The Warrior (sci-fi 2)

For a long minute, Yax Harpath kept one careful eye out for movement on the edge (about 50 meters away) of the ruined wall he was up against, but there was nothing. In the meantime, the three stubby thumbs on his left hand deftly twitched free the depleted charge cell of the lightning rifle and replaced it with a fresh one from the dispenser under the heavy pack his two lower gripping tendrils held on his back. One of the upper tendrils held the barrel of the rifle steady, and the other gently touched the wall, feeling for vibrations. He had configured his legs for stability, with a thick core of carpals which left him short and not very fast, but he resisted the urge to lengthen his legs – land speed would not save him here.
In a flash the crocadon swept around the corner, and Yax diverted control of his body from his normal thought processes to his Warrior mind.
Everything slowed. Suddenly accelerated reflexes combined with preternatural clarity and quickness of thought made Warriors almost unbeatable in combat, all things being equal. Of course, the crocadon was nearly 7 tons of furious predator, and hardly counted as an ‘equal’ to anything below its weight class.
Yax dropped his steadying tendril from the rifle as his ‘listening’ tendril snapped him away from the wall. His body described a lazy cartwheel away from where he had been standing, and the crocadon’s spear-like tongue fired through the recently vacated space. The tongue snap was normally an action too quick to see, but the processing speed of Yax’s Warrior mind allowed him to note the sticky barbs that coated that tongue as it pulled back into the croc’s capacious mouth.
While inverted, he completed his recharging of the rifle by twisting the energy gate between the recently installed cell and the central turbine of the lightning rifle open, and hit the button that started the turbine cycling.
The crocadon, its multifaceted eyes keeping track of Yax’s spin through the air, turned its heavy neck towards him and ‘girkked.’ Yax began the muscular contraction necessary to withdraw the carpals from cohesion in his central structure, and when he hit the ground he deformed into an even squatter shape than he had been before. The croc’s tongue whistled just past the top of his now bulbous head, and a wash of fetid breath accompanied its journey. The croc, still charging, was now only about 20 meters away, and he depressed the firing stud of the lightning rifle.
The turbine, drawing energy from the new cell, rotated its filaments through the charging screens and spun a bolt of pure lightning forth at the croc. Yax avoided the scars that had previously been made around the frilly head of the crocadon – prior shots from he and the other scouts had found that the bone plate hidden in the frills was just too tough to shoot through – and on instinct aimed instead for the currently-retracting tongue.
With a ‘Grakk!’ of agony, the croc’s tongue finished withdrawing, leaving some three feet of the end lying smoking and quivering on the ground in front of it. Its fore claws tried to push back away from the sudden pain, but the hind claws, nearly 10 meters back, didn’t get the message as quickly and kept pushing forward. As a result the middle section of the reptilian crocadon spiked up almost 4 meters off the ground before the hind legs reversed as well and the beast started pulling back.
Yax used the time given him to leap forward, reforming his torso and extending his legs as he jumped to add distance. He dropped the now-expended lightning rifle and grabbed his battle spike from his gear even as his lower gripping tendrils cleared themselves for battle by dropping the heavy pack behind him.
Landing face down, just underneath the snout of the crocadon, he sprang up, latching all four of his back tendrils up and around the top of the beast’s muzzle.
Surprised, the croc reared up and back to get away from this annoying thing, and Yax swayed forward and plunged the spike into a suddenly revealed thin-looking spot in the armor on its upper chest.
The resulting spasm of agony from the beast snapped Yax free from his grip, and he instinctively disconnected all of his carpals from their sockets, pulling into a ball with only stubby proto legs and arms, his tendrils still waving in the hopes of catching onto something to slow his fall. But he was flung too far from the edge of the ruins, and he slammed down into the sand hard enough to partly bury himself.
Bruised but not seriously injured, he popped his head up, and for a long second watched the crocadon spasm into death, his battle spike lodged firmly in what was apparently a kill area. With no enemies in sight, the Warrior mind dropped control, and everything perceptibly speeded up. Grains of sand blew by in a sudden rush from where the croc now lay, and the lightning rifle let off a sudden spark and was quiet. For a second he fought the instinctive panic that resulted from dropping out of combat status, but he calmed himself down and began the painful task of drawing his bone structure back into place with bruised muscle. As he did he made a mental note to report that area of the crocadon to other scouts spending time in the desert.
Now if he could only figure out a way to get home.