He was still sitting on his throne, and a naked woman with short red hair straddled his legs in the reverse cowgirl position. She grinded her hips a few times down onto his penis, and then she squealed with surprise when he brought his massive metal hand up on her ass and pushed her off his dick. She stumbled away and fell into the crowd of other naked or mostly naked women that were draped over the steps beneath Uffe’s throne, and then she sank down and sat watching us.
All the women were actually watching us intently, and most of them had glowing red eyes.
“You were expecting me?” I asked as I raised my rifle. I didn’t give the fucker a chance to respond, I just pulled the trigger and sent a burst of blue pulse bullets across the eight meters of the throne room. My shot was perfect, and it would have hit him right between the eyes, but the bullets stopped short when they slammed into an invisible barrier some two meters before the dais steps.
“My sister and daughter are fools,” he boomed. “I’ve known about their plans to murder me for longer than they knew they wanted to do the deed.”
“That looks like some sort of armored glass,” Kasta whispered in our ears.
“I’m going to see if I can figure out how to remove it,” Zea said. “Maybe keep him talking?”
“Your sister and daughter aren’t here right now,” I said as I kept the sight of my rifle on his skull.
“No,” he replied. “You are the fool, Vaish. You should have hid in your nest. Instead, you come to me, in my lair, and think you can kill me. I am not the feeble Idonan, nor the foolhardy Skyad. I am definitely not the weak Waymund. I am the wolf, and I hunt and kill the crow, hart, boar, and horse. Now you will die, and I will do little more than raise my finger.”
The Jotnar king tapped a button on the armrest of his throne, and the side walls of the throne room slid open.
Then sixty or so massive drone-wolfs stepped out of their homes and turned their glowing red eyes toward us.
“Shit! I don’t see any way to lower that wall,” Zea hissed. “There has to be a control somewhere in there.”
“Back up,” I said to the other women, and we all fell back toward the double doors as the robot wolves began to sprint toward us. These were a little larger than the pair that had escorted Layalina, and their claws scrapped across the ground with a sound that was akin to kitchen knives being sharpened.
“This man thinks he is a king! Now watch him and his bitches get torn to pieces.” Uffe’s laughter filled the room like thunder as we backed up to the edge of the double doors, but then his voice was cut short when Eve screamed.
“Ahhhhhhh!” the vampire yelled as she raised her left hand up toward the tidal wave of steel monsters. There was a boom of thunder, and then the entire group was lifted off their four legs and thrown back across the room like they were children’s toys. They bounced off the glass wall that separated us from Uffe and his women and they tumbled to the marble ground.
Then Aasne and I were hosing them down with our own waves of blue pulse bullets.
My first few shots carved a hole into the closest wolf, and then my next stream tore through the two drones to the side. I kept my shots to the left side of the room and Aasne sprayed the right. The group of drone-wolves jumped up to their feet as we shot at them, and then they turned as a group to charge us as we continued to bombard them. For half of a second, our shots didn’t seem to do more than delay the front wave of robots, but then Elana’s bullets tore through two at a time, and the creatures crashed in the middle of their sprint towards us like metal tumbleweeds.
“Back into the foyer!” I shouted when I realized that we weren’t going to be able to keep them at bay without some sort of choke point. Eve, Aasne, and I jumped back, and I moved to try to close one of the doors, but Eve guessed at my intent, and the leftmost door swung closed before I could grab it.
“Reloading!” Aasne screamed as she ejected a power cell from her rifle and popped in another. Eve and I covered her side for a moment and took down one of the wolves closest to the door.
“I’m reloading!” I shouted as one of the metal wolves jumped impossibly high over the other wolves, through the door, and angled down at Eve. The vampire was so focused on shooting her rifle toward the other corner that she probably didn’t see the wolf coming at her from above.
For half a second, time slowed down as I let go of my rifle with my left hand and pulled out my golden revolver. The gun barked in my hand as the robot descended from its jump, and then the drone-wolf disintegrated into a hundred pieces.
Another wolf jumped through the doorway, and he came at me with snapping jaws. I shoved the barrel of my pulse rifle into his mouth sideways to keep the teeth away from my armor, and then I shoved the front of my revolver into the robot’s red eyeball before pulling the trigger. The massive bullet from my gun punched through the entire length of the wolf and then shattered the metal skull of the robot coming in the door behind him.
I ripped my rifle free and made another attempt to reload my rifle, but there were too many wolves coming at us now, and I needed to use the longer rifle to stuff into one of the robot’s mouths so that I could keep its teeth away from my armored face. Then I ended it with another one of my massive bullets and managed to tear my rifle free again.
“Back!” Eve screamed again, and the remaining group of wolves tumbled up into the air and spun away from us as if they were leaves being swept up on the wind. They all either crashed into the gold door or passed through the open right side and spun back into the throne room.
Eve stumbled away behind us, and I grabbed her shoulder before she could fall down. She blinked her eyes a few times, but it looked like they weren’t focusing on my face correctly, and her breath was coming out of her body in ragged gasps.
“Are you okay?” I asked, and my wife nodded weakly before I felt her strength return to her so she could stand without my assistance.
“They are coming back!” Aasne shouted. “I only have a few shots left!”
“Here!” I said as I popped a fresh power magazine into my rifle. I tossed the weapon across the room, and she caught it with her left hand as I pulled my silver revolver free. I guessed that there was thirty or forty left, and I didn’t think that Eve would be able to push them back again without fainting.
This was going to be our final stand.
Then I heard what sounded like knives scraping across stone coming from behind us, and I turned to see Kasta and Paula’s group of wolf drones running across the foyer. The disc shaped fliers were right above the wolves, and they started shooting their plasma bullets at the oncoming enemy drone-wolves as soon as the group pushed through the doorway again.
The two groups of robot wolves collided as Elana’s sniper shots tunneled through the larger enemy ones. The flying drones sprayed the masses with their shots, but the lighter energy bullets did little more than spatter on the wolves’ armor. My revolver bullets were more than a little effective though, and every time I squeezed the trigger on either of my guns, one or two of the robots turned into scrap metal.
“I’m out!” Aasne shouted. She had been holding both her rifle and mine in her arms and was laying waste to any of the robots that tried to get close to Eve or Elana. I only counted eight or so of the enemy drone-wolves now, but we only had two of Paula’s smaller wolf drones left, and I only had a single shot left in each of my revolvers before I needed to reload.
“Aasne!” Eve shouted as she pointed behind the burgundy striped warrior woman.
Aasne turned to look at where Eve gestured, and the display case of a nearby weapon pedestal tumbled over. There was a double sided crescent axe on the stand, but it spun through the air toward Aasne as if she had yanked it on a yo-yo string. My warrior-wife dropped both of her rifles as soon as she saw the axe spinning toward her, and she snatched it out of the air as if she had practiced the move a few hundred times.
“Thank you, Eve!” Aasne screamed, and then the dual edges of the axe glowed with a bright golden light.