Chapter 165: Bioweapons Take the Stage
As the Astartes moved deeper into the command ship in lockstep, the other metal capsule that had embedded itself in the hull began to show signs of movement.
Hiss. Hiss. Hiss.
A pale, sickly vapor rose from the reinforced alloy bulkhead.
The corrosive hiss spread through the corridor like a snake's tongue testing the air, lingering long after it began.
Before long, the metal compartment, built to withstand direct cannon fire, had been eaten through by acidic blood, leaving a gap taller than a person.
Dozens of Aliens crawled out through the breach.
They lifted their heads slowly, looking up at the ventilation ducts overhead. Claws pried the grates open without a sound, and the Aliens slipped inside, crawling along the ducts in every direction.
After the Aliens left, the cryogenic units dedicated to storing the Lickers and Hunters stopped maintaining their low-temperature containment.
The frost coating the tank surfaces began to fade.
Soon, the Lickers and Hunters woke one after another, each tearing open the restraints of its own tank with a single claw.
As the tanks ruptured, a cold, sour gust of air rushed out through the openings.
It was as though they'd received some kind of instruction the instant they woke. Without hesitation, they began climbing toward the deeper sections of the ship.
"Attention! Attention! The command ship has suffered an internal breach. All units prepare for combat immediately!"
"Attention! Attention..."
A piercing alarm sounded throughout the ship.
The cold white light filling the corridors turned a thick, saturated red under the shrieking alarm.
In the command center.
The officer overseeing this engagement looked at the damage report displayed on the panel. After a few seconds of silence, he turned to the adjutant behind him. "Take a unit and check on Sector F, where the impact occurred."
"And the assault on Earth..."
"The assault continues. Don't stop it."
"His Lordship is still waiting for us to deliver our loyalty."
"Go."
"Yes, sir!"
With that, the adjutant led several units toward the area damaged by the impact.
In the red-lit corridors.
Several squads of Chitauri soldiers moved quickly toward the breach in the hull.
Out of concern that high-output energy weapons might cause further damage to the ship's structure, their weapons had been modified, reducing their output well below the levels used by the invasion force.
"Stay alert."
"This operation might be a decapitation strike against us."
"We can't fail His Lordship's expectations." In the narrow, cramped metal corridor, the officer leading the unit spoke in a cold voice.
The red light fell across his ferocious, bio-mechanical face, making him look even more frightening.
The Chitauri were bio-mechanical, a fusion of organic tissue and machinery.
That said, the majority of a Chitauri's body was still organic. At minimum, the various organs and the brain required to sustain life remained inside.
Heavy footsteps echoed steadily through the corridor.
As they advanced toward the damaged section, the man at the front suddenly stopped.
"Hold position." The officer's voice went cold, his gaze fixed on a severed half of a body lodged in the ventilation duct.
He gestured for his subordinates to pull the body out of the duct.
A wet, dragging sound, organs slithering loose from the husk of skin, filled the ears of every Chitauri soldier present.
Once they'd pulled the body out, they could finally see how its owner had died.
The upper torso had been torn open at the chest, the edges ragged with uneven bite marks.
The internal organs had spilled into the ventilation duct, dropping out in a trail as they dragged the body free.
Deep within the duct, a severed head lay motionless.
It looked as though something had punched straight through it. A hole two fingers wide ran from the forehead to the back of the skull, and through it, the blood-stained wall on the other side was visible.
The officer's gaze moved between the duct and the corpse. The small searchlight mounted on his shoulder settled on the dense scratch marks covering the inside of the duct.
"...The intruder killed him through the duct?" the officer murmured.
"This doesn't look like the way humans fight."
"Stay sharp regardless."
"And pass the word: the enemy is likely moving through the ship via the ventilation ducts."
Just as he finished speaking, a chaotic series of impacts echoed from the metal panel ceiling above them.
It sounded like something running around inside the panel.
The Chitauri soldiers who heard it immediately raised their weapons and looked up.
But the moment their heads tilted back, two shapes appeared at either end of the red-lit corridor, covered in scales, thick-clawed forms strong enough to tear through steel.
Hunters.
They appeared, silent as ghosts, at the front and rear of the squad simultaneously.
While the Chitauri soldiers were still looking up to find the source of the sound, both Hunters charged at once!
Leg muscles, reinforced with reptilian DNA, exploded into motion.
Scale-covered, claw-tipped legs struck shallow craters into the metal deck plating.
In an instant, the massive bodies, carrying a wave of foul-smelling air, slammed into the officer at the front of the formation!
The officer had just pulled his gaze back down from the ceiling when something caught the edge of his vision: a dark shape closing in fast.
His hand moved toward his weapon on instinct, but before his finger reached the trigger, the Hunter's barbed claw was already coming down on his head.
Splat!
A dull tearing sound burst through the corridor.
The officer's head separated cleanly from his neck, tumbling against the bulkhead with a heavy thud before rolling to the floor.
The headless body stood there for a moment, stunned, before blood erupted from the stump of his neck and the body collapsed.
The small searchlight on his shoulder was still lit, its beam sweeping erratically through the mist of blood.
"Open fire! Open fire!"
The Chitauri soldiers scrambled to turn their weapons.
But the corridor was barely three meters wide.
And with squadmates ahead and behind, nobody could get their weapon on target in time.
Two seconds later, a few of them finally found their angles.
Just as they were about to pull the trigger...
Crack!
The Hunter swatted the weapon out of the nearest soldier's hands, and tore the entire arm off along with it!
Flesh and mechanical parts mixed together as they slammed into the bulkhead.
The other Hunter struck from behind at the same moment, raking its claws upward. A Chitauri soldier was opened from groin to chest, his organs spilling out across the floor, the stench of blood instantly filling the corridor.
"Hold the line! Hold formation!"
"Don't break! Concentrate your fire!"
The Hunters' scales gleamed coldly under the red light. Their cloudy vertical pupils held no trace of reason. Only one impulse remained.
Kill!
Leave nothing alive!
One Hunter closed its claw around a soldier's head, lifting his entire body off the ground, then squeezed its claws shut.
Crunch!
The helmet collapsed inward along with the skull beneath it. Brain matter leaked out through the gaps, dripping down the claw.
For an ordinary person, witnessing this might have meant losing control of their bladder out of pure terror.
But this kind of brutality didn't frighten the Chitauri, whose own nature was no less brutal.
Chitauri soldiers had far higher combat discipline than an average military force.
Though caught off guard at first, they recovered quickly and reorganized.
The modified energy rounds had reduced output, but at this range, they could still inflict considerable damage.
Boom!
An energy round struck the lead Hunter in the shoulder.
Instantly, its scales shattered, exposing the writhing dark-red muscle tissue underneath.
Seeing that the attack worked, the soldier fired two more rounds.
One hit the Hunter's chest. The other punched through its left knee.
The Hunter staggered, its movements growing noticeably slower.
But it had no intention of stopping.
Even with its knee blown out, it gathered its remaining strength in its right leg and charged forward!
Whoosh.
Its powerful body slammed into the gap between two soldiers like a cannonball!
Ignoring the pain from every part of its body, it lashed out with both claws!
Slash! Slash!
Two more strikes!
The soldier closest to it had his head split diagonally in half. The other had his chest punched clean through.
Behind them, the second Hunter wasn't faring much better.
Three energy rounds had hit its flank, blasting a fist-sized hole in its side, the muscle fibers along the edges scorched black from the heat.
Its internal organs had been damaged too.
In a state like that, even without further attacks, it would die from organ failure within half an hour.
Feeling its life draining away rapidly, the Hunter let out a hiss!
"Hiss-"
It swung a claw backward, severing the gun barrel along with the hand holding it from the soldier who'd shot it.
Blood sprayed from the stump, and the wounded Chitauri soldier tried to fall back from the pain.
But the Hunter wasn't giving him that chance.
Its mouth, lined with rows of teeth, snapped open and swallowed his head whole, like a sack closing over its contents!
That wasn't the end of it.
It whipped its head violently.
There was a sharp tearing sound!
The Chitauri soldier went flying, transformed into something resembling a beheaded man from a Louis XVI execution.
The Hunters had real combat capability, but they were still mass-produced bioweapons, and their defensive capability wasn't especially high.
Under concentrated fire, the Hunters might occasionally dodge a few shots, but absorbing hits directly was the norm.
Large sections of flesh were stripped away by the energy rounds.
By this point, both Hunters were running on fumes.
Even so, driven by the killing instinct burned into their minds, they kept slaughtering everything living around them.
Until they finally lost all signs of life.
Thud.
The Hunters' bodies collapsed at last.
Their heads were nothing but pulp now, their limbs missing or mangled.
But even like that, they had carried out the slaughter to the very end.
The gunfire gradually fell silent.
The corridor sank into dead quiet.
The red light continued flashing soundlessly, casting the scattered corpses and pools of blood in an even more horrifying glow.
Fragments of limbs and machine parts lay scattered everywhere. The bulkheads were sprayed with blood, and the deck plating underfoot had accumulated a layer of thick, sticky blood deep enough to cover the soles of a boot.
The lone surviving Chitauri soldier leaned against the bulkhead, chest heaving, eyes sweeping across the carnage around him.
The squad had left with twelve members. Now only he remained.
"...Command, this is the scout unit. We've encountered intruders." The Chitauri soldier spoke into his communicator.
About two seconds later.
A response came through.
"Status report."
"I'm the only one left alive. The enemy is also dead."
"We don't know whether there are other intruders elsewhere on the ship." The Chitauri soldier replied, eyes constantly sweeping the corridor in both directions, afraid that something else might appear at any moment.
But just as he was scanning his surroundings...
Above him, from a ventilation grate that had been pried open, something was lowering itself down without a sound.
At first, all that descended was a long, smooth, black tail, tipped with sharp, elongated spines.
Then, quickly and silently, the rest of the creature followed, hanging upside down from the duct like a spider.
Not a single sound the entire time.
It appeared above the Chitauri soldier's head as quietly as an assassin emerging from the shadows.
Then-
Splat!
The sharp tail spine drove straight down through the top of his skull.
It punched through his entire body and emerged between his legs.
The Chitauri soldier, now skewered, twitched and convulsed uncontrollably.
The Alien glanced at its still-spasming prey on the end of its tail, then snapped its tail violently!
Whoosh!
The body flew off the tail and slammed into the wall at the end of the corridor.
The red light continued flickering through the corridor.
On the dead body's shoulder, the communicator was still trying to reach the soldier it belonged to.
This time, nobody would answer.
At the same time.
More dark shapes were silently emerging from the ventilation ducts, crawling along the bulkheads and ceiling without a sound, spreading like a tide toward the deeper sections of the ship.
Meanwhile, elsewhere.
The Astartes had already fought their way to the command ship's "Swarm Control Room."
The Swarm Control Room was a central command hub used specifically to control the Chitauri soldiers.
Every Chitauri soldier dispatched to Earth had their consciousness stored here before departure.
This was why, after Iron Man destroyed the Chitauri command ship at the end of Avengers 1, the Chitauri legion on Earth lost connection instantly.
This was the reason.
And it was also why the Chitauri army could be endlessly fed to Earth in the first place.
As long as the Swarm Control Room remained intact, they could keep sending troops to Earth like an assembly line.
Looking at the storage installation in front of them, as tall as a building, the Astartes exchanged a glance, and one after another, they removed timed explosives from their belts and placed them throughout the Swarm Control Room.
Once that was done, they prepared to withdraw.
However.
"Looks like our ship's a complete write-off," said an Astartes with the number Eight marked on his shoulder.
Hearing this, the one marked One turned to face him. "That's easy enough to solve."
"Our ship can't make it back to Earth, sure. But the one thing this ship has no shortage of is vehicles that can."
"So." One's tone shifted. "Head to the vehicle control room."
"As for the timed explosives here, set them to detonate in thirty minutes."
With that, One detached a severed Chitauri forearm from his belt and opened the wrist-mounted holographic map display.
After studying it for a moment, One led the way toward the vehicle control room, the rest of the Astartes falling in behind him, step for step.
In the command center.
The officer overseeing the engagement watched the malfunction zones spreading across the display like a plague, a vicious glint rising in his eyes.
He turned to the freshly assigned adjutant beside him and said, his voice cold: "Authorize the use of heavy weapons inside the ship."
"And pull back some of our forces. The intruders inside this ship must be eliminated, no exceptions."
"Beyond that, the Swarm Control Room needs heavy reinforcement as well, in case they try to destroy the control core."
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