It’s strange how much life can sometimes be like movies. One minute the woman was holding out her arms, palms up, sobbing and begging for me to leave. The next she was shredded meat crisping through the air, a sun-bright inferno trailing right behind it. I was only a few feet from her, and the blast launched me across the parking lot, to bounce against the main gate like a gong.

My vision swam and I blacked out, but woke up with a gasp as my suit hit my chest hard with electric shocks from its defibrillator. My whole body clenched into one big charley horse and I screamed, casting my eyes around and trying to figure out what in the exact hell was going on.

The first thing I noticed was more extensive cracking in my helmet’s screen. Tendrils swarmed around me, restructuring my body as the cartoon starfish peered at me questioningly.

“Head trauma detected user, should I enable cranial repair function?”

I tried to respond but could only manage a series of strangled squeaks. I could hardly breathe. There was a ball of something stuck in my throat, a mass of congealing blood blocking my airway. I convulsed, retching the blood out before I gasped the word, “No!”

My starfish shrugged and started dancing, sliding its feet around in the road. As I focused on it, the scene in the distance behind the cartoon became clear.

Oily black smoke poured into the sky from the remnants of our new d’jhz tower, and BuyMort bugs were swarming from the area. From a distance, they looked like huge centipedes.

The crowd of gathered people and workers scattered, screams rending the air as gunfire rattled and echoed. I gasped as I got to my feet, staggering into a run, and grabbing my blaster off the pavement as I went. Tollya and her squad were at the edge of the residential zone, so I ran toward them.

She hefted her own shotgun and slid on her slitted, metal helmet. “Gobbs broke!” Tollya roared. The tall hobb woman racked her shotgun and pointed it past me, firing into the ground at a nearby charging gobb. The little green man stopped dead, yellow eyes staring at the buckshot blasted into his boots’ steel toes.

Tollya stepped forward and bashed the gobb in the helmet, toppling him before he could decide whether or not to continue his attack.

“Why are they attacking us?!” I shouted. “Is that Dearth too, somehow?”

Tollya scowled at me through the slits in her helmet as she pointed to the gobb and said, “Recall.”

She stepped past me, jogging toward another group of gobb workers from the nearby barn construction area. Just then a blast of plasma scattered them, sending them fleeing in all directions. Running my eyes back to where the shot had come from, I saw Phyllis ambling about, a wreath of pot smoke rolling merrilly out from within her mech suit.

Tollya stopped moving and turned to address me. “What?”, she asked, looking at me as though I’d asked the dumbest question she’d ever heard. “No, they just gobbs. Any excuse to break things and steal, this perfect cover. You deal with bugs, I deal with gobbs!”

Tollya looked away from me, her eyes seizing upon a potential target. Moments later she picked up speed, launching into the middle of a group of gobbs in the parking lot. They were actively ripping apart my already damaged-beyond-recognition pickup truck, until Tollya landed in their middle and knocked out two with a single kick.

“Hobbs no kill gobbs!” She shouted. “Recall! Contract penalties for dead gobbs! Protect weapons and vehicles! Protect mo-gas!”

As I watched, hobbs began engaging the much smaller gobbs in melee combat, only using firearms to frighten or slow them.

My helmet pinged as a rock hit me in the head, my fractured screen showing a vague threat detection behind me. I turned to see a small horde of gobb workers rushing in the open main gate, being chased by Jada.

Several of them were focused on me, and a hail of small projectiles rained down.

None of it harmed me badly enough to trigger the suit, but it hurt. I pulled my ring off, summoned my gauntlets, and raised them to shield my chest and groin. Then I ran into the group and started kicking.

They were little, and I tried to hold back, but I was still getting used to my growing strength. I sent a few of them flying, before I got a good sense of exactly how much I needed to hold back. Jada roared laughter as little green men sailed into the surrounding walls.

“Rescan the block!” Jada shouted over their heads.

I cocked my head to the side in confusion but reached for my MortBlock.

“They’re going to try to sell anything they can, keep rescanning the MortBlock!"

"Why?" I shot back.

"That will prevent them from making sales. If they damage our items enough then the block won't recognize them. We’ll mop up the gobbs, you keep the block on defense!” Her growling voice carried over the shrieks and guttural yells of the goblins easily, and I nodded.

People screamed and ran, and goblins smashed anything they were near, pointing at the remains after and selling them. For the most part they seemed to be avoiding my human guests, but any people alone or separated from their groups were targeted too. The gobbs were indiscriminate, selling anything they could, and pocketing everything else.

Tollya plowed into another group of them.

With each step, she swept a gobb worker off their feet or slammed them to the ground with her shotgun’s butt. More hobbs streamed from the walls to engage the gobbs, and our weapons were surrounded by a group in thick makeshift riot armor, wielding batons that had been part of our admittedly coerced trade with the Arms Keepers.

They had fought us on the launchers, but not the actual melee weapons which weren’t covered by our ‘guns’ deal. I didn’t question it at the time.

I rescanned the MortBlock again and watched the sweep spread out on my cracked mini-map. This would prevent the goblins from selling anything that they couldn’t easily break, at the least. However, armed with their construction tools, and an apparent wealth of experience, they were quite efficient at getting our stuff to BuyMort’s sales requirement levels.

A gibbering goblin sprinted up to me and latched onto my bag, chattering at me angrily. I reached down for him and instinctively flinched when he snapped at me with his needle teeth.

The goblin and I realized I had metal covering my hands at the same time, and he screamed as I grabbed him, catching his mouth wide open.

I tossed the little creature into a nearby wall, and winced as he cracked and died against it. Despite their rebellion I felt a little twinge of sympathy for them. I wondered if the gobb riots were less to do with who they were as a species and more to do with how they were treated.

My thoughts were cut short, though, when the disturbing sound of many chitinous legs rasping together reached my ears. I swiveled to look and felt my jaw drop open. When Tollya had mentioned bugs, this was not what I had been envisioning.

A massive centipede with swollen red antennae scurried from a nearby apartment and I widened my stance, thinking back to my battle with Drusk. Going toe-to-toe with monsters was kinda becoming my thing and I felt ready one-hundred percent ready to do this.

That was up until I actually fought it. I stomped in close and it reared back off the ground in front of me then somehow leapt forward, plopping hard down on top of me and forcing me to the ground before clamping hold of my back. Dozens of its chisel-tipped limbs stabbed into my body as I was shoved into the things underside, where yet more legs stabbed into me for support.

I roared in pain before reaching back over my head to grab the creature and rip it free. Holding it in front of me with my strength-enhanced arms, I gave it a cruel sneer before throwing it back into the flames.

I’ve never been a fan of anything with more than six legs.

It landed with a chittering hiss and rolled up to avoid the fire, vanishing into the thick smoke.

More of the oversized centipedes arrived, scurrying around the destroyed tower. I ran, turning as Ordo peeked around the corner of the building. His oversized eyes went wide at the sight of me, and I realized my brown slacks had been torn mostly free from the front-side of my legs.

Thank Pasta I had the starfish suit’s cup, or I’d have been hanging loose for everyone to enjoy.

Ordo stepped out as I approached, firing in short, controlled bursts. The rounds sparked off the arthropods, causing a reaction from any they hit. The roiling bugs raised their heads and fixated on Ordo, a pulsing red light surging into the tips of their feet and antenna. As one, the glowing centipedes charged the hobb.

I screamed a warning and started to sprint as hard as I could for his location but Ordo’s face never changed. He simply slung his rifle and reached for a grenade at his waist. It was another mud-crete grenade, and he held it after the pin was out, whispering something under his breath before tossing it to explode in the air in front of the charging arthropods.

I stopped my run and turned my head from the brief flash, but I could hear the damage done. The centipedes screeched and hissed as the mud-crete hardened around their limbs and carapaces. I turned back to look just as their noises halted, their eyes and mouths sealed in the stuff.

Nonplussed, Ordo jogged over to join me.

“Damn, Ordo. You didn’t even flinch! Ice cold.”

“Aggropedes no problem. They stupid, boss. Hit them, get attention, they charge you. Always,” Ordo explained. He pointed over to where the next nearest aggropede was busily scurrying toward them, then met it halfway and smashed it with his rifle-butt. The heavy AK stock bashed the bug down to the ground, where Ordo stomped it flat. The armor plating never broke or shattered, but the bug inside it was crushed.

He looked at me as if to say ‘see?’ and I nodded. Point well made.

A scream sounded, echoing up from further into the residential compound, and all around me hobbs responded. I sprinted hard, taking point, running headlong into the next nest of aggropedes. They were swarming an apartment, trying to kill the residents. One man was down already, bleeding from the several stab wounds a constricting aggropede was causing.

I grabbed it, trying to crush its head inside its own armor plating. There was a slight resistance, like the internal structure was meant to protect the delicate brains. Once it caved, the aggropede squished and its limbs relaxed. I unwound it from the poor man, tossing it aside as he groaned and whimpered in pain.

“You alright?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. Ordo slipped to one knee beside him, pulling a first aid kit from his satchel. Meanwhile the remaining aggropedes swarmed into one of the apartment complexes, seemingly intent on chasing my civilians and avoiding my military. Something about that pissed me off, rage rising through me. I charged into the mud-crete building after them, clomping into the hallway before slipping and falling on my ass.

There’s a reason good soldiers don’t charge in red hot and angry, I told myself, shaking my head at how reckless I’d just been. But pulling myself up, I saw that it wasn’t all bad. The aggropedes had stopped and turned to face me. Evidently I didn’t look nearly as intimidating as the rest of my military did.

They were on the walls and ceiling, six of them, doing their best to look as creepy as hell and turning their primary feelers back toward me. I slapped the wall, hard. Small cracks extended through the mud-crete from my palm print, and the aggropedes antennae all became engorged and glowed red, as they raced toward me.

Within seconds, I was wrapped up in angry arthropods, dozens of small cuts from their legs bleeding into the hallway as I lashed out with hands and feet.

The creatures were not much of a threat to me, being unable to constrict around my limbs and prevent my movement. One tried to get my elbow pinned to my side, but I flexed the limb out and tore its legs free.

My suit’s painkiller was flooding my system as tendrils flashed and whipped around the aggropedes. They didn’t even give me much charge, as their flexible but strong armor stayed intact. Merely the arthropod inside was crushed, the soft flesh of which provided little kinetic resistance.

The mud-crete wall had provided plenty, just from cracking it with a hand-print, so I slugged the nearby wall to top up my charge, leaving a neat, fist-shaped dent in the hard, cracked surface. My cartoon danced in the hallway as I fought off the rest of the aggropedes.

They bit me, in addition to the many tiny legs stabbing into my body, but I barely noticed. I just smashed until there were no more of them moving in my immediate vicinity. They were far more effective at killing my people than they were me, a harsh lesson I learned as I walked past a corpse in the hallway.

She had been stabbed in the throat by several tiny limbs and bled out on the floor. I scowled and stormed toward the nearest screams, anger tinting my vision. Nobody messed with my people. I was going to make Dearth pay.