-Matthew’s P.O.V.-

“We’re comin’ in hot!” Strauss, the team leader of Last Call shouted over the general comms. “This thing is really pissed off!”

The first contact line of Bulwark stiffened, a series of rattled commands by trained military personnel readying to unleash a barrage of firepower from everything ranging from tanks, A.P.C.’s, hummers, and their own weapons. Bulwark had set up a staggered line, several shallow ditches dug out at twenty meter lines, just wide enough for a person to slip through, but not enough for a vehicle to get stuck. Metal reinforced many of these ditches, and none too few had shaped charges improvised and stuck into them for the eventual retreat.

If there was anything of note, it was the fact that Last Call had elicited a response that was by far the most aggressive thus far. Wolven pursued them doggedly whenever shifting teams was required. None of us knew why, knowing plainly that he and his team weren’t dealing the most damage. That honor went to Daniel and his temporary attachment to the Iron Chariots.

Previously, that was inconvenient to an extreme, though we’d taken advantage of that fact and hammered Wolven’s flanks until it relented each time.

Even better was the fact that Last Call were all very mobile, lacking a mech pilot, allowing them to fairly easily put distance between them. The many mouths howled and snarled at them, their speed increasing gradually, Wolven learning bit by bit how to control its own body better as time went by.

Last Call hit the three-hundred meter marked location in the killing field in front of the wall, diving into the ditch.

“Clear!” Jeremy Strauss, “Tear the damn thing down!” The man’s heavy western accent hammered the comms.

The tanks answered a half a second later, cannon fire roaring and a percussive wave of force hitting my armor in the chest.

My upgraded armor soaked up the force such that I could disregard it, but the effect of five tanks firing at once was a powerful thing. Dust blasted off of the ground around it, the sheer destructive fury known instantly as far across the field explosive impacts belted out.

Wolven had only just cleared the forest when fire erupted around it, angry howls replaced by painful shrieking. Wailing resounded as the second volley, joined by rockets, minigun fire, and snipers joined in. Our previous skirmishes had chipped away at soft flesh, but lost its luster after Wolven had created its shielding technique. This strike blew the shield apart at the front, having been accustomed to spreading its improvised carapace wide. The concentrated firepower shredded through a hundred bodies in an instant, a quivering mass split wide at the center as it instinctively tried to come back together. Reflexively, several meters worth of shielding came together to guard at the front, a good response against our tank fire.

But a mistake nonetheless as rocket fire, artillery, and mortars tore into its unshielded top.

It was at that moment the mass quaked, quivering with agony. Half of the shield drooped low, the mass behind it sagging like a puppet with its strings cut.

My eyes opened wide, my newly upgraded armor and helmet isolating my vision, focusing in on the portion of Wolven that had been hammered by that strike. I could feel my enhanced senses parsing away anything unnecessary, and at once it seemed that the grotesque mass was all I could see. A particularly dense tangle of wolves writhed, one of the mortars having hit very close. Gouts of silvery blood poured everywhere, rich with chunks of fleshy mass. And yet, in this one location, it was flowing, pumping like a hemorrhaging wound.

I marked the location through the ReaperNet, immediately seizing control of the firing mechanisms for the artillery.

“Fire on that location,” I forced myself to remain calm, my hands shaking in anticipation.

Wordlessly, the automatic fire of the upgraded artillery weapons opened fire in a punishing volley. Fire bloomed outward, shrapnel burying deep in the mess of flesh. Even as the explosions where flaring brightly, I watched, filtering out the blinding light and gritting my teeth as the tangle surged in on itself, adding on more flesh even as the pounding nearly tore through it.

All at once, the mass came alive, pushing up and forward, an arcing barrier covering it from the front entirely. It nearly toppled backwards when the remaining shells slammed into it, great chunks nearly breaking free, oozing thick viscous silver that hardened in less than ten seconds. There was no recognizable tangle of limbs in the shield now, it’d been reforged in punishment again and again now, silver and black streaked in what began to look like a solid wall, segments that roughly fit together against large, pulsing tendrils that forced them all together. Larger and larger forms were woven together.

“Center cease fire,” I heard Charlie Song command over the Bulwark command, “Last Call, move now!”

“Legion, cover the retreat.” I added to the command, looking over the Commander Song, who stood next to me. He wore a sharply designed power armor, parts machined to give it a much more fierce appearance, one that I had to admit looked good on the veteran.

“Did we hit something vital?” He asked me, referring to my directing artillery fire.

I nodded, “Judging by the response, I think we hit the main body. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like we did enough.”

“We spooked it, though.” He pointed out the fact that the shield wall hadn’t advanced quickly at all.

I nodded, turning my attention to Last Call as they clambered into one of the carriers, which had peeled out the moment the last man had stepped foot into the bay. Song noticed as well, quickly giving the order to resume firing.

The wall that Wolven had formed grew thicker in short order, and a quick check of the depth of Wolven quickly revealed why. We’d torn through a huge chunk of the main mass in that one engagement. It was down to around sixty-five percent of the total mass it had started with, a good start. But, our damage had slowed down considerably. The armor it had created was hard and extremely dense, concentrated shots between multiple sources still got through, as well as the lucky hit through an unreinforced section, but that was quickly becoming harder to accomplish.

It built the wall higher and higher as time passed, heavier near the top, it was likely guarding against the artillery fire. But at the same time I was wary of any other tricks Wolven would have in mind.

By the time it hit the two hundred meter marker the shield was nearly forty meters tall.

“It’s going to scale the wall,” Charlie Song looked flabbergasted, “It's just one huge siege tower.”

Blinking at that, I turned and examined the wall in more detail. It definitely could do that, but it was far too tall even for that. Surely Wolven knew it didn’t need something so tall? The closer it got, the less reasonable such height seemed to be for it. I stood at the edge of the wall, glaring at the whole picture, wondering at what Wolven was hoping to accomplish. From an aerial view, it had less than fifty percent mass left.

‘Wait, what the hell? We’re not doing that much damage…’ My brows furrowed for a few seconds before a cold knot formed in my gut. The many parts of the shield had seemingly been welded together, tall sections with wide trenches in between each segment to allow some measure of flexibility. They were forty meters tall, ten meters wide, and there were ten of them, each side by side. I could hear some of the chatter from my Legion, dumbfounded at how dense the shield had become.

A fearful revelation came into my brain then, something that I hoped I was wrong about.

“Song, pull the armored divisions back through the gate!” I spun, an edge of panic to my voice, “I’m going to blow up the field that Wolven’s sitting on in the meantime.”

“What?” He frowned, and then looked to Wolven, a quick estimation going through his mind as to the value of the maneuver. It only took half a second for him to decide.

“Armor division, pull back immediately! Full retreat!” He shouted the order, turning his attention back to the field fully. At the moment, he didn’t ask any questions, but in spite of any misgivings about the strategy he trusted me enough to pull the line back when we could potentially be doing more damage. The effect was immediate, a massive amount of our firepower vanished, Wolven pausing for a moment as though in confusion. The armored divisions retreated through three separate gatehouses. It would take them time, and Wolven was close enough to them that it was risky leaving them utterly undefended.

A snarl resounded from the mass behind the wall, one that sounded decidedly frustrated. I grinned, ‘Didn’t like that, did you?’ I thought venomously, ‘Here, an old trick for you.’

An instant later I connected my mind to the many explosives layered in the trenches. Wolven was resting on three such rows dug into the dirt and refilled with fiery death, starting at around one hundred and sixty meters. Four trenches suddenly erupted upwards, shaped charges tearing through the soft underbelly Wolven exposed. The shield wall fell backwards atop the mass, hopefully crushing a massive amount of them.

Several seconds passed and Wolven didn’t escape the shelter of the shields, baking in the heat bottled up beneath its own body and the wall itself from the incendiary mines. Either it didn’t want to risk the punishment that it’d receive, or it couldn’t let go of the shield.

Or…

“Tesla, I hope you’re ready to put that countermeasure to the test.” I linked directly to the man, situated behind the wall due to the fact that he was the only one that was familiar with our nasty surprise and how to operate it.

He spluttered, “Wait, already? The hell?”

“Just in case.” I answered him, watching Wolven’s shields quiver, steam and smoke released between the cracks. As much as I hoped it was utterly incompetent in some ways, I doubted it would keep those shields on top of it if there was that much damage being done.

“Uh, yeah, well, here goes nothing then?” Tesla breathed deeply. A moment later, I felt electricity alight in the air, several wires and poles embedded deep into the ground crossing the entire kill zone and beyond surge with thousands of volts.

Wolven screamed, worse than the simple wailing, I could hear a singular voice amidst the din as visible arcs of blue streaked between the plates of metal. A handful of explosives ahead and behind Wolven detonated as well, but far from all of them. Most of them were kept far enough away and sheltered enough that the electricity wouldn’t travel through them.

The shield surged upwards, splitting up somewhat as Wolven desperately sought to get out of the tunnel it had been digging. Bulwark and Legion alike wasted no opportunity, punching through the gaps into the softer tissues beneath. It lasted only a few seconds, but this close we could unleash surprising amounts of damage.

Among the only individuals who couldn’t do much at this stage were the Bonemen, the biotic having volunteered the use of its kin for the battle. Yaga, the strange psuedo-biotic himself, was several hundreds of feet back with a small reserve of his tribe, the others taking place sparsely on the wall, helping ferry ammo and directing personnel away from the wall, the many armored vehicles now taking up positions behind the wall. Yaga had stated that they would ensure that if there was a breach that they would assist in taking care of it. However, I wasn’t sure what they intended to do, given the fact that they refused any weapons we offered them.

I turned my attention back to Wolven, seeing it now rising, appearing quite similarly to a turtle at the moment. Then, out of the sides, Wolven sent several tendrils racing, much to my dismay. It probed the ground further out, hitting clusters of mines outside of our designated path, the explosions shredding the limbs. It recoiled after testing a few other areas, some of the tendrils torn apart by weapons fire.

Maybe it realized that there was no retreat now. It wouldn’t be able to tear through the ground quickly enough without taking massive damage from the electrical trap working beneath the ground. Left or right were mined heavily, and based on the few explosives that had gone off when the electricity started up, the path forward and behind were likewise lethally mined.

I swallowed hard, feeling wary over what it would do now. This was the exact situation we’d set up for it, but at the same time it was the exact worst thing that we could do. We boxed it in again, just like in the canyon, and for any ordinary animal that was trapped, they would go down fighting.

Wolven chose to do the same.

A deep, guttural growling like some primordial abomination rolled through the ground and up into my bones. For a moment, the firing seemed to taper off, the realization that the fight would turn one way or the other in the next few moments shared amongst us all.

We would either put down this rabid abomination, or it would devour us. There was no other option for any of us.

The shield wall surged upwards when the growl erupted into a singular roar, every fiber of Wolven in concert as the ground gouged deeply with the bottom of the shield. It clacked together in an awful display of power before surging forward with momentum and added power. The remaining mines in front of it for forty meters would be useless, smashed into oblivion by the weight of the wall.

Worse, though, was the sudden mass of Wolven’s body reeling through the air, nearly half of its total form corded by thick silvery beams, flexible and stretching on and on as ten blots of biotic abomination sailed through the sky.

Over and on top of the wall.

“Legion, attack!” I managed to shout just as one of the masses slammed down on the wall next to me.

In that instant, it was like a bomb went off as the Bonemen nearest jumped into the mass closest to anyone that had been caught, exploding with a loud bang and caustic juices spraying through the air.

‘What was that!?… Ah, they’re here to make sure no one is captured alive.’ I grit my teeth with the realization, knowing that it was a fate better than otherwise.

Moments later, the mass snarled, the rope pulling taught behind it as clambering jaws and claws dug into the wall.

“What the fu-” I began, even as I fired into the ball with my trench gun. The words didn’t leave my mouth before the wall beneath me began to slowly tilt forward to the ground, picking up speed as it went. “-uuuuuuck!”

I jumped, moving on reflex, my upgraded armor bracing me as I rolled across the ground, watching as the tendril stopped being retracted.

My awareness expanded, seeing through my helmet in 360 degrees only to see several sections of the wall torn down, six of those tendrils lay on the other side of the wall, right on top of the armored division.

Already I could see places where teams desperately put distance between themselves and the wolves, fighting all the while. The screams of those unlucky enough to not have one of the Bonemen nearby filled my ears. Grenades interspersed the air, interrupting some of the voices, while others still carried on, some blessedly ended after a cannon fired.

There was only one thing left to do. It came down to our worst case scenario, a close-range battle. Much of Wolven was damaged, but with this gambit we were isolated, our strengths reduced.

But we weren’t done yet.

“Reapers, come, we will collect our due.” I sneered at the main mass, holding my trench gun and drawing my new grenade launcher, following the tendril to where I knew the main body would be.