Titan: A LitRPG Adventure (UnderVerse Book 4) by Jez Cajiao (free ebooks for android .TXT) 📕

to ourselves, dragging the cudgel out, slapping it into her palm threateningly, and screeching again.

We glanced at each other, the sounds of more riders growing louder and louder as they closed the distance.

“Fuck it,” Arrin’s called, and he hit her in the face with a lightning bolt.

The diminutive figure was smacked backwards only to jump back up and grin at us with a mad light in her eyes, suddenly sprinting forward.

She covered the distance quickly, her short legs and wide stance giving her a waddle that would have been amusing, if not for the bloodthirsty look on her face. As I mentally tagged her as ‘walking like John Wayne,’ Grizz stepped forward. He batted her cudgel aside and kicked out, smashing her in the face with his armored boot.

She staggered, then grabbed his leg and sank her teeth into it, the sound of metal scraping across metal echoing around the corridor. Grizz growled and struck downwards with the pommel of his sword, slamming it into the side of her head.

The rest of us were frozen, watching the strange tableau: the enormous form of Grizz, well over six foot in height, heavily muscled, and the kind of a man you’d have on the recruiting posters for any armed force in the world, and the tiny bantam-weight woman, barely three feet tall, maybe three and an inch at a push, with bright blue, green, and purple hair running in rows from front to back, the sides shaved, and peculiar tattoos etched into her skin. She had a death grip on his leg and was attempting to gnaw her way through the armor, and judging from the way Grizz’s shouts went from anger, to fury, to pained disbelief… she was managing to do it, as well.

Grizz shook his leg, then grunted and rammed his sword blade down against the armor, forcing it into her mouth where she was starting to bend the metal. Once inside the edge of her mouth, he twisted it, holding it in place with his left hand, and slammed his right fist down hard on the pommel, driving it deeper and sending flecks of stone flying.

Before he could do anything else, Yen was there, as was Jian, grabbing the creature’s arms and dragging them back, while Lydia slammed her mace down hard on the top of her head.

It took two more blows, but as soon as the stone coating over her head cracked, she changed. The grey-white coating and coloring of her skin suddenly seemed to change into flecks and fragments, floating away on an unseen breeze, leaving a short, weak woman that took the fourth blow on the crown of her skull with a nasty crunching noise.

She collapsed to the floor, twitching, blood leaking from her ears, and we all looked at Grizz’s leg in shock.

There were sections of the metal that were clearly bent and twisted, and as we stared down at the corpse, it was clear that her teeth had been replaced with some kind of metal.

“What the hell was that?” I muttered in shock as Bane whistled, and we turned, looking up the corridor to see two more of them, similar in design, but still totally different. The first was a single wheel again, but instead of the rider being inside it, he rode above it, seemingly leaning over the top and gripping onto levers. The next was like the first, seated inside a wheel, but it was shaking and shuddering as jets of flame and blue-white steam erupted from it. I watched, stunned, as the pair seemed intent on ramming the other into the walls just as much as racing to fight us.

The riders both started screeching the way the last one had, and I shook my head immediately.

“Nope,” I said flatly. “Fuck to the hell no. Bane, Tang, get your arses back here and get behind us,” I ordered. “Miren, Stephanos, get back up the stairs. There’s no room for you here, and we need to be able to back up.” I regarded Grizz’s leg and then cocked an eyebrow at him.

“Can you fight?” I asked, and he nodded grimly.

“She didn’t get through the plate, just bent it and gave me a shock,” he admitted.

“Good,” I said simply. “Arrin, you’re on Lightning until you hit thirty percent mana; then you fall back and heal us as needed. Oracle, I want water in the corridor, lots and lots of it. Join those puddles up. Lydia, you and I have the big shields, so we’re going to take the weight until we can jam them up. Yen, fire anything you can down the corridor; I want those monobikes fucked up. Jian, stand ready with Grizz. When Lydia and I need to step back, we’ll give you both the shields, and then it’s your turn.” I snapped the orders out, despite worrying that there was no way we could hold those damn bikes if they hit us full on. Our only chance was to make them crash, and then we’d fight the gnomes on the ground.

I felt the tug on my mana and saw first one, then another, then, with the strain showing clear on Oracle’s face, a third fountain sprang up, this time a dozen feet in front of the foremost bike. I grinned, frantically building the spell I needed; before I could let it loose, though, Arrin had delivered, sending a weak lightning bolt hurtling across the air between them and us. The bolt hit the first bike just as it splashed though, the tiny figure on the top of the wheel shaking the water from his face, huge round goggles reflecting the light, until it hit him in the face.

His screeching broke off suddenly, and the bike wobbled as his muscles convulsed, yanking the levers inwards in reflex and twisting the wheel somehow. It started to skid, and as soon as the first bolt wore off, the rider tried to adjust. A scream started to rise, filled with fury, when my bolt impacted