Reed nodded unthinkingly. Losing ground now meant that your position was likely to be considered overly compromised and command would have to cut their losses. That meant nasty things for a city of nearly a billion people.

“We’re going to do what we can to make sure that doesn’t happen, General. Are your troops ready for a counteroffensive?”

The General snorted. “They are tired, hurt, and very, very, angry, colonel. What do you think?”

Reed grinned. “Alright. Then let’s push those bastards right off this rock!”

Squads from the Heroics touched down on every continent where there was fighting ongoing, small teams with heavy weapons lending force where it was needed and sometimes doing everything themselves if that was what it took.

They slammed into the Drasin wall at every juncture, sending the aliens reeling from the surprise and shock of their assault.

It was a moment that the beleaguered defenders of many cities had desperately needed, and when it came they rose up and met it with the last of their strength and ferocity.

Unfortunately, some cities were too far gone.

Eric pulled his mech back, firing everything he had as the wall of Drasin charged down on his position. They’d managed to awaken the beast in a big way when they began evacuating people from Dallas, and for the life of him he couldn’t figure out how or why. During the third hour of the evacuation a squad had been stumbled upon by a couple of Drasin, seemingly roving for whatever it was they needed for the next cycle of replication.

It wasn’t a big deal, or it shouldn’t have been. They’d seen dozens of similar patrols and generally dealt with them easily, but not this time. During the firefight that ensued, one of the Drasin let out a call that Eric had never heard before and rather hoped to never hear again. It reverberated through the remaining buildings of Dallas, the echoes seemingly going on forever.

The men on the ground had still been looking at each other in stunned confusion when the wave appeared—a literal wave of the drones, flooding down a side street and out onto the main drag where the fighting had been located. The team fired, but it was hopeless, and they were literally swept away and sucked under by the motion.

Eric arrived less than a minute later and all he could do was call for a retreat and run.

A fighting retreat is one of the hardest maneuvers to master in tactical combat, and though Eric was a master of it . . . he’d earned his mastery in a fighter plane and not on the ground. He did his best, but the wave was unending. It tore down on his backstop location, and, with fifteen more men inside, Eric ordered the retreat. He then stood right in the center of the street with everything firing on full automatic.