Inside her leviathan, Kerrigan’s expression didn’t change as she sensed the last ultralisk being cornered and dissected by a bunch of blood hunters. That marked the end of the landing party.
“My queen, the protoss are warping in onto our leviathans.”
Aboard one of the outer leviathans, a power field was generated. Hundreds of supplicant zealots were warped in.
The broodmother inside the leviathan reacted as soon as possible. Every zerg inside the ship converged on that location, but when they arrived, they found themselves facing an army couple times their size.
Thanks to the modified power fields, the Tal’darim units moved from the motherships to the leviathans in just seconds. By the time zerg arrived, the Tal’darim already had hundreds of zealots, half that number of stalkers, ten ascendants, two dozen blood hunters, half a dozen vanguards, and one Highlord.
“For Amon!” Ma’lash screamed and tossed forward a psionic orb, roasting every single zerg in its way. When the orb disappeared, all the hydralisks, zerglings, and banelings were fried. Only roaches and ultralisks were still standing.
The supplicants used this opportunity to charge forward. Countless zerg fell at their feet. Roaches were blasted to pieces by vanguards’ whose scatter cannons not only melted the roaches but also burnt holes inside the leviathans. An ultralisk launched forward like a wild bull, but a cloud of smoke appeared on its back, and the next second the assault beast was cut in half by a void blade down its body. Above his corpse, a blood hunter smirked and blinked away.
The leviathans were literally a zerg fortresses. Swarms and swarms of zerg came out of all the thousands of breeding chambers and spawning pools and charged upon the protoss, but although the halls of the leviathan were wider and taller than that of battlecruisers, they still couldn’t fit tens of thousands of zerg. Most of the Tal’darim could attack or at least contribute to the battle in some way shape or form while 99% of the zerg were forced to stay back and watch.
All across the field, leviathans were being assaulted from the inside. In one leviathan, Alarak crushed an ultralisk. In another, Nyon crushed an infestor and sliced his way through the crowd of infested terran that crawled out of the dead zerg.
“They don’t have the numbers.” Kerrigan merely replied before turning her attention back to the situation on the ground.
After the fall of the first wave, the second wave was quickly launched. This time, these forty thousand zerg lasted a bit longer. The third wave established somewhat of a defensive position. Around ten thousand of them converged and formed a single wave. Their mission was to hold their ground until more reinforcement arrive. They only had to hold for a couple minutes, but even those couple minutes were made impossible when twenty thousand Tal’darim swept across the field and killed every zerg on the ground.
Seeing the casualties, Kerrigan merely smirked.
“Something’s not right.” Nuroka frowned as he beheaded another hydralisk. He briefly connected to the protoss tactical network and glanced at the battle situation. He wasn’t too satisfied to see what happened.
The zerg were being slaughtered. Their advantage in numbers was nowhere to be seen when they landed among two million Tal’darim with groups of forty thousand or less. It was futile and meaningless. Kerrigan was a great leader and a smart tactician. She shouldn’t be doing something like this.
Nyon remembered going over the intel on the Swarm before this battle. The Swarm unit count was put around ten trillion.
1,000,000,000,000.
What does ten trillion mean? The entire Tal’darim population was around 14 million. This meant every single Tal’darim had to kill 71,400 zerg to completely wipe out the Swarm.
If Kerrigan piled on even half of those ten trillion units, she could cause some serious mayhem, but she kept on sending small squads of forty thousand units down. Why?
If the Queen of Blades was waiting for her flyers to break through, it wasn’t working. Swarm flyers were being beaten down by the Death Fleet. Phoenix chased down mutalisks. Destroyers melted corruptors. Scouts took on leviathans. Carriers built and deployed interceptors like crazy. There wasn’t enough Swarm units in the field to overwhelm the full might of the Death Fleet.
Another wave of roaches and hydralisks charged forward. Nyon frowned and ignited his blade again. As suspicious as he was, there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t just go to Ma’lash and tell the Highlord to pull back because he, the Sixth Ascendant, had a bad feeling about this. He couldn’t exactly call Jean or Delta either, not at the heat of the battle. Since there was nothing he could do anyway, he might as well use the time to kill some more zerg.
The fighting continued. At one point, when the tenth wave of landing parties was wiped out, Kerrigan suddenly turned to her queens.
“Now, proceed with the plan.”
All of a sudden, the leviathans, previously staying back and passively functioning as fire support and unit producer, moved forward. All of their weapons were turned to the maximum power, and countless spores, big and small, were thrown toward the Death Fleet. Fresh flyers entered the battlefield in tens of thousands.
The Death Fleet was taken by surprise. Whether because of some tactical reasoning or because he was just pissed off at the zerg, Ma’lash sent out most of the flyers he had as soon as the battle started. He wanted to crush the Swarm in one swift assault. This meant the Death Fleet was constantly having the Swarm at the edge of defeat, but it also meant after hours and hours of extensive combat, these flyers were exhausted. Their energies were used up. Their shields were depleted. Some of their hulls were damaged. This became more of a problem when the zerg sent out fresh troops. The new zerg flyers, with full health and in their prime condition, swept across the Death Fleet. Hundreds of Tal’darim ships exploded before the Death Fleet could put up some formal resistance.
Inside the leviathans, the boarding parties were facing counter attacks as well. The seemingly depleted ground forces were reinforced by not only ultralisks and infestors but also elite units like hunter killers. Banelings rolled toward the boarding parties. Most of them were picked off on the way, but some made contact, and the result was the shrinking in size of almost all of the parties. Infested terran were tossed out of the infestors, and they immediately opened fire.
“It’s a trap!” Having been with Jean for so long, Nyon was quite smart. Then again, if someone couldn’t realize this was a setup by now, he needed to be extremely stupid.
“The Queen of Blades held back most of her forces and pretended to be weaker than she really is! She wants to lure us in and take us out!” Ma’lash ripped a zergling into two like the beast was a sheet of paper. “The Forged! Hold your ground! Kill every single zerg that comes at us!” He unleashed a psionic storm into the incoming zerg reinforcements and charged forward. None of the thousands of zerg in front could stop him.
The Death Fleet retaliated after a few brief moments of shock. Tal’darim pilots held their ground until the last moment so they could contribute to the battle by taking down one more zerg. Carriers emerged from behind the cover of the Death Fleet and used its destruction beams to punch hole after hole among the zerg flyers. Everything, from the basic scourges to the larger corruptors, were reduced to ashes.
Heavy casualties were taken by both sides. Every second, dozens of protoss and hundreds of zerg perished.
“Launch all reserves. Send in everyone!” Ma’lash pushed forward even more and ordered. Almost immediately, red warp beams covered every inch of the leviathans covered by power fields. Thousands died before they could even open their eyes, but more arrived in one piece. There were plenty of zerg, but there were countless protoss as well. Millions of protoss, previously on the Death Fleet vessels, were dumped onto the floating zerg cities like a flood. The sea of red gradually overwhelmed the mountain of purple. Ironically, the Swarm was swarmed.
Meanwhile, as countless warriors on both sides fought and died in the battlefield in space, one of the leviathans quietly deviated from the main zerg fleet. Instead of engaging the Death Fleet, it was descending on the worldship.
Orbital cannons smashed into the beast’s armored underbelly and tore it open, but the leviathan went closer and closer to the artifact nonetheless. Photon cannons started unleashing as well. At first they targeted the leviathan itself, but they quickly turned their attention to the drop pods that were recently unleashed. Send out closer to the ground, these pods could reach the ground with less casualties than the pods before.
“Ma’lash is a fool!” On the worldship, Nuroka groaned as he looked into the burning sky. “He has the full might of the death fleet, and he still can’t keep the zerg from this platform? So much for the blade of Amon.” Ma’lash was gifted the name Blade of Amon for his ruthlessness in battle and his ultimate loyalty to Amon.
The supplicant forces around Nuroka didn’t say anything. Nuroka turned his neck slightly. “Prepare for battle. Ma’lash is weak, but we are not, and we will slaughter the invaders to the last.”
Hundreds of drop pods hit the ground, and zerg poured out. Zealots charged forward fearlessly, but they were hit in the face by hundreds of modified banelings. Screams covered the battlefield as nearly a thousand zealots were melted by banelings with more blast radius and blast damage than the normal version.
This didn’t stop the other Tal’darim from charging forward, but the loss of the first wave of zealots opened up an opportunity for more zerg units to come out. Countless ultralisks stepped over zealots and slayers. Vanguards covered the field with scatter cannons, but without support, they were quickly overwhelmed by thousands of elite zerglings.
Thanks to how short the distance was between the leviathan and the ground when the pods were launched, most of the drop pods were close to each other. This meant the zerg landing parties could easily converge and form a real army.
Even worse, the leviathan was continuing with its suicidal charge. Instead of futilely fighting back against the orbital defenses, the zerg capital ship simply took the beating from the defenses and kept on bombarding the protoss forces on the ground. Spore crawlers and spore cannons uprooted and crawled to the bottom and the side of the leviathan. At this close of a distance, these air to air weapons weren’t bad against ground targets either. Slayers and vanguards were blasted apart by spore crawlers and wrathwalkers were targeted by spore cannons with larger calibers.
“Focus fire on that ship!” Nuroka screamed as he pointed at the leviathan. The capital ship was getting closer and closer to the ground. It was mortally wounded, but it was still splitting zerg on the way down.
“It’s going at the vault!” One of the supplicant ascendants suddenly realized, and he was right, but there was nothing he could do. All that could be done was already done, and they weren’t enough. The leviathan crashed into the vault, slid over, knocked over an orbital cannon and three photon cannons, and came to a screeching halt.
The leviathan was several kilometers long. It was literally a flying city. It was so big it crashed hundreds of zealots and slayers on the way of sliding. The orbital cannon that was in its way was uprooted and destroyed.
The ship was down, but the leviathan held a million or so zerg aboard. A large portion of them was dropped off, but the rest were still on the ship and have survived the crash landing. Their zerg nature protected them from enough impact that could rip a human being apart. Almost as soon as the capital vessel hit the ground, they poured out.
Normally half a million zerg couldn’t take on two million Tal’darim protoss, but these weren’t just any zerg. The Queen of Blades planned and loaded up this leviathan especially for this occasion. She even kept this leviathan in the back of her fleet the entire time the Swarm made contact with the Tal’darim so it wouldn’t be boarded. Not only so, the leader of the Swarm added a few more surprises into the leviathan.
A slayer strided forward, firing as it moved, but the next second a giant beast charged out of a hole on the leviathan’s side. The slayer’s particle disruptor beam bounced off its armor and didn’t even make a dent. The beast stepped on the slayer. The slayer had its phasing armor on, but the beast crushed it nonetheless. The phasing armor didn’t even protect its user for a single second.
“What is that foul creature?” One of Nuroka’s ascendants gasped. Even someone as good as he was shocked.
If Jean was here, she would recognize this beast as a brutalisk. Brutalisks were enhanced versions of ultralisks with tougher armor, greater size, the ability to spit acid so high and so strong they could melt flyer armor, and a pair of claws that could rip through almost anything. They were extremely expensive and took a long time to be bred, and even in the swarm they were rare. However, Kerrigan was willing to spend the few she had here.
Nuroka didn’t recognize the unit, but that didn’t stop him from ordering the attack, especially in a time like this when he couldn’t afford to wait. Already, countless zerg were pouring out of the grounded leviathan.
Nuroka had no choice. Whether he was loyal to Amon and Ma’lash or not, he needed to make a stand here, or else all would be lost. He drew his blade. Supplicant forces converged behind him.
“Warriors of Amon, protect the vault with your life! For Ma’lash! For Amon!”
