“How were there so many attacking us?” Sean asked, “They covered the ground for miles, will we deal with that many every time?”

“Not exactly,” Asuta said, “I already had one of my missiles napalm the whole area after you left to burn up the dead bodies so the Endless Flesh can’t reuse them. There’s so many of them right now because all of them probably landed on the planet recently and were on the original Endless Flesh ship before. Billions or more of the things are covering the planet now to hold the line until the hives entrench themselves and begin real production of more of them. The Endless Flesh can recycle dead bodies with almost perfect efficiency if they manage to drag them back to the center of the nest to feed those grubs, and the Immortals they’ve captured add a little bit to their total pool of biomass over time. But since I destroyed the bodies after you were done, it should have made a sizable dent in the forces of the Endless flesh for now.”

“So, will something like that happen again next time?” Sean asked, “We’re going out again soon, right?”

“Yeah, we’ll keep going until it gets too dangerous,” Asuta agreed, “I’ve already saved five Immortals so far with my stealthy strategy, but what I’m doing doesn’t cut back on the size of the swarms either. That swarm you just fought will probably be the biggest one for a while. But specialized variants will start popping up to attack along with them, and don’t expect the attacks to exactly be small either. Even if they won’t be as big as they could be.”

“Anything else that we should do?” Sean asked, “Besides just going out to do it again?”

Asuta tilted her head to the side and appeared to think for a moment.

“Nope,” she said, “Just rinse and repeat. If you’re feeling in danger, then don’t hesitate to back off and retreat. These things get nasty if you give them time to dig in and fortify their nests.”

“Okay,” Sean said, “Back to work then, I guess.”

“Back to work,” Asuta agreed.

— — —

The massive centipede in the central chamber reared its head back and roared, causing Sean to take a half step back. It turned its head to him and spat a sticky glob of acid directly onto him before he could react. Sean swore as the acid coated him and started eating into the frame of his exosuit. But the worst thing was the flashing red light on his flamethrower as the acid ate into it.

Sean quickly shifted his grip on his weapon and with a grunt used the enhanced strength of his exosuit to throw his weapon directly at the centipede they were fighting.

Sean turned away and fell to his knees as the large chamber around them shook under the massive explosion that shook the chamber a second later and shifted the darkness into bright day.

Sean turned back and glanced down at his sizzling and pitted armor. He was going through these suits like socks by now. All of them needed new ones for each raid after these last few weeks. Asuta had a whole arsenal of them, but Sean was beginning to worry that even her supplies must be running out with how quickly they were going through them.

The centipede fell to the ground dead with a large thump as the antimatter explosion nearly erased the right half of its head.

Ash quickly carved the creature open and extracted the three immortals inside of it from the wet flesh while Roger and Lira frantically held back the swarm.

No longer were the swarm mantises and beetles only. Now they had to worry about sinuous centipedes, acid spitting dragonflies, and dozens of other variants that attacked them all at once.

Sean stepped forward and grabbed two of the Immortals that Ash had retrieved now that he was down to only his sidearm at his hip and grenades. Ash picked up the last one and helped Sean adjust his grip so he could hold all three of the confused Immortals at once.

A barrage bone spike came flying from the ceiling, all targeting Sean as the group started pushing out of the main chamber and into the tighter tunnels. The spikes shattered and only slightly dented Sean’s armor where they landed. Unfortunately the three Immortals he was holding weren’t nearly as lucky and looked like squirming pincushions as the spikes pierced through them effortlessly.

Sean kept moving in the center of the formation with his friends around him as they rushed back into the more cramped tunnels. After a few seconds the ends of the bone spikes snapped off and fell to the ground as the Immortals in Sean’s grip regenerated from the damage.

They kept moving through the swarm, Sean stumbling occasionally as the damage to his exosuit began to accumulate as the swarm attacked only him at any opportunity in an attempt to get him to drop his payload.

They made it outside to the surface into a world in chaos. Their fortress ship floating above was furiously firing at everything within a hundred meters around them to fight off the charging swarm of dozens of variants of insects.

The main guns with kinetic rounds fired near constantly at looming figures less than a mile away who only stumbled at each strike rather than going down with only a single hit.

Even as Sean watched a group of ten suicide fliers divebombed the fortress from above, the gaster at their backs of the flying ants swollen with a bright green fluid. The fortress shot them down, but the creature’s exploded into a spray of green acid as soon as they were killed, raining damage down onto the top of the ship and eating away at one of the furiously firing laser emplacements. Even as Sean watched the laser started smoking and stopped firing as the acid ate away at it.

The ground rumbled as a boulder landed a hundred feet away as one of the humanoid in the giants crouched down to throw again. The fortress’ kinetic rounds slammed into it an instant later and sent it falling to the ground before it could attack again.

The ropes came down from above and latched onto all of them and started drawing them upwards one by one. Lira, Ash, and Roger kept firing with their lasers and flamethrowers as the fortress struggled to keep all of the surrounding swarm from reaching them.

Another group of flying ants dive bombed the fortress and managed to land a direct hit on one of the protected engines. The engine sputtered and died for a second causing the fortress to lurch to the side for a second before it fired up again and they righted themselves. The group dangling beneath the ship were thrown from side to side as the ship kept reeling them up into its interior.

The whole group was drawn upwards and into the ship itself and the hatch below them closed.

An acid spitting dragonfly managed to slip in just at the last moment and attempted to attack the control console. Sean dropped the three naked Immortals to the ground and threw himself to the side to intercept the glob of liquid with his armor even as Lira reached out and slapped the dragonfly out of the air. She raised her foot and stomped it even as the acid landed on Sean’s chest and finally managed to break through to his body. His skin bubbled and peeling away as the acid ate away at it just as fast as it regenerated. Sean gritted his teeth slightly at the sensation and tried to move, only to find that his exosuit had finally given up the game and shut down, locking him into place.

Ash went over to the control console and started inputting the commands to get them out of here.

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“Sean? Are you alright?” Lira asked as she kneeled next to him in her exosuit.

“Fine, just got hit by the acid,” Sean said through the speakers, “Movements completely shut down though, I’m locked in place. I triggered the emergency release already and it didn’t do anything.”

“Ok, let’s get you out of there,” Lira said. She fiddled with his suit for a moment and found the point where the metal had warped to stop it from releasing him.

She found a welder in a bin to the side and brought it out and quickly melted the offending section of metal until with a hissing sound the torso of the exosuit swung outwards and let Sean crawl out.

He stood there only dressed in a clothing band when the ship suddenly lurched and Sean was thrown to fall onto the hard metal of Lira’s exosuit, where she caught him.

“Ash, what’s going on?” Roger asked from where he had been calming down the three new Immortals and giving them clothing bands.

“The flying ants took out the engine they damaged earlier,” Ash said as he kept tapping at the control panel, “We’re down to three engines now so we’re moving much slower. We can go down to two, but we’ll barely be able to do more than hover in place if it comes to that.”

“What are our chances of escape?” Lira asked, “If we’re already being hit this hard here, can we make it out in time…?”

Ash stared at the display where Sean saw that he was altering the firing paths of the laser turrets and main cannons to prioritize the right targets.

“I don’t think so,” Ash said, “There’s too many and they’ve done too much damage. I think we’ll have to go upward.”

“Upward?” Roger said, “Are you sure? We’ll be right in the firing paths…”

“If Ash says we won’t make it then we won’t,” Sean said as he stood back to his feet and Lira’s Exosuit released him from its embrace, “We’ll have to risk it.”

“Yes, do it Ash,” Lira agreed before turning to Roger, “You saw the engines. If Ash says she can’t get us out then we have to do the option we have left.”

“Alright,” Roger allowed, “Let’s go for it then.”

“Alright, increasing thrust to maximum force,” Ash said before he hit the panel again. The fortress ship around them suddenly started rumbling as the engines began to roar even louder and begin to whine slightly as they started slowly rising through the air.

Ash kept on optimizing the firing patterns for the ships weapons for the next five minutes as they rose. There were still a few flying variants that were flying upwards after them, but without worrying about all of the ones on the ground Ash was able to eliminate almost all of them before they reached the surface of the ship.

The shield had already shattered long ago while they were fighting underground, so unfortunately the ships surface was unprotected as the suicidal ants killed themselves to release blasts of acid to eat away at and disable more of the remaining laser positions. There were now only ten of the lasers on the underside still firing now. But as the ship rose through the air, less and less of the flying creatures were able to follow, until finally the last one gave up the chase and started flying back towards the ground.

They waited for another five minutes in silence as they rose through the air before Ash sent the command to home base.

It took another ten minutes before they heard the rumbling from the skies above.

They all tensed, even the new Immortals who seemed to sense everyone else’s tension. Sean swore as suddenly their ship lurched to the side again and something whistled right by them.

The ground below was lit up in a massive fiery explosion. There was more rumbling and more long range missiles from the nearest fortress city landed on the swarm below and burnt them to a crisp.

There was a brief pause before more missiles came down from the skies and scoured the remaining giants and larger creatures that had survived the initial barrage.

Their ship wobbled in the air for a bit but remained mostly stable as the orbital lasers finished off the last of the larger creatures. There was still movement down below from survivors, but most of them had been killed. And more importantly the bodies of the dead had been destroyed so the Endless Flesh wouldn’t be able to reuse them next time.

They hovered there for a moment observing the flaming battleground below them. Then Ash hit a few more commands into the console and the ship started moving again.

“Should be eight or nine hours until we get back with only the three engines,” Ash told the room as he sat down and took a slug of heavy metals from a nearby crate. Ash opened his chest cavity and started feeding it to his nanite swarm. Working on repairing his damaged and pitted frame with the nanites inside his chest with the raw materials.

Sean turned to the three new Immortals who were staring at him as the only one of the group out of the exosuits at the moment.

“I’m sure you have a lot of questions,” Sean said in a speech that was well practiced by now after weeks of conducting raid after raid on the Endless Flesh’s nests, “So here’s the basics of what’s happening right now and who we are…”

— — —

“Yeah, I think that’s it,” Asuta said as she inspected the damaged surface of the ship they had just returned with, “Well by my estimation we saved at least half of the Immortals that were trapped in those hives. So that was a good job. My own stealth efforts are running on the edge too. My ship was shot down three times already and I had to fight the swarm by myself while home base sent more ships to come save me…”

“So, what do we do now?” Roger asked, “You’re right, we barely made it out that time. But we can’t just leave it be. Even right now, home base is being attacked en masse by the swarm.”

“Yes, out of the fifty cities I made ten of them have already been overrun and destroyed,” Asuta agreed, “But home base is different. This place is brimming with better defenses, and the underground shield is far more powerful than the rest so they won’t be able to burrow in that way. Even if all the rest fall, then home base will be able to survive for a while longer. They won’t get in here easily.”

“What about Emily and the ship she’s repairing?” Roger asked, “Will she be fine?”

“Yes, those defenses are almost as good as ours,” Asuta said with a dismissive wave, “It’s such a small space that it's easier to set up proper defenses rather than the miles and miles of area to defend here and for the cities.”

“What’s the news of the main ship that retreated?” Sean asked, “What’s it doing?”

“It’s coming back,” Asuta said with a grimace, “It’ll be here and raining down more troops and reinforcements from orbit down onto us within the next week. But with everything we’ve done, we’ve depleted almost all of the Endless Flesh’s initial invasion forces. Now they’re down to the amount they’re gaining from the trapped Immortals to sustain their swarms by now. It’s a lot, but not as overwhelming as it was in the beginning. Despite them getting smarter with all the specialized variants they’re creating to counter us to make the amount of biomass they have go farther.”

“But the ship coming back would change that,” Sean said.

“Yeah, it would change that,” Asuta agreed, “Especially since it might start conducting orbital strikes with those heavy landing pods if it's smart enough to figure out that it can do that. So we’ve got until then to do a few final raids on the nests. Then we’ll just have to bunker down and try to deplete their numbers as best we can until Emily pulls through to destroy the main ship.”

“Won’t we still have everything on the ground to deal with even if the ship was destroyed?” Lira asked skeptically.

“Yes,” Asuta said, “But all my other space defenses in this star system are attacking the main ship right now to keep it from regenerating as quickly. Once it’s dead then we can bring them into orbit around the planet after a few weeks and use them to attack the Endless Flesh on the ground. Plus saving the hundreds if not thousands of Immortals trapped in the main enemy ship that are sustaining that thing right now to keep it regenerating itself so quickly.

“Actually this is one of the largest Immortal count fleets I’ve ever heard of. It has deployed hundreds of Immortals just for the land invasion alone. Which means it’s holding back far more than that in its main body. Most fleets of the Endless Flesh barely break a hundred Immortals total in the worst case.

“The combination of those two things will make things much easier for us and let us whittle them down their numbers with less risk to ourselves when we choose to do more raids on their nests,” Asuta finished.

“So we’ve just got to wait until Emily pulls through for us?” Lira asked, “And then go on offense once that’s done?”

“Pretty much,” Asuta agreed.

“What about Entiru and all the others we saved?” Sean asked, “They’re not going to help?”

“They’ll help us,” Asuta said, “But only after Emily kills the main ship. Then we can risk having a raid with a larger group including them in their own exosuits to help us out.”

“Okay,” Sean said, “So is there anything else we should do? Or are we just completely waiting until the right moment?”

“Just waiting,” Asuta said, “We can’t risk the Endless Flesh recapturing anyone to strengthen itself. Best to not give it the opportunity. So go relax all of you. We’ve all worked hard, so no use worrying about what’s going on out there until we can do something about it.”

They all dispersed and went back to their rooms to relax and decompress. Sean and Lira both took long naps as soon as they were clean. Neither of them had slept for weeks, and they were more than ready for a mental break from the constant stress of the raids they’d been doing on the Endless Flesh recently.