by Vowron Prime
Two up-armored Humvees blasted out of their berths from the hillside overlooking the battlefield, barreling through their enemies.
From the same hills, two hundred fifty Sorathean archers let loose with explosive arrows, adding their own explosions to the secondary blasts that continued to belch from the Tensa’s corpse.
The M5A1 main battle tank fired its massive 140mm high-explosive warheads, selectively assaulting the remaining enemy hover tanks that peppered the battlefield. A portion of the fleeing horde of monsters diverted to assault the hill, but the two dozen turret emplacements they’d installed around the foothills kept the abominations at bay. The tripod-mounted many barreled machine guns sundered the hundreds of beasts that were stupid enough to come their way.
Supplied by tunnels that connected back to Sanctuary via teleportals, the defenders could maintain their fire near indefinitely, as long as they weren’t destroyed.
As much as MC wanted to direct the operation from above, he didn’t have that luxury. His fight was here, against the most impressive enemy he’d encountered to date.
The Trilnyth disappeared, activating the cumbersome illusion field generator strapped to its back. Invisible to both Midar and Resistance sensors, MC soon gave up tracking it. Instead, he relocated apartment-sized chunks of ground high into the air, systematically working his way outward from the enemy’s last known position. Though impossible to sense, its relocator-jamming barrier served to light it up like a napalmed Christmas tree.
When the ability failed to activate, MC erected tall walls all around the area, boxing the lizard inside. Realizing the futility of stealth against an enemy with MC’s powers, Juri’dur ditched the bulky generator to prioritize speed over deception.
MC didn’t have that particular problem, seeing as how he could teleport. So he lifted his own illusion field and strapped it onto his back. After all, you couldn’t kill what you couldn’t see. Usually. Of course, stealth would be a bit pointless when he opened fire with the Vulcans.
The superlizard reappeared for an instant as it punched through MC’s wall, then disappeared again. This time, its stealth came from the Trilnyth’s optical camouflage, but its natural abilities fooled neither Midar nor Krar’s sensors.
“Al, switch to thermal and radar imaging. Weapons-free.”
“Command confirmed. Engaging hostile.”
A hailstorm of lead ravaged the Trilnyth warrior as the X42’s back-mounted Vulcan cannons slung a thousand rounds of depleted uranium per minute. Leveraging humanity’s best AI targeting technology, they did not miss. Neither did Krar’s quad microwave emitters. But the Trilnyth seemed impervious to energy weapons.
Quickly realizing that dodging was futile, the beast hunkered down into a ball of black armor that slowly disintegrated under MC’s devastating barrage. A shower of sparks covered the enemy as his rounds ricocheted. The fact that the lizard lasted more than a few seconds against such an onslaught spoke volumes about its durability.
In the background, the deafening din of hypersonic rail slugs filled the air as the Resistance struggled to maintain a perimeter, furiously gunning down endless hordes of mutated creatures. The majority of the beasts were dead, but there were enough left that victory was by no means a guarantee. The Tensa crash had merely evened the odds.
Resistance snipers fired at regular intervals, their signature cracks always accompanied by the fall of another glimmering magical dome. Other squads waged their own battles. Some prevailed, others fell.
The Trilnyth went on the offensive just as MC went to relocate the ground out from under it. Moving at a speed that was unfathomable for something so heavily armored, Juri’dur opened fire with its own energy weapon, zigzagging to throw off their attacks. The X42’s Vulcans continued their barrage, but their hit rate dropped considerably. With more chances to return fire, the Trilnyth forced MC to strengthen the energy dampener.
MC teleported around, engaging the Trilnyth from unexpected angles, but the creature had preternaturally sharp senses. The instant the Vulcans fired, it dodged. As soon as MC relocated slabs of rock above the lizard, it accelerated at a speed that would break most animals’ legs.
MC stopped moving around, letting the enemy pummel his dampener with directed energy.
They say that the best defense is a good offense, and what better way to go offensive than to use the enemy’s own weapons against them? MC focused his deflector shield, harnessing the incoming energy, imagining storing it in a battery cell. At the critical moment where it could hold no more, he released it back at the enemy at a rate far greater than its own weapon.
The deflected blast didn’t do much to the Trilnyth, but the same couldn’t be said of its weapon. The hoses and cables that connected the gun to its body melted off, forcing the lizard to discard the totaled laser.
MC thought he finally had the fucker cornered, but he was wrong. The lizard disappeared, moving faster than he could track. Too fast to target with his abilities. Despite being invisible to the enemy, he still couldn’t hit the bastard. MC needed a new strategy, and he needed it now.
“Sir, we’re losing the perimeter! We can’t take this much longer!” the Humvee’s driver called as she maneuvered the vehicle through the maze of dead allies and live enemies.
An antimatter bomb detonated nearby, erasing everything in its blast radius. Red Xs appeared on Torneus’s combat HUD, with another joining their ranks with every passing second—dead allies.
Sighting a new target, he squeezed the Humvee’s roof-mounted .50 caliber machine gun’s dual triggers, killing a mutated scorpion that was about to overrun the perimeter.
“We need to buy more time until Reaver can take down those chariots!”
Even with the Tensa’s destruction, even with all their preparation, they had already lost a quarter of their number to chariot fire and Hasta bombing. Barely minutes had passed since the opening of the battle. The Resistance shipped their wounded back into the underground tunnels whenever they could, but this was just utter chaos. Who would have thought the battlefield would devolve into such… anarchy?
Time seemed to slow as Torneus swept his gaze around the battlefield. Never before had he seen such wanton destruction.
Is this it, then? This is where I die? Without accomplishing anything? Without proving my worth to Father?
His eyes went wide as he spied a Hasta bomber break off from its wing to approach the Humvee from dead ahead, its weapons trained right on them. He swiveled the turret and held the triggers down to no avail. The barrage of bullets simply glanced off the crescent-shaped craft’s armored hull like insects splattering upon a windshield.
“Evacuate! Everyone out! Now!” he cried.
Torneus abandoned the gun to pull himself out of the turret gunner’s hole onto the roof, throwing himself overboard. Searing heat lanced across his back as he fell. The vehicle’s massive lithium battery superheated, triggering a chemical explosion that blew the Humvee into a dozen pieces.
A finger of fire erupted skyward.
Torneus scrambled to the Humvee’s driver, who lay on her stomach in a pool of blood. He turned her over and recoiled. Half of her face was gone.
Two more green HUD icons turned red.
Torneus rolled to his feet, unslinging the microwave emitter attached to his back. The horde was unending. His closest troops fought bravely—several hundred yards away. It may as well have been a mile.
Alone, outnumbered, and exhausted, he pulsed the energy rifle on nearby enemies. With so many around, he barely had to aim. He jumped, ducked, rolled, and dodged, destroying his enemies at an obscene rate. Like the casual popping of gore balloons, their innards ruptured in a shower of intestines and blood.
It made no difference.
Torneus fended off dozens of mutated enemies—spidorillas, pantherbeasts, scorpionids—as he made his way to nearby allies.
His weapon neared its limit. The energy cell could only provide a finite number of shots before needing to cool d
own. Dread coursed through his body. With neither time nor opportunity to reload, he unsheathed his nanomachine-enhanced blade.
Is this it? My last stand? he thought as a gargantuan scorpion pounced.
But instead of crashing onto him, its attack was mercilessly thwarted by gunfire, slamming the creature down into the earth from above. The barrage of bullets then traced a perfect circle around Torneus’s position before moving outward.
The depleted uranium impacted with such force that they kicked up plumes of dirt a dozen feet high. Like being surrounded by acid rain that destroyed everything it touched, his surroundings quickly cleared. Where the ground exploded, not one beast lived. As if protected by a guardian angel, within seconds, the entire vicinity had been cleared—only corpses and rubble remained.
“Apologies for the delay,” Edana called from Reaver, circling high in the skies above. “Reinforcements have arrived.”
Torneus lost no time in sprinting the hundred yards over to Gamma squad that had built up a defensive position there. Sliding in behind the barricade they’d erected, he took stock of the current situation.
Yet even with Reaver laying down cover fire, their enemies were still too numerous to count.
“Where’s your squad leader?” he asked one of the Zevan knights who had taken cover behind the barricade to reload.
“Gone. One of those infernal scorpions got through our defensive line.”
“All right. I’m taking command of this unit.” Torneus’s command HUD updated to bring up Gamma squad’s health status. Out of the ten, three Zevan knights had been killed along with their Dyn commander. Luckily, their two attack mages were still alive and were currently dishing out some serious damage. A weather control mage and a lightning mage, by the looks of things.
Their issue was area of effect. Dyn energy weapons tended to be highly focused—nearly useless against these kinds of mobs.
“XAM Control, are you able to provide fire support?” Torneus asked over comms.
“Negative,” came the reply. “Those chariots are blocking our firing arcs. Our shells won’t do anything against that armor.”
“Kevzel incoming!” someone yelled. Torneus’s eyes went wide as a hovertank trained its arsenal of energy weapons upon them from a hundred yards away.
He ducked behind an energy shield just before a massive explosion erupted nearby—the hovertank lay smoldering in pieces. He looked around for a moment, only to realize that the shot must have been fired from their own tank they’d deployed on the nearby hill.
“Fireteam Charlie says you’re welcome!”
He was thankful for the humans’ obsession with physical projectiles. They seemed to fare far better against these enemies, though they were not without their own issues.
“Sir, I’m out of ammunition. Requesting permission to engage the enemy in melee combat,” one of the Zevan knights reported, looking almost relieved to be able to fight with familiar weapons again.
“Negative, soldier. Against those numbers, you’d just be asking for a quick death. Retreat and rearm!”
But rail guns and microwave emitters weren’t the only weapons at their disposal.
“Mages, have you combined your attacks yet?” Torneus asked as he picked off another enemy.
No response. The mages in question were currently under fire from a force of highly-mobile indoctrinated Zevan enemies.
“Pierce my foes with frozen spears! Vanquish with the power of cold! Ice bolt!” Their weather mage conjured needles of liquid, launching them at a high velocity as if attempting to emulate human weaponry.
The result was underwhelming. While the barrage of icicles pierced the Zevan-type’s skins, they had no effect at all on the armored monsters.
Torneus hurled an antimatter grenade into the clump of enemies assaulting their position. Two seconds of anticipation were followed by the satisfying roar of detonation as their enemies simply ceased to exist as a negative shock wave erupted—their enemy’s atoms explosively canceling with antimatter particles.
With the enemy’s backline thinned, Torneus and the mages rallied to clear out the remaining stragglers. A minor victory; hundreds more soon appeared to take their place.
“I asked if you two had tried combining your attacks,” he repeated during a short lull.
“N-no, sir, it is difficult to add lightning effects to a water strike.”
“That’s because you’re using your magic poorly. You are a weather control mage, yes? Can you create weather systems, like rain? Can you make it rain?”
The mage nodded.
“Then do so, right now! Summon the largest raincloud imaginable.”
As the weather control mage chanted, Torneus opened up a private line to their other magic caster. “You have spells that can chain lightning from one enemy to another. Yes?”
The mage nodded.
“Good. I want you to cast that as soon as the enemies have been doused by the rain. Make it as powerful as possible. Aim for the ground.”
Torneus took turns with the other squad members to protect the chanting mages, who took cover behind their makeshift barrier. Though it may have been a mere thirty seconds, to Torneus, it may as well have been a year. Mutated beasts died with every agonizing second that passed.
The water mage finished his chant and a localized storm cloud materialized over their position, stretching for hundreds of feet in every direction. Ominous thunder cracked. A deluge drenched their foes in a micro-storm of epic proportions. The phenomenon even surprised other nearby Resistance fighters.
The squad took cover behind the barricade as their lightning mage finished his chant.
The mage stood, extending his arm. Lightning arced from his palm to the nearest werebeast with blinding intensity, sizzling and melting the enemy from the inside out. Like fingers, tendrils of energy arced from one enemy to the next, expanding, multiplying, spreading via the pool of water that had saturated the dirt.
What would ordinarily have stopped only a dozen enemies now left hundreds dead and roasting, or severely wounded.
“Fire for effect!” Torneus screamed, rallying the other troops. The squad bounded out, adding their energy weapons’ voices to the symphony of magical bombardment.
Torneus extended his rifle to the air and bellowed a roar. “To victory!”
His team reciprocated, pumping their fists, roaring in triumph.
Painting a perfect backdrop to their rally, a series of explosions lit up the sky. The chariot that loomed above them fell as Reaver rained death from above.
“All units, chariot down!” Torneus screamed. “Evacuate to safe positions! I repeat, abort and evac to safety immediately!”
Four more chariots followed, falling to the earth in a display that looked almost majestic. Almost choreographed. Yet when they hit the ground, their landing was anything but elegant. The scarab-shaped ships rent, twisted and split, buckling catastrophically against a level of force they were not designed to withstand, crushing the poor souls below.
“Alpha Squad reports all green.”
“Bravo Squad, all green here.”
One by one, the reports came in—casualties on their side had been minimal, having been forewarned by Reaver before its strike. Torneus recalled hearing Edana’s warning over comms, but he’d been desperately fleeing from a Hasta bomber at the time.
That same fighter had aborted its bombing run, rising rapidly, its antigravity thrusters screeching against the intense g-forces. The sleek attack craft rejoined its two dozen brethren in a delta-V formation as they continued upward, disappearing through the clouds.
“Reaver, this is Torneus. You have incoming. I repeat, a wing of Hastas just left the field and they’re coming for you.”
“Copy that, Torneus,” Edana replied. “We see them. Hold tight, everyone, you’re going to be on your own for a while.”
Torneus swore. A gunship’s biggest weakness was enemy fighters, and Reaver was outnumbered twenty-four-to-one.
Don’t die up there, Edana.
Fifty-Four
“Artillery!” Edana shouted, violently juking the gunship to avoid their pursuers’ barrage of energy weapon fire. The Howitzer erupted again, sending shock waves rippling through the ship—through her very body.
“Chariot down,” called the gunner operator from his seat.
“Guns tracking enemy Hastas. AI guide engaging,” another operator called out. The ancient human weapons had been retrofitted with the latest Dyn AI technology, which—while formidable on its own—could be further enhanced and actively tuned by a skilled operator. Edana only hoped the human weapons were up to the task.
“Twenty bogies remain.”
“Confirmed. They may have the numbers, but they don’t have me,” Edana replied as she threw the gunship into a sudden downward spiral.
.50 caliber tail-mounted rail guns opened fire, slinging armor-penetrating explosives into the Hastas’ armor. Though light, their enemies’ armor was state-of-the-art Dyn technology. The bullets themselves failed to penetrate, but their explosions had a pronounced effect.
“Bogey down!”
Forty seconds later… “Another bogey down.”
Too slow! Edana threw the gunship upward, yet the Hastas remained doggedly on their tail. The enemy seemed to have no problem finding Reaver despite its active camouflage.
“All right, then how about this? Decoys away!”
Four hundred radar decoys erupted from Reaver’s bomb tubes, rocketing away in all directions. Each presented an identical signature to enemy sensors. It wouldn’t take the enemy long to map the decoys’ point of origin and trace them back to Reaver, but the deception would buy them a precious few seconds, and that was all Edana needed.
“Brace yourselves!” she yelled right as Reaver pierced through a cumulonimbus cloud. She inverted the gyrofans, flipping the gunship upside-down near instantly.
“High-G incoming!” She flipped the switch on the quad scramjets, rocketing Reaver back toward their pursuers at eight Gs.
