“Team One, ready,” Gary said into his menu comms window. Three tiny comms windows were open beside it, each showing one of the members of the other teams.

“Team Two, ready,” Renn said for the Eurasian team.

“Team Three, ready,” Amahle said for the African and Oceania team.

“Team Four, ready,” Li Qiu said for the Middle Eastern and East Asian team.

“Confirm T-minus 120-seconds to decoy activation with field commanders,” General Johnson said.

Gary and the other hosts each confirmed with their local military or other government representative.

“Joint Naval forces in place, distance 200 miles from strike point,” a radio technician confirmed nearby.

The other militaries around the world all confirmed that their mundane armed forces were in place. Robots from Gary’s and China’s factories had been dispersed to all the strike points to lead the charge on any surviving aliens.

Anya drummed her fingers against her bicep and bounced on the heels of her feet.

“T-minus 80 seconds,” Johnson said.

Chell was holding Pan close to her again and the pangolin looked like he wanted to curl into a ball but was forcing himself to stay alert.

“T-minus 60 seconds. Confirm Alpha strike readiness,” Johnson said again. Since Gary had still refused to loan out his bombs, everybody was still counting on their own single big opening attacks to wipe out the aliens.

“Anti-matter bomb is armed and ready to detonate,” Gary said.

“I am having the Czar Bomba ready to go!” A comm window showing Zoya appeared in front of Renn’s face.

“Dimensional vortex trap is placed,” Amahle said.

“Mori Cannon loaded and targeting algorithms confirmed,” Li Qiu said.

Harrison sat on a pair of those impish creatures that had arranged themselves like a footstool as the alpha strike hosts sounded off. Francis stood behind him and warily cast glances at Samaira.

“T-minus 30 seconds. Final checks on monitoring devices,” Johnson said.

“All camera drones working fine,” Gary said. The other hosts confirmed that their own camera satellites, robots, and scrying crystals were showing them live feeds.

Samaira sat against the back side of the tent, her gaze fixed on the ocean. Chandrali sat beside her, ears slicked back and tail flicking from side-to-side.

“T-minus 20 seconds,” Johnson said.

Anya recognized Galtero from Brazil standing at the entry to the tent. His mecha loomed outside. The other hosts from the Caribbean stood around the edges of the tent and just outside, most of them fidgeting or staring out to sea like Samaira with silent tension.

“T-minus ten. Prepare to activate,” Johnson said. “5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Activate.”

“Decoy activated,” Gary said. Renn, Amahle, and Li Qiu echoed Gary.

Silence descended on the tent for several seconds.

“Is something supposed to happen?” Francis whispered to Harrison. One of the imps that served as Harrison’s chair chuckled and Harrison kicked it in the mouth with the heel of his leather boot.

“Report,” Johnson said.

“Nothing yet. It took almost an hour the first time, so just settle in,” Gary said. Johnson frowned but didn’t reply as the other hosts confirmed no activity. While Gary had been right that the first ambush had taken an hour or more, the recent ones had seen the aliens show up much more quickly.

“Movement,” Renn said. “Confirming twelve aliens on camera.”

Anya took a breath. The four packs were split into two groups of twelves, one of ten, and the last of fifteen.

“Hold until targets are in maximum effective area,” Johnson said.

“All area is effective area! Bombbbbaaaaaa!” Zoya said.

“Hold for now then,” John said. “And cut the chatter.”

“Confirmed!” Amahle said suddenly enough to make Anya jump. “Ten aliens!”

“That’s two full groups,” Gary said and then his mustache twitched. “I got fifteen of the bastards on-screen.”

“Another twelve here!” Li Qiu said.

“All aliens accounted for,” Johnson confirmed. “Strike as soon as you have them where you want them. Robots on stand-by, naval units on stand-by.”

“Bombaaaaaa!” Zoya said and then laughter before Renn muted her window with a shake of his helmeted head.

“Firing Mori Cannon!” Li Qiu said and there was a tremendous sucking noise followed by a blinding flash of light and a boom.

“They’re closing on the vortex trap. Activating!” Amahle said.

“All fifteen in range,” Gary said. “Triggering anti-matter bomb.”

Anya only had a brief glimpse of fifteen dark and inhuman shapes making their way through the water towards a decoy ship the navy had let them borrow. Among the shapes was something that could have been a helicopter, a giant anchor, and something spherical. They all moved with incredible speed through the dark Atlantic waters as a single unit toward the decoy vessel.

Gary flicked a switch and the cameras all went white. Anya couldn’t see the explosion, but even almost a couple hundred miles away, she felt it. It took a few minutes to reach her, but the ground shuddered and the ocean waves became chaotic for a brief time. Samaira calmed the waves, and Kemuel steadied the rush of powerful wind that blew towards them with a wave of his hand.

“Are they dead? Is that it?” General Johnson asked. His voice spiked for a moment, the only sign of emotion since the start of the operation.

“No sign of survivors according to Zoya,” Renn said.

“All targets destroyed,” Li Qiu said.

“It’s done,” Amahle added.

“Exterminators and DragonDrones aren’t picking up any movement,” Gary said.

“Hosts move in and confirm signal absence behind the robots,” Johnson said.

Anya, Samaira, Harrison, Francis, Kemuel, Alejandro, and Alvita joined Galtero as the Team One recon squad. Gary, Pan, Chell, and the other hosts from the Caribbean and South America would stay behind and defend field command just in case.

All of the hosts took to the air by one means or another, and soared up and over the wide blue ocean to where the aliens had been killed.

“Felix, will we be able to get their datastreams if we’re this far away?” Anya asked as she propelled herself forward with a powerful, localized gravitational force.

“We need to get somewhat close, but yes! The alien life signals are comparatively weak, but the datastream signal is massive. Give me a few more seconds…”

Felix went silent as Anya soared over the waves. Just as she was about to ask Felix about the datastream, he chirped up.

“There it is! Got it!” they said.

“Well doesn’t that mean all the aliens are dead if we got the datastream? Why are we even flying out there if you have it already?”

“Because I don’t know if this stream is from one alien, or all of them,” Felix said. “We’ll still need to be close enough to find their signals for ourselves, if there are any. Once I have more time with the datastream I’ll be able to parse out the different sources and confirm the number.”

“Can you prioritize that? The map info’s important, but for now we need to get a kill count,” Anya said.

“I can absolutely do that! Ignoring global-positional data in favor of determining the number of sources! This is a lot simpler. Just gimme a minute or two.”

“Thanks buddy,” Anya said.

“I see it ahead!” Galtero said from his sleek, giant mecha. It had gotten bigger since the last time Anya had seen it, now almost the height of some of the smaller skyscrapers in downtown Manhattan.

“Any sign of signals yet?” Anya asked.

“No, nothing yet,” Felix said. “Almost done with parsing out how many datastreams I intercepted though.”

“Send a text to Gary and Chell to let them know,” Anya said as she began to slow down.

“Done!”

The site of the attack was just empty ocean now, but the waves were still churning from rushing to fill the hole, and mist hung heavy in the air. There were also several severed alien limbs floating amidst clouds of thick inhuman blood.

“I didn’t have a clear view of the aliens themselves,” Harrison said as he flew alongside Anya, his demonic bat wings flapping leisurely. Francis sat atop a kind of flying hovercycle that decloaked when he was close enough. Anya could help but wonder how many hosts the young man had robbed to get the bike. It was a distracting thought, however, and she banished it and focused on the water below. No movement.

“Felix?” she asked.

“Almost done!” he said.

“No alien signals detected,” Samaira said from within her Shooting Star. The comet-shaped, elegant pearly-white craft had stopped above the ocean and hovered in place. The rounded front end of it slid open and Samaira and Chandrali stood on the edge of the opening staring downward.

“Done!” Felix said. “One data stream confirmed!”

“One?” Anya whispered as she hovered in the area above the ruined alien forms and the unsteady waves. She grit her teeth and brought Gary up in her comms window.

“Felix just confirmed only one data stream,” Anya said. “But there’s parts of the aliens everywhere!”

“It could’ve been just one with some minions or something. But I doubt it, I’m gonna——” Gary said and then looked away as somebody said something in the background.

“Anya!” Felix said. “Alien signals! Fifteen of them!”

Her blood froze and she looked all around, but there was only the pale blue sky above and the dark inky depths of the Atlantic below. The other AIs must have been alerting their hosts as everybody became tense and readied weapons.

“The signals are all over the place but they’re close. They just appeared! Straight below if I had to guess!” Felix said. Anya threw a long lance of solid light down into the ocean and its candescence shone through the dark waters. The light plunged down, down, showing nothing but a few scattered alien parts and debris from the ruined decoy vessel.

“Oh shit,” Anya said. Her spear of light had descended several hundred yards and now backlit a huge and ominous serpentine shape that was rocketing upward., surrounded by smaller, but stil huge and menacing surreal figures.

“Scatter!” Anya shouted and flew back and away as fast as she could. Samaira, Harrison, and the other hosts did the same.

A writhing train burst out from below the waters and rose into the air like a mechanical sea serpent of old. The engine of the alien train was like the old steam trains: a big smoke stack, a V-shaped cattle spreader in front. Except the cattle spreader opened into a mouth of iron and steam, lined with molars the size of cinderblocks. An eye bigger than Anya’s torso glared out of the front-center of the engine, and plumes of purple smoke jutted from the smoke stack. The cars behind it were all made of metal, but connected to each other by raw, ropey cords of muscle. The underside of the train bristled with countless tiny fins like the limbs of an aquatic millipede. It emitted a roar somewhere between a giant lion and the tell-tale whistle of an actual train.

Fourteen other aliens emerged from the ocean, and Anya recognized almost all of them from the video feed earlier: the anchor, the helicopter, and the spherical thing which turned out to be a volleyball bigger than a truck. They weren’t minions, these were the aliens, but they had avoided or tanked Gary’s anti-matter bomb somehow. Then Anya saw it, albeit briefly: all of the other aliens had emerged from one of the train’s cars, and a swirling, indigo portal within it. It had teleported them, and itself, somehow, away and back to avoid the brunt of Gary’s bomb.

And they had been smart enough to leave one of their own behind to let them think the signal their AIs latched onto meant they were all dead. And if one alien was dead, and the train had transported the other fourteen, then the train had been hiding somewhere where it couldn’t be seen, then rushed or teleported in with its brethren.

And the hosts had flown right into it.

Mother fuckers! Anya thought.

The purple cloud of smoke from the train moved with an intelligence of its own, forming into hundreds of tiny hands as it reached for the nearest host: Samaira.

“No!” Anya shouted and shot herself forward not at the smoke itself, but the smokestack. She sped herself up as much as she could over the short distance and slammed into the side of the engine like a living cannonball. Kinetic Absorption took the brunt of the impact and transferred some of that energy back to her. Her upgraded heavy plate armor took the rest.

She immediately summoned fire and light into the shape of seven longswords that spun around her in a dazzling and lethal hoop of radiant flame. They cut against the train’s unearthly metal side and brought up a shower of sparks.

The engine listed to one side and let out a furious roaring “Chooooo!” as it did. The smoke remained connected to the smokestack as it was somehow pulled away along with the engine, away from Samaira. Samaira had frozen for an instant as she had stared at the gaping iron maw and wide milky eye of the train as it had burst up beneath her, but Anya had given her a precious second.

Samaira fired a hailstorm of aetheric arrows at the alien train then rode on Chandrali’s armored back to the ocean below. The waters swirled around and then spiked up and out towards the train as they hardened into ice spikes coated in aether. The water surrounding the train’s body hardened into ice as well and halted another lunging attack it made toward Harrison.

The train twisted its body and the ice around it shattered. Samaira’s spikes slowed it down a bit more but broke against the train’s squirming underbelly as it surged forward again. Harrison flew back and formed a glowing green sigil in the air with his hands. A portal swirling with green fire appeared and some kind of giant, skinless creature with the body of a gorilla and the exposed skull of a giant elk and membranous wings emerged, followed by several more of its kind. The demonic horde flew at the train and latched onto it with sharp ebony claws and talons and began to tear at its metallic body.

“Distract it,” Anya said and pointed at Reggie as she increased the heat around herself while she continued to maintain the spinning rig of fire swords around her. Reggie grew from several feet long to several yards as he siphoned off some of her radiant heat and darted through the air at the train’s engine. Anya rammed herself at the muscle-like connection between the engine and the first car, increasing the heat around her to levels that made even Harrison’s demons back away squealing and hissing at her.

Galtero zoomed past Anya in his mecha, spearing two of the aliens on his glowing sword before slicing them in two and continuing past. Kemuel, Alejandro, and Alvita had six other aliens between them, and we were winning by the look of it. They formed a kind of coordinated attack, distract, defend trio. Francis was nowhere to be seen.

Anya cursed and focused on what was in front of her. She was burning hot, increasing the flames around her with light and using the sword ring to further slice into the supernaturally tough connective muscles. She flexed her forearms and the specialty blades Gary had helped install in her upgraded armor popped out. Each blade was over two feet long, and sharp and sturdy enough to slice a steel beam in half. Anya focused her Crown of the Firmament and inner light on the weapons and they became reinforced with pale, glittering light. She plunged the sturdy blades into the ropey muscular tissue connecting the engine to the next car and managed to pierce it, but only with all of her strength behind it and with her heat licking away at the alien flesh.

The train howled in fury, pain, and more as she drew black blood from it.

“Look out!” somebody said behind her. That purple smoke had swung around behind her, once again forming hands out of the cloud. Anya caught a glimpse of the surreal purple smoke reaching for her before something slashed at it and white sparks of electricity went coursing across it. Anya flew up and around and caught a shimmer in the air as Francis flew past on his hovercycle before vanishing, one sword in his hand crackling with lightning.

Reggie sensed her focus on the purple cloud and flapped his wings at it. The smoke blew backward, stretching away from the train’s smokestack, but fought against the powerful gusts as best it could. The train roared again as it rippled its body and brought more of its cars above the water.

Samaira now floated in a churning column of ocean water that kept her moving away and out of reach of the train as she fired arrows at it and used the ocean to alter its course, slow it down, and stab at it. She’d managed to sever hundreds of those tiny flipper legs and create a number of punctures in its under belly. However, Even as Anya started to think they were turning the tide, more and more sections of the train rose out of the water.

It had to be a mile long, at least, and it was releasing a small army of horrors, on top of the surviving lesser aliens, upon the unprepared hosts.