I paused the hologram and advanced the image frame by frame.

  The recon flight had suffered the same fate as the previous one, ripped apart by intense anti-aircraft fire from the Antithesis scattered around the area. Unlike the last group, this one had penetrated deep into the Antithesis-controlled territory and gained a good look at the hive before being shot down.

  The orbital strikes had caused incredible damage. The tungsten rod had penetrated deep into the hive, ripping the core of the overgrown organic mass wide open before the orbital laser lanced down into the wound, burning and cauterizing the surrounding area.

  Against any other hive, the damage would have been catastrophic, causing a cascading failure of the surrounding hive structures. The damage here, however, looked almost negligible.

  I nudged the image forward a couple of frames until I found the exact frame where the Kodiaks were flying over the wound and zoomed in on the damage. The surface of the hive was heavily charred. The laser must have burned its way through a meter or two of material, but it ultimately hadn’t cut that deep, considering the mass was dozens of meters thick. The pole had plunged deep into the heart of the hive complex, but after only fifteen minutes, the hive matter had already started to regrow, engulfing most of the projectile.

  The most concerning part was that hundreds, if not thousands, of Antithesis were pouring out of the wound. The missile attack may have scoured the Antithesis from the surface, but that was only a small percentage of the Antithesis that had made planetfall.

  “So much for a single swift decapitation strike,” Mud muttered. “It looks more like we kicked an ant hive.”

  “That’s probably not a bad analogy,” Wild whispered. “Just with huge, very angry ants.”

  “The recovery is way too fast. Nyx told me the lichen could redirect nutrients from the surrounding area, but just fucking look at that. If they managed to maintain the current level of regeneration, the hive might fully recover within the hour,” I hissed. “It’ll be a huge drain on their resources, but still…”

  Letting the hologram continue, we watched the Kodiaks bank and climb away from the crater, trying to get clear of the area, just before they were caught by whatever Anti-aircraft model had been wandering around the perimeter.

  “Wouldn’t the Antithesis want to replenish those resources as soon as possible?” Wild asked.

  “Well, the Antithesis are always driven to go out and consume the surrounding biomatter, but yeah, I assume they’d be a little more motivated after an attack like that,” I replied. “Why?”

  “Because the missile strike didn’t just kill the Antithesis around the hive, but it also stripped away a lot of the remaining plant matter,” she explained as she reached up and gestured at the display. It skipped backwards to an earlier part of the recording, where the Kodiaks were making the initial approach.

  She was right. I hadn’t noticed before, because I’d been far too focused on getting a look at the damage to the hive itself, but the areas the Antithesis had been harvesting had been turned into a wasteland. Whatever vegetation had survived, and there wasn’t much, was currently burning, probably due to their proximity to the laser strike.

  Between these burning trees and bushes were hundreds of Antithesis, spreading farther afield in search of new resources.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  “Fuuuuuccckkkk,” I hissed. “That’s not good. Instead of buying us time, we destroyed part of our buffer AND kicked the hive. That’s going to come back to bite us.”

  “Hopefully not literally,” Mud muttered.

  I stood up and sent a quick ping to the forward observers. None of them reported encountering any Antithesis yet, which was a good sign. It meant that there weren’t any Antithesis making their way directly towards the town.

  Or were there? Something about the check-in bothered me. It felt wrong.

  I pinged the scouts again, running their reports against the records of which units should have been in the field. Two Chameleons and a Fox hadn’t reported in.

  “Hey, kid, you okay? You just kinda froze there for a minute,” Mud asked.

  “I think we have a problem,” I snapped, before storming out of the Command Kodiak we’d been using as a combination communication hub and headquarters.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Wild screamed after me. I didn’t stop to answer; instead, I sprinted towards the wall.

  “Bandit, Dusty, we’ve lost some of the scouts. Why didn’t you report it?”

  “It just happened!” Dusty replied. “With the big boy Antithesis wandering around, we’ve experienced some intermittent comm issues. We’ve got regular check-ins to compensate. Why?”

  “The three that failed to check in are clustered fairly close together, and the Antithesis have become aggravated after the orbital strikes,” I replied. “I’ve got a bad feeling; can you redirect a couple units to check in on them?”

  “Of course it’ll just take…” Dusty paused. “We just lost another one.”

  “I want all the foxes on the wall on full alert,” I ordered, jumping straight up to the catwalk along the wall.

  “They’re always on alert,” Bandit yelled after me.

  I scanned the woods, looking for any sign of movement. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the fox to my left slowly, mechanically, sweeping its gaze left and right, ears flicking occasionally.

  Nothing moved, and none of the lookouts reported any anomalies.

  “Why the hell did you run off?” Wild asked. “What’s going on?”

  “Some of my scouts went missing, and I thought the Antithesis might be responsible,” I replied quietly. “They didn’t send off any alerts before they disappeared, though, and we haven’t seen any movement since then, so maybe I’m just being paranoid.”

  “Better paranoid than dead,” she muttered.

  I nodded, never once taking my eyes off the forest. Something felt off, but maybe the fact that the hive had survived had put me on edge. None of the foxes had reported anything so…

  An explosion rocked the forest, not far from the walls. Something had wandered into the minefield.

  I mentally prodded the nearest scouts, redirecting them into the area. They sprinted through the woods, crashing through the foliage to emerge as a group at the site of the explosion.

  What they found was the corpse of something that looked like a combination of a Model Four and a Model Nine. It was far larger than a regular Model Nine but had the identical thin grass-like strands covering it. Underneath the covering were larger vine-like strands which ended either with scythe-like bone extrusions, like the model Nines, or lamprey-like mouths.

  “What the fuck is that?” I muttered.

  Wild almost immediately punched me in the shoulder, pulling my focus out of the command network. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. Some sort of Antithesis, a new model I’m not familiar with. Maybe some sort of oversized Model Nine, or perhaps an alternative Model Twenty-One,” I replied. When I saw her confused look, I clarified. “Stealth models. Don’t worry, though, the Foxes have anti-stealth tech.”

  “Then how did you lose the ones on the perimeter?” she asked.

  I glanced over at her and frowned. “I’d like to say it was because the new Model has built-in ECM to isolate their prey. It’s a technique I’ve experienced multiple times before during the global incursion.”

  “Are you sure that’s what’s happening?” she asked.

  “No, I just hope that’s the case, because the alternative option is we can’t detect them at all, and that’s a serious problem,” I replied.

  I mentally prodded the small group of Chameleons and Foxes forward to spread out and check the surrounding area. As I did, one of the Foxes went dark.

  The rest of the squad twirled towards the downed unit, only to find it suspended a coupleof inches off the ground with a scythe-shaped bone protruding from its face. A semi-translucent tentacle was barely visible emerging from the back of the Fox’s head before disappearing in the forest gloom.

  I cut the connection just as the little squad opened fire in the general direction of the tentacle and turned towards Wild.

  “What? What’s going on?” Wild asked.

  I gave her a weak smile, “We have a serious problem.”

  Discord!

  Check out my Stories:

  Support me!

  Finally: Big thanks to all those people that review my draft, the chapters would be a lot rougher without your feedback!