Despite the messenger's ominous promise of an impending reunion, InGen's troops did not encountered a single guard during their descent of the Misty Mounts.
The company, on the alert, had expected to be attacked in the quarter of an hour that followed the parley, then the quarter of an hour turned into half an hour, the half-hour into three-quarters of an hour and when more than one hour had flown by, many of the mercenaries began to wonder if they had managed to shook off the guards.
Others, on the other hand, were convinced that the latter knew where they were, but that they were waiting for the perfect moment to strike, once fatigue and lack of vigilance had spread among their ranks.
In order to bypass the lines of the guards, the company had headed westward to make a large detour at the end of which they hoped to reach the southern slopes of the Misty Mounts and undertake the ascent of the southernmost summit while the guards would be still looking for them further north in the Cartago Valley.
As they began to make the detour, a new plan germinated in Sherman's mind.
He recalled a former mission during the Saurian Wars, which consisted of hunting dilophosaurs in the ruins of the old Pteratops Lodge, within the Cartago aviary, about a kilometre from their current position.
He knew that the building had been restored and extended since, with one of the extensions consisting in troglodyte rooms dug within the rock of the cliffs.
He called Decker and she came closer to him.
"Olivia. Reassure the men. Told them that we head for the aviary. There is a lodge, at the top of the cliffs, connected to troglodyte rooms. We shall find there food, first aid kits and shelter."
"The Pteratops Lodge? We can hold there a siege for several days if necessary," she said. "Numerically speaking, we and the guards have almost the same numbers. Yet, if they want to annihilate us before someone stops them, they will have to attack this night. This will force them to launch a frontal assault. If we organize a good defence, we should be able to repel them and survive until the arrival of reinforcements."
"Exactly. But we must be there first. Let's quicken the pace."
Decker nodded and conveyed the message.
Despite the tiredness that many of its members began to feel by dint of trudging in that treacherous jungle where even those who had walked through it a few times could easily get lost and go around in circles for hours until becoming mad, Sherman's new plan gave them some hope and encouraged them to continue.
They could have turned around to return under the gondola lift and follow it directly to the aviary as it crossed it. It would have been the simplest but also the most risky way to take since a troop such as theirs walking on the strip under the cables could be seen easily enough, whether from a spot higher in altitude or a drone.
Sherman rather made them walk along more or less parallel to the gondola lift, leading them towards the Cartago.
Once at the river, they would follow it up to the aviary.
In order to avoid the company being spotted, everyone remained silent, moved as discreetly as possible and the only sounds they heard during those long minutes of hike were the calls of same birds, pushed from time and time and almost seeming to answer each other, indicating the presence of some life in the middle of a greying jungle that had become as quiet as a cemetery.
Further on, however, a strange sound was heard.
It was some kind of a barely audible electronic buzz and by scanning their surroundings with their lights, they saw a drone fly in the air, a black and spherical one, the same that the Slayers had used the previous day to follow the guards and shoot the Indominus' ambush by the Dreadful Lake.
The lens of its camera was turned towards the company.
"Hey it's our drone!" Parker exclaimed.
"What is it doing here?" McNamara wondered. "It is supposed to be in the helicopter."
"Even if the desire to play with it had suddenly taken Cafaro and Yoder, they are supposed to be too far for the drone to receive their signal," Ford stated.
"Because they are not the ones flying it," Leng whispered, making sure to be not heard by the drone.
The Slayers looked at each other, realizing that if their drone had ended up there, it was because the guards had found the Archangel and captured its pilots.
Without any warning, Leng raised his light machine gun and riddled the drone with bullets.
Badly damaged, it crashed to the ground.
"To the aviary!" Sherman shouted. "Double time!"
They headed west, towards the Cartago, but their race proved quickly arduous as it brought them to not only slalom among the trees but also to climb and descend slopes of varying heights.
During it, they passed right by the steaming wreckage of the water bombing plane, about two and a half kilometres as the crow flies southwest of the parley site, and noticed that the windshield had burst into pieces and that the pilot was gone.
They crossed the crash site and followed the direction in which the water contained in the tanks of the plane had flown.
Birds screamed and answered each other throughout the area.
They soon stumbled on a combe and followed it, thinking that it would lead them to the river.
The combe being narrow and sinuous, they were forced to form a column, with only a few men able to run abreast.
They did not like the place so they crossed it as fast as possible.
After a bend of the combe, Sherman saw that it suddenly widened and opened on a marshy basin bordered by tall trees with gnarled roots and in which lied the complete skeleton of a large Stegosaurus, the one of an individual of the first park and that had lied on its stomach when it died.
Facing the combe, there was a small mound topped by a Kapok tree with mighty buttress roots.
Wary of the place, the Slayers lowered their visors and the company advanced with caution into the basin with all weapons drawn.
It was then that a projectile whistled in the air and Arana, then in front alongside Sherman, suddenly had a recoil. Sherman turned and saw an arrow running through one of his visor's opening, the one over his right eye.
As the tip of the arrow had not only pierced his eye but also thrusted itself into his brain, Arana fell forward.
Other whistles ripped through the air.
"Move back!" Sherman yelled.
A volley of arrows fell on InGen's troops and while they struggled to penetrate the armours of the Slayers as well as those of the heavy mercenaries, they stuck themselves without any difficulty in the less protected bodies of the other mercenaries.
Sherman scanned the edges of the basin, he saw nobody.
Those damn archers were well hidden.
He ordered the company to move back to the combe in order to be out of the archers' range, leaving behind the bodies of Arana and the five mercenaries shot down by the volley.
In their retreat, InGen's soldiers jostled one another and some, eager to get away as far as possible from the basin, started running to get out of the combe.
However, as they distanced their comrades, they ran past some of the thick bushes that bordered the bottom of the combe and suddenly, men in ghillie suits leaped out of those and took two of the mercenaries with them in the darkness, in the same manner as a big cat that had just captured its prey.
The mercenaries wanted to rescue the captured ones but ignoring where they were now, they hesitated to shoot, fearing of killing them, but the men in ghillies didn't waste any time and they heard them stab to death or slit the throats of their prisoners.
Realizing that they could no longer save them, Ford stepped forward and incinerated with his flamethrower the bushes from which the guards had leaped.
He increased its reach and burned other bushes and shrubs behind, but no cry was heard.
It was like if the men in ghillie suits had been nothing but ghosts.
Having not touched anything, Ford released his finger from the trigger and listened, on the lookout for any sound of breathing.
For long seconds, only the crackling of burning vegetation and the breathing of InGen soldiers were heard.
Suddenly, something hit the flamethrower's tank with a metallic sound and in the second that followed, it exploded in a big fireball that engulfed two of the mercenaries as well as McNamara, the three of them being too close from Ford to move aside in time, and the vegetation in the radius of the explosion was set alight.
Once the fireball was gone, it revealed the first two burning like torches and the second roasting in his own armour.
They were yelling and turned mad by the pain, they were gesticulating and moving anarchically, threatening to become dangerous for their own companions if they ever walked towards them.
As for Ford, the explosion had been strong enough to literally make his body burst into many fragments of burnt tissue, scorched flesh, and broken bones that had been projected around.
This horrifying sight sowed panic among the mercenaries and as it seized each one of them, horns were blown on both sides of the combe.
The sound they made was deep, booming and ominious, like trumpets of hell to their ears.
While they were still furiously blown, an important trampling on each side of the combe was heard and those who hurtled down the slope let out at the same time a cry so powerful and terrifying for a sound made by humans' mouths that many predatory dinosaurs would have run away on hearing it.
It weakened the little courage left among the mercenaries.
When the insurgents appeared in the light of the flames, roaring and weapons in hand, madness in their eyes in the middle of their faces painted in black, white and red, representing in some a dragon skull about to breath out a stream of flames, InGen's troops were so distraught that they couldn't direct their weapons on time towards the attackers, ten on each side of the combe.
They were upon their enemies so quickly that the latter didn't had the time to fire and the lighter of them even took advantage of the slope's inclination, the speed at which they were hurtling down it and any projections to leap among the InGen's soldiers, tackling some to the ground and even killing a few at the end of their leap.
The mercenaries having only daggers, bayonets and machetes while the guards had in addition sabres, spears and even axes, the situation turned in the disfavour of InGen's troops, especially since the insurgents were better hand-to-hand fighters than them and several of the mercenaries fell under their blows.
Wishing to get out of this trap, Sherman had no choice but to urge the company to leave the combe.
While those in the back repelled the guards with difficulty, Sherman and the front of the company came back in the basin, rushing towards the dozen of shooters that had taken position in front of them and were facing the combe's exit.
"The shooters!" Sherman shouted. "Gun down those shooters!"
Those with guns fired towards the edge of the basin, shooting down one of the shooters.
The others took cover behind the trees.
"Cover us!" Sherman ordered to some of the mercenaries.
They complied and continued firing as the rest of the company moved toward the thickets between the Kapok tree and the stegosaur skeleton.
One of the guards, hidden behind the trees, then blew a horn and footmen burst out of the thickets, preventing them from attack the shooters from the rear and the company from leaving the basin.
As they came closer, Olsen took off his helmet, threw it on the ground and lowered his balaclava, revealing the wound that had disfigured him in order to intimidate their foes.
The insurgents saw that a large part of his lips had been torn off by a bite, leaving his gums and teeth uncovered in some sort of a permanent grotesque grin.
He then brandished his great axe and threw himself on the attackers, screaming in his advance.
In order to avoid a blow, they swiftly moved backwards, but one of them fell.
He got up but too late because Olsen charged him, grabbed him by the waist, continued running, towards the spikes of the stegosaur upon which he threw him, impaling him, and as the guard was gasping and starting to vomit blood, he finished him by kicking his face with his knee while another rushed towards the giant.
He turned around and the guard was so stricken with fear that he was stopped in his momentum. But when Olsen wanted to struck a blow to that new adversary, the latter went to protect himself from the imposing blades of his axe behind the ribs of the skeleton. Olsen being too tall and too broad-shouldered to sneak inside the rib cage, the axe not being efficient enough to break quickly the ribs of a stegosaur and the guard being able to easily defend himself from anyone who would try to reach him, Faraci arrived to drive him out of his makeshift shelter, planning to strike the ribs with his mace.
On their side, Sherman and Decker were caught in a melee fight with the other footmen but the attackers coming from the combe had already caught up with the back of the company,
They moved aside without any warning, leaving more than half a dozen riders, led by Brunet, ride down from the combe at full gallop, trampling the bodies on their way.
Having adopted an arrowhead formation, the group of riders charged InGen's soldiers, colliding with them with full force.
They knocked down many of them, trampled others, and some of the riders even made their horses rear so they can strike their enemies with their hooves.
Leng, who had fallen on his back, died like that, the skull smashed by the enormous hooves of Brunet's horse in a squirt of mud and blood.
The company, disorganized following the charge, was unable to reform since the footmen who had moved aside immediately rushed on them.
The mercenaries tasked with covering the Slayers had to turn to face their attackers, which allowed the shooters that had retreated behind trees to fire again.
The riders moved away from the bulk of group and dispersed in the basin to attack the most isolated mercenaries and slayers.
One of them rode towards Decker, then duelling with a hoplite, and lowered his spear, planning to thrust it in her back.
But she heard the horse gallop in her direction and at the last moment she stepped backwards, pivoted and deeply cut first the upper part of the horse front leg, then its entire side with her glaive, tearing the stomach and the viscera.
The steed let out a neigh of pain and its injured leg failed it, making it fall head first and project its rider in the process.
The latter straightened up quickly, grabbed his spear and came to help the hoplite in his fight against Decker, forcing her to fight both of them at the same time, blocking each of the spears with her glaive.
Faced with the fact that Faraci had almost made a breach in the stegosaur's thoracic cage, the guard who had sought refuge there moved away from him but in doing so, he stepped back towards Olsen, who was waiting on the other side, stretching his long and powerful arm between the ribs to try to grab him.
As Faraci was smashing into pieces the last bone that prevented him from reaching their opponent, Olsen froze for a second, blinked just a little, pulled his arm from inside the rib cage and turned to face Selma Forrester, who had just thrown a dagger in his right shoulder-blade.
Not lethally injured but provoked, he closed his grip around his axe and charged her.
X
From the top of a promontory that overlooked the combe, the basin and the surrounding jungle, the Indominus and the Pack watched the battle.
From this point of view and out of sight of the fighters, the dinosaurs clearly heard the jingling grating of steel against steel, the gunshots, the horses' neighs, the yells and screams of men...
The latter particularly excited the neoraptors and proceratosaurs, and some of them desired to move down from the promontory and throw themselves into the battle, but the Indominus restrained their ardour with a growl.
They had to be patient.
That men kill each other, they will be less numerous to oppose any resistance to the Pack.
This vision of men killing other men was a very satisfying show for her, although it had left her initially circumspect since she had never witnessed such violent interspecific clashes.
She and the Pack had not stumbled on the battlefield by accident.
Having detected the scouts sent by Sherman to the pass, they had followed them at a safe distance, first them and then all of InGen's troops. Ordering her subordinates to stay behind, the Indominus had, alone, approached closer to the cleared strip where the parley had taken place in order to watch them, making sure to stay leeward and use her camouflage ability to stay undetected. She had clearly perceived the hostility between the Slayers and the grey guards.
She had then followed the messenger and those who accompanied her to the place where the other guards were waiting.
After returning to the Pack to resume the march, she had followed the trail left by the guards' convoy, leading them to witness those deploying at the ambush site.
Feeling a great curiosity about their schemes, she had then chosen the promontory to observe the whole process.
When the light of an explosion had illuminated the combe, they had been surprised and moved back.
Seeing the vegetation bordering the bottom of the combe being set alight, the neoraptors and the proceratosaurs had not felt comfortable and had looked at the flames with wary eyes, like if they feared that if they remained there, the fire would eventually come and trap them.
Unlike them, the Indominus felt a great curiosity about the fire and behold its destructive aspect.
Comparing the growing one in the combe to the one that raged north of the Cartago, between the Haunted Mountain and the Embrace, and whose line of progression was slowly but surely moving south, she wondered how fire was born and how it spread.
X
While dodging Olsen's attacks with agility, sometimes narrowly avoiding the blades of his great axe, Selma retreated to the nearest trees, inviting her opponent to follow her.
As fatigue began to disturb his concentration, the giant realized too late his adversary's trick as when he corned her against a trunk, she pretended to believe that her time had come and wait for the fatal blow but as his axe was about to behead her, she suddenly stooped down and one of the axe's blades went to block itself in the bark.
As Olsen tried to pull his axe from the bark, Selma rushed forward and stabbed him several times in the abdomen.
He then removed his hand from his weapon's shaft and turned the fight by giving Selma a violent head butt, making her fall.
As she tried to get a grip on herself even though she was stunned, Olsen lowered himself and grabbed her throat.
He tightened his grip, blocking her breath and while forcing her to look from up close at his cadaveric mouth, reading disgust in her eyes, he lifted her.
With his free hand, he removed the dagger stuck in his shoulder blade and held the blade near the base of the neck of his opponent, who had just spotted a spear lying on the ground nearby and was vainly trying to reach it.
Olsen suddenly felt a sharp pain, first over his right heel, then another over his left one, and he fell on his knees despite his best efforts to stand, releasing Selma in the process. His tendons had been cut.
He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Niall Forrester was standing behind him, axe in hand.
Realizing that he was defeated, he grunted and opened his jaws to curse the couple but just as his last words came out of his mouth, Selma thrust the spear into his open oral cavity.
The tip pierced the latter's bottom and emerged on the other side before planting itself in the ground, making the giant arch his neck backwards before having his head cleft by Niall's axe.
This opponent being slain, the Forresters turned towards the stegosaur' skeleton, inside which they saw Faraci's body lying on the ground and guards standing over him, and the basin.
In the face of the amount of casualties and seeing the Slayers fall one by one, the surviving mercenaries had routed.
As they climbed the edge of the basin in a desperate attempt to escape the slaughter, Brunet ordered a part of the guards to pursue them and ordered the rest to deal with the remaining Slayers that were Sherman, Decker and Parker, as Cortès had disappeared at the beginning of the debacle.
The third was behind the first two, still fighting, and whereas Decker's opponent came to join the formation, Sherman's one, full of ardour, decided to throw himself on the leader of the Slayers instead of backing down, which proved fatal for him since Sherman managed to avoid his attack and strike the guard, destabilizing him.
Then, grabbing his blade with both hands, Sherman struck the base of his opponent's neck with his sword's guard and the blow was strong enough for the tip of one of the quillions to sink in his enemy's trapezius.
Sherman pulled it off quickly and while the guard was bent under the effect of pain, he unsheathed his pistol and shot him in the heart at close range.
"Gregor!" Decker hailed him as she stood next to Parker.
Sherman then saw a shield wall moving in his direction, with the men forming it striking their shields with their weapons.
He turned and fled with his two remaining companions, heading for the Cartago.
This led them to progress on a gently sloping ground, but hearing the guards break their shield wall to run towards them, Decker turned and stopped, waiting their pursuers.
Noting only a few seconds later that she was no longer following them, Sherman turned in his turn and saw her brandishing her glaive while the guards covered the last meters between them and her.
"Olivia!"
She did not answer and attacked the first guard who reached her.
She ended up being surrounded fast enough but when the attackers were about to all throw themselves on her at once, some of them moved aside, revealing Darbinian and other archers lined a little higher on the slope.
Arrows whistled.
Decker suddenly stepped backwards and when she spun around, Sherman saw that three arrows were stuck in her chest, and one of them was near the heart.
He froze while she gathered her last strengths to save her two companions a maximum of time.
Sherman grabbed Parker's shoulder and looked at him with begging eyes.
"Run to the aviary!"
"But what about you?"
"Do as I says! Flee, Damian! Do not look back!"
Parker's watery eyes gave his a last worried look, then the young man left, trampling the frail shrubs in his path.
Sherman sighed behind his visor, closed his grip around Fendiserpentes' handle and with a determined look, he moved towards the guards standing before Decker's body.
He deflected an arrow with his sword, then another, and threw himself on the nearest opponent, blocking his sabre before running his sword through him in a move full of rage.
He ended up surrounded too but he didn't cared and was determined to take as many guards as he could with him in the grave.
But they were many and he vainly split the air around him with Fendiserpentes in his attempts to strike them, which exhausted him.
"A third one went there! Find him!"
Seeing that some men were sent at Parker's pursuit, Sherman was momentarily distracted and he could not dodge in time a spear whose tip was thrusted in his shoulder.
He groaned in pain and grabbed the spear to pull it abruptly out of his flesh but at the same moment, a rider arrived in his back and knocked him down by hitting the back of his head.
The guards approached Sherman's unconscious body, with some ready to finish him.
"Don't kill him!" The rider reminded them. "Brunet want him alive!"
X
Cortès had taken advantage of the confusion that had followed the riders' charge to slip away, very well aware that InGen's troops had no chance to emerge victorious from the terrible battle in the basin.
He had not taken the direction of the river, towards which most of the fugitives were running, but the opposite one, towards the south, and having judged that his helmet was annoying him in his race, he had thrown it in a bush.
As he continued to run away from the basin's surroundings, a guard in his pursuit appeared at the top of an embankment behind him and took aim at him, ready to press the trigger of his rifle.
But recognizing the Tun-Si thanks to his black mane, he hesitated and finally refrained from doing so, unable to bring himself to shot his cousin or let him be killed by one of his comrades.
"Velasquez!" One of his comrades hailed him as he was starting to climb the slope towards him. "You got him?"
"No, he's gone."
While the other guard was climbing the embankment, Cortès disappeared in the middle of the vegetation, going deep in the jungle.
"Which one of them was he?"
"No idea. He had his helmet," Velasquez lied.
"He won't go far," his comrade assured him. "Someone or something will eventually find him."
X
Continuing towards the Cartago, Parker ran down the slope while guards leaped at his pursuit.
As his pursuers were often hidden by vegetation, he had the impression of being chased by dinosaurs and not men.
As the march and the battle had tired him considerably, Parker was panting and not being certain of the distance that separated him from the river, he wondered how long he would be able to hold.
Arrows and darts whistled past him, he narrowly dodged them and dared to glance over his shoulder.
He saw his pursuers, bows and blowpipes in hand, hunting him down like an animal.
In front of the others, there was a blonde woman with braided hair, a woman pretty enough to be considered attractive by Parker if her painted face and hairs weren't smeared with the blood of a mercenary that she had killed by cleaving his face with an axe.
While panting in her race, she accelerated to try to catch the fugitive and brandished her axe high, seeming to be ready to throw it in his direction.
The slayer had an adrenaline rush that made him accelerate, enough for him to leave the guards further behind.
After pushing some bushes on his way, he faced the cliffs that formed a part of the western bank of the Cartago.
Downstream, he saw a high fence built across the river and its banks, with a gateway in its centre for the boats and upstream, he managed to discern the gigantic struts that rose high to form some kind of a dome that towered over the surrounding jungle: The aviary.
It was near, about one hundred and fifty meters away.
His first idea was to walk along the bank, but as the guards were likely to burst out of the thickets at any moment and catch him, he thought instead about jumping into the dark and disturbing expanse that was the Cartago, a few meters below his position.
But when he was about to jump, he felt a dart sink in his neck and surprised, he fell forward into the water in a large splash and lost consciousness just after hitting its surface.
His body ended up floating on his stomach and seeing that, Parker's pursuers rushed in the water to retrieve him as he was carried by the Cartago towards the fence.
X
Few were the mercenaries that had managed to flee the battlefield.
Seven of them had embarked on a wild run towards the south-west, hurtling down the densely vegetated slopes while hoping to have shaken off eventual pursuers.
When the ground seemed to become gentler, they ended up facing an electric fence three and a half meters high.
Fearing that it would be still powered, the mercenaries hesitated to climb it but they saw that a tree had fallen against the structure nearby.
It was neither tall nor heavy enough to have destroyed an entire portion but it had however interrupted the electrical current.
Noticing this, they immediately began to climb over the fence, using its thick horizontal steel bars, while behind them, the guards were looking for them.
"There are still some left! Let's hunt them down!" One of them cried.
The fugitives then redoubled their climbing efforts and the quicker and more skillful ones began to hop over the top of the fence, passing on the other side.
But as they did this, they saw guards converging towards the fence, hurtling down the slope in their turn in great strides.
One of the fugitives had more difficulties than the others in the climbing and that proved fatal for him since as he was about to pass a leg on the other side of the fence, an arrow pierced his back and surprised, he lost his balance and fell backwards.
Realizing that they could do anything for him, the others resolved to abandon him and they continued, disappearing in the undergrowth on that side of the fence, undergrowth from which they came out a few tens of meters further, at the level of a large meadow where the grass reached the lower part of their thighs.
As they moved away from the trees cover, they noticed in the light of their lights' beams that, about a hundred meters west of them, the ground abruptly went down to meet a body of water: The Cartago.
"The river! We must cross it!"
The six mercenaries then headed for the bank, but once they had covered two-thirds of the distance to the edge of water, they suddenly heard behind them several medium-sized animals bursting out of the curtain of thickets that bordered the meadow.
Instinctively, the mercenaries turned around and directed their lights towards the animals to determine their nature and react accordingly.
They saw that it was a small group of horses, saddled and mounted, that had entered in the paddock through a breach and rushing towards them at full gallop.
Approaching the mercenaries who sprinted to the river, the riders grabbed their rifles to start shooting in their direction, lowered their spears or drew their sabres.
One of the fugitives, out of breath, felt he was about to faint and aware that he was out of strength, he decided to stop and try to win time for his comrades.
But at the moment when he turned to stand his ground, the leading rider reached him and slashed his throat with his sabre.
At the same moment, the other mercenaries finally reached the edge of the water and swam desperately towards the opposite bank, about fifty meters away.
Having their backs exposed to the rifles and the bows of the guards, they expected that the latter would start shooting them but that didn't happened.
Finding this strange, some of the mercenaries glanced over their shoulders and saw that the horses refused to move any further and were nervously striking the ground with their hooves.
Surprisingly, the riders seemed to be fine with this and even moved back to line their mounts a few meters back, at a respectable distance from the water.
They then just silently watched them swim across the Cartago while carefully watching it, keeping a weapon in one hand and firmly grasping the reins with the other.
The rider with the sabre looked at his wrist, like if he was reading time on a watch.
Noticing the strangeness of the behaviour of the guards and their horses and aware that something was wrong about the river, the leading mercenary urged his companions to swim faster.
"Keep going!"
When he was about to reach the bank, one of those in the back felt a pair of jaws closing on his leg.
He was dragged underwater and the one who was swimming next to him screamed as a large animal was among them.
He saw a shape reminiscent of that of a crocodile but he realized that the monster wasn't one because it moved rather like an otter, waving gracefully, and it was larger than any modern crocodilian, about nine meters long.
On the bank, the horses neighed out of fear and looking back, the leading mercenary saw a creature with a narrow elongated snout, similar to that of a False Gharial except that it was crowned by a small sagittal crest before the eyes, swimming towards another of his companions and closing its jaws on his neck in a snap.
While the mercenary was carried underwater as the creature dived, making its hindquarters, legs and the upper part of its legs emerge for a moment.
Once he reached the bank, he got up quickly and reached out to his two remaining companions to help them get up.
One of them was so frightened that he scurried off to the thickets ahead. A serious mistake since a Baryonyx burst out of them jaws wide opened to seize the mercenary who almost literally threw himself in its maw.
The latter could only scream and he screamed even more, out of pain, when the conical teeth thrusted themselves on each side of his skull, perforating it.
As the predator lifted its prey and shook him, the surviving mercenaries tried to move away but at the same time, the two other Baryonyx rose from the depths of the Cartago and stepped out the water.
The three of them surrounded the two mercenaries and helpless, the latter tried to shoot at them but in vain as the immersion in the river's waters had made their weapons inoperative.
While the riders watched the scene with a disconcerting stoicism and coldness, the baryonyxes slaughtered them.
One was smacked by one of the long-snouted dinosaurs, whose big ungeal claw tore off his lower jaw in the process.
The predator then closed its maw on the mercenary's chest and one of his congeners bit at the level of his pelvis and as each were pulling him, his body was torn in two while he was still alive and the screams he wanted to let out became nothing but guttural, raspy and half-muffled sounds in his destroyed mouth.
With its snout, the third Baryonyx pushed the remaining mercenary to the ground and pinned him against it by stepping on him.
It lowered its snout to rip off its prey's head in a single sharp move, taking a part of the spine with it.
The riders watched the baryonyxes feasting on the fugitives for a moment or two and then turned away from the scene, riding back towards the basin.
