As he carved his way through another knot of toy soldiers, Chaltu noticed that the group of Arravex had broken down the door of their little hidey-hole. Grinning with fierce pleasure, Chaltu ran – full out, on all fours – toward the wide-open space where the door had once been. Two of the Arravex were standing in the opening; Chaltu didn't know why they were still there. Maybe they were standing guard or something, but he wasn't going to waste time thinking about it.

He charged. His long legs and arms made short work of the distance between him and the base's interior, and soon he stood within it. Not slowing his charge until he was a fair distance down the hall, just in case those two Arravex finally decided to do something, Chaltu looked over his shoulder at them.

Maybe there really were people guarding the place.

Tilting his head back, Chaltu sniffed the air in search of any of the Army ants that hadn't come out to get butchered like their little compatriots. Hearing, and then smelling, the approach of another group of humans, Chaltu chuckled in mordant good humor. It seemed there were more of them, after all.

"Heya, gents," Chaltu said, grinning as the Army ants came around the corner and giving them a real good look at the long, sharp teeth that filled his mouth.

The fact that the little ants chose not to run away screaming in terror, especially after what they must have seen on this day of days, meant they were all either very brave, or very stupid. Chaltu was personally inclined to go with stupid: only idiots would try to take on Zoanoids. The ants raised their cute little popguns and opened fire, but he'd seen their movements while they were getting ready, and he'd already leapt to the other side of the hallway over their heads while they were still bringing their guns up.

He could hear them firing behind him, where he'd been standing about five seconds ago—the Arravex were going to be pissed when those shells hit them. Not like it would hurt them at all, they'd just be annoyed; hell, he would've felt just the same if something like that happened to him.

Clamping his teeth down on the calf of the of the toy soldier nearest to him, Chaltu was rewarded with the with the man's loud screaming as the two of them fell to the ground almost on top of each other. As he gave the toy soldier a good, fatal mauling, he heard the roars of the Arravex as they charged in to deal with the rest. The bastards screamed a fair bit as the Arravex shredded them like cheap cloth, but the sounds were slowly diminishing behind him as Chaltu made his way still deeper into the base.

Tuning out the hot, coppery scent of spilled blood and other fluids behind him, as well as the taste of it still lingering in his mouth, Chaltu tilted his head back and started hunting for more toy soldiers. Twisting and swiveling his large, pointed ears, he searched for the heavy tread of booted feet and the distinctive "click" of guns being readied for combat, both sure signs that more of those toy soldiers were coming.

If they weren't already dead, they'd definitely be on their way; they were predictable like that.

XxXxX

As another of the Zoanoids came barreling flat-out at him, Drake dropped to one knee and fired his ZB2 into its soft, exposed underbelly. These Arravex he'd been briefed on might have been built like the results of a torrid affair between an Ankylosaurus and a Rhino, but the scales on their stomachs were still softer than those on their backs and sides; one shot there would kill them just as dead as anything else. One shot was just what Drake gave them.

The loss of one of their own seemed to go completely unnoticed by the four remaining Arravex, something that Drake took as further evidence of their inhumanity. After all, anyone human, even a soldier in the midst of a fight for their lives, would have at least taken the time to notice the death of one of their own even if they could only spare a second. But then, Zoanoids were just a bunch of dumb, heartless animals anyway. It was one of the things that made them so very easy to kill.

Throwing himself to the floor just as one of the Arravex dove at him, Drake rolled out of the way as another one made a flying-tackle on the spot he'd just occupied. Over his head and behind his back, Drake could hear his fellow soldiers preparing and then firing yet another volley into the enemy. Crawling on his belly toward the neat lines of his unit, Drake smiled grimly as they fired over him.

After all of the Zoanoids were dead and dissolving like they always did, Drake grabbed the hand offered to him and let First Lieutenant Marsters pull him back to his feet.

"We don't have much time left here, people," Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cross said tersely, shouldering his ZB2 as he looked all of them over. "Chronos will be sending in massive reinforcements soon. We have to get to our extraction point quickly, before these bastards manage to cut us off by sheer force of numbers."

"Yes, sir!" the remainder of unit answered, saluting sharply.

As they all started to fall out again, he kept a sharp eye out for any other Zoanoids. There were still bound to be some, and he wasn't about to see more of his fellow soldiers killed by those freaks of genetic engineering. He'd already seen more than his share of friendlies' deaths today.

XxXxX

The last of the Zoanoid attack-force had been dealt with, but none of the ACTF's soldiers were stupid enough to think that their last problem would be handled so easily. Said problem – one Imakarum Mirabilis – was currently engaging Ryan Crouger in the sky above them. Or sometimes even on the ground, if one or the other was knocked out of the sky by his opponent.

Sean had tried to help his fellow Guyver, but after Imakarum had battered him out of the sky for the fifth time, ripping his right arm off in the process, Ryan had told him point-blank that he could do a better job fighting the Zoalord if he wasn't worrying about saving Sean's ass. That was why Sean was down on the ground helping with the evacuation of the remaining personnel. He would often look up to see how Ryan was doing, but for the most part he focused on what he was doing; Imakarum had brought Zoanoids with him, and while he'd been told that that was pretty much what Zoalords did, those Zoanoids in particular were troublesome.

They were Enzymes—six Type IIIs and ten IIs—so Sean had to worry a lot more about keeping his skin intact than how Ryan was doing at the moment.

XxXxX

Imakarum, long past annoyance with this particular enemy and swiftly becoming furious, fired another two volleys of Gravity Bullets at the gray Guyver. The Guyver, for his part, dodged and wove between the blasts with a fluid grace more suggestive of a dance rather than the deadly battle that they were engaged in. It was annoying in the extreme, but even moreso was the young Guyver's reaction.

"Nice shot, dead eye!" the Guyver taunted. "Why don't you try firing with your eyes open next time?"

Hissing between his teeth in sheer fury, Imakarum fired a fully powered Spiral Crusher at the irritating Guyver. Through the distortion in the air caused by his attack, however, Imakarum could see the Guyver-boy pulling his arms in close to his body and holding his legs close together as he reoriented himself to hang horizontally in the air. The powerful energies of Imakarum's Spiral Crusher barely scratched the surface of the Fifth Guyver's armor, but that was not the worst of Imakarum's troubles with the boy.

No, the worst came when all ten of the dull, grayish-blue orbs sunken into the joints of the Fifth Guyver's strange, wraithlike armor flashed bright blue, and the boy vanished from even Imakarum's senses. He had seen recordings—what few there were—of the boy in combat with this strange armor enhancement, but he had not yet had the dubious pleasure of encountering this particular power for himself. His senses were completely unable to detect the Fifth Guyver now, so Imakarum knew that it was not simple invisibility giving the boy such a distinct advantage.

Still, that left the question of what the Guyver-boy had done completely unanswered. Imakarum was not entirely fond of unanswered questions, particularly as they pertained to his enemies.

His senses were stretched as far as he could safely manage, and yet he could not catch so much as a flicker of movement from his enemy. In such an environment as this, even invisibility would give signs of its use, but every movement of the surrounding air that he sensed was as random as any other and of no use to him in tracking the movements of the Fifth Guyver.

Raising his barrier, Imakarum found himself staggered by a powerful blow to the back of his skull. Losing the concentration needed to maintain his forcefield-barrier and barely holding onto that necessary to remain in the air, Imakarum was woefully unprepared for the blow that struck him directly in the center of his back. Driven into the tarmac by both the force of the blow and his own loss of the concentration – minor as it was in the end – needed to fly, Imakarum forced himself back to his feet.

Drained of almost all of his stamina from the prolonged battle and the pain of his wounds, knowing that he would be unnecessarily straining his Zoacrystal if he attempted to recover from such damage in his battleform, Imakarum let himself revert back to his human form. There was a greater than average chance that the Fifth Guyver would mistake his action for a sign of weakness, so that was another advantage to the Zoalord's unintended ruse.

When his enhanced senses were once again able to discern the Fifth Guyver's presence, Imakarum had to resist the urge to smirk in fierce triumph: apparently the young Guyver was not as shrewd as he liked to think, if he was willing to give up such a decisive advantage in battle so easily.