Her hands clutching a pair of assault rifles, her core burning with resolve and tenacity, and her feet soaked in the blood and gore of countless slain aliens, Terxah held her position tenaciously, and butchered the alien butchers with uncanny efficiency. While a cacophony of gauss fire, frenzied alien shrieking, and the roar of explosions echoed throughout her corridor, those twenty marines and sailors she led were unfazed; they showed a fearless determination to make the aliens pay for every inch of ground gained with blood and time, no matter how terrible their inhuman foe showed itself to be. Just as the next wave of alien abominations approached her, Terxah, roaring at a volume so intense it momentarily rose above the alien chorus, declared, "Humanity ascends! Kalithihar!"
Her rallying cry was repeated in unison by those around he, and the following moment even this battle-cry was drowned out by the sounds of vengeful, desperate gunfire, as the aliens finally entered the humans' sights. As the alien shrieking gave way to the sound of weapons fire, the very walls of the corridor around her became covered with alien blood, as the aliens within which it was once contained were riven by the dozen; with a tide of biofluid advancing behind them, and with an ocean of it lapping against the complex outside, these losses were neither permanent, nor relevant, to the endless alien horde. Terxah saw one of her team drop their weapon and flee at the sight of the black tide, but Terxah, ducking suddenly to evade the violent strike of an alien limb that instead found its mark in the throat of a Kalithiharian marine, soon found this to be the least of her concerns: with a quintet of blood-curdling shrieks, five of the soldiers nearby her revealed their true monstrous nature. Sprouting blackened limbs, losing any traces of humanity that once possessed them, and slashing at those whom they had been fighting beside, the alien infiltrators proved yet again that they were a terrible threat; while the human squad fought to survive this new attack, the conventional wave of aliens, being unsuppressed, continued to gain ground on the defenders. Though the hallways had been warped into a maze-like mess, if there were aliens amongst her team, a team that knew nearly every part of the labyrinth they defended, then the alien horde could navigate this maze-like mess — the human plan was coming apart after only a few minutes of being tested. Adaptation was key, but this took time; Terxah had to hold out for longer, for if her section broke, the undaunted aliens would have little trouble outflanking and obliterating the unprepared defences behind her.
A moment later, a jolt of recognition and alarm surged through Terxah's mind as she noticed, for the first time, a nearby grenade, left behind by what she had thought had been a mere craven, but was now revealed as an alien infiltrator; if the thing went off, it would kill her and everyone nearby. With a limitless alien horde nearby her, a band of alien infiltrators assaulting her formation from within, and an active grenade trapped in the epicenter of their position, the only thing the beleaguered human force had in its favor was Terxah; what the aliens didn't realize, however, was that this alone evened the odds.
Not wasting even a millisecond in reacting, Terxah, her entire form an edgeless blur as she moved with inhuman speed and precision, grabbed the grenade lying on the blood-soaked floor nearby her and hurled it with such force towards the mass of aliens that even if it weren't an explosive it would've been dangerous; in that same motion, Terxah spun and sprayed two of the lanky, unarmored alien infiltrators with a lethal hail of gauss rounds, cutting one of them in half and literally dis-arming the other, leaving it for the rest of the marines to deal with. Darting towards the final three alien impostors, all of whom were hastily unleashing their human weapons or flailing alien limbs on the whirlwind of death that was the Nemesis's pilot, Terxah clenched her hands into a pair of fists, lashing out at a pair of the aliens, before bringing her armored foot across the face of the third with such force that its human-like head was torn from its torso in a spectacular display of skill, strength and brutality. Simultaneously, Terxah's thrown grenade detonated, the force of the enclosed explosion annihilating dozens of conventional aliens nearby whilst tearing through the unarmored walls of the corridor. Such was the force of the detonation that it even sent a few of the unprepared human soldiers flailing to the ground, though before the aliens could even regain their footing, Terxah had grabbed an alien infiltrator's arm, ripped it clean off, and used it as a bludgeon to beat what remained of the monster down; grabbing the gun that was held by the alien's other arm, Terxah shredded any surviving infiltrator she saw, before expending the rest of the gun's magazine by firing it into the rapidly-recovering mass of alien creatures in the hallway beyond. Terxah's finesse seemed to eclipse what was possible for a human, yet those whose lives she had saved were thankful nevertheless. Even in her moment of glorious, impossible triumph, however, all around Terxah, the sounds of gunfire and explosions gradually subsided, being subsumed by an increasingly bloodthirsty droning of alien yelps and cackles: clearly, the human defenders were being pushed back all around her, and if Terxah did not similarly retreat, she would be encircled and destroyed, no matter how well she fought.
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:
"Fuck. You. All!"
As Korthekar railed and fought, his marine allies behind him, through the use of a well-placed volley of explosives, slew many of the mostly unarmored alien riflers that had wreaked so much death throughout the condensed battlefield; nevertheless, these would doubtless be replaced by new ones within minutes. The human line continued to hold, though its ranks were quickly becoming depleted by the ravages of hopeless war, and were the force to suffer any more significant losses, the risk that the aliens' endless offensive would break through the chokepoint, and carry through to the core of the complex itself, increased. There was more at stake than merely Korthekar's life or the lives of his crew members; to Korthekar, more important than his own life was vengeance, and now that he had over a million aliens before him, there was ample opportunity to achieve the retribution he so coveted. With each alien butchered, he grew closer to avenging the massacre of Light's End, though with each additional human slain, this debt grew even larger; motivated as much by a hatred for their foe as they were by their desire to survive, the humans fought with as much ferocity and tenacity as the monstrous horrors they combated. The battle was not over, and it would not be until the last human had either left the Cesspit, or had left the mortal coil.
Dozens of Tekran war-beasts, supplied by the Geneticier Velan had recruited, went toe-to-toe with alien fiends and sprinters, though with relatively mixed results; these were joined in the desperate melee by a number of Kalithiharian enforcers, and were bolstered by the supporting fire of over a hundred marines. The hallway in which they fought was as wide as a standard room, and was so long that the word 'hallway' barely applied — in such an environment, one would expect the human force's superior ranged fire to prevail, and for a while it had; recently, however, through brute force and clever diversions, the aliens had forced the humans into a close-quarters engagement. In such a situation, the ever-critical human grenades, being just as likely to blow up the humans themselves as their intended targets, became utterly worthless — worse still, in the hands of an alien impostor, the humans were the intended targets, and the number of still-bleeding human limbs scattered throughout their own lines was a testament to the effectiveness of these when employed by alien infiltrators.
In melee, aliens could generate new limbs in seconds to slice at their foes from impossible angles; even when an alien was cut down, it would often be revived moments later by the swamp of biofluid underfoot, which struck at the humans itself whenever it had the chance. Fiends were the ultimate foe in close combat, and their mighty blows had even crushed a few enforcers into lifeless husks; over three hundred marines had been eviscerated by sprinters, creatures that often leapt from soldier to soldier as they gutted their quarry with terrifying ease, yet these humans' eviscerated corpses were hardly distinguishable from the rest of the gore that covered the gruesome battlefield. Even where the humans did manage to inflict casualties on the aliens, they mattered for nothing; as the aliens were endless, killing them made no difference. The humans fought to delay their opponent, not to kill it, yet as the aliens strained the complex's defences to their limit after mere minutes of battle, even this conservative defensive strategy was cast into doubt.
Playing a major role in containing the sea of aliens that occupied the ground outside the complex were the defensive turrets of the military complex — these powerful weapons, under the guidance of Yelazar and other gunnery officers amongst Velan's force, had already slain tens of thousands of densely packed aliens. As such, they remained a critical target for the attacking alien horde, which had sent a significant portion of its endless numbers to scale the armored walls of the pyramidal complex and attack the turrets from below, all while swarms of harbingers charged these major batteries in an attempt to silence them permanently. Against these ill-accounted-for alien attacks, almost all of the human reserves had been deployed to the sections of the structure which housed its turrets and overlooked the grounds and walls below; if this front of the overwhelming onslaught was not held, the entire defence would fail within minutes.
The officers leading these reserves were Falmenec, Ralthina, and Dentor, mostly the same people who had commanded the inexperienced rear-guard during Velan's flight to the complex; yet again, they were all that stood in the way of the humans' annihilation.
***
Outside, the artificial lights of the compound remained the only source of illumination for kilometers, a lone light being swarmed and encircled by a writhing, shrieking sea of shadow — one which showed no signs of receding. As nearly all light had been absorbed by the aliens' atmospheric taint, and as the aliens' accursed, infernal realm had spread almost endlessly in every direction, many of the human defenders were forced to fight in conditions as dark as the aliens themselves. When alien harbingers were cut down or damaged in the alien-corrupted skies, they were quickly healed by the tainted air, much like their cousins on the ground were restored by biofluid; there seemed to be no end to the nightmarish powers of the aliens, and even as the humans resisted, their fighting spirit waned. Many had to turn off their ears just to block out the deafening roar of countless aliens, many of which now paraded themselves throughout the insides of the complex. Though fighting in absolute darkness didn't have much impact on the genetically or mechanically enhanced eyes of those defending, the atmospheric corruption did impair their ability to survive, and the sight of so much death did much to instill in the hearts of the defenders a looming feeling of hopelessness, of helplessness, and of abject futility, in the human heart. Even if they somehow survived the Cesspit, how could the galaxy survive a foe like this?