Acht turned around and her eyes widened at the danger. “Drei, dodge!” Her sister dove for the side, narrowly avoiding being impaled by a bladed stinger that gouged a deep hole where she was previously standing.

Drei gritted her teeth before aiming her gun and pulling her trigger at the megafauna. Annoying as regular bugs were, the exoskeleton of these massive bugs could not be understated. Bullets pinged off its carapace, barely scratching it, and doing little more than annoying the beast.

“I hate bugs!” She rolled away from its many legs and grabbed a nearby rock before bashing it against an appendage. She managed to snap the fragile limb, but the sheer excess legs that the creature had meant that any damage she did to the limb was superficial at best.

Acht fired off her weapon, targeting the beast’s eyes. She managed to shoot out one of them, though she debated the value of the action as it only served to incense the beast and it screeched in anger before it swung its stinger around at her. Before it could hit her, however, a large individual tackled her out of the way and smacked the stinger aside with an axe.

“Come get some!” bellowed Neun, readying her axe before swinging it against a mandible, denting it slightly before she had to back off from a spray of acid. Taking up her position was Zwei, grunting as he blocked a claw before parrying it off. Diving under the body, he seized the opportunity to strike an unarmored piece of the creature and stabbed upwards..

Being struck in such a vulnerable place caused the beast to fly into a frenzy, forcing Zwei to get away as it coiled up, using its claws to tear out and toss aside the sword, readying to attack once more.

“Scheiße,” snarled Vier, as she blocked off the stinger with her lance. “Schnell, Ein, schnell!”

“I’m trying, you hag!” growled the youngest, trying to get the vehicle working. “I don’t hear you trying to help. Quit whining and buy me some time!”

“Unerträgliche hundin,” she muttered, locking her weapon against the stinger and drove it against the ground. “Neun, jetzt!” The woman grinned at the confirmation as she ran in, the slight delay giving her all the time she needed to slice the bladed part off, eliminating the worst threat.

Instead of death by impalement, they’d just die from blunt trauma. A slight improvement.
“Where is Sieben when you need him?” spat Drei. “Sechs, fire!” The man complied, grunting as he shot a grenade in the creature’s face. The explosion did little but startle it, but the residual phosphorus more than made up for it by blinding it for a few seconds.

“Easy there,” murmured Zwei, the commander striding forward as calm as usual. “Sieben said he’d arrive once Fünf was done patching him up. Not many can boast being able to ground out a simurgh. Fewer survive the ordeal of doing so.”

“That’s because they don’t exist in our world!” Drei then winced at her own brash tone. “Sorry, that’s because they don’t exist in our world, sir.”

The corner of his mouth twitching, Zwei ran forward, his grace belying his age. Sword flowing behind him, he grabbed ahold of Vier’s lance, who swung the weapon to launch him towards the creature, rolling up the carapace and successfully avoiding death by trampling.

As the insectoid tried to get rid of the man on its back, Ein grunted as he pulled a cord, cackling in glee once the engine began working again. “Oi hag, I need it to rear up!”

“Arrogant arschloch,” scowled Vier, pivoting to the side to avoid the hit of the left claw. She smacked it aside and swung her weapon just as the beast’s mandibles descended, wincing at the force the creature was utilizing. At her back was Neun, eyes filled with bloodlust and the thrill of the fight. Swinging hard, she fought off the tail end of the beast and delivered a solid blow downwards, collapsing the rear end with a sickening crunch.

Acht and Drei kept their fingers on their gun triggers as they ran around the beast, which was uncoiling in a rage distracting it long enough for Zwei to scale up its back to its head, where he raised his sword and plunged it into the beast’s good eye.

Reeling in agony, rose up, using its many legs to give it the impression of a centipede climbing up an invisible spiral tower. The sight caused Vier to pause briefly and wonder if her epitaph would be, “Hier liegt Vier [Redacted], von einem megafauna-güterzug zu tode gequetscht.”

“Sie hassen insekten, ich hasse züge,” she muttered, running to the side just as Ein’s jury-rigged suicide bomber crashed into the fleshy underside of the beast. "Oh, mother-"

The force of the explosion knocked her off her feet, although she certainly would have faced worse has she decided to stay closer. “Mein Gott,” she murmured. “Ich lebe mit idioten.” Leave it to Ein to not bother with checking to see if his teammates were safe before blowing stuff up.

The beast wailed in pain as the explosion enveloped it, and despite herself, she couldn’t resist a smile at its suffering.

“The conflagration scorches and incinerates the body into cinders, flames greedily licking away at the precious oxygen that the creature so desperately needs,” uttered Zwei, closing his eyes.

“Fickle fires smother the furious megafauna, cacophonous cries dying off in the inferno as the insectoid ignites and immolates. Embers entrance the group as they fall from the blazing pillar, whose carapace acts as a brazier to roast the armored arthropod.” Even now, she mused, Zwei could always come up with a poem on the spot.

“Woohoo!” laughed Ein, breaking them out of their stupor. “Come get some!” Despite shaking their heads at the immature outcry, they couldn’t restrain a grin form forming. Ein’s enthusiasm was simply too infectious.

They had survived another day in the Looking-Glass.

“What the hell was that?” demanded Drei. “I’m used to giant spiders and land sharks by now, but I can’t even tell what the heck this is supposed to be.”

“Body and legs of a centipede,”murmured Sechs, eyes glued to the creature. “Mandibles and venom of a spider, claws and tail of a scorpion. I... have no clue.”

“Well, we need a name for it, since Sieben said-“

“Yes, yes, I know, ‘Give it a name. Names reduce the fear we feel for something and lets us mock it later in the future.’ You’ve brought it up more times than I remember him even mentioning it.”

Their argument was cut short when their walkie-talkie crackled. Though short, Fünf’s message struck them deeply.

“Sieben is dead.”
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When they found Fünf, he was holding Sieben’s hand. Although his face was impassive as ever, the slight glisten of a tear trail down the groove of his nose betrayed his emotions.

“He just had to propose to me,” spat out Fünf, not talking to anyone in particular. “I swear, if I didn’t know better, I’d have thought he was trying to prank me one last time.”

For a moment, everyone stayed quiet, letting the doctor collect himself.

“I just… ,” he breathed out, voice breaking slightly as thousand-yard façade he normally put up began to crack. “I suppose that a normal life wasn’t possible in the Looking-Glass but… with how Sieben kept going on and on about what married life would be like… I just thought…”

“You thought you could have a family,” finished Acht quietly, receiving the barest hint of a nod in acknowledgment. Fünf didn’t look at her, choosing to raise his gaze to the sky. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Drei’s face contort into anguish, but in this moment, she was irrelevant.
No, the only important person was dead. All because he himself was weak, because he had to be protected, because he couldn’t defend himself.

Because he, a symbol of the immaculate and meticulously cold face of medicine to Ein and Drei, was flawed.

“You know, ever since we went through the Looking-Glass, I always wondered what the purpose of sending us through was in the first place. Heck, they knew that the Looking-Glass’s Reflection wasn’t permanent so they could never track us down after we went through, nor do any of our communication devices connect with them. After all- ”

“Fünf,” stated Zwei, quietly but firmly. It would not do to ramble in front of the younger members. “Come, help me bury him.” The good doctor gave him a blank stare before nodding and helping the old man carry the corpse. “Sechs, take the others aside to set camp. Vier, on me.”

“Jawohl.” “Yes, sir.” As Sechs led Neun and the two kids - dubbed so for their relatively young ages - away, and Vier followed the two hoisting the Sieben’s body away, Acht couldn’t help but spare one last glance at the good doctor.

As the youngest ones had left, there was no need for a façade any longer and tears dripped freely from his face onto Sieben’s face, which was still grinning as though he had died in the middle of a joke. Before they went out of her hearing range, Acht heard one last phrase from Vier.

“Lang lebe Sieben. Könige sterben nie.”