A voice calls over the radio, screaming to overpower the roar of gunfire and engines — another man from his squadron.

  Suddenly, the device crackles, the needle sliding along the display as it picks up another frequency, cutting off the yelling man’s voice. “- What exactly do you believe in?” asks someone else entirely, a woman, whose voice now comes from the dashboard mounted radio. The pilot doesn’t recognize her, and he doesn't have time to worry about it. It’s probably some civilian broadcast that got mixed up with the rest. He slaps the radio with his free hand as static crackles all around him, his head turned to the side as he watches trails of bullets streak through the sky. The sharp, collective hissing of the electronics is barely able to come to his ears over the mind-rattling drone of the repeating heavy machine gun fire that is raging from all sides. The plane’s chassis shakes in response to his demands, as if there were a hive nesting inside the aluminum body. The sky on this cloudy day roars with thunder, despite there not being a single drop of rain to be seen — the crack of heavy auto-cannon projectiles. It’s of enemy caliber.

  Screams come over the radio as the standard frequency is picked up again.

  None of them are assigned parachutes. The pilot looks back forward, flipping two switches in preparation for his maneuver and also doing his best to silence the screaming man’s voice coming in from the broadcast. The downed man will be screaming all the way down until he hits the ground, but there’s no need to make that everyone else’s problem at a time like this.

  The pilot looks in the mirror-glass at the black silhouette that is rapidly arching up his way on his tail.

  His squadron has been intercepted on their patrol route by an enemy ambush. The attack came suddenly from an unexpected angle that should have been guarded. The enemy has a new trick up their sleeves.

  It’s funny, really. War has a way of making new things become old very quickly. When they were assigned these new planes, they were told they were top of the line experimental aircraft. But now here the enemy is, having upped the game again with their own new tech.

  The metal cage around him buzzes; the bare-bones, mostly stripped interior of the cockpit of the single seated experimental airframe stresses its discontent at the way its body is being treated by the man, the pilot, in control. He tilts his head back, looking ‘up’ for him as he pulls the plane upward further, flying nearly upside down, gazing at the shapes below him through the clear glass canopy of the fighter plane. Two aircraft from his own squadron are spiraling downward in a diverging circle maneuver to break apart their formation. Another one is on fire and hurtling down toward the ground, still being pursued by their hunter.

  The JFZ-09 ‘Kestrel’ is a prototype, single propeller, long range light fighter with a weapons emphasis toward its design of being an extremely nimble, high altitude, but poorly armored, combatant intended to push deep into the enemy's defensive locations as the tip of the spear — preemptively destroying enemy air assets and ground defenses before any supporting friendly ground units make their push. Essentially, it’s a plane designed solely for suicide missions and nothing else. Modified from the extremely modular JFZ-X chassis, which fields many variants from submarine hunters to heavily armored, short range ground support fighters, this newest version has been modified with dual 7.92×57mm flood-fed machine guns, deployable explosive cluster ordinances that are ‘technically’ ‘illegal’ because they are ‘horrifically’ ‘inhumane’, and an internal self-destruction load that acts as the pilot’s parachute replacement — the latter isn’t seen as an issue in the scope of human-rights issues.

  Designed to penetrate the enemy’s lines from unusual angles, much has been spared to allow an extra large fuel reserve and a special prototype engine only available on this model. Every single gram, down to the cushioning of the pilot’s seat, has been reduced as much as possible, giving the interior of the plane very much the appearance and sensation of being an actual coffin. Although the high-explosive charges that the plane is filled with really do bring it all together into something home-like.

  This interior sector of the war-zone was supposed to have been under watch by air-detection units to keep the skies clear for his squadron on their way to the enemy lines, but nobody warned them about any incoming bogies.

  It’s really no wonder, though.

  As he cuts the sky like a knife, the pilot looks, staring at the midnight-black hunter plane that has flown after him in pursuit, coming closer and closer like a reaching monster’s claw against the backdrop of the ever-blue sky. It’s a new, dual propeller design. His fingers grip around the throttle as he watches the heavy auto-cannon below the enemy’s canopy begin to rotate in preparation.

  He’s never seen anything like it. It must be a new enemy prototype, some sort of long range stealth interceptor. It really is fitting for the enemy to bring out such a thing on the same mission that they’re on with their new planes too.

  — Now!

  The cockpit lights up vividly orange in the same instant as he slams the control stick to the right in response to the shine of hammering gunfire, his plane spinning and diverging its ascending path as the sustained burst of .50 caliber machine gun fire on his tail cuts through the vector he was following a second ago. He’d recognize that sound anywhere. The enemy tends to field weapons with a lower rate of fire but a harder punch.

  The machinery howls as he rises further and further, his hands pulling back the stick harder still at his angle, rising higher and higher. The Kestral’s engine’s voice quickly becomes choked and silent as his ascent begins to fail against the whims of gravity, which begins pulling him down to the world. The lift beneath his wings is no longer enough to sustain his rise at this new vector of movement; his excessively sharp angle upward is too much to sustain for as long as he has been doing with the resources he has at hand.

  — The engine stalls out, a sickly momentum moving into his gut as he reaches the end of his push, and the plane hangs in mid-air by itself for a moment, neither falling nor rising.

  A sharp series of clacks fills the cockpit, the man shifting his legs as he flicks off a series of switches in precise order. He yanks the throttle, shifting the flaps.

  His plane spins and his propeller sputters as he free-falls and rotates the Kestrel straight downward against the drop, following the odd somersault through to the end. His vision is filled with the hued gray of the desolated world below that he’s crashing towards, hidden behind the cotton clouds. The pursuing enemy hunter shoots up and past him at the same second as he blasts down next to it, the two men both sparing sideways glances toward their counterpart as they pass each other by for just a brief flash of a second.

  The Kestrel hurtles down, screaming as he presses toward the dog-fight that his squadron is entangled in below. He aligns himself with the vector of another enemy hunter, chasing one of his guys, nestling the black bird snugly in the middle of his hull mounted crosshair.

  His index finger presses down against the heavy-set trigger on his control stick, and the machine responds with a deeply set, rigid clack that carries up his arm. Then, there, the mechanism roars, his light fighter making its presence known as the swarming of descending fairy-lights comes to his ears, together with the sounds of their biting through the metal of the enemy plane below. At over one-thousand rounds per minute per gun, there’s nothing else to hear inside the canopy except for the non-stop, hammering eruption and the jangling of metal in the ammo canisters behind him. A streaking daisy-chain of vivid fire cuts through the top of the enemy hunter below him — a pattern of hundreds of bullets blasting out of the weapon’s array in only a few seconds’ time. The black enemy fighter plane burns, its heavily peppered wing breaking off from the force of the wind raging against its butchered core, the damaged airframe unable to hold on anymore against the speeds it had been moving at. Fire and smoke trail down toward the ground as it spirals in a horrifically violent circle down toward the distant gray ocean, destined to become one crater of many in the battlefield that has shifted back and forth over the same stretch of land for years now.

  “I just mean, you know, I do not understand what exactly it is supposed to be?” asks the woman’s voice from the radio again. “Do you just like killing? Is that it?”

  — His hand flicks the radio, the needle sliding back to his frequency. A voice of thanks comes in from his squadron mate, whom he just saved. There’s some soap opera running or something. He’s got to talk to the engineers back at the hangar when this is done. Usually, military frequencies are cleanly separated from civilian broadcasts. There must be some kinks in the new plane.

  At the same time, he can’t help but narrow his eyes in annoyance as the blooming of a parachute makes itself seen, the neutralized enemy ejecting from his crashing plane with a very functional and present parachute.

  Bastard.

  “I just think that it is sad, is all,” says the voice over the radio, with the pilot looking at it in surprise.

  — His confused moment is interrupted as he lurches to the side, his airframe taking a heavy hit as something shrill whines behind him. The hunter he dodged a moment ago is back on his ass, the wind whistling like a ghost as it dives after him.

  In that same glance, the pilot can’t help but notice the missing chunk of his own wing hurtling through the air behind him. The enemy dodges the scrap.

  Counterbalancing the disrupted air-flow of his glide, he leans the plane to the side, spinning down at an angle.

  “How many is it? Do you even know? Souls?” asks the radio.

  The radio crackles; a familiar voice comes in, belonging to the man in the plane that he’s flying straight towards. “Waltz.”

  “Waltz,” replies the pilot into his own receiver, looking downward at the friendly airframe launching straight up toward him from below, one of his own. The allied fighter spins upside down as he maintains his own rotation, their two bellies coming close to sliding along one another as his fight is cut into, both Kestrels firing at the same time. The pilot’s Kestrel shrieks, its guns blasting at the enemy who was pursuing his friendly, as his own hunter is shot at from below by the man he’s swapped targets with — like exchanging partners in a dance.

  Both of the enemy hunters fall apart, spiraling downward.

  One enemy pilot ejects with a parachute; the other, his own target, does not do so this second time.

  The sky is clear. That was the last of them. Exhaling, the pilot pulls his throttle steady and looks down at his radio as status reports come back in. One after the other, the Kestrel pilots check in with their call-signs to establish who is still alive and if the mission is still a go. Out of the sides of his canopy, four Kestrels return to a wing formation that he’s at the front of.

  “Are you not scared?” asks the voice from the radio.

  — His fingers flick over the switches one after the other, trying to adjust the radio to isolate and shut out the frequency finally. They’re approaching the target.

  Men’s voices come over the radio as his fingers rest on it, yelling a series of commands in a frenzy, just as he was fiddling with the controls. The Kestrel pilot lifts his gaze, looking through the glass of the canopy, with which there is something very wrong. A pattern is developing over it, like interwoven honeycombs. Confused, he stares until he realizes that it isn’t the glass that is breaking or fracturing, but rather, the sky itself is enveloped in a webbing. The radio is full of chatter, but not about that, as nobody else seems to notice, oddly enough.

  Instead, what the remaining men of the pilot’s squadron talk about is what lies straight ahead of them. Over the nearby horizon crests a full swarm of easily two dozen more enemy hunters, with another two heavy fighters in their back formation. The trail of their movements distorts and disrupts the honeycomb pattern that is etched into the air, as if everything were submerged in a dense liquid, like the world was being submerged into a dripping beehive. He must be experiencing some altitude sickness.

  “…One day, you will end up where you are going. You know that, right?” asks the voice, taking a sternly disapproving tone that really grinds him the wrong way. She’s talking to him personally.

  Is this some shrink trying to test him? Some psych-evaluation from the flight research team?

  His fist strikes against the console as he pulls the corded radio into his hands, pressing down the button and answering with a single word. “Good,” is all that the Kestrel pilot says as he slams the radio back into the clasp and pushes the throttle of his plane forward as chatter comes from all communication channels, orders coming in from central air-command for his squadron to immediately pull back and regroup above their own defensive lines.

  ‘Where he’s going’?

  He’s not going anywhere. This is war, and it always has been war. War is the only place to go. War spans the world from here to the end of its most distant reaches. He was born in war, he went to school in war, and he grew up in war. He killed his first man at fifteen when he was drafted, and they gave him a rifle, and by the time he was old enough to sit in a plane, he had stopped counting how many it had been. He’s a natural at what he does. He’s driven by it. He loves it.

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  He reaches down, grabbing hold of a simple lever at the side of his seat, his hand resting on it as the silhouettes of his own squadron begin to diverge, the wing-formation breaking apart as they all pull back to safety.

  His thumb presses down on the locking mechanism of the lever, releasing it.

  He’s never disobeyed a command before, but there’s no point in him following these orders and regrouping in the back line. His damaged wing is throttling his speed too much. He won’t be able to outrun the enemy at the distance he would have left to go in order to return to the safe-zone. They’d gun him down half-way there. So there’s only one other viable option, one other direction out of the endless vectors available to a man with wings.

  The Kestrel’s experimental twelve cylinder piston engine is outfitted with a prototype device that he was told he doesn’t need to understand; he just needs to know that it works. It’s some sort of overdrive mechanism that mixes the fuel with an incredibly volatile propellant for short-term, high intensity situations.

  It’s not enough to get him back out of here — the ‘sprint’ it provides won’t last that long to make a difference — but the front-line is closer than the back-line.

  He can make it to there.

  The pilot shuts off the radio as a stream of orders is barked his way to return to formation and to leave the engagement zone.

  The sky ahead of him suddenly shines with wildfire as a full armada of auto-cannons and heavy machine guns unload his way in the very same second that he pulls the overdrive-lever, cranking it up, his back and helmet slamming against the loveless, hard seat that he’s strapped into. The Kestrel shoots forward like a banshee escaping sunrise, straight toward the mass of enemy interceptors, the oddly structured air all around him wobbling and distorting as if he were an arrowhead rupturing through gel as he yanks the throttle, the Kestrel flowing into a barrel roll as it glides through a tunnel of projectiles.

  The only place he is ‘going’ is where he’s always been, the only place that’s familiar to a man with no name and only a designation as an identity, the only place of purpose that he has — that place is wherever he can be to advance their lines one day forward, wherever he can be to kill just one more of the enemy’s numbers, to move the mission just an inch closer toward success.

  Nothing else matters.

  Here, in the burning skies above the world that is locked into a decades long war, flying over the ashen gravesites of some countless million screaming dead souls, he’s already at home.

  — His body and plane are cut through by hundreds of bullets at once; his hand presses down onto the self-destruction mechanism, cracking the glass housing, before the high-explosive charge erupts and swallows the distorted sky, a cadre of enemy planes, and him whole in a wave of fire and shrapnel.

  This here, this is where he’s going, if anywhere at all.

  His senses come to an end, and for the first time in any year of his life, there is no sound of gunfire, no roaring of engines, no screaming of voices in command or anguish, no thunderous explosions of mortar fire and artillery. For the first time ever for the man, everything is… quiet.

  And it remains so until a single voice finally chimes in, coming to him impossibly through the filtering sound of radio-static, as if he were still inside the Kestrel’s cockpit. “Perfect,” says that woman’s voice, her tone changing from its prior lofty condescension and into something more appraising and motherly. “— You are exactly what I need.”

  Even now, in death, the sensation of him falling never stops.

  Soft birdsong fills the air, together with the shrilling of many insects and the croaking of frogs, their combined songs creating the fitting soundscape to match the gentle atmosphere all around her, and she sings softly too, her voice joining the melody as she lets free the wordless song that her sister would always sing to her when she was scared. The winds of springtime softly push through the glades and the forest clearings, carrying over and onto the water of the great lake that is fed by so many rivers. The air smells of floral perfume as blossoms flower by the thousands all across the valley, and let it be known that life finds itself within a good season.

  The dryad turns her head, smiling and watching a fat, pleasantly buzzing bee fly toward her face. It stops and floats around her for a moment, as if wondering if she were one of the many blossoms, before then flying off to find something more familiar after realizing that she is not. Turning her head around, she watches it go, buzzing towards the monumental thing that towers over the forest of many trees and the lake of many rivers.

  — The world tree.

  Thriving there, in the middle of what may very well be paradise, is the single largest organism on the entire planet — a single tree whose roots can span across a continent and whose leaves and branches rest up in the sky so very high above. It takes days to walk around its base. Its leaves, in numbers beyond millions, fall and regrow in the amounts of drifting snowflakes in winter on any casual day, being carried off far and wide by the powerful air currents present up so high in the sky, spreading its magical essence all around the world to everywhere that the wind graces and that the leaves might land upon.

  The water that seeps through its roots, the pollen that swirls around its bark, the air that straddles its colossal mass — all of these things are blessed and touched by its nurturing power and carry the imbuing strength it gives them all across the world. It does so indiscriminately.

  The essence that the world tree gives off, it gives its gifts to the men of the fortresses and to the elves of the caverns, just as it gives its gifts to the orcs of the wild-lands and the dwarves of the mountains. It gives these gifts to the animals of the old places of every part of the world, just the same as it gives them to the monsters of the horrible regions, where none dare to walk.

  Nature does not discriminate; it only provides and takes in appropriate measures to balance itself.

  Air, water, magic — all manner of things are provided to the world as a whole by the world tree and she alone is the sole caretaker of it remaining.

  All of the others have left one by one, there having been a need for them in the aching reaches of the dying world that needs more healing than there are hands and souls to provide. All of them have gone to counteract the bleak tide that is slowly ebbing toward the world tree. There used to be dozens of them — caretakers.

  Then only a handful.

  Then it was just the two of them — her and another sister.

  She isn’t sure if she is imagining it, but every night is a little longer than the one that came before these days, and every dream that comes to her in her sleep is just a little darker and more frightening.

  — Something snarls at her from the side.

  She turns her head, looking at the startled bear that had been foraging through the blueberry bushes. In her daydreams, she had stumbled straight into it. After recognizing her, the massive animal lowers its head again and continues on eating as if nothing ever happened.

  “Are you well today?” asks the caretaker, her hand covered in callouses from work and dirt from the forest stroking the bear’s fur as she walks past it, the bear ignoring her presence now. “Oh?” she stops, looking down to the side and then rubbing the animal’s belly, feeling it.

  The bear is with young.

  “Congratulations!” she says excitedly, letting her hand fall from the expecting animal and rise to the bushes.

  The blueberry bush that the hungry bear is picking clean swells as the encouraging magic of her spell causes the plant to drink deeply of the rich world, pulling in vital resources and producing a swelling load of thick, dripping berries in the span of a few moments, their soft, tautly skinned bodies bursting from oozing juice. “Eat well.”

  Smiling peacefully to herself, the caretaker walks through the dense, thriving forest, the likes of which is to be found nowhere else in the world. The soil here beneath the canopy of the world tree is saturated with nutrients and deep-minerals. The dirt is moist and rich. Life thrives here in abundance.

  “Sister!” calls the dryad as she reaches her goal, gently pushing aside the brambles of the forest. “Sister, I’ve come,” she says, stepping into the sunlit glade — her sister’s favorite spot. In a way, it was very fortunate for it to have been here, of all places.

  Stopping, the caretaker stands there at the edge of the clearing and looks into it, at the heap of things laying in the open grass under the sunlight.

  Her sister’s corpse lies there, covered in a blanket of soft bark from the world tree. Desiccators, native to the area in legions, have begun their work of taking the dead body and returning it to the world. Mushrooms have begun sprouting from the exterior of the bark, feeding on the corpse together with countless insects and worms that move it around up and down — as if the dead body below were still breathing.

  This is the natural way.

  There is only one dryad left now.

  She had found her sister dryad dead only a day ago, taken exactly here, where she lies now. A knife was pressed through her, made of crude, sharp metal. It seems that the monsters have finally begun to reach the edges of the territory. The great rot has finally found the world tree’s garden.

  Kneeling down in the grass at the edge of the clearing, she stares at her sister, whom she has come to visit, before the body is fully devoured and broken down by the natural order and her spirit moves on and back into the cycle of rebirth.

  The last dryad talks to her, telling her about such things as her feelings and the fond memories she has shared with her. It hurts. But this really is the way of life. Animals, people, and monsters — they all kill and eat one another interchangeably. It is the exchange that nature created.

  “Come back soon, Sister,” finishes the dryad quietly, lowering her head and placing a palm down to touch the ground beneath herself, far from the corpse, in which worms and mycelial roots have already begun to return the body to the world. The forest, the grass, the animals — they all take from her sister and grow in turn. She hasn’t seen the culprit, but she assumes it to have been a goblin, given the weapon that she hasn’t touched. It lies where it fell, in the rocks by the dead trees. Goblins are vicious, small monsters that are more cruel than intelligent. It did not eat her sister, so the killing was for sport.

  This, too, is not unheard of in nature. There are many animals that hunt not for food but for the sake of it.

  Her hands, still touching the world, feel the energies moving through it. She listens to the whispering of the roots of the trees in the forest and to the secret hushed words and tones given in return by the mushrooms — the two creations of life often interacting with one another. She hears as they speak of the great rot.

  All across the world, roots touch one another. A tree near a mountain touches the roots of grasses below the peaks; the grasses spread across the tundra, where their roots touch the shrubbery of the boreal forests. Those roots connect and talk to one another, spreading out in all directions from one forest to the next, to the next, as the flowers speak to the trees, which speak to the mushrooms, and so on. A word whispered on the other end of the world makes its way through this great chain of life, resounding out in all directions below the ground. The plants never do have much to say, but when a single word makes its way across the whole of the world, it is one of significance.

  And for a time now, there has only been one single phrase uttered by the connected hivemind of all living things.

  ‘Rot’.

  A great rot, the great rot, has begun spreading from the other side of the world. Day by day, it consumes more and more. The march of the dead things corrupts the world and its beautiful, natural places as legions of monsters roam and rampage in a way that none have ever seen before. The great cities of the people of the world fall one after the other to the horde. The meadow mice drown in lakes of blood, sickering down into the deep burrows from above. One fortress after the other, one group after the other, falls, and the monsters keep on marching.

  And soon, the great rampage, the great desecration, will have made its way here to the last mark of true, pure, natural love and life on the world — the world tree.

  There is nothing that anyone can do to stop it. Not her, not any of the great kings or armies of legend. No hidden fortress in the mountains can be overseen, and no ship out at distant sea can go unnoticed.

  Everything will die. Everyone.

  Population die-offs are also not unheard of in the natural world. Sometimes, a species comes and simply replaces another one. There is nothing that anyone can do to stop it. Lifting her gaze, tears fall from her face as she mourns her dead sister, wondering how long she has left herself, as would any animal of intelligence and soul.

  — The sun flickers, a shadow casting down from over her head for a brief second.

  Confused, she covers her eyes and lifts her gaze in surprise, watching as a streak of black smoke and raging flames are cast down to the world below from the thick clouds of what feels like it ought to be a good day. A falling meteor rips through the sky from the horizon above, hurtling downward faster than she can follow. She jumps to her feet in shock, watching it and feeling the heat of its presence overhead for just a moment as it shoots above her close enough to scorch the treetops, before a loud, violent crashing comes from the lake behind her, hidden beneath the horizon-spanning shadow of the world tree.

  Hurrying, the dryad runs back the way she came toward the edge of the water, fully unaware of the thing that had been skulking behind her in the dense forest as she mourned, which had been quietly creeping closer and closer by the second.

  World Tree Apocalypse! This is my first invasion story, so I really hope you enjoy the ride! Please remember to follow and rate!