The long night stretched on.
Midnight passed, and still the sky beyond Melkath’s outer ruins remained restless. More Drill Tooths hovered at the edges of the park, pale shapes drifting like malignant balloons against the clouds. The Gamma Knights knew another wave was inevitable.
Garet, still sealed inside his makeshift rebreather helmet, moved among the survivors with quiet intensity. He laid out a second defensive pattern — tighter kill zones, overlapping fields of fire, fallback positions. The careful geometry of it steadied them. For the first time since the first swarm, they felt less like prey and more like hunters waiting in ambush.
While the others took their places, Garet returned to the workbench and began crafting more explosives with methodical precision.
Around one in the morning, Paul Best spotted them.
Four Drill Tooths came low and fast from the west, skimming the treeline. They had adapted. No longer diving straight down in predictable arcs, they approached in a staggered formation, using the canopy as cover.
Paul raised his alien plasma sniper and fired from three hundred meters. The first shot struck true, shearing a pale sac of flesh and bone. The second went wide.
Arkadiusz scrambled onto a nearby arched bridge and tried to bring his disintegrator to bear, but the weapon’s battery failed with a soft click and tumbled free. He cursed, switched to the MP5K, and stitched a short burst across one of the approaching horrors. The rounds punched into its pale flesh with wet, meaty impacts — yet the floating eye-bag barely seemed to notice.
Mordecai launched a grenade from his thrower. The Drill Tooths scattered with unnatural coordination, most of the blast spent on empty air. They closed to two hundred meters.
The Knights shifted positions across the Sleeth encampment, trying to meet the threat. Paul scored another solid hit, then missed again. Garet raised both hands and manifested a field of absolute silence in a thirty-foot radius around him. The world went eerily quiet.
The range collapsed.
Paul’s next two plasma bolts found their mark. One Drill Tooth detonated mid-air in a silent, gory explosion of ruptured flesh and spinning teeth. Garet followed with something new — a punishing wave of invisible nanites that tore through neural tissue and electronics alike. Ears bled. Eyes watered. Another of the flying nightmares simply convulsed and fell from the sky, its internal systems scrambled beyond recovery.
Arkadiusz and Mordecai moved to support the western flank. Noelani opened fire with her AK-47, scoring a single solid hit. The remaining Sleeth survivors hurled stones from their slings or fired laser pistols with little effect. Even Thisshish’s blaster went wide.
Then the survivors of the first wave reached the camp.
Three Drill Tooths locked their hypnotic red-eye rays on the nearest Sleeth. Two of the unlucky guards froze in place. The creatures dove. Spinning maws closed over them with wet, grinding efficiency. Blood sprayed across the dirt in silent arcs.
Mordecai’s mouth opened in a silent howl as he poured a sustained blast from his Mark XII into one of the feeders, vaporizing the creature in a flash of searing light. Noelani charged in with her ColdSteel gunstock war club, landing two crushing blows that staggered another of the horrors. Vulgaris swung from the central palm tree, vines lashing — one strike connected, but the second sent him tumbling from the canopy. He crashed down on top of Noelani, both of them sprawling hard into the blood-slicked earth.
A second swarm appeared over the southeastern treeline.
The pincer attack had begun.
Three more Drill Tooths locked onto fresh Sleeth targets. The feeding frenzy resumed. Bodies disappeared into spinning mouths. Blood flew. And through it all, Garet’s silence field held firm — the entire massacre unfolding without a single scream, reduced to the wet grind of spinning teeth and the soft, heavy thuds of falling bodies.
Mordecai vaporized another. Noelani scrambled to her feet and crossed to the new front, trying to interpose herself between the creatures and the remaining Sleeth. Vulgaris recovered and struck again with his vines. Thisshish slipped in the blood and went down hard. One of the Drill Tooths immediately locked onto him and began to feed.
Paul hurled two grenades in quick succession, forcing the nearest horror to break off. Garet finally scored a clean hit with a Mark VII blaster. Arkadiusz slotted in a fresh hydrogen cell and landed two solid disintegrator strikes. The beams seared away ragged chunks of pale flesh from the eye-beasts, their pain written plainly across every one of their blinking red eyes.
The fight became a desperate scramble to protect the weakest.
A Drill Tooth slammed into Noelani, its spinning maw clamping over her shoulders. Sparks of electricity erupted from her body as her mutation discharged in a short, violent burst, forcing the creature to loosen its grip. Still, the teeth dug in. She roared in utter silence, seized the edges of the maw with both hands, and with a surge of raw strength forced the spinning jaws to a grinding halt. Then she dead-lifted the entire thrashing mass off her body and slammed it into the dirt. Her war club came down like a judgment.
Paul and Arkadiusz finally killed the one that had nearly claimed Thisshish.
Five remained. Then four. Then three.
Mordecai’s Mark XII spoke again. A Sleeth warrior landed a lucky spiked-club blow that caved in another. Paul cooked a grenade that detonated directly against a pulsing red eye. Arkadiusz finished one more with a clean disintegrator shot.
The last Drill Tooth tried to claim one final victim.
Noelani met it head-on. She surged forward in a blur of motion and brought the ColdSteel gunstock war club down with everything she had left. The creature’s segmented body shattered under the impact.
Silence returned — real silence this time.
Seven more corpses of the flying horrors littered the ground. The surviving Sleeth huddled together, shaking. The Gamma Knights stood among the carnage, breathing hard, bodies marked by cuts, bruises, and the sticky residue of alien blood.
They treated their wounds with aerosol bandages and waited.
The rest of the night passed without further attack. When the first pale light of dawn touched the eastern sky, the remaining Drill Tooths high above retreated into their cloudy kingdom and vanished.
Thisshish led the battered Knights back through the ruins to the Garden of Steel.
Waldis waited for them beneath the central gazebo. His towering cyborg bodyguard stood nearby, robot head gleaming, avian legs planted firmly as it finished arranging six hulking black suits in a neat row. The Depthstrider suits looked like relics from the end of the world — sealed, matte-black, humming faintly with contained fusion power. Status runes flickered occasionally across their helmet HUDs.
Paul Best stepped forward.
“Waldis, we have so many questions for you…”
The sage of Melkath regarded them with tired, knowing eyes.
“You have precious little time left, Knights.
Dawn approaches — and with it, the Radboleth’s strength will ebb. I believe the creature is nocturnal by nature. The Depthstrider suits are now yours. When the sun rises, you will either meet the beast in glorious combat… or die poorly and quickly. There is no third option.
Seek rest while you still can. The hours remaining are few.
When the carnage is finished — assuming any of you remain — we shall speak of all that has transpired. At length.
I give you my word on that, Star Child.”
Waldis turned and walked away without another word, his cyborg attendant following in silence.
The Gamma Knights stood among the steel roses and the six waiting suits, staring at the pale light growing in the east.
The final mission of Melkath was about to begin.
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