The ultralisk broke through the swarm like a boulder through water.
Jake felt it before he saw it—a wall of dense, grinding mass pushing through the zergling tide, scattering smaller Zerg to either side as it carved a direct path toward the main bridge. The ground shook with each step, cracks splitting the dried earth in patterns that radiated outward like fractures in glass.
From his position behind the second line, Jake watched it emerge through the smoke and dust. Bone-white kaiser blades caught the firelight, each one longer than a man was tall, sweeping the air with lazy, devastating arcs that carved trenches into the terrain with every swing.
The defenders saw it too.
The gunfire didn't stop—but the rhythm changed. Shots went ragged. Bursts came shorter. The steady cadence of disciplined fire broke into something faster, more desperate.
Fear had entered the line.
"Hold!" Raynor's voice carried across the chaos. "Don't waste ammo—wait for the turrets to cycle!"
The automated turrets swiveled, tracking the ultralisk as it crossed into effective range. Heavy rounds punched into its carapace in rapid succession—sparks and chitin fragments spraying with each impact—but the creature barely slowed. Its armor was layered thick, evolved specifically to absorb sustained fire.
It wasn't invincible. But it might as well have been at this range.
Jake's hand went to his comms. "Raynor. It's going to hit the central barricade. Thirty seconds, maybe less."
"Yeah, I can see that," Raynor shot back. There was an edge in his voice that Jake had never heard before. Not panic. Something closer to calculation running out of answers.
"Tychus—you got anything heavy?" Raynor called.
Tychus's response came through choppy, half-buried under gunfire. "Got the siege tank warming up, but it ain't gonna be ready in thirty seconds, Jimmy."
"Make it fifteen."
"That ain't how machines work!"
The ultralisk hit the outer barricade.
The impact wasn't like anything else on the battlefield. Metal screamed as reinforced plating buckled inward, the entire structure lifting off the ground before collapsing sideways in a cascade of debris. Three defenders were thrown clear—one didn't get up.
Jake gripped the wall he was leaning against as the shock traveled through the ground. His body was still wrecked from earlier—his hands trembling, blood crusted on his upper lip and along his left ear, his vision soft at the edges. Every part of him was telling him to stay down.
But his psionic sense was screaming something else entirely.
The ultralisk wasn't alone. Behind it, zerglings were funneling through the gap it had created, pouring past the wrecked barricade in a stream that the remaining defenders couldn't cover. The breach was widening by the second.
"Raynor," Jake said. "The gap. They're flooding through behind it. You've got maybe twenty zerglings in the channel and more coming."
Raynor was already moving. "Redirect fire to the breach! Don't let them through!"
Raiders scrambled to reposition, but the ultralisk commanded too much attention. It swung again, this time catching a turret mount. The entire structure ripped free from its base and went tumbling across the bridge, taking two defenders with it.
Jake pushed himself off the wall.
He couldn't throw the ultralisk. Couldn't slow it. Couldn't do anything to a creature that massive in his current state. He'd tried something similar in the hive and it had nearly killed him even when he was fresh.
But he didn't need to fight the ultralisk.
He needed to slow what was coming behind it.
Jake moved to the edge of his cover, put his back to the reinforced wall, and reached out toward the breach. Not wide. Not far. Just into the channel where the zerglings were pouring through.
He found the narrowest point—where the collapsed barricade formed a bottleneck barely three meters wide—and he pushed.
Not at any specific creature. At the ground.
The packed earth buckled upward in a sharp ridge, maybe half a meter high. Not much. Not impressive. But in a narrow channel where two dozen zerglings were sprinting at full speed, it was enough.
The lead creatures hit the ridge and stumbled. The ones behind crashed into them. For three seconds, the bottleneck became a pileup—claws scraping, bodies tangling, momentum killed.
Three seconds was enough.
The redirected Raiders opened up on the channel. Concentrated fire tore through the clustered Zerg before they could untangle and push forward. Bodies dropped. The flow broke.
Jake's vision went dark at the edges. He grabbed the wall to keep himself standing. Something hot ran down the side of his neck—his ear was bleeding again, heavier this time. His skull felt like it was vibrating.
But the breach held.
The ultralisk reached the inner barricade.
This was the last line. Behind it—civilians, wounded, the command post. If it broke through here, there was nothing between the swarm and Backwater's center.
Raynor stood directly in its path, rifle up, firing controlled bursts into the exposed joints between its armor plates. The rounds did damage—not enough to stop it, not enough to slow it—but he didn't move.
"Where's that tank?!" he shouted.
"Firing!" Tychus's voice came back.
The siege tank round hit the ultralisk in the left flank.
The explosion was enormous—a concussive blast that sent shrapnel and chitin fragments spinning through the air. The creature staggered sideways, one of its kaiser blades gouging a deep trench in the bridge surface as it fought to stay upright.
A second round followed. This one hit the damaged flank again, cracking through the weakened carapace and detonating inside.
The ultralisk bellowed—a sound that rattled teeth and shook loose debris from every damaged structure in range. It lurched forward one more step, blades sweeping blindly.
Then its front legs buckled.
It went down slowly. Massive. Heavy. The bridge shuddered under the impact as it collapsed forward, blades embedding in the ground on either side of the barricade. Dust and organic fluid sprayed outward in a wide arc.
For a long moment, nobody moved.
Then Raynor's voice cut through the silence.
"…Is it dead?"
A marine approached cautiously, prodding the massive form with his rifle barrel. The creature didn't respond. Its eyes had gone dark.
"Dead, sir."
The cheer that followed was raw and ragged—more relief than celebration. Exhausted defenders slumped behind cover, some laughing, some too tired to do anything but breathe.
Jake didn't cheer.
He was on his knees behind the wall, one hand braced against the ground, the other pressing against his temple. His ears were ringing so badly he could barely hear the comms chatter. His vision kept phasing in and out—clear for a moment, then blurred, then clear again.
He could still feel the swarm. Pulling back now. Not defeated—withdrawing. The initial assault had been broken, and whatever controlled them had decided to regroup rather than waste more forces on a fortified position.
But they weren't leaving.
They were settling in. Building. Spreading creep across the terrain beyond the bridges.
This wasn't over.
It was just beginning.
Raynor found him a few minutes later, crouched in the same spot, staring at nothing.
"Hey." Raynor's voice was quieter now. The battlefield commander was gone. This was the other Raynor—the one who remembered that the people around him were still people.
Jake looked up. He probably looked terrible. He felt terrible.
"The breach call," Raynor said. "That was you."
Jake didn't deny it.
Raynor crouched down to his level. "How many of those are you gonna survive before one kills you?"
Jake wiped the blood from his ear with two fingers. Studied it. "More than you'd think."
"That ain't funny."
"Wasn't trying to be."
Raynor exhaled hard through his nose, the kind of breath that carried a dozen things he wasn't going to say. He stood again.
"We can't hold this place," he said. "The Zerg are digging in outside the perimeter. Next wave's gonna be worse."
Jake already knew. He'd felt the swarm reorganizing. New clusters forming at positions that would flank the bridges. Heavier units moving up from the initial landing zones.
"Evacuation," Jake said.
Raynor nodded. "Matt's bringing the Hyperion into low orbit. We load everyone we can and get off this rock before they hit us again."
Jake processed that. Everyone we can.
"How many can't we take?"
Raynor didn't answer immediately. His jaw worked once before he spoke. "The ship's not built for refugees, Jake. We'll fit what we fit."
Jake closed his eyes. The swarm was still out there, growing, entrenching. Mar Sara was falling—not in a dramatic collapse, but in a slow, inevitable tide that would swallow everything left behind.
"Then we move fast," Jake said.
Raynor offered him a hand.
Jake took it.
The evacuation began within the hour. Dropships cycled between the station and the Hyperion in rapid succession, loading civilians, wounded, and essential supplies in whatever order kept things moving fastest. The Raiders maintained a perimeter around the landing zones, but the Zerg didn't push. Not yet. They were content to watch the retreat—content to let the prey run while the nest grew stronger.
Jake helped where he could. Not with his abilities—those were spent. Just his hands, his back, carrying crates and helping wounded into transports the same way any other soldier would.
Some of the civilians watched him with open curiosity. A few with something harder to read.
He ignored it.
The last dropship loaded just as the perimeter motion sensors tripped. Zerg were moving again—not probing this time, but advancing in force.
"Everyone in! Go!" Raynor shouted.
Jake was the second-to-last aboard. Raynor was the last.
The ramp sealed behind them as the engines screamed to full power, the dropship lurching upward hard enough to press everyone into their seats. Through the small viewport by Jake's shoulder, he watched Backwater Station shrink below them—fires still burning, barricades broken, the dead ultralisk lying across the bridge like a monument to what it had cost to hold.
Then the swarm covered it.
Zerglings flooded the streets. Creep spread across the landing zone within seconds. Everything they had fought for—the barricades, the town square, Joeyray's Bar—disappeared beneath the tide.
Jake turned away from the viewport.
Mar Sara was gone.