Chapter 34

Fiona ran into the camp and went straight to King Rowan. He was helping pack up. He'd ordered everyone to break camp and hike toward Binsuil. They were going to get more supplies and reinforcements from the city. Binsuil's Lord already promised provisions and soldiers.

"They're coming!" Fiona screamed. "Everyone get ready!"

King Rowan swung his head toward Fiona's screaming voice. His eyes widened slightly when he saw what was behind her.

"Everyone arm up! We have incoming!" King Rowan yelled.

The order came a few seconds too late for those that were near the edges of the camp. The spiders swarmed over them and took control. The taken immediately turned and started shooting their people. Rowan had to watch again as his people died and he felt that familiar sense of uselessness.

There was nothing he could do to help.

I'm done with this, he told himself.

"Fall back! Fall back! Everyone get behind me," Rowan yelled.

Everyone that was able to ran to Rowan and fell in line behind him or next to him. Blaster fire erupted out of everyone's guns and lit up the surrounding area. The spiders, however, were barely phased by the gunfire. They kept surging forward as taken soldiers and Blak Army militiamen ran among them without worry.

Rowan had to do something.

He scanned through his blueprints quickly while his men provided him some cover fire. A surge of inspiration hit him. He found the blueprint he needed, opened its programming code, and made a few modifications to it. Then he engaged it and watched his nanos fly out to create it. It was a solid ring of metal with flashing blue lights blinking on and off every few seconds. It hovered about ten feet above their heads. The blinking lights started to pulse super fast. Then a stream of bright, white light rippled toward the ground and created a glowing wall. It completely encircled it led Rowan and everyone else with him.

The spiders ran straight into the light and just dropped dead. The light created a surge like an EMP but instead of blacking out electronics, this blast stopped the electrical impulses of any living thing. He had the technology outlawed because it was too dangerous but it served his purposes now as it created a tangible barrier that no living thing could cross. And the spiders weren't smart enough to stop moving forward. Each one that touched the light died abruptly and without warning. It was actually kind of funny watching them stupidly walk into the light only to keel over a second later.

Rowan had to suppress a bout of laughter.

But the humor was short lived.

He made a colossal error in judgment when he saw the spiders walk into the light like ignorant animals. Their real plan became evident as time passed by. The spiders were not stupidly killing themselves. There was a plan in action. The bodies of the mutated creatures just kept piling up, higher and higher. Pretty soon, there was a literal mass of carcasses about halfway up the light. It spilled through Rowan's protective shielding onto his side of the wall and kept getting taller and taller.

The spider creatures were deliberately killing themselves so that the ones behind them would eventually be able to climb over the top of the ring of light. And to make matters worse, they were completely surrounding Rowan and his group.

The king could make out the Blak Soldiers as they stood among the spiders, waiting for them to do their job. Every now and again, one would take a shot. They were largely unsuccessful but they didn't seem bothered by that.

"Sire," Lt. Pillar said. He stood next to his king and fired a couple rounds into the mass of spiders. "That was a solid plan but I fear we will need to come up with a better one soon."

"They'll be over the barricade in minutes," Milo said. "Can you make it go higher?"

"If I do, I risk disrupting the wall and letting them in. Even a fraction of them could wipe us out," Rowan answered. He fired through the wall and hit a Blak Soldier that was creeping a little too close for comfort.

"What do we do?" Fiona asked. She was scared but it didn't show in her voice.

"I don't know," Rowan told her. He sounded defeated.

**

Darvian watched the group of hold outs dispassionately and without emotion from the back of the mass of swarming croatoans. The only emotion he did feel wasn't even his. It was the other's. It was a sense of growing happiness at causing so much death and chaos. He continued watching and waiting. It would be over soon. Once it was done, she would be his again.

The promise the other made would finally be kept.

**

"Any ideas? Anything at all? Because things are about to get desperate!" Fiona shouted, trying to make herself heard over the constant sounds of blaster fire going off. She was shooting too but it wasn't doing any good. There were too many of the damn things and they kept coming in a seemingly endless wave. The amount of dead spiders continued to grow. The hill their corpses created was reaching over two thirds the height of Rowan's ring of light now.

"They're not taking me!" a younger soldier, one of the last that escaped the destruction of Edaeri with King Rowan, screamed. He suddenly threw his blaster to the ground and ran straight at the wall of light.

Several people tried to stop him but they were too late. They couldn't grab him in time. Everyone watched as he entered the light only to drop straight to the ground a second later. He landed on a pile of dead spiders. They, however, didn't care or even register the dead man. They just continued throwing themselves into the light and dying. Pretty soon, the man was half covered by the things.

"Stand firm. Stand true!" Rowan yelled. He was trying to keep others from pulling the same stunt. "We have survived so much already! We will not give in now. We will not let our fear of these creatures control us. Will we?"

There were only a few that cheered their king on but even those were half-hearted.

"We need a way out of this," Lt. Pillar said. "I nearly died way too many times to bite it in this dank jungle by those disgusting things, Sire."

"I agree," Fiona piped in.

"What if we go up? We can build a craft of some sort," Milo asked.

"The trees are too thick here. The craft will just get ripped apart by the branches and we'll crash," Rowan replied. He took aim and nailed a particularly aggressive spider that was climbing up the corpse pile to his right. It let out a warbling cry and then rolled down the hill.

"If we can't go up, what if we go down?" Pillar asked. "The Prince did it when he saved all of us in Detention Sector 1."

"Rone had a team of engineers there to make the tunnel. We don't." Fiona answered. "And something tells me going underground would be a very bad idea anyway."

"So that's it then?" Pillar shouted back angrily. "We just let them win?"

"No one said that. Look. There's a solution to every situation. We just have to be smart enough to find it," King Rowan said.

"We need to find it fast!" Milo warned. He pointed to where a mound of the spider creatures had nearly reached the top of the wall of light. In a few moments, live ones would start toppling over and then they were all screwed.

"Let me think. Just give me a second to think," Rowan said, frustrated. His mind was going round and round furiously but the harder he tried to figure things out, the more he couldn't think of a solution. He was failing everyone and that feeling caused a weight of depression to hang over him and cloud his thoughts even further.

The first couple of live spiders started toppling over the wall but everyone shot them out of the air and killed them before they could land. The incursion was manageable for now but Rowan knew that they were going to be overrun.

And soon.

And there was nothing anyone could do about it.

**

Soon. It would all be over soon.

That's what Darvian knew. The croatoans were going to overtake Rowan and his band of refugees. Once they were controlled, Darvian would watch as the ones Rowan tried and fought so hard to protect will turn on him and slaughter him like an animal. There was no pleasure in that knowledge. Not for Darvian anyway.

The other, however, got an immense satisfaction in knowing that the Rook king will, at long last, be dead.

The damaged parts of Darvian's mind that Blak controlled didn't care about Rowan dying. There was nothing there but emptiness. A wide and vast void. But buried deep inside, the true Darvian rebelled and fought hard to take back control. It was like swimming deep in the ocean. It was so dark that you didn't know which way was up and which way was down. He swam and swam and swam, trying to get back control of his body, but he wasn't even sure he was swimming in the right direction.

There was just darkness and more darkness.

But for just a split second, he saw light. It wasn't much and it didn't last long but that light was the greatest gift he'd ever received. It gave him exactly what he needed.

The right direction.

He headed for that light and he didn't stop. It was hard and it was exhausting. Despite that, however, he kept going. Whenever he thought he would stop, when he thought he had to stop because he couldn't push himself to go any further, he didn't. He thought about Fiona. He thought about fighting his way back so that he could see her. He thought about Rone and how much his friend needed him. He thought about his mother and sister. He fought for them so that he could find them again and free them from the other's control.

He kept going and going and the farther he pushed himself, the more he pushed the other out. The other wasn't aware of what he was doing, yet, but he knew that eventually he would notice and try to stop him. Darvian needed to get as close to the "surface" (at least that's how he perceived it) as he could. He felt that if he could at least get close enough then the other would have a harder time pushing him back down into the depths of that darkness.

Almost there, he told himself. Almost. Keep going. Just keep going. Just keep going.

He said it over and over again.

He said it until he finally felt the other notice what he was trying to do. There was a twinge of fear that hit him but he didn't care. He had to fight back.

"I'm not giving up!" Darvian yelled. "Get out of my head!"