It wasn't long before the oppressive silence above the shelter was torn apart by the low roar of an engine. A Luna-class dropship slowly descended onto the intersection, its reverse thrusters blasting searing jets of heat, scattering debris and insect carcasses across the ground.
The soft hiss of hydraulic systems echoed as the boarding ramp unfolded, revealing a brightly lit interior cabin.
At the sight, the shelter's survivors surged toward the dropship in a rush. Most were dressed in rags, stained with blood and wounds.
Among them were several former colonial security personnel—though retired long ago, their battlefield instincts remained far sharper than the average civilian's.
Once inside the transport, many crowded around the portholes, their eyes fixed on the twenty-plus Flame Lizards who were charging headlong into the swarm.
"They're throwing their lives away," a middle-aged man with soot-streaked skin murmured.
He was a veteran of the security forces, and he knew better than anyone: against a swarm of this scale, not even hundreds of Dominion soldiers in CMC power armor could expect to come out alive.
So, like many others in the cabin, he assumed the Flame Lizards were sacrificing themselves to buy time for the evacuation.
But the very next moment, reality shattered their bleak assumptions.
The lead Flame Lizard abruptly accelerated, his magboots thundering against the ground in an explosive burst of speed, his entire body becoming a dark green blur.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The bolter in his hands roared, spewing half-meter-long muzzle flashes. Each .75-caliber round tore through the swarm with devastating precision.
Spent casings clattered to the ground like a hailstorm, bouncing and rolling across the blood-soaked pavement.
Every round struck true. Three leaping zerglings were instantly shredded, their carapaces and entrails exploding midair, splashing foul green blood across the road.
"Oh my God!"
Someone inside the dropship gasped.
The Flame Lizards had already pushed deep into the swarm's center. Their twenty-strong steel frames formed a circular formation, backs to each other, bolters forming a seamless web of suppressive fire.
Whenever a hydralisk raised its head to spit spines, a split-second later its skull was obliterated by a pinpoint headshot.
Lurkers barely emerged from the ground before being targeted by concentrated plasma blasts, the superheated energy melting through their weak points and vaporizing their insides.
The swarm's greatest pride—its sheer numbers—seemed laughable in the face of these warriors.
Of course, the terrain worked to the Flame Lizards' advantage, providing them with cover and bottlenecks.
The narrow streets and ruined buildings flanking the intersection restricted the swarm's mobility, preventing proper flanking or encirclement.
The Flame Lizards capitalized on this, turning the battlefield into a killing funnel—any alien that attempted to breach their formation was ground to paste in the crossfire.
Then the battle intensified into close quarters.
As zerglings broke through the suppressive fire and lunged forward, the Flame Lizards holstered their guns and drew their melee weapons.
Whirr~whirr—VrrrROOOM!
Chainswords howled with bloodlust, bisecting the first zergling cleanly down the middle.
Power axes buzzed with energy fields, every swing cleaving multiple creatures in half.
Most astonishing was the squad leader wielding a power sword, its plasma field glowing with deathly azure light. With each motion, he became a whirlwind of destruction, dismembering everything in his path like a living blender.
"This isn't a battle…" the weathered veteran whispered, eyes fixed on the slaughter outside. His dry lips quivered, his voice rasping like sandpaper.
Reflected in his pupils were the armored giants advancing like an unstoppable tide. The creep recoiled beneath their boots, twitching and spasming like it could feel pain, forming an unnatural void around each footfall.
"It's a massacre."
His words echoed clearly in the hushed cabin.
The creep wasn't just physically retreating. The purple-black organic network flinched as though it had nerves, convulsing away from the Flame Lizards' magboots, like the land itself was trembling in fear.
In some moments, the surface of the creep bulged and collapsed, as if the very ground feared their approach.
Wherever the armored giants passed, their boots left three-centimeter-deep imprints in the hardened street.
One warrior's forearm was splashed with acid. As the energy shielding failed, the corrosive fluid hissed across the metal, raising foul-smelling smoke.
But he merely flicked his wrist, casting the acid aside.
When the smoke cleared, the adamantium-composite armor bore only pale scarring and webbed cracks in the green paint—nowhere near penetrating even the outermost layer.
The Luna-class dropship's engines roared, its plasma trail cutting a blue arc across the sky.
As the ship gained altitude, the view widened. Over a hundred survivors could now see the entire cityscape laid bare—
Once prosperous and peaceful, the city was now infested. Organic matter crawled across buildings. The streets swarmed with zerg like black tides.
But against that tide surged streams of steel.
"Oh my God…"
A young woman clung to the porthole, her voice trembling.
From above, dozens of burning drop pods fell like meteorites across the city, erupting on impact to reveal squads of Flame Lizards, Helljumpers, and various biological and mechanical units.
The Flame Lizards deployed immediately, forming tactical formations. Their bolters tore bloody paths through the swarm.
Even more shocking—their combat efficiency was terrifying.
They precisely identified every civilian cluster, broke through the swarm with unstoppable momentum, and escorted survivors to temporary evacuation zones.
The active Flame Lizards within the city numbered far more than the twenty they had seen earlier.
The drops continued. More squads landed in key zones, covering one another to form interlocking kill zones that halted the swarm's advance.
Zergling charges were shredded by bolter storms. Hydralisk spines were deflected by energy shields. Even mighty ultralisks were bombarded by heavy armor and orbital strikes until they collapsed into charred husks.
"Look over there!" someone shouted, pointing east.
There, a six-man Flame Lizard squad and a Helljumper platoon were escorting hundreds of civilians through the ruins, forming a mobile fortress around three Cyclops combat mechs.
The mechs' cannons thundered, reducing any zerg that approached to minced flesh, while Flame Lizards roamed the perimeter, cleaving stragglers with chainswords and axes. The Helljumpers provided precise covering fire and suppressive bursts.
Not a single civilian was harmed. All boarded the waiting Luna dropship safely.
Meanwhile, auxiliary forces deployed with the transport fleet were also arriving.
Thousands of auxiliaries poured from the landers in coordinated waves.
Their boots thundered across the ground, formations flawless, exuding a discipline far beyond the armies of the old world.
These soldiers embodied decades of evolution in the Empire's military technology.
In the early years of the Human Empire, the best the auxiliaries had were sealed combat suits with full skeletal exoskeletons.
These systems allowed soldiers to survive up to two hours in vacuum or extreme environments—but they fell short of true power armor.
Only elite units were issued McP suits—costly, high-end systems reserved for decapitation strikes and special ops.
But with the expansion of imperial territory, reverse-engineering of Precursor relics, and years of recovery, auxiliary gear underwent a revolution.
The current-generation "power suit" had completely reshaped battlefield doctrine. Its design echoed the concept armor from Starship Troopers, but far exceeded it in performance.
Today's auxiliaries were universally equipped with power suits.
Their most notable upgrade was the integrated life-support system.
Unlike older models, the new nanocycle filtration unit continuously purified external air. Combined with subcutaneous nutrient injectors, it enabled 72 hours of combat without resupply.
Armor joints were sealed with magneto-fluidic seals, ensuring perfect integrity even in deep-sea or corrosive environments.
For mobility, vectored thrusters on the backpack gave soldiers incredible agility.
According to the standard tactical manual, a trained auxiliary could make a single 50-meter tactical leap or safely land from ten kilometers using these thrusters.
This ability was decisive in orbital drop ops—when transports were shot down, the falling troops were no longer helpless. They became guided blades of death.
As for the tip of the spear—the Helljumpers—their power suits were masterpieces.
Their armor integrated quantum crystalline composites salvaged from Precursor ruins, capable of surviving direct plasma blasts.
Neural interfaces, enhanced by Inquis serum, boosted reaction time. Shoulder- and waist-mounted smart weapons made each Helljumper's firepower rival that of a mechanized platoon from Earth's old world.
Notably, their helmet HUDs employed advanced holographic tech, not only displaying real-time battlefield telemetry but analyzing enemy energy waveforms to predict attack vectors—dramatically improving survival rates.
From crude survival gear to instruments of conquest, the evolution of auxiliary equipment was a living expression of the Empire's military philosophy.
And as these warriors marched onto the battlefield, every footstep echoed a single truth—
In the darkness of space, only through evolution and conquest can survival be claimed.
However, the survivors' relief didn't last.
As more dropships ascended, the swarm's flying mantises spotted the movement.
They dove from the clouds, acid rounds raining down in a storm, trying to intercept the fleeing transports.
"We're doomed…" an old man in the cabin closed his eyes in despair. "There are too many of them… we'll never make it…"
Tension spiked again.
Everyone knew standard transports couldn't withstand a sustained acid barrage. A few hits, and the entire ship would melt in seconds.
But just as the mantises closed in—
Zzt—WHIRRRRR—BOOM! BOOM!!
A salvo of deafening gunfire and explosions erupted above the transport fleet. A metal storm of heat and death shredded thousands of mantises instantly.
The stunned eyes of the survivors turned to a massive green shape appearing outside the window.
A 600-meter-long escort frigate, its armored hull reflecting a cold gleam in the sky.
Its point-defense batteries activated simultaneously, spinning at dizzying speed, forming a deadly steel hurricane in the upper atmosphere.
A woman clutching her infant tightened her grip instinctively.
Outside, tens of thousands of custom high-explosive smart rounds wove a lattice of blue fire around the transport fleet.
Every second, more than 20,000 rounds screamed into the swarm, turning them into frozen shards of blood in the thin air.
Meanwhile, the frigate's ventral hangar opened, releasing twelve carrier-based fighters trailing blue plasma tails.
Powered by micro fusion engines, these killing machines broke the sound barrier effortlessly.
One fighter dove nearly vertically, opening fire as it passed the swarm—three encircling mantises instantly vaporized into drifting black smoke.
With such layered fire support, the Luna transports finally punched through the swarm's death trap.
As altitude increased, the sky beyond the portholes darkened—from indigo to deep black.
When the last layers of thin atmosphere peeled away, the ship gave a slight shudder—marking entry into near-orbit.
The tension inside finally eased. Survivors exhaled as one.
Many collapsed into their seats, silent tears rolling down their faces.
They were alive. And it was all thanks to those unknown steel giants.
Outside the portholes, more Flame Lizard warships loomed in orbit. Their weapons were locked onto the zerg fleet below and the infested surface, ready to provide cover for future evacuations.
And in the heart of the formation, the colossal Emperor-class battleship slowly adjusted course.
Its presence, silent and immense, declared a simple truth to the void—
Humanity is not a species meant to be slaughtered.
(End of Chapter)
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