Chapter 51 – Operation Sparta

 

Veronica paused to take a breath, realizing how many rhetorical questions her mind just posed. Then another thought struck her. She was in way over her head. Months after helping Ursula escape and helping her get away with the X-Dominion, the girl had begun her newest assignment, research and on-field data reporting with the XVI Excalibur Sky assault regiment, a SPARTA special operative team with a 100% guaranteed kill rating, doing reports for the elite Sovereign Protector Armies of Radiance Taskforce Armaments (SPARTA). Once the Special Paranormal Attack Tactical Research Agency, SPARTA had come a long way from merely being an initative against supernatural and obscure threats in Xi and investigating ghostly sightings. In Neo-Xi, SPARTA operatives were handpicked from all branches of service in the High-Fleet, and underwent special training in unique, highly mobilized, militarized assault and battery technology, each of them a certified master of their respective fields. To see them work as a team with an on-field reporter would be a first. Veronica had done many reports alongside SPARTA teams, but always in the cleanup or aftermath- Field Reporters were generally kept out of combat, and she well expected today to be the same.

She had been assigned to an SPARTA operative detail three times in her short career in Military journalism and data reporting. The first, was a mission into the borderspace of Set- incursion territory where Akura Units had been establishing outposts, using them to jump between the rimworlds where non-allegiance worlds existed, supporting and defending neutral territory that was not yet-Xi and no longer-Set, perhaps in an agenda to earn some goodwill on these planets. She watched the footage after the Spartan regiment Supreme Overlord took on the Panzer patrol units of the Set militia, wiping out an entire platoon of Akura units with special operations on a nearby station just a few months ago. The SPARTAN’s signature weapon of that patrol had been a custom designed Plasma Lance which over-penetrated even Akura unit's armored mech, designed by R&D head admin Entrapta after researching Set Weapondry herself. The second field report was an investigation into the 12th Air Auxiliary Fleet's top commander, Commander O'Keeffe, and his planned coup d'état with the insurgent Sovereigntists. Veronica was there to see it all. She sat behind a desk, overlooking a group of SPARTAN operators arresting O'Keeffe and five of his constituents, all clad in neon teal with jet black in their signature silvery-blue armor of SPARTA's signature design as they were arrested. Interrogations were still ongoing.

But today, she stood in the back of a coffee room as a group of six Spartans discussed their mission on a blackboard. The SPARTANs had the full run of the place, a coffee room with an indoor shooting range built into it. Veronica stood at the far end of the room while the Spartans went over what they would do. One of the agents spoke about the mission.

"The High-Fleet wants us to investigate the reported Sovereigntist forces in the Northern star systems. That means we will be entering the frontlines to get some intel."

"How do we accomplish that?" another member asked.

"Getting past Sovereigntist lines would be no issue at all. A few volleys will open a gap in

their defense lines. The High-Fleet wants us to get some information on them, but with Enigma- deficiencies in recon tech, we'll need to be thorough."

The agent spoke. His name was Rikard Gunnarsson, one of the Sword Operator detachments, hired to work under Sword Operator Liam. Rikard was the youngest in the group at 28. He stood only 5'6" and weighed in at 110 lbs, but with enough training and effort to make any man think twice. His armor alone was a work of art. The black and gold trim with intricate white plating that had once been a signature of SPARTA had been replaced by silver plating, but with gold plating on the armor's right shoulder. Around him were 7 other members of the regiment's Sword Operators, Desmond, Fielgor, Amélie, Ceres, Lamora, Liam and Kosmere. The group made up about a little over 1/100th of the six hundred member regiment.

"So we are going to break through their lines with a frontal assault? That will only make them more aggressive against us. It will also inform them we have intel on their ranks."

Liam added. He had been the most vocal of the Spartan detachment so far. He was in the room as the Spartan's regiment’s first-in-command. At age 26, Liam was the eldest in the group. He was 6'2" tall with a muscular 185lbs frame. With an exemplary record of service, Liam had been handpicked two years ago, promoted from Shield Operator to Sword Operator. "Liam," Rikard admonished him.

"No disrespect meant." Liam began.

Amélie took a sip of her coffee cup. "That's why we have the egghead." She nudged towards Veronica, who seemed rather lost in her own melancholy. The sheeny teal suit and its metallic trim didn't suit her well. It accentuated the deep hollow in her gut, a feature she'd gained through strict dieting and exercise during her time with the military. As a member of the Journalist Corps Veronica had to be slim, toned and physically fit. Not as fit as the combat units or the peak-fitness Sword Operators, each of which effectively acted as commanders for hundreds of SPARTA soldiers within Excalibur Sky. Yet Veronica knew that she was in way over her head. She was a field reporter, that's all. But today she had to pose as a field-technician as well, relaying intel on supply and communication logistics and keeping communication channels active in real time. "Y-yeah?" Veronica said, just catching up to the conversation.

"That's the job. Are you even paying attention?" Liam added, noticing Amélie was talking to Veronica.

"The egghead is no good." Amélie said as Liam looked at her.

"She's not bad. She just doesn't know the ins and outs of the field." Liam looked at her, shaking his head.

"The last two SPARTA intel operatives who were given field-reporter assignments to the 12th Air Auxiliary Fleet's 8th Air-Squadron were not up to task either." Liam continued as Veronica and Amélie watched him polish his Plasma lance.

"The problem is not her intelligence. It's the way she thinks." Lamora concluded. "Intelligence doesn't equal logic." Lamora turned to look at her.

 

be.

"What do you mean?" Veronica asked, abit muffed how blunt and brusque this girl could

 

 

"Your training reports were very impressive, I believe you're very intelligent. But your

PSI and ideological profile was very superficial at best. Usually that type, uses intelligence to secure their meager positions in political career jumps. We like the meat here, career opportunists are seen as rather deficiet.”

"You're looking for the answers in the wrong place." Veronica said. "I'm just a glorified journalist. I don't debate politics."

"That's precisely why you're an insufficient reporter." Lamora concluded, as the others around her nodded their heads in agreement.

"I thought I was here to cover your mission." She exclaimed.

Lamora gave her a prolonged frown. "Yes, but we are going to require someone who has epistemological knowledge of the enemy, their objectives and can confer it against a properly cognitive secure anchoring of Xi's own agenda and priorities. We're not flyby sensationalists, we're tacticians. Knowing psychological evaluation in terms of a resource-deterrent is not merely the matter of Psi agents." She added.

"Yes, I read the textbooks. I took a full course on Psi-theory on the battlefield. Don't patronize me." Veronia scoffed.

"Veronica," Fielgor exclaimed. He held a cigarette in his right hand. "Get to the point.

What is our mission?"

She sighed. "We're to protect the integrity of the High-Fleet under the chain of command by making sure the Sovereigntist forces in North can be dismantled. By protecting our ground bases, we can secure the Highfleet has adequate refueling and shielding from Soverignist flanking and terrorist sneak attacks." She replied, turning back to the mission.

"And why exactly?" He pressed her further. Veronica tensed up a little, feeling like she was under interrogation here.

"The Sovereignists do not act with the Xistress's priorities in mind. They seek to establish an xenophobic regime under autocratic military rule, where the chain of command is no more than a junta by a few brass. They have annexed several worlds and systems in the last few years, and with the current High-Fleet leadership at its weakest with the Xistress AWOL, the Sovereign movement has all the more reason to take advantage. Their ranks were long becoming disillusioned with Xistress control and are instead moving towards their own militaristic and nationalistic regime." She said.

"Hrmph. That's nothing we haven't heard before. What is our primary objective?" Liam exclaimed, exasperated with the whole discussion.

"You know our primary objective, Liam. To attack the Sovereigntist rebellion in its

infancy." Veronica replied.

"No." Liam corrected her. "We're not here to kill, to destroy or to take lives. We are here to gather intel, gather intel, and provide support for our mission. Our main objective is to destroy their intelligence gathering and dismantle their leadership structure. Our goal is not win a war, but prevent their ideological spread." He twirled his cigarette between his left thumb and index finger. "Their movement, militarily is small and still insignificant. What's dangerous is their reputation and reach can change that in a heartbeat. A fire can start with just one spark.." He flicked his cigarette. "The enigma is already eroding public morale. If they get off a half-way competent propaganda operation.. Boom."

"I heard rumors that they're even backed by Set..." Amélie added.

"If they are, then we've got a bigger problem than we originally thought. We have a few agents in Set that can report back on that. " Liam continued.

"That's all the intel we need to disseminate right now. We're just here to gather more.

That's why we need an egghead like Veronica here." Fielgor smiled.

"I'm not just an egghead." She replied, but the Spartans went back to their mission without her input. She stood there, the room slowly emptying, and she got the feeling they were deliberately disregarding her intelligence in some regard. Was she that insignificant? The Spartans didn't even bother inviting her to the briefing prior. The engines of the XVI Excalibur Sky assault regiment's flagship, the Valiant, was already blasting off at lightspeed across the galaxy as Veronica resigned herself to her meager quarters and 12x12' office. Warpgate lounges weren't afford for mere journalists like herself.

She knew how much risk she was going to take. Veronica struggled with the fact that she was no longer a high school reporter. This was the real deal now.

Elsewhere on the other side of the planet, a collision of kinetic shots exchanged like artillery salvos across a windswept mountainous plain. Two forces met on a battlefield, Satsuma flying above with highspeed flapping wings, her gigantic cyberized arms slinging and launching rockets of kinetic energy in the form of lead bullets she kept stashed in her furcoated scruff.

Across from them on the other side of a mountain range, Elysium's tendril-like bandages rapidly barraged Satsuma with plasma beams from their tips. Shots of plasma and lead interchanged, some of which hitting their mark, others blowing the edges of mountaintops as they ricocheted.

Satsuma danced with her opponent, moving with light and swift precision. Elysium's bandaged arms had come to a boil, writhing its way through Satsuma's defenses with a flurry of tendrils, a few of which snagged the back of her armor, lifting her from the ground and wrapping around her body with enough force to rip a tree. But Satsuma was no stranger to Elysium's power. She turned around, slashing at her opponent's body with her cyber-enhanced steel talons and snapping off the tendrils which snagged her body. She turned around and fired at the bandaged body again, a few shots of lead that blew the arms off, snapping its upper torso in half. Elysium's ripped bandages arms unfolded, showing skeletal arms underneath, then rapidly regenerated and twisted back around the mummified surface below.

Elysium grabbed Satsuma with its bandaged arms, bringing her head-to-head with it. "I never thought this would be a day where you would be so outmatched," Elysium began. "What's a matter, Urs got you on a leash? You're not as quick on the draw as you used to be." She laughed in her face. "You're getting sluggish, you know that Satori?" Elysium's bandaged mouth turned into a smile.

Satsuma kicked out at Elysium's torso and chucked rocks. A few talon gun rockets penetrated her abdomen. "Lotta talk for a ball of hot gas under a blankie." She retorted. She grabbed hold of Elysium's face and began to punch it. Each punch sent shockwaves of force throughout its titanic frame. "C’mon mumsy, don’t go soft on me now. Show me a fun time! Mwaha!"

Elysium's bandaged body fell backwards as she sent it spinning in the air. Satsuma's fingers clawed at Elysium's face, then flipped her around her limbs, her face turned into a scowl. Ely's bandages meanwhile swiftly sieged the moment and wrapped around Satsuma's neck, trying to strangle and choke her rapidly. Struggling, Satsuma shrieked. Her arm swung around and she held it on top of the face, ripping it clean off, then ripped it down to the ground in a single, sweeping motion, revealing a skeletal face underneath. Elysium's scaffolding-like structure came down and shattered as Satsuma ripped it apart piece by piece. However when the pieces torn asunder, they twisted like falling tissue and regathered, rotating as if helix-shaped pairs of DNA and rapidly reforged around her body forming a more massive body than the one she was fighting earlier.

Elysium's bandaged form had unraveled, forming a 28-foot tall titanic frame of 5000 tonnes weighed in with its own weight, giving it its own inertia and strength. Elysium's armored hide was more than twice as thick as the density needed to absorb overpenetration from Satsuma's talon gun. They managed to pin Satsuma and her arms down, tossing her through the mountain range, their bandages reaching for miles as they dragged her about like a child dragging a ribbon.

Satsuma finally tore her restraints and freed herself. She sighted Elysium's main body 13 miles ahead and picked up some nearby rocks, preparing to pelt her ahead when her highly- evolved hearing caught noise nearby. She flew back to where Elysium was. "I'm finishing this now." Ely told her. Satsuma felt her comm begin to beep. She pushed her off her and looked across the valley.

On the ground, a smaller group of Akuras and Set militia were clashing with High-Fleet troops and SPARTA operators. It was a messy conflict with casualties of both sides. Satsuma and Elysium looked at each other, than back at the fight ongoing below. Satsuma smirked. "We'll have to finish our little date some other time." Slowly Elysium shrank back down to humanoid size. That's assault regiment Sleeping Bear, based on the artillery they're using." She raised one brow. "Why don't we call a truce for now?" Elysium offered, a rare moment of diplomacy and chivalry for her.

Satsuma received a call on her comm. "Ursula's coming.. except...' she said." Her lips smiled. "Satsuma likes that idea quite alot."

Elysium folded their arms and tapped their foot. The pitcher plant Orchidian cleared her throat. "Word let slip Ursula will be here.. they'll be sending the Elderdragon and some Spartan teams to intercept." She smirked. "What do you say? Give them a warm welcome?" The times they’d fought before, they always justified a long enjoyable rout that sent their carnage streaking across their stars everytime.

Elysium was silent. Satsuma looked up into the sky, her lips curled up. "You know.. it's funny, Ely.. this is all starting to feel like a reunion. Just like old times.." She added, before jumping up and flying into the sky.

 

 

 

Sleeping Bear was fighting an uphill battle with Set forces in the frontlines. It had been a few hours since they landed. The SPARTA operators and soldiers who were on the field-report team had set up several field communications on several key locations and intercepted the data streams and intercepted communications. Sword Operator Heisenberg attempted to radio into his patrol on the east-side of the riverbank, only to be cut off of communications and meet sudden static.

"I lost communications there." He called into his radio. He then heard a faint beep on the other end. His radio went dead. He sighed, turning to the other members of his patrol. "What's going on?" He looked around him.

Akura A41-E, codenamed Twin, stood nearby. She was on a high point of a hill, the only female sniper in the patrol with 6 other Akura units, when she suddenly lost contact with 3 of the others. Did the Xi'ans get to them? She used her long-range scanners to observe the valley ahead, only to find somehow, the entire fortified encampment of Xi troops were in the midst of annihilation, some sort of aerial siege. "Our commander didn't order-" A large dark shadow cast over her from above, and then nothingness.

Heisenberg's unit stared up into the air.

Within twenty minutes, every Xi'an unit, SPARTAN and Set Akura unit was blown off the map and massacred. As the sun set over the mountains, an hour later, a single black form flew across the horizon. The form grew larger and larger, showing a 380-foot long form in full stride. With a scowl of its steel haul, it smashed through an Akura-base, which was now in shambles with its entire armored-core destroyed. The Excalibur Sky assault regiment's probe vessel, one of twelve under the command of the Valiant crashed down through the clouds, tearing the atmosphere into its metallic shell, leaving trails of hot white ionized gas as it flew through the skies with its speed and mass. Above the atmosphere, the Valiant kept its eye on the skies with an array of sensors and radar equipment, following the twelve probes as they flew across the skies and landed on the surface.

As the probe vessels reached the ground, they turned and landed in a formation, and a small skydrome emerged from the probe vessel's midsection, no larger than a buggy. This

repeated five times over, and out of these hovering skydrome's emerged numerous SPARTA soldiers clad in dark navy-blue and teal armor, brandishing hi-tech weapons as they readied themselves for an impending investigation. Veronica was ordered to stay in one such vehicle while Liam arrived with Lamora and Ceres.

"How much did we lose?" Liam asked.

"We lost 387 Mantis ships and a couple of SPARTA troops, along with non-field personnel numbering a total of over 700 Xi militia." Ceres said, reading the report.

"To the Set? Even for an advanced Akura-raid that seems improbable."

"We don't know sir." She looked around at the remains of the Akura-base. "It seems unlikely, given they were contested and neutralized here aswell. A rebel encampment maybe? Whatever did this had to have ridiculous levels of firepower and backing." She scooped up some black smudges in the dirt and rubbed them between her metallic gloved fingertips.

From the skydrome Veronica watched closely. They had been on a mission to intercept Commander O'Keeffe, when they'd received a sudden report from high-fleet command that O'Keeffe had gotten wise and aborted his Cascade-bound route across their destination. At the same time, a strange incursion had occurred on planet A6D, one of the key supply worlds in the High-Fleet. While not highly populated or high in agriculture itself, its resources were an essential linchpin between three dozen other systems in pooling resources and depots. It was previously under siege by to Akura militias and guarded by the SPARTA's XVI regiment and Sword Operator team, Sleeping Bear. All scans of life came up negative, the infrastructure appearing as if high-detonations had gone off. "Shit man.. place looks like a ghost town now." Ceres remarked.

"Yeah, what the hell happened here?" Liam asked. "Are you sure this wasn't by any chance caused by our own soldiers? A mutiny of some kind perhaps?" He continued, obviously suggesting Sovereigntist ties.

"That's hardly likely sir." Ceres replied, though Liam pressed on. Lamora nudged Liam. "We're not exactly sure sir. Yet." She continued, knowing her team was not fully briefed on the situation. They had all the pieces, but it wasn't together yet.

Veronica called into Liam's call. "Techies got done. Some evidence from preliminary scans suggests some sort of aerial assault."

"That's impossible. Sleeping Bear had full air support and three lunar stations, we would've heard a sighting of attack long before they could successfully wipe out a SPARTA regiment from the air."

Liam's comm rang again, and Liam raised an eyebrow. He tapped his comm. "You're breaking up. This is Excalibur-Blue, can you copy?"

"Excalibur Blue, this is the Valiant, please change frequency to channel 15." Came a voice through the radio.

Liam's brow furrowed, a slight sign of frustration. "Excalibur Blue here. What is this about?" He answered.

"This is Colonel Ackenson Ubala of the High-Fleet command. Please shift your frequency to our channel. We'll be sending down Excalibur Blue, as requested."

"But we didn't reque-" Liam was cut off before he could finish. He looked at his comm, and then at his team. "Holy shit.. Ugh, what are the shitheads in high command doing? We haven't even finished our initial survey and they're already dropping in a second regiment?" He spoke quietly. Excalibur Blue's flagship, the Solar Calvary had entered the atmosphere and its full contingent of SPARTA teams had landed. Slowly the surface was filling with 12 more Sword Operators and their hundreds of footsoldiers.

"What's this about?" Ceres asked, seeing a tall, muscular tanned skin man with a white beard and headplate coming in what she recognized as in Astatinium armor with Platinum Atlas plating.

"Operator Raheim." Liam said, a bit of gruff annoyance in his voice. "How astute for you to drop in here. Look, we don't need your forces to join-"

"Bite it out the ass Liam." Raheim said, his beard seeming to bounce when he yelled, which was anytime he spoke. "We're not here join forces with you.."

Liam's voice shook a little as he tried to remain calm.

"You guys really aren't thinking straight about this.." Ceres said, seeing Raheim's men were armed to the teeth with heavy artillery, several hundred man strong, each with a pair of S&M Plasma-rockets and an arsenal of kinetic weapons. "This isn't some friendly game of tiddlywinks, this is a highly-hostile environment." She added, trying to convince Raheim not to enter the A6D base of operations. "We still are operating in the dark, too many cooks in the kitchen.

"I'm taking the lead on this mission." Raheim said. "I'm not going to sit around while your men waste their time playing detective. We're here to find the Set culprits and destroy them, no more."

"But Raheim!" Ceres exclaimed. "We don't even know who-"

"Brat, I don't care. You couldn't catch a fucking mouse here. I don't need to explain my reasons to you." Raheim growled.

Veronica saw Ceres's eyes were burning green from the skydrome monitors. "My God.. he's such a dick." Ceres complained.

"We arrived first. Take your barking ass and smoke it." Liam said, standing his ground. "No." Raheim replied. "I got orders from high command. I'm sticking around until I see

you find me your culprit. Got it?"

He looked at Liam and Ceres and the rest of the Sword Operators. "So, who's the next one to speak and spew their shit?"

The Sword Operator team exchanged a series of sighs, followed by a scowl of frustration. "Goddammit, Raheim." Liam said.

"Hrmph. If your regiment finds who did it before I do, I'll give you a cookie." He replied, scoffing. "This isn't some game of cops and robbers."

"We're not taking orders from you." Lamora stepped up. "We have an assignment." "Then stay out of Excalibur Blue's way." Sword Operator Raheim replied.

The conversation continued with a series of threats, insults and warnings until finally, Raheim got bored and left. Ceres turned back to her group and Liam. "So what's going on here?" She asked. Liam crossed his arms. "Entire military installation got wiped out. They're calling in multiple regiments, even the Xistress's right hand Elderdragon is inbound." He replied.

"Who could've done this without our notice?" Ceres asked, looking at the devastated infrastructure of nearby buildings and hundreds of craters left in the wake of the landscape.

"I don't know. But whatever did this.. I think it needs to be answered to." Liam continued, staring at his troops as they prepared for the worst. "We're gonna have a lot of eggshells to step on." Raheim was yelling at his own unit not too far away, the echoes of his shouts could practically be heard in the distance, he was disciplining someone for touching some of the damaged scene in the warscape without permission.

Sleeping Bear had been completely decimated, save for a few craters, which looked like where they had been standing in the last several moments, where the entire regiment had disintegrated in an instant, save for the occasional SPARTA S&M rocket or two. Their entire base of operations had been reduced to dust and ash and the remains of any military units and infrastructure was nowhere to be found, all traces of them were completely gone. Veronica was told by one of the field-communications officers, they had lost contact with every single one of their field reporters on the ground when they disappeared, and strangely any data or recordings they kept seemed to be triggering invalid errors.

Veronica had no idea how to even begin describing how bad this situation was going to go. As she sat bored inside the Valiant, men and woman in white labcoats going over the data from what their equipment had been able to observe on the surface. No traces of other warships or airborne infantry were detectable. It was just the SPARTA regiments and the Xi bases annihilated from the skies with no signs of combat. The reports they were able to receive were also scrambled and highly distorted, as if something was transmitting interference to cover up the data. One of the radar workers tapped Veronica's head laying across a desk, telling her to go out personally and report on the ground. When Veronica said standard procedure was to stay interior-bound unless specifically called upon, they replied that the situation was anything but 'standard' right now and they needed field reporters to help document in the wake of such a disaster. She mentioned something about the other SPARTA teams having their own reporters

and not wanting to be 'last for the reports' or some nonsense. Veronica with a grumble, reluctantly got up and made her way out of the Valiant into the warscape, taking a small carriage-sized jetcraft down for a fifteen minute flight towards the surface.

By the time she got down, the girl was surprised to see not one or two, but 9 teams consisting of over 2800 SPARTA troops, their Sword Operators waiting near the center discussing the severity of the matter. The sky above had turned a deep purple, as if night had suddenly overtaken the world, leaving the only sound of insects and a distant cry of some bird or other creature in the dark. The light, which was being reflected off the surface of the moon above, was almost blinding to look at in contrast to the rest of the sky. Veronica's eyes struggled to look up as another ship- a warship and flag vessel arrived, everyone on the ground stopping to get a good look at the Vespa rover that flew out with fluttering chitin, carrying on it the face of intelligence and authority throughout Xi.

Ameisa Blight stepped her boots on the ground, the wings behind her flapping and blowing her hair wildly. The 9 Sword Operators looked at her with both deference and graveness etched on their faces. When Veronica met her eye, Ameisa stopped, giving her a long stare, making a silent question in her eyes, her hands in a questionmark pose. "Oh hey!" Veronica greeted, waving.

Ameisa didn't know this girl, Veronica knew Ameisa all too well. She was the enemy. Ursula had talked about her as one of Xi's most brilliant minds and strategic assets, a threat to their plans. She'd reassured Veronica that any footage or intel on Veronica's appearance or involvement in the doomsday battle prior, she'd taken care of completely. Such were Ursula's abilities over media manipulation and surveillance.

"Who's the newbie?" The Elderdragon asked. She vaguely recognized her, but couldn't say from where. Veronica cleared her throat. "My name's Veronica. You uh, sorta arrested me and my friends a couple years ago, upon getting Becca remember? You were looking for a girl named Thatti Nezura?"

Ameisa scratched her head, the recall coming slowly. "Ah yes. You got quite acquainted with one of our beetletanks, didn't you? You're a journalist now?" She asked.

Veronica looked back and around her, at the massing SPARTA regiments and the Sword Operators with Ameisa and Commander Cade. "Uh.. yeah.. sorta? A field reporter, just helping with logistics and data reporting, of regiment Excalibur Sky, ma’am." She saluted, overly formal as if in a pantomime of a soldier. "Is that okay, Elderdragon Ameisa?"

"Hrmph." The Elderdragon said curtly. "We're currently in the process of uncovering the source of the attacks on our base here. If I don't remember you from when you were with a wanted suspect, then you're alright, though you're going to be getting into the thick of things here." She replied. "Just stay focused." She replied.

Sword Operator Marshal Law of regiment Yamato Storm approached Ameisa. "We're working to get in contact with one of the regiments down south who've just completed a sortie through the Cascade Gateway against Set incursion. The SPARTA teams that went out ahead of

us aren't answering their comms and.. well, everything is pretty fucked there."

He noted, pointing out to the battlefield of ruins and destruction, the Sword Operator teams that were going through the battlefield and the carnage. "What gives, Elderdragon?"

"We don't know who's behind this. Yet." She replied, despite having a few suspicions. "Have technicians installed Sky-network barriers yet to shield the area with a light array? What about aerial armaments and turrets at the ready?" Basic defense, she was asking about.

"We've got that covered. My team started setting up 30 minutes ago 15 KM from here, should be online now." Sword Operator Cassandra of regiment Eversteel Sikanda said, if only her telepresence- the real her was already at the shielding point setting up, she was in the distance where massive mobile nuclear-artillery and shielding projectors could protect the atmosphere- even if the enemy attacked from the exosphere out in space, they could be shielded, and then bombard back with impunity with a Sky-network setup properly. "But I don't like it, especially with our resources so low, due to supply line issues with the Engima on-going. This could get bad quick if we're outnumbered."

Veronica humored that line after overhearing it. 2800 of the most advanced strike-force elite soldiers here and their teams, and they could still be outnumbered or outgunned?

Ameisa reassured her. "Are you ready to go back out? Our units are fully supplied and ready, our technicians are already setting up defenses, we need to find the source of the aggression." Ameisa insisted, not fully in tune of their logistics and supplies due to the haste of being brought out here. She already had her intuition deadset- Ursula and her Starbreakers were here, likely trying to get the better of them. Her pride refused to concede to such a challenge, arguments with the other Elderdragons about coming here still fresh in her mind.

Cade and Veronica followed Ameisa as she left the troops, and she got into her rover, and as soon as it was airborne she turned her head and waved to Veronica. "We're going to check on the shielding operation real quick. You're coming with me, Veronica." She said. "Liam, please gather your team and head to meet me there with "

"How the hell am I going to do that?" Veronica asked. "I'm a reporter, not a soldier." "That's a great way of putting it. You're going to help me find out who did this." Ameisa

replied, the rover picking up the gale of a small tornado in its flight. This planet had a few volatile wind patterns, the sole obstacle for what was otherwise a serene and placid landscape across its terrain.

The Vespa rover ascended with a powerful whine, the chitinous wings beating the increasingly turbulent air into submission. Veronica gripped the sides of her seat, knuckles white under her thin gloves. Below, the devastated landscape sprawled, looking like swiss cheese with the assortment of craters, twisted metal shards and pillars left behind glinting dully in the eerie purple twilight, and the ominous, undisturbed dust coating everything as if meteorites had fallen. The sheer scale of the annihilation was breathtaking and a little frightening. Squads of SPARTA troopers, looking like metallic insects from this height, moved methodically through

the ruins both on foot and mobile infantry units, the sizable technologically enhanced bugs carrying many as escorts. Veronica saw her commander, Sword Operator Liam on such a tank- their helmet lights cutting sharp beams through the gloom in her eyes.

"Impressive, isn't it?" Ameisa Blight's voice cut through the engine noise, cool and analytical. She wasn't looking at Veronica, her gaze fixed on the displays built into the rover's canopy, tracking vectors and radiation signatures. Commander Cade sat silently beside her, a stoic presence.

"It's… thorough," Veronica managed, her voice tight. "Whatever did this didn't leave much behind."

"This isn't even scratching the surface of it." Ameisa said. "There's no sign of any energy weapon usage, photonic residue, nuclear fallout, footprints, shrapnel, not a speck of gunpowder. Whoever did this was able to hide their tracks completely."

"But it's not possible." Veronica spoke.

"Is it?" Ameisa asked. Veronica felt a lump in her throat and was silent. "Precision requires power. Power leaves traces," Ameisa stated flatly.

She handed Veronica a bracelet. "That unit is linked to the Valiant's secure network and the broader SPARTA tactical feed. Standard Journalist Corps multi-spectrum recorder, enhanced for field deployment. Audio, visual, ambient energy fluctuations. Keep it running. Tag significant events, observations. Be concise, be accurate."

Veronica scratched her head. "A-ahh. Sure, but why me? I mean I know it's sorta my job

but.."

Ameisa smirked. "Between you and me.. Field reports tend to be pretty lucky in these

situations. You surviving is everything if we have a little run in with disaster. Don't take this duty too seriously- keep your luck with you."

"Y-yes ma’am." Veronica said, saluting in a way that felt comically improper. Her wide smile felt feigned but plastered her intentions behind them. This was a women that Caleb and Ursula needed to defeat, and they needed Veronica to keep vigilant on her. She could pass a lie detector test from SPARTA questionnaires or take a few of those specialize temporary amnesic pills Ursula gave her if a PSI doctor digged around in her head, but Ameisa Byte? The infamous elderdragon, her presence felt tense, real. Sweat beads dripped down Veronica's head.

"Alright men, let's get our asses in gear!" The Elderdragon Blight said. "We have to find the source of this attack and-"

Her radio comm started to crackle loudly. Seconds later, Sword Operator Casey came in screaming, her voice over the radio and on the verge of unintelligible. "Something's coming!

Report, aerial bombardment inbound!" She yelled, and Ameisa Blight's entire posture stiffened. Ameisa rapidly changed her comm channel to her warship. "Run scans on any attacking

vessels or spacecraft in the atmospheric vicinity." There was a brief pause, then the technician reported back. "Computers ran scans. AI sweeps found nothing."

"No one's coming?" Ameisa asked.

"Not a single thing. No sign of an enemy presence." The radio voice replied. "However projectiles do seem to be flanking regiment Eversteel Sikanda, coming from an unseen point in the atmosphere."

"Then-" Ameisa started to say, before the Vespa's engine cut out, plummeting to the ground. Ameisa's eyes got a little wider, and her brow was creased with concern. "We're being targeted!" She yelled. Veronica's eyes looked out the canopy at the sudden darkness and her heart skipped a beat. The flying chitinous craft was splattered, Ameisa jumping out just in time with hex-symbols at the bottom of her jetboots keeping her afloat. She was holding Veronica closely to her.

"Operator Cassandra! Report status!" Ameisa yelled on her comm. Nothing but static played back.

With a heavy breath, Ameisa slowly levitated down towards the surface and then glided forward, traveling at about 1/3rd the speed the Vepsa did prior with Veronica in tow on her back.

When they arrived on the spot finally, the entire shielding installation and SPARTA regiment had been replaced with numerous craters, and the makeshift buildings, shielding towers and artillery- strangely, had become sliced into literal slices and pried apart. Massive shield projectors, artillery pieces, and command vehicles weren't crumpled or blasted, they were sliced. Cleanly, impossibly. Veronica looked at the remains of one, the horrifyingly precise dissections of multi-ton war machines, its appearance reminding her of stacked, collapsing pancakes at her favorite wafflehouse. "Liveblogging… a massacre?" She said.

"Live-documenting an active investigation in a hostile zone," Ameisa corrected sharply, finally turning her gaze towards Veronica. Her eyes, sharp and intelligent, held no warmth, only assessment. "You wanted field experience. Consider this an accelerated course. Don't become a liability." She announced sharply, her tone less warm and friendly than before when they met earlier. The Elderdragon called into Excalibur Sky's Valiant warship, "Our shielding network was cooked. Bombardment is likely inbound. Spread out into the corners of the planet at variable range. Don't take any risks parking in the sky or atmosphere.." She said, telling them a location. She then made similar calls to the other ships, telling each SPARTA regiment to park at a different corner of the planet. Most of the crew onboard were ship personnel, the Sword, Shield and Spear operators inbound to Ameisa's location within the next 10 minutes. The calls took abit, because the occasional static and disruption caused a slight breakup every few seconds or so.

Veronica cleared her throat. "Far be it from me to question your, expertise, but wouldn't it be safer if all the ships retreated into deep space?" She asked.

Ameisa turned at her, now looking almost hostile.

"What?" She demanded. "We retreat into deep space with our teams and allies still on the surface? Then we'd be sitting ducks while our only escape means are rather than less than 10 minutes away. Flying away out of the planet's range to strand us is exactly the sort of tactic they'd depend on.”

"They would… but we'd be a lot safer if we just, y’know, we left!" Veronica insisted.

Ameisa didn't indulge her any further. She checked the data on her wrist comm's scanners. "Planetary magnetosphere is unstable here. Contributes to the communication difficulties, and these winds are becoming problematic."

By then, the sky above had shattered and a massive fireball was streaking down to the ground, accompanied by the sound of what felt like a small earthquake. The SPARTA regiment nearby, were scrambling for the ground, shielding, and cover. Veronica couldn't keep her legs from shaking, the sheer scale of the bombardment seemed to be larger than any SPARTA armory could provide. She saw a large, black, spider-shaped mass shooting out from the horizon in the distance, a blackness to it like an impenetrable wall of shadow, a long tail of smoke and flame pouring out from it as Sparta teams from behind them soon rushed on A-BSP infantry.

The strange spider-like mass appeared to be wriggling, with thorny spires, tendrils and a million cords coming out of it.

With advanced plasma weaponry and sonic handguns funneling blastwaves, the teams began to shoot and tear through the strange mass, but to no avail. The shape was far too big to destroy or be penetrated- Veronica heard a warbling screeching noise as the Spear Operators began to fight the enemy, struggling to get back to their feet. The sounds of plasma and explosive rounds exploded out from the sky as the teams were caught by the tendril masses in the open ground, caught with nowhere to hide, their Darwin-kevlar armor and advanced shielding powering up against an enemy they had no clue about. Many were being ripped apart, rapidly dissected into imperfect halves and segmented, cleaved slices by a quick whip of the strange black mass of tangles hoisted on a few thin dark wires.

Veronica had seen footage of Techtonids on galanet channels before, but the threat this gigantic tangle imposed seemed unlike anything she could imagine.

"Why isn't it leaving any footprints? No sign of an entrypoint, no sign of energy weapons or any conventional weapon." Ameisa yelled, noticing the enemy appeared resilient to plasma rocketry and most lead spray did little good. Standard plasma and kinetics were barely scratching it. The gravity pulses however seemed to cause structural instability in the mass. It bent, but didn't break. Soon came a titan of a biomecha, a A-BSP shaped like an upright ant with a centaur-like caterpillar thorax with dozens of segments- Veronica awed, she recognized the shape of it, the chitinous, black-grey exoskeleton. A MITAS, numerous infantry and P-lance fighters on its segments firing. The gigantic elongated insect mech, its infantry shooting a variety of gravity distortion-beams from atop it began to route the tangled black mass, its billions of threads bending and twisting in unnatural ways as if shrieking and The mecha's prehensile claws were clamped on to the mass, and with a sudden jerk of the claws, the mass

tore into several pieces, the tendrils and thorny protrusions ripping from the mass, and the mass itself suddenly flipped over. Like a tank running over a horse, its barrage of gravity shots was enough to flatten the strange black tendril monster, until it started to unwind like tape and make a retreat, lengthening itself and soon disappearing into the ground itself like a worm returning to the dirt.

Sword operator Liam soon arrived on the spot. "My team brought some extra firepower, what the hell was that? He exclaimed, having seen the strange mass and the giant MITAS unit of Excalibur Sky duke it out."

Ameisa folded her arms, still keeping her composure. "Status report?"

"Eversteel Sikanda is effectively gone. 287 casualties, including Operator Cassandra. My regiment lost 44 Spear Operators engaging with that entity directly, another 18 wounded. The entity, seemingly retreated underground. Scans show significant geological disturbance along that vector but lost track of it quickly. It attacked from underground about 70 KM beneath the surface in under a minute, that's why we couldn't detect its hit-and-run fast enough."

Lamora stepped forward, examining a slice of a dead comrade through a vehicle chassis- Amélie. He examined her dead torso and had the computerized circuits in his augmented cerebellum ran quick intensive scans and surface observations. "The molecular bonds are severed almost perfectly. Not heat, not mere kinetic force, possibly utilizing a high-frequency resonance blade or focused spatial shearing. Requires technology far beyond standard Set capabilities. Or, something not technological at all.."

Ceres nearby knelt, running a scanner over the ground where one of the tendrils had lashed out. "Still nothing. No biological residue or sample, not even a drop of blood. Whatever attacked us just now, even though it crumpled under our attack, it didn't bleed."

Ameisa stood silent, glaring into the distance. Her eyes were a bit colder and harsher than she had before. She turned, as if hearing a call on the wind. "You've had your field experience, now's time to get in there. Sword operator Law, take squad three, regiment Storm Trident, go clear the area for signs of attackers and establish a defensive parameter." Ameisa said, a quiet air of determination beneath her words. "Veronica, with me." She said, holding out her hand.

Veronica took it.

"We're going to need all our assets we can muster, and it's not going to be easy to do. We're going to go underground- maybe we can find some answers there." She turned to the Sword Operator. "Liam, where's the nearest compound? We had a military base here, so nuclear-proof shelters and research intel stations are a given. We don't have time to setup another planetary Shielding operation so we'll need to bunker down for the moment."

He scratched his head. "About 1.2 kilometers from here."

Veronica took one step back, to look at the entire battlefield and regiment Eversteel Sikanda who'd rushed out to shield the place prior, now permanently demolished and decimated. Many soldiers had been killed or wounded, their bodies lying in a large red and black

puddle, and as if that wasn't bad enough, a few still in their metallic Volsunga Protectorate Chassis, able to protect from a 820mm spatial-penetration shell of over 8 tons, weren't dissected. Veronica bent over and briefly pulled a Spear operator's BPC helmet off, the teal- metal and glossy headplate popping like a lead helmet revealing their face underneath. The former man, while not bifurcated had suffered some bizarre worse fate.

His entire face had become dried up and desiccated, skin mottled with sickly grey hues, cheeks caved in, mouth a hole with dried blood on the sides in rust-like red patches, and his eyes like two hollow black sockets. With his skin, it looked as if his entire visage had been scoured away. His skull, still beneath his skin with teeth and jaw bones still present but the eye sockets- that's where his eyeballs had gone. The man looked like an old dried mummy Veronica might see at a civilian museum.

Ameisa and the Sword Operators took notice, they slipped helmets off others of similar armor and found the same, horrible appearance. "What the fuck? How is that possible?" Liam gasped. Veronica had no idea, and neither did anyone else.

"Mind your decorum, officer." Ameisa told him. She leaned in, already analyzing, lights and symbols flowing around her wrist comm, her eyes already calculating. "Not a drop of hydrogen. Hemoglobin remains but, even his blood has been dried out. Cellular structure intact but completely devoid of intracellular fluid membranes. He's been sucked dry." Veronica's mind flashed back to how Ursula had once said about their enemy's enforcer, capable of 'Sucking the life from them like the undead', the old phrase and words haunting her as she remembered. "How is that possible?" Veronica asked, trying to pose the right questions a reporter should.

"I don't know, but it's not Set, and it's not us." Ameisa said. Veronica watched as many of the Spear and Volsunga armored soldiers were inspected, but the outcome was always the same. There was no life left within them, completely sucked away for the latter. Ceres moved from body to body, her scanner humming uselessly. "No residual weapon signatures matching the effect. No toxins or pathogens, no nanites, no biological agents detected. It's, perfectly clean.

Just like the slicing." She scratched her cheek. "The span and penetration of their fibers must not have been enough to get through the BPC armor on quick notice, so they took, whatever ulterior method."

The team regathered, an air of dread now clouding over the team. "What do we know about them?" Ameisa asked.

"Not enough." Said Ceres. "A bunch of black threads coming out of the ground, came out and killed a bunch of our crew."

"We know that the gravity pulses distorted and sheared them, so we know they can be affected by physics. Anything acting in the domain of physics, can be understood rationally and countered." Ameisa replied, trying to restore some confidence.

"Then we can hold off against them if they come back? Going underground might not be ideal if it has this attack method, we won't be able to utilize such weapons in an enclosed space,

it'll collapse structure integrity, won't it?" Liam asked.

"I want to say, but the gravity pulse shearing the tendrils is one thing, but something to the risk of dissecting a bugtank's shielding and defenses down to the point of drying it out from the inside out is something completely different." Ceres added, a touch of fear edging on her tone.

Ameisa finally turned around to face the Sword operator teams, 8 of them awaiting her leadership. "Me and the sword operators will head to the research outpost and go underground. We'll run reconnaissance operations, and just in case, keep mobile ZAHP nuclear rocketry- stations online in case we need a big wham." She turned to Liam and spoke for a moment. "Take squad one and two of the jousting P-Lances, along with squads one through twelve of Spear team and set up a perimeter 10 KM wide, 3 KM deep along the eastern flank of our base. We cannot setup shielding but we can arrange a distance to observe if bombardment resumes. A- BSPs and Spear only. Sword team leader Liam, report to my position once you're out of the area." She said, holding out her hand to Veronica. "It's going to be rough, this way." She said.

Veronica took her hand. Her heart still felt a touch of wariness, but Ameisa Blight- she was the Elderdragon, the most feared tactician in the entire galaxy. She had to trust her instincts.

Veronica followed her to the research outpost by way of the team boarding a warship's small- transport vessel. Ameisa and the Sword operators discussed amongst themselves, a few of the officers taking their helmets off in the heat, but Veronica's face, was a little different. They had cold military looks, buzzcuts, sweat and callouses, but unlike others she was completely bare- faced. A reporter, still wearing lipstick, her jumpsuit armor more like a shiny set of model wear than a military-grade armament. She felt like eyecandy, woefully out of place among the brass.

A moment later, the Sword Operators were suited up, getting out the vessel and heading off to the research facility, which on the surface had a small base of about 1200 people- homes and living quarters, ration facilities, radar outposts. The equivalent of a small town. "We're going to head underground, I want this compound fully secure. I want all its resources, the command center, scanners and everything. Get our hands on all the data and tech we can, set up our own defenses and-" "Miss Byte, you're going to want to take a look at this!" Shield Operator of regiment Star Crusade yelled, the others gathering quickly at the spectacle in the outpost. The quaint, dim little post looked like a ghost town, not a soul to be heard.

When they stumbled across the bodies of its residence, they'd been desiccated the same way the armored soldiers prior had, skin shrunk into their bones and cracked away like dried- out mummies and corpses, the same, withered, horrific appearance.

"Looks like whoever did this, they've got a 'bone' to pick w-"

Ameisa shot her bolter pistol at the tall and stalk-like Shield Operator Henson, barely missing their leg intentionally, reminding herself to order their demotion later.

The Elderdragon took a few steps back, examining. Withered and pale, shrunken. "Veronica," She said, her voice colder, and her voice holding a touch more command. "Contact through the Valiant SPARTA command center. Get their data logs, find out anything you can. I

want any info on anomalies and para-threats we have on file available to us right now. Maybe we can find something matching this description." She said, holding onto her weapon, and the rest of her team did the same. Veronica's eyes grew a bit wide, but shuffled off, took out a holographic inteligista reader from her purse and got to work, typing in midair like some kind of techno secretary.

She entered the Valiant's military-access encryption systems attempting to access the data that Ameisa requested. Red error screens with 'Invalid credentials!' popped up, causing the reporter to grumble. She entered the passcodes she recalled from her temp dossier upon gaining this job, a quest for her life as far as her reputation went. The same error flashed, like a red traffic light telling her to stop. A third attempt, Veronica now disheartened as she was denied further.

"The password is 'Aceway-76.'" A feminine voice mentioned in passing. Veronica entered it and gained immediate access, enabling her find what she needed and reroute the information to Ameisa's comms. The voice said 'Nice job, new to the troops?' in an almost smarmy tone behind her, a hand gently rubbing on her shoulder. Veronica turned around.

What she saw, she couldn't quite comprehend. It was some type of girl, whom upon looking at she could recall had short blond hair, a mint-green hoodie and purse with star- decorations over her navy-blue glossy suit that matched her own. And yet, despite this vain girl's appearance she couldn't physically see it, as if her senses were only a passing of memory or recall.

When she looked at the girl, a miasma of black scribbles and geometrical censoring shapes wibbled and wobbled around her, obscuring her visage. Veronica twisted her head across her shoulders like an upwards pendulum, and when she looked, her eyes darted across her body, her head- it looked like a mass of black muck and miasma. She took one step back, and one step forward. The black obscurity grew and shrunk around Veronica's perspective. "What is this?

Who are you?!" She demanded, confused how she knew what this girl looked like and yet could not actually perceive her. Was it some sort of trendy perception filter, she'd heard about those in the alt scenes, and it was a popular thing to use 3D Holo-filters to make yourself more beautiful, another gender or identity, give yourself a canine's head, a famous celebrity, etc. If this were some fashion statement, the girl was dressed up perceptually like the least fashionable, trendy person possible as a gaseous black void. The reporter squinted.

"Alsatt Rosales. I'm a field reporter like you, I take it you haven't been doing this for long?" Alsatt told her. "No, really, it's nice to meet you! SPARTA can be such a sausage fest." Alsatt replied, a sly grin to her face that Veronica could 'tell but not see.' Still disorientated but wanting to appear frigid, Veronica decided at least greet this new companion. "I'm Veronica, but uh, you can call me Vero." She said, attempting to shake the disorienting feeling when she looked at this strange void.

"Veronica huh? Sounds like a supermodel." Alsatt said, texting on her phone chat array. A traditional cellphone, not a wrist comm or any subtle encrypted technology, Veronica found that odd, the fact they allowed such devices here seemed suspicious. "I'm such a narcissist though, I love my own name a little more. So, Alsatt it is. No funny nicknames." She said,

leaning in closer to Veronica and taking another look at her body, fingers wiggling and trickling down Vero's backside with sleek rubber fingertips.

The reporter felt goosebumps run down her spine. The feeling of being inspected, touched and felt made Veronica twitch. "Mind your manners, please."

"Oh? Who? Me? I thought you'd like it." Alsatt said, having looked away from Veronica to her, a bit defiant.

"Your name, rank, and assignment?" Veronica asked, staring down at her and giving an uneasy smile.

"Oh, right! I'm a Special field reporter on supply logistics, SPAR-2 aka regiment Valkyrie Phoenix." Alsatt said, giving a flick of her short blond bowlcut.

Three of the other Spartan teams soon arrived at their location. "We've carefully monitored the entire perimeter, if anything happens, we'll have guns at the blazing." Ameisa said, having arrived with the other Sword Operators. They'd brought their helmets back on, glass visors down. The sight of them with visors on felt somehow calming, Veronica, even if she noticed her fear growing around Ameisa and the team, their very presence somehow giving the reporter a better sense of protection.

The Sword Operators soon turned their head-mounted scanners on, Veronica turned off her holographic tablet, and the team left in search for more intel.

On their way, Veronica kept an eye out on Alsatt, finding herself a little annoyed with her. "Why do you keep looking at me like that? It's weird." Veronica said, her heart still uneasy about the miasma-void around her, or how she knew somehow Alsatt was looking at her. Alsatt soon turned back to her, a few strands of black scribbling still moving around her outline.

"Like what? You're so sexy I can't take my eyes off of you." Alsatt said, her expression playful, grinning and biting her lip. Veronica felt an instinct to slap her, but the thought of hitting the girl disgusted her.

"Byte ma’am! All sword operators, look!" From out of the corner of the wood, a ghoul of the great beyond appeared, this time not as a spider monster or Cephalopod but on two feet. The figure appeared like a slender woman's silhouette made of black threads and wrapping. The threads were not thick nor strong, but they moved with a will of their own, flowing and wrapping around her head like strands of hair. The threads seemed to follow the movements of its carrier's head, as if attached to some great obsidian puppet master. When Veronica looked at the tension this woman or whatever she was brought, she felt herself tense up.

The dark mummified figure's started to glint and glow bright, as if energy were charging up. Veronica shivered, she remembered this one from the X-Dominion, the enforcer of X-Night. But she couldn’t say any of that or mention it, she knew information had to be tight from her lips.

"Cover your damn eyes, all Sword and shield operators!" Ameisa yelled, scanning the

energy readings of heat and ultraviolet intensity building around them. Ameisa took a few steps back with Veronica. From the figure's eyes, a blast of light shot out and rapidly engulfed them. Closing their eyes did nothing- when the light died down, a pulsing message appeared in mid- air, flashing on all their retinas in some ancient language.

 

 

 

מנא מנא תקל ופרסין

 

The neural-chips in Jovi, one low-ranked Spear Operator translated the meaning until it was readable. All of them read it at once.

Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin

The words 'Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin' flashed in all their eyes. Every Spear Operator took aim. Their hand hit their trigger, firing their weapons.

A great burst of projectiles formed a lightshow that lit up the surroundings.

The figure- a mummified woman did not flinch this time or retreat. Electronic assault Bolt-rifles, plasma coils, pulse-lances, nuclear grenades- all did nothing. She twitched like a training dummy being pelted with foam, barely tap-dancing They all shot and shot and shot- their bullets harmlessly bounced off the sides of the figure, and her threads were cut, severed and sheared but grew back and extended and reconnected as quickly as any damage was delivered. The thread-woven figure's figure seemed to take in each gun's shot, absorbing the light and dissipating it with a shimmer and glow of green, red and blue tones. Lasers pelted her and then faded as quickly as they were shot, leaving her no more scorched than before.

When she'd had enough of SPARTA delivering their feast of volleys, she wasted no time and refused to let them go for seconds. Black tape and tendrils from her body flowed and swirled about her, wrapping around their limbs. Twelve Spear Operators were caught in her grip, they clutched at their bodies, trying to break free. She thrashed about, moving back and forth as she lasso'd more each second and swung them back and forth against the ground, dragging one until their Pulse-lance cannons clanged and sparks of electricity were sent into the air. "Gah!" They cried as their lifeforce was quickly drained to a husk and then tossed into the air.

Their heads cracked and skulls splintered, their guts, organs and blood flashed down the crater that their bodies made. Their weapons all were flung into the air, ricocheted off the figure's body, falling back down with a dull thud and clink. Each shot had seemed to have little effect.

The black mummy's eyes, or where eyes would be expected to be glowed red with dark ambience, and she opened her mouth, bandages falling away revealing a set of metallic black teeth in her mouth. Soon, the black spider-like threads began to open her mouth and rapidly

stabbed a dozen more soldiers, penetrating steel armor plates like they were nothing. She twisted her neck and head, curving the threads and tossing the group aside effortlessly.

The figure then began to lasso more with her dark threads, moving rapidly like a berserker as they did.

Ameisa and her comrades took cover behind a building. Rapidly communicating with the nearby MITAS tank, she ordered to rush in for support, the gravity pulses from before able to at least slow it down.

Veronica had begun to panic, feeling her heart thumping and trying to take deep, calm breaths. Ameisa's face now wore a stern face of defiance and battle, as if she was ready for anything. Their enemy began to morph and shift shape. They watched the Spear Operators be lassoed and killed, and watched the now Cephalopodoid-mummy-like figure move on, the threads around her pulsing and glinting. It moved and moved, a great black monstrosity, twisting, turning and throwing her victims to the air, hanging and choking many by the neck. The sweat bead down Ameisa's brow was met with the trembling of the ground. The massive MITAS soon arrived, mobile and armed, all its segments wriggling like a centipede.

A mass of black threads burst from the ground behind them, wrapping around and encasing many of the soldiers inside a shell. The entity turned around, its head looking at the MITAS who stormed down and trampled it. As it slid back, Gravity Pulses rapidly bombarded and flattened her and with each thud of their feet, a new wave pancaked her body.

They put their arm up, unwrapping it into long dark threads that shot into the sky briefly as if shooting a flare. A signal to the sky.

Seconds later, something flaming rocketed from the sky and accelerated into the MITAS, piercing them with an avalanche of kinetic energy that transformed the insect mount into an expanding fireball. Rocks from the sky fell as hypersonic missiles and rapidly showered it. The impact caused a shockwave which blew dozens of Spear and Shield operators back, shattering nearby buildings in the aftermath.

"W-what? Aerial bombardment!" Ameisa said, rapidly analyzing the trajectory and origin of the kinetic attack.

The mummy-like entity soon began to dismantle the rest of the team, one segment at a time. Their threads weaved around the flaming screeching MITAS, others still cocoooned from their body and suspended in mid-air, and began to constrict around the entire unit. Tightening until they dissected the mount like salami, the threads penetrated and permeated, shearing and cutting it down, a great metallic mess dropped to the ground as the entity and Ameisa watched on at the gigantic infantry choked and then cut to ribbons, the metallic black wires from the entity's body slicing it apart.

The mummy-like figure then spun around and lassoed Sword Operator Vito Vallejo. She was caught in her arms, spun around, held with a strand of thread and then flung into the air, and hung upside down like a human chandelier.

"Gh!" The soldier said, wrenching and twisting. Her fingers started to go numb and pale, the skin peeling and flaying from her hands. She could feel her strength leaving her, her arms getting heavy. The threads were beginning to squeeze the air out of her lungs and cut her. She struggled and struggled as the thread began to cut her head and twist her neck around, then it slowly started to cut off her face and cut into her body, threading into her very flesh like black stitches, their skin pricked and punctured continually along their their spine, neck and chest, foreign forces invading their conscience. Inside her body's autonomy was hijacked on the cellular level, the entity forming protein chains and amino acids unique to the entity's physiology until its own organic chemical composition had infected the Spartan's own. She started to slip into unconsciousness and a daze of darkness. Her eyes closed and the threads slowly began to twitch under control of some unspeakable calAmeisa. The mummy girl dropped her, along with the dozen cocooned others. Once on their feet, they got up eerily, a crack and twist with each step like a walking corpse.

The compromised soldiers began to lurch and march back, they picked up any nearby gun and started shooting at their own former comrades.

"Dammit! Enemy has compromised them! Fire with extreme prejudice!" Ameisa yelled.

They all took aim, returning fire to the SPARTA teams. The other Spartan Operators in formation turned and turned their guns on their former allies, and the Spartan's who'd shot them with them moments ago were now firing shots at their regiments with lethal precision.

Veronica noticed the strange woman's eyes began to glow a strange blue and red. The entity marched ever forward. By now Spark Operators from backup regiment Barricadia Barrage began to arrive. The Operators, known to specialize in shock-and-assault heavy artillery tactics brought a Photonic Hammer Array (PHA weaponry) - a hard penetrating projectile weapon capable of using electrostatic charges to unleash shot of photons that could punch holes even through Akura units once launched with precision. Operators stationed a large beetle-like turret in front of Ameisa's forces while they provided cover from the back flank, opening fire at the mummy and her zombified soldiers.

"Cover your ears!" Ameisa yelled. The Spark Operators, seven needed to operate a single Photonic artillery weapon worked at calculating the vector's proper trajectory, and aim, a weapon requiring knowledge of physics from advanced ballistic experts to properly setup the sophisticated offensive.

The photon-beam weapon's lances shot and sheared right through the black threads. Ameisa and Veronica took cover. The creature and cocooned soldiers soon fell into the ground like rain, their corpses and organs scattered across the outpost. The Photonic Hammer's operators reloaded, pulling a large cannon-like aluminum carapace from their transport and aimed it, setting up sights and scopes. A large projectile came out, zooming and accelerating towards the entity as she turned and turned her head, and slowly approached with eyes flashing blue and red. It was as if she was watching for the shot, turning and turning her body, watching it coming and then, the projectile came-

Piecing and over-penetrating her body, sending her piling 20meters back in a gigantic firey crater. The ground shook, the photon beam cutting a trench on the ground like it was mere

sand. The Photonic Hammer shot a second time, and then a third, Ameisa and the other Spartans watching on. Ameisa ran over, cautiously with three other Sword Operators in tow. They looked down, the mummy laid motionlessly around what appeared to be a cracked, skeletal rotting corpse underneath.

Her threads had withered away, the corpse under looking like a great skeleton sheath, a rotting body of desiccation and dust, a long-lost ancient tomb. The threads had cut and cut her apart, Ameisa scanning the ancient bony skeleton within.

"No vitals?" Her scanning apparatus noticed some particular oddities- This body had its organs already removed, noticeably its heart and brain. There was some type of metal or alloy wrapped around its bones, and a strange and ancient metallic-black liquid that trickled out of it as well into an oily puddle. "Target kill confirmed." Ameisa said as the corpse lied motionless.

"Ma'am it looks like it's trying to regenerate. Can you do anything?" Alsatt said, the black blood seeping slowly like a puddle. It was soon covered in a layer of dust as the liquid slowly seeped away from its body.

Veronica looked around at the mummy and the soldiers who'd shot at their former allies, all their heads cracked. Injured Spartans were all around her, their faces blank and vacant, their eyes empty and dead like a puppet, corpses in their own bodies.

At the crater site, the skeleton didn't get back up, but the black liquid began to congeal and elongate, forming the shiny metallic black obsidian threads and bandages once again. They were soon draped and tied together, rising in the air and encircling each other to form the volume silhouette of the woman it was before, until its arms raised and it marched forward and attacked again as merely a series of bandaged threads with no body inside.

The Spartan Spark-Operator teams had reload and shot it and shot it, the ground whirling a seismically massive shift with every blast. But with each hit the mummy grew back the puncturing in its threads, with nothing solid inside and its threads seemingly able to move independently- the teams had realized whatever they were fighting, was not the skeletal body it used earlier as a prop. They were fighting these odd bandages themselves. The threads began to disperse and rapidly snake their way to the Spark Operators, attempting to dismantle their operation with her web weaving.

Shield Operator Puree Romieux tried to run, she was caught offguard by the bandages, they wrapped around her entire body and rapidly muffled her screams. Others could see her flesh drying out in real time, she puked out a slurry of blood and organs, becoming little more than another corpse. When she finished whirling out her insides, the entity took control of her limbs and quickly peeled off her skin like an unnecessary package, tearing it all apart and leaving their skeletal frame to be her physical support.

The group started preparing the Hammer again, keeping her at bay with Shock-Burst Cannons- a single hit could bludgeon a Highfleet Arachno-Infantry of 20m high and annihilate heavy infantry with heavy solidified electric charges. They all hit her point blank, the first battering her.

She took cover from her threaded body, retreating her arms into her body and twirling her head side to side like a ballerina dancing and dispersing her form, avoiding a barrage of shots, and then concentrating her hollow arm- a strange reddish-brown coloration spreading like rust on it overtop Romieux’s former arm, then a shift to silvery chrome. The thundering blue bolt a Spark Operator shot from a Shock-Burst Cannons went directly at her, she blocked it with her arm alone. She continued to march forward slowly without stopping, a heavy dread as she took her time closing the distance.

"She's too close, at this range we won't be able to get a second shot in or get aw-" A Spark Operator yelled.

"Do as I say and fire! We need to keep her busy!" Sword Operator and leader of regiment Barricadia Barrage ordered, her short pink hair unkempt from the stress as she tried to hide her internal squirming.

With the PHA weaponry reloaded, the seven unit crew pulled the release and unleashed the ballistic weapon. The Photonic Hammer array's turret pulverized the air with the scent of burnt overheating silicone as the Sword Operator pulled the trigger, the massive lance of photon fire coming down upon her. A great lance of a blinding silver flash and electric current shot into the center of the mummy, whose shiny metallic texture coated her body like a pearlescent balm and blocked it completely. The recoil of the photonic blast was calculated too hastily, or not at all rather- it obliterated the weapon and gravely injured two operators in the process, the hammer shooting a silver bolt at the mummy and crushing a 14m span around the ground, catching several soldiers in the flattened impact.

The Sword Operator's shields and armor shattered from this electromagnetic attack, she and half her team lay with shattered bones and ligaments internal organs pulped as half of their body was crushed from the photonic blast. The ballistic photon weaponry of that magnitude wasn't meant to be used at any distance less than 90yards away, and now it'd destroyed its entire operating crew.

The mummy however, stood unscratched from the magnitude of the attack. When the smoke and dust cleared, Ameisa and the the other SO's looked at the mummy like a destroyer of worlds.

Ameisa's analysis had just completed two sources of intel for her- firstly, the origin of the earlier bombardment and secondly, the composition of mummy's bandages and 'body'. The same as the Starbreaker from the doomsday battle prior.

"Impossible. It's.." The Elderdragon's glare turned severe. "Strong Interaction material." Ameisa and her comrades looked on with grim realization. A material as strong and dense as a neutron star. “But that would mean..” Her suspicions were correct. This thing was connected to the Starbreakers, or atleast had the means of replicating their abilities.

The mummy soon got up slowly, walking calmly like a ballerina as she dismantled the wreckage from the attack with black threads, dismantling and rearranging the metal of the area and the destroyed soldiers. Corpses became her zombies. Metallic and industrial components

became rewritten as she hoisted her threads not only rewriting organic cellular chemistry, but silicone and circuits as if soldering microchips and welding metal in tandem, forming new technology, new guns, new armor, updating the visors and technology the SPARTA elite soldiers used and gifting them to her growing army.

Ameisa was finally starting to put together the scope of the enemy they faced- their bandages, it seemed weren't truly bandages at all but stands of some kind of informational overload. The usage of Strong Interaction material, she figured was likely a mere replica of Black Rock Road's indestructible field. It had a strong field but lacked the sheer physical strength of it or the malleability of her prior Cephalopod-like attacks. The hijacking of physical bodies, she concluded was the bandages taking the properties of organic carbon and protein polymers, manipulating their atoms and turning them into the mummy's own cellular chemistry. Carbon, silicone, steel, tissue paper, plasma liquid, imitations of flesh, they seemed capable of transmuting into any material or composition. The bandages themselves were likely not even its true body but rather a mere property it deployed, making them effectively eternal. An ancient millennium soldier in a modern land, fighting beyond the limits of sense where anything was possible, where even a scientifically advanced and elite fighting force would be tactically out matched. No Spartan Operator could ever survive such an onslaught with this chameleon-like ability.

All of this dawned on Ameisa as she watched the bandages grow in volume, lengthening the arms, multiplying her reach until she was hoisted high up in the air and moving slowly like a spider across the battlefield. When they finally reached a hundred feet long, the threads began to move faster and faster and the entity got up and got up, towering over the outpost. The Spark Operators were nowhere to be seen, the entity had used them as well, taking every piece of metal from the turrets and the PHA's weapon, and the metallic black bandages had reconstituted the mighty Hammer for itself, rebuilding it from its bandages on its 'backside' high in the air and aiming it down. "RETREAT!" Ameisa yelled.

With a doozy of an ear-piercing shot, their enemy fired down at them shaking the earth.

Dozens of Sparta soldiers caught off-guard in the blast wave from the Hammer's impact and were pulverized by the attack, the crater it created was a 30 meters wide, bodies reduced to squashed mince. Ameisa and her surviving comrades, three others, jumped on a jetpack and hovered out from the crater with Sword Operator Cody-Carter at the controls. They hovered above the crater, and watched the mummy take notice, sending thousands of threads into the air like tentacles to attempt to grab those fleeing- 14 caught her in the latch and reeled her up like a worm.

She soon dropped back to the ground after a few seconds of struggle, returning to a humanoid volume and squeezed the captives until they were soupy blood and gore dropping into puddles with a CRNNCSSSSCCCH.

The mummy soon took stretched its 'legs' back up spinning like a carousal and elevated on high with its own thread. It stretched and grew high, high and higher still. On its long stilted bandages, it stood up over 1250m tall- higher than anything built on this world and looked to see where Ameisa and the group were flying away.

Already, Ameisa was fleeing, this operation to capture Ursula and the Starbreakers had been abandoned in her eyes until she had new intel. Veronica was on the back of Shield Operator Lana from regiment Avalon Destiny who'd arrived in a Mk. VII Sparthawk to meet her. Lana hovered over the battlefield atop her armor and began to communicate with another MITAS unit on a separate Regiment at her command. "Elderdragon Ameisa said to disperse. Ping me your location. Over." She ordered.

Suddenly, the sky appeared to set on fire as a projectile of some kind hit Ameisa- phasing past her and causing a massive ignition burn roasting the forest like a mountain-sized campfire.

As she flew away, Ameisa had unleashed a little device- a drone with holographic capabilities. The mummy was one-half of their dreaded situation, the other half was arguably as big an obstacle. She watched as the tall-towering entity signaled with her hands above and just as she predicted, a small flaming streak came from the sky and targeted the hologram. Based on the direction and speed, Ameisa's intuition and analysis was correct.

The attack had rained down from the moon.

Atop the surface pacing back and forth between curiosity and boredom, was the Starbreaker Satsuma. Her vision was looking upon the surface of the world, the group scattering like ants. She squinted abit. "Oh, they're scattering using the forests as cover. That's rather clever." She rolled her eyes. "Ursula said she wants the Elderdragon captured alive, but, if she can die that easily she's hardly worth my time. Well..." She picked up a few pebbles from the moon, slung back her metalized arms as the gears and electronic augmentations turned her shoulders and wrist and she threw the pebble forward, manipulating gravity to send it down at relativistic speeds. "..Talon Gun it is."

Above the forest the surface below shook like an earthquake as the streaking dots of bright lights came down and impacted the planet, the sky above rippled and undulated with a blinding light which caused sizable mushroom clouds across the planet’s surface. As the light disappeared, millions of tiny sparks cascaded out from the sky, a sky filled with a starry haze, and what had been a bright blue sky a few minutes ago had now blotted out in darkness with the light leaving in its place with smog. The forest below was now rapidly catching on fire, burning in a great inferno and the sky above was darkened with a haze of falling stars.

Ameisa and her comrades flew high above as the sky above blotted out from a great storm, rocks the size of golf balls falling like hail. Each carrying kinetic qualities that produced enough displaced material and energy for deformation, fracturing, and heat that pre-space faring civilizations could not replicate it without the discovery of uranium and atomic science.

Swept in a great rainstorm and tidal wave of stones, the rocks struck the surface violently like meteors, creating massive sinkholes in their wake, the rocks blasting out of the ground like rockets, the land shaking and quaking under the violent impact of only a few pounds of rock.

"Are they planning on burning down the whole forest?" Ceres asked.

"The enemy must have specific target requirements, this is them holding back.." Ameisa

remarked. "They know we can use the planet's environment as cover from their vision, so are trying to make that inconvenient for us."

The detonating stones began to accumulate as the fire grew worse. Veronica looked up. It was a massive cloud of the darkest black dust, as thick as a storm but completely devoid of particles and air, spreading out like a tsunami, slowly but surely covering the entire sky above and below with an unnatural black smog.

"The air is getting hard to breathe.." Lana said as she flew them away in her airborne armor, landing with Veronica and trying to get away from the smoke.

Ameisa received a report from four elite Regiments: SPARTA teams Desolate Vanguard, Infernal Destruction, Excalibur Blue and Frostborne Killers were arriving and confronting the bandage entity that'd taken out over a hundred soldiers previously. The four regiments were each composed of 105Spartan Spear Operators, 2 Shield Operators, 4 Sword Operators and 11 Knife Operators.

"Get us on the line to our backup regiments, this area is getting too hot to fight in or engage." Ameisa instructed, the air getting hard to breathe and the smoke spreading from the rocks and fire as the kinetic detonations rocked the contintent from above.

"..Ma'am we just lost signal." Ceres said. The static crackled around.

 

 

The Sword Operator Kosmere from Regiment Infernal Destruction took out a self- injector syringe and stabbed his neck, confronting the bandaged enemy ahead. "Stand back." He told the others, his veins already beginning to bulge. Infernal Destruction was known for its dabbling in biological warfare and weaponization, the Operators specialized in their augmented biology and genetic abilities and often could use viral infection to augment their soldiers with greater capabilities. Kosmere quickly injected the cocktail of viral and microscopic augmentations, his system quickly changing to adapt the virus inside him. The Shield Operators looked on as his system shifted, muscles growing to superhuman as he gained sharp talons, bestial proportions and a black plumage out his back which sprouted feathers. He leapt forward, stabbing the mummy.

They attempted to reinforce with a strong interaction layer- too late. Before the silvery lacquer came they tore at her arms and bandages to shreds, Kosmere stabbing directly into her chest and causing an explosion of black ichor to spread inside, his claws and feathers growing, and arms lengthening like a slithering cobra.

"Kosmere’s gene-mods can adapt to anything, we've got this!"

A virus, the same bioagent that gave Kosmere incredible strength could act as a nerve toxin and destructive celluar weapon that poisoned and lethally wounded others. The mummy seemed to only shudder slightly as the ichor dripped through their bandages and the celluar, muscular membranes on the microscopic. It slowed them for a moment, until they adapted.

Then with two Strong-Interaction enforced arms, they swung sloppily at Kosmere, sending his

limbs flying off as if they were made of soap bubbles. The Shield Operators watched as they tore him limb from limb, his head ripped apart from his body

The other Spear operators started unleashing toxic gas, bullets laced with viral agents and biochemical warfare, all manner that would cause even an Akura unit to wither in agony and foam with paralysis. Every last one was a brief annoyance, a puzzle in carbon and chemistry that the mummy's body reconfigured and healed swiftly against without delay. "They’re adapting to it! To all of it!" Kosmere's lieutenant Jasmith said. Once he was deheaded and delimbed, Kosmere began to regrow like a salamander, his head and arms reforming from where they'd been depleted, regenerating completely. "But she's not the only one that can do that! Infernal Destruction excels at this art."

Kosmere was soon fully resurrected and smirked, The Shield Operators watched in horror as he grew even larger, doubling in size and then thrashing the mummy like a child. While they couldn't harm her steely strong force-coated bits, she was weightless for him to shake around, his body a full grown muscle hulked out shape of an osprey with large wings, lobsterlike pincers and a serpent's tail. A creature of pure muscle able to rip apart concrete and steel beams.

Annoyed, the mummy began to spread their Strong-Interaction field across their entire bandaged surface, until they became a silhouette of pure metallic surface. Kosmere ragdolled her back and forth, but even in the devil's hands she could not be scratched. He created sparks as his pincers attempted to dissect and crack her, causing them to bleed and break. When she grew annoyed, she grew a flurry of silvery bandages that wrapped around him and flipped him onto the dirt. Hopping onto his chest, her hand turned a bright pure-white, light filling him up. Rapidly, information began downloading into his genetic sequence, a series of mutations changing his physiology- mandibles, carapace, bony plates, scales, additional limbs, spiked tails, amphibious pads, fins and tentacles, cancerous muscle growths and dermal black-steel- hardened exoskeletons.

While the mummy stayed sleek, immaculate in a single aluminum-like texture within her shiny graceful form, Kosmere evolved to an amorphous blob of horror, a chimera of hundreds of different species and mutations attempting to survive the overload she inflicted upon him with her infection. Every body part she'd damaged, he'd transformed into something else she could never fight against, but he could make no use of either. Soon his sentience was lost and body an unrecognizable menagerie of flesh and mismatched parts, unable to even move his limbs as he'd become a bizarre monstrosity.

The light from her hand spread out to her entire arm and took a deep red molten glow raising to 1800000 degrees. Kosmere started to melt into soup. The Sword Operator had liquified. The last adaptation against her heated attack was to petrify, becoming a graceless approximation of her metalized form, a statued replica of her, before soon cracking apart.

The mummy pulled him inwards and opened her jaw- hollow and empty. A hole to nowhere.

She soon reeled him into her belly in one last bite and let him pass down the rest,

entering her- where he went, no one knew. But that was the last they saw of Kosmere.

She turned around. Excalibur Blue had summoned numerous chitterling Firefly units flying in the sky, armaments and shock-blaster turrets on a biological exoskeleton on gigantic airborne beetles, they'd landed 15m above the ground and fired everything on her. Payloads of plasma and napalm caused the surroundings to explode but did little to her. Her bandages started to twirl like fans, becoming advanced and sophisticated jets which blew winds at 522 mph, sending them flying back along with chunks of land and trees as if a hurricane had hit them head-on. One attacked from behind- she used the bandages to wrap around the gigantic firefly’s like a python, strangling them into pulp and shredding them with her own nanoparticles until they disintegrated.

The others were simply swept away in the winds and hurricane force winds that she created.

As she looked around the other SPARTA teams, her bandages reconfigured, wrapping up her arms and body and creating a metallic coating that spread across every inch of her body.

One of the regiments, Frostborne Killers prepared their Knife Operators- natural assassins skilled in the art of eliminating high-priority threats. Several using speed enhancing suits began to accelerate with the power of Cascade cognitive-RUSH, fast enough to clock at Mach 50 without overheating their nanochip processors. Cascade RUSH, a drug that infused their bodies with pure Cascade energy, their muscle augmentations recharging like lightning strikes or a battery on every strike to the ground- a muscle-augmented version of the Spartan Operator moving beyond perception, like blurs.

They rapidly ran all around their opponent, zig-zagging in an unpredictable pattern- like a thousand lightning bolts. Their movement resembled an infinite chess board with an uncountable number of moves, their feet landing on every possible square. With the speed augmentation and the power of Cascade RUSH, their movements were a blur to the eye and were like a wind, as their feet and body left after images, the target was no match against their speed.

They struck her thousands of times with electroblades sharp and precise enough to cut Atlas Steel. After endless blows, they looked upon her and realized, they had not yet drawn any blood or left a single dent on her metallic surface, afterimages flickering like ghosts. With every strike, the entity remained unscratched.

Satsuma perched on a lunar ridge, hurling another stone into the gravity sling. "Pathetic," she muttered as the projectile streaked toward the planet. “Blight’s hiding in the trees like a roach." She took several more stones and tossed them down, Ameisa's advanced UIs and neural-chips alerting her of the dangers from the numerous sensors and satellites out in space as the moon stones fell. Even with their large fireball radius, Ameisa stayed in the air to avoid immobility and the gravity bound shots.

At their current speed, her tossed stone would only take fifteen seconds to twenty reach the planet. However that was more than enough time for Ameisa's augmented brain and sharp

reflexes to speed her boosters in her rocketpack and fly dozens of miles from the impact at highspeed, avoiding the planet-shaking detonations. Satsuma had sent down a barrage of over 1365 of these space-stones over the course of the afternoon, purposefully slowing down her pitch and lowering the momentum and velocity to pace her razing of the world below, each one of them still striking the surface and generating a massive wave of earthquakes, blasting craters in the planet and causing tidal waves around each shore and turning much of the surface to rubble.

The five Knife Operators of regiment Frostborne were tagged in the mummies bandaged grip, two of their necks snapped, one pulled apart, the other two thrown into the atmosphere and deep space where they died of velocity. For all their speed and usage of RUSH, the mummy had utilized the same tactic Ameisa presently used- highspeed attacks were only useful on the level of the ordinary, but a fast enough supercomputer or calculation could determine even the fastest of assaults. That was how she regularly kept up with Satsuma in their duels, and she found these assassins much much slower than her projectiles. One attempted to stab into their eye, only to stab an empty socket. They stepped back, and again RUSHED at her carefully- normally at speeds uncatchable for anyone else, the mummy’s eye slowly turned and followed them, grabbing their neck and slamming them down. A dozen sharp metal blades stabbed out of their arm and impaled the Knife Operator, ending their speedy stint.

The other Sparta operatives, still taking cover were beginning to feel a tinge of despair. "She's not just strong, she's adapting and improving as she fights." Shield Officer

Janesworth said, losing composure.

"That's what they said about Akura unit Akuryo-Shikawa a year ago."

Regimental officer Inuko of Excalibur Blue commented. He watched as legendary Sword Operator and leader of their regiment, Raheim stepped forward, the white scruff of his beard stained grey with age. "Step aside kiddies. This one isn't for amateurs like you." He zipped up his chronostasis suit and took an Atlas Steel magnetus-pike, its absolute magnetic field able to pass through any material.

The mummy watched them carefully as he strode in her view. Raheim was an old veteran, his exploits against not only PFU dissidents and Luminary-funded terrorists along the galaxy's border were legendary. His regiment, Excalibur Blue was a group of Shield and Sword Operators who'd worked with Raheim as a young officer after the fall of the Riders of War and as mercenaries, they'd traveled from planet to planet and had fought a legion of threats from Akura to Harvest piracy, to even Caldera's worst cartel thugs.

His Sparta unit, Excalibur Blue often antagonized Excalibur Sky with impunity. They were all experts in the field of military science and tactics, trained by the best and knew how to win a chaotic firefight from any situation. That said, they still were just soldiers.

Not this old man. The mummy didn't have time to blink before he pointed his spear at her and his chronostasis activated. One second, he stood in front of her. The next, behind her- a noticable curved dent now appearing in her belly's shape.

The Cascade-reinforced magnetics, strong enough that activating one in a skyscraper would collapse it and the turn all the metal in a city into a scrapyard merely from activation, were condensed into a single point. Whatever attack he did, left a notable Dent in her Strong- Interaction metal bandages, bending them around her chest and torso.

Raheim turned around and began attacking her from a different direction, causing her body to wiggle like the surface of the ocean from the magnetic repulsion. Elysium didn't perceive this attack, it wasn't like the high-speed RUSH of before. Even overclocking her perception, it was all instantaneous.

She was being assaulted from every direction, like an assault from a still-frame ghost. A dozen of Raheim's strikes, each denting her armor like a shot from a 12 gauge but they were still only dented- Raheim could not even make a true cut or puncture in her and he kept weaving around him like a ghost, a phantom to her own mind.

"He's, actually doing it.." Janesworth said.

"No.." Mevlur, another Spear operator grunt in the back replied. "He's not doing any real damage.."

The mummy's head twisted and turned, as if irises that weren't there were attempting to grasp every direction, but finding no gasps in Raheim's movements. Outside of the dents, one might assume he was teleporting. Elysium began to concentrate, their entire body becoming like a solar cornea as flares of light began to rotate around them in disc-like halos. When they were struck again, the first time enlightenment reached them.

The second time- they grabbed Raheim's arm mid-strike, in a world inverted from time.

His expression looked on horrified, no one had ever attacked back in Chronostasis. "I- impossible.." He uttered. They were standing still to Raheim who looked like he was moving in time-lapse.

Chronostasis equipment and suits, were a specialty tool of assassins and Knife operators in SPARTA, their research and development teams had created them out of cutting-edge investment into CASCADE-methodology and weapons. When worn, one did not merely accelerate as in the case of RUSH. One entered what one might suppose to be a lapse of sorts outside of time.

One can imagine a temporal stream as an old film reel, moving one second, one millisecond, one nanosecond to the next in pictured frames. By moving fast enough, RUSH slowed the timeframe. But elite SPARTA Operatives could completely freeze it. One would move between two or more film frames and be like a phantom, moving between the temporal bounds. Effectively, they would be able to attack outside of time itself. These methods were perfected and tested in many assassinations, the user able to activate Chronostasis, travel a few miles to the target, appear behind them and make 'incidents' happen to terminate, and then walk a mile back to their starting point. Not even a millisecond will have passed during their mission.

When they struck her again, she took a step back and blinked, her vision being taken

over by the blinding, bright halos of enlightenment. Chronostasis was a powerful ability, but even in SPARTA, its usage was limited to a handful of the best operators due to its immense taxing on the Neuralchip CPU. Even elite Spartans would run the risk of CASCADE's neurofeedback overloading their brains during activation, causing an overload to their optic nerves and their visual cortex if the wearer overclocked for more than a split-second.

But Elysium was an ancient powerful being, information processing was no barrier or limitation to them at all, and they had no measure or equal to it in mere living beings. It'd taken them a few attacks to learn what Raheim was doing, and a few dozen more to adapt and learn how to replicate it. The immense energy her corona released and reorganized, now recreated the effect used against her.

Elysium stood outside of time, her hand on Raheim's wrist. Raheim was frozen instead of her and she walked around outside of time, taking amusement in the paltry trick she’d adapted to and stolen from this buffoon. She’d dealt with far worse time-manipulating adversaries than him in her long existence.

The monstrous warrior struck her bandages in his chest, her hand glowing like a nova with every point of brightness. She could not be cut, nor did she have a heart, but her metallic bandaged armor had been weakened by his magnetic pike- but it could simply not be cracked and broken, not against a dense Strong-Interaction field. She ripped Raheim's arm off, its joints turning to black-steel and breaking apart like tofu. She'd begun to use Chronostasis on herself, and had found an even faster temporal frequency than Raheim had- and she wielded it like an orchestra of angels singing their sweetest song to a lullaby.

The rest of the SPARTA units taking cover watched as Raheim fell, bleeding from the gigantic missing appendage. Recovery nanites were already patching and healing the wound, but his little time-stopping trick would never work on her again. Before he got up, she stepped one foot on his chest and pressed down, cracking and breaking several ribs even through his steely armor.

Explosions rocked behind her.

The mummy soon looked around at the projectiles storming from the sky.

"Where's that starbitch at? What's she up to now?" She thought.

With a shrug, she turned back to Raheim, bandages that made up her fingertips already turning to RNA nitrogenous bases to recreate the same nerve agents and viral deadly pathogens Kosmere had used on her earlier. They sprung into the Sword Operator's mouth, infected him with a slick stab and pulled out slowly. "You bi-" they ripped his tongue away on the way out.

Within seconds he was a foaming convulsing mess, a walking chemical dump for all her biomolecular weaponry.

"Oh no! Regimental Sword Leader Raheim-!" Janesworth shouted, giving away her location. She shot out her gun a temporal-chronoifier, a similar SPARTA weapon to the Chronostasis Suit in reverse, a projectile field 5x5' in a dense cyan blue translucent cube, able to

be projected from great range and accuracy. Elysium was completely frozen in time, immobilized.

Then the square began to flicker and crackle, glitching out as she fought back. Her arms reached the edges and she cracked the perimeter, destroying the temporal effect completely.

Janesworth had never once seen anyone able to move or fight back once time-locked in Chronostasis, and without her prior fight to Raheim, she may not have. However, the effect made the foe a little less patient. "H-how is that po-"

Not more than a second later, Elysium pointed her finger and rapidly straightened it like a nail shooting out, piercing Janesworth's skull point-blank instantly from 40 yards. She fell away. Ely transformed her hand-bandages into a thousand tiny metal threads which knotted and formed a little satellite radio emitter, she began speaking to the one-woman artillery on the moon. “Ursula wants Ameisa alive,” Elysium reminded her, voice like rustling parchment. "Stop throwing your little sticks and stones everywhere, I told you not to overdo it."

"And why do you care what Ursula wants, Ely?" Satsuma asked.

"Well I care if you ruin my little fun down here with your inferno." She replied. "Tsk tsk. You focus on your task, I'll focus on mine." Satsuma barked back.

The mummy dispersed the radio and walked towards the group, sensing hundreds of SPARTA elites still surrounding her, all of them having seen what she'd done to one of the most experienced and fearsome Sword Operators.

"Whose next?" She asked.

All of them looked around at each other. They weren't a united team anymore, they were a disorganized mob of soldiers losing their common sense and morale. One of them stepped out, a young girl of only 19, Lilin Asuko. A lieutenant Shield Operator of the regiment Frostborne, one of the youngest ever to achieve the rank of a Shield Op with her high-marks, combat performance and excellent marksmanship.

“Rogers, forward! ”She ordered.

The other Sparta units watched as she ran head-on into Elysium, her chronostasis suit and weaponry at the ready. It was a risky move- if she made it out of this alive, she'd be a star, the best SPARTA Operator on record. Her chances of survival were low, but she'd taken a gamble.

That gamble didn't pay off. Elysium, completely having immunized herself to their temporal status blew right past her and cut her down with a swipe of her hand, long-black pincer like clawed tips drawing a wispy trail of blood in the air, like a scarlet mortal calligraphy of death.

On the planet's moon, regiment Apache Commando had been called in for reinforcements by Ameisa, a dozen Clusterhawks carrying smaller Starwasp bombers that

swarmed out above the lunar body and began to surround the Starbreaker. The regiment attempted to overwhelm her with Starbladed missiles, meant to be fired in swarm waves with hundreds of missiles at once, enough to disintegrate a mountain in seconds with their thermobaric effect and the concussive blast wave. However, the Starbreaker's immense gravitational field was able to manipulate a 300m diameter circle around herself causing the swarm to blow up prematurely into a billion shrapnel pieces, the detonation blasted about sending waves of destruction out into the surrounding landscape.

Satsuma looked up and laughed at the futility of their attack. The fleet was more than a few hundred miles away by this time and they had no hope of making any further impact on her- at that distance, their ship commanders may as well have been close enough for her hands to reach out and choke. She leaned her hips down, picked up some lunar dust and gravel and with a stretch or two of her neck, thrusted her arm with a full swing, the centrifugal forces of her arm sending the energy through traveling at 99.9999% C. The relativistic mass-energy hit the fleet, particles penetrating the plates, armor and shielding of each Starwasp as if hit by shrapnel, their psychic pilots feeling the pain as their biological mounts were punctured across their entire surface and imploded in a massive firetrap of a rupture. She saved for the Clusterhawks, which were already trying to retreat and put thousands of miles of distance between themselves and Satsuma, by taking out a strip of tungsten carbide darts the size of her head, each weighing a mere 115g. At the relativistic speeds she fired them one by one with perfect precision. Her Talon Gun strikes destroyed the massive Clusterhawk's exoskeleton-fuselages, crumbling them into a fireburst that left no sound in the emptiness of space and no survivors.

"What a naughty girl you are Blight, trying to buy time and sending your soldiers and bugs after me. Let's punish you by taking away your little pink telephone." She then aimed one by one at the solar system's satellites and communication stations across the short leaps of empty space, mere lunar stones demolishing them with nuclear payload.

The Spartan fleet had no further way to contact off the planet, as their communication arrays and comm-satellites were lost. Satsuma turned back to surface, watching as Elysium ruthlessly and efficiently annihilated the Spartan teams by the dozens sent after her.

Delilah crumpled and rolled, her RNA, carbon and nitrogen tissue already decomposing and breaking apart, her body unable to repair itself. Shield Operator Kazmir reached to her friend, to pick her up but found a pool of blood like tar, that when touched, turned into a tarlike mass of liquid carbon fiber, that oozed out of her wound and covered Delilah's body. "This bitch is a walking bio-toxin, I don't think she could be stopped." Kazmir said, looking down and shaking her head. The bandages of her opponent's body began to twist themselves into knots, the strands unraveling and recoiling like the DNA helix as they began to break apart and release black gas and steam, unleashing biohazards rapidly that were killing and decomposing most operatives merely in breathing radius of her.

A Shield Operator who had a helmet ripped off, had no face left and had a gaping hole of his skin and tissue torn away, his corneas and optic nerves being shredded and destroyed, he collapsed and turned to tar. A Sword Operator who had the upper third of his body ripped in two from his chest up, was turning into a pile of black-stain.

Approaching the scene, a powerful Psii agent from Excalibur Blue, Menschie ran behind a tree and started to concentrate, attempting a psychic assault on the enemy to crush and cripple their cognitive functioning. Menschie found this the Psii equivalent of a child trying to strangle a grown elephant. Too wide to wrap one's hands around, too strong and resilient to get any grasp or find purchase, the depth and pitch beyond what the child can comprehend. Her Spear Operative cloaking would make her invisible and undetectable to any conventional technology. And still in her despair Menschie forced her way into Elysium's psyche with all her mental strength, the same strength that had been trained to wrestle with highly disciplined Set warriors and military combatants found itself against an ancient unshakeable wall, a colossus of unimaginable psychic magnitude.

Elysium looked behind her at the girl huffing and puffing, and twitched unamused, the cloaking beginning to overload from her cognitive stress and become undone. Menschie's nose began to drip trails of blood. Then her ears and eyes, and finally blood spurt out her mouth, until her head 'crreeeeeked' from a hemorrhage. She fell over dead. The mummy went back to her business.

"You're lucky we got a civilian survivor. It might save our lives." Liam looked over at the reporters.

A moment later, Elysium was still killing Shield and Spear Operators even as they took cover and fled, her body setting itself at solar temperatures that heated the toxic fumes she released even faster, those near her were all turned to goo in a matter of seconds. The most elite fighting force in Xi had become completely ineffective and demolished next to the ancient and indestructible Elysium.

One soldier finally did get the drop on her with an experimental next-gen weapon, a miniaturized Bidimensional attack dubbed a "Blackhole X-mine." The X-mine had captured Elysium successfully in gravity that even light could not escape, twisting and distorting her bandages until she was sucked in and vanished from the present dimensional plane. Everyone took a breather, a sense of relief mixed with the blood and despair she'd caused set in.

 

 

She reemerged a minute later.

Wherever they'd sent her, it seemed even a blackhole couldn't contain her. The Bidimensional attack was a mere annoyance. She cried and screeched in every directional possible sending death through the ancient millennia unknown to others, as one of the remaining desperate Sparta soldiers recalled the words she'd flashed and given their retinas when the fight first began barely two hours ago.

'Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin'

Elysium had taken on SPARTA head to head, alone, and won. Her existence to them was still a complete mystery. To her, all their science, gadgets and toys were a complete joke. None of them, in their embarrassment and desperate fight had ever realized the extent of their

hopelessness, nor the nature of the being they were even fighting all along.

One of the most elite task-forces in the galaxy… Had been crushed under the heel of a mere Star.

Ameisa, regrouping with Liam and Ceres, their team of about 35 remaining Spear Operators and the two field reporters, Veronica, and Alsatt. Ameisa had been working alongside SPARTA for many years and had trained and learned of their elite and their elite elites. She realized now that SPARTA, as powerful as they were, couldn't comprehend the level of threat Elysium posed and were not enough to defeat her. They'd retreated to the compound that they'd planned on hiding and heading towards, most of the sky and ecosystem on the continent ablaze.

Liam spoke. "What about calling in an Atlas task-force? Will that do us any good? You must have some plan?"

"It is not a matter of strength, only resolve." Ameisa replied.

"Do you have a plan or no?" Ceres interrupted, less patient than her superior in the form of the inquiring Liam.

"We had her surrounded, outnumbered, and our foe still had the advantage. From the very start even.. She's not the type any of our guns or weapons can effectively fight." Ameisa conceded. "Besides, I have a suspicion we're likely dealing with some sort of traitor in our midst."

Veronica and Alsatt looked at one another. At least, Veronica assumed Alsatt was looking at her- she couldn't tell genuinely.

"A traitor?" Veronica asked sly.

"Yes. The entire sky was a smokestack after Satsuma's attack, and we were flying under the cloud cover and the giant forests aswell. She still aimed at our precise location, and furthermore the mummy entity knew how to attach select targets like the Shielding operation before we even got there. It's likely they have insider intel.. to whom, I cannot exactly say." Ameisa replied.

"You think the enemy has planted a traitor in SPARTA?" Ceres asked, voice like an unbending rock of stone, an ice-wall of a mind.

"It is a possible hypothesis." Ameisa said, taking a breath. "No creature, no matter how strong, can fight that well against agents of Sparta caliber without proper espionage and intelligence. They've been going at this with some kind of calculated plan."

Ameisa took another breath, and spoke her mourning words. "If the Xistress were here, she'd know exactly what to do."

Liam's hand began to twitch, and a faint light in his iris began to turn green, a sign of his cybernetic augmentation beginning to take over and start to overload with his growing rage.

Ceres placed her hand on his hand and spoke the words to calm him- Ameisa and Liam, for the first time in their careers had to let go, to put their faith in something other than themselves and each other to defeat the enemy. But even then, the thought of giving up that was impossible to Ameisa. "We cannot leave anymore. If we try to flee, we'll be sitting ducks and Satsuma will snipe us out of the sky the moment we leave the planet. We could try to make it all the way to the opposite of the planet from the lunar face, but with the mummy still hunting us and Sats still bombarding it's unlikely we'll make it that far. No reinforcements are coming, if we're to survive it has to be up to us." Ameisa took a deep sigh.

Liam sighed. "We've lost all of our combat capability in this mess. We can't rely on our numbers.. but what's left, are still Spartans. We've been through worse than this." He looked up at the sky, the clouds and stars.

"Easier said than done." Ceres said, looking at Veronica and Alsatt, two civilian reporters who were likely already dead. "The only choice left is death or honor. And neither is guaranteed."

"Yeah well.. my mother used to say Honor is the prize of fools and the dead. Cowardice gets you to another day sometimes." Ameisa folded her arms, trying not to pout. She hated admitting when Idola was right. "Let's head underground. This compound has nuclear grade- shelter that will prevent most lower-kinetic forms of attack. It's not guaranteed that we'll survive if she raises her shots above a certain relativistic and mass threshold but, it’s our only chance."

"Agreed." Veronica said hastily.

They entered the insides of an old military bunker, a hangar where chittering vehicles and artillery could be housed but was currently vacant. About 500 yards away was an underground shelter that could take them all the way to the planet's mantle. Ameisa said she'd access the shelter's security protocols in about a minute across the outpost, and they'd run through and try to make it so they could retreat further underground. Like rats in a maze, Liam thought.

Veronica crouched behind a crumbling terminal inside, her mind racing. Ursula’s mission, get close to Ameisa, to expose her and SPARTA’s weaknesses weighed on her mind. Ameisa's own objective to corner the Starbreakers with her elite team had backfired, and it appeared with Ursula's leadership, they’d capture her soon. Still, Vero felt her end impending. Did someone like Satsuma care if she was collateral? She doubted it. Be it from discovery, or as collateral damage in the showdown about to unfold, she could meet her end today. She fumbled for the pill hidden in her collar, a neurotoxin capsule. For emergencies, Ursula had said. If capture is imminent. To end herself swiftly and painlessly.

"What's the fun of ending yourself if its not the least bit gruesome?" She remembered Jel saying, teasing her in her usual morbid manner.

The bunker shook. Satsuma’s bombardment had found them. "Ameisa, incomin-" A shield

operator's head imploded as a speck of dust a few grams in mass broke through the roof and its kinetic transference smashed them flat, creating a shockwave like a grenade throughout the room.

Veronica's throat clenched. A few more microseconds and she would have the time to take the pill and swallow it. Her hand shook as hesitation and dread filled her, the end that was coming. A sense of panic and fear shot through her and she scrambled behind a chair and under a desk, her eyes darting like a rabbit's between Ameisa and the pill. She closed her eyes, slowly reached her hands towards her mouth and prepared for the worst.

PAP. The pill fell out of her hands. Alsatt appeared behind her as the one who slapped the pill away. "The mission isn't done." Alsatt replied. "We report until the end. We all go out together, or we get out alive. Let's go Vero." She told her.

Veronica gave a sad glance at her phenomenologically challenged friend, certain that behind the black static and wibbly-wobbly threads in her vision there was a look of reassurance and concern.

Everyone stood patiently as the Starbreaker's tiny missiles pelted the outpost from a lunar body away. Ameisa finished punching through the encryptions. "It's unlocked. Head outside and we'll run for it."

"But what if-?" Vero shuddered.

"What? That they'll intercept us? No way they'll get past me." Ameisa assured. "Trust me. Who else can you right now?" She said, offering a gentle reassuring hand to Veronica and smile that made the girl's sense of guilt twist her in knots. The girl who was asking to trust her.

Offering salvation to the reporter who absolutely couldn't be trusted. The irony curled up in the back of Vero's mind and she felt a part of herself bury in deep. "Y-yeah.." Veronica said taking the elderdragon's hand.

"Let’s get going!" Liam said, rushing towards the door.

The group of 39, one shorter than when they came into the hangar ran out across the compound, having to transverse 500 yards of death from above. The flaming shots sped like a meteor shower, Ameisa's cybernetic vision and enhancements giving her the ability to track and sense every shot. Alsatt and Vero began to cry out, fearing for their lives as an incoming mass of dust and debris was closing in, looking to be hit.

With a point of her finger, Ameisa muttered some utterances, a flash-blast of green and pink bolts shooting from her fingers with a Hexrune around her wrist. The shots burst through the air like the wings of a thousand chirping birds in the sky, intercepting as many freefalling rocks in the sky as she could.

The Spear and Shield operators had been working to get a beetle vehicle to the shelter quicker. Satsuma's falling shots fell upon them like a crumpled collapse from above, crushing them against the ground as it rippled the ground, ruining any chance of quick mobility. Ameisa's blasts had destroyed about two-thirds of the shots they'd initially fired to clear the pathway for

them, but the projectiles were speeding up. Ameisa looked on as they ran for their life. "These took 12 seconds to fall earlier.. Now it's only 8. She's speeding them up." Faster pitches would mean greater acceleration and more devastating impacts. Her ability to sense the incoming shots was already struggling to keep up as they closed in with greater number and faster speed.

"You mean she was holding back and pulling her shots earlier? You've got to be fucking kidding me.." Ceres said.

"It's her way of being courteous." Veronica replied. “She doesn’t want us completely dead, clearly or she’d have nuked the surface already with faster, bigger shots than this.”

The group ran, Veronica and Alsatt looking at Ameisa in awe as the Elderdragon kept up with hypersonic rocks sprawling and heading towards them, her fingers and hexrunes blasting like a gattling gun into the sky to defend them. Liam was too caught up in adrenaline and distress to notice much, his mind like that of a wild boar caught in the forest by a hunter's arrow, all his thoughts were of the next moment and the next breath. He'd spent a decade earning his way to the position as Sword Operator, a chief of an entire Sparta division, and now felt woefully inadequate next to the Elderdragon defending them from death by the Starbreaker's target- practice. The adrenaline coursing through Ameisa's veins and synapses burned like a wildfire.

Behind them, several more Spear operators had lagged behind, relativistic stones smashing them hundreds of megatons worth of TNT. Their bodies were destroyed by the ensuring inferno into the thinnest molecules, the rest of their atoms sent across the world's magnetic fields and solar wind. It was a grisly, terrible and ghastly death. "Still 500 yards.." Liam said, gasping. Ameisa desperately shot as many projectiles as she could, but was beginning to lose track and feel the fatigue and stress begin to mount. More SPARTA soldiers took cover as flaming shots were thousands of miles away one second and atop them the next, coming down like artillery that flattened reinforced buildings and structures.

“120 yards!" A Shield Operator called from behind, before a blast descended and obliterated her.

The voices behind shrieked and screamed, as the last Spear operators were only dozens meters away from the shelter and running for their lives. The Starbreaker's shots came nearer. Whether due to the delay from the moon to the surface or because she was merely toying with them, they reached the indoor elevator platform. 8 SPARTA soldiers outside rapidly ran forward "Get in! March!" Liam yelled.

The ground shook as they were smashed by rocks, the equivalent of hundreds of grenades going off at once and pulverizing them into pulp. Liam and Ameisa felt the impact of the last shot as a shockwave, their bodies were struck with hundreds of megatons of force in an instant. The elevator doors closed slowly, shielding Veronica and Alsatt from the gruesome sight, the two girls clinging behind Ameisa. The three of them, Ceres and Liam were the last 8 remaining Spear Operators were the last alive on the surface to go downwards. They could see in Ameisa's eyes that the impact had done something to her, that she was in some sort of pain, but she didn't say a word. A few of the soldiers who just barely made it in and had survived the last blast were shellshocked, morale in a state of utter chaos.

Ameisa was the first one off the elevator when they arrived down, the others rushing behind her out the shaft. She stepped off, then hesitated. "Wait a second." She turned to the nearby console and with a wave of her comm's ID, accessed the blueprint. "We're only, down on the 3rd floor? That's only 35m down, not nearly deep enough. None of the basic top 5 levels are reinforced." She said, realizing they'd been had. The empty elevator shut and locked, they heard a 'ding' as it went back up. "H-how?! No one was in it-" Liam shouted.

"It was, some form of sabotage." Ameisa's words carried a solemn sense of dread in them. "This was their plan all along. We've been lured down into a trap." Everyone went dead silent. Suddenly the ceiling trembled, two Spear operators screamed as the roof collapsed above them and ended their lives immediately. "Satsuma's still firing! We have to move!" The Elderdragon, resuming control shouted.

"But.. we're underground." Alsatt said.

"Our cover will be thinner than a speck of dust here. She'll pick up our location just as easy. We have to go down again." Ameisa said, realizing the only option was a deeper dive underground. In truth she was lying partially- the two soldiers had been killed point blank by the roof collapse, it was only a hypothetical but, the possibility they could be targeted even as they descended lingered on her mind. "Now!" The soldiers all ran towards another elevator, everyone silent, not daring to give out the panic they all felt in their stomachs. Ameisa attempted to hijack its digital console, only to find herself locked out of the 2nd elevator aswell. "That's.. impossible. Someone's changed all the encryptions. Even more than that.. They've rewritten the entire security software." Ameisa looked on at her wrist and the data flowing in disbelief.

"Can you get us down?" Ceres shouted.

Ameisa squinted. "If I have 15 to 20 minutes, I can find some vulnerable data points-" The entire bunker shook from above, the impact of the shots rattled them.

"We don't HAVE even 10. At this rate we'll all be crushed. We'll run and use the emergency stairs." He said. Everyone agreed and followed him, running across a long hallway. As more shots rocked the structure and integrity, dust spread about, the air pressure was high and it hurt their lungs. Visibility became low. From the dusty hall, a series of shots directly broke through the ceiling and killed more soldiers. The Elderdragon, Liam, Ceres, 2girls and 3soldiers rushed through until they made it to the stairs. The group looked down and saw the long staircase leading down, which descended from their level of about 500 yards underground until a vaulted layer leading to about 15 meters of lead on the interior.

"We'll never make it.." Ceres said. Liam had the thought that he'd rather be shot to death, than forced to sit by as the people around him died. He took his cybernetic headpiece off and threw it away as he descended. "C'mon!" He pushed his Shield Operator further down and the group rapidly started running down in circles for their life. "This is all playing in their hands.. the moment we get into that vault, it's certain death. They'll be waiting for us, or expecting us to get down inside." The voice in the Elderdragon's head spoke as she ran down. "That's if we make it all the way down." The footsteps echoed, as the sounds got fainter and dimmer. And then another stone slammed through the ceiling and smashed part of the stairway,

dissecting it. Ceres merely fell down to her death, Ameisa grabbing her wrist and holding onto her. "Grab onto my arm!" She said. Ceres climbed up the girl, Ameisa pulling her back up as the top-stairs dangled. But their rescue was short lived, as another rock blasted through the roof and the stairwell above collapsed, sending the two falling down rapidly. Ameisa's backpack kicked in, jetting her in midair and saving her in flight. The others had to slowly climb their way down to the working stairs and continue descending. Ameisa flew all the way to the bottom of the vault floor, she put down Ceres. "I'll be right back." She flew up and helped the three Spear Operator Sparta operatives make their way down, jetting them down and and back up again. Soon they were safe and she repeated the process with Veronica, Alsatt and Liam.

They approached the vault gate. Ameisa checked the digital security console. "It's not locked. We can go in."

"Why not?" Ceres asked. Ameisa stopped her before she advanced forward.

"Because they want us to to." She took a deep breath. "We're not heading in there. I don't know who was the spy, but.. I'm ending this here. Everyone get back, give me time to focus." They looked at each other. "NOW." And then scattered near the walls.

The Elderdragon used her cybernetic retinas to scan the room, the digital console had been rewritten, the entire infrastructure of the facility had been re-booted and re-configured. She scanned the room from behind the walls, trying to pinpoint all the sensors and signals. "Just as I thought. There's a motion activated lockup-projector inside, meant to seal us in. The moment we go in we're trapped." The ceiling trembled again. The previously dimming sound, instead grew louder.

"She's known about this the whole time. She's been waiting for this." Ameisa explained. "We either die out here, or we go into their trap and cede to their cage."

"We have to go in. We can't stay out here or above ground.. We're on our last legs." Ceres said. Liam reluctantly agreed with a nod.

Ameisa nodded and closed her eyes, as a single tear poured down her face. "You all go in, it'll be safe in there. I'll wait out here." She said, running her options through her mind. "W- wait! Don't!" Veronica shouted. Everyone went dead silent. "I mean, we'll wait out here with you. We stick together." She said. Alsatt nodded.

"No, you all have to live-" Ameisa tried to hold them back but they kept coming forward, their hands outstretched. She sighed. "Hang tight for a moment." She told the surviving group. Over a thousand elite Sparta soldiers when they arrived here, and only 7 survivors. What a wreck of a leader I am she thought. As the sounds grew closer, the air began to feel like a knife, slicing the group down as the shockwave came and rocked them like waves. The terrifying bombardment continued to pound the ceiling at the very tippy-top, crashing in and out, carving away at the top slowly.

Atop the moon, Satsuma paused.

"Hm? They're not going in the vault? Tsk, guess they've stopped running around." She cracked her knuckles. "Very well, given up then? Satsuma shall put you out of your misery." She took out a particularly heavy rock and a carbide dart. Ameisa would survive- probably. She was quite resilient, Ursula assured her of that. If she didn't and this took her out, oops. Satsuma was no good at guessing these things.

The first shot went down as everyone waited for the end- the rock, slung at 0.08C or approximately, nearly 30 million meters per second, destroyed the roof and multiply layers of the bunker with a powerful shake. The ceiling had collapsed and massive explosion rocked the surface with plumes of atomic smoke. In the aftermath, sunbeams exposed the group now even this far down. "See you." Satsuma said. Her arm reached back, and she slung her dart forward.

 

 

20 seconds until the Dart slung from the moon reaches Ameisa's skull

 

 

 

Everyone went deadly silent. Ameisa felt the tremor get closer and closer, as she stood waiting. Her eyes closed and she relaxed her breath, letting the world fall away until the relativistic projectiles from the lunar surface became like the gentle sound of waves. She could feel the Starbreaker's presence, watching. Sensing. Watching every detail of the outpost and everyone who lived within it in her mind's eye. In turn the Elderdragon could see the Starbreaker hundreds of thousands of miles above her, watching the surface from her orbiting position. She tried to focus, shutting out the world and her senses, to get as deep within her own thoughts and mind as she could. Everyone waited for their demise, as the last attack felt like an eternity ago. Ten seconds passed.

10 seconds until impact

 

The crashing waves became a reverie of starlight. As her memories drifted off, she replayed the highlights of her life in sublime simplicity. Growing up as the heiress of Byte Industries. Running away and living on the run, the infamous hacker. The girl who tagged with Protas and landed on another world. The trials of Marchwood, the long count among the history of the Solar Society.

9 seconds

 

Raising Protas and Raelyn's daughter.. In her memories, Mercy and her were sparring. They were fighting, as god-mother and daughter figure, as a master and student, as friends and women of strong will and questionable character. The two taking potshots in the woods, practicing spellcraft. Hex, the art of translating the Cascade signal into an artform of energy and kinetics, Ameisa was one of the first to understand how the Cascade in the form of Hex wove and blended all of existence together as a single cloth. Reality understood at its deepest level, defying even rudimentary physics. The sheep-counting physics classes and tutoring Idola gave her when when she was 7, Ameisa struggling to stay awake as she learned the laws of conservation of momentum put forward as early as Issac Newton and faster-than-lightspeed quantum curvature

put forth by Nora Wakeman centuries later.

 

8 seconds

 

In her stream of consciousness, she heard Mercy clap her hands and Sway roar, tunneling beams of energy ripping up the passing terrain of SS and pressing against herself. Ameisa that day pretended to be surprised that evening when sparing with the girls, but their attack still proved futile. How did she get out of that match victorious? A simple hand-signal and finger-snap would be equivalent to the force of a nuke, which Mercy and Sway in their dominion over nature proved. But, even a nuke and the physical energy it carried could be deflected with Hex, Ameisa's able to warp space-time itself. Momentum redirection without a direct physical impact. It might be able to alter the trajectory without directly stopping the dart or transferring its kinetics over the surface, Ameisa was taking a huge gamble here, she argued with herself on her options and the feasibility. In the context of hyper-technological warfare, one couldn't rule out anything, every card one has to play must be used at the right time. The atmosphere would be burnt at higher speeds approaching light, but Satsuma was pulling her punches and slowing their velocity, a heavy assumption, enough for that to burn up safely. The devastated carnage that followed fighting the two girls flashed in blurs with the days gone by of her mother's scientific teachings, all her memories and knowledge blending together in the psychic soup that made up Ameisa Blight.

7 seconds

 

She let herself think about it as her mind felt the weight of the entire Galaxy being crushed upon her, the gravity of all matter pressing down upon her with the force of a thousand worlds and stars as one.

6 seconds

 

She reached out, the Elderdragon felt the outpost begin to crumble and was ready to take on a hit. For an instant, the planet stopped spinning on its axis in her mind. The souls of every fallen SPARTA soldier were resting on her shoulders and conscience.

5 seconds

 

How large would the attack be? There were numerous axioms to consider, deductive reasoning speeding forwards through Ameisa's neurons like lightening. How fast would it travel? 99.99999999% C? Would Satsuma rupture the entire planet to get to her, was that in her psychology? The entirety of the surface would be destroyed and the attack would speed into the core of the planet, taking out even her little comrade with her on this world. The woman was a former champion of Orchid, destructive without measure, but also graceful and restrained. And currently under the dictation of Ursula.

Her axioms collided. It wouldn't kill her, but it'd slow her down. Could Ameisa be sure?

 

4 seconds

No it won't kill her. Enough to keep her alive. She had to be sure of that. How fast then?

Could she guess it based on the velocity of the previous shots and the destruction they’d left? What was the right angle, the velocity, the timing, it all needed to be perfect. At a density of 16 g/cm³ and traveling at 0.1C (10% of the speed of light), even a small rock or bullet would carry an energy of approximately 450 million Joules per gram. Upon impact, it would generate temperatures exceeding 22,624 °C. Far hotter than the surface of the Sun. The immense kinetic energy would cause instantaneous vaporization, stripping electrons from atoms and leaving only bare atomic nuclei. The resulting plasma would consist of ionized particles, as no covalent bond could survive the intense heat and pressure. Ameisa shuddered imagining it.

3 seconds

 

The rotation of the planet and turn on its axis. Exact distance from the moon. Coriolis force accounting for windspeed. Acceleration and frictional resistance. G force. Atmospheric factors and slowdown. Every calculation accounting for every possible factor. Distance. Velocity. Impact site. Minor time dilation across the divide from sender to oblivion. The Elderdragon had been living and breathing quantum physics and space-time for a millennia and knew the exact physics of the universe she lived in, and 3 others too. Every force of physics known as easily as someone lived and breathed. All the seconds counted. All the calculations had to be precise.

Satsuma might have been faster, stronger, a more powerful warrior and infinitely more durable than she was. But there was one thing she'd always had..

Her mother Idola had always told her such during those banal lectures. Ameisa could out-think them all.

2 seconds

 

In the last moment Ameisa's thoughts fluttered away into space like stardust on a cosmic breeze, as her neurons all turned to mush. The attack was like a blackhole. A vacuum in her mind, a hole in her memory. It was only a vision of her own failure. She banished the doubt completely. The ebbs and flows of the space put her in the zone, relaxing her breath and putting all possible forces of the universe under her cognitive mastery.

1 second left

 

Furthermore it'd take 13 seconds for the attack to hit her from the moon if were even going 10% the speed of light- if she were intending to hurl a lightspeed pebble, they'd all be dead already. She'd already calculated the seconds in her head, neural enhancers and processing chips clocking that possibility out. In the nanoseconds left as it was about to reach her, she'd slow down time to less than .1 second, take a step backwards, and wait out the full onslaught.

Calculating the exact impact point of a relativistic projectile would be immensely complex for anyone else, no one else could pull it off but her. Not even her Xistress or the other Elderdragons had the tenacity to push through mentally. For a fraction of a second, an instant, it came down. Her eyes opened. She'd calculated all the mathematics, probability and axioms and knew for certain exactly when it'd arrived- her cybernetic neural chips speeding every reaction to its limit and doing the rest. The window for a counterattack was so indescribably short, but she could do

it. Only her.

She'd win.

 

.0000000001 seconds

 

In the final nanosecond, time stretched out to what felt like infinity. Ameisa's perception took a leap through millennia of scientific understanding, her mind racing faster than light itself. She opened her eyes. Her hands clapped- She'd already sent them to a second earlier and was only now receiving the outcome of that decision. The reflection rune and stealth-cloak affect was already in effect. The dart bulleted millimeters from her iris.

It hit the thinnest wafer of light, a veneer of optics spreading as Ameisa's pupils dilated.

The Starbreaker froze. The carbide dart slammed seemingly into the membrane of her target's cybernetic eye. Then vanished.

The Starbreaker winced. What happened? There was no explosion or penetration, as far as she could see nothing had happened. She leaned over to get a better look, peering into the lower atmosphere. The one known as God's sling was dumbfounded. A rock launched by the God's own hand never missed. 20 seconds passed. Satsuma took a step back- exactly as Ameisa had predicted. The cloaked dart traveled back, completely unseen by its original sender.

It returned exactly where she'd thrown it or a step behind rather, at around .05 C. It reached such speeds and kinetic force upon impact that nuclear fusion was achieved in a brilliant collapse of subatomic reactions.

Satsuma had no answers or sophisticated thinking when the dart Ameisa's Hexrune reflected stabbed her in the eye- it destroyed her eye first. Then the kinetic force caused a sub- atomic explosion that obliterated her, a small star on the moon forming from the impact lighting up the darkened sky like a bead of hope. She'd just been outsmarted by a girl from the ground.

She'd never expected that.

When the nuclear explosion faded in the atmosphere-less vacuum of space, Satsuma was scorched. "FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU-" The Starbreaker uttered, her eye gone. It was no good, her eye and vision destroyed. Not only had she lost her eyesight, her body stung and burned, not merely from the heat, but the tingling burst of radiation that made her abit queasy. Her Starbreaker armaments around her arms and back had been fried by the electromagnetic pulse, she fell over and collapsed.

On the surface, Ameisa gasped for breath. She'd done it. As the others ran up and checked her, she let out a sigh.

Ameisa turned to her Sparta comrades gasped. Her head felt like it was on fire from her mental chip's overlock. She sank to her knees, breathless but victorious. A wash of relief fell over her as she glanced at her comrades and managed a weary smile. "It's okay. I'm good. Thank you."

"Huh? That was amazing." Veronica said, her hand on her waist. Ameisa looked at her as she approached, her hand on her side still shaking. "Wait.. wait.. I sorta hit the side of the ceiling, don't-"

Melted steel planks from the top roof collapsed fell down. Liam leapt quickly, pushing Veronica out of the way and saving her life. The plank fell along his spine and crushed his back and legs. He screamed in pain. Veronica ran over to him. Ameisa, feeling the weight of the moon on her, her eyes clamped shut for a moment. "A-ah, stay back! There might be another cave in." Liam shouted, gasping.

"But, you're hurt!" Veronica replied.

"This is fine, it only hit below the pelvis. I'm more machine than man down there anyway.." Liam said, paralyzed and pinned under the beam.

"I'm calling in a medivac drone and then I'll jetpack us out. We'll all be out of here in seconds." Ameisa said, approaching her phone. "Hang on."

Ceres, initially giving a look of concern at Liam, her hands reaching into her hair. She began to clutch and shiver, suddenly holding her own arms and backing away from the site. Veronica and Alsatt followed her back, giving her space. Her head whirled. She felt her hands go ice cold. They shook.

Everyone noticed her weird behavior and looked around. Ceres reached out and her hand found something- It was her Bolt handgun.

"Uh.. you okay?" Liam asked. "What's wrong?" Ameisa added.

Ceres was sweating, her body quivering. "Wh-what's wrong with me?" she asked. Ceres shot Liam in the head. Blood and brain matter came out. She kept firing, killing the remaining Sparta Spear Operatives in a maddened rush, a look of confusion and fear twisting across her face.

"Aaaah-!!!" Ameisa shouted, horrified. She threw out a reflexive finger-snap, slowing time to a crawl. With cascade she ran over and rushed the woman in a millisecond, tackling her against the wall. Ceres began to laugh and weep uncontrollably, before pulling at her scalp. "P- please, you have to.. kill me." Hidden under the swept side of her head was a small microchip with two purple decals that looked like.. pigtails? The chip was in deep, embedded in her skin to where one could see the veins pulsing around it and into it. "She said you all would be here. And now she's- Miss Ameisa you have to r-run." She raised the gun to her own head and tried to pull the trigger.

Some mental or physical force prevented her from shooting, her own autonomy revoked.

She reached for her head, trying to grab the chip in her hair, but her hands then moved to the side and started to do a weird dance with angled movements in her arms. Ameisa stepped back.

The vault door began to open up. A figure slowly approached out of the shadows. With a silvery crescent of silvery white hair, Ursula slowly appeared from the other side. The stolen Spartan armor that covered her and her hair flared and whipped, the crescent of her hair glinting with starlight. Her face was lined in a stern contempt, her fingers held up to her head and hair in intrigue, staring at the microchip device on Ceres. "Not feeling like yourself? That is most peculiar." She said, Ameisa instantly acting defensively.

"Ursula." She turned away in betrayal, Ameisa's heart sinking. "That chip.. I know who that's by.. So there was a spy."

Veronica felt her heart race, ready to face the music. "Come out." Ameisa said. "Entrapta."

A woman with two purple pigtails and a sleek pastel-aluminum jumpsuit approached, her hair rubbing itself like hands scheming. "Amiteeeeeeeeeeeee!~" Entrapta bounced forward with a gleeful skip, her hair-tendrils curling and uncurling with excitement. "Ameisa! Wow, you’re way more impressive than I imagined! The way you deflected that projectile with Hex? So cool!"

Ameisa braced herself. "Entrapta, what have you done?"

Entrapta grinned, oblivious to the tension. "Oh, her? Just a little microchip! I wanted to see how it would interact with complex, high-functioning Sparta operative! The best of the best- tho a little overrated if you ask me. And Ursula helped give me permission to do it! She and I have become best friends. All I had to do was take control of her to relay info to her Starbreakers and lure you guys here, and it worked out perfectly! You even took out the Starbreaker herself, how impressive. Plant lady seemed real tough! Though I should say.." Entrapta paused. "That this didn't really need to be a secret mission. But, I'm just super excited to show Ursula all that you've accomplished, and how she can use it! My new bestie and I are going to do so much science together!"

Ursula stepped forward, her voice cold and precise. "She is a collaborator. One of the most brilliant, albeit, unconventional, minds on our side." Ursula approached Entrapta, taking hold of her hand, and looking her in the eyes. "Entrapta, I am glad you are here. We have a lot to learn from you."

"Thank you Ursie!" Entrapta giggled, her violet hair a swirling flurry of excitement like a child bouncing up and down, oblivious to what she'd done, the woman squealing in delight. "This is soo much fun!"

"Ursula!" Ameisa called, wincing as she turned to her. "That chip.."

"Ceres was our eyes and ears monitoring you and your operatives the whole time. She was incredibly valuable for obtaining info on Sparta's inner workings." Ursula told her. "Yeeah! The chip let us follow her vision, auditory, even read her thoughts! With this we can control

anyone and make them better- Maybe even the Xistress!"

Ameisa shuddered at those last words. She created a floating rune at the palm of her hand, the 6-sided symbol ready to turn her rage into incineration, when Ursula folded her arms. "You'd burn your very brilliant scientist Entrapta? That's so cold Elderdragon Byte." She asked. Ameisa's eyes scorched through the both of them. "I'll put you both in the ground and rebuild everything you two have destroyed."

Veronica meanwhile tried to sneak away.

"Tsk tsk, very well. But I don't think you'll wanna try your chances with my associate over there." Ursula said.

Vero, bumped into the tall imposing mummified black figure entering the room.

Elysium. Reluctantly, Ameisa put her hands down. She'd lost it all.

"Entraptra, Elysium, why don't you go out and wait abit. We're going to have to have a chat. We'll see to it she's treated fairly."

"Ooo, sure!" Entrapta and Elysium said with a giggle and a cold nod, respective of each.

Ameisa watched as they left. Liam dead and covered in the rubble, Ceres still puppeted. On simple orders she marched out aswell like a marionette under Ursula's control.

Ursula gave a small smile and closed her eyes. "I know you don't want anyone to suffer, Byte. I'm not a big fan of torture or suffering myself. That's why I'd like you to join me. Abandon Xi and the Elderdragons. Become one of my Starbreakers instead, you'll keep your position in 'my' new regime and have a small say in how things turn out. I could use a brilliant mind like yours.”

Ameisa thought of it, her heart heavy. She'd lost. She knew it. But how could she betray her people, her Xistress? Even it meant losing a war with the Starbreakers? Abandoning her allies..? She couldn't bring herself to do it. "That won't happen." She said.

Ursula leaned forward. "That won't happen?" She asked repeating it. Ameisa shook her head no, a look of stubbornness on her face. "What won't happen."

"You won't win. Your 'regime?' You're just a dictator."

Ursula leaned forward and held her face to her, eye to eye, her lips twitching and moving.

Ameisa felt like she was being misrecognized, the strange sense of weakness, of submission this hollow victory had given the deranged lady. Ursula was a champion..

"You just don't understand, do you? You and your Xistress would be so useful in my-" Ameisa shook her head. "No." She said.

"-My Starbreakers-" Ursula held her. "No." "-New regime-"

"No."

"-Innovate-"

"No."

"-Improve-"

"No."

"But-" "Fuck off."

Ursula looked at her, confused. She'd expected she'd change her mind, even tried to seduce her. Nothing seemed to convince her. She chuckled.

"Oh, it would seem you're not as intelligent as I thought. A pity. Very well then."

Ursula left and Ameisa closed her eyes. All of Sparta was dead. Her elderdragons were lightyears away, she was a captive. She was alone.

Elysium returned, the dark mummified silohuette of a woman- or thing, whatever it was came near and imposingly grabbed Ameisa's arm. "Come. Do not displease her again."

"You-" Ameisa said with a pained gasp. It was hard to believe that much raw power in one person would have killed the entirety of Sparta. An immortal monster, incomprehensible beyond measure. Ameisa tried to create her Hex runes again and aimed her fingers like guns at them. "Oh be quiet. I know your tricks. You can't kill me, you're just a dumb girl." Elysium said, her voice cold. "Now move."

She pushed her along and lead back up slowly, Ely bandaging them up like a lasso and climbing out. She looked back at Liam one last time. The boy lay lifeless and crushed in the rubble. She remembered when the young boy came to him, telling her he was going to join Sparta because of her, and that she was her favorite Elderdragon leading Xi. "I'm.. sorry.. Liam. I'm.. sorry." Ameisa was silent, her feet taking a lead of their own accord. If they thought she was going to stop fighting them or change her mind, they were sorely mistaken.

 

 

She'd lost the battle. But not her spirit.