The wind cast soft snow across the world while the sun shone overhead, easily visible beyond thin blue bands of Winter Aurora.

  And the kaiju’s body burned.

  Aurora had picked up all of the pieces of the faceipede’s body and thrown them on to the burning mass of tree-kaiju, and then she promptly gathered up the small fires everywhere and piled them up before she went back to rest. Mark did not blame her for leaving them to work. She had done enough.

  And now that Mark was working, whatever ‘‘‘emotion’’’ he had felt about Aurora was gone again.

  Blessedly gone!

  Let us never speak of that weirdness ever again, amen, thank the gods, and all that stuff.

  Thank the gods for good pyromancers, too.

  Carl, the Bomber from the Grey Whale, was apparently a pyromancer in his spare time. Mark had never realized that, but here Carl was, standing at the head of a group of people that consisted of Carl, Mark and his team, and a few different soldiers from Grey Whale, who were all here at the settlement because they were needed.

  The corpse of the wood kaiju burned like an entire mountain on fire.

  Raging twists of red and yellow spun into the air, pulling in snow that melted long before it reached the fire. Smoke billowed upward as the faceipede’s massive corpse, with all its legs and smashed eyes and broken foreheads full of brains, burned atop the wooden kaiju’s remains. It did not burn evenly. That was Mark and his crew’s job.

  Mark and his team were 200 meters away from the flames, and even this was almost too close, even with the wind flowing toward the fire. The heat was amazing. The conflagration was one of the hottest things that Mark had ever felt. He had imagined that he wanted to be warm, back when he was practically freezing his nuts off a day ago, but now that he was warm the only thing he wanted to do was turn and run away, back into the cold.

  But there were monsters prowling in and around the remains.

  Some small faceipede, only several meters long, was crawling out of the remains of the larger one, where it wasn’t burning, all of its faces and mouths opened and devouring everything it could. Kaiju always had ecologies to them, after all. The faceipede’s ecology consisted of smaller clones growing inside its body.

  The tree kaiju’s spawn was burning along with the tree kaiju, though.

  The ice kaiju’s spawn had returned to the sky as steam, alongside the main monster.

  But the faceipede’s spawn were still alive.

  With a twitch of Union, Mark wordlessly told Carl what he needed to do next. These faceipede spawn were incredibly tough, and Mark had already killed everything that he could, so when they found a living spawn that spawn needed some help to get dead.

  Carl jerked as he spotted the small faceipede, well within targeting range.

  “Dropping the shield for a moment!” Carl said, still holding one hand forward. As far as Mark understood him, Carl was exploding the air in front of them in a casual sort of blast wave. Light and wind brushed past Carl’s fire shield, which was protecting Mark and everyone from the worst of the heat. Carl was immune to fire damage of all kinds, though. Carl asked, “You good?”

  Mark said, “We’re good!” He had already switched to a defensive Union, along with everyone else. Isoko did a bit of purity/impurity, though. Had to keep that breath going, after all. Mark said, “Ready!”

  Carl dropped the shield and heat washed across the team, causing tears and burning those tears away at the same time. And then Carl pointed at the smaller faceipede with two fingers and a dot of white radiance gathered at the tips. He had his thumb up, and then he lowered his thumb, like a snapping trap.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The white dot flew forward, making a track in the heat of the kaiju fire, like a plane parting clouds, sending the clouds, the flames the bolt passed through, swirling all around.

  The small faceipede, even with its dozen heads and many more eyes, was too focused on eating the corpse of its progenitor to dodge correctly. It still saw the dot of death coming for it, though. It had no idea of the danger of one of those dots, so it moved a little out of the way, expecting the bomb to hit to the side and do nothing.

  Carl flicked his fingers to the left, and the bomb followed his direction.

  The white dot impacted the small faceipede right in the middle of its body, blasting it left and right. Bone and guts splashed into the air, already burning, but the monster remained alive. It fell into the inferno, too, but falling into the kaiju-fire didn’t even kill it.

  But then Carl put up his fire shield again and Mark switched to a Union of Purity and Impurity, black lightning stretching out into the heat, his Power almost falling apart from the heat, but Mark connected to the heat, too, to the burning wood and the bubbling meat, and gradually, slowly, the bodies of the monsters started to disintegrate faster. The half-dead faceipede spawn died to flames, just like all the rest.

  What Mark was doing was more ‘poking a fire and making it burn faster’ and less ‘purity/impurity’ cleansing work.

  And soon enough, Mark’s poking uncovered another small faceipede, hiding in the corpse of its progenitor, eating the body from the inside. Carl lowered the blast shield to do actual blasting. And then the spawn would die, and Mark and the crew would return to more fire-poking and inferno-creating. There were 20-ish people on this team, here, and though Mark and Carl were doing the majority of the work, Sally and Isoko and other brawnies and fighters were here because eventually, invariably, they would uncover a real problem that would need actual solutions.

  And that is how it went.

  Two other teams were attacking the problem from much easier angles, but Mark and his people were on this angle, facing the strongest fires and the threats of the faceipede kaiju—

  “It’s gonna slough and crash!” said Eliot, who was at the rear of the formation, protected by Sally and Isoko directly, and looking at stuff on his monitors in his visor. “Run or tank!?”

  Mark decided, once he saw where the flesh was starting to separated way up on the body—

  “Retreat!”

  They made a dashing retreat away from the mountain of burning flesh, right before the flesh fell into the open—

  It was a landslide of burning meat and bone and spreading fire.

  At 300 meters away it was still too close, but they stopped here. They needed to fight.

  Smaller versions of the kaiju poured out into the open, out of the gore. Half of the crawlers went into the fire and almost died to the flames, so Mark helped them along to a final death, while the others crawled out of the burning muck and saw targets. Mark and his people saw a target rich environment, too.

  Faceipede spawn slipped across the ground, heading left and right, trying to surround the party of 20 kaiju cleaners.

  Mark slowed them down with enough weakness to make them easy pickings for the rest of his crew. Bombs blasted. Sally cleaved with her swords. Isoko stabbed through faces and chopped off legs. Others did their own things, with Barba shooting massive arrows that seemed to grow larger when they struck a target, fixing that target to the ground, while Eliot organized. Soon, that current eruption of faceipede spawn was dead.

  A mountain of guts burbled ahead as fires invaded from the sides, to lick into the cavernous hole that had been created out of the skin of the kaiju faceipede.

  Mark went back to a Union of purity and impurity, fire tending, while Carl threw bombs into the burbling guts, and soon fires started poking up into the shell of the faceipede kaiju.

  The fires burned.

  Hours passed as Mark and his team turned the roaring heat and burning body into smoldering ash, making sure to burn away everything that they could, while they could. Turning it all to smoke to drift away into the Winter Auroras was actually really good for the settlement. Winter was broken up just that much more by the heat that swept up off of the monster corpses.

  Soon, there wasn’t much left, and Aurora was back on duty.

  She picked up what remained and shoved it into a pile that was only a mountainside’s worth, making it an easy target to finish off. Mark and his team moved in, turning fire and flesh into nothing more than wind in the air, and soon, it was done.

  The sky was dark with twilight, and Aurora called out, “Step 2 complete! Now for a transfer to Earth. Team Blackvein, you have one hour to prepare. You can rest on the other side.”

  Mark did not collapse from weakness. Other people did, though; the ones who didn’t have jobs left to do.