Chapter Ninety-Eight (Leebaw) (2/2)
She reached out, to her Wood Elves, and led them in song.
In the quiet spaces, in burrows, the Leebawans sang with them, providing croaking counterpoint to songs they did not understand but respected.
Glad-Real-All, Elven Queen of Air and Ocean and Land and Sky sang her songs, guiding her soldiers as the battle raged on.
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Larger creatures now sleeted into the atmosphere. 73% of them had been swept from the sky by carefully planned fire patterns of slushed out defense vehicles, a testament to Admiral E's tactical ability and the ability of his gunnery crews, but that left 27% of tens of millions sleeting into the atmosphere.
Some opened wings, gliding on the air currents, looking for where their primitive brains told them to land to hatch the life squirming inside of them.
Others fell like darts, slamming deep into earth or ocean, breaking apart as the impact woke the creatures inside.
All of them were met by Queen Glad-Real-All, Lady of the Blood Code, Keeper of the Sacred Flame, and her warriors.
Creatures the size of a dog, covered in hard chitin armor, with four blade-arms and a long tongue, shouldered their way out of the husk of the giant seed-pod that had brought them and scrambled from the crater.
The moss they stepped on shot rhizome tendrils into their feet, sucking at their nutrients. The nutrients letting them push more rhizome into the creatures. Tendrils slid from out of the joints in their hard chitin armor.
An inhalation to screech filled their lungs full of pollen. The rush of air down the throat caused the pollen to explode into life. Shooting roots into lung tissue.
Most of them burst before they got five feet. Some never made it out of the crater.
One, tougher than the others, managed to drag itself nearly ten feet, its bladearms scraping at the dust.
It touched a seed. The seed felt it and vegetable matter clenched, heating the drop of water into steam. The steam expanded.
Driving needle thin spikes through the creature. The seed drank deep and felt the corpse fall upon it.
A single tendril of green pushed up, petals opening, seeking the sun.
In the ocean great creatures that fed on algae swept through the vast beds of Obscene Things, scooping them up in their krill nets. The great creatures felt the hunger and swept on, searching for more to eat.
Everywhere the invading corrupted life touched down, they found soldiers waiting for them.
Airborne viruses swarmed a field of bacterial, slicing through them, injecting their own DNA, ripping and tearing at the DNA code.
Bacteria was inhaled by a giant creature, found the lung tissue, and massively bred.
The giant creatures that had unfolded themselves from the drop-shells they had rode to the planet's surface inhaled less than a dozen times.
And drowned in their own lung tissue.
The Wood Elves had been born whole. They knew the songs. They knew the incantations. They knew the spells and rituals.
The Leebawan had been born in mud and misery but had learned glory and the brightness of life once again. They sang with the Wood Elves.
All of them sang to the direction of their conductor, the Elven Queen Glad-Real-All.
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In one spot a massive creature crashed down, the fiery impact of the meteor giving time for the life inside to establish itself. It drove roots deep, cracking bedrock to look for what it hungered for. It quickly developed giant book lungs to stir and clean the air. It shuddered with the pain of the infections that wracked its body, but still it grew. Biological battle-screen projectors swelled to life, protecting the infection from even orbital guns.
A shell began to form, allowing the tissue inside to form without constant attack. It sent out tentacles that, even as they died, left behind soil more condusive to the new life than the old.
A single blot that in a week had grown to over a hundred miles wide.
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Ukk-uk-huk followed Elanteer-3 to meet the Great Elven Queen. He was dressed in armor, plates taken from Overseer armor, can carrying his spear with the deadly blade. He shivered at her awe. She was coldly beautiful, unworldly, and moved with a grace that made him want to weep.
**Ukk-uk-huk, bravest of all the Leebaw People** the Elven Queen said, reaching down and touching him. **Are you ready to risk life and limb for your people again?**
”Yes, oh Queen,” Ukk said, looking up at her beauty.
**Though it may cost you your life?** Queen Glad-Real-All asked.
”For my People, I will do the jawnconnor even if I must die,” Ukk responded.
**I have a quest for thee, noble one. Journey through the Unclean Lands, find the Citadel of Death, invade it, and stab the Heart of Darkness with this, your spear** she said.
She grasped the spear and it warped in his hand. Great crystals wrapped around the stick and he could see a gold and silver fluid flowing around the stick.
”As you wish,” Ukk said.
His people were a small one that none had ever cared about before.
The Lady had brought back the fish both great and small, had returned the birds that sangs and screeched, had even called up again the little lizards that Ukk remembered from his youth.
**With you shall travel my servants, Elanteer the Brave, Karl the Undying Mechanek. to guide and keep you during your travels and troubles,** the Queen said.
From beneath moss stood up a great black warsteel Mechanek, its armor breached but its eyes still red. Mushrooms bloomed from the cracks in its shoulders and backs, crystals grew from the rents in its chest and legs, a burning sword in its hand.
Elanteer was clad in armor of crystal and living lace. Armed with a sword of crystal and wood.
Together Ukk-uk-huk and his two companions headed for the Heart of Darkness. The touch of the Elven Queen burned upon Ukk's brow.
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The pulsing mass within the shell sensed the three when they approached. It sent its warriors against the trio, but none could prevail. It tensed within its shell, knowing the armor was proof against any weapon that could be brought against it.
Their footsteps left behind spores that attacked the biomass the Pulsing One had carefully nutured on the ground, that had eaten into the soil. Spreading in moments, connecting to one another, creating a path that the rest of the vegetation used to assault the Pulsing One's territory.
The great black creature, clad in crystal and fungus, raised its fiery sword and struck, tearing a great hole into the side of the Pulsing One's citadel.
The three entered the spaces beyond. They crushed and destroyed the organs they found, severed the nerve cables that writhed in their way, smashed the creatures that the Pulsing One sent to fight.
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The Black Knight fell to a huge creature with massive bladearms that managed to shatter the crystal protecting the rents in his chest. He died with his fist around the creature's heart. He gave out a great trumpet-like death cry that shook the entire Obscene Citadel. In his death nanospores poured from the mushrooms, streamed from the rents in his armor, turning the tissue everywhere black as the Rohan Class nanospores attacked the tissue of the Pulsing One.
Ukk was wounded by a skinny creature with a stinger that fell from the ceiling and clung to his back, jabbing the stinger deep into his side. Elanteer swept it off Ukk's back with his sword.
Together the Elf and Leewbawan struggled on. Fever gripped Ukk, but Elanteer half carried him onward. They fought deeper and deeper into the Obscene Citadel, until, finally, they reached the Heart of Darkness.
It was a great pulsating organ, like twisting coral piled high.
The last of the Pulsating One's soldiers attacked.
Elanteer stood between Ukk and the foul creatures that burst from blister-like sacks inside the great cavity, his own sword of crystal and wood in one hand and the burning warsteel of the Black Knight in the other. He danced a dance of death, singing out his own death song as he did so, the blades flashing as he killed one after another.
Ukk dove into the black viscous fluid around the brain. It burned his skin, tried to dissolve his transparent inner eyelids, but he felt the Queen's touch on his brow and pressed on, one hand tight around his spear.
Ukk scrambled up the pedestal of bone and sinew the great pulsating mass sat atop of, used his claws on his hands to climb the mass itself.
As he reached the top Elanteer fell beneath the last of his enemies, their blades in one another's hearts.
Ukk lifted the spear over his head, the same spear he had carried the night he had learned of jawnconnor, and thrust down into the mass.
It ripped through the outer shell, the magic of the Marine KaBar tearing through the hard chitin. As is drove deep into the neural tissue beyond the crystal cracked, leaking the gold and silver fluid.
The creature screamed, once, before the nanites shredded it, absorbed its genomic code, and transmitted it to the Queen.
Ukk rolled on his back and stared upwards as the shell split and the fibrous tissue gave way until he could see the stars.
There he laid.
He watched the stars, breathing heavy, his body wracked with fever. As the two moons rose he saw a delicate creature fly from the trees on gossamer wings. It lifted him up, and carried him to the tree.
There, it sang songs of healing and love, nursing him back to health.
Eventually Elanteer-5, who had been born whole, came for him.
Ukk limped back with Elanterr-5, who had been born whole with the scar down his face that Elanteer-3 had received from a great creature, until he saw his old burrow. It had soft moss inside and the Leebawan gratefully sunk down onto it.
In his hand, he held his spear. The stick he had gathered that fateful night, the KaBar he had been given as a gift.
The others croaked and clicked to him to tell them what he had seen, what he had done, but he found he had no words.
He lived out the rest of his life, long by the standards of his people, hopping beside Elanteer, even as the Wood Elf was reborn whole.
He never forgot the lessons of jawnconnor or the quest to pierce the black heart.
And he never let go of his spear.
A lesson he taught the tadpoles.
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QUEEN GLAD-REAL-ALL 2871
INFESTATION ELIMATED
OBSCENE ONE DEFEATED
TERRAFORMING CONTINUES
RESTORING BIOSPHERE TO PRE-LANAKTALLAN STATUS
------NOTHING FOLLOWS------