Before Akari's warning had fully registered, the attack came. Dark, spider-like creatures, each the size of a large dog, dropped from the canopy on thick, glistening threads of silk. They had eight multi-jointed legs that ended in razor-sharp hooks and a cluster of glowing red eyes above chittering mandibles.
"Glyn-spiders!" Kaito yelled, drawing the short sword he now carried. "Form a circle! Protect the Princess!"
He and Riku immediately fell into a defensive stance around Himari, their blades ready. It was a textbook reaction, born of years of fighting the horrors of the Great Demon Forest. It was also, in Haruto's assessment, tactically suicidal. They were surrendering all mobility and allowing themselves to be surrounded.
"Negative!" Haruto's command cut through the air like a whip. "That is a kill box. You will be overwhelmed. Fall back to me. Now!"
He didn't wait for them to obey. He was already firing his plasma pistol, but not in the single, lethal shots he'd used before. He switched the setting to a wide-dispersal energy burst. Each shot bloomed into a fan of searing plasma that vaporized the first wave of Glyn-spiders, their chitinous bodies exploding in puffs of acrid smoke.
The momentary reprieve gave the guards the opening they needed. They hesitated for only a second before their survival instincts overrode their training, and they scrambled back to Haruto's position near a rock outcropping.
"Riku, Kaito, you are now a fire team," Haruto said, his voice a low, urgent command. He pointed to a narrow gap between two boulders. "That is your firing lane. Nothing gets through it. Himari, stay behind this rock and do not move."
He tossed Kaito a small, metallic disc from his pack. "Press the center when I give the command."
The Glyn-spiders, undeterred by their initial losses, surged forward, a chittering carpet of black bodies and glowing red eyes. They were fast, scuttling over the forest floor with an unnatural speed.
"They're too many!" Riku shouted, his knuckles white on his sword hilt.
"Numbers are irrelevant when faced with superior tactics and firepower," Haruto stated calmly. He raised his pistol. "Wait for them to enter the kill zone. Do not break ranks."
He let the wave of creatures surge into the clearing, funneling them towards their position. The space in front of them became a writhing mass of clicking legs and snapping fangs.
"Now!" Haruto ordered.
Kaito slammed his thumb onto the disc. A blindingly bright light erupted from it, accompanied by a high-frequency sonic pulse that was agonizing to the spiders' sensitive eyes. The entire front rank of creatures shrieked and recoiled, disoriented and temporarily blinded.
In that moment of chaos, Haruto opened fire. His plasma pistol, now set back to high-intensity single shots, became an instrument of precise, methodical extermination. Each near-silent bolt punched through a spider's head. He didn't waste a single shot. Beside him, Kaito and Riku, having recovered from the flash, began their grim work, cutting down the disoriented creatures that got too close.
It was a massacre. The coordinated, overwhelming assault of the Glyn-spiders was broken against a wall of tactical discipline they could not comprehend. Within a minute, the attack faltered, and the surviving spiders melted back into the darkness of the forest.
The clearing was littered with their smoking carapaces. Kaito and Riku stood panting, their swords dripping with black ichor. They looked at the field of bodies, then at Haruto, who was already reloading a fresh power cell into his pistol. He hadn't broken a sweat.
"That…" Kaito breathed, his voice filled with disbelief. "That was a flash-bang grenade. A simple crowd-control device."
Himari peeked out from behind the rock, her eyes wide. Haruto had not just defeated the monsters; he had orchestrated their demise, turning their own numbers against them. He had taught them a terrifying and invaluable lesson: the mind of a soldier was a far more dangerous weapon than any sword.