With impossible speed, the tentacle above him whipped around and attacked Horus. Jeff couldn’t pull his eyes away as Horus caught the attack with four of its arms while its other two arms activated fifty-foot-tall force-field swords and brought them down on Petra’s black-metal tentacle.
Petra’s tentacle spewed energy like a fifty-foot-wide blowtorch, which it directed at Horus as the rest of its body emerged from the earth. Horus defied logic, but Petra’s body exceeded even the grandest descriptions of a god. Its body stretched out of sight, blocking Jeff’s view of its fight with Horus, which was probably a good thing. He needed to focus on not getting killed.
It took all of his mental fortitude to keep himself from watching the Apostles do battle. Their combined armies were nothing but filler compared with them. A single tentacle from Petra’s body had smashed down in front of him, clearing his path of dozens of leeches as it obliterated their metal bodies, leaving a long trench where it had landed.
Jeff shook his head at his stupidity for thinking he could help kill an Apostle. Even with this bike and uniform, the idea that he might have been able to tip the scales in one direction was asinine. Carlee had been right; there was no war between humans and Apostles.
On the far side of Petra’s new trench, Jeff emerged and took a few shots at a leech in his path. At this point, the fight was so chaotic that it was impossible for him to know which side each robot was on. They danced around one another, shooting lasers, or tangled directly with one another, trying to smash their opponents offline. It was brutal and total warfare, with every leech killing as many of the enemy as possible before being destroyed itself.
The indicators in his vision were still dense, but already the battle had wiped out thousands of leeches, leaving the earth torn and burned beneath them. Jeff would have been happier that they were destroying one another if thousands of human bodies weren’t mixed in with the rest of the devastation as collateral damage.
Thinking of the helpless, unable to even fight back for themselves no matter how futile, caused him to shoot at every leech he could, knowing full well that the more he appeared to be a threat, the more likely it was that one of the leeches’ algorithms would target him.
Jeff didn’t care. A blast from his bike caught the back of a leech that was using pairs of massive claws to hold off two smaller leeches while the three of them exchanged projectiles. His attack sent the large leech off-balance, and an enemy leech took advantage of the situation, jumping on top of the bigger leech. It began drilling into the center of the much larger and clawed robot with a hideous metal-on-metal grinding noise.
Smoke filled his lungs as he passed over the flaming entrails of a few mechanical casualties. He coughed profusely, catching glimpses of the titanic struggle between the Apostles behind him. Petra had forced Horus back, and judging from the reduced number of energy blasts raining down on Petra’s octopus-like body, it had managed to take a fair bit of Horus’s army down as well.
Jeff caught his breath and searched ahead for any signs of the vagrants, but he couldn’t see far beyond the carnage immediately before him. He wrapped his cloak around his mouth with one arm to act as a filter and then ordered his hood to only show indicators for humans.
At first, the sensors misfired, indicating humans where only parts of them remained. The leech corpses were piling high now, blocking out most of the fallen humans who had been crushed beneath the warring robots.
As he circled around a particularly physical battle between two of the larger leeches he’d seen on the battlefield, his vision lit up with a cluster of markers not far ahead.
Two hundred and sixty-one humans—that was far too many to be the vagrants, but they were the only breathing bodies indicated, so he altered his path to be in roughly that direction, farther away from the clash of the Apostles.
A cloud of tiny floating cubes buzzed around him, and Jeff shrunk down tight on his bike, hoping that one of them wouldn’t decide to put a pin-size energy blast into his head. Instead, they fired at the front of his bike, disabling his weapons, before speeding on to another target.
Jeff strained his neck quickly to see Horus fail to dodge one of the great tentacles of Petra. He let himself savor the sight of Horus losing a pair of its arms even as pieces of its wings buzzed around Petra like an angry hornets’ nest, burning it with their red lasers.
A pair of flying leeches flew just over his head, leaving a trail of ionized air behind them as well as a putrid stench. Something dropped from one of them, and Jeff’s eyes followed the small blue orb to the ground in front of him.
He was in trouble. Again his mind tickled. He hit the reverse thrusters to try to slow himself, but he knew it wasn’t going to be enough. He shot one glimpse at the relatively clear ground beneath him and jumped.
An implosion happened in front of him, suddenly sucking the air toward where the orb had landed. Jeff hit the ground and rolled. His body armor absorbed most of the impact, but every part of him that wasn’t metal cried out in pain.
An explosion rocked the ground, sending a shockwave of static energy skirting out over the plains from where the orb had been. The energy caught a leech to his right and fried it. Jeff shied away from the energy, but it washed over him anyway. His cloak diffused it from hurting him, but it knocked his hood offline, returning his vision to normal.
He wished he knew how to press, and in theory, Carlee had already taught him. Jeff closed his eyes and desperately tried to turn a broken body of a leech into a new bike, trying his hardest to envision a reality where he had parked his bike in that location.
The sound of a leech stomping behind him quickly ended the pursuit.
Jeff opened his eyes and took off running toward where the humans were supposed to be, not far from him now. He weaved when he felt the instinct, and a green laser missed him by a few inches. His running was slightly lopsided because his mechanical leg provided far more power than his human one, but he leveraged the imbalance to help dodge several more attacks.
A pile of leech bodies stacked five or six deep lay right in front of him, and Jeff searched for a way out of this mess as the leech closed in on him from behind.
He dove forward, sliding underneath the awkwardly arranged wing of a dead leech as a laser burned the ground behind him. He didn’t slow as he picked his way through the twisted metal of the leech. He used his metal arm to break and bend debris to clear his path.
He emerged a moment later into a clearing filled with hundreds of Petra’s humans clinging to one another, surrounded on all sides by a wall of destroyed leeches. Turrets rested all around them, discharging round after round into the air at leeches crawling over the wall of their fallen kin.
A human encased in force-field armor was hacking a leech with an enormous force-field mace. Jeff only knew one person large enough to fill the armor. Talon leaped on top of his latest kill and stretched out a hand. A force-field disk appeared in front of it just in time to block some explosive shells from two leeches flying over the humans. The turrets caught the leeches with their tracking shells, reducing the leeches to a shower of melted metal.
The relief Jeff felt at finding the humans didn’t last long. He couldn’t find Carlee or the other vagrants anywhere. Only Talon—who lured a leech toward him and then pressed in a giant force-field spike beneath it, skewering the catlike leech—was visible.
An air transport big enough to carry fifty people popped into existence to his left, causing the humans to scream in panic. Jeff found Jane seated on the ground not far away. She lifted her petite hand, and the humans rushed forward to fill the vehicle.
Jeff fought the urge to join them. There were already too many people trying to fight their way into the transport. The doors closed around them, forcing people away. Some humans clung to the edges as it lifted off the ground. Dozens of tiny flying leeches popped into existence around the carrier as it took flight.