She only saw the sharp Brion spear cut through the air and then she was looking at the champion's head flying somewhere into the blazing grove. The others didn't even waver, showing no signs of mourning at all.
Perhaps they weren't that close.
Clearly she was beginning to lose her mind, Paula concluded. It was hard, keeping her head lucid when there was such chaos around her, and air was a luxury she was no longer provided with.
Kerven was standing almost of top of her, the enemies pushing closer with every second. Paula wanted to help, fumbling for her gun while trying to hold onto the large seed.
"Stay!" Kerven bellowed to her. "More are coming!"
She didn't even want to know what that meant. From her position nearly on her back, Paula could only see the feet of the enemies. There were so many. It looked like the entire Hoola army had suddenly decided to gather around them.
Considering they'd lost, Paula figured they were hungry for revenge.
A few days ago, she'd compared her job to that of the butcher's. It only took her half a minute of watching Kerven fight the Hoolas to understand what that really meant, and that it couldn’t have been the furthest from the truth. If one of the two of them was a butcher, it was definitely Kerven, right down to knowing where the ligaments were and how to cut through them effortlessly.
She was showered with blood, pieces of the enemy falling all around her. At times, she had to claw her way through corpses to be able to breathe at all. The press of bodies was insane as the enemies didn't give Kerven one second to rest.
"Be ready!" the captain called to her then. "I need to get you out of here!"
Paula agreed. She just didn't see a way in which that could happen. From her perspective, the entire grove was filled with burning people. She could have sworn the furthest Hoolas were actually catching fire, their howls echoing across the field.
It was utterly insane. She watched Kerven fight, practically crouching behind his knees with the seed pressed to her chest, unable to believe that even a man like that could get them out of that mess. What hope did they have against people who hated them so much they were literally ready to burn?
Then Kerven bent down and hoisted her up over his shoulder. Paula had just enough presence of mind to grab the Eden seed with her, holding it with arms, refusing to let go of her prize.
From the advantage of Kerven's broad frame, she could see what had become of the battle.
There was no battle, that was the answer. It was a pure, inglorious massacre. Both sides were pouring fire on each other, seeing that the war was about to end one way or another. Both wanted to leave the enemy with nothing but bitter memories of them.
The captain was still fighting, making his way through the mass of the Hoolas. Paula assumed he was going for the tunnel, but it was impossible to see and tell for sure. All she knew was that they were chased and aimed at. The Hoolas had drawn guns and were shooting at them.
Kerven was protecting her with his own body, shielding her from the blasts with his armor. Even then, he was still fighting. With one hand, looking around to see where he needed to turn to protect her, Kerven was slowly getting them out of there.
It was so ludicrous, so unbelievable that Paula wanted to remember it forever. There was nothing warm and fuzzy about the memory. Just the fact that if the sight of Kerven letting himself be torn to pieces by guns and blades for her sake wasn't worth keeping, what was?
"Tunnel up ahead," Kerven called to her and Paula thought she could just make out the mouth of the passageway. "The ship is gone and others can't land. Can you walk?"
Walk, or run?
"Yes!" Paula answered back as loudly as she could and after a moment, her feet touched the ground.
Away from the flames, it was easier to think and move, but nowhere was safe anymore. Paula knew the tunnel had to be filled with smoke and dust. It was also their only way out of there, so they had to get going.
It felt like she hadn’t taken a breath in a lifetime.
No one else seemed to be around. They were alone.
"Go!" Kerven roared over the sound of the Hoolas picking up a furious battle cry. "Run!"#p#分页标题#e#
Paula ran. Half-limping, half-running, she dove into the mouth of the tunnel, still clutching that ridiculous seed. Immediately, the thin air made her cough.
She didn't stop, running down the blessedly empty path. Kerven followed her, keeping the enemies away from her, backing into the passageway with fast, short steps.
"Major!" she screamed into the comm link on her wrist. "Detonate the tunnel from the grove's side!"
There was an indistinctive reply. She couldn’t have guessed at the words half a second later, they were simply gone, never having really touched her consciousness.
Then the tunnel collapsed. From both sides. All sides, really, as a tremendous impact knocked them all to the ground.
Paula scrambled to her feet, trying to see anything in the sudden darkness. In the few flickering lights that had survived the crash, the reality was worse than she'd thought.
They were buried alive. With a hundred Hoolas, no air and no way out.
16
Kerven
They were going to die.
The realization hit Kerven like a knife to the heart. He didn't need more than a second to analyze the situation and understand that their chances for survival were slim. Almost non-existent, in fact.
The tunnel had collapsed. It was dug deep so the Hoolas wouldn't see or hear them coming and now it was about to become a grave for him and his gesha. It had already been filled with smoke from the burning grove, now they were living on the mercy of the last remaining oxygen.
There were way too many breathers in the tunnel as well. That was a problem for him to solve. The captain only wished it guaranteed Paula's escape, knowing that it unfortunately did not. He was fighting a clock and the enemy both for the first time in his life.
Somewhere, his warriors at least had to be working on getting them out, for they certainly couldn't dig their own way through.
He had to keep himself and Paula alive until that moment.
All that took Kerven half a moment to figure out. Then he was moving, the spear twirling in his hand. More so than ever before he realized the truth of the spear being an extension of a warrior. It was like one of his hands was a long, sharp claw, cutting the enemies open.
Everything would have been fine, if it hadn't been for the cramped, claustrophobic space of the tunnel. As soon as the enemies got on their feet, they had to realize they were as good as dead.
Kerven thought he noticed the moment when one of them saw Paula behind him, still cradling her treasure. He couldn't understand the gargled cry, but the meaning was easy enough to understand when every last one of them started scrambling for her.
The captain discovered with a sinking heart that they could climb. Unlike him in the large armor, the Hoolas were light and the claws on their hands were sharp enough to hold them. He could move when he needed to, could even have reached the tunnel roof jumping... It made no difference.
The numbers were finally an enemy.
"Take cover!" he roared to Paula, trusting the authority in his voice to make her obey at a time when the fraction of a second counted.
She heard, ducking behind a fallen rock and pulling her gun from her hip and dropping the seed beside her. Firing into the attacking group, she took down several of them.
The others kept coming. Some of them had guns, a fact which he noticed only because of the flashes Paula’s weapon made, illuminating their cramped location.
Kerven lost track of time and space. All he saw and heard and felt was Paula, her beautiful blue eyes alight with fierce refusal to die every time she fired the weapon. She was absolutely gorgeous in her defiance, even if he noticed how pale she was and how badly she coughed.
He pushed his way through the crowd of Hoolas. No careful picking or making sure the ones he stepped on were dead first. The captain only had one goal in mind and he went through them with sheer force and bulk. He could feel bones breaking under his boots, heard the screams of those he trampled on his way to Paula.
She was doing her part. For a healer, she knew how to aim and had no trouble taking lives as easily as he'd seen her saving them before. Keeping her back to the boulder she was hiding behind, Paula fired without pause, only wincing when the returned shots went by too closely.
He reached her side, feeling like her closeness was enough to revitalize him. Turning to the Hoolas with a fierce snarl, Kerven began cutting down their lines once more, making sure he kept the most dangerous of them off Paula.
He quickly discovered it was almost all of them. The ones that had come into the tunnel with them weren't the same kind he'd fought before, out in the grove. They were thicker, faster, deadlier. Some sort of elite unit of the Hoola army, now pressing down to kill one of them as a comfort victory.#p#分页标题#e#
Kerven wasn't going to let it happen.
Yet even he had to admit he was hard-pressed in the tight, almost airless corridor where the enemies surrounded him on all sides, in three hundred and sixty degrees. He could feel cuts in his armor, the poisoned swords breaking into the weaker joint spots of his gear. His system was working overtime to compensate for all that as he cut and broke anything in his path.
Brions weren't merciful by nature. In battle, any enemy was a target that had to be neutralized as quickly as possible. If they had already decided to engage, there were no more moral conundrums.