Tora, again, was allowed to watch another offensive effort on the Earth alongside Captain Sandback, his vice-captain and those select scientists.
It was a swiftly coordinated and organised effort by a race that had just emerged from an era known as that of Many Wars.
Fifty thousand years when almost every part of the Milky Way was under siege from within.
Mankind was so thoroughly divided that conflict was born from the slightest differences.
It was somewhere during or possibly long before this period of unimaginable bloodshed that the Earth was lost.
Forgotten simply because so much more was happening elsewhere.
Then the Council came forth.
Emerging from the ashes of war, they organised those they could and promised one thing.
Unity.
They fought back the chaos of war, gathering and nurturing where necessary, but crushing all those who denied the notions of their cause.
The Newmen of the present were an advanced, bureaucratic, but hardened people.
The deaths of the ten thousand at the hands of Anoona's child were tragic, but the Newmen were prepared for that much.
No progress was made without loss, but for the first time, Tora was worried about the number of lives that would be sacrificed in the time that was to come.
If Anoona kept denying the Newmen their rightful home and eventually fell, then it would have meant the death of too many of her children.
And if she prevailed… it would mean the deaths of the millions of Newmen who yearned for home.
Tora bit his teeth as the bombardment began.
Three months had passed since his arrival, and they had learnt little to nothing about the civilisation that Anoona had built.
Sure, they had gained invaluable information about some of the life on the surface and the cellular makeup of Anoona to an extent, but the granules they had were part of a mountain that Tora felt he couldn't see the top of.
Like the first mission, this one wasn't broadcast to the general populace, and Tora was among the privileged few who were able to see it.
And when the people asked why the Council was bombing the home of mankind, Tora stepped forward in an address towards all Council territory citizens. He told them that the surface was occupied by a hostile and dangerous life form known as Anoona, stating that she was a biological weapon of unknown origin.
This confused some, who wondered why the Council couldn't just talk it out with her until they reached some sort of agreement, but her warning to the Newmen was also public knowledge.
They knew they weren't welcome, and Tora turned their confusion into anger.
He announced that the Earth was, without question, their home.
They deserved it as much as she did, and if she couldn't cohabitate with the Newmen, then she would have to either leave or die.
Tora blinked himself out of the depths of his mind and watched as the bombardment continued.
Then, from the far south of the equator, rose ten dark, Hawk-like ships that flew towards the Newmen fleet.
Their efforts were stalled by dozens of unmanned drones, but just like the monster that was Scalpel, they seemed to be incredibly resistant to any kind of damage, which made Tora bite his thumb.
The Hawks then opened their doors, and Tora, knowing what was to come, shuddered.
"My goodness…"
From the Hawks emerged Anoona's Beta Class children, and this time, they wore armour on top of their already hard carapaces.
They fell in groups of ten, floating in the void of space for a moment before crashing onto ten of the First-Class Newmen ships, each of which carried an average of five hundred thousand people.
The footage switched the to show one of the Betas as it tore into the ship it had landed on. It entered a storage unit, which depressurised immediately after.
Fortunately, the chamber automatically sealed all internal doors and vents, keeping the rest of the ship from being affected, but as sirens loudly blared above, the Beta walked up to the now sealed door, which led into the rest of the ship and forced it open, his claws digging into the metal until it screamed.
He broke into the rest of the ship, stomping his way towards the bridge as the staff were evacuated via escape pods that were dotted across the ship, although not all of them could make it to the small vessels since the other nine Betas had either destroyed or blocked the path to them.
The first Beta eventually came across a group of Newmen that were hiding under a table in one of the ship's many deserted cafeterias.
Three men and two women, soldiers all, who had been reduced to bodies petrified by fear.
What happened next chilled Tora to the bone.
[Come.] The Beta spoke in many voices, making half of the Newmen loudly weep.
One of them, a man, raised his sidearm and pointed it at the Beta before shooting him several times to no effect.
And, in a moment that further terrified Tora, the Beta didn't react, its eyes hidden beneath a helmet that allowed its tendrils to stick out from behind.
[Come.]
The man dropped his gun, prompting the others to do the same.
They then slowly got up and followed the Beta to the bridge, where the nine other Betas assembled those who weren't able to get to the escape shuttles in time.
There were about twenty thousand people, most of whom were seated in the spaces preceding the bridge.
The first Beta walked up to the captain of the ship and removed his helmet, revealing his face to all who were present, a marriage of humanoid and insectoid features that bore four eyes, pools of cyan.
The captain tried his best to stand upright, but his face damp with sweat, and his leg quivered ever so slightly as he stood before what couldn't even be described as an apex predator.
[Land the ship.]
Every Newmen within earshot trembled.
The bombardment by the other ships had stopped, and the focus had shifted to recovering the boarded ships, but any attempts to send help were thwarted by the Anoonian Hawks that were still flying about, taking shots at any ship that tried to interfere.
The captain swallowed, shakingly, before glancing at his navigators.
Some of them were crying, and others were frozen with fear.
These weren't combatants. They were trained, yes, but they were more technicians than anything.
The captain clenched his jaw, and it looked like he was about to take a defiant stand, but one of the First-Class ships suddenly exploded, shaking the bridge.
Tora, who had been holding his breath in the safety of the Santa María, glanced at the reports, and they said that the captain of the now obliterated ship had one of his engineers force a leak in one of the fusion reactors in an effort to kill at least some of the Betas, resulting in an explosion that completely consumed the ship entirely.
Tora returned to the footage from before and saw that the Betas had actually reacted.
The first one let out a gut-wrenching screech that made every Newman on the ship weep in terror.
He then let out a low drone as if calming himself before facing the captain once more, and whatever defiance may have filled the officer's eyes had been drained.
[Land!] The Beta barked, and the captain immediately instructed that his crew begin the landing procedure.
The higher-ups demanded that the captain stop, but he didn't, and the ship descended into the Noetic Storm, where its signal was lost immediately.
The eight remaining ships the Betas had boarded joined in the descent, and while the other sixty ships pointed their weapons at them, none of them fired.
Captain Sandback struck the table between him and the others in the office, shattering a chunk of the wooden slab.
"Dammit! Just what happened back there?" He gnashed his teeth, startling Tora, who was still struggling to process what was going on.
He then got a call from the council, which asked that he further his efforts in uniting the Newmen against Anoona.
They were like any democratic republic in that they needed the people's support in order to act, and the fact that they had just lost over half a million lives wasn't a good look, so the idea was to cover it up by fanning the flames of hatred.
Tora nodded, knowing that, at this point, only a unified and decisive effort would work on Anoona and her children.
He rushed to one of the auditoriums where several confused journalists and Humanity United officials were gathered.
There, he stood before them, afraid and shaking.
He had been given permission to play some of the footage of what Scalpel had done to what was being called "a group of Newmen delegates".
The slaughter was presented as an unjustified massacre by Anoona, who was denying the Newmen their birthright to life on Earth.
Everyone who was gathered glared at the footage, and this is exactly what Tora needed.
"I deeply apologise for showing you such harrowing imagery, but believe me, it is imperative that every Newman know that there is a force that would deny our heritage, our identity, our blood!" Tora yelled in panic.
"Her name is Anoona, a filthy broodmother, a cancerous growth on the face of the cradle of life, and we cannot allow her to persist! I show you this footage not to sow fear, but to show you how far life has come!" Tears began to well in Tora's eyes as visions of massacre flooded his mind.
"We are order, we are civilisation, we are peace, and we could never hope to cohabitate with such horrors! I know I set out to seek and conserve whatever life we found on Earth, but if she is allowed to live, I fear the lives of every man, woman and child in the galaxy will be at risk!"
.
..
Anoona's face stiffened in a way that made her shift with unease.
She stood at the top of a quarry, which all the captured humans were led into, numbering four million in total.
It was a cloudy day, but even then, none of them would have noticed her or Thunder, who were on top of a ten-meter-tall Bio-Metal fence that encircled what was once a copper mine.
"Ten…" She whispered, sending a chill into the warrior by her side.
"Ten of my babies. Gone. In an instant."
Thunder wanted to run away.
The last time he had seen his mother this angry was when 02 died, and that was over a century ago.
He knew that what was coming was going to be ugly.
Cruel.
Scary.
Anoona let out a sigh.
"I'm assuming Rusteater appreciates the new tech?"
"Y-yes. As soon as we get a hive set up on the moon, we'll have a whole new pool of resources, although I wonder if you'll keep the Earth as the hub for all future activity or implement a more decentralised layout." Thunder stumbled over his words a little, trying to keep her talking, but she instead generated a Noetic Shield around the quarry, which only made him worry more.
"Being more spread out seems best in order to avoid issues of logistics and such. I like the idea of an interconnected web with literal highways across space… but that will have to wait." An expressionless Anoona took a single step forward and spat out a single cell, which landed in the sands of the quarry.
Thunder's sharp eyes allowed him to see that the cell was rapidly consuming the calcium carbonate in the sand, burning through the ground as it ate.
It quickly reached the bottom of the quarry, and at this point, it was as big as an elephant. Its every movement shook the ground. Its body was also emitting large amounts of heat, which rose as steam.
The gathered Newmen all screamed and panicked, unsure whether to run to the walls where they might encounter Betas or stay put.
The now whale-sized child below then underwent a rapid transition where it burnt through 90% of its molten mass until it was the size of a humanoid.
Thunder knew what it was.
A new type of Beta-Class.
One that transcended the upper limit of the distinction, having 1,5 million Ostraka and a Noetic Presence of 10.5ML.
This was a Third Generation Beta, with 01 being only Gen One and Thunder being a part of the many Gen Twos.
Storm-force winds rose from the quarry as the newborn crawled out of the ground, emerging to reveal its truly deadly form.
It was a twisted humanoid, having reverse-jointed legs, four jagged arms and no eyes or tendrils, just a small mouth and nasal holes.
It stood ten meters tall and had a dark crimson carapace that was made of a complex system of superstrong, superdense Bio-Metallic materials.
A moment of silence followed its unearthing, and every Newman present stood completely still.
Then it suddenly broke into motion, dashing into clusters of people with enough force to turn them into pinkish mist, which it then sucked into its mouth before crawling and tearing through tens of thousands of people at a time.
Each of its movements sounded like an explosion, and the more it ate, the faster it grew.
Ten thousand Newmen at a time.
Then one hundred thousand.
One million.
Then they were all gone.