Chapter 382: Blood Hunters! Colossus Siege Engines! Weather Weapons!
"Well? Not bad, right? We do good work."
Fresh from the frontlines, Tosh flashed a confident smile at Paul, clearly fishing for praise. He could tell that the Universal Megacorp had deep pockets—it was a rare big client.
If he played his cards right in front of a Megacorp like this, maybe he could land a long-term contract for his mercenary group—and snag some Terazine resources on the side while he was at it.
"Not bad at all."
Paul nodded in agreement. The combat performance of Tosh's Ghost operatives had been unexpectedly impressive.
Their psionic powers were strong enough to disrupt even Protoss operations. Compared to training Jedi-like warriors, these psionic soldiers seemed cheaper and more efficient to produce.
If the Megacorp could gain control over the production pipeline for psionic warriors, it could potentially mass-produce supernaturally gifted soldiers.
From cybernetically enhanced troopers to Astartes-level supersoldiers, and now psionic combatants—the Megacorp was rocketing down the path to becoming divine.
At this rate, the age of corporate-sponsored cultivation and universal ascension might not be that far off.
"Interested in setting up a long-term partnership? Give us enough Terazine, vespene gas, and energy crystals, and this unit is yours to command," Tosh offered smoothly, hoping to lock in another major contract.
"I'll seriously consider your services. But right now, your priority is dealing with the Tal'darim."
Paul's reply was measured and polite. But deep down, he was already planning for the future: once they took Bysel and secured its Terazine veins, the Megacorp would have more than enough leverage to slash the cost of producing psionic warriors internally.
Why keep paying Tosh's rates when you could develop an in-house army?
By then, Tosh and his Ghosts would have only two choices—join the Megacorp machine, or watch it monopolize every local resource while they starved.
"No rush. You'll see just how cost-effective our Ghosts are. Take your time and think it over," Tosh replied coolly. He was confident that even in the entire Koprulu sector, few elite units could rival his operatives.
Clearly, he had no idea just how vast the Megacorp's industrial reach really was.
Paul said no more. The immediate task was to capture the Keystone Fragment and conquer Bysel once and for all.
---
Meanwhile, the Tal'darim offensive had suffered repeated setbacks at the hands of the Megacorp coalition. The Protoss Executor Naeon was growing furious—he couldn't tolerate these filthy apes continuing to defile Tal'darim holy ground.
After witnessing the failure of the harassment squads, he finally issued the order for a full-scale assault. This time, he meant to wipe the humans out completely.
"All brave warriors of the Tal'darim!"
"Obey my command—slaughter every human here and let these wretched lowborns know the price of insulting the chosen servants of the Xel'Naga!"
In the StarCraft universe, the Protoss were easily among the most species-supremacist civilizations. They saw themselves as the divine elect and looked down on all other life equally.
Humans, of course, were no exception.
With a wave of Naeon's hand, dozens of teleport flares burst from the crystal towers behind him—Tal'darim warp-in systems lighting up the skies.
To assemble this final charge, Naeon had called nearly every Tal'darim unit on Bysel to this battlefield for a last-ditch showdown against theMegacorp's combined forces.
In an instant, mountains and plains were swarmed with roaring Tal'darim warriors, launching a frenzied suicide charge at the Megacorp lines.
Agile Slayers used their phase dashes to probe for cracks in the enemy defenses, trying to tear open a breach.
Among their ranks was a newly introduced heavy armor unit—equipped with dual phase-disruption cannons and fortified with a Hardened Shield.
The Tal'darim called them Immortals.
Thanks to their thick shielding and robust armor, the Immortals managed to push forward through heavy fire. Behind their moving walls, the rest of the warriors crept closer to the Megacorp's defensive lines.
The Tal'darim's combined infantry-armor tactics were paying off; they were making headway—much more effective than the Slayers' earlier skirmishes.
But Immortals were not invincible.
Like Slayers, Immortals were once Protoss who had suffered crippling defeats in duels, and now continued to serve their caste through cybernetic warfare—sacrificing what remained of their bodies to uphold their honor.
Within Tal'darim society, there existed a brutal ladder called the Chain of Ascension.
Lesser Protoss could challenge their betters to rise in rank. Such duels were often deadly. Losers who survived became Immortals or Slayers—machines of war seeking redemption through combat.
Filtered through layer upon layer of attrition, these Immortals pressed forward, shrugging off hardlight turret blasts as they led the charge right up to the Megacorp frontlines.
Once in range, they unleashed scarlet barrages from their twin cannons, tearing through fire support installations.
Even though the Megacorp had deployed defensive shield fields, the sheer volume of enemy fire—and the relentless swarm—was starting to wear down the frontline's structural integrity.
The final battle for Bysel had begun. Both sides were prepared to fight to the last.
Wave after wave of Protoss troops poured in through Warp Prisms, rapidly reinforcing the highland battlefield.
It was clear Naeon intended to drown the human invaders in a storm of bodies.
The Megacorp's hardlight turrets were working overtime, charging up as fast as they could, trying to neutralize the advancing Immortals. But only focused fire from multiple turrets at once could take down those armored behemoths quickly.
A single turret's blast just didn't do enough damage fast enough.
Just as one group of turrets reached full charge, strange pulses of void energy enveloped them.
The AI-controlled guns—mid-fire—suddenly froze in place. Even the beams already released hung motionless in the air.
As though time itself had been stopped, the battlefield defied all logic.
Seeing this bizarre phenomenon, Panam Wells shouted urgently at the gun control center: "What the hell just happened? Why did the turrets stop firing?!"
Without those turrets, the first line of defense was about to collapse under the Tal'darim charge.
[System diagnostics show no malfunctions. All AI hardlight turrets are reading fully operational… but they just won't run!]
The command center responded with confusion. Everything seemed fine on paper—no error codes, no system faults.
But the guns weren't working.
Even more bizarre was what came next.
The void-wrapped turrets slowly turned translucent—phantom-like—fading from the battlefield as if they had never existed.
Then, from behind the Megacorp lines, shadowy figures appeared—wielding crimson blades. In the blink of an eye, a dozen soldiers were slain.
And just as quickly, the assassins vanished.
By the time Anyone reacted, all they found were bodies—and no sign of the killers.
"Enemy infiltrators!"
The alarm had barely gone out before the sickening shkkt of plasma blades echoed again. More soldiers were carved down.
Nobody had seen them coming. Luckily, the omnipresent AI drones had captured it all, feeding the footage straight back to command.
Watching the kill-cam feed, Paul's expression turned grim. The Megacorp had stealth units too—like the Marauder squads from the Iron Hands legion, who used advanced optical camo for infiltration.
But this level of ghostly precision? Even they couldn't manage that.
This campaign's turning out to be a lot messier than I expected. The Tal'darim won't go down easy...
Paul's thoughts darkened.
"Dark Templar? That can't be right. Why would they be helping the Tal'darim?" Jim Raynor muttered in disbelief. He had fought alongside Protoss before—he knew their internal divisions.
The Tal'darim were the ultimate loners among the Protoss. Their relations with the other tribes were hostile at best. It made no sense for Dark Templar to show up here.
"What are you thinking? Those aren't Dark Templar," Tosh said with a scoff. "They're Blood Hunters. Just because they use Void energy doesn't mean they're from the Nerazim."
"The Tal'darim have used Terazine to commune with their god Amon for years. Having a few fancy tricks up their sleeve? Not surprising."
And Tosh was right.
These stealthy assassins were Tal'darim Blood Hunters. Using their Void Stasis ability, they had temporarily phased the Megacorp's hardlight turrets into the Void dimension.
Void Stasis created a localized pocket of stretched dimensional time, freezing all matter within it—rendering defenses inert while the Tal'darim advanced.
Although the stasis effect wouldn't last long, the AI hardlight turrets of the Megacorp were effectively neutralized for the moment—giving the Tal'darim troops a rare opportunity to charge in unopposed.
As for the Blood Hunters and their incredible stealth, they were quickly becoming a nightmare on the battlefield. More terrifying than the visible firepower exchanges was the looming, unpredictable threat of sudden death. The psychological pressure this put on soldiers was immense.
At the same time, the Tal'darim's Colossus units finally arrived on the battlefield, attempting to break the front line once and for all.
These were colossal siege engines, moving on four long, slender mechanical legs—each step covering over 50 meters. At a glance, they looked like super-sized Imperial Walkers on steroids.
Despite the Megacorp's base being set on high ground, the Colossi loomed even higher—raining fire down from above in a brutal reversal.
They resembled oversized Slayers, with two focused thermal beam cannons mounted on each side of their thick armored carapace. Thanks to their towering height and sweeping arcs, their cutting beams could slash across entire units at once—reducing scores of soldiers to ash.
Through the frontline AI drones, Paul could see as the Colossus beams sliced through a squad of troops—their powered armor literally melted into molten slag.
Flesh, bone, and metal fused into puddles of liquified death. The fallen couldn't even leave behind intact corpses—just steaming, glowing wreckage.
Soon after, a Colossus swept its beams over a trench filled with defenders, instantly turning the shelter into a raging inferno.
What had been a defensive bunker became a deathtrap—an oven that incinerated its occupants.
Just as the Tal'darim soldiers surged to press the advantage, they were met with another surprise: fresh waves of AI Sentinel Robots emerged, holding the line.
By this stage of the Megacorp's military development, only the very best human warriors remained on the front lines. Standard combat roles had long since been replaced by Sentinels and AI clones.
Though Paul hadn't brought many elite troops to this operation, he had brought plenty of Sentinels.
And these machines didn't fear fire. Their bodies were built using the same liquid-metal morphing tech as the T-1000 infiltration models. Unless exposed to corrosive acid, even if they were melted down by extreme heat, they could self-repair and rejoin the fight.
Facing these virtually unkillable units, the Tal'darim warriors were thrown off. They'd fought robots before—but machines that melted into pools and reformed? That was something new.
As the Tal'darim prepared to resume their charge and overrun the line, rain began to fall.
They looked up, bewildered, to see dark storm clouds blanketing the sky—when had that happened?
The downpour came fast and heavy. Fat raindrops pelted the battlefield, drenching everyone. Executor Naeon felt a chill run down his spine. This wasn't normal—this wasn't even the rainy season, let alone the kind of weather that would produce a sudden, massive thunderstorm.
"Could this be a psionic storm? But... how could humans possess that kind of power?" Naeon was deeply unsettled.
Among the Protoss, only high-level Templar could channel their psionic power into devastating storms—psionic stormmasters who could call forth lightning and wind on command.
Even then, such talent was rare. The idea of humans achieving it? Unthinkable.
But this wasn't a psionic storm.
Back at the Megacorp's base, weather-control weapons had been activated at full capacity.
As a civilization built on massive-scale infrastructure, the Megacorp had long since mastered weather manipulation. Making it rain was child's play to them.
When Paul saw the Colossi unleashing intense thermal radiation, he had an idea: the searing heat would warm the surrounding air, causing rapid upward drafts.
That, in turn, would generate cumulonimbus thunderclouds. The Megacorp's weather weapons simply accelerated the process, pulling together latent storm energy already present in the atmosphere.
The result: a full-blown engineered superstorm, blanketing the battlefield.
"Pull your people back—lightning's about to start," Paul said calmly, eyes locked on the holographic battle display.
He hadn't deployed many human troops to the trenches anyway. If the AI Sentinels got zapped, they could reboot and return to service.
But the Rangers? Flesh and blood. They wouldn't survive a lightning strike.
Before Raynor could respond, a bolt of lightning crashed down from the sky—striking dead-center in the middle of a Tal'darim battalion.
A massive section of their forces was instantly incinerated.
The lightning was directional, precise—not something nature could produce on its own. And that was just the start.
A greater storm was still forming in the clouds above, and it looked poised to obliterate the entire frontline.
Seeing the raw, apocalyptic power of the Megacorp's "weather weapons," Jim Raynor didn't hesitate—he issued an immediate retreat order to the Rangers.
"All units—fall back! Leave the gear, just MOVE!"
Raynor couldn't afford to lose his only soldiers. If he burned through his last reserves, he'd have nothing left—just a title and no teeth.
Within moments, Ranger squads near the storm's edge began pulling out fast.
All human personnel took cover at a distance—only the AI Sentinels remained, standing their ground like unfeeling statues.
The Tal'darim weren't so lucky.
Their army was right under the storm's core. Worse, more and more troops were being warped in via Warp Prisms—right into the eye of the storm.
Mass deployment made retreat impossible. The muddy, rain-slicked terrain only added to the chaos—psionic warriors were slipping and losing balance.
With thunder cracking overhead and lightning flashing, panic began to ripple through the Tal'darim ranks. Their comms grew erratic. Orders weren't getting through.
BOOM—!
A massive wave of lightning tore down from the heavens—hundreds of bolts, like a waterfall of electricity.
The ground lit up in white-hot arcs as thousands were vaporized in seconds.
Even those who raised their psionic shields had no chance. The relentless lightning storm quickly overloaded their defenses, leaving them exposed.
Without those shields, Tal'darim warriors were forced to tank the storm directly. And that meant only one outcome—charred corpses.
Slayers tried to dodge and weave using phase shifts, but the sheer volume of lightning turned the battlefield into a prison of energy. There was nowhere to run.
They weren't Sentinels—they couldn't heal from this.
Even the towering Colossi faltered under the sustained barrage. Their immense size brought immense drawbacks—namely, they couldn't turn or maneuver fast enough.
Massive targets. Sitting ducks.
Their shields went down fast, and the metal husks that remained stood frozen, fried by the storm.
Worse still, their gigantic metal frames made them perfect lightning rods.
The moment one Colossus was struck, the bolt triggered an internal explosion, scattering shrapnel across nearby squads.
Lightning and flying debris mowed down wave after wave of Tal'darim troops. Executor Naeon could only watch in horror as his army was shredded by a storm they couldn't fight.
Now, surrounded by his elite guards, Naeon could barely stay alive—let alone restore order.
His only hope now was in the Blood Hunters he had deployed behind enemy lines.
If they could locate the weather-control systems and disable them with their void stasis ability, they might still turn the tide.
But Paul had already anticipated this move.
He'd stationed elite forces near the weather weapon systems, waiting for those assassins to show themselves.
"Your weather weapons... they've evolved to this level? That's terrifying," Raynor muttered as he watched the frontlines get purged in an artificial thunderstorm.
Thousands of psionic warriors wiped out in minutes.
Paul didn't know how to respond. After all, the Megacorp didn't usually use weather weapons in warfare.
They were designed for agriculture, not carnage.
Efficient, lethal weaponry? The Megacorp had plenty of those. The main role of the climate-control systems was to optimize crop growth.
Each carrier housed its own full-scale ecosystem. Once a new habitable world was secured, the Megacorp decided whether to farm or mine—based on the local environment.
In normal times, these systems helped grow food.
But on Bysel? They'd become weapons of mass destruction.
"We still haven't detected the Blood Hunters," Matt Horner warned Paul. "I'm worried they'll sneak in and sabotage the weather systems."
"Don't worry. I've already stationed personnel to intercept them," Paul replied confidently.
Against ordinary human units like the Rangers, Blood Hunters were ghostly nightmares. The humans had no real way to detect or counter them.
But their cloaking wasn't flawless.
Zerg Overlords could detect their movement. And within the Megacorp, there were individuals like Paul, Chani, and Luke—whose senses had been enhanced by spice or the Force.
With their heightened perception, no Blood Hunter could hide.
At that moment, Luke Skywalker stood watch near the climate control system.
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