Humanity Endures

Part 9 - Infiltration | Chapter 6

Wielding his rifle and bayonet with unnatural prowess, Velan, shredding through the locally outnumbered aliens around him with bursts of rifle fire, sighted the imperilled Yelazar not a dozen meters away, and resolved to support his friend, no matter how dire the odds; much like Yelazar, he was unwilling to lose another one to the alien monsters.

Reloading his rifle and stomping his blood-covered boot on the grisly ground, Velan bellowed, his voice fleetingly eclipsing the chaos around him, "Let's eradicate these monstrosities! On me!"

Those few who had survived the fight and were trying to find a new target, hearing Velan's words, followed him; though the narrow corridor was scarcely wide enough to accommodate three humans abreast, Velan, his squad of ten-or-so humans eagerly following behind him, readied their weapons and charged the mostly-alien mass before them nevertheless. They attacked with the intention of slaughtering the majority of the alien infiltrators before they could wreak havoc on the rest of the human force, while also relieving Yelazar, Illtera, and whatever humans had been skilled or lucky enough to survive for that long — the confined space favored the aliens immensely, but with the monsters outside the protection of their biofluid, things were made more even. Both sides could perish, and that was all Velan needed.

Against conventional aliens, Velan and his weary force would not have stood a chance; alien infiltrators, however, with their weaker armor and inferior melee weaponry, were far less able to hold a sustained fight against even moderately well-trained soldiers — they relied on surprise, and for each second that Velan's human force persisted, their inhuman assault lost critical momentum. For each second that Velan's human force persisted, however, more and more of them were cut down; the aliens, together with their forces created by corrupting part of the station, outnumbered the humans, and so far the casualties favored the aliens by a significant margin. Retreat for either side was impossible; mercy for either side was non-existent. Though their foe often wore the faces or armor of their friends and coworkers, the remaining humans had to kill and be killed, for survival in such a clash was not entirely about skill — it was often dependent on luck.

The situation on the fringes of his formation, where the most elite human soldiery met with the more powerful conventional alien forces, was becoming either a bloody brawl, an elongated firefight, or both simultaneously, depending on where one looked — both of these, of course, favored the aliens, even with Terxah in command. The status of the snake-like formation that the rest of the humans found themselves in was, though it had its moments of triumph, otherwise deteriorating rapidly. Velan and his counterattacking soldiers fought heroically, slaying dozens of alien infiltrators in the gunfire-filled melee that followed their charge — this same human force slaughtered its way to Yelazar and his survivors seconds later. Their combined ranged weapons fire slew even more of the monstrosities, but despite Velan personally fighting and emerging victorious against multiple aliens at once, those around him were less brilliant, and soon he became covered in not just the blood of his foes, but that of his friends. In other areas, entire sections of the hallway were purged of human life. When Velan's rifle ran out of ammunition, Velan tore the plasma bayonet from it, and stabbed at the aliens around him, using his other hand to pick up a sidearm from a fallen ally nearby and slaying two more aliens with it before this weapon ran out of ammunition as well. Velan, possessing inhuman reflexes, was able to evade most of the aliens' at-times clumsy strikes, though the same could not be said for his eviscerated friends whose corpses he was forced to fight atop. All the while, the alien infiltrators around him surged forwards, their spindly yet lethal limbs finding purchase in the armor and flesh of those around Velan, whose small force rapidly began to thin and weaken as the battle progressed. Thankfully, as the aliens behind his small squad were thoroughly engaged with their human counterparts, Velan's force did not have to worry about attacks from the rear, though doubtless if the humans locked in melee behind them were to falter this would change, with catastrophic results, as it had for so many others.