AN: The release schedule for this fic will be once a week, as I'm mainly focusing on my other fic, Game of Thrones: My Kingdom Beyond the Portal.
The withdrawal order was given.
It was the right call and everybody knew it. They gained some ground but they could not finish the war. The eastern gate they had taken abandoned. Three guilds pulling out through a corridor Ren was holding open with the last of the transports, and every one of them going out under a lid of solid air that would come down the moment the man holding it ran out of whatever he was running on.
"Adam." Ren's voice on the channel, flat, the way it goes when she is not going to argue. "We're done. Come home and drop it when the last of them is clear."
"Yeah."
"Say it properly."
"I heard you," Adam said.
He was standing in the open inside enemy ground with nothing left, watching a tower he could not reach.
Then he smiled.
Sage.
[ Host. ]
Is it ready?
[ It has been ready for a while. I have been waiting for you to ask. ]
Hehe, good. He rolled his shoulders. It's showtime. Let's hope this works.
[ Firing solutions in ninety seconds. ] A pause. [ Host, may I have the music? ]
Absolutely.
You see, Sage was a fan of Iron Man, so the music played was, well...
Nine hundred and eleven kilometers north, under a sector nobody was looking at, the ground opened.
Every channel on that front came alive at once.
Not with orders. With a guitar.
Twelve thousand people heard it in the same second, in their earpieces and out of every speaker on every transport and every wall mount and every open relay across three sectors, and not one of them had ever heard it before, because the song does not exist here.
Marchand's voice came over the channel. "What is that? What is that? Whose channel is that on?"
"Everyone's," Adam said. "Keep running."
The first projectiles came in at four minutes.
They came in high, out of the north, dropping through the dust ceiling in a spread so wide that people twenty kilometers apart thought each was the only one to see it. They were not shells. There was nothing solid about them. They went over the human corridor and did not slow down or detonate, and the human soldiers underneath them looked concerned.
Then they burst over the enemy line, and the light that came out of them was a color nobody had a word for. Every Xenomorph inside four kilometers started twitching.
Then they melted.
Not burned. Not blown apart. The ten-meter ones at the head of the push went down onto their forelimbs, plating running off them like wax down a candle. Soon they were just puddles on the ground.
The Yhwcha in the rear died where they stood, all of them, at the same moment, in threes.
It took eleven seconds.
Nobody fired. On either side.
Twelve thousand human beings stopped in the middle of a retreat and stood in the open with their weapons down, listening to Shoot to Thrill from a world only Adam knew.
Somebody near Tarr's position started laughing.
"Adam." Ren, on the channel. Very carefully. "What did you do?"
"Nothing much," Adam said. "You remember the experimental weapons from below our sector? Well, those were mostly biological weapons meant to finish humankind."
"But how did this happen, don't tell me..."
"Yep, with a little adjustment from Sage we managed to turn the tables, so to say."
"How long have you had it?"
"Well, it was finished probably not long ago."
There was a silence on the channel that Adam decided not to fill.
The androids kept coming.
That was the part that shut the laughing off. Machines are not biology. Forty thousand of them, unmarked, untouched, walking forward through the remains of everything that had been standing next to them a minute earlier, into a human line that had already been told to run.
Adam watched but made no other moves.
"Adam, we can't hold that."
"You don't have to."
"Adam—"
"Ren." He was still watching the sky. "Watch the sky."
It felt like it followed the beat of the music.
One object. Not fast, nor evasive, just coming, slowly, on a line so straight it was insulting.
The androids saw it. Every anti-air mount along the enemy wall turned, and forty thousand machines threw everything they had at it at the same instant.
It should have been a cloud. The volume of fire that went into that piece of sky would have taken a dreadnought apart many times over.
Two hundred meters short of the first impact, the air in front of the rocket cracked.
There is no better word. It cracked, the way ice cracks, in a jagged line, and the object went into the crack, gone. Every round the enemy had in the air went through the space where it had been and kept going, hitting nothing at all.
The rocket came out four kilometers away, in the middle of the android formation, forty meters from the base of the near spire.
Then light, massive, large enough to connect the sky and earth.
The blast had no fire in it.
It went out as a ring connecting the heavens with the earth. Everything metal it touched came apart into dust so fine it floated in the air. The android formation did not fall over. It dissolved, forty thousand machines at once, from the inner ranks outward, in a wave that crossed four kilometers in under three seconds and left the sand under them completely untouched.
The spires were deleted with everything underneath them too.
The dust from that reached the human side a full minute later, and by then the music had finished. Nobody had said anything at all.
Twelve thousand people stood in the open on a dead world and looked at a horizon where an army had been.
A medic three meters from Tarr sat down on a crate, very slowly, and kept looking.
Marchand said, on an open channel, to nobody, "Was that us?"
Nobody answered her, because the only person who could have was two and a half kilometers away with his hands in his pockets watching the towers disperse, with a huge grin on his face.
Then the sky spoke to everybody.
Not through the earpieces. Not through the relays. Every human being on that planet, awake or asleep, in a trench or a hospital bed or a supply hold, saw the same thing in front of their eyes at the same moment, in a format that about nine thousand of them had seen before and the rest had only been told about.
THE NEXUS BAZAAR
WORLD CONTEST RESOLVED.
The contested world designated by your species as the Yhwcha world is now held in full by humanity. Organised resistance has ceased. The contest is closed.
DISPOSITION OF THE WORLD This world will be reassigned. It is to be drawn into your dimension and held as a permanent forward ground, and every future incursion directed at your dimension will make landfall here first.
DISPOSITION OF THE LOSING PARTY The dimension of origin of the defeated species will be harvested. Its energy will be drawn into the Nexus Bazaar. Available listings, tiers and services will expand accordingly.
AWARDS Every explorer who stood on this world during the contest will receive a victory allocation, scaled to contribution. Assessments will be issued individually.
Congratulations.
Adam read it, looking relieved.
Sage.
[ Indeed, Host. We did it. ]
Did I understand that correctly? No more incursions on Earth?
[ Yes, it seems that this world will be the new front for our defense. ]
Behind him, very faintly, somebody on an open channel was asking for the song again.
AN: If we get to 100 power stones, I will release an extra chapter on 300, another one. If you wish to support the story and read ahead, visit [email protected]/skeri123