Humanity Endures

Part 7 - Last Stand | Chapter 3

Giving a glance to approaching alien horde, which seemed particularly interested in seizing her position, Terxah ordered her forces to retreat, and then sprinted away from her position along with them, clearing the blast radius of her planted munitions in moments. The next instant, with but a simple thought-command, these explosives detonated with a force so powerful it seemed as if it could rend the planet itself. The aliens which had been assailing Terxah, numbering in the dozens, were reduced to nought but ash, though this was far from a victory; just behind the remains of the fallen advanced a new wave of aliens that had poured in from the sea of horrors outside. Worse still, the maze that the human planners had hoped to create had almost entirely failed thanks to the efforts of alien impostors; with this failure, the war of attrition that was intended to be fought amidst this maze was placed into jeopardy as well. As the endlessly replenishing aliens poured in from all sides of the compound, charging over the dissolving corpses of tens of thousands of their own fallen just to slay a trivial number of humans, something dire became clear to Terxah and many others present: one could not win against such an enemy, one could only delay one's defeat.

With those protecting the outer section of the rear of the compound performing a fighting retreat, the only thing that kept the aliens from breaking through on other fronts and occupying the entire first floor was that elite force which had been holding the complex's frontal choke-point near its main gate — in the midst of this brutal affair, unsurprisingly, was Korthekar.

***

The combatants in the hallway waded through a shin-deep, gore-filled lake of blood, a sickening mix of both human and alien equivalents; with every passing moment, this lake was enlarged. The sound of gauss fire was eclipsed only by the shrieks of aliens, both those fighting, and those dying. Wherever one looked there was carnage and death — Korthekar could not have been more in his element.

His suit rendered pitch-black by the gore of those hundreds of aliens he had slain, Korthekar would have been indistinguishable from an alien fiend, were it not for his implants identifying him as human; being unsatisfied with the carnage he had wrought thus far, Korthekar continuously added to his newfound paint-job. His lightning cannons routinely frying dozens of smaller aliens every time they recharged, Korthekar's other two, free hands — hands that had once grasped MMMs, the ammunition for which was long-since depleted — made clear to all the brute strength of enforcers, against even the most hideously powerful of foes. Every passing second, Korthekar, his lungs emitting a roar to rival the bellows of the aliens he fought, would grasp and rip a sprinter in half, or viscerally pound one into blackened pulp; such small aliens posed a relatively trivial threat to such a soldier. Rather, it was the fiends, whose sheer physical strength, if not their armor, outstripped even Korthekar's own, and the riflers, whose warbling ranged weapons could reduce him and his armor to a molten puddle with a few combined volleys, that remained the greatest threats to his continued existence. Though these two varieties of alien creature were less common than the seemingly omnipresent sprinters, they were certainly not a rarity; by extension, the alien battlefield was no safe place for even the mightiest of human super-soldiers.

Sighting a sizeable group of alien riflers approaching, their distinct, sickly perversions of a human standing posture contrasting clearly with the seemingly rabid, four or three-legged creatures that comprised the mainstay of the melee-centric aliens' hordes, Korthekar, commanding any soldiers nearby to seek what cover they could, waded into the front lines, and grabbed the nearest sprinter he could see, whilst the anarchy of battle unfolded around him. Holding the flailing, protesting creature by one end, Korthekar wasted no time in grabbing the beast's other end and stretching its squealing form so that it acted as a shield; as the shrieking creature furiously, yet harmlessly clawed at his tank-like arms, Korthekar, two of his arms holding his shield and the other two wielding lightning cannons, simply waited for the inevitable. Moments later, the riflers in the distance discharged a surge of golden alien projectiles into the wide, fortified hallway, immolating dozens of aliens and humans alike — though one was far more expendable than the other — yet Korthekar remained comparatively intact, his improvised, now-expired cover having absorbed all that which was meant for him. Hurling the limp alien corpse back whence it came, Korthekar, discharging his lightning cannons into the alien crowd, roared a rather simple battle cry at the alien abominations: