Woah! What the hell happened here?

No idea Flare, seems to be a few robots moving around down there guarding the place.

Is that person there the new Sam? I mean, regardless of who it is, we might as well go down and say hello.

-Voice Log between CryoFlare, SkyFire, and InqueAbyss, 2056

Looking around in a panic I realized one thing; I was in the middle of a massive amount of downed corn, far from the safety of a tree line.

I was being forced to take the swarm head on.

“Pyri, how is the zapper doing?”

It is fairly low on power, but it should be enough to thin the swarm out for you considerably before running out.

Not wanting those things anywhere near close enough to be able to take a full meat-shot from it, I swapped the Trench Stormer for my Fox’s Trill, “I guess I’m dealing with the massive birds in the meantime?”

That would indeed be an advisable course of action.

The flock of oversized pigeons had gotten closer, the larger birds looking like overfed pterosaurs with excessively bloated undersides. Although the bloating could be a trick of the light considering each one was covered in smaller birds.

Sighting in on the leader, I was met with a warning thrown up on my glasses.

[Object is too far to reliably hit!]

I muttered, “Remind me to get a weapon more suited to sniping sometime.”

Already in itinerary number three, and for what it’s worth, you can hit your target from this distance. It just won’t do as much damage as you’re hoping. I will alert you when in proper range.

I started firing, bolts of electricity tearing through the air. Each one missing the larger units, but not the swarm behind it. Unlike previously, the swarm seemed to react much more intelligently to being fired upon. The Ones moving forward to envelop their larger cousins, stopping me from getting a clean shot.

“Pyri what gives?”

Those larger units are Model Elevens, they are highly intelligent, and can carry other Models quite efficiently by using their enlarging stomach. They recognized the threat you posed and let the Model Ones overtake them.

I fired off a few more bolts, “So I get to deal with intelligent enemies again?!”

Yes.

I finally snuck a lightning bolt through the swarm and hit an Eleven. It faltered for a moment, then kept flying forward. “I liked them better as mindless killing machines.”

Think of it this way, more difficult units to kill means more points for you.

I couldn’t argue with Pyri’s logic so I just kept firing. Alarm bells in my head began ringing about how I had no cover out here whatsoever, the swarm could just loop around and attack me from all angles whenever they wanted.

That would be bad for obvious reasons.

Making up my mind, I rushed back to the wreckage, taking a few moments to turn around and fire off a few more shots at the encroaching swarm. Eventually the zapper began rapidly spewing electricity as well.

Model Ones were raining from the sky which had me humming an old song to myself as I forwent turning around, and focused on getting some sort of hard obstacles around me.

Spark, the Elevens have entered your effective range. I’m marking them on your HUD now.

A small handful of dark red arrows appeared in the edges of my vision, each one slowly getting brighter. Looking over my shoulder, the arrows resolved into blobs of the same color. Taking the queue for what it was, I spun around fired off a bolt at one of them, rather than a single bolt, I saw the forked lightning of my zapper lash out the second I sighted the blob and begin flash cooking the Ones in front of it as quickly as possible. The bolt worked its way through the remaining swarm, only shocking a few of them before impacting the Eleven in its head.

Not taking the time to celebrate, I turned and sprinted some more. The blobs had gotten a bit brighter while I had taken the shot, and were getting closer to a bright scarlet every second.

Luckily, one of the arrows flashed and winked out, hopefully denoting a death.

“Pyri, is it too much to ask that the Eleven crashed, and killed off the Models holding onto it?”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

The Eleven did crash, and most likely injured some Models inside of it, however any aerial Models on the outside of it detached, and joined the swarm once it began to fall.

Also you might want to just focus on getting to cover. Let me thin the horde for you.

Heeding Pyri’s advice I buckled down and sprinted for the equipment fifty meters in front of me. I was so close!

Dodge to the left now!

With a leap to the side I heard the sound of something impacting the ground, throwing up chaff from the impact.

Some of the Ones are in a position to dive bomb you. Keep focusing on running, Ill let you know when to dodge.

I poured on the speed, the backpack swaying back and forth with its weight even more as I made my way towards the grain cart. I needed something I could abandon if needed. Almost everything else was a deathtrap.

Honestly being up in the air would’ve been perfect for this whole thing. Air superiority and all.

Maybe when I had the points and the information in my head to know how to not turn myself into a smear on the ground.

Finally reaching my destination, I turned around and fired wildly at the Elevens, none of them really hit other than a glancing blow to a membrane. Causing it to falter, but it did drive them back a bit.

The swarm then began to descend, not towards me but towards the ground in general. The Elevens were completely covered by the swarm condensing on the ground like some twisted version of fog.

Firing into the antithesis-fog, I shouted, “Pyri what are they doin’ now?”

They are providing cover for the Model Elevens which are landing, expect ground based Models soon.

About a dozen curses went through my head, “Definitely something to fly, sitting under a piece of garbage metal box while slinging electricity sucks.”

The swarm began to twitch as if getting ready to rush me.

“PYRI SOME SORT OF REPELLANT NOW!”

A group of small boxes dropped down to my feet and screamed, my helmet cut the sound out almost immediately, but the sound still had me flinching backwards underneath the rear of the cart.

The swarm didn’t like it much more than I did, most of them began climbing up and away from the noise erratically as lightning tore through them. A few tried charging through anyways, but soon ended up melting in mid air and crashed to the ground like over ripe tomatoes hitting the side of the shop.

That was a fun day, to be perfectly honest.

The Elevens getting revealed shook me from my small tangent. They rose up with the flock and were just, staying up there?

If they didn’t want to go through the screams of the damned at my feet, then I would just have to pick them off during the break they unintentionally gave me.

The Ones were still trying to dive bomb me intermittently but each one met the same fate as the last, crash-landing due to a case of ‘dissolving wings’.

The very wet squelches were only getting more satisfying as time went on.

Sighting the brightest looking blob, I fired bolt after bolt, dropping Ones as the zapper did the same, until finally another Eleven was falling from the sky with Ones peeling off of it in a macabre sight.

It hit the ground next to a group of bedraggled Threes with a crunch.

They were covered in scratches, dents, and some were even dragging obviously broken limbs.

I started to snicker at the sight, when a lot more Threes came out of the corn. These Models were nearly pristine, and were obviously what had been dropped off a few seconds ago.

“For fucks sake!”, I swore. “Pyri, focus on the dogs!”

I instantly went back to firing up at the Elevens, instantly seeing much less success without my AI’s help. It took me much longer to knock a second and third Eleven from the sky. It was excessively frustrating to watch each of my shots get soaked up by Ones and only reach the behemoths as a light zap they could recover from.

The Threes didn’t last too long thankfully, but it was still enough of a delay for the screaming boxes to stop working.

Noticing the gap in my defenses, the antithesis instantly swooped back down to take advantage of the opening. It was chilling how once again there wasn’t even a sound other than a cacophony of flapping wings.

Digging in my pouch I threw a pair of nades up into the tip of the swarm. “I need more of those screaming boxes Pyri!”

The screaming soon began anew as the thrown nades exploded violently after the first few birds passed by them.

So many bodies were raining from the sky.

Spark, be advised that the Zapper is almost out of power.

I took in the swarm, it was much thinner, with a majority of the Ones now dead on the ground or surrounding the flying behemoths, of which only three were left.

Another shot dropped that number down to two.

I dropped the rifle at my feet and reached for my shotgun, “Just give me time to empty this thing and reload. I’ll just deal with them a lot closer than intended.”

Be careful, their mouths are full of teeth as long as your fingers.

I failed to both suppress the image that came to mind or the shiver that came after it,as I began firing off the remaining shells in the drum. Sending webs of electricity up at the swarm, taking chunks out of the remaining groups.

As the final shell was fired, I instantly pulled the drum off and slapped a new one in as fast as possible.

Only to fumble the damned thing and drop it.

“PIECE OF GARBAGE!”

I squatted down to pick it up, and latched it to the gun properly this time, and looked up to see a single Eleven with much more Ones around it than before.

SPARK MOVE!

I instantly bolted away from the cart as fast as possible as something slammed right into it, sending it end over end. The good news was that I had found the second Eleven and it was not doing too well between the screaming and slamming itself into a metal box. The bad news was it got rid of my cover.

Before it got away I racked a shell and swapped to slugs before sending one right into its head.

It fell head to the ground, but I was too busy looking up at the last dregs of the swarm I had been fighting.

It appeared that they were sick of my shit given the fact that in a few moments I would be tackled head on by an oversized bat.