There wasn’t much time left, and I had to suit up before I could move on. The call had already been put out to Sol, and he was going to meet us at the designated rendezvous. The entire offensive would be launching, by that, in less than ten minutes. Cyber settled back into the command center to man her station, and Foci and Paradise wouldn’t be able to stay out of the firing line this time.

They had carried Daniel and Hickory to the meeting point as I directed them. There, they would all wait together for the final push. I had other ideas about my own ride. As I’d already learned with Maximal, the regular firepower wasn’t going to cut it in this fight.

I was beginning to realize this was our greatest problem. We simply couldn’t compete, no matter how sophisticated our biological engineering, against these magic demigods. But I could damn well give it my best try, no matter the futility, because we could get close.

And the best of the best, I knew, would not be something I attached to my back. It would be something I rode. After all, nothing got closer to matching the might of a god that modern explosives did.

Waiting in the bay for me, we had one last bio-mechanical fighter jet. I knew it was there specifically for me because the cockpit was shaped for a human pilot. I only had to climb in, and it clamped down around my body like a fleshy tomb. Then came the rush of information as the physical boundaries of my experience grew.

I had not felt such an intense change in my physiology since the early days with Creep. Even my mind expanded, and suddenly, as I willed the jets to turn on and begin hovering me out of the loading bay, it was an instinctual level of control. I couldn’t explain it. I just knew it.

And oh, what a joy it was to return to the sky, just as I did all that time ago, above the favela. There was a primally satisfying thrill in blazing my engines to rise above the city and the trees. From there, everything seemed small again.

I had just one jet on my aft end that I could manipulate for vertical takeoff, along with some smaller thrusters for maneuvering. On my sides were two straight wings. All in all, it was not dissimilar to the kinds of jets a human would recognize. All except for the conspicuous absence of any cockpit. There was just a long, flat spike for a nose, sans any glass.

As I saw, there was no hiding this plan of ours. Sol had gathered up the troops around the tallest standing building in the city, and they were fighting off any Heroes that attempted to stop them. They were holding their own, but against the undead and the remaining high tier Heroes, it wouldn’t be long until they were overrun. The only chance we had to get up to the Lich’s stationary platform was to have the scarab climb the tower and make a bridge. It was slow-going, but it was almost in place now.

I felt out what weapons I had at my disposal then as I roared up to join the fight. Before I had much time to get acquainted with them, just getting to my destination required that I let loose a hellfire of bullets.

That’s a good one, I noted. But what else do we have?

The good news was that most of the undead heroes were easy to kill, as evidenced by the fact that someone had already succeeded at it. Bullets, I saw, mostly did the trick. That meant I could keep the better stuff in reserve. Precisely, I had six rockets and two bombs, with the latter being far stronger. So strong, in fact, that I might have risked friendly casualties if I wasn’t careful.

My eyes were numerous along my hull, and I quickly spotted Hickory and Daniel on the ground level doing what they could to hold the line while the Scarab completed its movements. Their work mostly consisted of trying to ruin the undead bodies beyond any hope of functioning in order to put them down once and for all and clear the field. It was messy as hell, and they were beginning to drown in gore.

For my part, I kept my guns hot shooting down flying heroes. There was a small army of drones helping me out in the sky, as well as three other fighter jets still remaining. The Martians, apparently, had managed to outclass or sabotage most of Seraph’s presence in the sky. All the jets and the drones were dead because, ironically, if there was one thing we were better at, it was the sheer complexity of systems and technology. Meanwhile, Seraph had big flashy superpowers.

Those class one blasters were a real pain in the ass, too. One of them was capable of throwing out enormous beams of energy, even searing into the hide of the Scarab, and no matter how much we tried, he just shrugged off any attacks from the ground. Whether it was bullets or poisoned lances or even cannon fire, it just seemed to pass through him, as if he himself was made of light.

He took turns changing targets, shooting at me and my fellow fighter jets, but his lasers were not instantaneous, and so they could be dodged. They were more like some kind of plasma than actual light, and as hot and painful as it was, taking a glance from them did not immediately bring me out of commission. As annoying as it was, we had to prioritize targets, and so I tried to ignore him for the time being.

I took turns testing the various heavy hitters that were still in the sky as I strafed around dodging their various attacks. There were half a dozen projectile Heroes that appeared to still be living, not undead, and they packed a wallop on top of their toughness.

One of them produced a spotlight, and its surface area turned whatever it passed over grey and blurry. Those unfortunate Martians that I saw fall into the area did not fare too well. They turned to solid stone, dying shortly after as any parts which did not come under the beam sloughed off, decapitated by default.

I really don’t want to give that a try, I thought. Who knew how deep beneath the surface it penetrated, or if it could one-shot me? But the see-through Martians were certainly at a disadvantage, regardless. They attempted to create cover from the light, deploying strange little creatures that took in rubble and spewed out heavy smoke.

This worked, for the most part, allowing our main forces to continue preparing to board the floating glass platform of the Lich King. Yet, there was another Hero who threatened the plan, and I set my sights on him.

He produced hurricane-force winds and as he saw his deadlier teammate being stymied from the density of the smoke-covering, he directed his Power to help. There was just a short window of time to kill him before all the work was undone, now. I took a close maneuver around the other remaining Heroes who protected him, firing off my guns in a straight line. But I saw what had helped him to survive this long.

Around his body, the force of the wind being generated was so spectacularly strong that it actually stopped bullets in their track.

One of the other fighter jets signaled me through its lights. “Watch out!”

Then came the retaliation. Before he finished blowing off the smoke cover, the Hero focused his Power to bat me down with a wall of air, and I nearly dove straight into the Earth on its tide. The force had me in a tailspin, but I stabilized and pulled up just in time. Going off course came with its own risks and benefits as a result. The sky was awfully populated these days.

My hull ended up smacking into one of the other remaining Heroes. Since I had made my foray into their tightly packed group, I tried to weave around their defensive blasts, yet I hadn't considered what would happen if I just rammed one of them in the face.

He was splattered across my hull in an instance, and I counted myself lucky he wasn’t one of the tougher bastards. His survival must have been due to some other kind of gimmick. This, however, gave me an idea.

If I could generate a sufficient blast around the wind-Hero, his force would be overcome. I knew that this far into the fight, my comrades in the sky were out of missiles. Not every Hero remaining was unkillable, then. Some just hadn’t been given the old college try.

Only, now the supporting Heroes had their eye on me. They knew I was reckless, and they set about shoring their defenses up. There was just one last opening to get my rockets through, and that was from above.

Human beings, even Heroes who had fought for years in the sky, were still incredibly accustomed to thinking in two dimensions. In the vast majority of their fights, flying Heroes nonetheless did not face other flying threats. They watched the ground and merely provided support from above.

When I pulled straight up, stalled, and dove straight back down for the center of their mass, they never saw it coming. The path of my rocket was clear, and I let it rip faster than a speeding bullet.

In its explosion, the fire and force were somehow sucked into the personal torrent of the Hero, and I watched as, in split seconds, he was crushed against the shockwaves. He needed to stay perfectly still, I realized, just to avoid stepping into his own Power, and I had forced him to move. All that remained was a red mist strewn across the world after that as he was churned through the blender of wind.

“Let’s go!” I called.

After some fighting, there were just two remaining fighter jets, apart from myself. They fell into formation with me at the lead, and we took up a protective tactic as the Martians finally began to ascend the Scarab and board the platform. They were ready to make their rush on the Lich’s stronghold, and they needed cover from above.

Unfortunately, that was when I got my chance to see exactly what happened when the grey beam passed over me. I didn’t spontaneously combust, but suddenly I became heavier.

Several inches of material along my hull was transmuted from sleek carbon fiber straight into solid concrete. The drag alone almost tore me apart, and the added weight shifted my balance in unsustainable ways. I had to rely heavily on the small and delicate adjustment boosters of my front end after that. Normally they were used just for emergency maneuvers, but my balance was almost destroyed at this point. I was moving at a fraction of the speed, and staying airborne became a constant struggle.

I fired one last hail-Mary rocket into the mass of flying Heroes, injuring a few of them but killing none. We needed as much time as we could get to help as many fighters as possible to reach the platform, but we were leading them to the slaughter.

Sol was still in his enormous crab-suit, and he fought valiantly, but the Super Thralls of the Lich were more powerful than anything we had yet seen. He had to dodge just to avoid being knocked off the platform by their attacks. One of them threw punches so devastating that the Great Storm was stirred by them in the distance.

At last, I dared to rise above the level of the platform and out from lower airspace along with my crew. I primed the remaining four rockets I had, and we moved in for a strafing run.

I had my eyes on the Lich. If I could just kill him without being taken down, we could still win this.