Kaerin
It was the way the insects moved that caught his eye. The pattern changed before anything else did. A complete copy of events that happened while in the hive. It did not spell good news.
"Debrief now!"
"They've set up a planetary hive at the hill nearby, Went to take them out, something happened and they turned their attention to the ship. We couldn't stop them." Verrik spoke, standing three meters off to the left, as if reading out a forecast instead of counting enemies closing in on them.
"Nothing else to add,?" Kaerin asked, already doing mental calculations on what that meant as the insects continued to approach in steadily coordinated waves. It was times like this that Kaerin loved, a challenge in itself and a chance to fight. There was nothing that brought him more joy. Yet here he was still worrying about the specifics.
Kinsley," spoke Kaerin through the comm, his voice slipping beneath the sounds crowding in. Kinsley was hidden in a crevice on one of the set-up workshop tents to act as their long-range shooter. He wasn't a hundred percent but he was making up for it with everything that he had.
"thirty-three remaining," came the reply, clipped and precise from wherever Kinsley had positioned himself at range. "Down from seventy-one. They're grouping in two clusters. One on us. One at the ship's east side."
That confirmed it.
"What's at the ship's east side?" Kaerin said.
A pause.
"As far as Lan described, it leads to his main workshop adjacent to the ship."
Lan was doing something, wasn't he? He could only sigh as he prepared to deal with it. An elbow slammed into the creature's shell, movement sparked from the bounce. Watching, Kaerin noted how the swarm held form. The group near the ship moved with purpose, no chaos in their flow. Low-level insects, while weak, made it up in numbers, and numbers were the worst bit of all of this mess.
"Hold positions," he said. "I'll check the east."
His gaze snapped in that direction. Locked in a struggle with a warrior breed, fingers tight on its arm to block the snapping jaws from his neck.
"On your own," came the words from a disbelieving Verrik. Neither asking nor stating but it sure did sound like judgment.
"I won't be long."
"You are not EVEN SUPPOSED TO BE FIGHTING."
At this point, he was used to such talks and promptly ignored his teammates. He went on ahead. Numbers were down so much that just the three could handle the big group for a little while. Skirting the edge of the base, he stayed close to the ground, moving through slopes and raised metal panels like Lan designed. Each turn gave view and shelter all at once.
He was stopped on the way by some rather insistent warrior insects whom he had fun throwing and swinging and flinging towards the rather sturdy ship exterior, barring the windows of course. Still standing firm even when everything fell apart. Every piece spoke of four full years shaped by intent. You could see it everywhere.
A whisper of movement caught him just before the turn. He could now clearly feel what was buzzing in his mind as he drew nearer. Lan was definitely using his powers but for what? The air shifted near the eastern edge. Something wasn't right. His body froze mid-step.
Something shifted inside him as he looked at the scene. His thoughts moved a different way, one he seldom followed. It then went quiet.
Lan stood near the rear of the compound, a bow held loosely in one grip. His face showed something new. Kaerin noticed it right away. Gone was the calm mask he used during talks. The usual impatience around uninvited people? Missing too. Instead, there was an edge. A twitch near his lips, almost pleased but not quite settled.
Around him lay nine insects scattered across the soil.
Their heads had vanished.
One moment they were there. Then empty shells, like something deep inside just quit holding on. The earth stained black around where they fell, close enough that time hardly passed between each. His eyes moved to Lan. Then settled on the bugs. Back to Lan once more.
A sudden turn from one of the leftover hull shapes caught Lan's attention. He moved with purposeful motion, pulled his grip higher on the bow. Down it went again, just as quick. He then turned his head towards one of the other insects and Kaerin felt something he had never quite felt before, and not in any of those attraction-like feelings. Instead, it was the oddest thing he had ever heard or felt. The insects, however… it was the same feeling that Kaerin felt whenever an insect queen attacked them with its screams. He couldn't help but shiver. The Watchfulness gave way to curiosity behind his stare.
The change came through clearly, Kaerin could even feel it,as weight in thought tightened, narrowed. Movement froze in the creature. Up lifted its feelers, slow. A noise followed, deep, hesitant, nothing like prior insect sounds. Back it slid, without delay.
An insect died from mental power.
From a male zerg.
It was shocking.
Facts fell into place on their own. Lan sat beyond classification, ranked SS+ male. No file had ever logged that before. Even males who had S+ Mental strength could at most corrupt a female or subfemale depending on their level of control…not this physical manifestation he was seeing. His mind wasn't deceiving himself either; Lan really was physically using his mental power.
Insects moved as one mind, tied together by thought alone from an insect queen of the hive. Kind of like shared signals passing between them. The way they followed orders without sound? That happened inside the head. A strong Male Zerg at S+ level could twist a female Zerg's inner control - if that worked, then someone stronger, at SS+, might reach further. Maybe beyond females entirely. Distance didn't seem to matter much too it seemed.
Something simply went unchecked. Insects never crossed paths with male zergs. Kept away from fighting, held back, shielded. When one rare moment put a male near such creatures, it vanished - buried for safety, files locked, results hidden, untouched by light.
Few darted toward the ship's edge. He watched bugs swarming near Lan instead of attacking. Not one moved close. Several veered off, sliding backward into shadow.
Staring down, he saw those bodies lying there - headless. Their forms stretched flat beneath his gaze. He couldn't help but feel more shocked.
Kaerin was caught somewhere between exasperation and a kind of reluctant awe that he would not be naming out loud.
He took a step forward.
Something in the air shifted. Lan's pheromone concentration was higher than usual, the mental expenditure driving it up past what he normally kept suppressed, and the effect on Kaerin's constitution was an immediate and unwelcome warmth at the base of his skull that he identified, catalogued, and firmly set aside. Not now. Not with insects in the compound. Not ever, if he could manage it, which he increasingly suspected he could not but that was a separate problem.
An insect peeled from the hull cluster and launched itself directly at where Kaerin was standing.
He jumped, not his most dignified movement; nevertheless, the insect sailed through the space where he had been, hit the ground, and was dead before Kaerin landed, thrown wide by a burst of telekinetic force that hadn't come from him.
He landed. Looked up.
Lan was looking at him with an expression that conveyed, without any particular warmth, that he had just been watched failing to notice an incoming insect while standing around staring.
"Done daydreaming?" Lan said. He was already tracking the next movement in the cluster, attention split without apparent effort.
Kaerin brushed dust from his sleeve. He found his voice. "What," he said, with the tone of a man who had walked around a corner expecting a standard problem and found a completely different category of problem entirely, "do you think you are doing?"
"Defending my compound."
"Alone. Outside. With your mental power open."
"Yes."
"After I specifically said not to do that."
Lan glanced at him with a look of absolute non-remorse. "You said that. I didn't agree."
Kaerin felt something move through his chest that he chose to call frustration. It was easier than the alternative. "You walked out a back hatch to fight a swarm by yourself because you were sulking."
Lan paused.
It was brief, barely a fraction. But Kaerin caught it because he always caught Lan's fractions. An insect lunged from the left, moving fast, angling for Lan's blind spot.
Kaerin stepped in and drove his blade through its skull before it covered half the distance. The body dropped between them.
"The tables," Kaerin said, with the mildest possible inflection jokingly, "have turned."
Lan looked at the dead insect. He looked at Kaerin. His tail moved once, a single sharp flick that Kaerin had come to understand meant something between irritation and acknowledgement.
"I wasn't sulking," Lan said.
"Of course not."
"I wasn't."
"You left through a back hatch to fight a swarm alone rather than stay near people who were offering to help you. You can call it whatever you like."
Lan opened his mouth.
"You were also right," Kaerin added. "About the compound. They had no right to lock you in but they don't know you can protect yourself you know."
Lan closed his mouth.
Kaerin watched him recalibrate. It was always interesting to observe, the moment Lan encountered something that did not fit his current model of the situation. The slight pause. The tail that stilled. The eyes that sharpened and then carefully settled back to neutral.
"You're not shocked," Lan said finally in genuine assessment.
"About the sulking?"
"About that." Lan's chin angled slightly toward the insects on the ground, and then, with characteristic understatement, toward himself.
Kaerin considered it. "I stopped applying standard logic to you. Results improved."
Lan stared at him for a moment.
"That is not an answer."
"The one you want?." Kaerin moved to cover Lan's left side as another insect broke from the cluster. He put it down with two shots and stepped back into position. "You are SS+ class. I have no idea what the upper range of that looks like. No one does. There is no record of it. I can do things most if not all, things that females can't do too physically; who's to say you aren't similar." He paused, watching the swarm's movement. "Its impressive though, almost though you were an insect; however, best to hide it from the rest."
Lan was quiet.
"Additionally," Kaerin continued, "males are never placed in direct insect combat. The cases that did occur were suppressed for identity protection. So the data set is nearly empty."
"There can be more like me out there..." Kaerin risked a glance at Lan who looked almost hopefull but he'd rather not beak his hopes soon. He diverted instead.
"We will need to discuss this properly," Kaerin said. "Later. Focus on saving your home first."
Lan looked at him for a moment longer than comfortable, and then something that had been braced in his posture quietly settled. "Fine," he said, and turned back to the swarm.
They fought in silence for a short while. Kaerin found his rhythm adjusting to Lan's without conscious effort, covering angles Lan left open, pulling back from the ones Lan had already tracked. It was not so different from fighting with Verrik, except Verrik had twelve years of shared combat to draw on and Lan had none, and somehow it still worked.
He found himself watching Lan between targets. The sharp economy of it. No wasted movement. No hesitation when something new entered his range. He tested the new frequency with the precision of someone running experiments rather than fighting for survival, and the result was the same either way because for Lan those appeared to be compatible activities.
Kaerin felt something he did not entirely mean to feel. Something close to ease.
He had not fought beside someone who matched his focus in a long time.
"They're not slowing down," Lan said.
Kaerin scanned the cluster. Lan was right. The main swarm was thinning, but the hull group maintained its numbers. They were being fed replacements from somewhere, insects that arrived in small groups from the eastern perimeter and immediately joined the hull effort rather than the general fight.
"Apart from you, they're ignoring the fight to get to the hull," Kaerin said.
Lan dispatched an insect with two economical shots and kept moving. "The ship's power system runs on activated mineral deposits. My mental power reacted to them during the spar unintentionally. They might have sensed it."
Kaerin processed that. "Your power reacts with the mineral? Never mind, go on."
"That, and your recon team walking back from the hill deposits...its where I mine the mineral." Lan's voice was flat and annoyed; he wasn't fond of his colleagues, and Kaerin understood it from his side. "Between the two sources, they had coordinates within an afternoon."
The hill. Verrik and Mantis had gone up the northern ridge. The mineral deposits Kinsley had flagged during their initial scans sat near that ridge. They had gone right past them.
"The ship itself is intact," Lan continued. "The mineral deposits are mostly in the outer sections. The weakened reinforced glass panels, the hull junctions. They'll work through those first."
"How do we stop them from focusing there."
Lan went quiet for two seconds. That particular silence meant he was already sorting through options. "If we can redirect their attention. Pull the activation away from the outer sections toward a single concentrated point. They'll cluster to me instead of spreading along the hull."
"And then."
"And then I deal with the cluster." He said it without emphasis, the way he said most things that should have been significantly more dramatic.
Kaerin looked at him.
"You would be drawing a concentrated swarm to a single point and then standing in front of it."
"Yes."
"That is your solution?"
"…It's efficient."
Kaerin rubbed the bridge of his nose. So audacious! He begrudgingly felt proud that someone out there had crazy ideas just like him, but for some reason, he wasn't happy that it was Lan specifically putting himself in harm's way. He also knew himself well enough to know that he never stopped when told to with those crazy plans, and it would be hypocritical of him to try and argue otherwise or talk lan out of it. The least he could do...
"I'll be beside you," Kaerin said.
Lan glanced at him. "You don't have to."
"I know."
Another silence. Then Lan looked away. "Don't get in my way," he said, which in Lan's register was approximately equivalent to thank you, and Kaerin accepted it as such.
They kept fighting while the plan took shape between them, and Kaerin noted, with the quiet private part of himself that he allowed honest observations, that Lan's shoulders had dropped two centimetres since they started talking.