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

Me and Franks stayed by the window, me because I was trying to catch a glimpse of where the monster was going to come back, and Franks, probably because he didn’t like being told what to do.

Milo was staring at the monitors in shock. Our Newbie barracks had caught on fire. “Were you really serious about this coming out of my pay, Earl?”

“Of course not,” Earl said as he grabbed Milo by the strap on the back of his armor and dragged him toward the door. “I don’t pay you enough to cover this. Move!”

It appeared that the heat from the fire had driven the fog back, but on the other side I could see the glowing stuff moving, glowing, flowing like it was alive and angry; it almost looked like a giant snake. It was gathering in one spot.

“He’s already back,” I shouted. The monster rose on the other side of the fire, easily over twenty feet tall now. The puritan affectation was gone. The coat and hat were missing. Now it was just a giant sort of man-shaped skeleton made of twisted wire and powered by blue flames. “Main parking area, about two hundred yards out.” Then I watched in horror as the Drekavac bent down and easily lifted a car by its front end. He began to spin the vehicle around like he was doing a hammer throw. Even Franks decided that was a good time to back away. I did, too, because the car was gaining speed until it was whistling through the air around him. Then Drekavac let go and whipped the car toward MHI HQ.

It sailed through the air like it had been launched by a catapult. It was a white Audi R8, and it managed to even look good while flipping end over end through the sky. The Drekavac’s aim was good and he hit the command center wall. The impact shook the building so hard it knocked me off my feet. Dust filled the air. The window I’d been standing by was gone, replaced by mangled metal and broken concrete with rebar sticking out of it.

Holly ran into the command center carrying an AT-4. She pushed past Franks, saw me lying on the floor, then she saw the remains of her new car sticking through the wall.

“You motherfucker!” she screamed. Holly went over to the hole in the wall and aimed the smoothbore anti-tank weapon at the monster. “I just paid that off!”

The command center was a really big room, but the back blast on an AT-4 was still a bitch, so I got to my feet and fled to not get burned by the overpressure.

Holly fired. The concussion was insane. Anything in here that hadn’t been ruined by the Drekavac got scorched or blown away by that instead. This kind of hostile work environment bullshit was why I had tinnitus.

The Drekavac had picked up a pickup to toss at us when Holly’s 84mm warhead hit him in the midsection. The explosion cut him in half. Both halves melted into the parking lot as the truck burned on top of him.

Eleven.

The fog immediately flowed back into that same spot. But I couldn’t even call it fog anymore. It was more like the ectoplasmic slime we’d seen in Las Vegas. And this time it was all of it. Every bit of the unnatural substance crawled beneath that bonfire. And a mere five seconds after its last death, the Drekavac sat up. The burning truck went bouncing away. The monster stood, covered in chunks of molten asphalt, bigger than the frost giant we’d fought during the siege, and he let out a roar of such intensity that people must have heard it in Birmingham.

Earl was in the hallway, bellowing, “Big guns on the parking lot now! Hit him with everything we’ve got!”

All along this side of HQ, Hunters threw open the armored shutters. We had a variety of man-portable heavy weapons ready to go, including bunker busters and anti-tank weapons. The Hunters started firing. It was like being inside a metal drum being beaten with hammers as multiple SMAWs and Carl Gustafs went off.

The Drekavac was rocked by so many explosions that I couldn’t even see it. This was an order of magnitude of more firepower than we’d used to obliterate Buford Phipps. The explosions staggered the monster but didn’t drop him. We’d been warned that the last few manifestations were powerful, but this was madness. We were hitting him with enough munitions to sink a battleship. Instead of dying, he reached down, scooped up a car that had caught on fire, and flung it at us.

The flaming wreck spiraled through the sky and landed on our roof. The gas tank must have ruptured because the next thing I knew, the roof was caving in and barfing fire everywhere.

Julie was shouting for every Hunter in the building to run to this side to concentrate fire on the monster. And whoever didn’t have a heavy weapon picked up a fire extinguisher or carried the wounded out of the way. Franks was firing a 20mm rifle freehand.

The Drekavac started running toward us, covering vast amounts of ground with every step. Milo’s secondary turrets lit him up. Mines went off. Warheads punched through his chest and head. Big chunks of monster were flung in every direction. Our Hind flew past, hitting the Drekavac with everything, but he didn’t even slow. The monster crashed through the towering wall of fire, falling to pieces but still pushing forward, until a lucky hit got him right in the knee. The bottom half of his leg came off. The monster stumbled, but he was so big that falling brought him nearly to the front door.

He was too close for big explosives without injuring ourselves in the process, so every Hunter there hung out the nearest window or fresh hole in the wall and shot at him with small arms. I ran to