//------------------------------// // Darkest Hours // Story: [Forlorn Ascension]|[Rites of Dominion] // by Desrium //------------------------------// “This is the Harmony battlecruiser Triterion reporting! There is nothing left! Our ranks have been broken. I repeat, our ranks- “ A beastly sounding roar preceded the immediate cease of the transmission, the frantic voice on the other end engulfed by the flames of destruction that marked the defeat of yet another ship and the loss of even more lives. Soon, the static subsided as well. Stunned figures stared at the super projector, unable to move as if frozen in time. After all they had done to bring peace back to the galaxy, how could such a disaster be allowed to happen? Even Uolix was locked in place, unable to look away from the red star in the red sea. What felt like an eternity later, one of the analysts looked over to her. “Commander…” it started to say with a trembling voice. “what do we do now?” At this, Uolix shook her head and dropped her sights from the hologram. She rested her claws on the terminal as she pondered this horrific situation. What could she do? She mobilized thousands of ships into battle and they were all demolished by this new enemy. What could she do now that would result in anything ending differently? Her eyes were pained with bitter pangs and she wanted to cry, but for the sake of the others dared not shed a tear. She had to stay strong, even with the prospect of death looming on the horizon. It was what Javic would have wanted. Gaali would have stayed levelheaded and logical. Romaz would have been feisty and proud up until the very end. How she missed them so, and how she wanted to live on in their memories. “Commander… we need to do something…” Murmuring began to resonate among those present in the situation room, chattering about what they were going to do, and how hopeless the future of the galaxy appeared. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do!” Tsubar’s voice echoed through the observation center. Heads whipped around towards the source of the sudden announcement. They found the Shu’badi gripping the railing lining a platform high above the super projector. The door behind him closed, meaning he had been in the room for just a few seconds. He flipped himself over the railing and spread his Arcane-Manipulators, floating down to the action center several stories below upon ripples of bright blue light. He hovered before the super projector with all eyes his captive; even Uolix found herself staring and wondering what Tsubar was planning. “We rally the rest of our fleets and we go fight!” he shouted. “Nothing’s changed about this war except the way we fight it, but if we start despairing now then we’ve already lost. And we are the ones who survived the Hoof-Talons’ tyranny and not only that- we kicked their asses!” “But so many have died already,“ one operative dared to say. Tsubar whipped around to face the officer. If looks could truly kill, then it should have counted itself lucky the Shu’badi’s visor completely hid his expression. But before his passion could be unleashed upon the hapless operative, Uolix reigned him in. “I understand you are angry, Tsubar. We all know how you feel about things like this, but we can’t base the matter of our survival on rage. Lives are at stake!” “But lives are always at stake! Death does not stop conquerors from conquering! Death does not stop pirates from pillaging! Death does not stop war mongers from waging war! Death should not stop guardians from protecting what they cherish!” “But blind sacrifice will get us nowhere!” “There won’t be sacrifice! Before, I would have been just as daunted as you all are. But that was before our breakthroughs! We have the power to fight this new threat just as we fought the Hoof-Talons! We have the battle units!” “Experimental battle units. Ghu’arat knows Tzorvar Prime gave us enough trouble without adding the mass produced units on top of it!” Uolix retorted. “Tzorvar Prime is an isolated case and you know it! The units that came before are perfectly functional and powerful in their own right! Handling major crises is what they were designed for. To not use them now would be foolish and an insult to everyone who ever faced impossible odds but fought valiantly regardless!” The murmuring increased in volume, rising and tone as debates grew heated amongst others, their voices taking on a hopeful nuance. Tsubar panned his sights across the platforms, spurred on by the reaction. With a calmer, quieter voice, he spoke directly to Uolix, “We live in an age that our friends only dreamed of. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than what we had before. We need to hold on to it now more than ever or risk losing it forever.” Uolix flexed her claws pensively. After a moment, she asked, “And you genuinely believe?” Tsubar nodded. With a sigh, she turned to the Harmony collective. “Dispatch every asset we have! We stop their reign of terror before it begins!” Tsubar hoisted a metal tentacle into the air, and the gesture was returned by all regardless of whether they had arms, tentacles, hands or hooves; the analysts at their terminals brimmed with zeal, the officers standing on the various levels of the room shouting their praises, even the construction workers who held their tools in the other showed their support. Such was the power of this moment that they almost did not notice that the red star disappeared from the display, as well as a chunk of the rest of the Thymal region. Almost. The enemy was destroying the monitoring drones as well… *** The triumph of hope elsewhere meant nothing to those on the besieged surface. Huddled inside dark crevices, crowds of people hid from the invaders. They had moved to another system after the first was subdued and made quick work of the defenders there. Now flaming wrecks were crashed in the bottom floors of buildings, the pavement cracked and jagged. Bodies littered the streets. Inside the buildings, refugees clung to fleeting life. Walls had been blown in, entire floors burning, the windows shattering and showering the ground with glass. Towers leaned into other towers, misshapen and broken. Smoke hung in the yellow sky, trailing up from the war-torn city. The black coffin-craft flew over the streets while deathless soldiers marched down the ruined city, guns toted. Hysterical people were holding on to their beloved deceased in the piles of bodies laid out all throughout the metropolis, doubled over them and mourning. They were either torn apart by the yellow-green beams of energy that sliced them in twos, impaled on the nasty clawed blades some of the deathless carried or dissolved into glowing sludge by the blasts of deathless weaponry. The few that survived the initial siege without finding a shelter to hide in met similar fates. They all were frantically bolting around corner after corner, watching where they had come from only to find themselves faced to face with the deathless forces. Some were lucky enough to shamble off into the night, evading the light of the burning piles of rubble. Most however, fell before the onslaught of necrotic blasts. Hovering over the hive world, the Marauder was a steel cloud. It stayed above the smoke, shining under the light of the planet’s blue moon and glowing with green energy. The pale creature watched the executions in the streets with a morbid satisfaction, approving the manner in which the tide culled the living and then subjected the corpses to the ritual of resurrection. Their souls were offering to the Gods, but the bodies… the bodies were the spoils for the deathless tide to reap. A band of the soldiers headed down a deserted straight. The buildings on either side of the wide streets were dark save for the small flames licking their walls. The deathless warriors treaded over the twisted bodies beneath their heels, their boots kicking up the light dusting of ash that coated the area. Their glowing eyes peered into the shadows, hunting the irresistible essence that was life –strong, powerful life, steely spirits that needed to be delivered to the heavens. Glaring eyes looked down at them from inside an alcove formed by collapsed walls and ceilings. A visor dropped shot down from the top of the helmet the person wore, the opaque orange screen covering what little else of their scarred face the helmet did not. The crouched figure raised a bulky looking rifle with glowing bulbs lining the barrel, the red energy within glimmering like the fires burning across the city. “You thought just because you brought down the Triterion that you had us all?” he muttered. He flipped a few switches on the black gun and turned a few dials. He looked down the sights of the rifle, taking aim a short distance ahead of the group. “Mistake. And as for mistake number two…” The group of undead stopped walking without warning. The figure in the darkness saw their glowing eyes turned towards his direction. There was no doubt about it, they knew where he was. How, he did not know. What he did know was that his little ambush plan had to be tweaked a little. As they hoisted their weapons up, he brought the end of the rifle over what he figured to be the center of the group and pulled the trigger. The barrel slid back into the main assembly like a cannon, belching fire. The explosive slug crashed into the ground right in the midst of the soldiers, a bubble of hot gas popping with a whooshing bellow. The soldiers became shadows for but an instant before being thrown about like ragdolls. “Thank you, battle brother. Your weapon has served me well,” the Harmony soldier said, looking to the body encased in thick black armor plating. He rested the heavy ordnance rifle beside its original owner before leaping out of the alcove and into the flickering firelight. He was a slender looking fighter, his dark red battle suit form fitting and complimenting his well-defined body. White armor plating covered his torso, upper arms and forearms, thighs and shins. The helmet he wore was also white, accommodating four short horns that protruded from the back of the soldier’s head. Jet boosters on his back and the sides of his leg armor blared to life just before he hit the ground. He dropped onto the rubble strewn battlefield and rolled before breaking off into a sprint down the street. His sneak attack had incinerated a good portion of the undead squad, leaving mostly molten corpses scattered around the blast zone. Those that did not share the same fate were already back on their feet, unfazed. One with four arms, for example, was wielding four necrotic rifles and sending bolt after sickly colored bolt after him. Without breaking stride he held his hands over his thighs. The compartments over them opened up and the grips of his pistols popped up into his hands. He then threw himself to the side, jumping a respectable distance into the air and twisting his body in such a way that he rolled through the air to face his attacker. His broad-headed guns fired their smaller caliber shells into the deathless, small explosions going off where they slammed into the undead’s armor and detonated. The undead staggered back from the concussive force and the agile soldier tucked into himself as he neared the ground again. After rolling sideways through the air, he kicked his legs out again and touched down, sliding across the dusty pavement firing rapid shots into the other deathless still standing, knocking them off kilter. He charged towards them, closing in on one soldier that regained its footing shortly after a blow straight to the gut hit true. It raised its spiked rifle and the Harmony soldier fired both pistols into it, causing it to erupt into eroding green energy that ate away at the upper body of the deathless until its legs fell to the ground in a heap. “You’re not even half the soldier you used to be!” the operative shouted as he vaulted over them, front flipping through the air and firing at another deathless as he was upside down. Three quick shots blew its neck, an elbow and a knee apart, causing the undead to drop where it stood. When he came back down, he holstered his pistols and kicked up a necrotic rifle into his waiting hands. It was him versus the four-armed undead. “You know, if you could shoot worth a damn, you wouldn’t need four guns!” The monster let out a rasping growl before firing one rifle, the bolt soaring at the soldier, who dropped down into a roll. His boosters fired up thereafter and he was off the ground by time the second shot was fired at him. He returned fire at an angle, aiming for the lower set of arms on one side of the undead and succeeding in having the bolt of energy slice both arms on that side off. When he came back down, he deftly arched his spine and leaned out of the way of two simultaneous blasts issued from the undead’s remaining guns. When he straightened, he fired a single shot into the center of the deathless, cutting it apart. “Like I said, you don’t need four guns to get a simple job done.” The soldier held the rifle out in front of him to inspect it properly and then spat, “Disgusting weapon.” He tossed it aside as if it were trash, drew his pistols again and restocked their magazines. When he was done, he returned them to their place and looked up into the darkened sky. “Come on… we need reinforcements. There are not much of us left and we can’t hold out much longer… ” *** Phineas sat leaning forward against the straps in his seat. He rested a foreleg on his instrumentation panel, holding up his head as he fiddled around with his long range communicator, his PDA in the little improvised slot he made. His thoughts whirled around in his head like a vicious storm. What happened since he went into stasis? And what the hell was with the Iopteryx? What did it all mean for him? He was all alone with one doozy of a mystery and he thought the best way to get his bearings would be to get an idea of how things were at the moment. Last he remembered the Harmony was handling things quite nicely. But before long he started to pick up the crackling signals. He sat up and listened to the broken transmissions that flickered in and out, words disjointed. He came across a disturbing number of these transmissions, distorted calls for help. They couldn’t have been sent out too long ago, Phineas figured, if he was just now receiving them. He tapped in commands on his computers and brought up the holographic star map. Another bout of button pressing later and he had tracked the origin of the distress signals to a star cluster located in the inner region of a galactic arm. He was many systems away, but the pulsing segmented line that pointed to one star system showed that there was definitely something going on there. The issue with the Iopteryx and the things he missed while asleep could wait, he decided. There were beings out there in need of assistance! "I can't die. Not because there's a fight I need to fight, but because there's a chance for me to live!" he remembered himself thinking before he put himself back in the pod. “I’m starting to think that I only live to fight…” He prepped the Spell-core for warp and took off, iridescent streaks of purple left by his engines as he shot out of the wreck of the scientific vessel, speeding through the blackness away from the planet the decimated ship orbited and into an expanding prism of light, jumping to the Thymal region.