Rescue operations soon began system-wide, searching for the numerous survivors clinging onto fragments of human ships, or crippled wrecks; an ocean of missile-like escape pods, deployed from now-destroyed or crippled ships, swarmed towards still intact craft, civilian stations, or the planet below, where their crews could safely disembark now that the immediate battle had ceased. Those alien warships that had been crippled were given no quarter: after being thoroughly nuked or cracked open with gauss rounds, and only after this, robotic probes were sent to explore and study them in the not-so-vain hope that the ships could contain items of scientific value for the human race. If there was anything that the recent battle had made clear, it was that this human navy was in desperate need of adaptation and knowledge, both of which were easily acquired from the wrecks of disabled alien vessels. Nevertheless, if these robotic human probes uncovered any living aliens, then the entire ship was destroyed moments later — science was important, but the security of her planet was more so. The shattered wrecks of countless fighters, human warships, and stations that got in the way — among them, the EWCC — drifted harmlessly throughout the void, many of them being thoroughly searched for survivors, though rescuers were not optimistic. The battle had been among the costliest ones waged in humanity's recent memory, but at least it had been won. Tehkria remained a strong planet, Tehkria's navy remained a strong navy, and Lassarha had survived — the worst thing to come of the battle was the loss of the EWCC, but Lassarha had succeeded, for the most part, in protecting her people. No matter what trials came next, with Lassarha at its helm, Tehkria would be prepared.
The system — at least, the parts of it that weren't still on edge from having been dosed with MECS — let loose a collective sigh at the conclusion of the day's hostilities. Lassarha's hearts, which had been intensely pounding for the past hour or so, began to calm down, as the lack of conflict, and the calming influence of whatever MECS lingered in her system, both eased her frayed nerves.
Exhaling deeply, Lassarha's thoughts turned from rest and relief to remorse: billions of human beings had been callously butchered by aliens, each other, and her, over the course of the climactic battle. So much death would have reduced lesser people to grief-filled wrecks, but not Lassarha: though she mourned her billions of dead, with every ounce of grief that tore at her hearts of steel, her fury grew. All of this needless loss was either due to inane political machinations of the despicable Heralax Tekran, or due to the arcane, monstrous whims of a genocidal alien species — a species that deserved to be subjected to the same cruelty it had wrought, and a species Lassarha planned to eradicate, immediately after she wiped Heralax and whoever supported him off the once-proud face of the galaxy. What made her sick to her stomach, aside from all the needless death that she had just witnessed and delivered, was the fact that she considered a human being — nay, a Tekran, the supposed paragons of the human galaxy — to be on the same ethical level as the genocidal monstrosities which now threatened humanity itself. If the Empire had fallen so low, Lassarha asked herself, did it deserve to survive?
She quickly pushed such a stupid question out of her thoughts: of course it did.
The fact that Earth had fallen under attack from just over a million alien vessels, and that immediately afterwards Tehkria had been besieged by another massive inhuman force, implied that the alien menace was now perfectly capable of launching large-scale attacks with impunity. The surface of Tehkria below, though the planet's tranquil appearance had been shattered the moment it started pouring millions of tonnes of ordinance into orbit, appeared even more chaotic than it had during the battle; wherever alien ships had crash-landed on the planet's surface there now lay a battlefield. The aliens were contained, and affairs under control, but by no means were they peaceful: Tehkrian forces, some of the most elite in the galaxy, had quarantined the alien menace and were pushing them back to the cores of their corrupted footholds, indiscriminately slaughtering alien-looking aliens, human-looking aliens, and, tragically, even a few human-looking humans, all for the sake of the greater good. Sporadic revelry took place in the wake of the victory, though the underlying mood was one of sorrow for the dead, and fear for the lives of those who remained; no one doubted that the aliens would be back, and some even suspected that the Nahmatiixers would return in due time.
Lassarha, for one, did not fear for her world's continued humanity — those few aliens that did survive and were currently fighting on the surface of her planet were hopelessly outnumbered, and were surrounded by the endlessly defendable cityscape of Tehkria, that was as much a fortress as it was an ecumenopolis. Her greatest uncertainty instead came from the aliens' ability to perfectly replicate humans that they killed — when any number of her own people could be aliens determined to undermine her planet, no adequate defence could ever be mounted again. Fearing this reality, Lassarha ordered the planet-wide adoption of measures intended to stop the spread of the alien corruption before she then turned to her other means of resolving this issue: Lassarha ordered Xalina, the scientist of her ship, to cease whatever project she was working on and instead create a more viable, more reliable means of detecting infiltrating aliens. The current scanner Lassarha and the rest of the fleet had received was both woefully inadequate — it, as experience had shown, only detected aliens with around a five percent rate of success — and it was uncomfortably expensive to produce; for the safety of her planet, and all the others in the galaxy, a better tool had to be designed, and quickly. It was now the end of the third day of the war with the aliens: if humanity did not adapt by the fourth, it could be extinct by the fifth.
Within hours of the battle's conclusion the last pockets of alien resistance on the surface of Tehkria had been annihilated, and Lassarha began to devote her time to readying her government, her planet, and her people for a more intense and deadly war — wars — than anyone could have ever anticipated. The popular saying, 'humanity endures' was already doubted by many people, including Lassarha, but now as the galaxy was being torn apart from within and without, by forces familiar and forces literally alien, the once-proud saying had become more of a cruel joke. The world of Earth was turning black under the influence of alien corruption, and the rest of the divided galaxy threatened to follow; on the minds of every military planner, and every soldier across the Empire, was the eternal question of crisis: what now?
***
Lekahn ducked; a beam of alien fire tore through the roof above and the wall beside him, slicing through the arm of a nearby soldier in the process. Their screams were silent against the blood-curdling roar of the aliens below, and their cries for help failed to penetrate above the whine of stretching metal, as the skypiercer he and his unit were occupying threatened collapse. Splayed out before Lekahn was a grisly array of corpses, mostly human, with a few alien limbs and torsos wading in a sea of mankind's blood — these were the solemn remnants of an incident but a dozen minutes ago, where a swarm of aliens had teleported into the floor Lekahn and what was left of his division, the 1708th, was defending. The result of this incursion had been utter slaughter; more than three-quarters of the surviving humans had been slain, and all of the aliens had perished, though there were always more of the latter.
The alien shrieking, as incessant as it was deafening, threatened to make Lekahn go insane — worse still, since his supply of MECS had long-since evaporated, focusing on the battlefield was becoming difficult amidst the tempest of emotions and the maelstrom of fear which tormented him at every turn. Breathing had long since become a near impossibility inside his claustrophobic, bloodied helmet, but at least, unlike many of his fellow soldiers, Lekahn still had the privilege of breathing at all. Beside him were two of his fellow soldiers, part of a remaining fifty in the 1708th Division that had once numbered thirty thousand; though one of the two soldiers had sustained a nearly-mortal wound from an alien projectile weapon, it only hastened the end for the unfortunate man, for, doubtless, anyone there who was still alive would eventually be butchered like the others. The other soldier of the pair was, like everyone else, almost out of ammunition, and entirely out of hope.
Quintets of alien 'harbingers' — winged, clawed, fleshy, fighter-sized alien barges that carried insignificant weaponry and very significant numbers of alien troops — glided past his disintegrating window, the alien flock screeching at the corruption-choked heavens while their yelping occupants, creatively dubbed 'riflers' by many amongst the soldiery because of their ranged weaponry, unleashed a torrent of gilded death on his position. The entire damned skypiercer threatened to come down as the main projectile cannon of an alien 'stomper' — a five-legged tank-like beast that covered anything it walked past in biofluid — was directed towards the base of his building, though at present, this building collapsing was the furthest away of Lekahn's problems; the only question on his mind was not if, but how he would die. The potent human artillery on his half of the planet was hopelessly busy trying to preserve the current, wavering front line, and direct air support had become all but impossible: with even the air being contaminated by alien corruption and capable of attacking things by itself, any human trying to fly would quickly find themselves forced into the nearest skypiercer by the very air they flew through. Underground, cut off from their tanks, artillery, and other saving graces, the human army was in almost full retreat, and even with these vehicles, the aliens above ground were, quite simply, endless; if there was an impossible situation, the defence of Earth had become it.
Lekahn, in agony, hopeless, and hyperventilating, rapped his blood-stained hand against his weapon's magazine as if to check if it was still there before he stood up and glanced out of his window during a lapse in the aliens' onslaught; what he saw couldn't have been more disheartening. Not only did the tide of blackened alien flesh, the writhing seas of biofluid, and the cackling clouds of harbingers stretch as far as his genetically-augmented eyes could see, but part of the monstrous horde below was flooding the lower floors of the building his depleted battalion was defending. The very buildings around him in the city he called home had been twisted and perverted into grotesque spires of alien flesh, spires from which emerged thousands of bloodthirsty alien scum each minute, spires that soaked the streets of his proud city with the so-called "biofluid" that seemed to revitalize, revive, and sustain any alien it touched. As if that wasn't enough, thousands of new aliens seemed to be birthed from the arcane ooze with each passing, death-filled second. The skies around him were black and fell, having been corrupted by an airborne alien pollutant through which shone an intense, nearly constant glare — not the glare of Earth's sun, but the glare of nuclear detonations in the atmosphere or on nearby continents, all of which were intended to provide some semblance of ground support to those human forces that remained. The airborne alien corruption spread its vile taint to almost anything it touched, though there was hope to be found beyond the bleak fog and the nuclear firestorm: thousands of Strategic Deployment Pods, each of them containing tens of thousands of marines that were determined to defend humanity's homeworld, landed on the surface of the planet every few minutes. Besides them, the surviving forces of Earth were mustering, artillery capable of pounding stompers into the ground was being loaded and aimed in grand batteries of thousands of pieces at once. SSGTSBCs, or Single Shot Ground-to-Ship Ballistic Cannons, were being organized alongside hosts of anti-aircraft vehicles in order to cleanse the heavens of all alien filth, while entire divisions of tanks were being rallied to reclaim the surface; Lekahn, however, didn't expect to benefit from their arrival. His division had been entirely cut off from the human lines for hours, their communications equipment lost, their aircraft and vehicles destroyed, and their commanders killed. Those desperate humans within the skypiercer he was defending were all that remained of a division that had numbered thirty thousand once, and things did not look promising for the remaining forty-seven — three had perished in the last minute alone.
The next moment, after discharging what little ammunition his coilgun had, Lekahn was forced to duck again as a cacophony of trilling echoed above the shrieks below, and the next moment, a flurry of retaliatory alien fire shot towards him; though it missed his head, a beam of the stuff went straight through his gun, and much of the fire that had missed then proceeded to melt through the wall he had been using as cover. Lekahn was presented with a choice: to relocate, or die, and though the former would only delay the inevitable, he chose it regardless. Rolling away from the typhoon of golden death, Lekahn only barely found safety behind an unpowered digital desk, while he watched his two compatriots agonizingly reduced to slag by the weapons fire that had been intended for him. Now there were forty-five. Without a functional gun, Lekahn checked his belt for grenades; all he found was a non-lethal stun grenade, which was more likely to tickle an alien than ever kill or incapacitate one of the bastards. Such was the number of alien forces present that it would require nothing less than a good number of nuclear weapons to destroy them all, and even then their structures and biofluid seas would be intact, but as his battalion had lost all of its heavy weapons early in the chaotic fighting, neither he nor his division had such a thing. If the mad scientists of the Empire could find a way to somehow cram a nuke into a grenade, he would have been eternally thankful, but as the room he was in came down around him, along with the rest of the accursed building, Lekahn knew that he would never live to see that glorious day.
Glancing back at his melted weapon, Lekahn cursed his luck and drew his ceremonial plasma sword — intended to be a status symbol for officers, or a tool for parades, rather than a proper weapon — though he was then forced to dive for the door behind him as a hail of alien projectiles from the ground below, shooting through the armored floor below him, reduced his cover to ash. With no cover, no safe exit, and no effective weapon, Lekahn was, in a word, fucked.
Expecting death, Lekahn closed his eyes, shut down his hearing, and relaxed as much as he could in preparation for the bittersweet end, though no end came. Curious, and more than a little unnerved, Lekahn reopened his weary eyes and reactivated his hearing, to discover to his hesitant relief that the hordes of alien monstrosities had ceased attacking his position, and instead were fleeing the area, rapidly. Even the biofluid hastily receded from his skypiercer as it moved away from the area with almost fearful vigor. Perplexed, Lekahn checked the nearby area for human transponders, textcomms, anything that would indicate human reinforcements scary enough to warrant an alien withdrawal, yet he found no such evidence.
Then, as he surveyed the corrupted, desecrated cityscape before him, joined by a few of those who remained, Lekahn saw what had made the aliens flee, being created, before his very eyes. The alien biofluid that had flooded the city was coalescing into an unspeakably large, sleek, metallic object a few kilometers away, an object that his implants told him was just slightly smaller than a human cruiser. The alien biofluid, moving of its own volition and in defiance of gravity, continued to surge towards the mass, which was now constantly swamped by undulating waves of seemingly sentient liquid; the spectacle was watched excitedly by millions of aliens, all of them yelping and shrieking to their black hearts' content. A stupefied Lekahn watched in confusion, whilst many of his compatriots, deciding they would rather not be around to see what the alien creation was, fled. Lekahn knew this was pointless; they were surrounded, and if he was to perish, he might as well die standing his ground, like a soldier. Continuing to observe for seven minutes straight, Lekahn's curiosity waned and his boredom waxed right until the sea of alien liquid suddenly stopped flooding towards the center of the fallen city, falling back towards the corrupted Earth, seemingly obeying the will of gravity once more. It was then that, as the alien screeching reached its apex, Lekahn finally saw what the alien fluid had been creating: lying motionless in the streets of Earth, its blackened surface perfectly matching that of the fallen cityscape surrounding it, was an alien warship. It seemed that the alien biological liquid did not just revive fallen alien soldiers, corrupt anything it touched, or birth new hordes of the beasts, but it also created alien spacecraft — in minutes. Lekahn dreaded to think how many of the ships the aliens could create from just one fallen planet.
Its engines igniting, the alien craft rose into the taint-choked air until it was hovering over a kilometer above the shattered streets of Earth, where it paused its ascent. Lekahn realized all too late that the alien vessel had paused its ascent to direct its weaponry on the nearest speck of resistance — himself, and what remained of his division. Firing on the skypiercer that had been sheltering him, the alien vessel's arcane weaponry easily shattered the upper levels of the structure, allowing gravity to bring the kilometers-high upper levels of the building down onto those below, annihilating everything and everyone within the building as well as anything within two kilometers of the violent demolition. As the colossal building collapsed onto Lekahn, crushing him like an insect, his last thoughts were ones of uncertainty — at least he died when there was still hope, but, when alien warships were being built on the surface of Earth, just how much hope remained?
When the skypiercer finished its violent demolition, the horde of alien monstrosities surged forth into the now-vacant space, corrupting the remains of the once-proud structure while the shrieking masses put to death every last terrified human who had tried, desperately, to flee their inevitable fate.
Out of the 1708th Infantry Division, there were no survivors.