Porter sat back in the cockpit of the White Storm. His head was still spinning from his previous moment with Riya but the fog was beginning to clear. He couldn't say for sure he had completely revived, but he could at least pilot his Goliath around. The group had gathered at the edge of the cliff once more, but were now surrounded by fellow Goliath pilots and armed forces swarming down at their feet.

This would be a titular battle. Or so they were being told. Different channels buzzed with voices as commanders addressed each of their divisions. It was rumoured that Cross Marian would be coming north soon to serve as the leader of all the forces, including the Artisans. Bloated warships were already circling overhead, enormous whales in the sky that watched the ants below. Maybe Marian was already in one of them.

"Our job is largely to assist in taking out any larger Jahari." Ardwen cut in through the noise, his channel programmed to override the others in each CRU battlesuit. "From the last battle, they couldn't gather that any one particular Jahari stood as anything more than any other. They don't seem to have leaders or a hierarchy. So, if it comes down to it-"

"Kill all." Ochenkov's brusque voice ended Ardwen's speech. The barbarian general liked things simple and efficient. If the enemy was in front of them, they needed to kill the enemy. Nothing more and nothing less.

"Yeah, yeah, I got it," said Chase, brushing aside the comments with his confidence.

"Chase are you...are you reading in your cockpit?" Ardwen's eyes narrowed as he accessed the internal camera for the South Star. Chase's eyes were slowly moving along like a typewriter, resetting every so often as they scanned a screen.

"Uh...no, no, not at all." The accused scrambled to close all his open windows, sitting back in his chair and taking up a relaxed pose, as though nothing had happened.

"It's probably that Parallel book everyone is into at the academy," Nami snorted, a bit upset with her boyfriend's lack of seriousness. "He hasn't stopped reading it since last week."

"Say Chase, wouldn't that make you a bit of a nerd to be reading like that?" Porter couldn't resist the opportunity to take a stab at his bully and he snickered to himself.

"No way loser, it's not like it's a school book. It's about a video game where..." The group simultaneously hit their mute buttons on Chase's microphone, leaving him to drone on and on to nobody.

"Back to the point." Ardwen stepped forward, surveying the terrain beneath them as he spoke with the group. "We don't know a lot about the Jahari beyond what little we've seen of them. They seem to have a weakness in their chest but nowhere else. Decapitated Jahari are still just a vicious, and others were seen crawling around without legs, dragging down whoever they could find. We would prefer not to end up that way."

"Got it, go for the heart." Porter felt a tremble in his fingertips. This was not there first battle. It wasn't their first foray into danger. But the magnitude of this particular fight felt different, wrong. Fighting other humans was different. You knew there was emotion, thinking, and pauses. There were lapses in judgement and mistakes and bursts of energy. But the Jahari had none of that. They killed and did nothing else. They cared little for how they did it or how much damage they took to do it. They only wanted to do it.

The first explosion ripped through the earth, shooting rock bursting outwards before the ground caved in. Porter watched in awe as the snowy mountains turned into ant hills, swarms of Jahari pouring out from holes mixed with the hulking Bahari. The tip of another mountain cracked and split apart, an immense worm rising up and floating into the sky, immediately hunting down the warships. Tentacles began to sprout from its body, lashing on to the first floating vessel it came across, pulling the two together.

"Remember, heart," Ochenkov said before stepping over the edge of the cliff and falling down into the oncoming hordes.

"Some general he is," Chase snorted.

"He leads by example," Ardwen snapped back, quick to defend his superiors. "We need to follow him though and stay close together. It will be easy to get lost in all the different troops but I think if we can remain a group we'll be fine." As Ardwen finished the sentence Raul and Chase leaped into the fray, dashing ahead of the group due to a bet they had placed between each other. Ardwen smashed his head against his battlesuit's display at their incompetence. "You guys can't just do one normal battle for me can you?"

"Sorry Ardwen," Nami giggled, zooming off to take up point as a sniper.

"I guess we all just do what we do best," Riya mumbled, grabbing the White Storm's arm as she went by, dragging Porter down with her into the charge.

"But...we don't even have a strategy," Ardwen called after them, forgetting they could all hear him fine through their communication network. The youth sighed and leaped in after them, priming the few weapons he had on Mother Gaia. Three metal spheres flew out from the back of his warmachine, hovering around his Goliath as it dropped onto the ground. Already he was picking up the signals from the thousands of Bahari on the surface of the Earth. Each of the monsters had a massive, beating heart that registered on his scans, and he isolated them out from the smaller Jahari. The heartbeat of each Goliath pilot was buried too much behind the sounds of their machine to be detected the same way, so it offered Ardwen an easy way to plot out the enemy locations.

And it was scary. This was not a skirmish like at Easley. This wasn't even similar to the numbers that had been reported in the battle of Narrius between the Enians and Artisans. This was a full-scale invasion force. There was no other way to describe it. It looked more like some of the alien invader movies Ardwen had watched when he was a young child than it did war films from the battles all around Earth. This was something different entirely.

Porter barely managed to get his feet under him as he was pulled along by Riya. She was obviously trying to keep up with Chase and Raul but in the mass of Goliaths all charging forward, they had quickly lost their friends. Even with their advanced tracking, Chase and Raul were moving too fast in and out of too many soldiers for them to ever catch them.

"Maybe we should slow down a bit Riya?" Porter dug his heels into the ground and yanked backwards, taking control of the situation as Riya came to an immediate halt. "I mean we just left Ardwen behind, we need to start planning this out a little better."

"We need to fight Porter! That's what we need to do!" In shock, the teen released Riya, her normal demeanour gone in lieu of a more battle-driven warrior. This was not a Riya he was used to, or had ever really seen before. Where was this coming from? "I want things to go back to peace Porter, for the world, for the country...for us. So we must fight now as fast as we can." For a moment, Porter saw himself in Riya. He saw his ideals, his imagination, his vision, all of it combined into her at once. To save the school, to protect his friends, to find his brother, to have a family, Porter would have done anything to get those things, would fight for anything with everything he had. That was passion was it not? That was honourable and valiant to have such a goal behind your lust for war.

Was it? That was not the teachings of Ishiyama and Enianism. That was not the pathway that the saint had wanted for the world to follow. Was Porter the most faithful of people? No, not entirely, but he did know the foundations of Enianism, and he knew that battling in order to achieve peace was no way to achieve peace at all; it only created more fights.

Is that what he had been a part of in the Crisis Rescue Unit? Is that what they had been doing? Saving people and towns and villages in order to preserve peace, only to create more war? Was the solution not in training and guns and weapons, but in something else entirely? Those were the same beliefs he had always held on to before, the same ones coming out of Riya's mouth at that moment. But when he heard it from someone else, someone he cared about...something was wrong about it.

"No Riya." Porter grabbed the girl's shoulder, holding her back again. "You don't need to fight. I need to." That was the answer, the solution to the problem. It was Porter who had taken on the burden of protecting his friends, of clearing this world of war and evil. His father had died trying to do the same thing, trying to protect his family, and all of it was for the sake of one great war machine. Sigma only existed because conflict demanded he exist. The Red Scarf Rebels had only existed because conflict had demanded they resist. None of it needed to exist but it did...and Porter was the one who had undergone training. Porter was the one who had adopted the burden of salvaging the world. Not Riya. Not Chase or Ardwen or Nami or Raul or anyone else.

"I'll see you on the other side." Porter's Goliath hugged Riya then pulled away, his twin blades sliding down into position for combat. The White Storm became a blur, electricity crackling around it before it took off as a bolt of lightning, forking through the army until it lead the charge, crashing straight into the chest of the first Bahari. Twin swords drove into its pulsing heart and sheared its body clean in half.

Ardwen watched from the backlines as the first Bahari signal faded away...

* * * * *

Grimsley's axe swung upwards, cleaving through a Bahari's head, leaving its face split open, a gaping mess that oozed orange blood. He then levelled the turret on his arm and unleashed three Goliath-killer rounds into the monster's chest, detonating its heart and leaving splatters of red and orange across his Goliath.

Next to him, Goulet's whip-like sword twirled through the air, carving through the biomechanical flesh of any Bahari that stepped too close. Some he flayed down to the bone and machinery, while others he chopped apart, leaving them a pile of assorted body parts. The smaller Jahari had mostly fled, scattering into the different tunnels and pathways in an effort to escape the sudden attackers. It seemed they were not used to dealing with enemies within their catacombs and the hive mind was scrambling to come up with a solution.

"Something isn't right." Goulet paused for a moment, flicking his sword back to his side, causing it to cut straight through a Bahari's shoulder on its way. "There should be more of them, much more. They should be coming at us, not away from us. Even some of the Bahari are leaving."

"Maybe they aren't used to being invaded." Grimsley spun around, burying his axe in the chest of an approaching Bahari. He dislodged his weapon by blasting the creature's body away using his massive gun. "Maybe they're scared."

"They don't feel fear. They don't even know what it is. No this is different, organized and intentional. Look there." Goulet pointed to a series of tunnels where the majority of the Jahari were running to. "It would seem as though something important calls to them in that direction."

"Where does it lead?" Grimsley heaved, exhausted from the constant battle. He still wasn't used to being a pilot and it took its toll on his body, even after his training.

"From our direction right now, as far as I know, it heads north. But that is only a guess as we are underground. The tunnels can twist and turn and go anywhere really."

"Is there anything of value in the north?" Goulet remained silent in answer to Grimsley's question, revealing nothing he knew, if he knew anything at all. "Fine, then we head in that direction. That bigger thing went that way before didn't it? So something must be going on that way. Maybe it's the heart of all this."

"Maybe indeed. But would you be prepared for that?" Goulet's sword flicked out, lopping off an approaching Bahari's head. The body continued to charge closer, ignoring the pain, until Grimsley batted it away with the flat of his axe.

"It's not about preparation anymore Goulet. Now it becomes about action. And we must take that path."

"Very well, we will go deeper into this pit of hell." Goulet's sword stretched out again as he whipped it around, the blade dancing through the air as it leaped from foe to foe, cutting through flesh and metal with ease before piercing into their chests. With each enemy felled, the dance picked up speed, the air beginning to hum as Bahari blood coated walls of the opening. In a grand sweep, Goulet pulled his sword back, and Grimsley winced at the squelching sound of different Bahari bodies hitting the ground, the muscle and metal fusion producing an unnatural sound on the earth. "The rest have already run. Be thankful for this turn of events, or we would have most likely died a long time ago. This is a suicidal mission you know."

"No it isn't. Not when I intend on living through it all." Grimsley pushed past Goulet and headed towards the opening, using nothing but sonar and projections to move around without light.

Goulet smirked within his cockpit as his student moved away. "That's quite a burden you hold, young Grimsley," he said to himself.

A/N: After so much waiting, so many delays, the war in the north is finally upon us. And is Grimsley on a crash course with the CRU or do his tunnels lead him deeper into the realm of the Jahari?