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1% Life's Real (a 1% Lifesteal parody)
B4 - The Road to Greatness is Paved with Corpses

B4 - The Road to Greatness is Paved with Corpses

After half an hour, Biscuit's tentacles rematerialized on his back. "I sense no enemies within a hundred miles of our location. We can proceed to our advanced camp."

The group advanced with the speed of their slowest members, which were the Minotaurs. Amanda and Camille were a close second as the slowest but it was definitely the minotaur musicians. Robert didn't ask them to slow down a bit and they didn't care about such petty competition. Robert wondered how the Taulusians would hide an advance camp. While they traveled, he tried to find an opportunity to talk with Biscuit. One came after a hundred-and-fifty-mile jog. It was close to the end of the day.

“Enemies are moving over that cliff above us,” Biscuit whined, it was how they whispered. “We should enter a nearby cave and take shelter during the night. Freddy, you go ahead to scout for any caves we can use.”

Freddy vanished.

“Not even I can sense your brother,” Biscuit said. “Ace talents are just like that. That little experiment confirmed that yours is also an Ace. You hold mastery over the Void dimension.”

Robert opened a telepathic link. “I doubt I would manage to force a five-star Space Arch to change dimensions otherwise.”

“I knew my control had slipped for a moment there. I appreciate your candidness. I truly do.”

“What hope do you have of any change here if even someone as strong as you can’t push them back?”

“We are at a stalemate. Power for power, we are weaker but our superior organization and tactics have won the fights for us. However, you know very well how even the strongest of balances can be tipped with the smallest force if it is applied correctly. Each of you has an exceptional talent. Let’s not discount human ingenuity. You are like children to the interspace. But how much did you accomplish in these two hundred years? More than most civilizations with thousands. I don’t resent the pacifist faction for deciding to trade their freedom for safety. The war wasn’t kind to our warrior brethren. We lost too many brave defenders.”

After Freddy returned. They followed him and entered a cave and descended five hundred feet into it before entering a large hall. Robert deployed the portable habitat for himself. Amanda and Noah used the new type, meant for humans. The Taulusians placed some woven plant fiber mats on the ground and laid down on it.

Robert thought about Biscuit's plans. Were the corgi planning to dump the humans? All that talk about Ace talents sounded suspicious.

He hadn't used his talent in several hours since that experiment. If he didn't spend his hours soon, he could be spirited away at an inconvenient time. He made sure Spidersilk was okay and that his creatures had their needs met. Then, he was off into the liminal void.

After mapping several passage realms of interest, Robert became really good at it. All he needed was to take a good look around and his imprint would update his map. With his spatial senses reaching as far as they did, he placed distant areas in their correct places more often than not.

With each day he dedicated to that, the map of Taulusia revealed itself as another floating world hovering on the skies of his mind palace.

It had about three times Earth's landmass, and half as many oceans. The polar caps had no ice on them and the planet seemed to be in one of those high-atmospheric carbon greenhouse cycles where plant and insect life became bigger than normal.

Life thrived. Perhaps it thrived too much, which was why the Taulusians were having so much trouble defending their Homeworld. The dog-like aliens bred fast. A female could have a litter with two to five children every eleven Earth months, including the two months of nursing.

Being intelligent and sapient creatures, the females wouldn't submit themselves to breed all the time and let their children become soldiers. Their emotions were much like those of human mothers.

Then they had the issue of waiting for these children to grow up, obtain a Prime Vestige, and reach at least two-star status before they would see the front lines.

Their one-star Archs were considered apprentices and received instruction and supervised passage delving. It highly reduced the mortality rate. But from two-star and onward, they were expected to face mortal danger on their own, to keep themselves from stagnating.

Humanity could take a page from that playbook.

*

*

Then he found the Endless Hive's occupied region

Robert saw war beetles the height of a ten-floor building and the length of an oil supertanker, carrying thousands of monsters. Floating fish with hard plates covering their bellies and dozens of humanoid monsters with bows or wearing mage robes.

Throngs of hunched creatures with six arms and two legs, covered in natural armor plates devoured everything in their path, leaving only naked ground for miles. That's how they terraformed worlds. But filling the bellies of these creatures with everything on the planet, including the topsoil.

It was bad. How bad? Seven Zerg grandmasters vs one Terran noob bad. “Defense of the Alamo” kind of bad, if the defenders had only junior high wet toilet paper straw blowguns and the enemies came with .50 machine guns.

Robert couldn't see magic from the liminal void but he was pretty sure the Taulusians would need the help of half of humanity's four-star to even the playing field…

Wait a second!

Robert left Taulusia via deep void, to make a visit.

*

*

The next morning, Robert tried something new. He used the conceptual transmission upgrade of his telepathy spell and linked with Freddy. He sent the image of his world map and Freddy projected it with his illusion affinity.

The expedition members gathered to look at the globe. Biscuit floated around, over, and under, focusing on the hordes of monsters Robert located.

"This is where we will whet our fangs," Biscuit revealed with a confident and commanding bark. The area he was pointing at was about thirty miles away from their cave. "Freddy will go ahead and bring a report on enemy forces and defenses. Once we have live intelligence, we will attack."

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Freddy vanished, the illusion dissipating into thin mist. The leadership made their plans and everyone attended to their pre-battle preparations. The Taulusians did nothing because they didn't have equipment to put on.

Robert, his three musicians, and Amanda donned their Minotaur armor. Caroline took her deviant Minotaur out of her po… cket habitat. Veronica put on her healer light plate armor. And Noah… just stood there, looking good in his teacher uniform.

Their Minotaur armor had a new feature. It was mounted on the pauldrons, outside of the wearer's field of view, and had two shielded pods for small creatures. The shields covered the pod and protected the occupant from physical or energy attacks without blocking their ability to attack. Robert carried Cotton and Coal on his armor while Amanda had LiMeiLin and Spidersilk on hers.

It still took some time until Freddy returned. When he did, everyone gathered to watch.

He played a holographic movie of the camp, showing everything as he saw it. The plans were adjusted. And set in motion.

*

*

Despite the bulky armor, the three Minotaurs were still a few inches shorter than Caroline's deviant. It was impossible to hide the four bundles of joy, violence, and musical sensibilities. That's why the plan included using the four as a distraction.

Upon visual contact with the Endless Hive sentries, the Minotaurs bowled forward, axes raised and speakers blasting their bleats and war bellows to intimidate the bugs-that-were-actually-descended-from-fish.

Right before the clash, Robert cast two-star haste on his three Minotaurs, spending more than half of the essence stored in his void heart. The haste caused the Minotaurs to blur forward and forced the defenders to lose their timing as the great axes blurred and cleaved it all. Exoskeleton, monster, and endoskeleton. If this was a cartoon, the camera would show sushi rolls dropping behind the Minotaurs as they advanced into the camp. But it wasn't so the split bodies locked in their death throes littered and obstructed the camp entrance.

The Taulusians didn't mind getting their paws dirty as they rushed after the Minotaurs, barking and howling like the Cerberus and the dogs of Tartarus had come to reap souls.

Amanda dropped green-glowing seeds behind them, erecting bushes of highly-evolved crown-of-thorns with necrotic poison dripping from their thorns. LiMeiLin used her talent, Scent Manipulation, to lace the bushes with an alluring scent that would make any fleeing monsters seek refuge inside the deadly plants. Spidersilk also used her talent in the bushes. A glamour hid the thorns and made them seem like leafy and harmless shrubbery.

Caroline and Veronica stayed near Noah. The three were safer together as a support unit.

Robert winced as his armored boots splashed alien blood everywhere. He entered the camp and started to spray the battlefield with his semi-intelligent magic missiles. He saw twelve Minotaurs fighting the monsters but his fairy eyes knew eight of them were illusions. Freddy was somewhere, hidden, helping keep the pressure away from his friends.

The only one who didn't engage was Biscuit. The Endless Hive would react very differently I'd they knew the leader of the Taulusian Resistance was nearby.

Amanda walked in after Robert, her armor's chrome surfaces shining bright as she threw lightning bolts at the monsters, banishing shadows and crackling like the wrath of a mad Goddess.

Robert knew it wasn't over even though the first assault ended in a massacre. He could sense hundreds of Endless Hive warriors and biomass regurgitators (the six-armed devourers) coming up through dozens of tunnels.

He engaged Freddy with a silent message. Since the spell only delivered the message without knowing his location, providing feedback, and was harmless, it bypassed Freddy's talent. The camouflaged hound appeared next to Robert, who immediately engaged both minds with a telepathic link.

Red arrows appeared above the concealed tunnel entrances. Their forces split thin to defend those chokepoints. Freddy vanished again.

Amanda threw more seeds. Her bean (not pea) Gatling plants grew and rotated to defend three tunnels.

Coal spat a big dollop of cloying Darkness, covering an entrance. Robert stood near that tunnel and the next, his boar spear ready.

The covers camouflaging the tunnels burst and poured dozens of monsters each. Robert couldn't even tell the monster's shape or how big they resembled as he swung both ends of his spear, slashing and bashing bugs in equal amounts.

The hasted Minotaurs sent a shower of bug parts as they cleaved any who dared to surface. Caroline's Minotaur used its Control Metal talent to turn itself into a steel-bladed hook porcupine.

It was chaos. Robert was so busy with his tunnels that he had no idea how the others were doing. The tunnel covered in Coal's Darkness slowed down the monsters, causing them to clog the tunnel and leaving easy pickings for Cotton's Light beams

Two Taulusians were on the verge of getting overwhelmed but dozens of fierce war hounds leaped from the shadows to rescue them. While the monsters were intimidated and busy with these illusions, the wounded padded their way to Victoria to get healed.

Hail of beans flew out of Amanda's not-pea-shooters, shredding into the monsters busy with Freddy's illusionary war hounds, keeping them contained. Sparing only a glance, Robert noticed Amanda had doubled the number of plants around her.

Five minutes into the invasion, the tides shifted. The hasted Minotaurs had experienced ten minutes of combat. Their Enrage Timer talents activated, doubling their speed, strength, and resilience. The great axes moved with the speed and grace of a master fencer's rapier, whooshing through the air like a blur, unstoppable.

Their bloodlust reached its peak, and the berserker humanoid bulls entered the tunnels in search of more prey.

Half an hour passed. Robert was pacing his essence usage, relying on his satellite core to keep his buffs going. He only knew that his Minotaurs were alive because their link was still active. Amanda had tapped out a while ago. The Taulusians were rotating themselves to keep the pressure. Mounds of body parts and a small lake of green, white, and red blood seeped back down the tunnels.

"Robert, go get your bulls back! Now!" Noah shouted a command.

He used his primary talent. Swimming down in the near void, he followed his links to find the Minotaurs. They were a hundred feet beneath the labyrinthine tunnel network, betraying the extent of the Endless Hive's logistics. The camp had several hundred times more monsters than what Freddy scouted.

He waited to return, took a nap, and did maintenance on his armor. Then he reappeared in reality, tapped his Minotaur, and took him back with him to the liminal void. He dropped it next to Amanda's bushes by the camp entrance, then did the same with the other two.

As Robert appeared with the third monster, Noah slapped his hand on a chitinous rune.

"Unnatural disaster: Biomass reactor locust swarm."

Millions of hungry monstrous bugs appeared out of nowhere and descended upon the camp as a black cloud. They started to eat everything in the camp, living or dead. When nothing else remained above ground, the black clouds entered the tunnels.

Deep inside, the bloated locusts rushed forward on suicide runs into the last defenders of the Endless Hive outpost. Each locust that died exploded in a burst of enzymes and acid that dissolved organic matter and served as food for the locusts coming behind them as well as for the eggs they spread upon death. The locusts who ate the rich paste fertilized the eggs, bloating themselves and charging to death once more.

The disaster was self-perpetuating. Eggs hatched within several minutes, the grasshopper larvae feasting on what the adults left behind, pupating, and emerging as a new locust in less than half an hour from their mother's death. Spreading their rapidly-drying wings, they joined and refreshed the swarm.

On the surface, Noah faltered and was supported by Caroline. Keeping his summons active cost him a hefty upkeep cost but was worth it. He held the spell for six more minutes as he confirmed no more Endless Hive creatures existed in a twelve-mile range.

His "Who Would Win" talent allowed him to simulate a bout between two entities or groups in range and tell the outcomes of a fight to the death where both sides used their powers, talents, and skills to the best of their ability, without holding back.

It didn't reveal how or why but he knew who would be the winner and how badly hurt the winner would be. All he needed to confirm the wipe was to ask the outcome of a fight between the Bonsai Rafflesia and all the survivors of the enemy camp.

The drawback was that, while he could get the result of complex simulations, the more complex it was, the harder it hit him with talent fatigue. That's why he used the weakest creature on their team as their representative.

When the result shifted from a perfect victory for the Endless Hive into a perfect victory for the tiny plant girl, that was it.