"Oh, gosh. They really turned the hospital into a hive."
I stared at the black resin-like material that the xenomorphs had secreted to create some sort of hive. Shaking my head in disbelief, I stepped inside and glanced around.
The patients and priests had been cocooned and turned into hosts for more of these things. The adventurers had been killed, slaughtered to the last man. I could see their armored corpses lying scattered about the outside of the hospital, as well as a few inside the compound. Inner jaws had smashed into their skulls, breaking through helmets and obliterating their brains.
It was carnage everywhere. A sea of blood pooled beneath the cooling bodies, and I had paused to momentarily draw a huge magic circle outside the hospital. There were bugs climbing about the interior of the hospital, and a few of them had watched me curiously, but they didn't strike. Not yet.
As long as I didn't step into their lair, they wouldn't attack me. They were zealously guarding their territory, watching out for intruders. Even though they were watching me cautiously, none of them moved to attack me yet because they didn't deem me a threat. In time, a few would branch out and pounce on me, to capture me and drag me back to their hive so that I could serve as a host for their parasitic brethren.
But instinct told them not to attack…yet. They could tell that I was a dangerous person, probably just from reading the bloodthirsty aura that radiated off me. Despite my best attempts to cloak myself, I couldn't. Not that it mattered. No matter what kind of stealth shadow spell I cast, they would know I was coming.
The hive was their home ground, after all. I wouldn't be surprised if they could pick out foreign movements or sense that something was amiss.
Fortunately, the bugs didn't understand magic. They had no way of knowing what the magic circle I was currently inscribing was meant to do. So they watched for now. In any case, I didn't need that much time. Using blood magic, I was able to draw the colossal magic circle in less than a minute.
Then I moved in.
Everything changed when I stepped into the hive. The still walls came alive and the xenomorphs pounced.
"They're coming out of the walls! They're coming out of the goddamned walls!"
Even as I shouted that gleefully, I was throwing multiple icicles in all directions, impaling the creatures to their own resin-coated walls. As they writhed about, I drew Night Fang and whipped out, slicing through the head of one of them. With my other hand, I grabbed a shuriken and tossed it. Spinning rapidly, it curved about the interior of the hive in an arc, cutting through several heads. The xenomorphs let out alien shrieks that were cut short as their acidic blood splashed across the walls and floor of their hive.
Unsurprisingly, the resin was resistant to their acidic blood. An inert substance, perhaps?
Not that I cared. I raised a hand and retrieved my returning shuriken before continuing onward. One of the monsters lunged out from a wall, believing itself to be unseen, but I stabbed its head with a backward thrust from Blood Angel. It paused for a moment, as if not believing that it had just been pierced. Then the front half of its head spilled off, before the rest of its corpse toppled over.
Lashing out with my whip, I watched as it coiled around a pouncing xenomorph. Night Fang tightened and sliced through the creature's body before it crashed into the ground. Even when cut into pieces, the top half of the monster was still alive, writhing as it hissed vengefully. I ended its life by stabbing its head with Blood Angel.
Turning around, I kicked a charging xenomorph in the face before it could rake its claws across my back. It cried out as it was sent hurtling backward, and I whipped Night Fang over to coil it around its head before cleaving it apart.
Another xenormorph leaped at me, but I fastened Night Fang to my belt before drawing another device. Squeezing the trigger, I caught the creature in a net and watched it tumble backward, thrashing about wildly as the metallic wires tightened around it in a grip so deadly they bite through the monster's exoskeleton.
I wasn't going to wait for the acidic blood to corrode through the sizzling metal net. Hurling Blood Angel, I impaled its head with the blade before it could burst free. I wasn't as stupid as some hunter to slowly draw a knife and confidently stroll toward an enemy that had yet to be defeated. It was impossible to trap a xenomorph, after all.
I sure as hell didn't want to die from a head bite.
Picking up Blood Angel, I continued further into the tomb. As I reached a vast cavern inside the hospital, which had totally been transformed, I realized that I might be at the heart of the hive.
Drawing the triangular laser mines, I then dispatched them to all the corridors leading to this central cavern.
I hadn't even activated them when a xenomorph was already pouncing on me from above. Twisting around, I dodged its strike before lashing out with my whip. Night Fang coiled around it, slicing it in half before I ended its life with a stomp to its head. I was quick to remove my shoe before the acidic blood could eat through it.
With a flick of my hand, I then activated the laser nets, essentially trapping myself in the cavern.
No, the xenomorphs were trapped in here with me. Grinning, I pushed my glasses up my nose and glanced around at the teeming hive.
"It's a bug hunt."
The xenomorphs were not as amused and they charged as one, a dozen jumping from rafters, the ceiling, and the walls…some even from the floor. With a single gesture, I cast an advanced spell that I had been preparing all this while. Blood spears erupted from the ground around me, having been buffed by all the blood I had absorbed from the dead adventurers outside the hospital.
While I wasn't very pleased about it, the slaughter of the adventurers proved to be the monsters' undoing.
Chilling screeches of pain echoed throughout the cavern as the xenomorphs were impaled by the blood stakes that I had conjured. Of course, the spell wasn't enough to kill them. They were unusually resilient, able to survive grievous wounds that would kill a human outright. I had seen a xenomorph bisected at the waist still survive and continue to claw its way toward me before.
Fortunately, I had never thought about depending on my spell to kill them.
Instead, the creatures were flung toward the laser nets because of the sheer momentum of my blood stakes. They screamed as they were sliced apart into many pieces by the ruby lasers, cut into so many sections that there was no way they could crawl about even if they somehow survived. Not that I had to worry. The gaps between the laser nets were so tiny that the heads were cut into several pieces when they flew through the grids.
Within the space of five minutes, I had massacred over fifty of these things.
"Phew…"
Deactivating one of the laser traps, I retrieved it and proceeded deeper into the cavern. I could hear a bloodcurdling cry, one that was far louder and more terrifying than the elephant-like shrieks produced by the lesser creatures.
If I wasn't mistaken, the monsters I had been fighting so far were mere drones. Warrior-drones, to be exact, but not the…queen.
As I suspected, the queen was waiting for me deeper inside. A massive thing that was so tall that her crested head scraped the ceiling of the vast cavern that used to be a hospital wing, she was about five meters high. Maybe six. I wasn't sure. She had four arms, two normal ones tipped with claws, and a pair of smaller and weaker arms closer to her chest. Like the drones, she was eyeless, but her crested, elongated head resembled a majestic crown. A tail that was a couple of times the length of her height stretched behind her.
She was standing before a bunch of eggs. I watched as several of the eggs closest to me began to hatch, the top parts peeling back like a fruit to reveal the parasitic creatures within. Unlike the drones, these monsters were smaller, about the size of an adult's head and pale in color. One of them jumped out, and I caught a glimpse of something resembling a horseshoe crab with spindly limbs and a whip-like tail before I sliced it apart with my shuriken.
"All right, no more fucking around."
Taking a deep breath, I cast Absolute Zero and froze the entire place. The half-open eggs, the creatures that managed to hatch, and all the closed eggs – the entire hive was suddenly covered in white and azure frost. With a snap of my fingers, I shattered all of the frozen eggs.
The queen screamed in fury and I looked up to see that she was unaffected by the ice. No, that wasn't entirely true. Her body was frozen and she was struggling to break free of the icy tomb that now restrained her, but she was still very much alive.
Damn, but she was one tough bitch.
With another cry, she broke free of the ice and started toward me.
"All right, then. Let's do this."
I dove to the side narrowly avoiding her lethal tail strike that shattered the ice that surrounded me. I lashed out with my whip, but she batted it away with her claws. Smart enough to not let the whip coil around her, she yanked it out of my grasp and tossed it aside.
Her tail whipped out again, and I was forced to jump over it. Spinning in midair, I drew both Blood Angel and Nocturne before slashing the creature. The queen wailed before backhanding me, but I managed to parry her claws. Even so, her tremendous strength sent me crashing against the wall.
Snarling, the queen gestured to somewhere. To my surprise, new monsters emerged. They were different from the drones, far larger. Like the queen, their heads bore crests, but not as large or majestic as their matriarch's. They let out bloodcurdling cries before loping toward me at incredible speed.
Praetorians, huh? The queen had called out her elite guard to take care of me. Why she didn't do it before, I had no idea.
Oh…because I had frozen them earlier with Absolute Zero. I noticed layers of frost still crumbling off their black exoskeleton. Apparently they had been caught by my spell earlier, but managed to survive. Unlike the queen, they had lower resistance to magic and thus required more time to break free.
Sheathing Blood Angel and Nocturne, I grabbed two of my shuriken and threw them. The first two praetorians died, cleaved apart by the rapidly spinning discs. Even their armored crests weren't enough to protect them from the deadly power of the shuriken.
The remaining two immediately swerved to the side. Without waiting for them to recover, I was already sprinting toward them. Jumping up, I drew both Blood Angel and Nocturne before plunging them through the head of the closest praetorian, eliciting an enraged screech from it. It clawed at me desperately, its tail arcing upward to pierce me like a scorpion, but I had already withdrawn along with my swords, leaving a trail of acidic blood in the air.
Landing a couple of meters away, I turned just in time to see the wounded praetorian bear down on me. Ducking under its claws, I then swung both of my swords up to clamp the black and red blades onto the praetorian's neck in a scissors grip. In a single motion, I decapitated it before backing away to avoid the shower of acidic blood that sprayed across the walls of the hive and spilled across the black resin material that now coated the floor.
Without pausing, I sheathed both of my swords again before jumping up to retrieve my returning shuriken. Just as the final remaining praetorian charged at me, I tossed one of the shuriken to cleave its head into two. The rest of its body, partially bisected, flailed about for a few seconds before flopping down impotently.
Then a tail swiped the shuriken aside, knocking it off course. I managed to retrieve it before returning my eyes onto the owner of the tail.
The queen was back, and she was pissed. With an angry snarl, she charged at me.