Disclaimer: You know, I didn't expect to have to keep doing all of these gags for this long, and I realize now that they're kind of limited just by their nature. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this is a poor way to test the elasticity and resilience of the tree branch since it puts me in a dangerous situation with dubious measurements and a high risk of bone fracture. Also, don't own it.

Well, he finally admitted that his jokes are stupid. My work here is done. ~f

Catalyst

Austin inhaled deeply, sucking the nicotine laced smoke deeper into his lungs. One advantage to being hastily deployed halfway across the world was the fact that his superiors were just as thrown off as him, and hadn't bothered to check his packs. Hell, he was pretty sure they'd taken advantage of the situation just like he had. It would be just like the bastards, enjoying a good smoke while the rest of the rank and file was stuck in these damn trenches.

He took the rolled paper out of his mouth and dared a glance over the top of the ditch. It was weird how much the scene matched those old war movies, right down to the miserable grey sky and squelching mud. Of course, he didn't remember seeing mountains in those movies, but what did he know. It wasn't like he was a film buff.

Then again, he couldn't remember any movies where one side occupied several trenches while the other was covered with purple goop and mutilated, bullet ridden corpses. Apparently these bugs didn't have any artillery to speak of, so World War I tactics worked like a charm. Speaking of bugs, he caught a glimpse of movement on the edge of the horizon. I looked like he wouldn't get a chance to enjoy his smoke after all. He spat the cigarette into the mud alongside a dozen others and let out a shout to raise the alarm. The pasty, dress-wearing bloke to his right snapped to attention before raising his stick right in the same direction as Austin's rifle. Austin still wasn't sure what to make of magic being real, or fighting alongside these...witches and wizards. He got the feeling that if he got out of this bizarre scene in one piece he'd have some rather complicated feelings about all of it, but right now he couldn't be arsed to care too much. Their lunch break was over, and now it was time to get back to the grind.

The swarm of...whatever they were rushed forward with the same single mindedness as always, charging uncaringly into Austin's line of fire. They didn't make any attempt to dodge or take cover, and for all that their claws scared the ever loving shit out of him, most of them were mowed down long before they got close.

In the distance, he could see the multicolored spellfire and muzzle flashes erupting from the rest of the line. It was a wide wave this time then, the zerg were spreading themselves out. He pushed that thought aside, keeping his eyes on the enemy in front of him.

Austin's clip ran out and he quickly reloaded before turning his sights back towards the wave. It was a relatively small wave, with only a few of the humanoid freaks running the gauntlet. They'd been coming like clockwork, a few freaks charged the line every day or so, twice a day at most. No guns, no armor, no vehicles, nothing. And they must have had advanced weaponry somewhere. From the maps the higher-ups had shown them the creepy crawlies had taken over most of the eastern coastline, and the bombs he could occasionally hear in the distance must have been hitting something. But whatever. If the enemy wanted to act like a bunch of idiots, that wasn't his problem.

As he let fly the last few rounds into the enemy, Austin sighed and reached for another stick, taking a glance at the wizard to his side. The big flappy robe of a uniform was dripping with mud, its wearer looking as weary as Austin was. This was the worst kind of tedium, really. Long stretches of boredom punctuated by short bursts of extreme terror, as some naval officer had famously put it, although in this case even the fighting wasn't all that intense. Austin took in a deep breath and lit the cigarette. Damn things might kill him someday, but he'd rather die of some disease than let those ugly buggers get to him.

The sounds of fighting in the distance had also stopped. They must have finished first and they'd probably be radioing in to confirm that about now. Come to think of it, he needed to radio in as well. Eh, they weren't paying him to be good at remembering things. He could wait a minute, savor the smoke. The rest of the line wasn't going anywhere. Austin lifted the next cigarette to his lips.

Suddenly, Austin was sprayed with blood as something carved through his flesh. Pain erupted in his left arm, jaggedly broken off at the elbow. The wizard turned towards the screams, wand raised, before something he couldn't see burst through the man and twisted him apart in a bloody shower of gore.

Self preservation instincts forcing themselves to the surface, Austin let go of his stump and grabbed desperately for his rifle, which had fallen into the mud, and raised it into something resembling a firing position. He looked around frantically for a target, any target. He heard a low growl from behind him.

Austin whipped the rifle around, ignoring the blood spraying across the ground. He saw what looked to be a muscular, oversized leopard with insectoid plating and mandibles covering and digging into its back. It didn't have time to move before Austin squeezed the trigger, bullets firing wildly at the hulking beast. He released a ragged laugh as he saw his shots hit, each causing a massive visible impact, spraying bits of the creature all over the trench. Austin didn't let go of the trigger until the clip was empty. The beast stood as still as the dead, small craters covering its skin where his bullets had hit. Had he even hurt the damn thing? It wasn't moving, so maybe. But he didn't have time to worry about that right now. His stump was aching like hell, and this trench wasn't safe anymore. He needed to get out of here, but his legs refused to cooperate, collapsing under him. Shit, was it blood loss? Was he bleeding out? Austin glanced at his stump. He was feeling woozy and he hadn't paid much attention in first aid, but he didn't think that his arm was supposed to be swelling up and changing color this quickly. Christ, was it spreading into his chest? What the fuck was going-

...

The human's body collapsed into the mud, robbed of its vitality. The plague runner looked down at it for a moment, head tilted, before the Mind demanded it moved again. There was more to kill, more to infect. It glanced over at the invisible vectalisk. Predictably, it saw nothing. It waited for its kin to carve its way to the next section, before plodding along the ground on padded feet. The test was not yet complete.

(Transition)

Dumbledore wasn't sure whether he preferred numbers or pictures when it came to planning wars. Numbers were easy, you could look at the big picture without being reminded of the people and lives behind them. On the other hand photographs provided far more detail, even if they weren't always details you wanted to know. In this case, Dumbledore had both, spread across the round table, and both the fine details and the big pictures were saying much the same thing.

An aide from the ICW scurried over to the table, bringing more papers. "Thank you Jean-Paul." The young man nodded and moved to stand over to the side, out of the way, leaving Dumbledore to pore over the new numbers. They told him the exact same story as the ones before them.

"Does it seem to anyone else that there is something of a shortage of these...infested corpses?"

Heads raised towards him from across the table. "What makes you say that, Supreme Mugwump?" Gerald, one of the ICW delegates, asked. He was currently discussing tactics with some uniformed muggle who had an impressive number of medals and awards pinned to his chest. "We've been fighting and killing them in massive numbers," Gerald continued, "Our most recent estimates put them at hundreds of thousands-"

"Yes, that is rather odd, isn't it? I would have thought, simply looking at the numbers, that there would be millions."

There was silence. Dumbledore took that as a signal to continue. "Given what I've seen of the zerg, they think of us as resources. By that logic, they have just taken possession of a massive cache of resources. Why are they not using them on the front, why are they not sending them out? Moreover, where are the creatures we've encountered in the past? The ones that could fly, or drop bombs, or build truly horrifying wards?"

Most of the others in the room were exchanging worried glances. Adeviar, at Dumbledore's side, was repeatedly clenching his fists, open and closed, again and again. The bandages on his face twitched and contorted. "If we are not seeing their resources on the frontlines, then it begs the question of what exactly they're using them for."

"Mr. Byhumorn, you have a rather... unique insight into the enemy. Do you have any guesses as to what is going on?" asked General Solomon.

Suddenly, Adeviar stiffened, as if the question offended him. He stopped moving almost entirely staring directly at Solomon. Dumbledore could see mis muscles twitching and flexing under the bandages, revealing the carefully contained tension beneath the surface.

"...Couldn't say. They have a lot of things they could be doing," he managed to say. Dumbledore had noticed moments like this ever since the zerg had started to move openly. Moments when Adeviar almost seemed to be struggling against himself, as though he were fighting an invisible war. The poor man, the stress he must be under from this bloody conflict. Dumbledore couldn't even imagine what it was like.

Unfortunately, it seemed that others in the room lacked his empathy. "No, you have to know something," Solomon demanded. "

"I. Don't. Know," Adeviar growled the words out stiffly.

"This is a matter of life and death, not the time to keep your lips sealed," Geralt said. "Just tell us what you know."

The threads snapped. Adeviar rocketed forward, claw scything through the air. Jean-Paul's neck was cleaved in half.

Everyone else reached for their weapons, hands moving to waists, grasping for wands and firearms. They stopped the instant the aides head and body melted to a pile of dark sludge, leaving a mutilated brain lying in the corner of the otherwise immaculate room.

Adeviar's hand stabbed into the side of his head. He moved them out, dragging out a strand of silver gel, which he flicked onto the table, splattering across the maps before congealing into a smooth ball. "Zerg infiltrators. Memories of all of them. Two minds intertwined, human and alien, use to hide. Don't listen to pleas. Kill them."

It was Geralt who spoke up first. "What in Merlin's name just happened?"

"Swarm...controlled. Ordered me...to refuse. Solid target, single front. Fought back, beat them off, for now. They barely keep a grip, I'm mutant, other, they're strong. Won't last...long. Days, hours, maybe," Adeviar shook his head, retracting his outstretched claw,

"Adeviar, surely there must be some way to provide some greater protection," Dumbledore said. "We could look for a solution, some sort of cure."

"Tried. Failed. No time now," Adeviar said, eyes darting, frantically searching the room. They focused on the muggle general. "Nuke them. Now."

"Sir, I hardly think you understand just what's-"

"No time," Adeviar interrupted again. "Do it now. Only thing they fear. Wanted to hide from you, now want to kill...all of you, all. Before you resort to them."

"You can't seriously expect us to do this."

"Don't care," Adeviar said, and the general's eyes went blank, before the muggle man turned and obediently walked out of the room. "No time. No...time. Can't wait."

Dumbledore spared a glance into Adeviar's mind. It was every bit the battlefield that his demeanor had suggested, a lone bastion of runes and stone fending off a barrage of tentacles, piercing slowly through the defenses. But for the moment, his mind was his own, as much of it as he could spare at least. He knew what he was doing. Whatever knowledge he had gleaned led him to think that this was the best action. Dumbledore wasn't entirely convinced that it wasn't, either. In normal circumstances, he would have objected to these methods, to Adeviar's means and ends. Given the circumstances, he didn't think he could afford to. It seemed that some things really did require a clear sight of the greater good, no matter how strongly Dumbledore wished to avoid it.

Adeviar had noticed his intrusion, he must have. He didn't seem to care. He gestured towards Dumbledore. "Come. Need you. Need all... of you," he said, gesturing to the mages in the room, before beginning to walk towards the door solemnly.

"Where are we going Adeviar?" Dumbledore asked slowly, hesitantly, summoning Adeviar's memories as he did so and handing them off to Geralt along with his pensieve. Geralt popped away, presumably to deal with the infiltrators, leaving Adeviar and Dumbledore alone in the room.

"Ritual. Didn't work...first time. No choice. Nukes, will get most. Can remove rest."

"And if it summons something worse?"

"Won't. Know now. Know what to look for. Enemy of Swarm. Possibilities. Blinding gold, great magic."

"You must be absolutely certain about this, Adeviar."

Adeviar barked out a hoarse laugh as he walked out of the doors, jerkily gesturing for them to follow. "Won't have time for regret...either way. Swarrm's control...too great. Running on borrowed time."

Dumbledore felt himself pale slightly at that revelation. His heart went out to Adeviar, truly. The man had been through so much, and it didn't seem as though he would survive to see victory, even though he would be instrumental in any victory they might find. But it didn't matter, it couldn't. None of them enough time to do anything about it.

(Transition)

Abathur's eyes spread in all directions as he strove to take in as much of the golden gleaming egg before him as the human corpses piled alongside it, melting in the acid and letting their sweet biomass swell to form his creation. It had been a long time, far too long, since he had beheld the true pinnacle of the Swarm's might. This thing was well worth the thousands of pounds of biomass necessary to feed it.

True, his experiments were a delight. Nundus and defilers mixed beautifully, the disease and its carrier now all in one package. Crossing the zouwo and demiguise strains was unconventional, but they had blended well nonetheless. Abathur expected great success from his plague runners and his vectalisks. The other projects would come along just as nicely, producing more efficient killers. They probably wouldn't annihilate the humans, but all they had to do was keep them off balance. Let the thief rebel, let him rally the pests against him. His most prized children would walk their brutal path regardless.

Abathur was standing in the ruins of human habitation, surrounded by the biomass of their dead, piled high and wide as far as his eyes could see, melting down and feeding the rows of glowing golden eggs. He was growing weapons to rid himself of his most despised foe. In all likelihood, he stood on the cusp of humanity's extinction. There wasn't a single place in the universe he would rather be.

(Transition)

Nothing stopped her. Luna supposed that she should have expected that, in hindsight. She was a Queen, whatever that meant. Apparently it meant that the zerg would allow her passage through their midst without complaint or delay, letting her walk freely from the mouth of a nydus worm in Britain all the way to the center of the Swarm's territory on the other side of the globe. This, this was where all the new recruits were. Thenabar had helped reassure her, but she still had to check for herself.

The differences struck her the second she emerged. The skyline, rather than being dominated by creep and trees, was composed of massive metal buildings, consumed by creep and in varying stages of ruin. Massive spiderwebs scrawled over the streets, gleaming with the glowing runes of the weavers. Luna could feel their alien intelligences crawling over and examining her, accepting, for now. It was weird. She wasn't used to feeling so many wards in one place. Actually, the whole hivemind felt weird here, like part of it was a little bit out of sync with the rest of it. It clicked together when she stretched her senses out to a nearby overlord and saw herself take a step forward several seconds before she actually did. Had Abathur improved them? He had assimilated the demiguises...

Ignoring the headache the future-glimpses caused her, she reached out to the altered overlords and started to look around the city as though she were flying around herself. The silence was starting to make her nervous. Every other time she had been to a muggle city, it had been filled with noises. There had been cars driving around, people shouting and talking, and the miscellaneous sounds of thousands of odd devices working in tandem. Everything else was the same. The rough concrete the muggles used felt just as harsh against her feet here as it had in London. The air was still a bit abrasive against her throat, the skyscrapers were just as imposing and beautiful as ever, even despite (despite?) the creep covering them. But all the people were missing.

Was Abathur rounding them up, perhaps still recruiting all of them? There had clearly been a lot of people here, and it took a lot of time and attention to fully bring in each person. Luna hadn't even been patient enough to wait for Abathur to finish when he'd been working with her, it had taken so long!

If that was the case, they had to be around here somewhere. Abathur wouldn't just shove a few million people into a sack somewhere. Luna's feet kept carrying her forward as her mind darted through the strands, sieving and sorting through them to find what she was looking for.

After the first few minutes, Luna was starting to get tired of the sound of her own footsteps. Each city block in front of her was just as empty as the ones behind, and it didn't help that she couldn't read any of the signs. Still, she pressed on. She had to find something on sooner or later.

Despite her conviction, it was nearly an hour before she found anything except patrolling zerglings and the occasional dragon. Out of an overlord's eyes, placed just at the very edge of her net, she caught sight of a carapace encased humanoid a few seconds before they stepped out from an alley. Luna let out a shout of joy, shattering the silence. Her tentacles dug into the concrete, cracking it apart before launching Luna onto the side of a building, which she scrambled up rapidly, getting on top for a better view, barely noticing the glass that cracked under her claws. She caught sight of the distant figure and sprinted towards it, flying over streets and using roofs as launching pads. The figure didn't seem to take note, walking briskly away from her. Luna didn't care.. She'd found someone, finally!

Luna bounded forward, approaching the figure, leaping like a frog, approaching the end of the skyline towards the open space. She was about to catch up. Just one more leap and-

The concrete shattered under her as she slid to a halt, losing her balance in shock as she took in the sight before her. Slowly, shakily, she rose to her feet, looking over the open space, outside of the gleaming skyscrapers and winding streets. Her eyes darted everywhere, looking for something, anything else. A low wail came unbidden from her throat.

Corpses. Bodies stacked as tall as houses, and as wide as Hogsmeade, slowly sinking into a grid of green bubbling pools. Luna couldn't make out faces from this distance, just piles of skin, unmoving, clammy, gray, sinking and melting slowly. No cocoons, no modifications, no sign of mutations or assimilations.. Just green slurries funnelling slowly into massive, obviously inhuman eggs, feeding them with lives. No, not lives. These people were dead now, turned into food, reduced to things. There was only one living being in that corpse pit, one distinctive, familiar, intelligent, and suddenly horrifying creature.

Luna could never mistake the utterly unique form of Abathur, standing right in the center of all of it.

Dun dun duuuuuunnnnn! ~f

(Transition)

Psionic integration: Despite the relative rarity of psionics across all planets, the Swarm has encountered a fair number of non sentient species which display some psionic ability. The species which originally gave rise to the overlord, defiler, queen, viper, and infestor strains are prime examples of this. These species tend to be both incredibly rare and incredibly delicate. As of yet, the zerg do not know precisely what causes psionics to manifest, and so they are reluctant to modify these species beyond basic muscular and dermatological augmentations. In addition, the rarity of these species the Swarm couldn't work around this limitation. As such, many of the abilities of the original creature are left unchanged, forcing into a narrow niche of useful roles which not all hive clusters may need in the first place, with the exceptions of the overlord strain and later versions of the queen strain. It is only recently, with the absorption of many of the both useless and valuable psionic species abundant on Earth that more radical research and combinations are being used on the frontlines, such as the plague runners and vectalisk. The plague runner was designed as a siege breaker. It's main weapon was the large amounts of flaky dead skin cells on its surface, infested with a potent mix of the defiler and nundu diseases. Each individual cell is extremely infectious, and any significant force applied causes the volatile chemicals beneath the dead layer to erupt, scattering the pestilent particles. Combined with the musculature and natural weaponry of the nundu, the plague runner becomes a vicious close range combatant which can only be taken down by heavy artillery or intense, precise force, both of which scatter the infected cells across incredible distances, causing widespread destruction. The vectalisk, which is the result of a mixture of demiguise and a zouwu essence, most closely resembles an elongated sea urchin with its long, carapace-covered form and massive array of bladed legs. Unlike a sea urchin, however, the vectalisk has bladed limbs protruding in all directions, to better carve through vectalisk was made for the same purpose as the plague runner, but is capable of more surgical strikes, where a plague runner causes widespread devastation wherever it goes. The vectalisk can also teleport a fair distance, allowing it unprecedented mobility. As its demiguise heritage also allows it to stay completely invisible, this allows the vectalisk to cause widespread havok, or perform deadly surgical strikes into the heart of enemy territory before retreating to a safe distance. Or both.

Regardless of their ultimate purpose, these two strains represent the first step in a new era of psionic evolution for the zerg, one that is certain to raise the Swarm to new, terrible heights the likes of which no lesser species can comprehend.