Chapter 375: Mutalisks in Your Face! Purification Beam! Ride of Death!
After retrieving the hunter's spear, Paul turned toward the group of human soldiers. Before he could even speak, one of them blurted out excitedly:
"Are you with the Federation? They actually received our distress signal?!"
Judging by Paul's squad's gear and equipment, the soldiers immediately assumed they were some elite Terran Federation special forces.
After all, Rangers weren't exactly known for wielding such advanced weaponry.
Paul gave a mysterious smile and replied, "Our identities are classified for now. What matters is—you're safe."
The soldiers finally let out a collective sigh of relief, tension draining from their faces. They had waited here in despair for far too long, convinced they were going to be devoured by the Zerg.
Now that a sliver of hope had arrived, the exhaustion came crashing down like a tide. Their bodies went weak with the release.
"This all the people left here?" Paul glanced around and saw fewer than ten survivors.
One soldier shook his head and pointed toward a passage below the bunker. "No, there are over twenty others down there. A Ghost operative went out earlier to scout and search for more survivors."
"As for whether Anyone else is still alive out there—I really can't say. But from the looks of things, we might be all that's left on this whole planet."
The soldiers sighed. Most of the ones left behind were unarmed civilians. The rich and powerful had long since escaped aboard shuttles before the Zerg arrived.
"Sorry… that Ghost operative isn't coming back."
Paul handed the blood-smeared neural module to the soldier and gave a quick order: "We need to get out of here immediately. The main Zerg swarm will be arriving any minute."
Taking the neural module, the soldiers immediately understood what had happened. After a brief moment of silence in the Ghost's memory, they rushed into the bunker to guide the survivors out.
Meanwhile, Paul contacted the Hyperion, requesting extraction for the survivors. "We've located survivors—about thirty in total. Deploy assault dropships ASAP to get them out."
[Acknowledged.]
No sooner had Megatronus responded than flagship commander David Martinez issued a warning:
[Paul, the Protoss Golden Armada is accelerating toward the planet. To avoid unwanted conflict, we'll need to withdraw from orbit soon.]
[Proceed with caution. Unless absolutely necessary, do not engage the Protoss fleet.]
To the Universal Megacorp, this wasn't the time to blow their cover. If they could stay hidden, they would.
As the Golden Armada closed in, Universal Megacorp's reconnaissance drones gathered more detail.
The fleet was composed mainly of Void Ray cruisers, with a few Tempests among them, all escorting the supercarrier Purifier as it charged toward the planet.
Seeing the Purifier about to descend, David instantly deduced their real intention:
They were going to glass the planet—fire the Purifier's main cannon until the world was scorched to barren glass.
With the war escalating, the Protoss were clearly in a rush to purify as many Zerg-infected worlds as possible, and had been traveling at full acceleration since arrival.
Now, the Golden Armada was less than twenty minutes away.
[Assault dropships launched. All Hyperion AI combat drones have been deployed to cover your extraction.]
[Move fast. Don't linger.]
Megatronus voice came through once again.
"Understood!"
Soon, the survivors emerged from the lower levels of the bunker. Unlike the well-equipped soldiers, these people were mostly helpless civilians, including many women and children.
Had Universal Megacorp not shown up, these people would've either been devoured by the Zerg or purified by the Protoss—forcefully "ascended" to "paradise."
One of the survivors stepped forward, asking Paul with barely contained emotion, "Are you with the Rangers? Thank God… I thought we were done for!"
The signal-sending equipment was ancient—at best, it could broadcast to near-orbit. It shouldn't have reached beyond the system.
Yet by pure chance, the passing Universal Megacorp fleet had picked it up.
"You sent the signal?"
Paul eyed the man—gaunt-cheeked, glasses-wearing, clearly an engineer or scientist.
"I'm Payne. A Terran Federation engineer. I sent the distress call."
Payne had once had a seat on an evacuation shuttle, but his superior stole his spot to bring his pet dogs instead.
That moment shattered any lingering loyalty Payne had for the Terran Federation.
To him, the ruling class and the common people were simply different species. A civilian's life wasn't even worth a domesticated animal.
Hearing this, Paul nodded to the Master Chief, signaling his team to protect this man—he might be the key to linking up with the Rangers.
"All of you, move out—now! Drop everything that slows you down. Run as fast as you can!"
Just as Paul gave the order, swarms of Mutalisks streaked overhead—one of the Zerg's elite air units.
With leathery wings and monstrous agility, Mutalisks were apex predators of the skies.
But to Paul's surprise, they ignored the survivors entirely, soaring instead toward the upper atmosphere—toward orbit.
"The Zerg are heading to intercept the Protoss fleet?" Din Djarin remarked, relieved. That might buy them more time.
Then again, this meager Zerg force stood little chance of halting the Golden Armada.
But it was clear now—the Zerg knew the Protoss were closing in, and had dispatched everything they had to delay them.
"Hurry! Move!"
Paul and the investigation team rushed alongside the fleeing civilians, repelling waves of ground-based Zerg converging from all directions.
Though the air was clear of Mutalisks, the Zerg ground forces were still vicious and unrelenting.
Even as the survivors dashed toward the assault drop zone, the Zerg launched a frenzied attack, trying to devour them before escape.
Meanwhile, on the surface, the Zerg continued frantically hatching Mutalisks to hurl into space against the approaching Golden Armada.
The Protoss, for their part, were laser-focused on cleansing this planet—just one stop on their purification schedule.
All three sides were racing against the clock.
In orbit, the Purifier was drawing closer—an enormous supercarrier nearly a hundred kilometers long, encased in layers of shimmering shield fields.
Even a direct collision with an enemy ship wouldn't faze it.
In the vastness of space, the Purifier loomed like a god, with Void Rays, Phoenixes, and Tempest-class warships arrayed around it like a constellation guarding the sun.
At that moment, the Zerg's flying swarm broke through the upper atmosphere—a massive cloud of Mutalisks, surging toward the Protoss fleet like a swarm of locusts.
The Zerg Queen had sacrificed every remaining larva to produce this aerial army—billions of units launched in a desperate counterattack.
A monstrous insect tide hurtled through space, crashing toward the Golden Armada. It was the Zerg's only possible response.
Yet even in the face of this Mutalisk swarm-to-the-face, the Purifier's commander—Executor Selendis—remained calm, utterly unfazed.
She issued a crisp order: "Maintain speed. Continue acceleration. All ships, fire at will. Swat down those bugs."
Selendis was the fourth Executor of the Templar caste—one of the few high-ranking Protoss females with real authority.
Her mission: lead the Golden Armada and purify the Zerg infestation. She'd faced plenty of Zerg fleets along the way.
None had ever survived.
That was why the Zerg Queen on this planet had gone all in—consuming every ounce of biomass to produce more units.
Too bad... she was still too late.
As Selendis's command echoed across the fleet, the surrounding Void Rays began charging up, releasing searing prism beams that sliced through the Mutalisk swarm.
The light beams slashed like precision blades through the massed insects, carving them to pieces and scattering their corpses across space.
Behind them, Protoss carriers launched waves of Interceptors, creating a metallic tide that intercepted the swarming Mutalisks head-on.
The Protoss were determined to prevent even a single Mutalisk corpse from contaminating their hulls with Creep or parasites.
At that moment, flesh and metal collided in orbit.
Laser fire swept through the void, transforming the battlefield into a blood-drenched meat grinder.
Every second, tens of thousands of Interceptors and Mutalisks were shredded into fragments.
Life and souls meant nothing here—only waves of reinforcements charging to their deaths.
This space battle had become a raw contest of resources.
To win, Protoss carriers kept churning out Interceptors, flooding the front lines.
On the surface, the Zerg harvested every last drop of biomass to hatch more Mutalisks, flinging them skyward to die.
Watching from behind a nearby star, the hidden Universal Megacorp fleet could only stare in stunned silence.
Crude, primitive tactics… but gods, they were glorious.
At Universal Megacorp's multiverse base, V watched the clash unfold between the Protoss and Zerg, quickly analyzing both factions' combat styles and strategic patterns.
Johnny Silverhand stood to the side, casually offering his take: "These dumb bugs only know how to throw lives at the problem—trying to buy space for their rear lines to push forward. But the cost is insane."
"With just the resources on this planet? There's no way they can keep up this kind of reckless burning."
If humanity tried to face off with the Protoss using similar throwaway tactics, they'd burn through the entire planet's worth of resources in less than a day.
"The Zerg's entire strategy hinges on rapid mass production—overwhelming by sheer numbers. To them, death is meaningless."
"Compared to the value of buying precious time to develop and reposition, paying with lives is practically low-cost."
Morgan Blackhand nodded thoughtfully. If this had been Universal Megacorp facing the Zerg in space, they had more than enough solutions.
MD-500 Molecular Fission Missiles, Hardlight Cannons, Neutron Purge Beams, Nano Plagues, Psionic Disintegrators...
Any one of them could've swept these pests aside with ease. But for now, all they could do was sit on the sidelines and watch—intervention was off the table.
Li Ang remained silent the entire time, calmly observing the front lines. The Protoss Golden Armada, the Terran Federation in retreat, and the rising strength of the Raiders...
It seemed the Wings of Liberty storyline had reached the three-way conflict phase—the race for the Keystone fragments had begun.
They needed to move even faster.
Back on the ground, David Martinez called in from orbit:
"Paul, the Protoss and Zerg are locked in heavy combat. The Zerg bought you another thirty minutes—this is your last window. Make it count!"
David had already been preparing to order Ootimus prime to pull out—by his calculations, they were out of time. But the Zerg's desperate counterattack had bought them a brief reprieve.
"Copy that!"
Paul and the others had reached the drop zone, where the assault shuttles were due to land. Thanks to the Swarm Queen funneling all resources into producing more Mutalisks, many existing Zerg units had been forcibly recycled—lessening the pressure on Paul's team.
Still, trying to evacuate over twenty civilians was slowing things down considerably.
Had the Zerg and Protoss not begun fighting, Paul would've been forced to abandon the weaker ones and prioritize extracting the engineer.
Then suddenly, a blinding pillar of light crashed down from the sky.
A deafening, bone-rattling boom followed, the kind of sound that made your eardrums throb. The whole planet trembled—as if a catastrophic earthquake had been triggered.
The Golden Armada had just fired its Purification Beam.
The beam's sheer size made it impossible to perceive as anything but a wall of light—vast and endless to the naked eye.
If it weren't for the thousand-meter-tall mountain directly in its path, no one would have understood what they were seeing. The mountain was instantly vaporized—melted like ice cream under a blowtorch.
No one could've imagined such a holy-looking light could be such a devastating weapon.
"It's glass burn!" Chani gasped.
Glass burn was a cheeky nickname used within Universal Megacorp for this sort of orbital annihilation. And no one "played glass burn" better than the Covenant.
As molten materials began to spread outward in blazing, liquid form, Luke and Din Djarin couldn't help but flash back to the last time they'd been hit by an Imperial Star Destroyer's orbital bombardment.
But even those strikes took days to finish. These Protoss beams? They could do it in under half an hour.
"Run! We don't have time!"
Paul shouted at everyone. The Protoss had begun their cleansing protocol, and not even the Zerg's Mutalisk horde could stall them any longer.
In the distance, the surging Zerg were instantly consumed by the tidal wave of molten glass. But this wasn't some artistic amber preservation—these creatures were burned into nothingness the moment they touched the lava.
The Protoss' purification beams were tuned to full power for maximum extinction efficiency. There were only two ways to die here: instant vaporization upon contact with the beam, or slow incineration beneath the rolling tide of molten glass.
Of course, the Zerg didn't care about how they died.
The only ones afraid of death… were Paul and his people.
As the searing heat wave rolled in, the survivors sprinted with everything they had. The drop ships were in sight—freedom was just meters away.
Paul and his team continued to gun down the Zerg blocking their path while frantically hailing orbit for updates.
"What the hell?! I thought we had thirty minutes! Why the beam now?!"
Paul shouted in panic.
[It's just anti-swarm fire. The actual planet-wide Purification Strike hasn't begun yet. Estimate: less than twenty minutes.]
David's reply clarified the situation.
The Purifier had simply fired its main cannon at the Mutalisk swarm, trying to clear them faster. Unfortunately, the beam had torn through the insects and kept going—right down to the planet surface.
Hence the catastrophic destruction.
"Damn it!"
Paul gritted his teeth. If that blast had landed closer, they'd all have been instantly "purified and ascended" on the spot.
Fortunately, that beam eventually faded.
From orbit, it looked like someone had branded the planet's surface with a glowing circular scar—a monk's tonsure mark, as one soldier joked grimly.
But that "scar" covered hundreds of kilometers, and everything within it had been obliterated in a flash.
And this was just a casual shot. Once the Purification Beam was fully charged, it would vaporize all life upon contact, leaving only minutes before planetary sterilization completed.
The survivors, though temporarily spared, didn't stop running. No one knew when the next beam would fall.
Driven by sheer will to live, they kept pushing forward.
Above them, the Golden Armada had wiped out the Mutalisk swarm. Countless Zerg corpses floated in space, incinerated or scattered to dust.
Phoenixes and Interceptors mopped up the stragglers, clearing a safe descent path for the Protoss to take orbital position.
Then came the Purifier's second round of charging.
This one was meant to kill everything.
Paul looked up—what had started as faint glimmers were now hulking ships, clearly visible in the sky. The Protoss had arrived.
But the survivors were already collapsing from exhaustion. Some dropped where they stood, lungs bursting from overexertion.
Most were untrained civilians—unlike Paul, who was a genetically modified super-soldier with psionic enhancements.
For many, death might have been the easier way out.
"I… I can't… I really can't keep going…"
Engineer Payne gasped. His heart felt like it would burst from his chest; his lungs were screaming with blood-filled agony.
One more sprint, and he'd die right there.
"John, take him. Get him to the evac point."
Paul gave the order to the Master Chief. Payne was their best lead on contacting the Raiders—and by far the most valuable survivor.
"What about the others?"
The Chief glanced back at the haggard civilians—half-dead already. They clearly couldn't go any farther.
From a mission success perspective, the logical move was to extract Payne and leave the rest. Let them die in the Protoss cleansing.
It wouldn't cost Universal Megacorp a thing. In fact, doing so would improve the investigation team's survival odds.
"You get Payne out. I'll handle the rest."
Paul didn't say he was abandoning them—he still wanted to try.
"Why can't Megatronus come help? He has teleportation—he could evac them all in one go!"
The Master Chief didn't understand. It was just a matter of asking.
"No, he won't agree. His mission is singular—ensure our safe extraction. Everything else is outside his scope."
Paul smiled bitterly.
Just having Megatronus transferred from the Transformers universe to assist here had already bent the rules.
Asking him to step down and save a few irrelevant humans?
That would cross the line.
By Universal Megacorp's mission protocols, Megatronus had done nothing wrong. And not even Paul, as the team leader, could force him to go against his directive.