Waterstrider

Otan, Tseludia Station, Pantheonic Territory, Fifthmonth, 1634 PTS

Sprinting through the hole that had been opened up by a well-placed set of explosives, Triezal slid down the corridor, skidding on his heels as his boots sliced their way through the top layer of the floor. It was all his subordinates could do just to keep up with him, but the enhanced muscles of the Jobu were enough to do the trick, far dwarfing that of his own Merris physique.

There were six of them in this squad in total, consisting of Triezal, the squad leader Kholl, and four elite soldiers. All of the soldiers were Jobu, as the Korlove under his command had been placed in different positions. Because they were shorter and physically weaker than the Jobu, he was worried about the speed they could move, so Triezal had assigned them to the other positions in the plan, such as the bomb squad who had opened the entrance for his squad. He himself would have had difficulty keeping up with his subordinates were it not for the advanced equipment he had adorned his body in. This role was the most dangerous, and he dared not bring anyone slower than himself.

The corridor was thick with Exid drones, though the thick flickering aura surrounding the lower half of Triezal’s body caused them to part to either side. Those who contacted his feet found their exoskeletons dissolved away by the vibrant energies. The squad followed in his wake, traipsing their way through the corpses as the endless waves of giant insects swarmed to either side. Their miasmic resistance allowed them to walk through the smoke, suffering only minor damage to their clothing, and none to their actual bodies.

Triezal gritted his teeth, suffering through the keening wails of the drones as they died, and the chittering screams of those who rushed out in mindless hope to confront the intruders. Forcing his way against the tides was like running through a mire, sapping his strength at every opportunity. Still, they continued to make progress, taking advantage of the Exid Queen’s inability to give precise directives at this distance. All she could do was pre-issue orders to attack all aliens that they bumped into. This was within Triezal’s expectations, and a core aspect of his operational plan.

It wasn’t long before they made it into the heart of the hive, faced with Queen Sikreis and her personal guard. Her mouth chittered as they entered, a thick puff of pheromones emerging from her glands.

“Emotion: Disdain. You will die for your insolence, Celans,” she said, the words emerging from a mechanical speaker embedded into the side of one of the walls.

“You are the one who will submit or die, Sikreis. Those are the only options which remain for you. You should have accepted our initial offer when you had the chance.”

Acting on the Leader’s orders, Triezal had indeed offered to buy out the Sikreis Corporation, but of course he had been turned down, to no surprise. This was always the primary plan.

He turned back to his men. Squad Leader Kholl and two of the others had started to unpack a box strapped to their pack, while the remaining two had started to pull explosives from their own packs.

The stream of Exid coursing out began to turn around, and those moving through the other tunnels began to course back towards them. Triezal imagined that the failure to operate the Sikreis Queendom’s factories today would probably have a significant impact on the station’s daily economy, though that was not his greatest concern at the moment.

Here, the drones were near enough to Queen Sikreis to be perfectly controlled by her. They were attacking from all sides, and it was now far more than Triezal could handle on his own. Luckily, there was less of a need for them to move fast, and his subordinates had finished unpacking. Streams of orange mist jerked and stuttered from the nozzles of the machines, blowing thick clouds of activated flickering miasma into the Exid worker drones. This was Akatar, the most destructive and corruptive version of flickering miasma.

Under the streams of miasma, the drones melted and warped, their chittered screams resounding through the cavernous space.

“Emotion: Shock. What is this?” Queen Sikreis asked in horror. The scent of her shock filled the room, thickly palpable in the air. There was a deep click on the ground as she took a fearful step backwards, but the voice that emerged from the machine was toneless.

Triezal smiled as he looked up at her, searing the exoskeleton off of a worker with a kick from his booted foot.

“Did you really believe that we would have come here without a plan, Sikreis? You thought too little of us.”

Here, he aimed to scare Sikreis, and prevent her from drawing near and using her enormous body to attack them. If she did, there was nothing they could do to prevent their deaths, but these weapons would certainly cause her great injury were she to draw too close.

Despite the extremely high destructive output of the small squad, it was difficult for them to deal with the relentless tides of drones. Exid workers continued to climb over the corpses of their comrades, blindly following the orders of their queen. One of them managed to get a claw wrapped around one of Triezal’s legs. He grunted in pain as it tried to crush his bones, but managed to raise one of his pistols in time, the bullet nearly instantly crashing right through one of its eyes and through its brain. Instinctively, one of Triezal’s hands reached for the knife carefully strapped to his waist, but Triezal held himself back. He could never use that weapon unless he truly had no other choice. Instead, he activated the metal plate atop the back of his right hand, creating a small orange barrier which he used to bash the drone out of his way, managing to escape with mere bruises and scrapes. Another Exid climbed right over the body of the one he had just killed, continuing the relentless pressure.

Triezal cursed. They had taken too long to reach this place, while Sikreis had reacted quicker than they had anticipated. It was too late to do anything about it, though. Triezal himself would be able to escape if he used his naeratanh dagger, but that did not hold true for the rest of his men. If they ran, they would be mowed down by the hordes of drones. The only way out was to force the queen to surrender.

“Throw the bombs!” Triezal shouted, gritting his teeth as he endured the pressure of the still-continuing waves of bugs. His boots would last for a while longer, but his ammunition and other tools would soon run out of charge.

He was unable to see the bombs being thrown due to his position, but he could see the blooming explosions behind the lines of Exid. They had already killed hundreds of the workers, but the tide of bugs never ceased. Based on the research that Triezal had performed in advance, he knew that the Sikreis Queendom had hundreds of thousands of workers, and was one of the smaller Exid forces.

He could hear a scream from behind him, but rather than the high pitched squeak of an Exid, it was the fearful shout of a humanoid. The Heirs’ soldiers were very well trained, so the shout could only have been a result of a very heavy injury. Though one of his squad members had been injured, Triezal still did not dare look back. To turn back for a moment was to risk failing to hold his portion of the line.

The air was thick with the scent of insect blood and smoke, as well as the pheromones which the Queen used to control her workers. Flakes of carapace and rock scattered through the air, tracing patterns that Triezal might have thought were beautiful were his mind not so focused on the matter of killing drones. Triezal was the sort of man who often enjoyed fighting, able to use his words to manipulate the mood of his opponent. In a fight like this, he found that to be difficult. Not only was the risk extreme for him and his men, it also was a battle fought against creatures so alien he couldn’t help but feel as if he were facing monsters.

“Finally, we did it! We’re ready, sir!”

The excited words came from Kholl, and Triezal couldn’t help but let out an exhilarated sigh as he heard what he so wished to.

“Sikreis!” he shouted, smiling madly. “We have planted explosives around the room. You should know well that we have access to tactical nuclear explosives. Surrender, or we will blow them.”

This was the crux of the plan. There was no real possibility of escape should they fail, for there were simply too many of the drones. It would take an army to conquer an Exid Queen by normal means. So Triezal and his men had come up with the idea of forcing themselves into a situation of mutually assured destruction. Based on Exid psychology, it was extremely likely for Sikreis to choose servitude over death.

The queen’s mandibles clenched, creaking and screeching in a maddening tone. She then bowed her head in resignation, knowing it to be the case. The drones stilled, ceasing to approach us, even backing somewhat away, leaving them standing above a sea of white corpses shrouded in orange light.

“Emotion: Resignation. You do know how the others will react to this development,” she said.

“I do. We are prepared to handle the consequences.”

Another puff of pheromones were emitted, and Triezal knew this meant she was laughing at him.

“Perhaps we will both be dying regardless. But fine. As you wish, I swear myself to the services of the Heirs of Ottrien, provided I am granted the rights of a vassal.”

“All of your rights as a queen will be maintained,” he replied. “We will soon send someone to discuss our next steps.”

Triezal turned back to see the state of his men. Only one was unwounded, and two had fallen to their knees panting, nasty gashes on their legs and chest. He gave them a tired smile.

“We did good,” he said. “Let’s take ourselves to a hospital. I think you’ve earned yourselves a holiday.”

There was a soft cheer of triumph, which echoed in the space filled with the bodies of dead aliens.

Akatar: [Originally thought to simply be flickering miasma, akatar is actually an activated high-energy state, and only occurs naturally within the Incursion, when lesions allow miasma to flow directly into Telles. Celah, which is located in that area, is covered in millions of lesions, and so akatar was commonly encountered by the ancestors of the modern Celans, and exposure to it over the course of generations has led to the Jobu race's high ashatic resistance. As it is a type of flickering miasma, akatar is a chaotic energy which moves in inconsistent stuttering powers, and altering the shape and anture of everything it touches. In rare circumstances, it had even been able to transform nonliving structures into moving, monsters that almost resemble living organisms. According to ancient Jobu myth, akatar is the lifeblood of the universe itself.]