The battleground.
A mayhem like this the Antarctic has never seen since the first time snow fell over this ground.
The ice is on fire. The snow is red with the blood of many humans and metahumans. Strikeforce 1 disks cross the sky exchanging fire with flying T5 droids: for each robot destroyed, ten more take flight. On the ground, hundreds are the droids disabled, but tens of thousands are the one still active.
And if the fallen among the alliance of metas are just a dozen among a hundred arrived, that's just because basically the robots don't care about the humans. Just a few thousands of them are responding to the attack. The other hundreds of thousands are just flowing out of the mountain, to gather on the border of the ocean. And then, stopping, apparently waiting for something to happen.
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"What are they waiting for, Flash?" asks one meta, his polar gear showing the silver and grey colours of the Strikeforce, while destroying with his bare fist one of the T5 drones.
"Who fucking cares, Freehand?" responds the other Strikeforcers, stopping two more robots with a burst of photon blast. "They are gonna fuck us all in the ass. we are gonna die. We are walking dead right now."
"They are like bees, I tell you! My grandpa had honeybees in his farm" says a third Strikeforce 1 agent. From his eyes fires laser beams, that cuts through the vanadium steel of the robots like it's butter. "When they swarm, they leave the hive and land nearby, one after the other. And there they gather, waiting for the queen bee. Just when she arrive to guide them, they leave all together!"
"Good work!" yells the field leader of the small team. "And good theory, Fireworks. So you think they are waiting for their Queen bee?"
"Yes, Director. I suppose they are waiting for Naecken. It would be just logical, no?"
Suddenly, just from the other side of a wall of ice, comes the cry of a man. Then, over the top appears a fifth Strikeforcers, a female, bleeding from a deep wound on the right shoulder.
"Dreamweaver, what happened? asks Director, alarmed.
"The illusion I... casted... worn off. I... can't... contain.... them" whispers the woman, and then her head falls down, face on the ground. Just a second passes, and a hundred of foot soldiers appears over the walls, firing with laser guns and magnetic blasters, overwhelming the remaining Strikeforcers.
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"Nobody will gonna find us here!" says Freehand, pressing his both hands over the large wound on his left knee, to try to halt the loss of blood.
"We'll... die... here..." whispers Director, lying on his back half submersed by the snow, that has begun to fall heavily from the low grey clouds that has quickly covered the sky.
"The magnetic blaster have silenced all of our trackers. Shit, there is no way they can spot us in this nothingness."
Then, the roar of a snowcat is heard approaching, and soon two man, one with the Strikeforce gear, and a red cross sign, the other with the simpler gear furnished by the EPS, appear.
"Thank God, you found us" says the Director, closing his eyes, finally conceding himself to faint.
"It's impossible you found us... here!" wonders Freehand, while the medical staff member of the Strikeforce attends to him. "Nobody could locate someone in... in this hell!"
"Not for someone with my nose" winks the one in the EPS parka.
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A few kilometres away, inside the EPS carrier, three men obseves the battle.
"Mr. Tweed, how is the recognition?"
"Completed, Mr. Walker. All the metahumans on the battleground have been catalogued."
"Excellent, Mr. Tweed. Now, Mr. Turner, could you put a stop to this grotesque show?"
"With pleasure, Mr. Walker."
The ex-MCCA agent eyes close in concentration. The sky blackens, the snow stop to fall. Turner's open his eyes, than now glows of white fire. A loud, cracking thunder shakes the ground, and thousands of lighting fall from the sky, hitting all the robots on the battleground, reverberating from one to the other.
"Remarkable achievement, Mr. Turner."
All the quarter million robots are on the ground, completely disabled.
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On the battlefield cries of joy are heard everywhere, when the ground begins to tremble, and a loud, booming noise seems to come from the deep of the earth.
Then, the ice begins to crack, and the soil shakes violently. The snow vaporize, and from an enormous crater just formed at the foot of the artificial mountain, a huge form appears. Metallic yet clearly biological, alive yet unquestionably cybernetic, something resembling a mantis, with dozens of legs and many wings heads toward the surface. As the clouds dissipates, the just reappeared sun makes the surface of the thing glowing like quicksilver, and sends its shadow to obscure the battleground and the dozens of metas and norms that has survived.
Because T5, when it reaches the surface, stands over the ground from an height of 300 hundred meters, as tall as the Eiffel tower.
Walker looks at the exhausted form of Turner, and raises an eyebrow.
Not very far, Adem Different narrow his eyes, to watch the towering behemoth toward the sun. "Just one more" he whispers, and smile, before returning to his battle with the Annunaki.
