While the terran strike team was dying inside Kerrigan’s flagship, the fight on the outside was no nicer. If anything, it was even worse. In space, in most cases, if a ship fell, then everyone on board would be killed. Mostly, crew members didn’t have time to get to escape pods before their ships fall apart. Even if they did, there was no promising the pods could survive in the hellish environment. A single glaive worm could end the lives of dozens.
Jean sat in the bridge, giving orders to her underlings. Admiral Thorn has already told everyone to obey Jean’s orders. Some officers and crew members had doubts of why someone as young and seemingly inexperienced as Jean was in command of something so serious, but those doubts died down when they realized how effective Jean was.
All across the field the leviathans were beaten back. All of the zerg light flyers were terminated, and the terran light fighters were circling around the leviathans, doing their best to do some damage but failing to do much.
Suddenly, Jean received a report from the Warden command unit on the leviathan that told her the Keystone was going to be fully charged soon. In other words, unless Kerrigan chose to flee, she would only have the opportunity to launch a final assault.
Jean didn’t think Kerrigan would flee, but even if Kerrigan did, she would never make it. Jean has already deployed squads and squads of fighters around Kerrigan’s flagship. As mighty as she was, Kerrigan couldn’t effectively move in space without a transport. Transports, usually overlords, would be defenseless against Jean’s fighters. Hell they would likely be gunned down before they could even get out of the leviathans. If she did, she would die even quicker than if she stayed.
If Kerrigan stood and fought, then she would combine all her available forces and send them into a final round of attack. All the terran needed was to hold their ground, and when the Keystone was activated, it would wipe out every zerg in its blast radius.
“Get me two squads of vikings.” She suddenly ordered.
Inside the ships, the Warden Command Unit walked to Raynor.
“Zerg units assembling on all directions. Attack imminent.”
Raynor rose his eyebrows. His past experience with Raider Warden units gave him some knowledge in communicating with these Umojan ones.
“Can we hold?”
“Unlikely, but we will be reinforced.”
“How?”
“We will receive air support.”
“Air support?” Raynor was about to say something when zerg screeches came from the other end of the halls. He could feel the vibration caused by countless zerg units running through the ship. “To arms!” He yelled. “We must hold this!”
“All units, form formation! Terminate all zerg units!” The Warden Command Unit’s order was much more concise. Immediately, Warden units formed several lines, ready as always.
Once again, countless zerg poured down the halls. Twenty ultralisks formed the first line. They stomped on the mountain of zerg corpses, crushing them and clearing a path for the other zerg behind them.
But these ultralisks weren’t the first zerg units.
A brutalisk was the first.
Several Warden ghosts fired their railguns, but they were completely ineffective. Perhaps railguns could kill ultralisks, but the brutalisk was a whole different story. Everything the terran had, whether they were railguns, grenades, or gauss bullets, simply bounced off. A few Dominion ghosts that survived the onslaught made a few attempts with their snipes, but those failed as well.
A Warden ghost leaped onto the brutalisk’s head with its jetpack and ignited its plasma blade. It slashed down on the beast’s skull, but all the blade did was leave a slight scorch mark. To any zerg, much less a brutalisk, it was nothing.
The brutalisk slammed its head against the ceiling of the leviathan’s hall and crushed the Warden unit.
Units from all three factions fired, but none of the factions was able to do anything. The brutalisk and the ultralisks simply stepped forward, crushing everything in its way. Some Warden units tried suicide bombing, but even the reactors going off merely pushed the zerg assault beasts back a bit.
Even worse, smaller zerg units flooded in from behind the ultralisks.
Terran were slaughtered. A road of blood was paved beneath the feet of the ultralisks. Raynor did his best to form a line of defense, but every time he gathered several dozen men, the group was immediately overwhelmed.
Suddenly, just when the terran line was about to completely crumble, a series of explosions went off, and the next thing Raider saw was a giant hole appearing under the ground of where the ultralisks were.
The brutalisk and all of the ultralisks fell out of the hole and into space.
There was a reason Jean didn’t order the bomb strike as soon as the ultralisks appeared. She knew she didn’t have time to deploy reinforcement and other heavy weapons onto the leviathan, which meant she needed to take down as many ultralisk and brutalisk as possible.
That was why she waited so long. The entire time, she was waiting for her Warden AIs to construct a structural map of the leviathan and determine where the explosions needed to go off so all the ultralisks would be brought out of the equation.
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And that was exactly what happened.
Both the brutalisk and the ultralisks were pretty much dead. In the leviathan, they were invincible, but in space...Jean saw the brutalisk that caused the terran strike team so much pain and suffering getting cornered by two squads of vikings. Three rounds of torpedoes reduced the brutalisk into dozens of pieces of flesh and bones.
The zerg continued pushing, and at certain points, even the Queen of Blades herself, not fully recovered, went into the battle. She was greeted by railgun round after railgun round.
The cold calculating Warden units were the first to be completely obliterated. They stuck to the mission, and they paid the price. Despite being the second line of defense and being behind the Warden units, the Dominion and the Raiders fell one by one. Even Raynor received a spine to his arm. The pain bent his legs and sent him onto his knees.
Once again, the Swarm pushed forward. Kerrigan took another railgun to the face before snapping the neck of the last Warden ghost.
The Warden Command Unit was beheaded by a hydralisk.
A zergling leaped onto Raynor and raised its claws.
And then the Keystone went off.
“No!” Kerrigan screamed as a much more powerful shockwave hit her. Instead of merely knocking her out, the blast burned through every single one of her cell. The shockwave carefully separated the zerg parts of the cells apart from the terran ones and ripped them out of the Queen of Blades, just leaving her human side intact.
Spine wings disappeared. Kerrigan’s snakelike hair was returned to her normal, human hair. It was still long and spiky, but it was human. Her claws were returned to fingers. The carapace all over her body disappeared, replaced by bare skin.
Her psionic powers dwindled. Her transformation from a terran ghost to the Queen of Blades amplified her power, and the return to humanity cut her power by nearly half.
The zerg horde behind her were hit as well. They weren’t as lucky as Kerrigan. The shockwave took out everything that was zerg, and for the common zerg cannon fodder, that meant the shockwave reduced everything in their cells to ashes.
Every zerg unit inside the blast radius was scorched.
The shockwave continued through the entire leviathan before disappearing. Even the tiniest zerg organism on the ship was gone.
With a loud screech, the leviathan itself started dying. As surprising as it was, the leviathan itself was a giant zerg creature, and it was dying.
Raynor felt the ground shake, but instead of lying down on the ground like every other Raider and Dominion soldier and pray god for surviving through this, Raynor pushed the glowing zerg corpse aside, struggled up, and walked to Kerrigan, who was knocked out. Ignoring the wound on his arm, he covered the naked Kerrigan with his own body.
The leviathan gave out one last scream before dying. Unlike the basic zerg units, the leviathan’s death didn’t make the entire unit crumble to ashes. Instead, the leviathan’s corpse remained intact. This saved the lives of both Raynor and Kerrigan and basically saved the fate of the entire sector. If Raynor and Kerrigan fell here, then Amon would move into the sector practically unopposed.
As the situation became clear, Raynor looked down on Kerrigan with a slight sense of disbelief. Even now, he couldn’t believe he did it.
He saved Kerrigan.
Not only so, Sarah Kerrigan was human again.
Suddenly, he heard someone approaching from behind. He turned around and saw it was a Dominion officer.
“Commander Raynor,” The officer started, and immediately Raynor didn’t like what was happening. He silently rested his hand on his sidearm.
“What is it?” He demanded quietly.
“Please hand the Queen of Blades over, commander. She has slaughtered billions of us. She has to be punished.” The officer said quietly.
“And then what?” Raynor unbuckled his holster.
“She will face trial at the Dominion capital world of Korhal, where she will be sentenced to death.”
The Dominion officer waved his hand, and the Dominion soldiers that survived stood up and raised their weapons. The rest of the Raiders loaded their weapons as well and took aim at the Dominion soldiers. Some loyal men placed themselves between the Dominion soldiers and Raynor.
It was amazing how quickly situations change in battle. Former allies became practical enemies almost immediately.
“Stay back, son.” Raynor took a deep breathe. He didn’t want brave terran soldiers to survive the zerg, only to perish at the hands of their own, which was why he pleaded. “You don’t want to do this.”
The officer hesitated slightly. A part of him didn’t want to do this, but he also knew Emperor Mengsk won’t be happy if he had a chance to eliminate both Raynor and Kerrigan and he didn’t take the shot. General Warfield could disobey Mengsk’s will and make an alliance with Raynor and the Umojans, but as a low level officer, he couldn’t do the same thing.
He drew his weapon and pointed at the Raider in front of Raynor. A scan of the surrounding told him there were still a hundred or so Dominion soldiers and only around eighty Raiders. There were still a hundred or so Warden units, but they have lost all the Warden Command Units, and while their simple AIs were capable of basic logic, they still identified the Dominion soldiers as friendlies. If these Warden units were attacked, their programming would allow them to passively fight back, but without a direct command they wouldn’t actively intervene into the conflict between the Raiders and the Dominion troopers.
“Move, or die.” The Dominion officer finally demanded. It was the last straw.
Raynor sighed again and looked down on Kerrigan’s face. Under the dim light of his CMC armor, Raynor could see Kerrigan’s carefully crafted facial features.
“In that case, I’m sorry.”
He turned around with a pistol in his hand.
A series of gunshots rang out for several minutes before ending abruptly. Ten minutes later, a dozen Raider dropships approached the leviathan’s opening.
As Kerrigan’s flagship fell, the rest of the Swarm started falling apart as well. Boarding parties on the Gorgons were gunned down inside the vessel halls. Leviathan tentacles were ripped apart by laser batteries and torpedoes.
When all the other forces were gone, the leviathans became the final target. Squads and squads of fighters, covered by the gunfire of capital ships, bombarded every inch of carapace of the leviathans. Orbital defenses like spore cannons and spore crawlers were melted. Even the zerg cities couldn’t survive this amount of fire.
When three broods, twelve leviathans in total, jumped in to reinforce, the last leviathan was already reduced to eighteen pieces.
Faced with the full might of hundreds of battlecruisers, the broods had no choice but to warp away. Dominion and Umojan fighters alike attempted a pursuit, but the leviathans were swift in their retreat.
Inside the Umojan flagship, the crew members and officers were overwhelmed by excitement. After all, they just survived a battle against one of the top menaces in the sector.
But Jean wasn’t excited.
“All ships prepare for combat.” She silently ordered.
The crew members exchanged confused looks, but orders were orders. They did their best to suppress their excitement and passed down the order. Before long, the Umojan Fleet was ready for battle once again.
Only this time it wasn’t against the zerg.
With the foreign threat gone, it was time to do some good old backstabbing.