Chapter 22

Atlas

Over the twenty minutes that followed, we briefed our units as to what was about to take place. Pride swelled in my heart seeing the determination on every face. In many ways, the tough life we led prepared us for this challenge. It also didn't hurt that the Black Guards were our people's finest warriors and hunters, therefore undaunted by what awaited us. The Monochromatics who would join us below were also seasoned fighters as we retained those who served as Civil Protectors in the residential areas.

The anesthetic canisters arrived five minutes before we finished the briefing. We agreed to give them to the Whites—three in total—as their greater magic would more easily allow them to unravel a small section of the lumen shell we would craft and use kinetic magic to slip it inside.

Pythus, Leodros, and I would each lead the three main units of ten—five Whites paired with five Blacks—that would attack the Queen. Their teams would flank her, while mine would perform the frontal assault. Between us, at three and nine o'clock, the remaining two teams would protect a dozen Monochromatics each responsible for controlling the giant creature. A similar set of backup teams would await at the surface to take over if things went sideways for us.

"My brothers and sisters, today we hold in our hands the fate of not just our city and the citizens we have sworn to protect, but the future and peace of the entire Promethean race and of our very planet," I said in a solemn tone, projecting loudly so that all could hear me. "For the first time, we do not go in blind, fighting an unknown enemy at the cost of our own lives. We have a plan, a clear target, and weeks of intensive training during which every single one of you shone like our brightest star. It is with great honor that I go to battle by your side this day. Together, we will make history. And tonight, we will recount the tale of how we prevailed, of how we survived. The blessing of the Lights upon you!"

The warriors echoed that last sentence in a warlike cry.

At that instant, movement at the edge of my vision drew my attention. I jerked my head up to see a drone flying overhead. Its primitive design compared to the devices Venus had been using betrayed it as belonging to my people. Either our media or our Senate were observing—not to say spying on—our efforts.

Despite the resentment I felt towards our leadership—and to a certain extent our population in general—we set up an evacuation plan that would allow everyone to seek refuge in the escape settlement we secretly built should things go awry. I simply prayed it wouldn't come to that.

Dismissing the drone from my thoughts, I turned to look at the gaping hole of the cave entrance the Sibris had turned into since the terrain shifted.

"Atlas!" Venus's voice called out, startling me.

I turned around to see my mate running towards me. I frowned upon seeing she had not put her helmet back on before coming closer to this area. Granted, the radiation levels on the surface were still too negligible to present any type of a threat for a human. But anything that even remotely threatened my mate set my nerves on edge.

Apparently oblivious to the nearly one hundred and twenty people surrounding us, not to mention the drone filming us from above, Venus ran to me and threw herself into my arms. I caught her effortlessly and didn't resist when she drew my face towards hers to crush my lips in a kiss that screamed of desperation.

I tightened my embrace, slightly lifting her off the ground as I returned the kiss, pouring into it the depth of the emotions I felt for her. When our lips parted, she pressed her forehead against mine, and we silently savored the tender moment for a few seconds. She eventually moved her head back to lock gazes with me. The look in her eyes nearly had me come undone.

"You go in there, kick that thing's ass, and come right back to me. Do you hear me, Atlas?" Venus said in a commanding tone that failed to hide the worry gnawing at her.

"I hear you, my mate," I replied tenderly. "My body, heart, and soul are yours, my Venus. I love you and intend to spend the rest of my life with you. Nothing, not even that radioactive Queen will keep me from coming back to you. Anyway, you owe me a guided tour of the galaxy. Don't think I'll give you an excuse not to make good on that promise."

She snorted, love and sadness warring for dominance on her beautiful face. "I love you, too, Atlas. And you'll find out that the best way to piss off a human woman is to ruin her travel plans by being a no show. So get your butt back here, or I'll come get you myself. Deal?"

"Deal," I replied softly before reclaiming her lips for one last passionate kiss.

With much reluctance, I put her back on her feet. To my shock, the soft hum of hundreds of wings clicking saluted us as every member of our units gathered in the wrecked valley gazed upon us with a glimmer of hope and approval. My mate and I had truly become a symbol of the fundamental changes that were finally sweeping through our society. This first public display of affection between us only cemented it.

And after today, once we were victorious—and we would be—my brothers and sisters would undoubtedly start reclaiming their right to love, to family, and to a future filled with dreams and opportunities.

To my surprise, I realized Kyrene had also come out of the tent and was embracing Acamon with undeniable maternal affection. She devoted her entire life keeping this a secret to avoid undermining her credibility as the top scientist in her discipline. The shocked expressions on every face followed by a powerful air of awe and longing underlined just how deep their hurt ran to have been discarded by their families and denied parental love and acknowledgement.

This, too, I hoped would sow even more seeds of change.

After one last caress on my woman's cheek, I marched to the entrance of the Sibris, gesturing for my unit to follow. Acamon fell into step with me, although he remained a couple of steps behind, a distance that would increase slightly once we entered the cave.

I took a deep breath then used my tymbals to produce ultrasonic clicks informing every unit that I was in position, ready to go in. Each unit leader responded in a similar fashion. Although we possessed long-range communication systems, this method was the safest as we couldn't be certain how the magnetic fields below might negatively affect our much weaker technology. But the ultrasonic sounds we could naturally emit traveled far and wide enough that we could more easily coordinate our efforts without risk of losing contact.

Once I received all the confirmations, I signaled for the Blue Monochromatics to drop the kinetic fields they had set up at each entrance to prevent the Zuras from crawling out. Surprisingly, as soon as the path was opened, the crawlers remained inside. But then, based on the camera feed from the probes we'd been watching, the Zuras who hadn't fled were busy attacking the Queen.

Heart pounding, I spread my wings wide as I stepped down the artificially created incline into the cave. The other four Black Guards of my unit flanked me, their wings similarly deployed as we walked side by side, forming a protective wall. Seconds later, a pleasant heat washed over my back as Acamon started sending low-level waves of pure magic at me. From the corner of my eyes, I noticed the eyespots of my Guards starting to glow as the White they'd respectively been paired with did the same for them.

I didn't know what I expected upon entering this underground lair. Granted, I'd seen its appearance through the camera, but it didn't deliver on the suffocating air and excessive heat my mind instinctively attributed to such an environment. Far from being warm, the temperature leaned on the cooler side. Obviously, the air wouldn't qualify as pleasantly fragrant, but it didn't reek. The smell of wet soil covered in damp leaves came to mind. However, the ground was definitely not damp.

The hard surface almost felt like polished stone, but I recognized it as residual lumen. Drafting magic always created small physical particles that almost looked like dust. During normal usage, the quantity was too negligible to even be noticed. On construction sites where casters heavily drafted to erect buildings out of lumen, large amounts of it would accumulate throughout the day and needed to be cleaned off to avoid it condensing into this solid, almost marble-like material.

The ceiling of the cave hung far lower than I would have liked, with barely a spare meter over our heads. As it was uneven, it dipped down in certain places, some lower than our height, forcing Leodros's team to bend as they approached from our left. Straight ahead, another similar dip made it impossible to get a full view of what awaited us. From this angle, we could simply see the front legs of the Queen, clawing at the ground for purchase while the swarm of Zuras scurried around, some of them climbing on her.

But the loud screech ahead followed by an angry rattling sound had my blood turning to ice. I braced for the Zuras to attack us. To my pleasant surprise, although a few of them hovered around us as if to assess how much of a threat we represented, they all turned away from us to refocus on their mother.

I'd just begun bending down to pass the lowered ceiling section when a blinding yellow light rushed in our direction. Without hesitation, I dropped to my knees, wings spread wide, and cast a kinetic wall before us. To my relief, my companions reacted in a similar fashion. The yellow lights turned out to be a still forming fire blast. Part flames, part yellow magic, it crashed against the invisible kinetic wall, as if stopped by a glass panel. Our black wings greedily absorbed the lingering magic, while the Whites dispelled the flames.

Considering the size of the fire blast, the little Zuras couldn't have cast it, which only left the Queen. That she would launch such an attack with half the magic unused indicated that she was a novice caster. She possessed great power that she hadn't mastered. This made her incredibly unpredictable, just like untrained young Whites. They could cast every type of spell, but you never knew if they would use the full power of the magic drafted or only part of it, like the Queen just did. Had she not wasted half the magic, her fire blast could have generated sufficient heat to seriously injured us.

She threw a few more fire blasts in quick succession. Judging by the locations where the explosions of light went off, the Queen was shooting randomly, like a panicked animal lashing out. In the time it took us to cross the five meters of lower ceiling, we deflected six more blasts from her, one of them inexplicably made of ice shards instead of fire.

My jaw dropped as the cave opened up, giving us an unimpeded view of the creature. By the Lights, this thing was much bigger than the camera let on! Its head alone was a little taller than my entire body and exceeded my width, even including my wings fully deployed. Its antennae were at least a meter long each and thicker than my arms, with a spiked sphere at the tips.

They glowed with an intense halo, followed by a flash of bright light before they fired off their spell. Judging by the way she wildly waved her antennae and frantically fought to free herself from the hole she was still steadily carving, the Queen was enraged. A part of me believed she was actually rabid or had gone feral as a result of whatever illness turned her insides radioactive.

Four of her giant front legs—two on each side—were now out of the hole, exposing what I believed to be her torso. Wide flaps connected them on the sides, giving the impression that if airborne the Queen would have been able to glide on air currents. Were those the vestiges of fuller wings that had allowed her to fly to this location to repopulate this nest?

From this frontal angle, I could see two large eyes on each side of her face, and three smaller ones directly in front, where I would have expected to find a mouth or nose. Only when it reared its head back in another effort to wiggle free of the rocks and hard dirt preventing it from climbing out did I notice the massive vertical slit where its neck and chest would be. It split sideways, giving a glimpse of a sea of sharp teeth before releasing that ear-piercing shriek again.

As disturbing as it looked, the real source of concern was how her struggle to free herself was scraping the flesh off her back, causing the hollow parts to bleed with toxic pus. Hundreds of dead Zuras surrounded her body as she continued to fire at them.

"Monos, trap her front legs!" I shouted as my unit advanced directly towards her.

I immediately repeated the command with ultrasonic clicks.

Although the ground was mostly light-gray due to the condensed lumen residue covering it, the hole created by the Queen had exposed the ochre dirt beneath it. In seconds, the latter began shifting around the Queen's legs, like a volcano rising from the ground. Even as dirt ensnared her legs, the Brown Monochromatics invoked thick vines, which they wrapped around her shoulders, further trapping her.

Palms raised before me, I gathered as much halo as I could from the steady flow of pure magic Acamon was feeding me, then started firing it as an uninterrupted stream of kinetic force at her antennae to keep them from aiming towards our Monos. Leodros on the left side of the cave and Pythus on the right both emulated me, trapping her antennae in a triangle that would only allow her to cast upward.

Enraged, the Queen fought even harder to free herself, but failed miserably and ended up nearly immobilized.

While the Browns maintained her restraints, the Grays and their paired Whites shifted their attention to the exposed sores on the Queen's back. With tons of pure gray lumen residue covering the walls and floors of the cave, the Gray Monochromatics had plenty to draft from, allowing their paired Whites to cast their own magic directly at the Queen as well, accelerating the process.

I stared in awe at the tiny Zuras joining their efforts to ours, their lumen the same marbled hue as the one covering the ground as it filled the holes in their mother's back.

While Pythus, Leodros, and I continued to imprison the Queen's antennae, our Black companions moved closer to her to nullify any magic she might cast. The combined power of their wings snuffed out the Queen's halo even as it began to form around her antennae. But they had to shift a few times until they found the best strategic position so that their magic absorption wouldn't interfere with the spells of our units restraining the Queen and sealing her back.

The benefits of the past weeks spent training together shone through. Each team worked efficiently with few words required for their members to understand what was needed. In minutes, the exposed section of the Queen's back had been completely covered in lumen. Before we even finished, the little Zuras began moving the dirt around the hole trapping their mother to expose more of her as she remained all but paralyzed by the Monochromatics' snare.

In that instant, I realized we were truly going to make it.

"Monochromatics, try to lift another segment of the Queen without releasing her," I ordered both vocally and with ultrasonic clicks.

The two units moved slightly ahead of us to the side. Using earth magic, the Browns shifted the dirt behind the Queen, opening it by a couple of meters. She immediately attempted to raise the lower half of her body through that opening. To my shock, a narrower segmented section appeared with a series of shorter legs vaguely reminiscent of those of a centipede. The way it curved in at the end hinted that she possessed an even longer tail than we imagined.

More disturbingly, right below those legs, the translucent skin of her swollen underbelly gave a glimpse of a huge concentration of that same yellowish pus oozing out of her back. I couldn't tell if something had happened to her in the depths where she previously dwelled, or if she had always been like this. But there was no question her insides overflowed with that radioactive waste. If we pierced her belly, the ecological disaster that would ensue would be devastating.

And none of us would survive.

I spread the warning, and once again, the Browns shackled this new section of the Queen's body with thick vines. The little Zuras gave up their efforts to dig up their mother and assisted the Grays and Whites in sealing her back.

My heart soared as we progressed just as efficiently. In less than ten minutes, we were readying to move on to what I hoped would be the final segment. Then would come the challenge of rolling her onto her back to lay down a thick coat of lumen on her belly to avoid any potential leaks before we finalize the cocoon that would completely contain her.

The same excitement was on full display on every face as I gave the order to lift more of her body. As with the previous round, the Browns and Grays moved forward to open a two-meter-long rectangular hole behind her.

They never finished it.

As soon as the ground loosened behind her, the Queen whipped up her tail. It quickly got stuck, indicating there was an even longer segment remaining. However, in her growing distress, the Queen continued to whip her tail upward. The ground behind her swelled from the pressure below. It undulated, as the surface had done before the fissures appeared.

A sense of dread washed over me seconds before complete chaos erupted. A thundering sound resonated in the back, and large chunks of dirt and rocks exploded upward before raining down on us. Startled shouts filled the room as the units backed away.

But it was the six-meter-long giant tail with a two-pronged fork at the tip that turned my blood to ice. With that same terrifying screech, the Queen swiped her now liberated tail up, slapping the low ceiling with such force that it sent large sections of dirt flying out, piercing right to the surface. She then whipped it sideways, nearly squashing the nearby warriors and sending a few of them flying back.

My heart skipped a beat seeing some of them crash against the side walls and others get buried under chunks of the collapsing parts of the ceiling. Flying debris rushing our way forced my unit and me to cover our faces even as we shifted our kinetic magic towards it. In the few seconds that took, the Queen seized this brief release of her antennae to bombard the room with magic. The Blacks having temporarily scattered due to the sudden mayhem, our anti-magic protection radius collapsed. The Monos and Whites barely had time to dodge while casting kinetic walls to avoid getting burnt to cinders. The Blacks closest to the Queen dove and flew out of range, barely escaping getting squashed or speared by her tail.

Her savage movements as she wiggled in every direction quickly loosened the dirt trapping her body. When the first vines snapped around the middle segment, I realized it was just a matter of seconds before she completely freed herself. Worse still, her struggles violently rubbed her underbelly on the sharp edges of the hole, and the bulging section behind her middle legs appeared frayed. I couldn't say for certain due to her erratic movements, but radioactive yellow pus seemed to be trickling out of it.

"Whites, control her tail!" I shouted, forcing back the rising panic trying to rob me of rational thoughts. "Blacks, to me!"

Despite the cramped vertical space, I flew the short distance to the Queen's head and all but stood on her left shoulder, wings spread wide to snuff out the halo of her antennae. Pythus and Leodros joined me, one standing on the opposite shoulder and the other on her nape. Despite her thrashing, her upper body still bound by the thick vines made it a more stable place to stand than the ground, which was shaking worse than during an earthquake.

Struck by an idea, I began to cast lumen around her antennae, binding them together. Without hesitation, my two lieutenants and the rest of the Black Guards joined in that effort. I berated myself for not thinking of it sooner.

Following my lead, the Whites who had been forcing the tail down through kinetic magic so that it could be bound to the ground with vines shifted to wrapping a large enough quantity of lumen around the tip. Not only did it eliminate the threat of the sharp forked tail, but it also made it too heavy for the Queen to easily wave it around.

She still attempted to push herself up and break free of her shackles. But by then, we had sufficiently regained control of the situation to thwart her efforts. The Monos jumped right back into action. This time, instead of shackling her with dirt and vines, they cast lumen around her limbs, like a thick plaster cast, blocking any future movement she might want to perform.

To my shock, I noticed a pile of withered Zuras on the right side of the Queen's body, near the area of her underbelly I suspected was leaking.

"Acamon, with me!" I yelled, gliding down to that section but not standing too close.

Even from that short distance, I could clearly see the leak as the Zuras in the back tried to seal it. In an impressive display of power, Acamon sent pure magic to my wings with his right hand while casting lumen directly at the Queen's wounded side with the other. Only a true master could simultaneously perform two different types of magic.

Now that her antennae were fully wrapped in lumen, we assigned a single White to maintain its integrity as the Queen vainly continued to try shattering it with magic. With her entire body exposed and mostly restrained, I ordered the Monochromatics to finish sealing the holes in her back—which extended over her midsection and the upper half of her tail—and shifted everyone else's focus to building the lumen cocoon around her.

Thanks to their greater magic, the Whites created a casing for her head, in which they placed the first anesthetic canister and sealed it around her shoulders. Acamon set off the remote trigger, releasing its content within the casing. Moments later, the Queen went still. My heart ached for the creature. Up close, I could see how sick she had become. Even her chitin scales looked diseased, the edges frayed as if eaten by rust.

The myriads of holes in her back testified to the fact that she had given birth to hundreds of young, but nowhere near the number currently filling this cave. Had she coupled again over the years? The gods only knew how long her health had deteriorated while she continued to fulfill her duty. I could only speculate as to what could have turned her insides into this radioactive substance. Could whatever she ate down there be the cause?

With much care and coordinated efforts, we turned the Queen onto her back with a mix of kinetic and earth magic so that we could complete the casing under her, but not before allowing Venus's probe to get a close scan of her distended belly. Considering the massive size of the queen, at least four meters wide, and twelve to fifteen meters long, it took an insane amount of time to complete our task. Even with the Whites feeding us pure magic, the Monos quickly burnt out as creating lumen—a physical transformation of magic—was significantly more taxing than creating a halo magic like for kinetic pulses, fire blasts, or lightning bolts.

Thanks to our Shaydwin enhancements, the Black Guard trudged on aided by the Whites. I couldn't tell how many hours it took. By the time we finished, a sense of surrealism settled over us.

"It's done," Pythus whispered in disbelief, breaking the deafening silence that had settled over the room, only disturbed by the scuttering of the Zuras. "We did it. We survived."

"We did it," I echoed, my throat tightening.

Tears pricked my eyes as our new reality sank in for all of us. The same powerful emotion I felt could be seen on every face. Then as one, the males and females of the Black Guard and Civic Protection started embracing each other, cheering and crying all at once.

Despite our determination to beat the odds, we came here prepared to die. But now, a single thought replayed in a loop in my mind.

I'm coming back to you, my Venus.