We had the hyperdiction zone down to the centimeter. We had the artillery, the missile sats, the free-fire stations, and the capital ships all updating their targets by the second.

The Brood didn’t have even a second of warning, as suddenly between one eyeblink they were going through hyperspace, and in the next they were uncontrollably shunted out into real space.

Relative velocity compression meant that although they didn’t stack up on one another, the distance between their bioships was compressed a great deal, and pretty much everything around them began to open up on them instantly.

Being subject to any amount of concentrated psychic disruption, the Macross launchers went off first when they were most useful, hurling out some general high-explosive goodness, including some with Venom loads.

Gatling railgun launchers brrrrrrrrrted their way through ammunition at the smallest targets in range, punching holes in the smallest bioships and exploding into razor-edged shrapnel inside that did horrific damage to both the enslaved creatures and those riding them.

Fusion fury lit up millions of cubic miles of space, and the Brood kept dropping down out of hyperspace right into it.

The Brood were shocked, and the surprise at the assault rang through their hivemind. However, those behind didn’t know precisely what was going on, only that those ahead of them had dropped into normal space and were dying. The level of interference made it hard to even get a position fix before the concave of firepower was wiping out those who had dropped into normal space.

They couldn’t get all of them, of course. The Brood front was just too broad, and there were just too many bioships of all sizes. Burning and bleeding bioships hurtled on past the waiting fleets, and the lead ships began to open up as their targets materialized in the ever-expanding killbox as more Brood dropped out of hyperspace.

This was a stream of Brood stretched out over hours of jumps to hyperspace, and they had time to respond. Rough position and timing fixes rippled through the hivemind, but the hyperspace lane was broad and solid, and veering from the course could literally be lethal if they hit cross-currents. Emergency drops to normal space began to take place, not trusting a hyperspace ambush, and in a wave of normalizing ripples of space-time, the entire Brood Fleet fell back into reality, painting themselves into a billions-mile long literal ocean of hundreds of millions of bioships, ranging from the size of starfighters all the way up to things that could rival the elder Acanti.

Speaking of which, said spacewhales’ Sublime Chord hammered into their hivemind, and Acanti pulsing with Xandaran power cores, the roiling storm of solar energy swirling about them, hit them from all sides in a massive coordinated strike that went raging towards the lesser queens who maintained the fundamental structure of their hivemind.

Despite the volume of firepower facing them, even with the rise in alertness and other defenses, the sheer number of Brood bioships began to overwhelm the line of defenders, although not without losses. Wounded, often ablaze, spraying unknown ichors and leaking atmospheres and organs, bioships nevertheless hurtled by the line of capital ships, and countless starfighters swept down upon them to cripple their offensive capabilities and finish them off.

The Descent upon D’Bari had begun.

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Cleo felt the power thrumming underneath her as she rose to her feet.

Adjustments had been made to the Crimson Tower beneath her, resonance building between it and the planet beneath it, formations of magic woven, and her natural attunement to weather, magnified by magic and psionics, encompassed the whole world and far out into space.

The first solar flares, basically particle streams, began to incandesce through space as she charted and tracked her targets, the Acanti marked by their Chord as it merged into her own, every other bioship a target.

Lightning bolts far greater than any Terran storm could generate crackled through thousands of miles of the void, smashing into Brood bioships in chains and tearing through them and their crews with the fury of the distant star and the Crimson Tower rising defiantly up from the planet before them.

She watched the nodes spray out from certain vessels, separating into formations of metal specifically arranged to attract and focus the solar wind. Spreading across massive areas at miles per second, they formed moving walls of energy retention, and when something passed them, it was just like a mosquito flying through a bug zapper. Wild bolts of annihilation crackled through the void, frying hundreds, then thousands of ships as the moving waves of metal orbs flowed right into the thickest concentrations of the Brood and made targets of them all.

Still, the Broods’ numbers were too immense, and they were getting past the starfighters and the cosmic lightning. The Brood hit the planet’s atmosphere, and the whole sky seemed to boil and turn grey, the entire world covered by a sudden storm protesting their intrusion mightily as thousands of Brood ships came down from the sky, intentionally and not, and the lightning and tornado-class winds were there to meet them.

The sky was full of lightning, thunder, fire, and falling, flaming bioships burning up on uncontrolled atmospheric entry in countless numbers. The ‘uncontrolled’ aspect of that soon stopped, as tens of thousands of young Acanti deployed to snatch all those burning morsels up before they were lost, letting the ships still under control descend into the hell of lightning and thunder now encircling the whole planet with deadly clouds, arcs and chains of blinding power reaching from the Scarlet Tower and around the entire world to reap the forces coming down.

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At forty-three minutes and fifteen seconds, the first two-mile-long beast, blasted through twice and venting flaming not-blood, crashed heavily along what had once been an open plain, guided there by gravimetric projectors making sure nothing landed atop the planet’s four defensive centers and the rings and squares of walls and fortifications put in place upon it.

At forty-three minutes and twenty seconds, Mr. Hill’s Brute Squad was teleported into place nearby, and even before the Brood and their servant bio-constructs could come swarming out of their dying eel-like vessel, the Brutes were rumbling to the attack.

Perhaps the buzzing drones thought they had an advantage with being airborne, until Mr. Hill’s Stillflight Field expanded mightily, washed across them, and shrieking parasites fell from the skies, their pitiful wings unable to support their actual weight.

Amusingly enough, Hawkeye and Angel both had jet-powered backups, and ended up the only things aloft, painting the entire battlefield for some of the most deadly infantry in existence, while a company of Shi’ar shooters was teleported in to support them, moving out with the grace of hunting hawks to begin their sniping.

The mercenaries from the Colosseum were huge on personal glory and prowess, but they also weren’t fools. The Unlimited Combat Tranche on the Colosseum was very active, and they all knew the power of high science, power armor, droids, and war machines. Ergo, every single one of these contestants had some form of power armor of their own to protect themselves with, as well as some form of ranged attack tool to pound away at enemies all the time, not just when in personal combat.

But when the Brood were restricted to the ground, the Brutes just flared up personal force shields and came for them like an armored avalanche. The grounds about the dead bioship erupted with terrific impacts and explosions of gore.

The Mountain brought out his Flail, built it up into a supersonic wheel of death around him, and strode through the Brood forces, the bodies of the swarm exploding as the shrieking circle of death around him advanced. His job was to maintain the huge Stillflight Field, keeping the Brutes comfortably in control of the ground. Outside it, sure, the bugs’ psychic power could get them airborne, and there was plenty of shooting coming from that direction.

The Shi’ar slapped down some anti-air modules, and pulse lasers swept through the skies at all the nicely hovering targets trying to shoot the armored and fast-moving Brutes hundreds of yards away from them, reaving thousands of them from the air in seconds.

Shrieking shells of starfire artillery came down on the bioship, impacts punching through the length of it and filling it with infernos. The Brood streaming out from inside it stopped abruptly, and massive weapons, shockwaves, and personal energy projectors that would normally take entire crews to wield normally soon cleared away the last of them.

“Wounded, signal positions!” Dealer’s voice came over coms, and everyone who hadn’t bothered to indicate their injuries before lit up at once. Flashes of light streaked through the air, the ubiquitous playing cards that all of the gladiators knew so well. They broke across anyone wounded with Healing Fire, sealing up gashes, cleansing burns from fire and acid, seared away chemical or biological infestations, and restored anyone without crippling injuries to full health promptly.

Five members of the Squad had been struck with either concentrated firepower or incredibly powerful assaults, but that didn’t matter to the Dealer, who simply targeted each of them one by one with Regeneration effects. The complete repair or restoration of them began instantly, to be completed within minutes, or even seconds if they still had the limbs.

It was a display of Healing prowess they’d never seen from another being (although Mr. Hill knew that the Vanir Volunteers had the same thing going for them from the Blessed Lightning of Ursula) and another reason why the morale of the Brute Squad was so high. As long as Dealer got to them, they literally could not die, and she could reach a LONG way out to save them.

The fact that a rain of those Cards could descend on their enemies like a firefall of explosives and wipe out acres of them at a time was very reassuring, too.

“Form up, and grab the guy next to you, check their armor over. If you’re missing integrity, flag up and get it sealed. You know these things are gonna be using vermin swarms, biologicals, and infestations, you can’t afford no holes. Reform on me!” The Mountain barked into coms. “Captain?”

“Five minutes, we’ve got another target!” Captain Harold called out, promptly turning to the Goluxian next to him and going over his armor, before raising his arms to have the look-over returned to him.

The Stillflight was lifted, Hawkeye and Angel swooped in while Flint Marko and Mr. Hill looked one another over. The Sandman’s outfit was designed more to carry ranged weaponry around than to actually protect him, as Sandy could haul around some severely-oversized artillery if he gathered the mass to do so. He and Hawkeye had actually worked out systems where Flint would form countless razor-edged silica blades and ride the winds Hawkeye formed, chopping through whole swathes of hapless Brood at the same time.

There was a rolling call from above, and heads turned as a baby Acanti, only fifty meters long, zipped in above them and promptly sprayed the entire two-kilometer length of the Brood void eel down with vivus. Singing happily, the vivus intensified as the little whale inhaled, and the eel began to break down very quickly indeed as the Acanti began to devour it.

A second Acanti, just a little bit smaller yet, joined the first one, hovering politely overhead and making swishing motions before a transcendent Chord sent rains of unwhite fire falling down all around them, and all the gore and carcasses of the dead Brood ignited.

They could barely feel the pressure, but thousands of unwhite-flaming bodies were drawn up off the ground into the waiting mouth of the Acanti, flaring as they came apart and the vivus swirled down its throat as it began to clean the battlefield.

When it was done it would join its podmate in devouring the downed ship. By the time the two got it all down, they’d likely double in size or more.

There were pops as several members of the Squad were teleported away urgently, having to refit damaged weaponry or broken armor, grumbling about it but not arguing. They’d all been clearly shown what could happen if a Swarm breached their armor or they were caught without it, and none of them had any desire to die like that.

The whole action had taken only twenty minutes. At one hour and seventeen minutes from the start of the combat in space, the Brute Squad was teleported to their next target.

It was an action being repeated across the planet, and would continue as long as they could contain and destroy their targets. When the numbers grew too great, the proactive killing would slow, then stall, and then they would start fighting from the defenses.

The Brutes and Vanir Volunteers all had extra sets of artillery-grade weapons waiting in the arsenals ready to tote around when that happened.