The train cars started to open and unload a variety of deadly payloads. A swarm of cow-sized locust creatures from one car, a hundred lashing tentacles from another, missiles of flesh and bone from a third, exploding orbs of some kind of green glass from a fourth, and so on and on down the length of the serpentine train.

A pair of sleek chrome drones detached from the sides of Galtero’s mech and orbited the giant robotic frame like moons around a planet. Any time one of the locust-things or green glass bombs got close, the drones fired powerful lasers that turned them to ash or slag, respectively. The mech itself wielded a huge energy sword and swept through the incoming mobs easily enough, but they were keeping him from attacking the train directly, along with three of the surviving aliens. Galtero was holding his own against them all and winning, but they were keeping him away.

“It got Alvita!” Kemuel shouted over the comms. Anya saw Alvita’s name on her menu contact list go dark a split second later. She caught a glimpse of one of the cow locusts impaling the slender Jamaican woman with its spear-like legs and that was that. Kemuel screamed and slashed the monstrosity in half with a concentrated gust of wind, but Alvita was already gone. Her body plunged into the dark water below and a mass of tentacles yanked it out of sight.

“No!” Anya said. The train was too big to keep an eye on all at once. Any time she turned to focus on one thing, eight or twelve others changed or moved behind her. There were only four surviving aliens besides the train, child'splay for any one of them at this point, but lethal distractions when paired with the train.

The other hosts were similarly kept distracted and away by them and the train's minions and projetiles, and Anya could see the tell-tale signs of a turning battle. But more train cars kept opening and more unique horrors spilled out of each: a roving cloud that shot lightning, a spinning golden wheel surrounded by blades, what looked like some kind of miniature black hole pulling water and anything else into it, and more.

“Gary! We’re gonna need back-up!” Anya shouted into her comms window. “Send as many Exterminators as you have, now! And another A-M bomb!”

“They’re already on the way, bomb too,” Gary said. “The ones that were in place were taken out all at once when that thing showed up. Just stay alive and be ready to get to a distance of 2 miles.”

“Will do! Make sure the others know!” Anya said and closed her window. Even with her Cognition Acceleration, she couldn’t spare the concentration to relay the message to the other hosts in the area.

Anya ducked under some kind of bony flechettes that the train engine spat out of a panel on its side. Most of them soared past her but the few that did hit her armor sprouted tiny legs and began to drill on their own. Sparks flew up from her light-reinforced plates and she swatted the boney flechette drills away.

Anya used a pair of glue bombs from her belt to seal the flechette compartments shut, then threw hellfire grenades down the train’s open mouth and another in the smokestack. All of them went off at once and the train writhed in pain, frustration, or both.

She flew at the front of the engine and tried to slam one of her blades into its eye. It caught the weapon with its metal eyelid and then it slid its half-seared tongue out of its burning mouth to grab her. The flesh of the tongue blistered and blackened from the heat coming off her before it even got close and Anya growled at the engine as she tried to force its mouth farther open with her feet and breathe fire down its throat. Her spinning fire sword actually managed to cut the tongue off entirely and cauterized the severed muscle shut as it howled again.

Anya had to back off when the purple smoke came for her again. She didn’t know what it could do, but she knew it didn’t care about her heat.

There had only been fifteen alien signals, and Felix confirmed one of them had definitely died because of the datastream. Fourteen aliens had emerged from the train. So where had this——

Anya’s eyes widened.

It was one of Big Al’s pack members. It had to be. There were no other aliens on the planet that hadn’t been accounted for.

Was that what had been going on? The aliens had been prodding their decoys, testing them out with the weaker aliens, just so one of the strong ones could lull them into a false sense of security and ambush them?

“Fuck me,” Anya snarled and focused on her connection with Reggie. She sent her elemental a mental image of a tornado around the train, specifically the engine. Anya directed a wave of heat that would have turned most metals into liquid at Reggie, and the winged serpent grew further, as big around as a small car and the length of a couple city blocks.

“Sam! Hold it still as best you can!” Anya said.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to do!” Samaira said.

“I’ll help!” Somebody yelled. Kemuel flew in, a look of fury and grief on his face.

“My elemental is going to make a cyclone, can you help with that?” Anya asked as she dodged a rain of bone flechettes from another compartment that had opened further along the engine’s side. Kemuel gave her a thumbs up and flew upward to where Reggie had begun flying in a cycle, going faster and faster. The wind was already enough to pull Anya with it and she had to anchor herself with Gravity Dominion.

Samaira created a small glacier to try and hold the upper portion of the train, and Anya pulled every ounce of heat away from the ice and up into the whirling cyclone as it formed. Anya conjured fire and light and spun them together into a searing golden nebula of celestial heat that the cyclone vacuumed upward and spun it round and round.

The ocean was well below freezing, but just a few yards above, the cyclone was a whirling kiln of heat and scorching winds. Kemuel had to back away as his hair began to ignite, but he continued to help Reggie localize the cyclone. Anya used her gravity skills to try and create a sort of gravitational snare around the train’s upper body even as she fed more and more heat into the cyclone. The train was massive, and the increased gravity made its movements weak and sluggish. It let out a howling roar as the wind and fire and ice assailed it.

Further down, Galtero fired his orbital lance at the train’s midsection. He was high up in his mecha in the sky, almost out of sight, when a searing beam of green energy shot down and plunged into and through the train. The ocean exploded around it and the train howled as it was split in two, and obliterated the remaining support aliens.

“Die!” Anya said as she flew up and into the center of the cyclone and began to shred the train engine’s weakened metal exterior. The heat had made it soft and her light-enhanced fore-blades cut through it like warm cheese.

“Bomb incoming! Get out of there!” Gary messaged Anya and the other hosts. Anya’s fire was up, the highest she had ever let it burn. She could keep going too: her fire created light and fed the Crown of the Firmament within her. The Crown itself had materialized at some point during the fight, and wreathed her flaming hair and head in a halo of pure light. Her whole body was engulfed in golden flames, and Reggie was now the size of a subway train himself, almost at his maximum.

Anya could tell Gary to keep his bomb. She was enough. She was turning this freak into molten metal and flesh and she would get the most experience out of the fight, the most levels, and make herself even stronger so that next time——

“Anya get out!” Samaira shouted at her over the comms. At the same time, Reggie sent her a concerned spike of blood red and traffic-light yellow. The train’s single huge eye had been turned to ash long ago, its metal was melting off it like wax off a candle, exposing a bizarre skeletal architecture beneath.

But it wasn’t dead, and her damage to it had driven it mad. The purple smoke had been swept up into the cyclone, and it swirled around her, undisturbed by the the ungodly heat within. Thousands of spectral purple arms reached for Anya, only held away by the hurricane-winds Reggie and Kemuel sustained.

“It’s got me!” One of the other hosts screamed over the comms. It was the one from Cuba, Alejandro.

“I’m coming, the rest of you go!” Galtero said and piloted his mecha towards a writhing mass of train cars and the multitude of terrors they were unleashing.

“I’ve got them distracted!” Harrison said. He had summoned a sizable army of possibly hundreds of demonic creatures, most of them small, but enough to keep the terrors emerging from the train distracted with plenty of targets. “This won’t last forever! We need to go!”

“Shit!” Anya said and flew straight up the center of the cyclone. She summoned Reggie to her with a thought, and the serpent flew up with her. Kemuel had already retreated some distance, and the vortex died as soon as Anya was up.

The train engine howled as it collapsed back into the ocean, lifeless, but the rest of the train still writhed despite its numerous wounds. That was when she saw it: purple smoke seeping out of the innumerable cuts, burns, gashes and breaks she and the other hosts had made along the entire length of the train. The alien wasn’t the train: or at least not just the train. It was the smoke. Or whatever changeable substance that resembled smoke.

The smoke that had been held back by the cyclone coalesced into a thick cloud that sped after Anya once more. As it seeped from the body of the train, it reached for any nearby hosts. She saw it grab Alejandro, who flew with the aide of his cloak. The smoke coiled around his leg and the leg just vanished. She heard Alejandro’s scream from across the waters and he began to fall, but Galtero caught him in the giant metal hand of his mecha and flew away. The smoke followed him as well and the mecha lost most of its left side as multiple smoky tendrils grabbed at it.

“I'm unstable! Back-ups are kicking in but I need help!” Galtero shouted into the comms.

“I’ve got you!” Anya said, once more thinking of how she had just watched Carl get his head slapped off, how Alvita had just vanished beneath the waves. She soared away from the dying engine, away from the smoke that followed her. She created a kind of opposite gravity buffer around her that sent any projectiles or smoke reaching for her flying away in the other direction. It worked on those strange green glass orbs, the bone missiles, the cow-locusts, but it did not affect the smoke. It continued to close in on her from all directions as it closed in on Galtero and Alejandro as the former’s mecha continued to lose altitude.

“Bomb gets there in 30 seconds, Anya,” Gary said.

“Anya we can——” Samaira started to say.

“Get out of here!” Anya shouted. “Gary keep the bomb coming! Sam, you and the rest just run!”

“It’s spreading that smoke shit everywhere. It’s getting wider and wider by the second. If I delay detonation, it could spread out beyond the blast radius.”

“Then don’t delay!” Anya said. She was almost to the mecha, and the smoke was almost touching her. It sensed either her escape or its death, or both, and had sped up considerably to match her speed.

“It’s not a heat bomb, kid. It’s anti-matter. The goopy smoke shit is matter. You’re matter. Fifteen seconds,” Gary said. Anya flew underneath Galtero’s mecha, spinning to one side as the smoke hands grabbed for her. One of its amorphous hands seized her leg and she reinforced the armor there with light. The tendril sparked and more joined it, clutching at both her legs now. She made the gravity around Galtero’s mecha all but non-existent, making a zero-G bubble around it.

The smoke was destroying her light defenses, now actually touching the bare armor. Gary’s advanced alloys held up, and so did the armor’s additional charms and Samaira’s runes, but the smoke was actively pulling on her now. It was far more substantial than its appearance would have lead her to believe, slowing her down and away from the now weightless mecha. Worse, it was sending more tendrils towards her face and her nose and mouth. She didn’t want to think of what it would do if it managed to get into her lungs.

Anya put two powerful and opposing gravitational points on either end of Galtero’s mecha, like pulling against the resistance for a slingshot. She made the mecha itself as close to weightless as possible, then sent Reggie a picture of him coiling around her and the mech together. Reggie obliged and secured himself to Anya and the mech just as the tendrils of purple smoke closed in on her face.

She released the hold on one of the gravity wells behind the mech and it immediately shot forward. Anya sent another picture to Reggie, of him flapping his now huge wings to propel them even more, and he once again obliged. The mech, Galtero, Alejandro, Anya, and Reggie soared away, the purple smoke finally lagging behind.

Anya glanced behind her and saw the smoke and the train it was attached to still chasing after them. The damage she and the other hosts had done to it had slowed it down enough that everybody else had managed to escape and Anya was not only staying ahead of the smoke, but increasing the distance between them. Galtero, for his part, was making his mech fly as best he could and helping to propel them, even though it wasn’t much.

“We’re clear!” Anya said to Gary. No sooner had she sent him the message than she saw a tiny pinpoint of light descend toward the ocean and the center of where the train’s body was. She immediately looked away and squinted her eyes against the flare of unnatural light. It wasn’t anything that would fuel her Sun’s Heart or do anything but unmake whatever was inside of it. The train gave a final howl that was cut short.

“Datastream detected!” Felix said. “Signal gone! It’s dead!”

“Thank god,” Anya said. “Keep pinging for alien signs. I’ll play the living decoy for now. Galtero! Can you fly back to field command with Alejandro?”

“I can, but it’ll be slow,” Galtero said over comms.

“I’ll take him,” Francis said as he decloaked on his hovercycle beside Anya. She raised an eyebrow at him but didn’t see as they had much choice. She pulled a small, chrome device out of one of her utility pouches as Galtero set his mecah to hover and held Alejandro out in the palm.

Alejandro had dark tan skin, but it had turned ashen from blood loss. His leg below mid-thigh was gone, and the end of his stump looked like it had been exposed to some unknown and terrifying chemical. The bone that poked out was riddled with holes that steamed, the muscle tissue had almost turned to a kind of fluid, and the skin around the stump had blistered and turned an unhealthy purple color.

Anya pointed the chrome device, shaped like a snub-nosed pistol, at the raw wound. Pale greenish gel squirted out of it and turned to foam on contact with Alejandro’s injury. He moaned, barely conscious. The foam hardened into a plaster-like consistency and Anya sighed as she placed the now empty healing device back in her pouch.

“He’ll be okay until Samaira or another healer can get to him and do something more. Tell Dr. Immonen when you get a chance,” Anya said. “Thanks Francis.”

“Yeah,” Francis said and shrugged as he took Alejandro from Anya and put him in front of himself on his cycle. Both men and the cycle vanished and Anya felt a rush of air as he sped off.

“Gary,” Anya said as she brought up her menu, “send a few of your drones and Exterminators with me back to the attack site if you can spare them. I’m going to make sure we’re alone here. How are the other teams?”

“I’ve already got some patrolling the area. They’ll follow your lead. As for the others…it’s bad news,” Gary said.

“Ambushed?” she asked. Gary nodded.

“Three hosts dead on Team Two, two hosts dead on Team Three, and six hosts dead on Team Four,” Gary said. “So with the one we lost, it’s twelve total. Lots of pretty serious injuries, too.”

“God dammit,” Anya grit her teeth. “What about you all back on the island? And the other command areas?”

“Everybody at each field command is fine,” Gary said. “Immonen’s currently healing Team Two’s wounded, already almost exhausted himself though. Old Lady Yai is picking up the slack on Team Three, but she’s almost tapped out as well. Team Four’s dedicated healer tried to charge in during the fighting to save somebody and got sliced up by a ferris wheel. The other Team Four hosts are doing what they can to stabilize the wounded.”

“But the aliens?” Anya asked.

“Dead, near as I can tell from the chatter. Ours was the last to die. I don’t have the hard data yet, but I’d guess they’re all from Big Al’s pack.”

“Yeah they’d have to be,” Anya said. She took a breath and glared at the horizon. “All right. I’m going to sweep the area. I’ll be back once things settle down. Just have another bomb ready to go if we need it.”

“Will do. Watch your ass, kid,” Gary said and his window closed.

“I’m coming with you,” Galtero said.

“No way. Your big robot is wrecked to hell.”

“I have more than one,” Galtero said as the chest of the mecha opened and revealed a much smaller, but still large mecha within. It was closer in size and style to the Exterminators Gary made, but it was in better shape than the multi-story mecha it came from. The big mecha eased away from its smaller cousin and then flew up into the sky, engines sputtering and leaving a trail of smoke behind it.

“Where’s it going?” Anya asked.

“Holding satellite until I can repair it at my factory,” Galtero said. “This one isn’t as strong but it’s tougher than your friend Gary’s Exterminators. C’mon!”

Galtero rocketed away and Anya grumbled as she flew after him with Reggie coiled close, back to his usual small size.

The aliens had played them. A host had been killed right in front of her in an instant, and once again, she’d failed to do anything to stop it.