Sweeping the tunnel was slow work. Krasus and the Legionnaires were taking heavy losses. They were littered with traps and devious hybrids, who fought them tooth and claw for every inch. “Curse these Drydellians, they had been secretly supporting this hybrid den, feeding them dust, weapons and equipment.” When he finished with them, if he was ever able to finish with them, there would be a reckoning.

What had started out as a Centuri was now probably half their number and that was an optimistic estimate, for what the hybrids lacked in equipment and training they more than made up for in desperate ferocity and devious cunning and a definite home field advantage.

A legionnaire up front howled with fear and agony as he was caught with one of those accursed noose poles and wrenched forward and dropped into a deep pit whose bottom had been studded with sharpened metal spikes. His cries ended when he landed with a meaty squelch on the bottom of the pit.

Krasus shouted at the legionnaires' backs, and they bunched together, trying to cover one another from any possible angle of attack.

“Form up and keep tight ranks! Foam spray up front!” he called out. The ranks parted just wide enough to allow a legionnaire with a foam pack to spray it into the hole. The foamy gel rapidly expanded to fill the pit and hardened into a stone like substance, successfully covering the trap pit. Up ahead he could see the tunnel opened into a large chamber. This would be the beast's final place of retreat.

He smiled grimly. This would be over one way or another and then he would have his reckoning with the Drydellians. “I want a trap team up front, foam sprayer behind them!” Krasus bellowed as he ducked some globular mucosal projectile that went whizzing past his head, striking a legionnaire behind him straight in his helmeted face.

The Legionnaire put both hands to his face with an anguished howl as he went down. Krasus quickly glanced at the legionnaire, to see where the mucus had struck his helmet. It melted through the helmet and the skin of his face had already shriveled to half its size as it steamed and the flesh boiled. The hybrids which had loosed the mucus attack, were two insectoid beetle-men, who had dug in at the end of the tunnel, bend over and were launching the acidic blobs from their posteriors, while peeking out to aim from between their legs, the antenne on their heads, twitching with strain, as they tried to produce projectiles to shoot into the legionnaires ranks as fast as they could.

Krasus took careful aim with his pistol and sent an emitter blast flying straight and true, right into the left most beetle man’s fundament, just as it was about to loose another one of its fetid blasts. The shot caused a clog in the beetlemans bowels and it erupted with pressurized slime, falling forward as its own flesh began to shrivel and boil.

Krasus sensed their moment to get out of the tunnel was upon them. He urged the Legionnaires forward, putting his hand between the shoulder blades of the one in front of him and pushing him forward.

“Move through! Do not stop! He urged the Legionnaires and with a final last effort and several more well placed shots, they burst through into the hybrid's redoubt. It was a large jagged space, and the roof swept up and away, shrouded in a murky darkness. Krasus looked to examine the darkness, but found that his nightshades had become broken, when their focoulators had been splattered with discharge from the hybrid’s acid ball that impacted on the legionnaire next to him. “At least it wasn't my seeing eyes.” Krasus thought ruefully. Now there would be no escape for either of them.

What was left of the Centuri moved into the large chamber. The wide space was crudely hewn out of the pillar’s cities' foundational red stone. Krasus could see no exit and the hybrids had run out of places to run. Across the floor, there were hundreds of sharpened reeds, stuck into the sand at haphazard angles. In the center of the space there was a very large one that rhythmically discharged great festering puffs of air. The atmosphere in the room was heady and warm, and it stank like the foul breath of a thousand unwashed hybrids as it swirled around him. Krasus wanted to gag, and he wished he had taken Moloch’s advice and requisitioned a helmet. “Where was his fellow Centurion? Dead most likely.” Krasus knew to be separated from the main force in this hybrid den was a death sentence. Moloch was a capable fighter, but if he hadn't been able to reunite with them after all this time, it was likely they would only find his body, or maybe a few remnants of it.

Everything about the room felt wrong. His knee high boots sank ankle deep into loose dry sand that made it hard to make any sudden movements as he slogged through it.

High up in the center of the room, Tzreek’s gleaming resisteel nest floated above them powered by a gravitational impeller the same used in the drydellian gondolas and was able to steer it around with relative ease. He seemed unconcerned and stroked the headfeathers of one of his hens and cooed soothingly down at her.

“You finally made it here to join me in the spectacle of your death. Noone invades Tzreek’s den and lives!”

“Look around you Tzreek, the only way out is through us.” Krasus shouted up at the floating nest.

Tzreek blinked and rapped his claws on the side of the nest.

“Just so! And rest assured I shall be taking it, as soon as you all are dead.” Tzreek gloated.

Krasus wore a perplexed expression.

“Look around you, Tzreek. Your Creatures have been destroyed and now you are trapped and alone. Surrender and cast yourself upon the Emperor’s mercy.”

“It doesn't matter that you destroyed the den. There are always more fools in Drydellia who would trade their humanity in exchange for just a little power over their fellows. In no time I’ll have plenty more servants where they came from. If you’re looking for anyone to blame, blame the Drydellians, they are the ones who made the citizens' living conditions so terrible they would throw themselves headfirst into my feathery arms.”

“I blame you both.” Krasus said, and went for his emitter pistol. He drew and fired in one smooth motion and while he wasn't very fast the move took Tzreek by surprise. He made a panicked squawk and shoved his hen between him and the emitter blast, holding her up like a shield. The female bird hybrid took the shot right in her chest.

Tzreek held her, stroking her plumage one last time as he looked down at her longingly. Then his head snapped up and he unceremoniously heaved her out of the nest and her body fell, kicking up a swirling plume of dust as it impacted in the sand.

“It is very rude to break someone else's toys! She was one of my best creations.” Tzreek shouted as he closed the nest’s cover and moved it to a higher position towards the darkness of the ceiling.

The Legionnaires formed several loose crescent shaped ranks that fanned out across the floor, that they might open fire on the resisteel nest from all sides.

Potter walked up beside Krasus, setting down the Legion standard in the sand and wiping his brow with the back of his hand, as he leaned against it. His eyes were closed and it seemed as if he was listening intently.

“Centurion, can you feel that?” He said, opening his eyes and fixing Krasus with a concerned look.

“Feel what?” Krasus asked, stopping in his tracks and holding up his hand. He closed his eyes and inhaled slowly, trying his best to quiet his mind and body and just listen. He had been so focused on Tzreek he had not noticed a very subtle vibration that was emanating through the sand around them, causing the grains to skitter and dance.

Nassim materialized. His blue glowing face wore a troubled expression. “You aren’t going to like this my guys, but buried just a meter below the sand are hundreds of hybrids. See those stakes? Yeah they are using them to breathe. Right now they are wiggle-worming their way towards us as quietly as they can to ambush us while Tzreek keeps us distracted. Also up there? More crowmen.”

As if in confirmation of Nassim’s word, a slimy ribbon of excrement splattered at Krasus’ feet. He looked up into the darkness and could barely make out shapes flitting about above and hear the scrabbling of claws and quiet twittering caws.

Krasus looked down and drew his voidblade. He drove the point of the blade towards the base of one of the sharpened tubular stakes. He heard a grunt and a strangled muffled cry emerge from the tube.

“Legionnaires lookout! They are below us! ” He bellowed, as a multitude of pale naked humanoids of every description erupted from the sand below. The floor of the chamber looked like a stepped on fire ant nest, as the hybrids came boiling out of the ground. Their limbs were twisted and misshapen as they lunged out of the loose sand, gasping for air and latching on to any nearby Legionnaires, biting, clawing and dragging them down into the roiling sand for the others to latch onto them. One hybrid with impossibly long legs launched itself in the air, and bowled over a Legionnaire, landing on him and ripping into the flesh of his neck with its sharp long teeth. Krasus shot it twice, once in the hip and once in the hand, and it screeched a horrible sound, and bounded off, gaining momentum and leaping up high into the air to land somewhere else in the chaotic melee. The legionnaire bled out in the sand, as other hybrids rushed forward to drag him off by the ankles back into the depths of their ranks.

Krasus knew it would not be hard to guess what they wanted the deceased soldier for.

He laid into the sand hybrids with renewed vigor, bringing his voidblade down in a powerful stroke that, cleaved off the arm and half the shoulder of a hybrid that lunged at him, then he neatly dodged another with a spin, evading its attempt to tackle him and as it rushed by he separated its head from its shoulder with a quick precise slash of his void blade. The head fell with a wet plop into the sand as its blood crackled and spit along the blade's burning edge. Two more of the pale gangly hybrids lept at him, he put two quick shots into each of their chests. These hybrids seemed more feral and weak than the others they had faced, as if they were candidates that failed to completely hybridize and instead existed in a state that exemplified a physical condition that was the worst of both. They outnumbered Krasus and his forces ten to one and they fought desperately to keep from being overwhelmed.

Pfunkt! A large emitter blast struck him in his chest armor. Krasus whirled around to try and track where the shot came from, but he couldn’t until another went whistling past his head. It was Tzreek, up in his nest trying to shoot him in the back when he was distracted. Now there was a surging tide of darkness swirling down from the ceiling and Krasus could see that the crow men had decided to join the fight.

“Form up! I want us in a tight circle, each of us will watch another’s back.”

Like clockwork the Legionnaires responded to the command and backed into a tight neat circle, with the front rank kneeling and the back rank standing above them. Potter was in the middle, bellowing a war hymn. Potter was a low level awakened, and his developed talents were of the defensive variety. As he finished his hymn, faint white light wreathed around him and then shot out, making the wall of hybrids as they rushed towards their lines, move slower as if they were trapped in amber. He concentrated with all his will, clutching the standard and with his eyes turned skyward, white light glowing from them. The Legionnaires made the best of their advantage and struck into the hybrids, with renewed vigor. Then Potter exhaled and the effect expired as the hybrids were freed from the force of his mind and they once again scampered, crawled and leapt at their lines. The crowmen finally descended on the legionnaires, striking the formation and putting them into disarray as they landed. Potter made some inputs to the legion standard. The top of the pole crackled with a foreboding dark blue lightning. Then suddenly it arced out and began lancing into the crowmen. Each crow man the lightning touched screeched in agony, and fell out of the sky, stunned by the powerful blasts. The lightning daisy chained off of each hybrid it touched, arcing and jumping from one nearby crow man to another. They cawed as they died, set upon by the legionnaires.

The hybrids fell as they charged their formation, but as they did more crawled over the fallen.

A legionnaire cried out as he took an emitter blast to his neck. Tzreek was still up in his nest, and if he was left up there to leisurely snipe them, his presence alone might be enough to turn this battle.

Krasus pulled a magma clag charge off his belt, and primed it. Then he keyed his grav belt and jumped up into the air with all his might. He sailed up above their formation. He could see they only had twenty five legionnaires left. It didn’t seem like the hybrids numbers had been affected by them at all, although he could see the huge pile of their bodies that surrounded their ranks. As he rose in the air he could see the shiny bottom of Tzreek’s nest. He cocked back his arm and threw the charge with all his might. It went hurtling through the air and just as it was going to hit Tzreek’s nest, a wounded crow man flew past. The chemogrip adhesive on the clag charge stuck to the crow man, and it looked down a shrieked with terror. Quickly it beat its wings and rose above Tzreeks nest and off and away into the darkness.

Krasus began to fall slowly towards the ground and he cursed bitterly as he did so. That was the only charge he had left, and his only good option of destroying the nest. The resisteel plating had made it all but impervious to their emitter fire and with his anti grav belt he could only get so high into the air. He moved to his wrist control to press the button to detonate the crow man who had fled, hoping that it would have retreated to it’s flock.

But the crow re-emerged from the darkness, darting forward and grabbing Krasus with its claws and bearing him aloft, as he was made so light by the anti grav belt.

“Howdy Dude.” The crowman uttered in a series of guttural squawks.

Krasus looked up in amazement. The crows eyes blazed with a frosty blue light.

“Nassim?” He asked tentatively.

“In the flesh!” He chortled in several long caws, his wings beating against the air as he carried Krasus up higher and higher into the air. Tzreek paid them no mind as they circled above his nest.

“How is this possible? I didn’t know you could possess living hosts.”

“I’m an old spirit, there are lots of things I can do.” Nassim the crow man said with a measure of satisfaction.

“These hybrids have weaker defenses against my influence, and when you popped the clag charge on this one, his mind broke with terror and it made him too easy a target to resist me. Now I’m inside him Centurion. I’m all up inside his feathery giblets.”

Krasus was not in the mood for Nassims jokes. “Is there a point to this uninvited joyride? There is still a lot of fighting to do down there you blue goof and our brothers need my help.”

“And mine, Nassim said with a tone of measured certainty. “I’m going to help you destroy Tzreeks nest, and hopefully kill two birds with one clag charge. Get it?” Nassim guffawed with long squawks again.

“Light above Nassim I swear to the void! Your crow voice is even more annoying than your usual one.” Krasus said annoyed.

“Be careful Centurion, you might just kill me with your kindness.” Nassim said, clicking his beak together.

“I’m going to fly this old crow into Tzreeks nest. Be sure to detonate the clag charge when I’m in position.” He continued as he flew Krasus above a open place away from the Legionnaires formation.

“Okay, that makes sense. But Tzreeks nest is that way, why have you taken me over here?” Krasus asked as he squirmed around in Nassim’s crow talons.

The sand below began to boil in the center as something large was emerging from it.

There is a really big hybrid still left under the sands. And I’m getting you into the perfect position. I’d have your void blade ready if I were you.” Nassim cackled, as a huge scarred bald head emerged from the sand and roared with rage and suppressed hunger, as it pulled itself out the ground. It was five meters tall and began lumbering through towards the Legionnaires.

Krasus felt his guts clench and turn to ice.

“Uh, ready for what Nassim?” Krasus asked, feeling very vulnerable all of a sudden. Nassim was a spirit that did not share his same interests in staying on his side of life.

“For this!” Crow Nassim cawed as he let go of Krasus. “Remember, detonate the charge on time Centurion!” He called down after him.

“I’ll get you for this you bloody blue goof!” Krasus shouted as he used his grav belt to float slowly down, his void blade in hand and angled towards the lumbering giant below. All he heard in response was Nassim's cackling crow laughter as he beat his wings, streaking away, towards Tzreek’s nest.