"The right flank is down!"
"Sarah, aka 'Silver Fox,' is confirmed KIA!"
"Repeat: 'Silver Fox' is KIA!"
"My left arm's interface drive shaft is jammed by one of the little bastards' bone spikes."
"I need fire support!"
"They're chewing through my energy shield!"
The voices of the surviving members of Jones's squad were distorted in the communications channel by extreme fear and immense pressure. This was immediately followed by a brief, desperate scream filled with unwillingness and pain. Then came the sickening, grating sound of alloy being torn apart.
Another green light representing a life signal instantly went dark on Gestalt's shared tactical screen like a snuffed-out candle flame.
Shen Kai watched all of this numbly.
He could "see" on the battlefield how the once incredibly bright colors, representing the powerful life force of the Worker Bee Six veterans, were being mercilessly devoured and extinguished one by one by a filthy tide of colors composed of countless foul sub-entities—a tide of chaos and malice.
In the end, they all turned heart-stopping ash-gray, representing absolute death and nothingness.
He saw a "Reinforced Sentinel" communications officer get pounced on and dragged to the ground by three exceptionally agile "Sub-Entities" from different directions at once. Before he could let out a full cry for help, he was torn into a shower of flying fragments in seconds.
He saw a medic with a red cross on his shoulder get impaled from behind by a giant bone spear wielded by an elite Sub-Entity that dropped from above as he tried to aid a mortally wounded teammate. The spear pierced his thick interface armor and chest, brutally nailing him to a shattered rock.
He watched Ryan's stomach churn violently and bend over to vomit everything he had eaten. The fiery red energy around him had been consumed by a green energy of terror.
He saw Nadeshiko clamp her hands tightly over her mouth to stop herself from crying out, but tears streamed from her beautiful eyes like a bursting dam. Her light pink aura had been completely dyed a deep blue by endless sorrow.
The ideals she had once cherished and the beliefs she had fought for were mercilessly and utterly crushed into the most humble dust by the violent and cruel reality before her.
"Hold the line!"
"All of you, hold the goddamn line!"
"For the Federation!"
Sergeant Jones's horribly distorted roar, filled with rage, grief, and despair, came through the comms channel. But soon, his voice vanished too. The channel was left with nothing but the cold hiss of a lost signal.
A dead silence, like a shroud from the abyss, instantly enveloped the bloody battlefield, which had just been filled with explosions and screams.
Gestalt's face was already as grim as could be. He grabbed Ryan and Nadeshiko, who were on the verge of collapsing from extreme fear and grief after witnessing the brutal scene, and dragged them from behind their cover to a larger, more solid, concealed rock.
His voice was hoarse, like two rusty iron plates grinding together, but every word carried the unquestionable final command of a commander.
"Maintain what little composure you have left!"
"Steady yourselves!"
"Immediately force-activate the holographic tactical recorders on your helmets!"
"Record everything happening here—"
"the detailed combat footage of the 'Wailing Aggregation' and the 'Sub-Entities,' their attack patterns, and their energy reactions."
"Record every frame!"
"This is the final command of the 'Pioneer' squad!"
"We must bring the intel back to Rocky City intact!"
Shen Kai didn't move.
He stood quietly behind Captain Gestalt, like a weathered stone statue.
Unlike Ryan's visceral fear, which made him feel like he was about to vomit, and unlike Nadeshiko's immense sorrow and despair over her shattered ideals, what he was enduring at that moment was a more complex and indescribable mental storm, one that was far more perilous.
He heard the silent wails of dying soldiers on the battlefield filled with unwillingness and despair. He heard the screeching dirge like the snapping of a cosmic string as the once incandescent "Iridescence Cores" in their chests rapidly faded and died out. He heard the sticky sound of fresh warm flesh being torn apart by monsters and the crisp crack of hard alloy bones easily crushed.
All of this surged madly into the ocean of his consciousness, like a cosmic flood that had broken through a billion-year-old dam, unfiltered and unmitigated by any mental barrier, in the most primitive, most violent, and most direct way possible.
They threatened to tear his shred of human reason and cognition to pieces.