Humanity Endures

Part 7 - Last Stand | Chapter 5

Leaping to his feet using his legs alone, Rislavahn grabbed his coil rifle with his other arm, wriggled it loose from the dead fingers of his detached limb, and, taking a few stumbling steps forward, finally summoned up the strength to dash to the nearest firing port, whereupon his rifle became but one instrument in the deadly orchestra that was the humans' defence; the complex continued to hold, and it continued to do so with spectacular fashion, in spite of the great odds against it. With the turrets dealing unimaginable damage to the tightly-packed aliens and the human gauss fire proving equally as effective against the monstrosities' close-order formation, the defence looked as it was already decided, for the Kalithiharian marine tasked with repairing the space elevator was but a short while away from success. Without any effective means of breaking the stalemate, Xandra thought, the aliens below them would continue to be massacred while having only killed a few hundred, and the aliens battling on Terxah's front and Korthekar's front would doubtless be delayed effectively by the defences present in either of those well-fortified areas, having only killed around a thousand humans. This seemed so easy it was almost as if the aliens were purposefully keeping the humans alive; Xandra was unnerved, yet she was also thankful. A moment later, however, and with the monstrosity emerging from the depths with a guttural, soul-piercing screech, the aliens proved why one should never consider a desperate battle over until it is properly over.

A golden inferno slammed into Xandra's firing port, much of it passing through the thing's minuscule gap and reducing part of the ceiling beyond to slag that then rained down onto the heads of those below; however, an unhurt Xandra was concerned less by this than the abnormal sound she had heard. Waiting for a lull in the aliens' barrage, Xandra finally glanced through the port and stared at the living surface below, curious to see what had produced the strange roar, and, more importantly, fearful of discovering what it meant for the continuation of the battle.

Her genetically-enhanced eyes searching the battlefield below with great agility, her eyes sighted the monstrous thing that had drawn her attention in the first place, and Xandra found her gaze unwaveringly affixed to the horrible creature: standing at least three storeys tall, with a body much larger than that of a human tank and lumbering forth on a quintet of trunk-like legs, advanced an alien horror larger than any Xandra had seen before. Its shifting, fluid-like yet sturdy body was somewhat rectangular, though marked by uneven protrusions, unnatural ridges, and frenzied tentacles that lashed out at the air around the monstrosity in the absence of a close enough human target; this freakish core was supported by a series of almost elegant, curved legs that looked as if they could outpace anything human — or crush it into dust. Jutting out asymmetrically from the beast's front was a head-like structure, identifiable mainly by roughly a dozen sickly-gold circles that were placed seemingly at random across the creature's cranium, endlessly scanning for targets that the abomination's weapons could annihilate; this head's cackling maw let loose shrieks which easily echoed throughout the fallen cityscape, and the quivering hearts of those humans it faced. As the titanic tenebrous terror lumbered forwards, an endless stream of alien biofluid poured out from a network of unsightly gashes on the underside of the monster, bathing those writhing beasts below it with the sustaining, revitalizing power of the aliens' most potent weapon, whilst serving to corrupt anything pure that the beast walked over. Wherever the alien beast got all of the biofluid Xandra could not be certain, but what she was certain of was this: the aliens' answer to the human tank was even more terrifying than the rest of what she had seen from them. The thing was a monstrosity among monstrosities; a terror to put all the other terrors underneath it to shame, and one that seemed capable of even greater slaughter than its terrible peers. Fighting the aliens in space was difficult and often foolhardy; trying to survive them on the ground was nothing more than an impossibility, and this beast was but another monstrous curiosity in the aliens' endless bag of fatal tricks.