An inexorable wave of pain crashed against Velan's mind; his head throbbed, his spine tingled, and had the agony he suffered not been suppressed by a well-timed injection of MECS, Velan would have fallen unconscious for the second time after his crash. Checking that his contact lenses were still in place, that he wasn't bleeding, and sighing with relief when he discovered that he was fine on both these fronts, Velan felt his pod's harness recede back into the device, finally allowing him to move again. As he brought a weary hand to scrape off the dust on his armor's visor, Velan's implants chimed in, broadcasting the message across his shaken mind, "No internal or external bleeding detected; fractured bones in spine and arm being stabilized; no broken bones detected."
Truly, escape pods were brilliantly designed, if Velan could be thrown from space into the side of four buildings and only suffer a fractured spine — something that was easily fixed in the modern era. His wounded hand from his battle on the Poseidon had already recovered; these other injuries were similarly of no concern.
A moment later, Velan's escape pod's front half burst open automatically, revealing the devastated floor of a commercial structure, now reduced to nothing more than a metal box filled with rubble, dust, and broken glass. His hazy vision being sharpened by MECS, Velan then understood his precise whereabouts — his pod was, at present, embedded in the 157th floor's ceiling.
As his restraints had been unfastened, however, the moment Velan slipped out of the last vestiges of his harness, he fell out of his pod and landed with near-comedic flair on the debris-littered floor — face first, though his helmet managed to barely keep him alive and conscious.
Around him, many of his remaining crew members, still numbering in the hundreds on the 157th floor alone, were sluggishly climbing out of their own variously damaged escape pods, checking their weapons, adjusting their armor and inspecting their suits' microbial shields with a fearful vigor that was dampened by the shock of their arrival; this shock would fade with time, but their fear would not. Next to Velan was Terxah, unharmed, clad in light, highly mobile infantry armor, and as alert as ever, despite having had nearly no sleep in the past day; near her was a fully armored Korthekar, whose suit had been so durable that even after suffering from atmospheric entry it looked reasonably intact, if scorched. A few meters away from Korthekar lay a shattered civilian hypersphere, contained within which was a tattered outfit, and a pile of dried gore that had mixed with the dust on the war-ravaged ground — no doubt, the morbid remains of the hypersphere's occupant. Not only was this an unfortunate sight in and of itself, but it also served as a reminder that, considering the stresses all of the Cesspit had gone through, it was unlikely that any hyperspheres remained functional; even if they were, as this unfortunate person had found out, they were unlikely to be safe. The corpse within the hypersphere's wreck had been viciously desiccated by time, and by the terribly hot climate borne of countless nuclear impacts; its garb was tattered, and, judging by the pool of vicious, partly-dried blood that accumulated in the bottom ridge of their hypersphere, he was clearly long-dead. The lack of any civilian presence besides the corpse in front of him reinforced Velan's theory that most civilians had fled to the other side of the planet, underground, or both, in their pursuit of survival. Fleeing underground was a wise choice — the firestorms, sonic debris, and nuclear fallout of the surface was not conducive to the survival of anyone not covered by armor, and though the subterranean sections of the world were more likely to harbor alien monstrosities, that was a risk Velan would be willing to take, were he a civilian. As he wasn't, it was a risk that Velan would thankfully not have to take; he simply had to find a way off the Cesspit before the Kalithiharian navy began to nuke it again.
Standing up, Velan, wanting to bring his remaining, weary crew members together before they marched to the nearby space elevator, began to use his implants to track the locations of all his other sailors — as people's implants were so interlinked, tracking the locations of everyone, and even viewing the record of everything they had recently done, was a possibility, and indeed sometimes a necessity, for high-ranking officers. Becoming aware of the locations and status of his remaining subordinates, Velan cursed emphatically: as he had predicted, a fair number of them had been spread throughout the surrounding area, making rendezvous and survival even more difficult. Yelazar and Illtera had landed on a slightly subterranean floor of Velan's skypiercer; a few other, more junior crew members occupied various other floors of the skypiercer below Velan; roughly ten other people — including Falmenec — had been spread throughout the nearby, still-human cityscape; a few unfortunate, and likely doomed sailors had crash-landed within the limits of the corrupted city. Fifteen of his crew had died as a result of the violent landing, but, as hundreds of thousands of Kalithiharian vessels had been destroyed as well, their human crews, numbering in the thousands in Velan's local area alone, stood to potentially replace some of Velan's many fallen, and to aid him in taking the nearby space elevator. In order to test their humanity, Velan intended to make use of the few alien-detectors he had stored in the escape pods of his crew — though they hadn't been proven to work, they were theoretically better than nothing.
Rushing around the room he was currently in, Velan set about helping the mildly wounded out of their pods. Sprinting over to the nearest unopened one and forcing open the pod's hatch, Velan found a struggling Ralthina within it, who was as awkwardly contorted within her escape pod as one could be; as the faint lighting of the skypiercer caught her armored visage, she stammered through sharp breaths, "Never let the ship get blown up again, and if you do, never let me board another one of these fucking escape pods!"
"Your incessant whining and whinging has already ensured that I'll do my best to stop you from getting on an escape pod, believe me!" Velan replied, extending an arm towards the struggling Ralthina so as to help her up. Grunting, cursing, and coughing up a light spray of blood onto Velan's armor, Ralthina gladly took his arm and stood. Exchanging another round of quips with the woman, Velan then stepped away only to notice that the room he was standing in was scarcely still a room — nearly the entire floor's interior had been completely levelled, with but a few interior walls and the place's structural supports remaining somewhat intact. The only clue as to the place's purpose was some faded, blood-stained writing on one of the few remaining interior walls, which read, "Logistics Department — Level 4." A temporary sign underneath that one read further, "Floor under extensive structural repairs: avoid large gatherings."
In that moment, the floor beneath Velan's feet let loose a strained, agonizing moan, as the added weight of the new arrivals pushed the damaged floor beyond its limit; having been hammered by firestorms, falling ships, escape pods and metallic debris, the floor and the skypiercer it was a part of were both dangerously close to collapse. Velan, not wishing to be trapped in a collapsing building, ordered his crew still within the skypiercer to evacuate immediately; this order did not come quickly enough. A trio of final, belated escape pods slammed into the war-weary building's 157th floor, obliterating a few overstrained structural supports as they went, and, with them, any sense of safety Velan may have had. This violent arrival forced the floor beneath Velan and his once-again endangered crew began to warp and buckle, threatening to give way at any moment, while a torrential rain of metallic shards from the shattered ceiling above began to assail those scrambling to safety below. Most of Velan's crew members fled back to their escape pods for safety, but Velan, whose escape pod was embedded in the ceiling of the room, and who couldn't fly up to reach it, found himself left with few options — his Personal Flight System, or PFS, the series of thrusters built into his suit, happened to be inoperable for all the debris. Searching around frantically for any cover, Velan's fearful eyes were confronted with the glistening, majestic, and massive armored form of Korthekar, standing just a few meters away, and whose armor could likely save him from his literal and imminent downfall. Informing the glorious brute of his intention, Velan, rifle in hand, darted over to the man and ducked; Korthekar, overstimulating his suit's microbial shield so that it began to flood outwards, then proceeded to envelop Velan with his armored arms so as to shield him from debris, and ensure his captain wasn't flung from his newfound protection.
Velan had reached Korthekar not a moment too soon. While Velan deactivated his implant-controlled ears in an attempt to preserve them, the 157th level's floor finally succumbed to the ever-callous laws of physics, snapping deafeningly as it fell away and deposited its contents onto the 156th floor; the combined weight of Velan's crew, the debris from the 157th floor, and the damage inflicted by the violent arrival of both of these, resulted in the 156th floor collapsing as well, mere seconds later. The very same happened on the 155th floor, the 154th floor, the 153rd floor, the 152nd floor, the 151st floor, the 150th floor, and, eventually, the 149th floor; the chain reaction only ceased on the 148th. Unsurprisingly, the entire ordeal seriously wounded many of Velan's remaining crew members, and shook the rest of them in the most literal sense possible.
Thankfully for the crew of the Nemesis, the exterior structure of the skypiercer remained mostly intact — it was merely the interiors of the 157th-149th floors that had failed, though this provided little comfort to injured people trapped within claustrophobic escape pods.
The 148th floor had only been able to survive thanks to the fact that it was an on-planet hangar, intended to sustain the astronomical weights of starships, and thus it had been able to weather the wave of debris that had rapidly assailed it, though not without great difficulty. Obviously, the hangar had been stripped of any ships it may have once possessed, but at the very least it had prevented Velan from falling through the entire building.
Being released mostly unharmed, and entirely un-lacerated, from Korthekar's near-crushing embrace, Velan thanked his microbe-soaked savior, took a moment to stretch his strained self, and then hastily devised a plan for rendezvousing with his crew members distributed throughout the skypiercer and surrounding cityscape. Rescuing these crew members was necessary before Velan marched on the space elevator, for reasons both selfishly pragmatic and heroically idealistic. Pragmatically, when any number of his people could be killed by the aliens, it was helpful to have spares; on the heroic side of things, as their commander, an officer of the navy, and a human being, it was Velan's duty to save as many of his people as he could — he owed them nothing less. Whatever his reasons for attempting it, however, barring the completion of this rendezvous was a rather egregious problem: the collapse of half the building had thrown a substantial amount of debris into the 148th floor, while the forces of the building's near destruction had transformed the 149th above into a maze of fallen structural beams which rendered the place as unnavigable as the 148th, if not more-so — this debris blocked Velan's crew from attempting any direct escape from their new tomb.
While his crew set about freeing those whose pods were trapped under rubble, Velan strategized their escape; his first strategy was to find an exterior wall, melt through it, jump out of the building, and try to stop their descent when they neared either the surface of the city below, while a few others detached from the rest whenever they neared any of the floors where some of Velan's crew members were trapped. Once this was done, the crew members on these floors could be freed, while the main group arriving at the surface would be able to round up the survivors from the Kalithiharian fleet as well as those Velan's own ship, following the idea that there was safety in numbers. Despite this seeming appealing, however, one issue remained with his fledging stratagem: jumping out of a building was never an entirely safe maneuver, especially when people's PFSs could have been unpredictably or undetectably damaged by any of the numerous trials they had faced recently. Nevertheless, in spite of the risks and no matter which strategy was adopted, if Velan's crew wanted to proceed, it would have to start digging, even if this digging was a process slowed by the number of people who were either wounded, or who were tending to the wounded, using some of the medical supplies in their pods to expedite the self-healing that genetically-enhanced human bodies could undertake. Everyone else's movements were further reduced in speed and accuracy by their freshly reopened emotional injuries, for with so much of the crew dead, even those as stalwart as Korthekar found themselves forced to rely on MECS and MECS alone to stem their tide of grief — somehow, however, Terxah seemed almost entirely unfazed. Velan's lieutenant Xandra, who was usually unusually silent, had always been difficult to read, but even then she seemed similarly dispassionate; between her and Terxah, Velan had enough suspicion for the rest of his crew combined, though he didn't dare act on any of it without any concrete information. This went especially for Terxah, who had saved not only his life but also the lives of his entire crew multiple times during the battle of Light's End, through her piloting prowess — if she were an alien infiltrator, why would she do such a thing?
Velan was not as unaffected as either of them, but he took great care not to be consumed by sorrow. His every breath and every movement possessed by a grim, overriding desire to keep himself and the rest of his crew alive, Velan forced himself to put the fallen out of his mind — survival was most important, and mourning for the dead would only result in more dead to mourn. He would allow himself to feel debilitatingly sad when the aliens were dead and the war won, but not a moment earlier, lest neither of those come to pass.