Their deaths were instantaneous – they had been evaporated.
The next three-fingered fighter had a dinosaur-like head with large green eyes.
He skillfully used a wave resonator and a laser as weapons. The fighter instantly destroyed all barriers with his resonator, and eliminated any target in sight.
The fighter was very good. His enemies had nothing to do but to retreat and hide, but the fighter did not give a chance to anybody. His eyes were closing like a shutter of an old-fashioned camera, and his head was turning like the head of a pilot in an air battle.
It was difficult to approach him, and the enemy changed tactics. The color of the soil around the fighter started changing. At first, it was very far from him, and the fighter did not pay much attention to it. He concentrated on what was going on in the vicinity and what was an immediate threat.
The circle around the fighter was narrowing. The land in visibility range had changed its color to brown.
The fighter noticed danger and switched on his resonator at full capacity, but at this moment something unexpected happened, that became disastrous for him.
The killing power of his weapon became his enemy. Mold, which was changing the color of the ground, divided into smaller parts after each blow. The stronger the blow, the higher the rate of division. The dead mold was growing darker, and new, brown one, was growing faster and spreading ahead.
The mold grew up to seventy-eighty feet high. The rate of its spreading had increased manifold.
The fighter shot at the mold from his laser weapon. Loud hissing and gurgling was heard, followed by poisonous smoke rising from the spots where his blows struck. The mold turned black and fell down, but was immediately replaced by the new, brown mold.
The fighter made one last attempt and then began to turn around himself with his laser switched on at full capacity.
Brown mold was growing taller and taller, filling in all the space around. Soon it was hanging over the fighter. Its layers grew thicker and thicker. The laser failed to shoot down the whole mold. Soon it crashed down on the fighter with all its mass.
It was seen that he was shooting at the mold with his laser, hanging on by the skin of his teeth; from time to time a laser beam burst out of the thick layer of the mold, illuminating the breach from beneath.
Julia saw that the laser was working more and more slowly. Finally, it stopped dead in its tracks. The laser beam went to the distant space.
Soon it died out, and the breach closed. A hill above the fighter flattened. The mold, like soap suds, was reducing until the earth came to light.
The fighter wasn’t to be seen anywhere.
The mold had dissolved him.
The next combat was taking place in space.
The camera, filming this battle, was at the level of the fighter’s shoulder, on his silvery spacesuit.
The fighter himself wasn’t seen. His spacesuit resembled an elongated egg. Its surface contained lots of shallow cavities with small circular apertures.
To husband his weapon, he successfully avoided space debris and asteroids, rushing towards him. But soon their speed began to grow. Stars, surrounding him, were becoming longer and longer.
The fighter began to use his weapon, and it exactly reacted to collisions, eliminating all hindrances in his way and ignoring cosmic bodies, which were not dangerous.
