Read The Reward of The Oolyay for Free Online

contorted every which way - panicked and convulsive. Vorstram repeaters rose in the hands of every soldier, squarely trained on the  terrifying creature, the safeties clicking off and the clips being checked frantically. Above this rising doom, the dangling child puppet still asked them if they wanted to be its friend in a steady and chilling rhythm. Finally, Pojlim felt the Omblond Pistol’s circular grip-latch slip into his fingers, and he whipped it from his holster as fast as possible.
    Before he could finish the action, Pojlim’s legs, arms and head were ripped from his body as six tentacles simultaneously gripped him and tore him apart. Everything that consisted of Pojlim was  then thrown at the readied soldiers. As a spew of lavender gore was hurled across them, the soldiers barely flinched as they unloaded their weapons into the terror’s body, the puppet child screaming and convulsing. The monstrous alien moved toward them and grabbed another soldier, tearing him into pieces and pushing through the weapons-fire while it still had strength.
    Inlojem heard the screaming and firing from the back of the truck and jumped out, his sickle-blade handle downward, the metal curved toward the ground. He saw five other forms emerge from the rock-face behind them and rush the soldiers around him. They skittered and jeered, parts of them morphing into vibrating faces of Vesh or plants around them. The air between their tentacles turned patchy and dark, or wavy, oscillating in and out of existence.
    “Fools! Behind you!” He yelled as he rushed toward one of the emerging shapes. The soldiers turned and began to erratically open fire through the paralyzing fear of seeing more of them. Inlojem’s foot was grabbed by a tentacle, but he sliced through it instantly with the sickle-blade. The gripping, severed tentacle still clung around his foot as he hacked and slashed to avoid being grabbed again. He worked his way around the gyrating organic mass, keeping under its bulky head to avoid its vision, careful not to touch it in any way. Its tentacles morphed and changed, creating cutting edges and blunt weapons to stab and smash him with, but he clipped them from its body as it maneuvered to catch him. Finally he thrust his frame atop its head and angled the front of the sickle-blade into the center of its tentacled mass and held onto it. He could feel its tentacles wrap around him, but their strength drained as the blade cut deeper and deeper.
    “Hold your ground!” Teftek yelled, still firing at the first monster, knocking it down each time it tried to stand up and regenerate. He kept aiming at the same grouping of bullet wounds and dared not take his eyes off of it. Aljefta reloaded his clips and pumped round after round into the first monster as the soldiers around them screamed and violet blood poured across the landscape.  “We’ve got to get out of here,” he muttered to Aljefta, who nodded in agreement. Teftek glanced over to see Inlojem with the head of a monster pinned to the ground, its weak tentacles unable to free itself. He dropped his gun and yanked out his machete, sprinting into a slide along the dirty, rocky path toward the first monster. As he drew close with his machete out, the child-puppet asked him “Why don’t you want to be friends?” A tentacle slid around Teftek, but he had already jammed his machete, with full force, into the sensory orb in the front of the alien’s head, and the tentacle convulsed as Aljefta unloaded his weapon into it. It had enough strength to throw Teftek off of it, but the machete was lodged straight into the thing’s brain as far as Teftek could tell.
    With consciousness fading in and out, Teftek felt the back of his bleeding head. He had been thrown against the metal cab of the truck and had rolled off of it like a rag-doll. He laughed with a bizarre nonchalance as the rampage of violence against his soldiers continued. At the beginning there had been thirty-five of