Earth

Antarctica, Gary’s factory

1 day After Willis’s Destruction

T-minus 1 hour until alien contact

Mona stood in front of the mirror in the tiny bathroom attached to her temporary dorm. Her armor and cloak were outside in the bedroom, and she lifted the form-fitting black shirt she wore underneath up while tugging down the waistband of her pants just enough to expose the area below her belly button.

There was a four-to-six inch horizontal scar there, long-healed. She traced a finger across it, though she knew every subtle contour of the thin pink line on her lower abdomen by heart. She had traced it many times, especially after. It was all she had left of her.

Her AI had told her she could wipe it away, and Mona had told the hologram it could go fuck itself and it should be telling her more about those side-quests so she could level up her necromancy skill. It hadn’t been nearly strong enough back then to raise anything but some brainless skeletons and ghouls. But she had hope that maybe someday she would get her back.

And then she had tried.

She had gone to the tiny grave, marked by a headstone no larger than a brick. A single (would-be) mother couldn’t afford much more than that.

She had tried, and failed miserably. The thing that had crawled out of the tiny coffin hadn’t been her daughter. She had screamed and felt her sanity slipping away, had been seconds from turning her powers on herself, when Renn had appeared.

He’d told her he was sorry, that he couldn’t know what she was going through, but he could help her find something else. It had been enough to get her away from the tiny grave, and the tiny thing that wasn’t her daughter and never would be, no matter how much she leveled up. It was a fact that was hammered home with every skill point she put into necromancy.

The dead were gone. There was no bringing the person back, only their body. The wraiths she summoned weren’t people, only echos of emotions and psychic imprints. The grave knights, liches, wights, zombies, ghosts, and specters she commanded were nothing more than memories of whatever they might have been, once. In a way that had brought her peace, and Renn had helped her through the nights when it hadn’t been enough.

The aliens were a blessing in their own way. They gave her an outlet, a tangible, simple problem. Fight or die. So easy, compared to other things, and Renn had made it even easier.

But now he was gone, too.

Mona tucked her shirt into her pants and washed her face in the sink.

Kan, that nut-case, was dead-set on declaring Renn dead and going back to doing his thing. She couldn’t blame him too much: he’d lost a lot too. He was just taking it out on other people instead of the aliens like she was. Still, he didn’t have to seem so eager to proclaim Renn dead.

And as much as she hated to consider it, to entertain the thought for one moment, she had to admit it was looking more and more likely.

But if that were the case, then things became very simple once again. She would go out with a bang, take the aliens with her, and that would be that. The dead were gone, and she was not so averse to joining them if there was nothing else for her on this world.

She donned her armor, the Plate of the Forgotten. It clung to her and moved with her like her own skin, and granted her protection from most forms of attack. Her cloak, Reaper’s Mantle, further granted her safety from magical attacks and allowed her to fly and obfuscate her presence, much in the same way Dr. Immonen could. Her primary weapon, Fang of Winter, lay against the wall nearby. It was a scythe whose blade was made of diamond-like transparent ice. She took it, then tucked it into the folds of her cloak, where it promptly disappeared into the pocket dimension she had attached to the cloak’s inner lining.

The pull of necrotic energy, of entropy itself, was strong here in the icy wastes. It was a land where the basics of life struggled, and everything was kill-or-be-killed. There were a surprising number of corpses beneath the glaciers, buried deep, but there. A lot of dinosaurs.

That made Mona smile, but only for a moment as she left her room.

As soon as she stepped out into the hallway, she ran into two of the American hosts: the lesser psychic, Chell, and the magic user, Samaira.

“Oh!” H-hello!” Chell said and looked up at Mona. She was a short little thing. Mona wasn’t that tall for a woman, but Chell barely came up to chest-height.

“Are you well enough to be on your feet? I thought you and the other hosts from the moon were all but exhausted,” Mona said to Samaira after giving Chell and slight nod.

“Dr. Immonen patched us up. He can’t do much for my aether stores, but those are coming back a lot faster now that I’m back on Earth. And we’re pretty close to a ley-line, actually. Who knew?” Samaira said and shrugged.

“I’m gonna go check in with the Doc and Gary,” Chell said and ran off for the nearest grav-lift.

“I should head toward the outer perimeter. It’s where my army will be of the most use,” Mona said and started to leave in the opposite direction.

“Wait,” Samaira said. Mona paused with her back to the other woman and glanced over her shoulder.

“What?”

“I just wanted to say good luck, and stay safe, and don’t do anything stupid,” Samaira said. Mona arched an eyebrow and turned to face her.

“What’s this about? We’re not friends. Best I can tell, you’ve been nothing but staring at me and Renn sideways since you met us,” Mona said.

“Yes. And? You’re going to tell me you and him don’t have something planned if we survive this? That you don’t have ulterior motives? I’m not stupid.”

Mona grunted and smirked. “No. I s’pose not.”

“And no, we’re not friends. But I can recognize somebody about to do something stupid easily enough.”

“And what’s that mean?”

“It means it looks like you’ve already given up. Chell sensed your misery from a mile away but even if she hadn’t anybody with at least one working eye could tell.”

“What business is it of yours what I feel?” Mona asked. “Fuck off. Go do your magic schoolgirl goody-two-shoes act somewhere else.”

“One of our most powerful allies going into the final fight with a death wish is absolutely my business,” Samaira snapped. “We need you. And friends or not, we’re all human. Well, not Brody or Pan, but you know what I mean. This is our home. And…and we can’t give up on Anya and Renn. I’m not believing it until I go out there myself and get confirmation.”

Mona studied Samaira in silence for a moment. There was a hint of desperate, fragile hope in her voice. She recognized it at once, because she’d had the same tone when she’d last spoken to Kan. She smiled a little.

“I get it. Your girl’s with that doctor though, ain’t she?” Mona asked. Samaira blinked in surprise and she blushed hard enough to be visible even beneath the dark brown of her cheeks. “Ah, right on the money then.”

“Just because she’s not with me doesn’t mean I don’t want her back, and safe, and happy. It’s what I want for everyone. Renn included,” Samaira said.

“I think you might actually mean that.”

“I do.”

“Y’know, if we survive this, it won’t be the end of things. There’s gonna be a whole host——pun intended——of new problems. Me and Renn might be one of them.”

“Yeah, maybe. I’ll deal with that if it comes up.”

“Will you now?”

“Like I said, maybe. I guess that’s up to you and Renn though. Just be careful, okay? It’d be pretty stupid for Renn to get back and find out you got yourself killed.”

Mona grunted. “Have fun out there, goody-two-shoes,” she said and walked away toward her post.

“They’ve breached the final defenses in the atmosphere. They’re coming,” a voice said over a loudspeaker a little over an hour later.

Chell recognized the voice of General Johnson. He would be in the central control room of Gary’s factory with a few other leaders and Gary himself. The young woman gulped and readied herself. She had already blanketed much of the area with a basic psychic shield, ensuring that everyone’s minds would be protected from any overarching mental assaults. With the levels she had gotten following the attack on Alien Omega, she’d managed to buff herself substantially.

She just wondered if it would be enough.

She was currently bundled up in some hi-tech all-weather gear to protect from the cold of the antarctic wastes, and standing a few dozen yards away from one of the armored, hidden entrances to the factory.

A second after the announcement had come over the hidden speakers, a number of metallic pillars of varying sizes emerged from beneath the ice and snow. The smallest of these was no bigger than a soda can, while the largest was the size of a city block and over three stories tall.

The smooth sides of the pillars expanded and opened, transforming into huge cannons, missile launchers, Exterminator bays, or forcefield projectors. A few of the soda-can-sized nodules near Chell had little glowing bulbs pop out of their tops and emit a protective field around her, outlined in the snow in a wide circle almost a quarter-mile in diameter.

“Well, glad to know the old man’s got our backs,” Mona said beside Chell.

“He has for everything so far,” Samaira said as she rode Chandrali out of the armored doors, which hissed open and slammed closed behind her.

“Testing menu comms, can everybody hear me?” Dr. Immonen said as his face appeared within Chell’s menu.

“Yes, but that’s expected. Can’t get shit from anybody in China, though,” Mona said. Chell looked up and saw a pinkish light, quickly darkening to crimson as it came through the atmosphere high above.

“At least we can communicate with everybody else in the base,” Samaira said.

“The defensive satellites culled their numbers some more, got almost all the small fry. From Anya’s attack plus all the other defenses, we’ve killed 99% of the freaks,” Gary said, also from within the control room.

“That’s great!” Chell said.

“Yeah, it is. But that still leaves about 60,000 aliens coming for our hides,” Gary said.

“Oh geez,” Chell said and gulped.

“And they’ll be the toughest bastards to have survived this long,” Mona added.

“And the vast majority of them are coming right for u. About 45,000 of them,” Gary said.

“What?” Samaira gasped.

“How many hosts do we have here?” Chell asked.

“You, Hendricks, Dr. Immonen, Mona, Samaira, Kan, Bernard, Pan, Jiro, Kemuel, Brody, and Galtero. The rest of the hosts we know of are at the factories in China and protecting major cities that are also being targeted,” General Johnson said. “The Chinese are getting targeted by almost 15,000 of the aliens, with the rest heading for Tokyo, New York, Rio, London, Seoul, and Los Angeles. We’ve got hosts and droids already there or en route. Everybody’s hands are full so…we’re on our own for now.”

“Why’d they all want to come here so much?” Chell asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Mona asked. “We took away their big fuck-off rock. So if they want Earth gone, it’s going to take a while. And the more time they leave the factories alone, the more shit Gary and the Chinese can build to wipe them out and end the invasion. So, this is ground-zero.”

Chell fidgeted and shivered despite the fact that her clothes kept the cold at bay. Samaira padded next to her atop Chandrali and patted her shoulder.

“This is also the most heavily fortified position on the planet. The factory is pumping out more Exterminators and cannons as we speak, and we’ll have multiple shielded positions to fall back to. We’ll be okay,” Samaira said. “And hey, maybe we’ll get more help soon enough.”

“You think Anya and Renn might still be coming?” Chell asked. Samaira smiled a little and glanced at Mona.

“I think I’m not the only one.”

“Enough. They’re here,” Mona said and nodded upward. Thousands of tiny black dots were fading into visibility above them in the chalky blue arctic sky above. Some of them glowed yellow-orange as they broke through the atmosphere, heedless of the extreme temperatures their entry caused them.

Mona raised her hands and said, “No need for the small fry today,” and summoned her army. Dark billowing shapes poured out of the folds of her cloak as she withdrew an enormous scythe whose blade appeared to be made of a single sculpted diamond. The dark shapes formed themselves into robed figures with glowing green eyes and smoky silhouettes that were roughly human, but whose lower torso tapered of into serpentine coils. Armored skeletons with enchanted weapons and armor appeared from glowing portals beside Mona, closely followed by the skeletons of actual giants, wielding clubs and axes longer than Mona’s whole body.

Then the ice and snow cracked and Chell gasped as inhuman skeletons rose up.

“Are those…dinosaurs?” Samaira asked. Mona laughed. Something like a brachiosaurus raised itself up out of the ice as its bones clicked into place, and then began to wind themselves in ancient muscle and sinew and pebbled skin. Mona floated up to the back of the giant sauropod and rode it like a titanic horse. More ancient bones freed themselves from the ice and began to knit flesh to themselves: something like a small allosaurus, an ankylosaurus or a closely related cousin, a mammoth with tusks and a sweeping trunk, and dozens of others, but all of them at least as big as a truck. All of their eyes glowed green and they pawed and scraped at the ground, eager to use claws and teeth and tusks and horns that had not been wielded in eons.

“Well that’s just showing off,” Chell said.

“Who knows, maybe the bastards will get scared and run off,” Mona said and laughed. The sudden sound of hundreds of cannons, guns, and missiles firing into the sky cleared them all of that notion at once. The black dots in the sky had grown closer, and one at their center drew Chell’s eye. It glowed red, and tendrils of crimson luminance wavered out from it like countless grasping fingers.

The sky above was lit up with hundreds and thousands of explosions as the factory’s automated defenses went to work. Squads of Exterminators and drones took to the sky, and Chell had a brief moment to wonder if they’d even be needed after all.

That was when she felt the psychic pressure grasp at her mind and she was forced to push back on it. She followed the psychic trail back to its source and pointed a hundred yards away, at a subtle indent in the snow.

“Invisible one! There!” Chell shouted. Samaira turned on Chandrali and snapped off an arrow. It exploded as it collided with something unseen ,and a gout of thick alien blood spurted into the chilly air, freezing before it even hit the ground. Something squealed and the air flickered as a corpulent sack of pale green flesh appeared. It had a huge brain and small, piggish eyes that shone with hate.

The ice around it rose in a wall to protect it and Samaira scoffed.

“Bad move!” she said. She waved her hand and took control of the ice with her Water Dominion and entombed the psychic alien, and crushed it.

“Here they come!” Mona said as hundreds of aliens began to land in the snow. She sent her hordes of undead wraiths and skeletons and zombies and dinosaurs to meet them, riding out herself on the back of the thundering sauropod. Samaira took control of the icea and snow and created aether-infused spikes of crystal that impaled the aliens. Those who weren’t killed outright were wounded enough to fall at the feet of Mona’s army.

In the distance, more booms and flashes of light could be seen as the other hosts began to engage the growing waves of invaders. A ten-foot-long bone spike shot out of the sky and was stopped mid-air against the forcefield directly over Chell’s head. She shouted in surprise as the organic projectile shattered against the protective dome.

An alien with a serpentine body and leathery wings, its back covered in countless similar bone spikes flew at her and the other two women with its maw gaping. Chell materialized a glowing pink creature from her mind: it was her first dog, Mr. Wrinkles. He had been a French Mastiff, all broad shoulders and folds of furry skin, and when Chell had been a little girl, he had seemed enormous. He appeared larger than a draft horse, and galloped up into the air and mauled the alien. The psychic construct of Mr. Wrinkles shredded the alien in moments, the vile invader no match for the psychic shards of its teeth and claws.

“That was pretty cool!” Samaira congratulated her and fired a huge volley of arrows into the sky.

“Yeah, I’m getting the hang of it, I think!” Chell said and summoned more protectors from her memories: her old teddy bear, bigger than a semi-truck, some of her favorite comic book heroines. She wielded a huge baseball bat from her Little League days and knocked a psychic ball into the air where it multiplied and hurtled into the oncoming mass of murderous alien flesh. They exploded, sending shockwaves of her suppressed fear and anxiety through the aliens and sowing confusion among the ones with lesser psychic defenses.

She’d used her skillpoints, yes, but she’d also done nothing but think of new ways to use her powers while she’d been laid up in bed. She raised shields summoned from her determination and refusal of the aliens, formed long psychic knives of her hatred, and more to throw at the aliens.

A flash of color caught her eye, coming from the heart of the redlight. Except it wasn’t red. It was some other color that she had never seen before. It shot out in a ray, no bigger around than Chell’s arm, aimed at Samaira. Chell leapt forward, threw up as many shields as she could, and shouted a warning to the other woman.

Samaira turned, saw Chell, saw the beam of alien color, and drew back in horror. Chell collided with her, pushing her out of the way with a big, soft, glowing pillow she had summoned and sent her and Chandrali away into the snow.

The alien color beam struck Chell in the chest and she fell to the snow with a thud. She touched her sternum where the beam had hit, half expecting to see a hole there, blood, organs, something, but there was nothing.

“I’m okay!” she said. “I’m…” but then she realized she wasn’t.

What had she been doing? Something with her mind? What was it? How?

“Chell! Get out of here!” Samaira said as she jumped off Chandrali and rushed towards her. “You’ve got to get——”

There was a huge thump in the snow as something landed just outside the forcefield. It was a towering figure, made of serpentine curves. It had a death’s head face, glowing red eyes in black sockets, a pharaonic hood that swept back into its gray-scaled snake body, and four arms. In two of its arms it clutched a gleaming ebony staff tipped with a gleaming red orb. In another hand it clutched a shield, and in its fourth hand it held a stone. It looked like just a lumpy piece of gray rock to Chell, save for a single hollowed out section at its center, no bigger than her first. Within that hollow there was a throbbing well of that alien hue. It was growing smaller by the second, but it was there.

“Mona! Back-up!” Samaira said. “Chandrali, take it down!”

The tiger roared and leapt at the serpent. It raised its black staff casually and the the red light changed, condensed, and lashed out in a tight line of fiery red light. It swept up from the ground, and bisected Chandrali from nose to tail. The great armored tiger fell apart into two gory halves, her insides and blood steaming out onto the snow.

Samaira roared in anguish and fury as she grabbed Chell and shoved her back toward the armored doors. Chell’s mind was a mess. She couldn’t fully grasp what was happening, how she was here, but she knew it was better to leave. She scrabbled away from the fight, crying as she did. The armored doors scanned her as she approached and hissed open, then slammed behind her as she continued to flee the battle and find somebody, anybody who could possibly help her.