"Shadrach, they're in the house. Cover me," yells Emile as he turns his mystical six-guns towards the house and, standing in the door, rains holy fire on the monsters attacking the men on the ground.
Shadrach nods. "Clear the house and out the back." As the gunslinger fills the doorway and his pistols roar, the old soldier pivots, his back nearly to Emile's, as the barrel of his rifle sweeps the yard. A bloom of blue-white light from beyond the barn - the continuing evidence of Nora working clean-up in the distance - illuminates the four shadow creatures that make a break for the porch, slathering as they race to attack the pair.
THUMPTHUMP WRRRRRRRRRT! go the wheatcutter blades as Hansel comes careening across the yard at breakneck speed! The shadow creatures, mid-run, have no chance to dodge and the front of the tractor is splattered oozy-black with ichor as the otherworldly horrors meet the fine edge of mechanical precision. Eight piles of mangled limbs lie unmoving on the packed earth as Hansel continues onward, rounding the corner of the house.
With a shrug at the now-empty front yard, Shadrach turns back to the doorway. He drops to one knee and aims past his compatriot at the shadowy forms crouching over Richard and Báleygr. Báleygr lies on the floor under the shadow creature, transforming before their eyes. Fine, bluish-green scales cover his body; his fingers and toes webbed. Large, delicate-looking fins stretch down the back of his arms and legs with another running from his forehead down his spine. Instead of facial hair, he has a few thin whiskers projecting off the sides of his face. Large, black eyes with no apparent lids bulge out, dominating his head. Thin lips blend into his cheeks under a small bump where two slits sit as nostrils. Lower on his neck, gills protrude.
Shadrach mutters to himself as Báleygr's form wavers and resolves into something other than human, but long experience keeps him on task even as he takes it in. "What in the Nine Hells is that thing?" he asks, even as he depresses the trigger on his rifle.
The rapid-fire blasts of Emile's twin guns and the burstfire of Shadrach's church-blessed carbine tear through the half-dozen creatures in the hallway of the house even as they try to clamber over each other and make it to the basement door. Their forms explode as the mystical bullets of the pair tear through them, splattering the entire hallway with black, tar-like substance, not even chunks or gobbets remaining to risk reformation.
The creature splattered to goo as he struggled with it, Old Richard curses, wiping ichor from his face, "Oh Lord, I ain't coming home with you." He rolls to his side and pauses, seeing the fish-like monstrosity next to him that he previously thought was the unassuming mechanic. "Where'd his coveralls go?" he murmurs aloud, perhaps a form of disassociation in this strangeness. Nonetheless, he is stoic and pulls a high-tech stim from his belt, applying it. The antibiotics, coagulants, system stabilizers, and plasma course through Báleygr strange physiology and he coughs back to life. (Báleygr is back at 2hp.)
Outside the now-shattered back door, two shadow creatures try to leap in on the downed men once more, but are also evaporated by the burst fire of bullets. Two drones sweep their spotlights back and forth, scattering the half-dozen or so shadow creatures there. On the roof, Taavi sights in on the illuminated rose arbor, the single point of still spotlight from the third drone, sighting-in on the black-clad man standing casually beneath the trellis, smoking a cigarette as he watches the chaos. KRAKOW! his rifle thunders. The man falls backwards, clutching his shoulder, wounded, but not down, as he now dodges the spotlight.
A metallic bang then catches Taavi's attention to his left, away from the trellis. A drone pivots to shine on it - a metal hatch door is torn open, the metal now bent and mangled, the movement of shadow creatures seen as they dissappear within, heading down below the house...
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