Cataclysm, Pt 12

You push back against your self doubt, and your apprehensiveness. If you don't help in doing anything at all, you might all end up dead. Either trampled to death by the rampaging bugs, or erased by the incoming shadow creature.

Either scenario frightens you terribly.

As you rack your brain in search of a way through these insurmountable problems, the relieved soldiers rush to reload all of their spent magazines and strap them into their pouches. The few that are done faster than the rest of their team quickly tag in and get straight to the fight.

They slip into their roles rather easily, and enter their hyper focused combat states with little issue. They clearly know what they need to do, something you wish you had insight on.

It's the same with Kaja. She's certainly not a soldier, and doesn't have their particular brand of discipline. But she still takes to her task easily. Everyone around you seems to know what to do and how to do it, which leaves you desperately wanting.

You can only watch in awe as they all bring what they've got to bear to this massive fight. In fact, you can see each and every one of them get more and more worn out as time goes on, as they pour their whole selves into this harrowing defense.

Much like the insects attacking you, everyone is working in conjunction as best they can. And it dawns on you that even though people don't operate with a hive-mind like the insects, they seem to settle into a similar thought pattern.

It's like they all act as one - when Kaja swipes at a dozen or so insects, the soldiers do their best to catch stragglers. And it's the same when it goes the other way. If the soldiers concentrate their fire into a particularly nasty cluster of bugs, Kaja sweeps in to pick off any they don't catch. Even the officer is swept up in their orchestra, directing and conducting the carnage with a deft and practiced hand.

Their thoughts and emotions swirl all around, indirectly affecting each other, and guiding their actions as a whole. When one of them moves, the rest follow suit in their own way, and add to the symphony with their own destructive notes.

It occurs to you that you could, perhaps, influence it. After all, only you can see how everyone is swept up by everyone else around them. You could help the officer conduct it all, somehow, some way.

You wonder if you could do something like abate the fears they're all feeling - that lingering dread that seems to be eating away at their cores. It's like an acid that's constantly wearing away at their resolve and will to fight. The closer the bugs get, the more they're worn away.

But of course, you're not sure how to do anything of the sort. Remove their fear? Help them overcome it? How on Earth could you possibly do anything like that? You have no clue what courage is, what it means to face what's out there.

You're extremely afraid, just being this close to all the fighting.

All of them certainly know how to overcome fear, far more than you do. After all, they're right at the front lines of it all, facing it right this moment.

The bugs! They're a hive mind, right?!

Maybe if you can't affect the people around you, maybe you could affect the bugs! And you won't have to sweep across every single one of them - you just have to affect enough to cause those individual thoughts and emotions to ripple out and spread to the rest.

If you could do that…

You grit your teeth and close your eyes as you reach out Telepathically once again. And in doing so, you feel that familiar sharp pain stab you in the head. But you push it away as much as you can, and instead concentrate on the task at hand.

You do your best to take a page from Kaja, from the soldiers all around you, from the officer, and focus. You train your mind on a cluster of insects just beyond the front, far enough away that they won't get automatically slaughtered by your defenses. They need to be alive long enough for you to project through them.

If you can just counter the fear that the shadow creature is exuding, and make the insects fear all you more, it might just turn them in the other direction.

Just like that time when you pushed away the shadow creature, you dig into the depths of your soul, and brandish your despair and your fear and your insecurity. Then you inject it into that cluster with as much strength as you can muster.

It works, to some small degree. Many of the insects in the cluster begin to exude a fear about what's in front of them, equally as much as what's behind them. And it spreads to the insects around them, outwards, further and further.

They echo your emotions, and spread your desperation and helplessness to the point where handfuls of them simply stop in their tracks, unable to act.

But the recursion is slow, at least in comparison to how fast they're smashing themselves against your defenses. The few that stop are soon overrun by their own, and trampled by dozens of others as they scramble for safety.

Their chitin is cracked and shattered by their sharp insectoid legs.

And thankfully, they don't echo out whatever pain they feel, if they feel any pain at all. You have no doubts that if they did so, you would be instantly crippled by the feeling. They all would be.

Besides, you have your own crippling pain to deal with. You certainly don't need any more to weigh you down and break you.

You fall to your knees as the pounding in your head increases to unbearable heights. It's as though the pain wraps itself around your head, and squeezes with preternatural might. You can feel every part of your head strain: your eyes, your ears, your skull, your jaw, everything.

Part of you wants to plunge yourself into an icy-cold lake simply to alleviate what you're feeling, to stop what you're doing and collapse. But there's no such relief for you. All that exists is the promise of destruction, and you use that fact to prevent yourself from giving up.

Not only that, but you simply can't imagine Kaja, or your Dad, getting cut down by any of those bugs. Or by that shadow creature. You refuse to see a future where that happens.

So you do your best to push past the blinding pain and continue to pour those debilitating emotions into the insects. Though you have no idea how long you can hold out. The pain is so much stronger than before, and you feel your consciousness begin to slip.

You feel your body waver, and your consciousness starts to narrow as you push more of yourself into the insects. It's right at that moment that you pour everything you've got into the bugs and flood absolutely everything that you're feeling into the bugs. Like a kind of last-ditch effort.

And everything you've got bottled up inside sweeps through the small cluster of insects like a wildfire. In turn, they echo your raw emotions and spread them to the rest of their hive. They start a hypnotic chittering that rises through the din and the fighting and the screaming and the dying, which courses through every bug around them.

As a result, all that you are is echoed through the hive, up down the entirety of their ranks. Most of them practically stop in their tracks as they echo that same hypnotic chittering, which heightens to a vast, deafening crescendo.

Everyone around you is utterly stunned at the sight, but more so by the sound of it all.

The chittering easily drowns out all other sounds to the point where it invades all your ears and dazes you. Your minds are literally stunned to the point that many of you fall over stumbling - your inner ears are completely thrown out of whack as your sense of balance is thoroughly upturned.

You yourself stop your Telepathic attack, unable to keep going simply due to the pain you feel. It's soon replaced by that dizzying insectoid note that all but causes you to black out and fall over. Although your eyes are shut through all of this, you can feel the ground shudder and shake beneath you.

More than that, you can sense as the insects scramble in every direction away from you. And also away from the shadow creature.

They skitter up the buildings and down the streets by the thousands as panic and terror pincers them. Some even dig down through the asphalt and concrete in an attempt to burrow into the ground. Every single insect does everything they can to get away as fast as they can.

You can literally feel their hive mind splinter as the hive itself breaks apart, as each of the insects flee in whatever direction they see fit. As though you've imbued them with some small sense of individuality and shattered their sense of one-ness.

At least, temporarily. Even as they scatter, you feel the hive mind begin to recover. Though that doesn't stop the insects from continuing to run off.

The chittering and the rumbling abates moment after moment as they flee from the area. Certainly more than enough to allow all of you to recover from the dissonant chorus.

Kaja leans down and helps pick you up off your hands and knees, even as the soldiers around you watch with absolute awe at what's transpiring right in front of them. The insects literally evacuate from the street ahead with absolute abandon, leaving behind the cracked and broken bodies of their dead.

Thousands of fractured chitinous shells litter the intersection in front of all you, each one dripping with fresh blue-black ichor. It spills out onto the shattered asphalt and concrete surrounding all of you, and coats it all with a thick layer of bug innards.

Of course, that sulfuric smell begins to diffuse into the air, and threatens to suffocate each and every one of you. It causes some of you to cough and gag. One or two soldiers even retch violently from the smell, though surely the sight of all those insectoid corpses heightens their nausea significantly.

With Kaja's help, you steady yourself just as the last few remaining insects skitter away.

You want to look at what you've helped create with some sense of pride, but all you can feel is a deepening sickness enveloping you. And that isn't just due to all the bug guts and rancid smells. It's the pain in your head, still pounding away despite the fact that you've long since stopped using Telepathy.

Thankfully, it ebbs away as the moments pass by, albeit too slowly for your own preference.

"Did you do that?" Kaja asks you. Her face is a mixture of worry and pride and relief, which part of you is glad to see. It's nice to be looked up to, for once. If even for only a few seconds.

"Maybe a bit," you say, your voice strained.

"You shoudn't have pushed yourself that hard. I mean, thank you. But still. You're a mess right now."

"Didn't exactly have a choice, right? It's do that, or get… I dunno, skewered. Or worse."

Kaja hugs you tightly, and you feel her warmth on your body. The feeling puts you at ease almost instantly, and the headache that plagues you seems to abate even faster as a result. You embrace her in return, with as much strength as you can muster, but you feel completely drained, both physically and mentally.

Perhaps emotionally, too. You put quite a lot of yourself and your innermost feelings into those bugs.

You gasp as you realize something, just as you sense its approach. It has been coming towards you since the beginning of this mess, and it hasn't stopped or slowed in the slightest. Not only that, but you can sense that whatever you've projected hardly has hardly affected it.

Its bleak all-encompassing ephemeral shadow seems to swallow up more and more of the street the closer it gets to you.

"The shadow creature thing!" you exclaim. "It's still headed this way!"