Anya flew down the hallway as quickly as she could toward the hangar and her V-200. Many of the other hosts had already departed, but there was a small gathering around her vehicle.

Riley, Chell, and Pan all waited beside the stealth craft and looked up as Anya flew towards them.

“You all coming with me?” Anya asked.

“I sure as hell am,” Riley said. “MacDougal said she wants an agent’s eyes on the ground, somebody outside the military and not a host. She’s too important to go herself, next nearest agents are in California, so I volunteered. Gary gave me a couple presents.”

Riley opened his dark blue jacket and revealed a chrome belt buckle with a button on it, and a side holster that held a sleek, black pistol.

“Gary gave you a gun?” Anya asked as she got into the V-200. Riley got into the co-pilot’s seat while Pan and Chell scrambled into the back. Anya started her pre-flight check and started to lift-off while the other were still strapping in.

“Yeah I couldn’t believe it either. He insisted on having it returned though, even if it can only target aliens. Said he trusts me okay, but not any of the other feds, and he’d feel bad if he sent me off to fight Big Al with just a forcefield,” Riley tapped the belt buckle as he said the last.

Anya shoved the guidance discs forward and the V-200 streaked out of the hangar and up and over the vast sandy expanse of the Mojave. They’d flown over the rest of California and reached the Pacific within minutes.

“Holy cow this thing is fast,” Chell said.

“I like it because it’s comfy,” Pan said.

“Look, I’m real proud of you both for coming along, but are you sure you’ll be able to handle this? It’s Big Al and like, thirty aliens. None of the pack are as strong as the train was, but they'll be tough if you're not ready,” Anya said. “Me and Riley can hop out and the autopilot will take you back to Gary’s factory.”

“No!” Pan said, in probably the loudest Anya had ever heard him talk. He actually seemed to scare himself as he squeaked and started to curl into a ball before he stopped. “Brody told me I have to quit hiding all the time. And I still feel bad for Alvita dying and others getting hurt when you were fighting the train.”

“Me too,” Chell said. “I mean, I didn’t talk to Brody, but if everybody’s fighting, even people without menus, it’d be stupid of me to just sit back at the factory and twiddle my thumbs. And if we don’t stop Big Al here, it may be worse next time.”

“Good,” Anya said and smiled. “Just stay close together and we’ll all look out for each other, okay? And if you get hurt, find Dr. Immonen when he arrives.”

“Okay!” Pan said and Chell nodded.

“Are there any hosts there already?” Riley asked.

“I already sent messages to every host on our list,” Felix said. “The nearest hosts are Kemuel and Galtero. They were both on the big island of Hawaii when I sent the initial message out minutes ago. They arrived at Honolulu almost immediately after. We’re the closest after them. The next closest are Brody and I’m assuming Cooper. Jiro, KoreaMan, Yai, and Li Qiu are another few minutes behind them. The rest of the hosts on the contact list will take anywhere from thirty-to-ninety minutes to arrive.”

“It only took Big Al a half hour to do most of the damage to New Delhi,” Anya said and clenched the guidance discs. “It’s going to take at least another ten minutes to get there. Message Galtero and Kemuel.”

“Okie doke!” Felix said. Two comm windows appeared along the right side of Anya’s field of vision. One of them stayed blank, but the other opened to show Galtero. His face was tight with concentration, and he was locked into the holographic cockpit of his mecha. Explosions and alien screeches rang through the air outside, and Galtero only glanced at Anya before he whipped his head to the side.

“Please tell me you’re almost here!” Galtero said.

“We’re on our way! Ten minutes!” Anya said as she pushed the V-200 as much as she could.

“There’s dozens of them!” Galtero said. “And a lot of them keep giving birth to littler ones! The city’s being overrun!”

“What about the patrol bots you had from Gary and the Chinese?” Anya asked.

“There's still a lot of them functioning but most of are focusing on defending the civilians while me and Kemuel draw the aliens' fire and try to take them out. No sign of the big one yet. Shit! Kemuel! I can’t talk!” Galtero said and the line cut. Kemuel still hadn’t answered his comms. Anya grit her teeth and checked her map. All she could do for now was keep the speed up and hope Galtero and Kemuel could hold out until back-up arrived.

“Holy shit. Is that it?” Riley asked after what felt like an eternity later. It had only been slightly over eight minutes of pushing the V-200. The island of Oahu and the city of Honolulu lay below them. Anya had never been to Hawaii, but even with all the chaos of smoke, fires, and ruined buildings below, it was still obvious how beautiful it was, and hopefully still would be after everything.

Anya couldn’t see all of the aliens from this height, but she could see a lot. They swarmed in and around the city like locusts over a field. A hot air balloon with teeth, a twisted replica of the Statue of Liberty, a literal monster truck, a submarine on centipede legs, and more. There were flashes of smaller ones on the street, flitting between buildings, but they were too tiny or quick.

She also saw, to her great relief, Galtero’s big mecha with its orbiting drones and a blurring white streak that was Kemuel. Samaira and Chandrali were down near the shore, the former making use of the ocean and the latter chasing down the smaller aliens or their spawn and tearing them apart. A flash of white and gold signaled Renn’s presence, hovering above the city and lifting inhuman attackers off the streets and crushing them into balls of bloody flesh. Mona’s Gothic carriage circled the city on its flaming wheels, and Mona herself leaned out the side, laughing gleefully as clouds of glowing green specters flowed out of the carriage and descended on the alien horde below.

Anya thought Big Al might be the Statue of Liberty impersonator, currently trying to zap Lemuel with a white laser from its torch and failing spectacularly to catch up to him. Maybe the submarine. Then she caught movement in the ocean, something slowly creeping up on the shoreline, pushing the water away from it as it rose slowly toward the surface.

“Oh fuck me,” Anya said.

She had first thought it just another part of the sands beneath the waves, or maybe a shelf of smoothed rock. A vast, gray, domed mass made its way forward on segmented crab-like legs. It breached the surface of the ocean, shedding water off itself in vast waves that turned the ocean around it into white-capped froth.

“Is that a friggin’ football stadium?” Riley asked.

“Looks like it,” Anya said in a whisper. It could be nothing else. It was well over twenty stories tall, and several city blocks in diameter. The black crustacean legs it walked on were each twice as tall as the stadium itself, and bent in half as they flexed and propelled the stadium out of the waters. Four pincers, each bigger than a commercial airliner, emerged from the stadium’s underbelly. A silvery human face was on the front of the stadium, and it was smiling placidly, as if in meditation. The top of the structure was a gentle sloped dome, currently closed.

“I think Gary should’ve given me a bigger gun,” Riley said.

“Work with what you got. I’m setting the autopilot to put you down in the center of the city. Pan, you go with him. Chell, can you fly?” Anya asked as she opened the door of the V-200.

“Uh! Y-yeah!” she said.

“Good. Fly over to Renn. You’re both psychics, so just follow his lead. If you need to retreat, or find a host that needs medical aide, get them to the V-200 and hit this button here on the dash. It’ll take you back to Gary’s factory and the medical bots there. I’ve got a medi-gel gun in the glovebox if you can’t wait that long or until Dr. Immonen arrives,” Anya said as she rubbed Reggie’s summoning stone in one of her pouches and the feathered serpent emerged.

“Got it!” Chell said. She was very pale.

“What should I do?” Pan asked. Anya looked at the pangolin and smiled.

“Keep Riley and any other normal humans safe. And keep an ear out for me. I might need your help with something later. I have an idea. Go!” Anya said and winked at Pan, then jumped out of the V-200 after hitting the autopilot button.

“Good luck Nowicki!” Riley yelled after her. “I owe you some more donuts if we make it through this!”

She gave him a thumbs up as she fell. She made sure Chell was out and moving towards Renn. A bubble of pink light surrounded her and she zoomed away toward his distant, white-coated figure. The V-200 closed its door and became completely invisible once again, and Anya directed her attention to the city below. Big Al was still out in the sea, not doing anything but lumbering forward. All its power wasn’t in speed, at least.

She didn’t want to antagonize it before more of the other hosts arrived and they had a better chance at putting it down. She engulfed herself in light, fire, and whirling blades made of both, and headed towards Samaira on the beach.

“I have this! You get inland!” Samaira yelled up as soon as she saw Anya. The majority of the shore had become a lethal wall of enchanted ice spears. The area further out to see swirled with hundreds of whirlpools that pulled small creatures that looked like snails with flippers into the spikes and impaled them. Anything inhuman that got near the beach was seized by long tendrils of water and either encased in ice or thrown into the spikes. Chandrali got anything that was lucky or stupid enough to come near Samaira, either with her claws or an ice blast from her mouth Anya hadn’t seen before. If there were hostiles in the air or far away from the water, Samaira picked them off with her bow.

“Got it!” Anya said and flew onward. “Reggie! I need you to fly around and take care of all the little ones! If you get injured come back to me.”

Reggie sent her a firm white green of approval, coupled with a pale lavender of concern at being away from her, then darted away. He set fire to another group of those winged snail-things as he passed, and then disappeared behind a building.

“Felix, direct me to the nearest alien, do your best to find their signals!” Anya said once Reggie was gone.

“It’s actually really easy now,” Felix said, confused. “They’ve been so hard to find for weeks, but now Their signals are really strong. The nearest one is straight ahead four blocks and then a hard right. It’s killed twenty-three hosts.”

“How many had the train killed?” Anya asked.

“Forty-two!”

“So about half as strong,” Anya said as she soared over the streets. Innocent people were running everywhere. Cars wrecked, turned over, buildings blown apart. Several of them pointed at Anya as she passed by, others screamed. She couldn’t blame them. She probably looked just as alien as the actual invaders, lit up as she was.

She turned the corner and saw the alien at once: a pinata the size of an actual horse was in the middle of the road, colorful paper on its sides flapping. The tiny strips of paper separated from the body and folded themselves into multiple shapes: stars, birds, tight spheres, and flew in different directions. The stars sliced through anything they touched, the birds flocked together and slammed through windows or cars to get at the civilians inside, and the spheres acted like bullets that shot straight through stone and metal. Like the puppet in Prospect Park, it had real, living, baleful eyes that instantly locked onto Anya when she appeared.

“I need a catchphrase!” Anya shouted as she lit herself up even further so she was consumed in golden-white fire. Her Sun’s Heart blazed even through her armor, and her Crown of the Firmament radiated its pure light. Anya shot herself at the horse-sized pinata alien at full speed and with all of her blades out.

The pinata alien squealed in pain as it ignited and Anya extended her foreblades and punched the creature in the throat from both sides, then used all of her strength to sweep her arms wide and decapitate it. Hundreds of tiny wrapped candies burst out of the now open neck, each of them ending in what was clearly a fuse. They sprayed up and around, scattering through the air and the street and landing near wounded civilians.

Anya pulled every last one of the tiny candy bombs toward her with a wide gravitational field, crushing them all into a tight little ball, and then encasing it in a shield of light which she further covered with her own armored body. The explosion was immense, probably would have taken out the entire block, if not more. Her light shield fractured, and Anya held in the explosive force with an inward surge of gravity and absorbed as much heat as she could. Anything else that topped her off beyond what she could contain she unleashed straight up into the air in a tight ray of heat and light.

“Holy shit,” Anya said as the pinata alien fell onto its side. The countless tiny papers that made it burned quickly to ash as Anya focused heat around it.

“Signal gone! It’s dead! You got half a level from that!” Felix said. Anya grunted and then glanced around at the civilians. A lot of wounded, but no dead bodies from what she could see.

“Get inside and stay there!” she shouted at the people who stared at her, then took off again. “Next!”

“Five hundred yards straight and hang a hard left!” Felix said. “It matches the signal of one that killed seventeen hosts!”

“Too easy!” Anya shouted as she rocketed forward and then spotted an alien in the shape of a giant rosebush with fleshy tubes sticking out from between the leaves. Long vines whipped around it, and a storm of rose petals circled around in a crimson cyclone. Anya felt the heat of lasers shooting out of the fleshy tubes and laughed as she flew at it. It shot her with a laser and she drank its heat right up. Its vines whipped at her from a distance but didn’t even scratch her armor. A petal or two did manage to flutter under her guard and briefly touch her neck. She felt the skin there go numb, but her Regeneration skill undid whatever toxins were in the petal within moments.

And then she grabbed the bush in her arms and soared up, up, up into the sky with it and ignited it even as her swirling fire blades cut it to pieces.

“Signal gone! About a quarter of a level for that one!” Felix said. “And Brody’s signal is closing in from the south!”

“Looks like another squad of Exterminators and the Chinese bots are here too,” Anya said as she glanced back toward the beach. Sure enough, about thirty Exterminators, ten DragonDrones, and over a hundred of the Chinese bots were flying in. Another mechanical figure soared with them, though its flight pattern was more erratic. Cooper.

Another figure, bulky and riding a flying surfboard, was right beside Cooper. Anya would have recognized Brody a mile away.

“Li Qiu and some of the other Asian hosts aren’t far behind. Immonen’s almost here, and Harrison and Francis are coming with him,” Felix said as Anya blasted a flock of bat-winged leeches that one of the aliens had spawned. “Currently only fifteen alien signals remain on the island!”

“Good. Let’s end these things,” Anya said and glanced to the ocean. That was when she saw Big Al touch the shore with one of its huge crab legs. The giant, silver human face on the front of the stadium changed from placid tranquility, to almost surreal fury.

The dome opened.