Cells at Work: Ebola

Chapter 9: Duty, Destiny, Lies

They were losing.

He didn't need to sugarcoat it. He didn't need to hide it.

The truth of their situation burned as bright as day. These psychotic macrophages were slaughtering them at a rate faster than they could stick their gladius blades into their beating mitochondria.

The mauled corpses of his brothers littered the battlefield, and he could see that their lines had grown thin. They started this battle vastly outnumbering the enemy, they clearly had the advantage in strength, but these maniacal maids proved to be far more brutal and relentless than they've anticipated. Their numbers had started to come into parity with theirs, and he knew it would only be a matter of time before the macrophages succeeded in utterly wiping them all out from this world.

As the acting commander of the battalion after Lady Em decapitated his superior, it was now his duty to order his comrades to fall back.

"Fall back!" He bellowed to his brothers while keeping the pressure on the macrophage leader. He checked Lady Em's hard swing of her scythe before lunging a counterstrike of his gladius directly into her throat. "Into the liver! Fall back!"

Without hesitation or fanfare, a dozen horns scattered in the battlefield howled a loud tone, signaling the remaining KT cells to disengage from combat and relocate back into the liver.

Almost immediately, the KT cells started their tactical retreat toward the organ's main ventricles with extreme discipline, bleeding the macrophages for every ground they relinquished. With such skilled rearguard actions, they evacuated first the wounded inside, followed by the exhausted and the spent. A number of the neutrophils, those who successfully evacuated the non-immune cells into the liver, also decided to fall back inside.

Gradually, the KT cells' battle line began to shrink, but they never faltered. Those that chose to remain as cover for the rest did so with no illusion of ever surviving the next hour. Death was not only certain, it was a given.

And yet that fact didn't even hinder them one bit.

The rearguard fought with such ferocity, such madness, that they dealt massive punishment to the maids they once called their sworn sisters-at-arms.

"I am surprised lieutenant," Lady Em quipped. "I thought the KT cells never retreat."

The KT sub-commander snorted. He unleashed another thrust of his blade aimed at the maid leader's chest, to which she blocked with Plagueharvest's metallic shaft. "This is not a retreat... We are charging in the opposite direction."

"Hah!" Lady Em, let out a genuine giggle. "That is a good one, I admit."

Blade and scythe spun around like a music-less dance... slicing, sweeping, clanging.

"You will not succeed traitor," the KT sub-commander growled, his eyes burned with raw fury. "I will end you!"

He launched himself toward Lady Em, swinging his faithful gladius to battle once more. They traded blow after blow with such ferocity that each strike of their weapons boomed like cracked thunder. The blade master versus the angel of death... they fought like legendary cells of old back when the world was still young, and antigens roamed free to spread their corruption.

The KT sub-commander wielded his gladius for another batch of blazing slashes, but this time, Lady Em went in the offensive, swinging Plagueharvest in deadly, looping arcs, with all intention to eviscerate him. He blocked and parried the macrophage's great swings, but now he was on the defensive, and slowly, he started to give ground.