Humanity Endures

Part 7 - Last Stand | Chapter 3

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.