Light Beyond the Dome III

The rat king came on like a tide.

A wall of fused bodies rolled over the broken street, a tangle of ribs and tails and slick black eyes packed so tightly they moved as one. The stench hit first. Rot and iron and wet cellar. Then the sound came, a layered skitter that swelled into a single choking scream.

Ulric lifted his sword and set his feet. Runes woke along the blade, pale as winter sun. “Form on me,” he said.

Yamada laughed like a boy who had found a locked door and a bigger boot. He snapped his cleavers up and began to bounce along the curb stones, light on the balls of his feet, testing angles, searching for the first weak seam.

I palmed a bomb and thumbed the cap. The fuse spit. The rat king’s leading heads rose to meet us, muzzles peeling back to show strings of needle teeth.

“Serve it hot,” Yamada called.

I threw low. The bomb skipped, kissed a slick flank, and blew a plate sized hole in the leading mass. Ichor sprayed and tried to crawl back into place. Ulric stepped into that instant and opened the sword like a lantern.

Light poured out in a wide cone. The beam carried heat that felt clean and merciless. Wherever it struck, the fused tissue softened and then pulled apart. The rat king shrieked and lunged through the light with raw momentum, but the cone stripped its knots and left them ready for knives.

Yamada hit a fallen signpost, kicked, and sailed over the front rank. Both cleavers fell together. He rode the split with his weight and tore a seam from shoulder to hip. He landed on one palm, spun, and took three tails in a single backhand cut.

The rat king tried to close. The seams puckered and dragged inward. I pulled a flask with a white label from my belt and smashed it across the wound. Soap crawled into the cut and turned the ichor thin. The hiss was instant. The surface bubbled and sank.

“Hold it open,” Ulric said.

“Working on it,” Yamada answered, and jammed a cleaver into the sagging seam like a door wedge.

I snapped two bombs at once and threw them short. Both detonations punched pockets into the mass and coughed gray foam back out. The smell thickened. Fat and bile and foul wine. The rat king recoiled and then surged again with a ring of heads that moved like a crown.

Ulric widened the cone. Light sheeted across the crown and flattened it. The beam did not blink. He pressed it forward a handspan at a time, steady as a carpenter planing a stubborn board. Wherever the light held, the slime lost authority.

Yamada saw the lane and took it. He ran the beam’s edge like a rail and chopped into a vertical seam that tied three torsos together. The first cleaver bit deep. The second hooked bone and tore the three apart. He kicked off a broken pillar, flipped, and hit again before the bodies could remember how to stick.

The rat king reared. A lash of congealed ichor snapped for Ulric’s head. I met it with a bomb in the air. The blast chewed the tendril into clots that sizzled and died in the cone.

Another tendril caught me across the ribs and lifted me off my feet. I heard the crack as if it belonged to someone else. The world flashed white. I slid across stone and left a line of blood. Breath would not come. My heart kicked once and skipped.

The ward stone at my chest thrummed. The current woke and ran my bones like a map. Ribs tugged, pulled straight, and set. Breath tore back in with a sound like a bellows taking the first stroke. The hurt followed, hot and honest, and then settled into a hard ache that let me move.

I was already on my knees with another bomb in my hand. I thumbed the cap and threw into the mouth of the nearest seam. The blast rolled the bodies outward and left a clean cavity. I smashed a second white flask and watched the soap chase the ichor down the walls until the foam turned gray.

“Now,” I said.

Ulric stepped to the cavity and set the cone to full. The light reached into every fold and spread along hidden channels like a river on a steep grade. The rat king writhed. Knots unwound. The mass sagged. Yamada poured into those gaps and made them permanent with steel.

We drove the thing backward across the square. Every step cost the creature shape. Every burst of light turned one voice into many. The chorus lost its rhythm. The front broke and showed the mess of ribs that held it together.

I drew two crowbars and shoved them into a thick seam near the spine. A grenade rasped down one bar and set both irons to a dull red. I drove them home, felt the bars bite, and threw a third bomb in under my own hands. The impact blew the seam wide. The ward stone pulsed against my sternum. I gave the current a path. Heat ran through iron and skin and nerve. My palms blistered and then knit as fast as the blisters formed. The seam opened like wet bark. I upended the last of the soap into the wound and watched it foam.

“Ulric,” I called.

He did not waste the beat. “Endure no longer.”

The cone became a pillar. Light filled the wound, then spread through every junction as if the rat king were made of hollow reeds. The body convulsed. A spray of skulls shot free and clattered across the stones. Yamada leaped after them and cut each one in a single clean chop before it could melt and return.

The seams burst. Bodies tore apart. Ichor flooded the square in black streams that turned gray at the edges and then burned into ash. The scream lost its middle and collapsed into a scatter of thin cries that faded one by one.