I drew back, ducking beneath the wild swipe of a clawed hand. In the span of a breath, I struck forward again, the Spine ripping through the biotic before I was forced to dart backwards, pressed in on my flanks by a pair of wolves. Their jaws snapped shut behind me, missing me by inches just before the sickles descended, cleaving through their necks.

A tentacled limb shot forward, winding through the press with a wicked barb at the end. I ducked just enough to dodge it, but didn’t immediately counter attack. Just afterwards, a dozen more limbs struck out at me, squeezing between corpses and still-living biotics, each tipped with a similar barbed spike. Had I counter attacked, they’d have been much more difficult to dodge.

With a flourish, I spun the Spine, black-red blades shearing through the tentacles as a beast farther in the horde shuddered angrily.

Beside me, a pair of Determinators struck forth with bayonets. They sliced through the wolves that had attacked me in one fell movement before stepping back as one, moving with my own retreating steps as we did so. I stole glances around us as we went, robot and monster alike a tangled mass in the melee. Few of us bore any ammo left at all, even my own reserves were in the tens of shots. The Centaur had become dramatically fewer, but in their wake their numbers were replaced by tens of different species of biotic. The defense had gone from a semi-standard plan to one that had devolved into a desperate melee, each Determinator striving to catalogue new and unusual biotics and their ever adapting attack patterns and sending them to the rest of the Legion.

We’d lost a quarter of the Determinators, ironically more than we’d lost to the Centaur, merely because of the fact that they were using the Centaur as incredibly dangerous flankers. Without the ability to annihilate the chaff any longer, this strategy was proving to be incredibly difficult to deal with for us.

Myself and the two Determinators at my side fought, retreating all the while. My guard had detached from me at my command, roving as mobile kill squads as my mechanical force split up amongst the buildings and streets, fighting through the horde and forcing them to expend forward momentum to harry my squads. The artificial sentience fought without fear of their physical bodies dying, but I now realized it would be wholly inaccurate to say that they fought without fear at all.

The Determinator’s minds would survive so long as we won this war, the server base that still functioned underneath the city would give them a place to reside even if they had no physical bodies to work with. That wouldn’t help them if the biotics won, of course. And that had engendered a special kind of desperation, a fear different from what I felt or remembered as a human. It pushed them to force themselves to perform better, even beyond what their cybernetic minds thought themselves capable of when merely examining their hardware and software.

Something qualitative had shifted within the Determinator’s Legion, though I couldn’t quite understand what it was that had changed.

Ultimately I had to trust in them, trust that they could excel even in this. Some part of myself hurt knowing that there were many of our teams that fought losing battles, the only support they gained from other teams and my roving guards.

As much as I disdained it, I needed to withdraw. The pair of Determinators that flanked me continued aiding in carving a path for me towards our defensive line even as I guarded our back from attacks. While my initial attack had culled the field, it had taken me much farther away from our final line than intended.

It had already been roughly thirty minutes since I started making my way back. I kept the frustration at bay, unwilling to put myself or the Determinators around me at risk in the effort of rushing.

Yet, we were all running on dregs. I could hear the wall ahead now, the human side of the Legion employing what little ammo we had left on the horde, and roughly half of the Determinator Legion struggled to keep the waves at bay. Between the final layer of defense and the entrenched Determinators in the buildings, the biotics weren’t able to mount an effective last push.

But it was only a matter of time, or mistake. It was a delicate balance now, made harder with every loss, made possible only from the brief rest we’d given the rest of the army. But, fatigue was building fast, ammo was running dry, damage was mounting up. All of this precipitated in one, brutal fact.

We could hold for, at most, two or three hours if we made no great mistakes. If a gap in the defenses appeared, that could vanish entirely.

It took us another five minutes to get closer to the range of the walls, where a few barrages of gunfire were able to clear a path for us to move the last hundred meters with less trouble.

I jumped, scaling the wall as the Determinators split off from me, aiding in the defense wordlessly.

A hand reached over and helped me up, as large as the torso of my power armor.

“Good to see you alive,” Daniel greeted me, and without aplomb continued, “They’re waiting for you in the radio station. Good luck.”

I knocked the man on the side even as he lifted his other arm to renew his defense. We didn’t speak any longer, at this point, every second mattered too much.

As I jumped from the wall, landing on my feet with the hiss of carbon muscle and pneumatic joints from diffusing the fall, I thought about the people around me. It wasn’t as though I regretted not speaking with them more, but closer to something as being curious as to what they were up to usually. However, I did have to admit that somewhere along the way, my connections to them had grown more distant, loose. Even outside of the people who had long been my friends, I had few that regularly met with me.

Amusingly, even the aliens didn’t really socialize with me in any especially close fashion. Somewhere along the way, I realized that I’d been the one to become distant with everyone. It was easy to do so, I realized, when I could literally put my consciousness into a signal and experience time differently. When my attention could split at will into a hundred directions, when I experienced more closeness with my Determinators than I’d ever felt with any living thing.

Before I knew it, I was coming upon the radio station and firmly put those thoughts away. If we succeeded, perhaps I could try to rectify my oversight. I’d long been too important to excuse myself for my lack of social contact.

‘That sounds… narcissistic at best.’ I chuckled, entering the halls and traveling to the testing room where a handful of specially equipped machines toiled over the captured biotics that were being tested on.

With a flex of will, I obtained the relevant data from the machines, filtering through it rapidly to know what had been attempted and the results from the project.

“Matthew,” I heard Dr. Ross’ voice greet me through the monitor nearby, “I think we’ve run into a problem.”

A frown spread across my face, visible as the power armor receded around my head. “They’re not responding?”

I filtered through the data rapidly, before blinking and coming to the conclusion just as Yaga spoke, “Not so much as not responding, but not responding enough.”

“They’re resistant?... No, something else?” I clicked my tongue, “What else has been tried?”

Dr. Ross nodded to the biotics in various cages along the walls, “We see better results when we change the permutations of the signal. As we adapt, they show more of the effects. I think what we’re looking at is the King’s influence here, he seems to be trying to block or shift their perception of the signal, but we’re literally dueling him here.”

I blinked at that, before realizing what he wanted from me. Dr. Ross smiled, seeing the recognition in my eyes, “Yeah, we can’t keep up with him. He’s far better at this than we are.”

“Then…” I stared grimly at the biotics and then back to the screen, “Can we…” I trailed off, losing my train of thought, silence falling in the room.

Yaga let it linger for a few seconds before speaking, “If we had more time we could try to compete with him. Perhaps build a supercomputer array to out-perform him. But what with the destruction to the city and the Obelisk…” He trailed off, shaking his head forlornly. “We don’t have the time, nor do we have the resources.”

“It’s over,” Dr. Ross spoke, eyes tired and distant, “we can maybe generate enough white noise to block out part of the city, but I don’t know how long that would last. Plus, they’re still biotics. Even without direction, they’ll still default to trying to eat us.”

Now I understood why they hadn’t told anyone else. If everyone knew that the ending that awaited them was death… but perhaps that would be for the better.

However, I wasn’t willing to give in just yet.

“Shame that the reactor has so many failsafes,” Dr. Ross chuckled darkly, “It’ll take too long to make that thing go nuclear. By the time it does, we’d already be getting vacated out of some biotics bowe-”

“If we had enough computational power, with the information on what these frequencies do, can it be done?” I cut him off, suddenly glaring at the room of biotics.

Dr. Ross paused, “Uh, well, we don’t really know what all the frequencies do. And we really don-”

“It’s possible.” Yaga stared at me skeptically, “But I don’t think you’re enough to… oh.”

His eyes widened as he realized what the full extent of my plan was, followed swiftly by Dr. Ross. “That… that could work…” he murmured to himself before nodding, “It might not work, it’s not an exact science after all, but it’s better than nothing.”

“I need you to contact the other heads and the field command, I’m going to begin now.” I wasted no time in preparing myself, not knowing if this would succeed at all or not.

They said something then, but I didn’t hear them, my body's senses dimming until I fell fully into the data immersion. An ocean of data shivered around me, moving at my touch and command. Phantom limbs stretched from me, sifting through the information I had on the project and quickly assimilating them. The psy-emitter itself was a complex and poorly understood piece of technology, however the method to control it was not.

I could feel my limbs slotting into place distantly, fed across the distance through the receiver in the building with me. Gradually I felt the flow of the frequency, the touch of the psy-emitter through my own mental connection. It was different in a way from my standard delves through cyberspace, somehow close, but numb. If I didn’t have hard values to input, it would be like trying to open a hundred locked doors with lockpicks and hands that couldn’t feel anything. As it were, it felt more like I had a hundred locked doors and the keys to each one, but I just didn’t know which one went where at first.

So, I began to slot myself into the machine, steadily making progress. Some of the “keys” fit the lock, but didn’t actually turn them, leading to my first hurdle. I tried to place them, finding at the end that there were several keys that couldn’t fit at all.

That was the first hurdle, but I forced myself to check them all, one by one, slowly. At first, it was an agonizing process of guess and check, but with the frequencies at hand, it was only a matter of patience. It went slowly, but as I became more fluid, more used to the sensation of my ‘awareness’ dimming across the threshold of the device, progress exponentially sped up.

The second hurdle displayed itself as I began to turn the keys, trying to interact with the biotics in the room with me. The signal fluctuated, but even so, it wasn’t much faster than the super computers that had already been employed. Worse, I was clumsy at the controls.

I grit my teeth at that, pushing more of my awareness into the psy-emitter, a cold feeling accompanying the numbness. That coldness grew, becoming somehow more expansive, as though my mind and awareness had expanded somehow in the process, transformed, swollen and unfeeling. It unnerved me, but I couldn’t stop, especially when I realized that I could interact with the signal more fluidly after that.

Suppressing my growing disquiet at the sensation, I pushed more of my mind into the psy-emitter before I began to feel my mind quake.

Hopeful, I flexed my will through the device, turning keys that allowed my cybernetic being to enter the world of thought and emotion. The change was stark as I flexed through the signals, the biotics in the room went through berserk motion followed swiftly by morose sobbing. Wails could be heard, followed by a disturbing silence. Yet, I couldn’t tell what they were feeling except through observation. I was still numb to it.

‘I… I don’t want to go further.’ I felt the thought rise in my subconscious, a fear that I couldn’t deny that came from myself. Perhaps going further into the psy-emitter would give me a better handle on what was happening, but these sensations were alien to me. Raw emotion, some the likes of which I hadn’t felt since having become a cybernetic being, was just beyond my range of touch on the other side. It went beyond mere human sensation, however, as it was pure, unfiltered, truly overwhelming.

It rightly scared me.

Ultimately, I didn’t delve any deeper. Sensibly, I knew that this was the last chance we had, but there was a difference in putting my body in harm's way than to willfully put my mind through a blender.

Even so, I tested the signal more before I felt that I had a good enough grasp of what was going on.

“Alright, I’ll begin extending my range now.” I sent a message to Dr. Ross, feeling through my senses the state of the front lines.

It had already stunningly been almost an hour since I’d gone under, and in that time the battle at the wall had reached the climax. The Determinators fought hip-to-hip in front of the wall, much of the squads in the buildings already having succumbed to the unending tide.

They had minutes left. Now was the time.

I pushed the signal through the biotics in the room. They stiffened, seizing up as I struggled to suppress their own minds. After moments I could feel another influence upon them, but I was able to suppress it and push onwards. It felt bizarre, but I could almost feel the psi-emitter's influence as it spread through the air, bouncing from radio towers and signal boosters throughout the city.

As it expanded, I could feel the resistance on the connection grow. A handful of biotics adapting was straightforward, but a hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand?

The number grew explosively, and I felt my ability to respond dwindle, suffering and capable of slowing them down only so far. Even that much was helpful, but it would be too little to save us now.

But it was enough to truly begin phase one of my plan.

With a flex of my will, I pushed the signal farther, an echo sounding first to the mountains, then to more distant receivers. As it did so, I connected to more and more biotics, and these I could scarcely even begin to influence.

I could, however, feel another influence now, visible only through the big picture rather than on any single biotic. It seemed to be aware of me more than I was of it, too, for it pursued my connections, ensuring that I could find no real purchase. Contemptuously, it kept me at bay with no more effort than shooing away a fly.

Then my sense touched Gilramore, Argedwall, and Sunvilla.

Their computer systems suddenly stopped all at once, my unused phantom limbs pirating them in a chain reaction and devoting their computing power to my efforts.

And then the echo sounded louder, spreading faster. My will uplinked to satellites and spread faster. Basilisk’s territory was next, and from there my processing power exploded exponentially.

The King was the master of biotics, able to use them in ways that I imagined would look similar to what I was doing right now. Yet, there was a difference to be had, here.

Every city I touched, every village, capital, every single human habitation had computers, but they had one other thing in common.

They had Obelisks.

“You may have billions of biotics, maybe trillions. But what if I match that?” I asked the King, knowing he couldn’t hear me, “Well, let’s find out.”

Every Obelisk on the planet lit up at once as contained server banks appeared wherever there was space. Power supplies activated, the sheer, absurd amounts of Matter Energy from the assaults around the globe feeding the supply with room to spare.

And then I felt my mind slow. I frowned, sensing the echo of my own thoughts reverberate back to me hundreds of billions of times a second.

It was then that I was truly able to enter the ring with the King.

And even through my muddled state, I could almost imagine the rage it felt as I created discord in his ranks.

“Let. This. Be. The. End.” I stuttered out, feeling the edges of my being stretched beyond anything that I’d thought possible.