There naturally was no way we could reach them in time, even if we did spread the news of the invasion throughout the Sector. A whole massive arm of the Sector Fleet was dispatched, and they would probably get there in time to catch the Xenos in-system, but there was no way they were going to save the planet.
Brus and Jen managed to evacuate several thousand troops as the mega-cities were slaughtered and overrun, chopping open Rifts into Gloom for the people they trained to evacuate into, while Jensa made literally dozens of teleports through the Underweb via line of sight to get to their location before they were noticed, sending them off to another facility. She got the lock to Gamara II, also, but Brus and Jen elected to remain behind, and work the Karma.
They were the last people left on the planet, holding a final position as Imperial Legionnaires, noblemen, desperate Planetary Guard, Kasr warriors, borgaii from the Mekkers, and anyone else who could shoot made a final last stand, and then popped an antimatter reactor to insure they wouldn’t be taken alive.
Immune to heat and radiation, both kids survived the eruption. Furthermore, they’d decided to take the fairly radical step of seeing what would happen if they incorporated the Emperor’s genetics into the Rantha bloodline. Harvesting a couple dead Legionnaires was anything but difficult, shrink’em down and down the hatch, and then, then there was nothing left but fighting.
They shut away pretty much anything that didn’t have to do with fighting, fullstreamed the whole experience, and simply went out to kill.
The Xenos numbered more than they could possibly hope to slay, but it didn’t matter. The Xenos sent out bigger and bigger creatures to kill them, until there were virtual kaiju trying to find them and run them down.
They killed everything.
They moved with impossible speed for their size in any environment. They could fly if need be, speed along the ground, swim unnaturally fast, rage through the endless tunnels of the megacities, and do it all while constantly killing.
There wasn’t anything but xenos and us watching, so everything was out: wings, tails, Arakne Arms, all of it reaping with everything it could, making trails of carnage through even the densest mass of them that burned with acidic blood, vivus, and the dead.
They got hurt a lot. Healing Edge took care of anything drastic, and regeneration and fast healing did the rest. They got bone-numbingly tired, Revitalization went off and took away their fatigue, and drove the killing on.
Both of them grew. Jen ended up growing to the full height of an Annis Hag, a full eight feet tall, making her Sword Reap look quite undersized within its soulblade. Of course, it doubled her Might and more, which a few hundred-ton biomechs didn’t really like. Her skin was all blue-black, her Curse effectively invisible, and her eyes were burning with the wrathful gaze of the ghaele and the petrifying stare of a medusa.
The Xenos that met her eyes died or turned to stone. When she ran up the spiked tail of a kaiju and dropped down right in front of its multiple eyes to glare into them, they learned that DC 50 petrification saves can take down things the size of a building, too. Shades of Clash of the Titans! Ancient mama Medusa would be so proud...
Brus grew even bigger, bulking up to a full twelve feet tall, and his Might also doubled. His Hammer Sow could hardly be seen in its killing path, everything literally exploding within thirty or forty feet of him, the equivalent of a wrecking ball at supersonic speeds simply blowing apart what he hit... and he moved so bloody fast while doing it, too.
He took out one of the kaiju by jumping atop its back, bulling his way through the orifice that lead to the cerevore control center in the back of its head, and reducing the controllers and its brain to wild pulp and burning vivus, exploding out through its carapace to jump to a much smaller fleshtank and bring Sow down directly atop its brain turret to instantly crush it flat.
He got hit and his armor breached many times by the power of the bigger xenos, but the psychic matrix took the power Mindfeaster on Sow stole off them, and rebuilt the sundered, Tempered adamant back to full. His fighting simply continued unabated, harvesting their own phrenic power to launch massive explosive strikes that could shatter the leg of a kaiju-xeno, or hit a biomech like a point-blank cannon shell.
In their wake, the planet that was being harvested and devoured by billions of Xenos Gatherers began to change.
Vivic energy swirled around the blood they shed, the banefire’d and invasive biology of the dead xenos, and phrenic energy burned and poured into the Land, spurring... something.
The ecology of the planet began to ripple, and things began to grow in the path of their rampage.
It started off with pollen, and seeds, little grains that proved to be deadly allergens to the invading xenos. The plants that emitted them grew, disintegrated into powder, and regrew.
Golden dust drawn by phrenic energies swirled to the xenos, invaded them, and began to grow.
More plant life erupted out of the xenos, as their blood became water and their meat became fertilizer, the shattered carapaces were crumbling flowerpots as they shattered from within, grew, and blew into yet more golden dust... and vivic flames devoured it all and fed more to the Land.
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The Xenos were harvesting the biomass... and then the biomass began to harvest them.
Grasses became thrusting spears, the slightest oils became poisons that made acidic xenos blood explode. Shattered xenos fell to the soil, which fed on them with unnatural speed, and continued to evolve.
Roots with bark as strong as xenos carapaces erupted from the ground, coiled about them in multitudes, and dragged them beneath the soil as their black shells cracked and were crushed. Tendrils and branches invaded dripping jaws, feeding on the hissing saliva, a wild and nameless hunger for the life of the Xenos spreading, spreading...
As they died, it spread faster.
Jen and Brus could hardly miss the planet eating the harvesting hordes, the streams of silk and slime gathering in the air, and growths erupting over the tubes and tendrils that were sucking away the groundwater. Politely, they kept ravaging everything in sight, paying particular attention to the organic pipes that were siphoning off biomass and water, and pumping it up to the great carrier motherships in low orbit all over the world.
Sensing meals that would be satisfying indeed, spontaneously mutating seeds, pollens, bacteria, molds, and viruses raced up along the tentacle-pipes and flesh-tubes, devouring, infecting, spreading as whole sections of the Xenos Hivemind went dark.
The Xenos didn’t know what was going on, as the ecology of the world was sucking in psionic energy like a sponge to fuel its growth, and a massive hollowness was starting to settle over the world like a pall. The infection raged up multiple tendrils, found a home in the first mothership, and backed by the power of Banefire, blew through the alien immune system with the equivalent of feasting on snacks, raging along its nervous system and rapidly coating it in psilence as it was devoured from within.
Whiskers of the Wild went up on Jen’s face, glowing with Soul as she saw this, and she advised the raging greenery around her, “Use its spore launchers to infect the other ships!”
The greenery around her trembled at the sensation of being spoken to, and then understanding what was being said. Hundreds of miles above, infected spores were squeezed into sphincter launchers, and then simultaneously fired at all the ships of the Xenos Fleet.
Not all of them hit, but when the numbers launched were in the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and then millions, it didn’t matter. They drove through the void, splattered against the thick carapace hulls of the Xenos, and slime, pollen, and seeds were dispersed through the thin atmosphere surrounding the bioships. Very quickly, they found the seams and pores, and devoured and expanded their way inside rapaciously.
Jen and Brus kept up their work, because there was no reason to stop, even as the xenos choked and died, spitting up new growths that danced to full growth inside the vivic flames sprouting up to eat them, the air full of golden pollen that seemed to have a light of its own.
The Xenos Fleet did try to disengage, cutting free the feeding tendrils, trying to gain distance from the planet... but it was too late, and it didn’t matter. Their massive amounts of phrenic energy and empowered flesh just made the invading ecology grow all the faster, while the Curse effect of banefire seemed to find every weakness to exploit and rendered the defenses of the bioships useless. All its numbers and seething hordes of children were just new fertilizer and fuel for the invading ecology, torn apart and mulched as roots tore themselves out of the bioship, flowers grew out of steaming blood-acid pools, and golden pollen flowed towards anything that was thinking.
Unable to control themselves, the psychically charged fusion cores of the bioships destabilized, and were vented off energetically into space. Control of gravity faltered and failed, and the ships wavered, wobbled, and slowly, oh so slowly, no matter how far they had fled, they began to fall backwards.
Back, towards the world of gold and green they had been sucking dry, and which now very much looked like it had opened up to welcome their return.
It didn’t happen over hours, but days, as the entire world-eating swarm fleet of the Xenos crashed down to the planet they had nearly stripped of life, and which now was stripping them.
Compressed gases stolen from the atmosphere were vented back, restoring it and more as they escaped the bioships. Water broke free of spatial compression and flowed out like mighty rivers, beginning the process of rebuilding the seas and lakes. Gigatons of mass pressed into the seas, and mountains rose as valleys deepened, changing the geography of the world.
A riot of green and gold swept over the shining black, and diamond-hard shells crinkled and cracked and broke down, bit by bit, as the world feasted upon the world-eaters.
------
Brus and Jen watched this entire process taking place from down on the surface of the world.
Like many worlds settled by humanity, the ecology had been abused and crushed under the weight of industrial output and the demands of feeding a massive population. Swathes of the planet were uninhabitable, and other sections marred by the chemical-driven cycles of rapid crop growth carried on mindlessly, long since having driven most of the native plant life to extinction, and certainly most of the native wildlife.
Such things were now returning as the biosphere hummed with the energy of the bioships being devoured. Adult animals were bursting forth out of fibrous sacs, leaping about like younglings as they did, excited and joyous at being alive, and feeling the edge of the massive planetary consciousness at the corner of their rudimentary minds.
The Green was paying close attention to the two of them at all times, somewhere between wonder, awe, and smothering protection that the two of them certainly did not need.
They had made Eleven in their Racial Class. Saving a whole planet and Awakening a worldmind to eat an invading fleet of biovores was certainly a whole lot of Karma, even if they hadn’t done the killing themselves.
“I guess we aren’t going to be hopping around the galaxy anymore,” Brus mused to his girl. He looked closer to the gorilla side of things than a human now, except for the fact he was twice human height and far more massive. He was pretty sure he was rated for at least eight gravities, too, as the extra height was unlocking Jotun Stature effects inside him.
“We better teach this planet how to defend itself, or the incoming Fleet may get a little overanxious about reclaiming her,” Jen mused, swirling hair at least ten feet long now, having much in common with steel wire. “What do you think of a psionic world able to control its weather, magnetosphere, and gravity well?”
“It’s still gonna have to start a reactor or something at its core,” he grunted. “If you want to make a world that can’t be killed, it’s got to be a killer of a world.”
“Trees with superconductive interlinked root systems, node crystal cogitators, energy networks... I think we certainly can help it with some designs.”
His tusks were much bigger now, and very prominent when he smiled. “Yes, we can build some pretty big stuff with a whole planet, can’t we?...”
He could always visit the galaxy through his family’s eyes, but who got to be onsite to making a living planet into something that could endure a grimdark universe?