“Ahhh!” Another war pig was sliced apart by a burrowed hunter killer. Marines turned around their guns and the elite hydralisk was immediately blasted into pieces. But it was too late. The team was down another man.

Viper smirked under her ghost visor. The marine could’ve survived. In fact, when the hunter killer first came out of the ground, the marine jumped backward and was about to escape the claws of the zerg, but Viper secretly focused her psionic energy and made the man trip, therefore indirectly killing him.

This death arose some doubt among the mercenaries, but most of the men were already numb. The zerg were everywhere, and they weren’t afraid to trade their lives for the lives of these terran mercenaries. All the mercenaries wanted to do was get this mission over with and return home with their money.

However, as the man fell, Viper suddenly realized she couldn’t keep this going on. The strike teams have already reached the center of the data core, and it would be long before they plant the explosive and evacuate.

A baneling suddenly came out of the ground in front of her. Viper, deep in her own world, didn’t sense it as soon as she could’ve, but she reacted quickly nonetheless. A surge of purple filled her eyes, and the baneling exploded with half of its body still under the ground.

Acid spilled out, but the ones toward Viper were deflected by a psionic shield.

The strike team finally reached the building they came here for. A dozen Raiders marines in blue armors marched inside while the rest secured the surrounding. Scattered zerg units converged on the data core, but they were held back by the mercenary firepower.

Viper remained outside the data core. A series of gunshots came from inside the building. Two minutes later, the Raiders came out.

“The bomb’s planted! Let’s move! We need to get out of the blast radius ASAP!” Raynor ordered loudly.

Viper bit her lips. Her time was running short. Their mission was about to be completed but at least one half of the mercenary combatants were still standing. If this kept on going, she would have no choice but to draw her rifle and hope she could take down Raynor with one shot.

Suddenly, she thought of something.

Inside another data core, Sarah Kerrigan crushed a squad of war pigs. An elite goliath fired its gatling cannon at the Queen of Blades, but all the Queen did was smirk and hold her hand out, and the next second the terran strider exploded from the inside. The driver was transformed into a million pieces of flesh and bones.

Suddenly, the queen turned toward a distance as she sensed something...something psionic. It was as if someone was trying to get her attention. Closing her eyes and silently ordering her swarm to slaughter what was left of the mercenaries on this site and infest them, Kerrigan launched herself into the air. When she landed again, she was already dozens of meters away. With a method that was multiple times more efficient than walking, Kerrigan moved closer and closer to Raynor’s squad.

“Sir, the Queen of Blades is moving toward your location!” Matt Horner immediately saw the queen’s movement. The Hyperion, along with most of the Moebius and mercenary battlecruisers, was held back by the Swarm flyers, but Horner always kept a scanner trained on Kerrigan. This cautious act might’ve saved the life of everyone inside Raynor’s squad.

“Damn it!” Raynor turned around. “Move! Kerrigan is coming for us! Move!” The mercenaries, already marching in full speed, moved even faster. Raynor looked back and realized he and his team was already far enough from the data core, and he pulled the trigger.

An explosion sent the data core, along with every piece of information in it, to the ground.

A distance away, Kerrigan growled and jumped once again. This time, Raynor and his men didn’t need words from someone inside a towering battlecruiser to understand the situation. They could already see her.

Mercenaries ran as fast as their metal armors could. Marauders were considering dropping their weapons to make themselves lighter, but then, to their dismay, they realized their grenade launchers were attached to their armors. A couple reapers smiled in satisfaction as their jetpacks placed them at the front of the horde. None of the men, not even Raynor, considered the option of standing and fighting, at least not when they had a chance of escaping. Just Kerrigan alone could slaughter them all.

The terran were fast, but this wasn’t a race. This was a battle, and this would soon be a massacre.

“Come, my swarm!” Kerrigan keenly saw Raynor among the crowd. Frankly speaking she didn’t know who sent out the psionic projection or why she did that, but she didn’t care. Even if this was a trap, she was confident she and her swarm could crush everything. That was why she immediately forgot about the psionic signal and turned her attention to her former lover...and current nemesis.

Raynor has, for multiple times, sabotaged Kerrigan’s plan to get the Xel’naga fragments. The queen wanted him dead.

All around zerg units converged. A reaper, with a wide smile open his face, was too busy looking back at Kerrigan and ended up smashing into the claws of a hunter killer. Well, let’s just say he no longer had a smile on his face. In fact, he didn’t even have a face anymore.

Men screamed as they were surrounded and mowed down.

“Matt! We need air support now! We’re getting slaughtered down here!” A zergling jumped on Raynor. The man tapped a key on his rifle, and a bayonet popped out. He positioned the bayonet so the zergling literally crashed into the bayonet. Still alive, the zergling screeched, only to be tossed back onto the ground by the rebel commander.

“Our dusk wings are on the way.” After a series of successful missions, the Raiders employed a squad of twelve elite banshees, dusk wings. Their hyperflight rotors allowed them to breach the zerg wall of mutalisks and corruptors.

Twelve banshees might not be enough to kill the Queen of Blades, but they could buy some time for the Raiders to escape.

“Thanks, Matt. I know I can...eh!” The next second, Raynor felt a sharp pain in his chest. He looked down and saw a purple psionic blade coming out of his chest.

Viper.

She used the distraction caused by Kerrigan and the Swarm to deliver the killing blow.

“Sir!” All the Raiders left on site, three hundred or so, immediately went into a frenzy. Raynor’s Raiders, as the name suggested, was built around James Raynor. The man was the soul of the army. People didn’t join the Raiders because they wanted money or power. They joined because they believed in Raynor’s cause. This cause was greater than everyone.

All the Raiders, except the Warden units, who were still gunning down the zerg, turned their guns and started firing at Viper, even those who were about to perish at the hand of zerg units.

Marines turned their guns and sacrificed their lives just so they could fire another bullet at the woman that betrayed and almost assassinated their leader.

Viper barely had time to pull her blade out of Raynor before she was riddled by a hail of bullets. Taken by surprise by the Raiders’ obviously suicidal movement, she tried to form a shield around herself, but even so at least a dozen bullets went through here before the barrier was up. Red blood with a trace of purple inside painted her hostile environment suit in an unnatural color. She fell back, struggling to contain a scream. Raynor collapsed on his knees in front of her, but she no longer had the power to finish him off.

Thankfully, the Raiders didn’t have much of an opportunity to finish Viper off either as the Swarm used the moment of opening and ripped their lines apart. Even the Warden marines couldn’t hold their ground against thousands of zerg. Machines were destroyed. A Command Units repositioned the Warden units to do maximum damage, but a series of spines pierced its chest, went through the armor, and destroyed the CPU.

The strike team was still a distance away from where the transports were, but it would never have a chance to get there. Some of the men were still standing, yet they were completely surrounded and gradually overwhelmed. Every Raider dead was one less terran and every zerg dead meant one fresh zerg could take the place of the fallen.

Seeing the change in the situation, Kerrigan rose her eyebrow, and it took a second for her to realize what happened.

She, the leader of the Swarm and the one who slaughtered billions, was used as a weapon by a puny ghost who she could crush in seconds.

Then again, the situation was good for her. Raynor was pretty much dead. The ghost who used her was as good as dead. This strike team was wiped out. She didn’t have a chance to get to the data core the Raiders were in charge of, but the rest of the cores were mostly controlled by her Swarm.

Everything seemed well.

Until twelve banshees came down from the sky and unloaded a sea of backlash rockets on top of her.

“Ehh!” The queen leaped back and dodged out of the blast radius of the explosion. Behind the banshees, a dozen dropships lowered in altitude and landed in the middle of the members of the strike team that survived the previous onslaught.

Upon noticing the situation, Horner directly contacted the pilots of the dropships and convinced them to do a daring attempt: evacuate the Raiders from the middle of the zerg Swarm. Raider pilots complied. Some of the mercenary pilots refused, but they changed their mind when Horner offered an extra payment.

The Raiders that survived hurried into the dropships. Zerg units made a move, but the banshees showed these alien why they were the best in the sector as they emptied everything they had on the Swarm while barely dodging all the spines and glaive worms. A squad of mutalisks came up and was intercepted by a squad of mercenary vikings.

A few men brought the wounded Raynor inside one of the ships. When most of the living were in, the dropships lifted off.

“No!” Kerrigan felt like she needed to keep an entire fleet of mutalisks and corruptors above her at all time. Back on Xil, a squad of vikings ruined her day. Now a squad of banshees is doing the same thing. What is it with her and terran flyers?

Psionic energy condensed at her legs and powered her up. With inhuman strength, she literally landed on one of the dropships that was in midair.

“This ain’t fair!” A mercenary war pig inside the transport complained.

The dropship pilot did her best to turn the transport and push Kerrigan off, but her efforts were futile. Kerrigan’s spine wings stabbed down and ripped the dropship apart. A couple unlucky passengers, and two pilots, fell out of the sky and into the middle of the Swarm. If they weren’t dead when they hit the ground, they wouldn’t enjoy any mercy at the hand of the Swarm.

But that was all Kerrigan could do. All the banshees and dropship spread out and stayed away from her. Even if she wanted to jump onto another dropship, she couldn’t reach it.

She tried to summon her own flyers, but they were held back by the Moebius and the mercenary battlecruisers and all sorts of fighters. The deadly style of the mercenaries did massive damage to the Swarm.

She could only watch as the transports fly away.

But as she hit the ground, Kerrigan realized there was another entity on the ground who wasn’t zerg but was still alive.

The ghost that stabbed Raynor in the back, both figuratively and literally.

None of the Raiders risked their life trying to bring Viper onto one of the boats of life. It was a miracle they didn’t kill her. But the ghost’s situation was far from good. Dozens of bullets entered her body from one side and came out to opposite side. Her body was a mess. Her suit was in pieces.

A hunter killer walked up to Viper. Its claw was raised into the air, ready to come down and slash Viper into two, but he never had the chance to do so.

Viper literally ripped the hunter killer to pieces with just her mind.

Kerrigan frowned as Viper stood back up. She was obviously different. Her eyes were completely purple. She radiated a powerful psionic energy that made the Queen of Blades feel uncomfortable. She was still wounded, but she didn’t seem to care. The openings on her caused by the gauss rounds seemed to be closed already.

Between the time from being shot and almost being dissected by the hunter killer, Viper wasn’t waiting to die. Instead, she reached inside her pocket and injected all of the terrazine she carried into her body.

Viper took all the terrazine from Tosh’s base. It was enough terrazine to last an entire army of spectres through weeks, but she injected them all into her body in a matter of minutes.

The impact was severe. The voice that has been haunting her for weeks was amplified so much it turned from a quiet whisper to a deafening shout. Every piece of her cell burned, but with pain came power. Her wound didn’t magically disappear, but she was able to literally burn them shut.

It hurt, but she didn’t care. The pain she felt inside her mind and her body was countless times stronger than the pain of sealing the wounds.

Void energy formed a web and allowed her to see everything around her without even turning.

The ghost looked at Kerrigan. At the moment, all of her pain, fear, and anger exploded. Her logic was burned away by the void energy racing through her veins.

A few minutes before, when she assassinated Raynor, Viper still had some logic within her. She had a plan of escape and intended on leaving this planet alive to fight another day. Even when she injected all the terrazine, she was thinking about living through this situation at all cost so she could take down the Terran Dominion.

Now, all she wanted to do was kill.

The voice inside her mind strengthened that belief.

Destroy them all...Raynor...The Terran Dominion...Kerrigan...kill them all in the name…

...of Amon...