The noise of their heated discussions filled the forest. One of them ran to the edge of the island and made a sign; right away, a patch of earth materialized on the shore, extending the land a few feet. Others, seeing her success, started to work on the bridge to Ugo’s lair.
It was hard work, much harder than when Ugo had done it, but still, the work progressed. More and more Sandaras came to the edge of the abyss and expanded the land.
“Encrypt the bridge so that Ugo can’t erase it from under our feet!”
“I thought of that,” exploded the one with the idea. “Why do you think it’s going so slow?”
“He’ll run to another island,” complained the third.
“Oh, shut up!” snapped the fourth. “You always grumble!”
“Soon, he’ll run out of resources,” exclaimed another clone. “Perhaps we should speed up that moment,” she smiled. “Dupli—”
“Hey! You want to run out of space on our island?” a sixth clone admonished her. “Isn’t it enough how many of us died already?”
While her “sisters” were working hard on the bridge between the floating islands, a Sandara spotted something glimmering in the discoidal grass. Even though the grah wasn’t the kind of female attracted by sparkling trinkets, this time she made an exception: she pushed the grass out of the way and saw a tooth—or rather, a fang. A guval fang “extracted” by a drughira. With her hearts about to break her chest, she realized that the tooth distorted the air around it, hurting the island, which tried in vain to heal itself. The guval teeth had the delete algorithm embedded in them! The finding left her speechless… She tried to touch it, but it burned like molten metal. And yet, the root didn’t seem to be dangerous. Of course! That was the place where the killer function modulated on the beast’s jaw and had to protect it from self-digestion. She took the fang and ran to the nearest Sandaras.
“Look what I’ve got here!” she shouted over their chatter.
From the first glance, all of them understood the implications of the discovery.
“Search everywhere! Recover every single tooth!” she ordered.
Before she had even finished the command, the Sandaras dropped in the grass, carefully picking out every guval fang. And there were plenty of them!
The purple luster of a sarpan materialized like a thin llandro, chased out of nothingness by Sandara’s imagination. When it touched the fangs laid on a table in the portal sphere, the metal flowed voluptuously and embedded them symmetrically, turning the weapon into a monstrous jaw. More and more sarpans and drughiras swallowed the teeth found by the other grahs.
With a joyful battle cry, the confident horde launched the attack on the newly built bridge. Meanwhile, on the other island, Ugo also had reasons to rejoice: the updated code of his guvals was ready for use.
“Let’s see, let’s see,” he exclaimed, delighted. He materialized a guval in front of him and ordered, “Duplicate.”
Right away, the guval turned into two. After several more orders, more and more surrounded the small hill raised by Ugo on the islet, from where he was surveying the future battlefield as any good commander was supposed to do.
Meanwhile, the grahs had reached a tail’s distance from his island. His nostrils quivered, waiting for the slaughter. Ugo shouted in derision, “You arrived just in time, my dear nieces!”
At his sign, the last gap of the bridge disappeared, the two islands becoming connected.
“Rip them to pieces!” he ordered the newly bred beasts, which rushed to attack.
The two lines slammed ferociously on the shore of the islet, and right from the beginning, Ugo sensed that something was wrong. The Sandaras punched through the line of guvals as if it was made of seafoam, armed this time with equal weapons and still enjoying a crushing numerical superiority. They smashed the guvals’ snouts mercilessly with their drughiras; they cut them to pieces with their sarpan saws and pierced them with their falchies. And for each fallen Sandara, more and more riders charged forward with blind rage, carelessly stepping over the swarm of fighters in front of them. Along the whole length of the bridge, a column of tens of thousands of Sandaras crowded, on their way to exterminate him.
A giant melee was taking place near the islet. Every second, hordes of creatures were falling over the edge. The Sandaras were trying to push the monsters out of their way, without caring whether they, too, were falling into the sinister abyss. And even though the guvals became more numerous, the ones in the front line were pushed back, their vicious fangs flying all over the place, pounded away by the mighty drughiras.
For the jure perched on top of the hill, even more alarming was the finding that his indestructible guvals seemed a bit, well, killed by the weapons of his savage nieces. At first, he hoped his eyes were playing tricks on him, but the blinding flashes left no doubt that massive creatures disembodied in the islet’s fabric, much larger than the feeble bodies of the grah females.
This can’t be, he thought, trying to calm down. It took me years to program it, and they managed to develop a delete algorithm so quickly? Ridiculous! Surely the flashes had another explanation…
More and more Sandaras crowded on the islet, pushing the front line to the middle of it. But despite the speed of their advance, Ugo felt a crumb of hope, seeing that the line of guvals was thick enough to slow them down.
Unfortunately, his hope didn’t last long. Although he usually knew how to turn things around even in desperate situations, this time Ugo had to concede that the revelation he just had—namely, that his guvals had stopped dividing, despite his commands—wasn’t exactly the best finding to keep his optimism flying.
“Duplicate!” he screamed, terrified, at the surrounding guvals, but they didn’t seem to have any intention of multiplying in the foreseeable future. “Duplicate!” he yelled again.
Driven by a gloomy feeling, he tried in a faint voice, “Extend the island.”
“Insufficient resources,” the display replied. “All levels are full.”
“Build a bridge, then.”
“Insufficient resources.”
That was it! He had no more resources. The Sandaras, in their reckless dividing, had swallowed them all. Seeing the end coming, an icy chill ran along his tail. He wanted so badly to delete his islet and kill everyone, but the islands couldn’t be deleted without the council’s express consent. Forbat’s masterpiece, the fool—if he was good at anything, it was inventing ridiculous rules to make life miserable for honest architects like him.
The last lines of guvals gathered around him, suffocated by the sea of females. With a mental command, he became invisible. He knew his effort was wholly useless because he had no way of crossing their lines, but it hardly mattered now. Blinded by rage, he jumped on the first niece coming his way, a female perched on the back of a guval and busy with beheading it. Ugo stuck his mental claws deep into her spine, seeking to extract pain, atrocious pain that only he could find, to bring it to the surface, multiply it, and set it flowing through her veins.
“Aaaiii,” screamed Sandara and fell to the ground, writhing in pain—in a totally peculiar way for a grah, but Ugo was a master when it came to inflicting suffering.
Immediately realizing what was happening, another fighter hit her back bluntly. Sandara was almost cut in two, but the sarpan blow caused agonizing pain to Ugo, too. More and more Sandaras started to hit blindly with their weapons, even though they couldn’t see their target. Pierced from all sides, the monster had no alternative but to become visible.
“I give up,” he screamed, terrified.
He looked in horror at the sarpans and falchies pointed at his mug, seeing the air trembling around their edges.
“Guval fangs! You used the fangs of my guvals!” he shouted madly.