Monster Hunter Bloodlines - eARC by Larry Correia (read a book .txt) 📕

to collect this many cadavers without being detected? I’ll have to find a new home and start over. Oh, you will pay dearly for this trespass.” He was twenty feet in the air now, and violent winds were whipping through the farm. Then the skull snapped toward the road as Phipps sensed a new danger. “You cowards even brought reinforcements.”

I turned to see what had gotten the lich’s attention. There were a bunch of headlights racing down the dirt road directly toward us.

“Lizard folk,” the lich muttered, clearly disgusted. “So the Hunters have allied themselves with the Lacertian Cult. I should have known you inferior types would eventually commingle with reptiles.”

The reptoids and their followers were the opposite of allies, and if the lich didn’t kill us, they certainly would . . . But for once I was really thankful that gnomes were a bunch of loudmouth reprobates, because if they hadn’t blabbed to the reptoids, we wouldn’t have gotten this great distraction. Everybody on my team used the opportunity to get up and run like hell.

Buford Phipps pointed both of his hands at the road, bony fingers splayed wide, and started chanting. The ground began to shake so much that I lost my footing and fell on my face. The earthquake increased in intensity. The smaller buildings collapsed. Fissures were torn in the Earth. Real magic is some scary shit.

The cultists were inbound fast. The maniacs hung guns out their windows and started blasting, only the growing earthquake was bouncing the vehicles around so much that they weren’t in danger of hitting anything. The lead car suddenly slewed sideways, and the next one in line clipped it. The convoy came to a sudden, dusty halt. Cultists bailed out. Among them were the hulking, shrouded figures of actual reptoids, and there was so many that this had to be the entire Atlanta cell.

The lich clapped his hands.

A terrible magic was unleashed. The ground rippled and came alive. It was almost as if the soil became liquid, and the entire field along the side of the road rose into a wave, rolling and growing, racing toward the vehicles. The cultists screamed as it crashed over them. Cars flipped. Bodies were crushed. Then the wave broke. Tons of rock and soil fell, burying them instantly.

As the dust cleared, fifty yards of road was just gone. Other than one pair of headlights sticking straight up out of the dirt, it was as if the reptoids had never been there at all.

Milo hadn’t been kidding about crazy powerful. We needed to take Phipps out fast or his magic was going to smoke us all. I looked toward the car Sonya had stolen from Bonnie. The interrogation we’d overheard had made it sound like Sonya had brought the Ward with her, so it was probably in that car. If I could reach it, I might be able to power it up just long enough to obliterate Phipps.

The insanely dangerous lich turned his attention back toward MHI. “Now, where was I? Ah, yes . . . ” He began floating in my direction. “I was about to twist the blood from your bodies like wringing out a sponge.”

As the other Hunters started shooting at the lich again, I got up and ran for the Hyundai.

Sonya was already there, messing with something in the front seat of the car. At first I thought she was trying to drive away, but then I realized she was struggling with some object inside a plastic grocery bag. It was the Ward.

“Turn it on!” I shouted.

“I’m trying to figure out how.” She got out of the car holding a black rock about the size of a softball. The Ward that MHI had used before had a strange mystical code imprinted on it, where bits of the rock would actually become pliable to be moved into shape. Align the right code and it would activate. This one had to be something like that as it seemed to come to life in Sonya’s hands. “I think I’ve got it.”

The Ward flared with a blinding white light.

When I blinked myself back to reality, all of the windows on Bonnie’s car had been blown out. Sonya was lying on the ground. For a second, I thought that she must have activated it, but then I heard Phipp’s insane cackling. The lich was still alive. It hadn’t worked.

Sonya bolted upright, gasping for breath. I ran to her. She still had the rock in her hand, only now it had turned a bright angry red color, so she’d done something.

“Let me see it.” I tried to take the stone from her but she wouldn’t let go.

“It’s stuck,” she said in disbelief.

I was so much bigger and in such a rush that I hoisted her to her feet and she still wouldn’t let go.

“No! I mean it’s stuck to me!” She turned her hand upside down and shook it, but it was like the Ward was glued to her palm. “Get it off.”

“Hold still.” I grabbed her wrist and turned it so that I could see the Ward better. It was smaller than MHI’s old one, the designs on it were a little different, and it was clearly stuck to Sonya’s hand. Not stuck. Fused. Like welded to her skin.

“Uh . . . ”

“What the hell, man?” Sonya demanded. “The dead guy’s looking right at us. Make it go, Opie.”

“Working on it.” I touched the markings on the stone, but they seemed stuck in place now. I tried to force them to move, but they were totally frozen. “How do you jam a rock?”

The lich was ignoring all the bullets smacking into it and floating our way. “How dare you bring such dangerous alchemy into my presence?” He made a dismissive gesture. A gust of hurricane-force wind smacked into me. I planted my feet and managed to hold onto Sonya for a couple of seconds before she was torn away and I got tossed over the hood of the car.

“Curious. It appears there has been an unexpected interaction between Newton’s