The exploding puff-mouths and lilly-flies were also very unwelcome, especially when we weren’t allowed to bring ranged weapons in, for pain of death.

Swords that could throw Sharding attacks against foes using their own ranged attacks were one of those corner cases, however. Smart people had things like returning knives, overlong whips, or throwing spikes to hurl and detonate those kinds of things ahead of time, and of course when our Shards ripped into a cloud of the things and detonated them, setting off a chain-reaction, that was much appreciated.

That said, those who were prepared did pretty well for themselves. They weren’t here because they were pushovers, after all.

The urgobs were laying about themselves with power claws and stomping feet, the alchemic treatment on their armor denying the acidic attacks, and letting out electrical discharges when the cellulocusts attempted to swarm them.

The drow had sealed up their carapace armor and were moving with lithe speed and grace, blades with monomolecular and fractal edges being deployed, along with monofilament whips and boomeranging blades. Iron-hard bark shells and coverings were sliced clean through, and severed pieces of cellulocusts littered the areas they passed through.

Behind those two, a mi-go with six artificial limbs was a cross-cutting buzzsaw, while some humans in power armor were hacking with rotary saw-chakras flitting around them, wielding oversized axes and blades in artificial fists with speed and energy. Reptoids lashed out with glowing, rune-enhanced teeth, claws, and tails, their scales defying the attacks of their enemies, while cyborgs moved with mechanical speed and precision, tearing the ‘locusts into cloying chaff and sawdust, ripping, cutting, piercing, and tearing as fast as possible, moving from one, two, and three targets at a time, on to the next...

It was a savage show and melee, and nobody was immune to it. The ‘locusts scuttled to surround everyone, and clambered right over those in front to get at those in the back, while the flying ones simply centered on any clusters. It was cut and hack and stab without end, moving from one enemy to the next, no stopping if you wanted to live.

Nobody beat our kill-totals though, as the four of us chewed through the scuttling scenery, bathed in syrup, sap, poison, acid, slime, and other ichors of various types, to no effect on us. Our kill totals climbed as we ripped through the waves of the weakest with abandon, circles of violence that left nothing alive behind us.

Bush and shrub-sized second-tier ‘locusts leapt forwards to engage us. The first one hit Celestia, and was Hewed and Finished before it got a strike off, the two behind it freezing in shock despite supposedly having no fear. The first one to hit Jensa got popped precisely in its nexal network, Banefire ravaged the decentralized cells, and it dropped as she continued right on by. The first one to come up on Keva in her Whirlwind Dance got six different limbs chopped off with Improved Sunder before she opened it up vertically, and with a backfist sent it spinning and slamming into its fellow... who she promptly proceeded to buzzsaw through in the same way.

I channeled my Inner Briggs (who was watching and laughed heartily) and charged my trio.

Chalice was inserted in the one on the right, energies ripping through its nexal network to kill it. My hand went into the second, ignoring the toxicity of its fluids and how steely-hard its bark was supposed to be. The third one I rammed my head into, cracking and shattering its carapace as razored limbs clawed at my back and sides, and acidic venom spewed all over me. I pumped my legs and carried all three of the things back, crushing everything that got under them with my feet coming down like steel spikes, or plowing them out and away as I brought my arms together and cracked their bodies even more.

Countless ‘locusts crunched, cracked, and splorted beneath my feet, or were smashed out and away as I covered the distance to the looming mothertrees in command of them all, all of them turning photoreceptors my way to watch me highstepping.

I plowed through the tertiary line, literally ramming the shrub-slayers into a gourd-beetle the size of a van, hooking Chalice right through the pulped remains of her victim to impale its head and eject a cellulose-ravaging Shard through its innards as I let go of everything, sending gourd-beetle and battle-shrubs flying away from me.

One of the mothertrees flicked a fruit grenade at me.

Jensa’s Shard streaked overhead and caught it ten feet from the release point. Blunt damage blew the fruit apart, and the concussion effect caught the nearest fruit on the mothertree, while acidic poison goo sprayed everywhere with hissing, organics-eating strength. It seemed the fruit needed to be primed, which was probably done through internal chemicals just before throwing, so they only popped apart instead of exploding as we were hoping... but while the mothertree’s resins dealt with the acid, and its limbs merely swayed in the explosion, those ‘locusts underneath and around it were still hissing and burning under the impact of the fruit’s chemicals.

I lifted Chalice at the mothertrees, as the ‘locusts paused all around me, sitting there unharmed while all their poisons and acids dripped off me. Tattooed Whiskers hissed into existence on my cheeks. “Only a thousand will live. Kill the weak, and wait for the drow masters to descend. You have to kill them if you wish to live.”

Sure, they were plants and a hivemind. Maybe they could understand normal speech, maybe not. But the Whiskers of the Wild made sure they knew exactly what I was saying.

The mothertrees shifted slightly, as if looking at one another, then out over the battlefield where their minions were dying much, much faster than the fleshy and mechanical opponents they were fighting were. My girls were chewing up the second tier, and I had butchered part of the third without any trouble.

Silently, making no attempt at a reply by any of the various means, the cellulocust Mothertrees turned away, and as they did, the entire ‘locust swarm abruptly retreated and flowed after them, to the amazement of those following us. They even made very wide and careful paths around me and the girls.

If only one of the mothertrees lived, that was enough for the locusts. But that probably wasn’t going to happen if they continued engaging with us. They would have to spend all their minions to reduce the counts enough, and then hope to survive.

I ignored the cellulocusts as I turned to the right, started that way, and the ‘locusts parted around me and the girls as we glided in that direction. “Goblins!” I called out, and my ki-laden voice was clearly heard by those fighting behind me.

-Jensa, you locate that Marquis yet?- I /inquired idly.

-Yeah, he’s up in the second tier seats at two o-clock from where we started.- That was clear across the arena from our starting point, but Masks of Clarity are nice that way, especially paired with eyes like hers.

I had to know where to get to when I got out of here, after all. We had learned that he was dealing with Noble House Koilhettreo, and indeed was delivering cyber-augmented death warriors for these games. He was probably personally attending to inspect the performance of his creations, and get either recommendations or assessments from his buyer for the next batch. Feedback is so essential for good marketing, after all.

As a noble house, House Koilhettreo naturally controlled several frequently-used Portals; a couple sized for ships, and others much smaller and used for raiding, supplementing the main ship Portals. More than likely it maintained a base, a pirate-town on some unknown world, where the Marquis had currently moored his ship.

My goal was going to be following him through that Portal and onto that ship, as it was highly doubtful I’d find any kind of usable Portal elsewhere in a reasonable amount of time. Any wild Portal we found was liable to be on the Khagan Sector side of the Rift, or on some barren rock nobody visited. The odds of finding one on an Imperial world were very small, and one on an important Imperial world where things could get done, even smaller.

It wasn’t going to stop us from adding everything on Gloom we could to The Map, of course, but those were all long-term plans, expanding our data. At some point, we were going to co-opt the Gloom, and not really care if the elvar races didn’t approve of it. The hyn population here was not large, but recruiting any Void Brothers made the whole mapping process move much, much faster...

---

The terrain about us was slowly shifting, creating easy pathways to the next fight the owners of the Arena wanted to see, while not exactly stopping us from going after the goblins.

And since it made it easier for those targets to come after us...

Another scuttling swarm was coming our way. More feelers, fewer tendrils, no leaves or stalks...

“We’ve got incoming Kundi!” I snarled out for the benefit of the gladiators behind us. The insectile hordemind was known across the galaxy, different Swarms with different color schemes, all of them voracious, implacable, and mindlessly violent. The cheering section in Markspace was already diving to identify the color schema of pale green, red, and black, and not finding any exact matches for any spaceborn Swarms, although there had been records of some unleashed on some hapless planets here and there without warning...

Huh, confirmation that the drow had been developing their own strain of Kundi as a dump-and-forget bioweapon... sounded like a favor that should be returned, although letting the Kundi loose in Gloom was likely self-defeating, although how they’d adapt against the shadow-dwellers would be interesting. Most likely they’d be a huge snack, as hiveminds didn’t do well in Gloom...

The insectile Swarm used somewhat less poison than the cellulocusts did, but had more phrenic forms wielding disparate forms of psychic energy, particularly psychic stingers, pincers, and mandibles, all of which could rend steel. They also had psychically-reinforced musculature and carapaces so they could stand upright, and the first oversized winged ones were flying in our direction.

There was no sign or warning, but the Null Interdiction went out, and the incoming swarm of oversized hornet-like bugs fell to the ground haplessly, unable to support their weight on their gossamer wings without the support of some psychic levitation or anti-grav. Their beetle-like cousins on the ground led the way, the infamous high pedipalps of their kind poised to punch and pierce down, while they spat acid at the unlucky.

Not having to fear the fliers made things easy. Those in acid-resistant power armor took the lead.

“Their carapaces are resistant to slashing attacks, you want to cut and pierce their blood vessels and get them bleeding inside, they will die very quickly to their own acid if their flesh is bruised. If you have a blunt weapon, this is the time to use it! Focus on their limb joints, joins, and skulls... and if you have a big enough club, just crush them!

“The spidery ones are the guards and can attack with four limbs! Those are the ones which might have optional energy attacks!

“As for the little ones scuttling on the ground, they need to be crunched and can nip off your legs, so don’t underestimate them! They all count towards the thousand, so kill them all!”

Big heavy weapons weren’t very useful in dueling situations, but for clearing hordes and swarms of weak things, they worked just fine. Some of the more cyberized fighters swapped in heavy hammers or polemaces for their limbs, and began laying into the Kundi in carapace-crunching and bug-flinging glory. Smart people crowded in on their flanks, stabbing out with precise thrusts, especially at anything attacking the big guys down low.

Bug squealed and died. The carapaces of the insects, and their psi-charged digging pedipalps, were incredibly tough, but if their acidic blood leaked, it caused cascading internal damage which would literally eat them away from the inside out. That was good, because energy attacks of other kinds on them tended to be very ineffective. You crushed them, or you stabbed them, and anything else just didn’t work that well.

As for us, our Swords were Heavy Weapons, and we could change the damage type. Blunt damage it was, and ten kilo bars of crushing impacts combined with a very sharp point when needed slammed back and forth between kundi like crushing maces.

==========

Author’s Note: Kundi are based on the Olthoi from Asheron’s Call, a now-defunct MMORPG, the third big online game to exist.