(Rewritten) Ch. 57 – Xenocide Act I; Desperate Rush

"Carpe diem!

Just…don't pluck too hard. Don't want the universe to unravel."

– Printed on a fridge magnet

***

I leapt from the tree and caught myself on the lower branches of another, taking advantage of their solid surface to kick off into a hard sprint towards the leading edge of the chase, where Leah would be.

She was moving in a very wide circle that would eventually pass my own ATV, about a quarter of it complete. I ran parallel to the Antithesis and caught frequent glimpses of them between the trees. Grenades dropped by Leah blew up every other second, scattering units in bloody plumes.

Tinea.

The small screen that gave me a bird's eye view of Leah replaced itself with another and grew bigger, showing a large gash in the ground, about three meters deep and five wide. Rain water and mud had accumulated at the bottom.

Leah will need to cross this trench in approximately one minute. She would have to slow down and climb the opposite bank, which will allow the Antithesis to catch up. If you hurry, you should be able to get there several seconds ahead of her and prepare something.

"Show me the way!"

New colors overlaid my vision, painting a path ahead and inside Leah's course.

Blinking red means jump, blue is land here, green is sprint, yellow means use hands to swing around. Go the fastest you can, don't slow down. You will need oxygen halfway there at the latest.

I set off hard, rammed my toes past the mud into the ground for the most demented sprint my new body was capable of. I was moving so fast that I had to fight the air pushing my torso up and away until I bent over like a racing cyclist.

"Buy it!"

Signal when ready to receive. It's a dissolving pill to place under your tongue. Breathe through your nose until it is gone. One point.

Not yet. Several corners ahead required my hands. I was almost to the half-way point, breath ragged, spots popping in my vision. Needed air.

The path altered itself. I followed.

Faster, Tinea. You're falling behind Leah.

A hoarse scream broke from my throat.

One more corner. There, long straight. I forced myself into a faster sprint, rocketing across twenty-five meters in a single second. I was going nearly one hundred kilometers an hour, beyond the limits of even my new body.

Too breathless to speak, I stretched a hollow fist out. Felt something appear in it.

Smacked it past my lips hard enough to hurt, caught it under my tongue. It tingled.

Held my open mouth shut with my hand as I desperately sucked in air. A flow of prickly mint joined the stream from under my tongue. Hit my lungs.

A flash of heat and cold crashed through me, tearing the haze from my eyes. The spots disappeared, and I was suddenly back at the front of my brain.

There, the trench. Five seconds ahead of Leah. She was only thirty meters away, crawling, compared to me.

I yelled, "That foam!"

A gun fell out of the sky in front of me and I caught it by reflex. Bright orange, not for fighting.

Canister attached from underneath. Foam.

I pointed it at the rut in the ground and started spraying.

A wave of heat brushed across my front as a stream as thick as my arm touched the opposite side, sizzling where the rain hit it. The foam flashed yellow and red and brown for a moment, and swelled to match my torso, almost too fast for me to keep up with spraying. It turned ash gray and hardened into a non-porous pebbly stone so light it didn't break off to tumble.

Two seconds.

I whipped the gun back and forth from edge to edge, painting an arch in the air as I jumped down into the trench.

Leah was here. The bridge was wide enough, but it sat in mud. I slid underneath it, splashing through the water, to hold it up from below as she touched the bridge.

Applied too much strength, heard it rip up the earth on one side. Bad leverage.

Leah wobbled badly. I bucked her over the rest of the trench, felt her hit the ground five meters past the edge. On her wheels.

She gunned the engine, and shouted at me on the call, "Run! They're close!"

I jumped out of the ditch with the bridge above my head, wound up and tossed it at the closest Three, ten meters away.

The foam-ash-cement thing was bigger than I was, but so light. It slowed down in the air from its own drag before it even hit anything.

The aliens would've been fine, but followed their instincts and dodged hard to the side anyway. They bowled over their cohort in a massive knot. Uncanny chaos. I giggled as I threw two of my tentacle grenades in there, for extra seasoning.

I spun around and dashed after Leah, looking for a good spot to disappear again, towards the outside, where I'd find the remaining Fives and Sixes.

A glance at the map told me we were almost halfway to my ATV. I'd have to keep an eye on that, make sure I made it with time to spare. I wouldn't be much faster than Leah on it.

There, a particularly thick patch of trees. They wouldn't really be able to see me past it.

"I'm off again, Leah!"

She saluted me with her horn and I broke away grinning, bouncing from trunk to trunk and taking corners at full tilt.

I slowed down slightly as the last of the oxygen pill fell apart under my tongue and dissolved away.

Ten meters to my side, Antithesis broke through the trees. So close. They were looking towards Leah and missed little quiet me. I disappeared up into a tree, one that had several storm-broken branches ripping holes into the top of its crown that would allow me to shoot my mortar trajectories without care.

The closer aliens were mostly Threes and Fours in a loose cluster. I tracked a denser knot of aliens with the help of Tynea's drones, and they would arrive in a few moments more. It gave me time to load another magazine of xeno-busting shells and start by picking off Fours with HSRP rounds, until finally, a pair of Fives appeared.

I eradicated the two fuckers with prejudice, reloaded another four shells to a total of an unwieldy six, and, stuck between the adrenalin high and holding still in ambush, got almost bored waiting for the actual throng of ambulatory plant matter to arrive.

Really. Couldn't they at least show some consideration for my efforts here and line up properly? Hmph. I would have to speak to the manager.

Oh, lucky me, there were three of them right there. Fat, juicy, stacked Sixes, stomping along like truck-sized, six-legged hippos, all clustered up with dozens of small fry.

I launched three fragmentation shells, accidentally killed a model One on the way up—actually, why were there so few of those?—and enjoyed the carnage on the ground as pieces of organic Antithesis armor added their own shrapnel to the storm of mutilation.

Adding up the numbers quickly, I had to kill…five more Fives, and…also five more Sixes. Three forty millimeter rounds still loaded.

Huh, where were the remaining Sixes and Fives?

"Tynea, did the aliens split up or something?"

No, not yet. However, they are lacking the proximity and guidance of the Sixes. They'll soon break into individual streams that cover more ground naturally.

Shit, that meant a lower density of points. Uh…

"Can you pin-point where that change first occurred?"

Certainly.

My map zoomed out, and a ping pulsed along the long curve we'd taken, a few hundred meters behind the aliens.

"Please search that place with your drones, see if you can figure out what happened to the missing Fives and Sixes."

I will do so.

"Okay, thanks. I guess I'll go and get my ATV now."

Leah was two thirds of the way to my vehicle, which meant I only had to haul ass, not break the sound barrier. I swallowed another one of those energy boosters and let the pleasure of gooey goodness wash through me, before using the fork I was sitting in as a starting block and sprint-jump-hopping my way through the forest.

Five missing Fives…what were they doing? Was it a problem? We did have active defenses… Ah, shit.

I called Leah with a thought again, who picked up almost instantly.

"What?"

"Missing Fives," I warned her. "Don't know where they are or if they'll attack. You should be fine with your horseshoe, but your ATV isn't covered."

"Okay. No worries, I have a plan should my wheels fail. For you, too."

"Great, I'll be there in a few."

"I'm having Ypsi watch your ATV to make sure it's safe and all."

"Oh! Thanks! Good idea. Is it?"

"Safe? Yeah, so far. No movement nearby. By the way, did you notice how there's no flyers around?" Leah asked. I could hear suspicion in her voice.

"Yeah, there aren't enough of them, are there?"

"No, there aren't. But I have no clue what they might be doing."

"Mmm. We'll keep our eyes open. Maybe they've just gone to join the big swarm or something."

"Yeah… I'll be passing your quad in three minutes."

"And I'll be there in two. No worries!"

"Good." There was a lovely smile in her voice. "See you in a second!"

"Yes," I answered, "see you in a second."

I kept running, increasingly out of breath again, but drawing close to that copse that concealed my ATV when Tynea's voice rang through my mind.

Tinea, I've located the missing Antithesis.

"Where are they?"

They entered a smallish cave system. I was able to send a drone some ways in before it was destroyed, and found no trace of an existing nest. I'm uncertain if there is a small one already hidden and feeding itself on the missing units for biomass to grow faster, or if the missing units are about to root and spawn a new nest. Either way, it would be best to kill it as soon as possible, before it gains a lot of strength.

"Underground, huh? That makes for dangerous units."

Yes.

"But a nest is worth a lot of points, yeah?"

Indeed.

"..." Fuck, Leah's armor was still crap for close quarters. Either she'd need to upgrade, or we'd have to split up again. Or we ignored the nest…which didn't sit right with me.

How many of the two or three hundred aliens chasing Leah did we have left to kill? They'd had a constant influx of additional units, too.

According to the map, the new size of the group…was about equal to the original size. Two to three hundred live targets, but they were increasingly splitting up. That was no good, hard to kill them fast enough like that.

I tossed a glance at my counter. 1300, marked as our combined value. We had the points for a solution.

"Tynea, I need something to lure all the aliens to one spot."

Large area audio-scent lure, fifty points. It's fragile machinery and needs to be protected if you want it to last the fight.

Leah and her turret would help there. Time to coordinate. And I needed to be able to stand my ground, too.

I arrived at my ATV and saddled up as I called Leah again.

"Tinea?"

"Hey. The Antithesis are splitting up, and some are probably forming at least one new nest in a cave nearby. I want to lure the rest of them back together in one spot, and we'll need your turret and a bunch of other stuff to kill them all in a proper standoff. Are you okay with me preparing something? It'll take at least a few minutes, I think."

"Go ahead, and tell me where. I'll circle the area."

"Will do. You're gonna need actual armor, too."

"For the cave?"

"For the cave."

"Yeah. Ah, we need to decide. Gear, or flight?" Leah said.

"...Gear. This time. We have vehicles, but we're fucked for points without them until we have real gear."

"Agreed. I'll see what I can do for armor. How many points do you need to set up?"

"Um…like five hundred. Two new weapons, explosives, and other machinery to set up. You use the other five hundred, and we'll have three hundred left for whatever."

"Sure. Lemme know where to go, alright?"

"Yes, I'll have Tynea share the coordinates with you soon. See you there." I sent Leah a thumbs-up in her own style, which she returned with a grin.

"See you there."

***