They arrived amid explosions strong enough to make Anya think the aliens wouldn’t need to kill them. Even though the nearest missiles were still miles away from them, their force waves rocked Gaia’s Saber just enough to make Anya concerned for a moment. The explosions of the missiles detonated just shy of Willis’s surface, many of them detonating against that pale aura of red light that was almost entirely gone now. Those that did make it to the surface struck mostly barren rock, or were deflected by flashes of light from alien defenders.

There were more updates on digger rockets, but none of them were doing very well. Of the few that touched down on Willis, only one had managed to get to 5% depth before being destroyed. There were ten of the rockets around the Saber, all of them highlighted by the ship’s interactive main screens, and their landing sites marked on Willis ahead. They only needed one of them to make it to 80% to be considered a success. 100% would be better, and the more rockets that made it, the better, but one would do.

“Clearing the landing zone,” Renn said and pressed a button. Gary’s automated commands did the rest, and Gaia’s Saber unleashed a torrential volley of destruction from its main cannon. It was a piercing beam of fiery yellow light that made the entire ship tremble and blasted a crater across Willis’s surface that managed to scatter thousands upon thousands of the aliens below. The smaller volleys from the missile tubes and secondary guns helped clear the area on the asteroid further.

“The Saber will maintain orbit around the asteroid. Deploying defense drones while we’re out on the surface,” Anya said and pressed another button. A small army of drones emerged from multiple bays along the sides and underbelly of the ship, all of them gleaming in the light of the distant sun and ready to swarm anything that threatened the ship like a hive of deadly robotic bees.

“Rockets will be touching down in one minute,” Renn said as he left the bridge, Anya close behind. She still gleamed with light, ready for her walk into the void. They strode down the hallway, away from the bridge, and to the airlock that would normally function as a docking point. They both stepped into the airlock at the same time, neither hesitating. Reggie was curled around Anya, wings and feathers slicked back, his mind a steady thrumming of deep red and pale yellow, ready for the fight he sensed was coming.

“You ready?” Renn asked as the inner airlock door sealed behind them.

Anya took a breath and said, “Yeah,” and then the outer airlock opened.

Anya could have easily resisted the suck of the vacuum of space, but she rode it out, blasting herself into the void and down toward Willis. Gary’s seemingly endless volleys of missiles continued on either side and ahead of her. The blackness of space was driven back by the constant barrage of white explosions, but she paid them little notice. She was transfixed on the digger rockets in front of her, and the pock-marked gray rock of Willis ahead of them.

“Felix, open an audio channel to Renn,” Anya said. Her voice carried to her AI, and therefore her menu, within the shield of light and air she had made for herself. She hadn’t thought if it when she’d gone after Omega, but she’d been a bit preoccupied then. She’d had 30 hours to think of little details like this during the ride.

“You’re good to go!” Felix said.

“They’re coming,” Renn said as Anya saw scattered dots and shapes on the asteroid’s surface begin to congregate where Gaia’s Saber’s main cannon had hit. Several of the shapes left the surface and flew up, their forms becoming more distinct as they approached. There was something like an enormous wasp, but with a human infant’s face; an amorphous jellyfish-like creature whose transparent body churned with lightning; a mass of what Anya first thought were shadows, but turned out to be living smoke like from the alien train, and more, more, thousands more. None of them had made the attempt to appear remotely like anything but monstrous predators and killing machines. No more disguises or hiding or observing: just simple, brutal death in countless shapes and sizes.

The wasp-infant buzzed directly at Anya, growing larger and larger as it approached, until she realized it was the size of a garbage truck when it was nearly upon her.

Anya’s Sun’s Heart and Crown of the Firmament flared, and her Singularity’s Grasp made the space all around her tremble and bend. At level 87, with all her bonuses, the wasp-infant never stood a chance. Anya sensed it had armor that her localized gravity well crushed, that it could regenerate from the spears of light that pierced it, and that the numerous acidic chemicals that her fires boiled to steam within it could have melted through the toughest armor, but it was all for nothing.

She crushed it into a tiny, flaming mote of light before it could even attempt to strike at her. Reggie absorbed the residual heat and quadrupled in size as he uncoiled from around Anya and unleashed a torrent of glittering golden flames that fanned out ahead of them, backed up by a powerful blast of her own.

“You just killed twenty aliens!” Felix said. “Based on RAC and experience points gained, they ranged in difficulty from the train alien to just below Alien Alpha! You got a full level from that!”

“Damn,” Anya said, impressed, and landed on the gray, craggy surface of Willis with an impact hard enough to shatter the rock and send out a wave of force. Reggie swirled around her, now the length and width of a modest train. The first digger rockets landed shortly after, and Renn with them. He had multiplied himself several times over, with at least twenty of his clones holding in a tight formation around two of the digger rockets.

“I got about fifteen of them. My AI said the strongest was on-par with Alien Alpha,” Renn said as one of his clones approached Anya. She was immediately next to one of the two rockets Renn was already guarding. The rockets themselves deployed landing gear and aligned themselves to point directly down at the ground, and then gleaming drills emerged from their bottoms and began to devour the tough rock beneath them.

Thanks to the Saber’s main cannon and the missile barrages and Anya and Renn’s attack, they had a few seconds of respite, though Anya could already see waves of aliens approaching them. Worse, she saw that the ominous red light around Willis was becoming more intense again as Gary’s missile barrages began to slow, and more of them were deflected.

“Yeah, the strongest I killed was about at that level too,” Anya replied. She continued to build and charge herself, stoking the flame and light of her heart and crown. She didn’t wait for the horde to arrive: she unleashed another massive golden beam of heat and light with its own deadly gravity well that pulled aliens towards it. She swept it across the horizon and saw it incinerate dozens more. She was a little surprised to see several of the aliens take the hit directly and not even slow their advance.

“Looks like they’re bringing tougher ones along,” Renn said.

“Are they doing any psychic bullshit yet?” Anya asked.

“A little. Nothing I can’t handle, though,” he replied. “They look like they’re more interested in brute force than anything really subtle though.”

“Yeah, the asteroid the size of Australia was kind of a giveaway.”

Renn and his clones waved their hands as one and the encroaching mass of aliens from the opposite side of the crater were torn apart in showers of dark blood and ichor and tattered flesh and limbs.

“I’m already almost at level 90,” Renn said.

“Felix?” Anya asked.

“You’re about to hit 91!” Felix replied.

“This seems…easy,” Anya said and glanced at the nearest digger rocket. It had already burrowed into the ground fully, leaving a massive hole behind it that spewed pebbles and dirt. Still, it and the other rockets in the area had gotten further than any others: Anya’s watch, tied to the ship’s computer thanks to Gary, showed her that each of the ten rockets she and Renn had descended with were at 10%.

“It’s good if they all make it, but don’t stray too far from these two. And if we have to, consolidate on the rocket you’re next to,” Renn said. No sooner had he mentioned it than a small squad of aliens in the distance leapt into a hole made by the furthest rocket and an explosion followed. Her watch display informed her they were now down to nine rockets.

Anya’s first instinct was to charge out, blast the whole area, maybe use her watch to call down another strike from the Saber and obliterate another huge swathe of aliens. They were pouring in over the edges of the crater, drawn to the deaths of the own kind and the power Anya and Renn wielded against them. But going after any of the other rockets would leave the rest vulnerable. She knew it was going to be like this: besieged on all sides. She blasted the aliens where she could, killed as man yas she could without extending herself too much, but more always came.

And she held position with Renn.

Anya sent a hurricane of flaming, light-enforced swords sweeping across the surface of Willis, and her heart sang as she saw each of the thousands of flaming golden blades impale her targets and explode. She created thousands of sparkling orbs, no bigger than fireflies, and sent the scattering into the distance. Each one exploded with the force of a ballistic missile and burst into even tinier explosive fragments. Reggie devoured the ambient heat and his scales glowed with his inner flames. His throat was a blazing furnace into hell itself, now large enough to swallow a train. He belched pure heat that made the gray rock of the asteroid turn orange and wilt like flowers. Every flap of his wings created winds that were hot enough to char flesh and ignite the air itself, as well as scattered his feathers which were now bigger than surfboards and cut through the enemy with brutal efficiency and left glowing, cauterized slices of them behind.

Renn had been right about this much at least: she never would have risked doing things like this on Earth.

And she enjoyed it.

She was a conductor of a burning symphony of mayhem. And even if her watch told her that another digger rocket, and another, and another were falling under the encroaching waves of inhuman nightmares, she was having a literal and figurative blast. Anya waved her hand, her veins lit up with the pure radiance of her heart and her crown, and shimmering golden waves followed where her hand traveled, hundreds of yards long, half as high.

The lesser aliens incinerated instantly, but there were more behind them, endless.

And more worrisome, the bigger aliens were becoming more frequent, those who survived her area attacks. Many of them were still visibly injured, but a few only +smoked somewhat.

And then one caught her eye.

She had just point her finger and she and Reggie had just blasted an oncoming wave of tentacled horrors, evaporating dozens, maybe hundreds at once. The attack left behind a glowing, smoking trough in the asteroid, filled with nothing but ashes…save for a single alien.

It had crested the lip of the crater just as Anya and Reggie had fired, only one more freak among the multitude, but it was the only one standing afterward. And not just standing, standing tall, unharmed.

It was over twenty feet tall, not much compared to the others, but more than enough to intimidate. It had the lower body of a snake, and the upper body of a four-armed man. A hood rose behind it, both serpentine and pharaonic in appearance. Its face was a human skull, with a pair of smoldering red lights set deep in the sockets, and its lipless, toothy grin made of viperous fangs. It was all over gray scales and flesh, the color of cremated masses. It held a long onyx staff tipped with a glowing red crystal in its two right hands, while it held a curved sword in its upper left and a shield in its lower left.

“Shit, that one looks serious,” Anya said.

“You’ve hit level 95!” Felix said.

“”We’re down to four rockets!” Renn said. His clones had closed ranks and there were more of them now, all cramping together and starting to overlap. He was causing bursts of blood and gore and creating psychic shields around the remaining rockets that repelled or shredded anything that came near them. But he was starting to waver a bit. And as much as Anya hated to admit it, she was too. She had expended more energy in a few minutes than she had over days or weeks previously, and even though she had her light dominion to stretch out her reserves, and she had several Star’s Breath crystals, she could still tell it wasn’t going to be enough.

The display on her watch told her that each of the remaining four (now three, as another wave of aliens sacrificed themselves to batter Renn’s shield apart and destroy the rocket below) rockets were at 40% depth.

And the waves of aliens redoubled. What had rushed them before had been a horde. What came at them now was a horde of hordes. The aliens crested the lip of the crater all around them in a living tsunami of fangs and claws and pincers and eyes, all aimed at them. The pharaonic cobra at the forefront ahead of Anya pointed at her with its onyx staff and slithered forward with nightmarish speed, the crest of the wave crashing toward them. Anya hit a button on her watch and Gaia’s Saber fired its main cannon at the thickest patch of aliens. The entire horde in front of Anya was backlit, and tens of thousands of inhuman silhouettes were transposed against the destructive beam before they scattered into ashes.

Except, again, the pharaonic cobra. Its glowing red eyes were only for her, and its grin grew wider as it waved another, even larger waves of foes forward. This wave didn’t just surge forward, but flew up, over them.

“The ship!” Anya shouted.

“Focus on defending the rocket!” Renn snapped.

Anya tore her eyes away from the distant flicker of Gaia’s Saber as wave upon wave of aliens washed over it. Its shields held, its drones defended it, but it was inevitable. The ship took down hundreds of aliens, maybe thousands, but for every one it killed three more rose behind to take its place. There was a flash of light behind Anya, and a notification from her watch that Gaia’s Saber was no more.

No more main cannon as back up.

No souped up ride home.

It was a one-way ticket anyway, Anya thought as she set her jaw. Just gotta make sure the rockets make it.

“It’s slowing down,” Renn said and pointed at the rocket Anya was guarding.

All of the digger rockets had slowed significantly. At the previous rate, it should have been at 55% or more, but it was only at 43%.

Anya looked at the incoming legion of aliens. The pharaonic cobra grinned at her as a wavering sea of tentacles and insectoid limbs and baleful eyes swelled behind it: just a fraction’s fraction of the ravenous legion.

Anya looked back at the cobra’s smoldering ruby eyes, and she knew.

They weren’t going to make it.