The Battle of Milliways
A few moments ago, the door blew open. Now all hell has broken loose. A thing with wings and far too many legs escapes the opening (into space blacker than even space should be allowed to be); Cuthbert Allgood pivot and shoots from the hip, hitting it in three places before it crashes into the fireplace.
A giant beetle with an almost-human face, bullets bouncing off its shell, breeches the boundary and leaps at tiny pink prey, and explodes back as Smith and Wesson ventilates its soft underbelly. Don't fuck with the ballerina.
Joe Manco backs towards the bar, cigar clamped in his teeth, fire with one hand and fanning with the other; he's on his second gun and running out of bullets. But there's dynamite on the bar. He's used it before. The cigar lights the fuse, and the dynamite joins the head barman's in arc into the todash darkness, clearing the middle ranks of the nightmare flow that will not be staunched.
Raph hurls a volley of shuriken into the dark, driving back the rat-like monstrosities speckled from head to toe with eyes and teeth; one leaps through the doorway, and quicker than thought comes the sai to impale and fling the wretched thing away.
Alain Johns, grim, purposeful and intense works the left side; Moiraine Sedai hails fire from the right. Standing next to Roland who is sprawled on the ground and, currently, reloading, is Svava, shooting sharp shards of runic magic through the door and cleaves any creature foolish and lucky enough to enter the bar with the bright, spinning razor-edge of her seax blade.
There are things with too many eyes, and limber spiders whose webs burn like acid where they wisp and blow; and all manners of horror. Something moves behind them all, something big. One enormous baleful eyes shines like a yellow moon on a planet in God's shadow. It reaches something with talons--a hand, but that eye, oh, that eye is set in the center of its palm.
And crouched under a table is Ace, and thank all the gods of every world Tim gave her the nitro back.
A giant beetle with an almost-human face, bullets bouncing off its shell, breeches the boundary and leaps at tiny pink prey, and explodes back as Smith and Wesson ventilates its soft underbelly. Don't fuck with the ballerina.
Joe Manco backs towards the bar, cigar clamped in his teeth, fire with one hand and fanning with the other; he's on his second gun and running out of bullets. But there's dynamite on the bar. He's used it before. The cigar lights the fuse, and the dynamite joins the head barman's in arc into the todash darkness, clearing the middle ranks of the nightmare flow that will not be staunched.
Raph hurls a volley of shuriken into the dark, driving back the rat-like monstrosities speckled from head to toe with eyes and teeth; one leaps through the doorway, and quicker than thought comes the sai to impale and fling the wretched thing away.
Alain Johns, grim, purposeful and intense works the left side; Moiraine Sedai hails fire from the right. Standing next to Roland who is sprawled on the ground and, currently, reloading, is Svava, shooting sharp shards of runic magic through the door and cleaves any creature foolish and lucky enough to enter the bar with the bright, spinning razor-edge of her seax blade.
There are things with too many eyes, and limber spiders whose webs burn like acid where they wisp and blow; and all manners of horror. Something moves behind them all, something big. One enormous baleful eyes shines like a yellow moon on a planet in God's shadow. It reaches something with talons--a hand, but that eye, oh, that eye is set in the center of its palm.
And crouched under a table is Ace, and thank all the gods of every world Tim gave her the nitro back.