The final order had one line in it that mattered more than the rest.
No staging. No consolidation. Each force commits from its own position on its own approach at the stated hour.
It was ugly on paper. Every officer who read it hated it. You do not send eleven separate forces at a fortified belt without grouping up first, because grouping up is how you concentrate, and concentration is how you break a line.
But the enemy had spent a month reading humanity's movements and had never once been wrong about where the weight was going. Grouping up meant being seen. Eleven approaches at the same hour meant they had to answer all of them.
Adam's force set out at four in the morning.
By the time Sector Nine's ships came over the last ridge, the fight was already an hour old and had stopped resembling anything orderly.
The enemy sector burned in three places. Their wall was a curtain of dark composite twelve meters high and something had already opened a hole in it wide enough to drive through. Both sides were pouring into that hole and dying in it in numbers that made no sense.
Above it all, ships fought.
Adam had never seen an air battle from underneath before. Human dreadnoughts and Yhwcha hulls turned around each other at four kilometers up, too big to move the way anything that size should move, trading fire that lit the dust ceiling from below. As he watched, something Yhwcha-shaped came apart at the middle and both halves fell, and the near half landed inside the enemy's own perimeter and killed a great many of their own.
Nobody on the ground reacted to it. They were all busy.
On the walls and under them, the swarm: androids in blocks, Xenomorphs in loose fast waves, and Yhwcha teams moving through the gaps where the fighting was thinnest, doing what they always did.
"Right," Adam said, mostly to himself. "Okay."
The command post was a shipping container with the roof cut off, four hundred meters back from the line, and there were five people in it who mattered.
He got the picture in ninety seconds.
Two Level 7s were committed, one on each flank, and neither could break through because every time they made a hole the enemy filled it with new forces. The eastern front was a killing field and nobody should walk into it. The wall breach was holding but only because two hundred people were standing in it. There were at least four L6-class entities in play and one thing on the northern side that nobody had a rating for and everybody was avoiding.
"How many can you put in?" the ranking officer asked.
"Ninety-one thousand."
The man looked at him.
"You're serious."
"Sage, let them march," Adam said out loud, and behind them, four kilometers back where the transports had put down, the ground started emptying.
He sent the androids first and ordered an aggressive rush, on purpose.
Not stupid — simple. Nine and Sage could run formations that no human commander could hold in their head, but Adam didn't need them to. He told it to move them straight at the breach in blocks of four hundred, at a steady pace, without cover, without cleverness, and to keep pushing in for as long as it took.
Because they were not soldiers. They were a wall that could move.
The enemy had spent a month learning to fight things that valued their own lives. Ninety-one thousand machines that did not care, walking forward in step, changed the arithmetic of that breach in about four minutes. The two hundred people holding it came out. Blocks of androids went in, were destroyed and were replaced by the blocks behind them.
Then he sent the guild.
Sixty Eclipse members, behind the android line, doing what sixty explorers do when somebody else is absorbing the incoming fire. Marchand went up onto the wall itself and started burning her way along it. Korva went into the breach working with the androids. Adeyemi opened a warp portal in the air every ninety seconds and pulled wounded out of places nobody could reach on foot.
It worked. It was working. That was the strange part, standing in a container and watching something you had thought about twelve days ago actually work.
"Right," the ranking officer said. He looked about ten years younger than he had at the start of the conversation. "That's much better. Now we have the other problem."
The other problem was that androids do not fight Level 7s.
Nothing below a certain point does. You can put ten thousand bodies in front of an L7-class entity and it will walk through all of them and be annoyed, and the four L6s were nearly as bad, and there were only three fit Level 7s on the entire planet and two of them were already committed on the flanks.
"Give me the northern one," Adam said.
"Are you sure about that?"
"No, but I am confident enough to be able to escape if anything goes wrong." He was already checking his gloves. "Ren's taking the command from here. Anything that moves on this ground goes through her, and if she tells you to move something, move it."
The officer glanced past him.
Ren had come in eleven hours earlier, off a supply flight she had talked her way onto, and had not slept since. She did not look like a person who intended to. She had the whole board up in front of her and had already redrawn two of the approach lanes.
"He's better at smashing stuff," she said, without looking up. "I'm better at everything else. It's not complicated."
Adam went out through the back of the container.
He found his opponent on the northern slope, and it was not what he expected.
He had fought Xenomorphs. Everyone had, by now. They were fast, they came in numbers, they went down when you hit them properly, and the L6 variants were bigger versions of the same thing.
This was not a bigger version of the same thing.
It stood four meters, and it was bulky, which no Xenomorph had ever been. The black carapace was plating, not shell, layered in overlapping sections across the shoulders and chest the way armor is layered, with a spread of horns off the skull and spikes running down the back and forearms. It had a tail and it kept it low and still. It was standing in the middle of a stretch of ground with nothing living on it, just waiting.
Sage?
[ Nothing in the catalogue. Approx. mass around nine hundred kilograms. I would not engage it in—]
He ran straight at it.
That was, in retrospect, the mistake.
Adam is not slow. He has a body built out of the best biology of two worlds and a long time of Nen and Haki conditioning from before. He had put a hand through the chest of an L4 commander in eleven seconds without breaking stride.
The thing crossed nine meters before he had finished committing to the first strike.
He got the Knuckles up in time and that was the only reason his arm still worked afterward. The impact took him off his feet and launched him forty meters back. He did not land so much as arrive, and he was still working out which way was up when it was on him again.
The next twenty seconds were the worst twenty seconds Adam had spent in a fight in two years.
It was faster than him. Not marginally. It was faster than him the way an adult is faster than a child, and it was stronger, and the plating shrugged off a full Knuckles strike to the sternum with a noise like a hammer on a steel plate. He tried Overhaul on contact, got a hand on it and took a section of the shoulder apart, but the section closed while he was still watching it.
It hit him in the ribs with the tail and something inside him gave.
Rewind.
He felt the ribs go back and felt what it cost, and he was already reaching for the shadow of the ridge behind him when it came again.
Shadowstep.
He came out ninety meters up the slope, on one knee, breathing hard.
The creature turned to look for him, unhurried. It did not sprint. It had no reason to. It had just spent twenty seconds proving that when the distance closed it won, and it was perfectly happy to walk.
Talk to me.
[ It is faster, stronger, and it regenerates faster than Overhaul can remove tissue. You cannot out-hit it and you cannot out-last it. ]
I noticed.
[ Then stop trying to. Host, it has one advantage and it is not strength. It is closing speed. Take that away and it is just a very large animal in an open field. ]
Adam looked down the slope.
Time to use some rules.
He spent one.
"NEW ORDER." He said it loudly, more for his own morale than the need for it. "The air on this slope, out to a hundred meters from where I'm standing, becomes solid to anything moving faster than a man can run."
The world did not flash. It never does. The dust hanging in the air simply stopped drifting and started hanging, and forty meters below him the creature took one more of its unhurried steps and the step came out wrong.
It stopped. It looked down at its own leg.
Then it tried to close the distance the way it had before, and the slope turned into a wall.
Adam walked down to it.
That was the part the recordings show, and the part that got played on Earth-Prime for the next two months. A man walking down a slope at an ordinary pace toward something twice his height that was straining forward like a swimmer against a current and getting nowhere. The order affected it but not to the degree Adam expected.
The rule did not apply to him because he was not moving fast. He had no reason to.
At thirty meters he used Theft.
He did not take a weapon. He did not take the plating. He reached out at range and took the thing it had been relying on more than anything else without knowing it, which was the regeneration. He held it loose. Ten minutes.
The creature felt it go. It made a sound he did not have a word for.
Then he closed the last thirty meters and started work.
Without the healing, everything became much easier.
He took the left knee with Overhaul and a Knuckles strike into the joint. It went down on that side and swung the tail. The tail came through thick air at the speed of a slug. Adam stepped inside it. He put a hand flat against the plating over the ribs and took the plating apart, a section at a time.
It got a hand on him once more and broke his left forearm. That was fair. It had earned that. Over time it realized slow movements with more power were the way to fight but it was already too late.
He finished it with the Knuckles at the base of the skull, twice, and it stopped moving on the second one.
Adam stood over it, completely healed, since he still had its regeneration working.
How long was that?
[ Four minutes, eleven seconds ]
Yeah.
He stopped to survey the battlefield down below and also canceled the rule.
Sage. Tell Ren that this thing is done.
[ Done. ]
Time for me to split up.
Double.
Soon the ground was filled with a small army of Adams, all rolling their shoulder and looking ready to fight.
AN: If we get to 100 power stones, I will release an extra chapter on 300, another one. If you wish to support the story and read ahead, visit [email protected]/skeri123