of the Windowpuncher – How I Became the Accidental Warlord of Arizona. Apocalyptic GameLit at novel35.com

I stood at Doofus’ side, watching the now alone queen. Her brood lay around her in pieces or smashed on the walls and ceiling of the egg chamber. She reared her mandibles back and roared again.

Rayna whooped in my ear. “You did it! They backing off!”

I checked the Fumble-Bee footage. Bombs still lazily fell over Silken Sands, but the bulk of the swarm was retreating at full speed, heading for home. Heading for us.

At a glance, it appeared that over a thousand yarsps were running for our position,

“Thank you boss!” Tollya shouted over Rayna’s shoulder. Her face was covered in soot, in slits that matched her helmet’s visor. “Saved us!” she barked, before moving down the line to help another hobb. There was still work to be done.

“Casualty report?” I asked, holding my breath.

“Clear, no dead. Four injured, Doctor Miles with them already. Wall held!” Rayna shouted the last to her defenders, and the hobbs took up a cheer. Some humans joined in, weapons raised. In the distant background, I saw Molls, holding her bow and looking toward the main hobb station.

I glanced at the aerial footage, taking in the extent of the damage. The secondary gate had not held, once the main force arrived. Thankfully, the murder hallway lived up to its potential and stopped the horde before it could breach either of the reinforcing gates that lead into the compound.

There were hundreds of dead yarsps scattered around the compound, and groups of hobbs already gearing up for a work detail to butcher them. Many more lay on the ground outside, piles and rows of the violent insects still smoldering from the Mo-Gas.

The rush of sprinting yarsp would take some time to arrive at our location, and I felt confident Phyllis could roast them all in the primary tunnel as they arrived, so I wasn’t overly concerned. Safe in the knowledge that the affiliate had held, and those I cared for had survived, I turned to explore my current situation.

The answer to the mystery of the hive's access to unlimited quantities of meat was not immediately apparent, but the trail of yarsps barfing into the queen’s mouth had been coming from an excreted catwalk that sloped down to the other side of the massive cavern. It ramped down to meet a tunnel at the far side, which vanished into the dark.

“Phyllis, are you good to stay here? We have a shitload of yarsps coming in, and I suspect they’ll be primarily coming down this main tunnel. I was thinking you could just hold it with that mega-flame-thrower you have?” I asked.

“It’s a plasma thrower dearie, much hotter than fire. But yes, I can hold here and wait for the buggies. Just as long as I don’t kill the big one, right?” She said.

“Right,” I said, nodding. I turned my attention to the dog next.

“Hey Doof, you stay with granny Phill, okay?” I’m gonna go explore a little bit,” I told the dog. He cocked his head and met my gaze with his most serious ‘I’m listening to you’ face.

Then buttons sprang to life from his collar and lit up the floor in front of him. He stepped on his favorite button, and the machine snapped, “pack!”

I knelt and rubbed his head, feeling the prickle of his shield on my hand and wrist. “Don’t worry buddy, I’ll be careful. You stay and help granny Phill.”

“Pack!” the button said as he stomped it again. Then he licked my hand and turned to sit and pant up at Phyllis. He kept nervously eyeing the queen in the ceiling, but she was encased by excretion.

Without tearing her much smaller upper portion free of the giant, hanging thorax full of eggs, the queen would be helpless to move. Her thorax was massive, pale, and pulsing with movement. It was also supported by the excretion structure. The queen had multiple laying channels, where eggs piled up in a soft landing pad of birthing ooze.

The shelves in the wall had been built specifically to hold up her weight, and to spread out the area her eggs were deposited in. I stared down, using my helmet's mapping feature, and couldn’t see the bottom for sheer range. At each level down, the hanging thorax partially rested on a shelf of hardened excretion, supported from below by pillars of the stuff.

As I passed by a shelf of undamaged eggs, I paused to sell one to BuyMort, just to see what price I could get for each. To my surprise, a BuyMort pod arrived almost immediately, coming from the queens feed tunnel.

Purchase: Livestock, Yarsp egg. Rarity, common. Condition, good health. 5 Morties dispensed.

There were enough eggs that I wasn’t terribly concerned. It would add up, and the real goal was preventing this next batch from storming our gates tomorrow morning. Some of them already had wriggling yarsp forms inside.

I ordered the pod to sell every egg in the room and walked toward the far tunnel. It, like the rest of the cavern, was tiled with hardened patches of excretion, but the wear on this section was immense. Some of the tile was worn down, and every millimeter was covered in heavy scratching. 

It also looked like it might be long. I picked up the pace, breaking from a walk to a jog.

You can find story with these keywords: BuyMort: Rise of the Windowpuncher – How I Became the Accidental Warlord of Arizona. Apocalyptic GameLit, Read BuyMort: Rise of the Windowpuncher – How I Became the Accidental Warlord of Arizona. Apocalyptic GameLit, BuyMort: Rise of the Windowpuncher – How I Became the Accidental Warlord of Arizona. Apocalyptic GameLit novel, BuyMort: Rise of the Windowpuncher – How I Became the Accidental Warlord of Arizona. Apocalyptic GameLit book, BuyMort: Rise of the Windowpuncher – How I Became the Accidental Warlord of Arizona. Apocalyptic GameLit story, BuyMort: Rise of the Windowpuncher – How I Became the Accidental Warlord of Arizona. Apocalyptic GameLit full, BuyMort: Rise of the Windowpuncher – How I Became the Accidental Warlord of Arizona. Apocalyptic GameLit Latest Chapter