Ethen Gearhart's Arc

Chapter 7 of 9

The second beast dropped, then a third. Ethen's squad held the relics and fired. But the machines kept coming. They moved faster than he had guessed. His rounds struck brass hides and sparked, yet the beasts barely slowed. One bullet to the leg. Two to the flank. Still they ran. Ethen fired at the nearest. The shot hit its shoulder. The beast stumbled, caught itself, and sped up again. He fired twice more. It closed half the ground. His gun lacked the punch to stop them in time. At this rate they would reach the relics and swarm his knights. "Aim for the heads!" a knight shouted. Ethen tried. A head shot cracked one open, but each beast took three or four rounds. Too slow. He counted eight left. They would cross the open ground before he could drop them all. He looked at the field around him. Scattered war relics lay across the frozen tundra. Rusted shells. Broken clockwork insects, long dead, their legs frozen in the ice. Then he saw it. One relic near the center had a wide crack down its side. Steam vented from the crack in a thin white hiss. An old boiler, still under pressure after all these years. Ethen made his choice. He pointed at the venting relic. "Steamhunt!" His cheetah snapped its head toward him. Brass plates flashed along its spine. "Lead them! To the boiler!" The cheetah understood. It bolted from cover, straight across the path of the charging beasts. The machines turned to chase. Their gears whined as they gave chase. The cheetah ran fast and low, drawing them into a tight pack beside the cracked relic. Ethen rose from cover. He aimed, not at the beasts, but at the crack in the old boiler. He fired. The round punched through the weak metal. The boiler burst. Steam and shrapnel tore outward in a white blast. The pack of beasts flew apart. Brass legs and gears rained on the ice. His cheetah had already cleared the edge, plates singed but running. When the steam thinned, the beasts lay broken in the snow. Two stragglers remained at the far edge. Ethen's knights picked them off with slow, aimed shots. Then the field went quiet. Only the hiss of the ruined boiler and the click of cooling metal. Ethen lowered his gun. His squad stood among the wreckage, whole. Not one man down. A knight clapped his shoulder. "You turned the ground into a weapon." Ethen did not answer. He watched the cheetah limp back to his side, one joint grinding. The machine had done its work and taken the damage. He knelt and ran a