Titans of Chaos

There was a terrible stabbing pain in my leg when I tried to stand, and I could not stand. And thiswas no mere "surface" pain; I was no longer occupying a huge fourth-dimensional volume, withplenty of room to disperse shocks into. No, I was simply the little blond girl the maenads wantedme to be.

I suppose it should have been impossible to break a leg when encased in a perfectly rigid metalsuit. But maybe one of the smart maenads had been inspired to believe I would break a leg when Ifell. So here I was.

The maenads swarmed down the cliff like a troop of monkeys. One girl ran down the cliffside as ifit were a flat surface, her personal gravity at right angles to the rest of the Earth.

Several of the girls flew. They did not fly like birds do; they did not move through the air likeVictor levitating. No: They whirled through the air like autumn leaves in a gale, swirling high andlow, pitching up and down, arms and legs spread wide, tangled hair-mops shedding grape-leaf.

The maenads landed around me like paratroopers. Some merely touched down like ballerinasstepping off an invisible carriage step. Some landed on their heads. One of them splattered into awash of broken bones and wide-splashed blood, and gathered herself together, and stood up,laughing drunkenly. Several of them splattered and did not get up.

I shot and shot and shot and shot.

The other shells, meant to stop the other paradigms, did little or nothing to these girls. Maybe onefell down on her rump and started crying, maybe two. Most of them slapped the bullets away likeannoying hornets. Or brushed away the bleeding wounds as if they were nothing, Colin-like.

They had wands and spears in hand, and more than one girl was still clutching a convenient treeor oblong slab of rock. Then they were in a circle around me, dancing and screaming andlaughing, pounding me over and over, stabbing, bludgeoning, whipping. One girl on her handsand knees put her teeth to my arm and bit.

I was bruised, but was not hurt. Even the tree trunk smashing over and over against me merelydrove my armor-stiffened body into the dirt, but did not crush me instantly into red paste.

But I was blacking out, and the girl biting my vambrace was reaching for the seam where myhelmet met my neck...