Thresholder

“Radio Mette, tell her there’s an attack incoming,” said Perry.

The dragon went for Perry, uncontrolled rage in a body the size of a freight train, and Perry dropped to the ground, using the sword to pull him sideways so he’d miss the smashed remains of the Demon Core. He was faster on the ground, and it wasn’t about the fight, it was about the bugs moving toward the Natrix. Perry needed to deal with both, and he was too slow in the air, not to mention lacking in maneuverability.

The tooth had been intended to provide some healing power, but from the shape that this new dragon form was in, it was clear that it hadn't done what Jeff had hoped it would. The cancerous growths were still there, and they were huge now, pulsing and red. The largest of them, which had been on Jeff’s belly, was at the creature’s midsection, and it seemed to weigh down its magical flight. There were three in total, and some of them seemed like they were new. At a certain point, they could potentially be one of the things that killed him, the masses pressing up against his other organs, or maybe subsuming them.

For his part, Perry had been hoping that the tooth would take longer to kick in. It had obviously done something, and while it meant a burning rage and not much for healing, Jeff’s wolf-dragon was clearly larger. There wasn’t much time for analysis though, and once Perry was on the ground, he was running for his life.

The dragon crashed down to the ground beside him, its enormous head slamming into the rock hard enough to shatter it. This new form was either clumsy or just overwhelmed by unfamiliar anger, but that made it no less dangerous. The HUD was showing a view from the back-facing cameras on Perry’s armor, and while Perry was pushing off against the ground with all the strength and power he could muster, almost flying over the rocks, the dragon was gaining on him.

Perry rolled to the side, feeling the hardness of the rock jam against his shoulder, and only narrowly avoided the claws of a stunted half-wolf arm. The claws were sharp enough to dig gouged lines in the rock, and as soon as Perry was on his feet, the dragon had made a sharp turn, trying to trap him.

Perry leapt into the air and landed deftly on the dragon’s back, bringing the sword down on one of the red growths. The dragon was so large now that it felt like sticking a toothpick in a sausage, but the response was more than Perry could have hoped for. When he withdrew the sword, a jet of blood and pus came out, and Perry stabbed down again, slicing open the stretched skin to release a flood. The dragon writhed beneath Perry, throwing him off, and while it was occupied, Perry started running.

They were only about fifty miles from the Natrix, not all that far. Perry was significantly faster than the insects were, at least when running at his top speed, but he didn’t want to bring Jeff all the way there, or even most of the way. What he wanted was for their fight to take place among the insects. He wanted to feed on them, take their power for his own, and thin their numbers before the army that Marjut had gathered made its way to the weakened city.

He landed on the back of a beetle the size of a U-haul, one of the largest that he’d seen, and placed his armored hand against the shell. It tried to buck him, but he steadied himself, eyes on the writhing dragon, whose welt was still painfully draining out. As Perry rode the beetle, half his attention was on the dragon, and after a moment of squirming pain, it straightened out and shot off along the ground, slithering like a snake rather than flying in the air.

Perry was getting better at the energy extraction, and it only took him a handful of seconds to snap through the internal resistance in the beetle and center the flow of his own energy. The beetle died, and Perry was the beneficiary, a rush of power rolling into him down the meridians to give power to legs for a leap high into the air.

The dragon came crashing through the area that Perry had been, and Perry’s jump landed him right on its back with only a small amount of help from the sword to nudge him to the side. Perry jammed his sword down into a red spot where the scale had flaked off and leapt down to put his full weight into the slice. He was rewarded with a huge gash that caused a cry of pain from the dragon, but Perry was knocked off when the dragon went airborne, rocketing into the sky in a tight curving coil that left Perry to land softly on the ground with another use of the sword to kill his momentum.

The dragon twirled up into the air, leaking blood and other juices down. It was hideous and scarred, clearly dying, but it wasn’t dead yet. Perry had gotten two good attacks in, crippling attacks that had surely weakened it, but as he watched, he saw that the huge gash he’d put in the creature’s side was healing up, a werewolf’s regeneration acting fast to close the wound. Jeff was damaged though, radiated down to the lowest level of his being, and when the wound closed, it closed wrong, with bubbling red flesh like a keloid scar that glistened wetly in the twilight. The wound acted like a kink in a hose, changing the way the dragon writhed in the air.

For a moment it hung there in the sky as Perry looked up at it, a train-sized snake just about to fall. Then the dragon’s head turned toward Perry, who was down on the ground. It coiled up tight in the air, compressing itself, blisters and all, then sprung out with a burst of magic powerful enough that Perry could feel it wash over him before the motion had even started.

It was tempting to try to thread the needle and get into the creature’s mouth again, but the last time Perry had only made it past the teeth through what he thought of as luck, and it was a trick that Jeff had to be expecting — and possibly prepared for. Instead, Perry gathered every scrap of energy from Esperide below him, along with the energy in the bugs he’d linked to, and waited until the very last second to throw himself to the side.

Perry was up and running before Jeff could recover. The dive had shaken the earth and cracked the rock, and the rest of the body had slammed into the ground like a train derailment from above. When Perry looked behind him, he saw the dragon’s jaw open wide just before the roar ushered forth from it.

If Perry hadn’t had a helmet on, he was sure he’d have been deafened. It was loud enough to shake his bones, so loud he almost lost his footing. The dragon had cracked its head with the hit against the ground, breaking bones, splitting apart his face, and now it had grown back together, fusing bone. Perry had thought that in this new form, Jeff might maintain some semblance of his intelligence and personality, but it was clear now there was nothing left there, only the same rage that Perry himself had felt back in Teaguewater. There it had come in cycles, waves of anger mixed with lust, and he surely would have killed someone if he hadn’t had someone stronger than him to hold him down and distract him.

Perry kept running. He was at the tail end of the main insect swarm, but they seemed to be coming in from all over. It would take time for them to move, and Perry would need to put in the work to kill them before they got there, wipe out at least half of them so the Natrix would have a chance. The engineers would be repairing the guns and fortifying the shell of the Natrix, possibly even moving it if they could plot out a defensible position they could get to in time, but time was definitely not on their side.

Perry ran through the insects, moving far faster than them, as the dragon came from behind. He reached out with a hand to touch the shell of one of the largest of the bugs, slowing down enough to be beside it, and with a grunt and a twist of his wrist, stole its life from it. It was easier with his body awash with the power, but made him feel overfull, like too much dinner sitting in his stomach. He tried to release some of it as moonlight, shot from his palm, but he still hadn’t been able to get that technique to produce anything of consequence, even if it relieved some pressure.

The dragon came crashing down into the bugs, crushing some and flipping others to the side. Perry had left himself an exit, and darted to the side to get out of the way, doing his best impression of a matador. Instead of cleanly slipping through the swarm, he found himself going ass over teakettle in the air, and realized only belatedly that he’d been hit. Alarms were blinking on the HUD and Marchand was saying something, but the damage was mostly to the armor itself rather than the supercharged man inside it. Perry rose into the air with the sword, narrowly avoiding getting crushed by one of the mammoth beetles, and tried to reorient himself. The thought passed through his head that if not for his magical healing, he was probably taking too many hits to the head.

When Perry looked down, the dragon was gone, completely vanished. Perry spun around in a moment of panic, trying to find where the hundred thousand ton creature could possibly have gotten off to, only for the HUD to draw him a thick red circle — highlighting Jeff, the man, rather than the enormous dragon.

“The hell!” Jeff called from the ground. “You never said it would be like that!”

“Stop the bugs!” shouted Perry. “There’s no point in having them go! Marjut is dead, call it off!”

“I could!” said Jeff. He laughed, though he was scarred and bleeding, down there on the ground. The insects were racing around him, taking no action against him. “I really could, though I didn’t get as good as she did. I could fly on ahead and stop it all. They’d break up against me like a wave against the biggest fuckin’ rock you’ve ever seen!”

“Then do that!” called Perry.

“Nah,” said Jeff. “It’s got nothing to do with me. I’ve had all the paltry delights that the city had to offer, all the shit food and terrible plays, all the women who were only fucking me because they were worried I was going to kill them. I wouldn’t break the place, not out of spite, not to hurt you, that’s not me … but I’m not going to stop them.”

“Shoot him,” said Perry, and the words had no sooner left his lips than the shoulder gun had popped up and fired. The bullet sailed through the air with all the precision that Marchand could manage, but Jeff had turned to the side, and the bullet caught him in the arm, digging deep but not causing more than a wince.

“So it comes in cycles?” asked Jeff. “I’ll turn into that a few times?”

“Stop the bugs and I’ll tell you,” said Perry.

“Nah,” said Jeff. “Seems like it’ll be fun to find out on my own.” He cracked his jaw. “I think I can feel it coming on. I have to say, this might cause some problems in the next world.”

“Shoot for his head,” said Perry. “Take a shot that’ll hit him in the eyes, the neck, somewhere vulnerable.”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “His armor appears to be extensive, but I shall do my best.”

The gun fired again, and this time Jeff moved his hand up to block it, as though he’d been waiting for it. If he was trying to catch the bullet, he’d failed, as evidenced from the bloom of red blood on his palm.

“Fuck that stings!” said Jeff with another laugh. “Can’t we have a friendly chat while we — ah, there it comes.”

Jeff transformed again, exploding out into the wolf dragon, still as sickly as it was before. By the time it was finished, Perry was on the move, catching back up with the swarm that had continued on without them. If the transformation was anything like what Perry had gone through, it was going to get worse before it got better, but if the destructive potential could be leveraged or turned against the bugs, then that offered a way out.

Perry didn’t think he was strong enough or fast enough to keep getting out of the way though, not on the ground and certainly not in the air. Trying to run among the bugs and dodge every single attack from the dragon was a losing proposition, since it would take only a single solid hit or bite for Perry to get completely knocked out. There was a trick in his arsenal that he hadn’t had nearly enough practice with yet, and it was time to start trying to abuse it.

Perry had reached the bugs when the dragon came roaring in, the sound of its body snaking back and forth through the trampled reeds almost loud enough to drown out the marching of enormous insects. The dragon was huge, its blisters and growths rubbing against the ground and causing more damage to it.

Perry waited, judged how much time he had, then opened the shelfspace and stepped inside it.

The strangest part about it was the silence. Perry had gone from running alongside a huge swarm of animals with an angry dragon behind him to almost total quiet, with only the sounds of his armor and his body. The interior of the shelf was still, devoid of life or machinery, and Perry stood there breathing hard for a moment, letting his limbic system try to sort itself out. After a few seconds of that, he started venting out some of the excess energy, healing himself up from all the minor damage he’d taken, including the hit from the dragon that had sent him up into the air.

Looking out of the shelf was difficult, and Perry hadn’t had much chance to practice that either, but it was as simple as doing a fractional ‘turn’ of the ring, like trying to adjust his old shower for just a bit more heat without having it go straight to scalding. The opening into the space started tiny, just a millimeter across, and stayed in the same static position, showing the exterior world.

The dragon was thrashing its way through the insects, bowling them over and running rampant, crunching down on them with its huge jaws. It was the rage, Perry was sure, and every bug killed meant one less that the Natrix would have to face.

Perry took a breath and opened up the overlap between spaces all the way, stepping out onto the planet’s surface.

The dragon snapped his head around immediately, milky white eyes seeing nothing but some other sense honing in on Perry. The roar was muted this time, whatever lungs it was working with instead compressed with the force of coiling up for another launch. Perry held his sword tight in his hand, trying to mark the places where the welts were, especially the big one that was halfway down the body. Perry’s feet were planted firmly on the ground, hand sweating inside the thick glove, and he had only two seconds to visualize the way he’d dodge.

When the jaws opened wide to swallow him up, Perry was on the move, and they missed him by a handspan. His sword was out and he was braced to hold it in place. He landed beside the snake as it raced past, and the sword scored across the lump. This one wasn’t a fluid sack like the other though, it was hard as a rock, and it took all his effort, digging his heels in, not to get thrown off balance. He leapt to the side to avoid a swipe from the tail and rolled into another leap, this time into the sky. The dragon circled around, rising high and howling, and as Perry watched, the wound that he’d made opened wider, splitting apart and revealing a yellow-white mass inside. This then fell out, the mass disconnecting itself from the flesh, and tumbled to the ground in a rain of fluids, most of it blood.

Perry prayed for the dragon to go limp and fall, for that to be the final blow, the point at which too much blood had been lost. Instead, the dragon roared and turned toward him.

Perry let out a breath, waffling between whether to hide inside the space or try to dodge again. He had burnt off the swell of energy, most of it simply not fitting within his vital matrix, and every time the dragon came at him, it was another opportunity to die. Still, he planted his feet and watched the sinuous motion of the dragon. There was another of the large growths on the tail, and Perry had to believe that cutting into them was resulting in, at the very least, substantial blood loss.

Perry moved, trying to line the dragon up so it was a straight shot down, hoping that the creature would slam its face into the hard rock again. If it could kill itself that way, that would be all the better.

This time, whether because of nerves or because he was trying to compensate for a lack of power, Perry started his lunge too early. The dragon shifted its angle, and while Perry avoided the brunt of it, his legs were caught by the side of the lower jaw.

Perry blacked out for just a moment, and when he came to, the dragon was reeling, dazed from the impact. Attempting to run caused only waves of pain from his mangled legs, so Perry let the sword carry him high up into the air.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” said Perry, trying to divert energy to fix the problem. It was deeper than just broken bones though, as it was clear the hit had been hard enough to damage his actual meridians. It was damage that would heal, he hoped, but pushing energy down the Gallbladder Meridian ended only with that energy leaking out into the air.

“I would advise immediate medical attention, sir,” said Marchand.

It was time to transform, but the wolf lacked offensive capacity, and would be limited to staying on the ground. But with broken legs, Perry wouldn’t be doing much good on the battlefield.

Perry landed on the ground as the mechawolf just as the dragon had begun to rise into the air again. The stampede of insects had mostly moved on from them, and their numbers seemed to have grown since leaving the cave. Perry had no idea how wide Marjut’s range had been, and even less of an idea as the mechawolf.

In the hybrid form, Perry’s senses were sharper, his movement faster, and he ran along the ground making an analysis of the wolf-dragon that was flying overhead. It was an idiot creature, dangerous because of its immense size and rage but easily duped and baited, unable to think more than a single step ahead. The beast’s anatomy was clearer to Perry now, the data gathered being refined by the hybrid biomechanical systems. It was mostly a tube of muscle with scant internal organs protected in the center, and it was relying solely on magic for its flight, which meant that it would be a threat until the moment it died.

Perry raced back toward the insects, burning energy and catching them easily, then weaving among them fast enough that he had nothing to fear from their jaws and pincers. He brushed beside one of the larger ones for long enough to steal its life, and once that was done, he redoubled his effort to get to the head of the swarm, leaping up onto the backs of a few. He dug his metal claws into the chitin, scratching through it. He could see in all directions, and when the dragon came crashing through along the ground, kicking up dirt and plowing through everything in his way, it was possible to leap to the side, with less risk than it had taken as a human.

Perry went for the tail, which was swinging back and forth faster than the rest of the body. With a single powered lunge he reached it, and with claws extended he swiped it. The flesh was soft, like sinking a fork into pudding, and it came away in chunks as the dragon howled. It was bleeding all over now, dripping across the swarm that was ignoring it completely, its flight erratic, and Perry’s watchful eyes and tiny camera studs tracked it as he avoided the insects.

The dragon slowly transformed back into a man, contracting all the wounds down to smaller sizes but not removing them entirely. He hung limply in the air and breathed heavily, but he was dripping too, a weeping man.

Perry leapt for him, as high as he could, and just barely made it.

Jeff reached out with a bloody hand and grabbed the wolf by the neck. He was rewarded with claws across his chest, which didn’t sink in nearly deep enough, and more scratches across his face that made him lean back. Jeff squeezed hard on the metal, but he wasn’t nearly strong enough, even when a second hand joined the first.

“Die!” he shouted. The muscles of his arms were straining, the cancerous masses beneath the skin showing through.

Perry had no response, a mouth that was incapable of making speech sounds and speakers that he preferred were silent. The flesh his claws were sinking into was so dense, his attack making gouges that should have been down to the quick. There was blood streaming from the wounds, joining the dripping blood from the open wounds that had been split and never healed back. His face was a mass of growths, and claws had split his lips.

Perry kept up with his attacks, and Jeff threw him to the ground, where he landed among the bugs. Perry landed hard, straining metal and flesh, and turned his eyes to watch the enemy.

The transformation was slow this time, and the dragon was ailing, its turns through the air drunken and sloppy. Perry bounded forward, lacing his way through the insects, leaping into the air when they threatened to crush him, or sometimes slipping beneath their bodies.

The Natrix was visible ahead, having approached faster than he’d expected it to. It was just a dot on the horizon, and Perry could hear the radio chatter, most of which was simply ignored as inconsequential. They had weather balloons up and sensors that could now see the incoming horde. The first of the swarm was already there, and the guns hadn’t had nearly as much of a rest as they needed. The repairs were half-cocked and sloppy, done with the backups to the backups using parts cannibalized from elsewhere.

Perry ran to them, as fast as he could, and once Jeff had become his abominable wolf-dragon self once more, he followed.

Over the radio there was a single message that caught Perry’s attention, one directed at him specifically by the computer controlling the Natrix. They had prepared a countermeasure, something that they were sending out, and they were telling him to get out of the way of it.

Perry put on more speed, draining every vessel from his body, every reserve in the battery, running the reactor at full throttle. He was still wearing the ring somewhere beneath the encasing of metal — it had become a foreign body in the same way the nanites had, the same way that Jeff had worn it embedded around the bone of his finger. It was the last resort, an escape that neither the wolf part nor the computer part liked. Still, he readied himself to use it, to duck out, and sent a message to the computer clone requesting a countdown to detonation.

It was down to the final handful of seconds.

Perry stopped where he was, skidding across the field, checking the map and seeing where it said. He needed the dragon here, not in with the main mass.

When the dragon approached, it was huffing and roaring, dripping its effluent onto the ground. It reared back its head fifty feet into the air and brought it down with a rush of tumors, teeth now crooked from the damage and the wounds that grew back wrong. Perry leapt to the side, then raced backward, snapping head following him as the tail swished wildly around.

When the timer hit two seconds, the payload on the way aboard hastily constructed gliders, Perry slipped into the shelf space.

He waited there, braced on all fours, and after five seconds had passed, relaxed marginally. If he was still there and still alive, it meant that the extradimensional space hadn’t suffered any damage. After ten seconds, he stepped back into the world with a trot, tail wagging. The dragon was gone, but Jeff lay on the ground, missing an arm and a leg, with a pool of thick blood beneath him.

“Portal,” said Jeff. His voice was thick and wet, with a speech impediment from how crooked and malformed his teeth had become. “Should be here now. Nice fight, by the way. More nukes in the pocket.”

He was wrong though, it was a weaker weapon than that, a costly prototype that was too expensive and too powerful to use against the bugs and far, far weaker than a nuclear weapon. It was premised on the idea of fusion-boosted fission bombs, and required sacrificing the inferior micro-fusion reactors for a messy weapon that was worse than most alternatives, except that it used things that were already on hand. The fissile material had been taken from the Kjärni, flown via a GPS-guided robot drone, a plan that Perry had kept in the background as much as possible so that Jeff wouldn’t see a single bit of it.

The portal opened up not far from Jeff, even as the debris began to fall down. He laughed and hefted himself up, flying rather than trying to stand on one foot.

Perry was on him in an instant, knocking him to the ground and rending him with his claws. Jeff fought back, punching with his one remaining arm and kicking with his remaining leg. He was fighting to go through the portal, where his hoped for salvation might lie.

When Jeff tried to fly away, Perry grabbed his arm, sinking teeth into the flesh there. They fought for a moment, each pulling in a different direction, but as wounded as he was, Jeff was still the stronger of the two. Perry found himself dragged toward the open portal.

Jeff’s transformation was slow and apparently unwelcome. His ruined face had agony written on it, and as he grew, spine extending to impossible lengths, the extent of the damage he’d taken was made clear. He was a mass of tumors created by accelerated healing processes, and certain wounds that wouldn’t heal at all. There was barely any fur on his form, and where his leg and arm had tried to grow back, the werewolf’s half of his healing doing its work, there were only bubbling masses that clung to him and weighed him down.

Jeff expanded to his full height, a vertical freight train of flesh, then collapsed to the ground.

Perry ran to the head, hoping to get a killing blow, but it was clear from the lack of motion that it wouldn’t be needed.

He turned to stare at the portal. He took a single tentative step toward it. Through two years, not a day went by that he didn’t think about the portal that would take him away from here and what kind of life there would be to find there.

The insects were still coming though, and needed to be killed. The Natrix needed defending. Perry was enough himself as the wolf to think about the ticking clock.