Chapter 8 EIGHT
The East wall came down. 0800 hours in the morning. The alarms blared off all over the base. Soldiers and cadets started off towards it. Area command began handing out instructions.
“L-band elites, to the East now!
U-band, second defense strategy. Mark the formations!”
“What? East?” Ken snapped.
“You said it earlier. This loop might be different. The enemy is aware of it so it keeps changing the system.” AIDEN replied.
“I need to start heading towards the gate. Be alert. Bring the right upgrades today.” He said and zoomed off towards the parading soldiers.
He arrived there in no time and stood behind a tree.
The L-band had taken their position in front of the haze of dust that has formed waiting patiently for it to clear. The commander raised his hands signaling them to get their weapons ready.
Human machines with mental and physical supremacy. They began to transform themselves. Some turning their hands to blades, cutters. Feet to wheels. Developing wings. Advancing vision ranges. Ready to take on.
But they were caught off guard.
This time not by ancient dinosaurs.
Bergons!
They jumped out suddenly from the dust and applied targeted attacks on the soldiers. Six soldiers down in under a minute. Parts ripped off. The atmosphere changed from a charged and composed one to a shambolic one filled with wails of the victims.
Ken counted, “one, two, three…five Bergons.”
“AIDEN, I couldn't even defeat one the last time. How am I sure I can survive a second here?”
But there was no response this time.
“AIDEN!!”
“Hello?!”
“Fuck! I guess this is up to me now.”
•
“Xavier, are you there?” Leo asked through the mind link. One benefit of being a part of a band is that you all can share information without talking. Every band has an invisible connection to each other through the mind link. Some use this judiciously. Others only with their friends like the case of Leo.
“Bro please don't tell me you are dead. Xavier!” He cried.
Xavier was one of the front liners attacked during the first set of kill.
Leo had trained with him everyday in preparation of the apocalypse. They were both expectant to survive and fight side by side. But it had failed before the fight even began properly.
“L-band transformers, move to the front line!” The controller yelled from the watch tower.
That was Leo's group. They had the ability to shape shift into any object or machine.
They started to match in synchrony.
“Formation three!” Their commander yelled.
They split into smaller groups. Larger, more built ones at the front. More slender ones into drones and waiting in the sky.
The Bergons killed and disappeared the first time. This round will be different, they thought.
The first Bergon did not roar when it attacked.
That was the most terrifying part.
It came out of the dust in complete silence, wings pinned flat against its body, moving on all four limbs like it had studied how predators hunt and decided to become the definition of it. The L-Band commander saw it at the last second and drove both reinforced arms forward to receive the impact. His feet had become anchors fastened to the ground.
The ground beneath his anchor bolts cracked from the force.
He held on.
Yet it was not sufficient.
He turned both arms to power drills but they stopped on contact with the bergon’s skin.
Up close the Bergon was worse than any briefing had prepared them for. Its skin was not normal flesh. It was layered armour, dark and ridged like volcanic rock that had cooled over centuries of something burning underneath. Its eyes were dark and did not reflect light. They absorbed it. Two deep empty sockets that watched everything from every angle and reflected none. Dagger teeth the length of a grown man's forearm lined a jaw that could close around a vehicle. The ears, blade shaped and constantly rotating, tracked every sound in a three hundred and sixty degree radius simultaneously.
It breathed on the commander's face.
The temperature dropped fourteen degrees in one second. He had turned to an ice statue.
“Soldiers to the front now!” His last words before his face was frozen.
Three soldiers moved before the order came. The first converted both arms to rotating tungsten blades spinning at four thousand revolutions per minute and drove into the creature's left wing joint, the softest connection point in the anatomy. Sparks flew where metal met armoured skin. The blades slowed. The soldier pushed harder. The Bergon did not flinch.
It turned its head and looked at the soldier like an inconvenience.
Then it exhaled.
A concentrated stream of ice hit the soldier at point blank range and encased him from the shoulder down in a block two feet thick. He could not move his arms. He could not convert. He stood there frozen mid-attack, blades still spinning uselessly inside the ice, screaming through the mind link at a frequency that made every L-Band soldier within range wince simultaneously.
The second soldier had shifted her entire upper body to a hydraulic compression unit generating forty thousand pounds of force per square inch. She clamped both converted arms around the Bergon's neck from behind and activated full compression. The sound it made was like a building settling. Metal and ancient armoured flesh grinding against each other. The Bergon's neck did not break. But it slowed. It turned its head one hundred and eighty degrees to look directly at her and she understood in that moment that it had let her grab it.
It wanted her close.
Fire erupted from its mouth directly backward.
She released and rolled but not fast enough. The left side of her conversion plating melted clean off. The skin beneath, the human skin she still had under the engineering, blistered instantly. She hit the ground screaming and converted her remaining arm to a fire suppression unit just to keep herself from burning completely.
The third soldier drove a pneumatic drill arm directly into the soft tissue below the jaw, the kill point they were taught from the standard Bergon briefing. Three inches of reinforced steel rotating at full speed.
It snapped on contact.
They were taught wrongly.
