Only the mighty will of the Seven Dreamers sustained and directed them through all of that torment, working through Shetharra and then Naero herself. Shetharra’s blinding white flame blazed radiant all about them. Both of them cried out in fierce pain, at fires and energies that threatened to reduce them to ash and atoms at any instant.
Yet within her daughter’s fiery invincible spirit and indestructible force of will, they could both be tormented, but never vanquished or destroyed.
Naero blacked out for a few instants at several points.
She managed to survive the bone-blasting ordeal, aided by Shetharra’s precise guidance while being merged with her. By the time she made it back out, she was left so drained and weak that she could barely move.
A great fear swept over her in that vulnerable state.
What if the enemy executed their main attack while she was so helpless?
It was Khai and the other GSA Champions who rescued them from deep SpaceTime within the spheres, and brought them back under concealed protection. Shetharra had summoned them vis her father.
If the enemy leaders hunted Naero to destroy her, they would need to find her first.
While she regenerated, she still would not waste time.
She sent her consciousness syphyng through Space-Time to merge with her top Naval Strategist Counterpart, Kali.
Om helped them integrate seamlessly in her still weakened state.
While Naero and her rep strategists adjusted the near endless formations against the ongoing enemy movements, her primary form would need to rest in order to regain her full powers.
That might take hours of precious time, and the enemy leaders could strike at any moment, if they could locate her.
Enemy activity and attacks increased with each passing minute.
That could be the start of their new offensive.
They might do anything to draw her and the other Champions out into the open.
Naero/Kali computed the growing threats and linked with General Jaer Sherman and Fleet Captain Alphonse Weingart on the flagship of the Wellington Irregulars.
“Queen Molly, come in, Queen Molly. This is Naero Prime, back onboard The Holy Ghost. Let me speak with either Jaer or Al. Urgent. Over.”
A calm feminine voice answered. “Naero, this is Bodii. Things are pretty hot right now. The next big enemy push has already started up here where we are. Sam and Al are out doing their best to position and maximize the effects of our remaining vortex cannon batteries. We’ve already lost sixty V-cannons to the enemy and those accursed Darkforce stars, damn them!”
There were only so many of those crucial super weapons.
From the looks of the battle reads in that area in a flash, Bodii held her own against the foe with her fleets at that key point, aided by Naero’s reps.
Everyone at that juncture took a pounding from the enemy. By now that was normal. Yet they maintained good order and discipline overall, despite considerable opening losses.
Like Queen Bodii, the stubborn defenders hammered back at the enemy with their combined forces, while they waited for their other damaged super weapons and ships to come back online from out of the fixer clouds.
Waves of more vulnerable merchant ships acted like tugs, towing listing and burning hulks back to the fixers to be refitted and crewed once more.
They did so at great risk, and the growing cost of many lives.
“Patch me in to them both if you can, Bodii. That’s exactly what I need to talk to them about. Keep up the firepower and the good work, over.”
The Empress of the Iceni Warrior women slightly chuckled. “You know I like to bring the heat, N. Patching you in now, over and out.”
Instantly she heard Jaer cursing. “What the hell do you want now, Bodii? I told you, I’m up to my eyeballs in kalligators. We’ve got to get all of these blasted V-cannons back on line and blazing again, or we’re all cooked!”
“This is Naero Prime, Jaer. Bodii just patched me in.”
“Hey, N,” Alphonse said. “We are in quite the shit storm here are we not?”
She laughed. “Tell me what else is new, Al.”
“You got that right. I’m a trifle occupied, so I’m going to keep working like the dog I am and just listen in for a bit. Talk to our partner in crime, Jaer.”
“Sure thing, Al. Guys, after our latest battle analysis, I need all of our remaining vortex cannons repositioned at these key locations, ASAP! If you think things are rough now, they are about to get far tougher once all of these corrupted stars cut loose. Only you and your V-guns have any hope of holding the line, and anchor our center against the attack from these enemy stars. Here’s the coordinates; data feeds already online.”
“Bloody hell!” Jaer shouted, still scanning Naero’s feeds. “Are you goddam serious? We have to reposition all of our big guns and start all over again, even while were still under heavy attack?”
“That is exactly what we need to do, Jaer. It’s our only chance, so haul ass!”
“N,” Al said, “they’re grinding us to bits as it is. How is anyone going to survive this kind of heat?”
“I’m working on it, guys. The Champions and I are massing our forces to take out the enemy Prime leaders. I really need you all to make this work.”
“You got it, N. Go cook those fuckers on a red hot spit and we’ll eat them for you! Move your ass, Al!” Jaer shouted. “I’ll get with Bodii and our fleets to regroup yet again. There’s no damn time as it is!”
The enemy’s growing host of Darkforce stars did not wait or hold back.
They unleashed a massive salvo of hyperstar rays that ripped across many parsecs with massive destructive force. They also attacked uninfected stars and began the process of corrupting and converting more of them.
The Alliance as yet had no way to stop any part of what took place. The enemy continued to turn the very stars against them.
Then Naero sensed the enemy onset, just as Shetharra and the Seven had predicted.
The three Primary G’lothc leaders and their guardian hordes raced toward the battle lines to bust the war wide open.
If they broke through the way that they intended, the defenders might not ever contain them again, and they would be free to devastate and murder at will.
Shetharra’s spirit form still remained merged inside of her mother, both of them prepared to fight to the last.
Khai and the GSA Champions circled protectively around them, now that it was known what the enemy’s plan focused on.
Just as the main force of the enemy struck, Kali executed their primary tactic.
In a masterful stroke, the defenders jumped back in rippling unison to their next battle line, avoiding the destructive power of the enemy that meant to crash through them.
The enemy wasted their initial mad charge, their heavy attacks blasting through nothing but empty space.
And now the defenders knew exactly how many Darkforce stars fired upon them, from what vectors, and what their maximum effective ranges were.
Fresh strategic and tactical data poured in, from the enemy blunting the forward momentum of their own assault.
The enemy also blundered into waves of the new phazed Cosmic smart mines.
The V-cannons cut loose from new vectors that concentrated their withering fire on the enemy hordes, and the Darkforce stars themselves.
After multiple strikes from the V-cannons, each Darkforce star so engaged stood disrupted and could not return fire for several long minutes. This effectively took many of them out of the fight.
“Here they come, Mom,” Shetharra warned.
Three massive wyrmholes opened up around Naero’s position, triangulating all around her.
The trio of the Prime Enemy Leaders charged into the already heated battle, their bodyguard hordes and fleets gathered protectively all around them.
They charged in under the cover of another ferocious barrage from the Darkforce stars that they controlled.
The Dark
Emperor, Nahaxrathrax, unleashed his own destructive hyper beam. The fluctuating black ray, lit with red lighting, chewed through the fighting fleets of both sides.
The enemy slashed a wide open path through that section of battle, in order to get at Naero.
Then from the other end of the triangle, the maelstrom that contained Xath the Hidden, from the depths of the Delta Quadrant unleashed pulsating waves of far-ranging ion force at unencountered levels.
These shock waves wreaked havoc on all forces present.
The enemy had plenty of forces to spare.
Friend and foe had shields disrupted by the chaos, power cores also. Some of the latter exploded outright, but most of the affected fleets floated like dead fish in a dynamited sea, drained of all power.
Khai led a third of the GSA Champions at Nahaxrathrax in a swift counterattack.
Janner, Ra, and Shalaen took another third straight into the maelstrom to engage Xath. Their goal: to destroy or drive him off. Take him out the fight either way. In other encounters, he had proved the weakest of the three thus far. The most prone to run when threatened or even pressed hard. Yet so little was known about this creature, whatever it was.
The same could be said about Khemathrykal from the Beta Quadrant, and he wielded a hyper beam that was far more destructive than that of the other two enemy Prime Leaders combined.
He had yet to open fire.
Why was he holding back?
The other pair already attacked with everything they had it seemed.
Naero, Baeven, and Jia led the final third of the Champions, including Zhen, taking the offensive. Each Champion battle group also included hundreds of allied energy beings backing them up.
They tried to stay spread out so that no single attack could strike more than one of them.
Om helped Naero sustain her real-time links with Khai and Jan, in hopes that they could all coordinate their actions. That was a major challenge in itself.
Baeven and Naero took their near-Darkbeast forms, but kept themselves at intermediate planetoid size energy being forms of under ten kilometers high.
Larger battle forms would open them up to more concentrated enemy mass attacks, and attacks from the higher energy spheres, especially from the Darkforce stars and Khemathrykal.
The defenders tapped into several different Cosmic spheres in order to power up, just as they had practiced, but they carefully avoided the higher level spheres, knowing that Khemathrykal was a master of them and those energies for reasons they still did not understand.
His strikes from within those spheres were incredibly magnified and powerful, beyond anything else, even compared to the hyper beams from the Darkforce corrupted stars.
His known Cosmic attacks with that hyper beam could do the most damage when focused through those upper spheres. Naero had learned that the hard way.
A lucky strike on his part could slay any one of them with one single hit.
Om and the spyfixers assigned to defense tracked the battle, on alert for any warning of one of Khemathrykal’s incoming hyper beam attacks.
If the targets got enough warning and were fast enough, they could dodge them or flash out of harm’s way.
The three strike teams hurtled straight at the three enemy commanders.
Without warning, massive Darkforce explosions detonated among the defenders and between them and the enemy Prime Leaders.
There was little damage but the GSA people were broken up and scattered in complete confusion by the power of those blasts.
All three enemy forces smashed into them, adding to the chaos.
More enormous explosions erupted to their rear positions, knocking them around like ten pins.
Om, what’s happening? How do they keep nailing us? Where’s it all coming from?
Got it, Naero! It’s coming from Khemathrykal. Somehow he’s flashing in the Cosmic hyper blasts from the Darkforce stars at the exact instant. There’s no warning. No defense against this technique. Warning, the Dark Emperor and Xath are executing some kind of strategy. Look at the similar ways that they and their protective forces are maneuvering.
Got it, Om. I see them.
She advised the others through their links. Om also alerted them through his fixer feeds.
Guys, this N. Stay spread out against those flash blasts. We’ll do our best to interrupt Khemathrykal. As you can see, the other two leaders are preparing some kind of trap. Hit them hard and let’s either try to throw them off their game or spring it too early.
“Affirmative,” Khai said.
“On it, sib,” Jan said.
Their segment of the battle zone for several parsecs around them lit up and rocked with the heavy exchanges between the three GSA Champion strike forces and the trio of enemy prime leaders.
Naero held her fleets back so they weren’t vaporized in the tremendous crossfire as the Cosmic heavies duked it out with each other.
The enemy ducked in and out of several spheres, expanding and shrinking size at will to avoid attacks and damage.
Naero and the others did their best to follow hard upon their targets, without getting T-boned by the enemy’s dirty tricks.
Several of them took serious damage. Scores of their supporting energy being allies fell, slain outright or seriously damaged.
This was no longer hit and run.
The enemy leaders weren’t running.
Their massive, shifting battle forms also took heavy damage and they cried out psyonically in agony for all Cosmic beings to sense. They kept moving, but these powerful G’lothc abominations also fought hard on every level of the engagement. The defenders had to blast their way through waves of enemy guards and minions, and wade through their burning exploding remains to try to punch and batter their way through to get at the Prime Leaders.
All of this bogged down into a very tough three-part fight over an immense field of battle, and neither side hesitated or gave any quarter.
While all around them, the battle for their galaxy was now fully engaged on many levels, in all four quadrants.
Nahaxrathrax shrank down from a thousand kilometers in length to a hundred in an instant, in order to avoid the heavy attacks falling upon him like a storm of retribution.
Khai had attacked his gigantic head directly with Yii, wielding the Cosmic Sword of Light with mighty slashing two-handed strokes. Several of the Dark Emperor’s gigantic eyes burned with white flame and would never function again.
The Prime Leader cut loose with another concentrated hyper beam, disintegrating a few unlucky energy beings by chance. They and their kind did not retreat for an instant, and kept up their attacks. Their peoples had suffered greatly from that fiend. They siphoned and drained the Dark Emperor of his Darkforce energies as fast as they could.
Ommo flashed in front of Alala to shield her.
Both of their Remo forms perished instantly, completely vaporized. It would be several long minutes before they could assume other Remos and rejoin the fight.
Poly fought at Khai’s side, slaying and tearing and cutting at their great foe with her great scything mantid claws and her fierce Cosmic eye beams.
Nahaxrathrax whipped and writhed around, twisting and tying himself almost in knots.
The enemy guards hurled themselves at the defenders, who shielded themselves with part of their foe’s own converted energies, and kept fighting.
When Poly’s shields collapsed, Khai instantly extended his verdant, adamantine layers of shielding over her.
The battle surged forwards and back as the enemies fought each other toward the death, spinning, darting, and smiting.
Janner, Ra, Shalaen, and Tarim in his Remo gunnery platform fought together to penetrate the maelstrom of Xath the Hidden. Darkforce hyper beams and blasts lashed out at them. The visibility within the whipping energy nebula they fought within nearly blinded them. They fought on psyonics and sensor reads, but nothing was certain in such a fight.
Janner wounded the concealed enemy leade
r somehow with massive Cosmic explosions.
Shalaen took a direct hit from a starg hyper beam that nearly killed her. Tarim tried to carry her away to regen. A Darkforce explosion took his unique Remo out of action.
Energy beings quickly zipped Shalaen away to safety into the Interdimensions. Who knew if she would survive?
Janner and Ra fearlessly penetrated into the heart of that maelstrom to take out their foe, and to witness what this malignant thing was for the first time. Their battle took them thrashing about, fighting fiercely and bitterly all the while with their foe and its bodyguards.
Naero and Baeven sensed where Khemathrykal was hiding among the depths of his forces, shrouded by waves of enemy phage, mind wraiths, Fulroks, and other enemy hordes that helped obscure and mask his exact location.
Yet they followed and moved along with his movements, and that somewhat revealed his position. Om was the first to note how this gave the Prime Leader away.
Naero and Baeven led a two-pronged attack to flush out Khemathrykal and take him down.
The intense fighting enveloped them.
Naero sent a telepathic signal through her reps. Jaer, Al–blast a path open for us on this mark. Mark!
The defenders could also play the enemy’s sniping game.
Combined V-gun battery fire ripped out of several new wyrmholes, phazing in at relatively point-blank range.
Enemy forces melted away and exploded before such concentrated Cosmic destruction.
A blazing tunnel penetrated the enemy defenses and Naero and her strike force shot straight through that blazing opening.
Another such opening would be blasted through on the leeward flank for Baeven and his forces to attack from another optimal vector of their own.
When Naero and company raced in, they confronted an extremely strange phenomenon.
Scans, teknomancy, and psyonics all revealed Khemathrykal to be something quite amazing and terrifying.
This strange being at first did not seem to have any physical form at all, even as they unleashed their attacks.
Naero!
I see it, Om. I’m still trying to believe it.
Khemathrykal was a nebula creature comprised of pure Interdimensional Darkforce and Ultrium–a Darkforce energy being that existed at the same time in multiple key Cosmic spheres. The Cosmic echoes of this abomination alone staggered the very mind.
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