“We were supposed to be superior. A god to an ant. It was supposed to be easy. When we heard from the Overseer that another species, blinded by greed, took the bait, we rejoiced. It has been almost a millennium since the last purge. We got into our groups and went through the wormhole. The new prey looked odd, similar to us but with a few major differences. They had four appendages like us, two arms and two legs. They were quite a bit smaller than us at about 2/3rds our height. And they lacked the chitinous armor we have, with a leathery hide replacing it. They seemed to have fur on their heads but nowhere else. A curious species, but it did not matter. They were to be purged like those before them. The ones in the room we stepped into from the wormhole were obviously not from their warrior caste. The knowledge caste perhaps? It matters not, they died all the same, in screams of terror and pain. We relished in their sorrow, feeling hopeful, as our first prey fell like margas before our blood-soaked claws and smoking barrels. A short while after our initial victory, a new caste came in, this time with opaque, black armor and primitive gauss rifles. Probably this pitiful species’ excuse for a warrior caste. They fell just as easily as the knowledge caste, their armor useless against our exotic matter rifles and their pathetic weapons not leaving a scratch on our glorious armor. We quickly purged the building and waited for reinforcements, so we could clear this hive. Of course, we didn’t need the reinforcements, but there was protocol to follow.
Day by day, more of their hives fell before us. Day by day, millions cowered at our feet begging for mercy. We showed none. That was a mistake. We thought we wiped out all but the smallest enclaves of these creatures we now know as humans, but one day, while my clutch mates and I were clearing out a section of a hive in a subcontinent the humans called “India”, we were requested to return to our sub-hive to help defend. I could hear the nervousness in the communications officer’s voice as he requested help. I complied, as we all did, wondering how in the great abyss did these pitiful creatures mount an assault, let alone one that threatens our sub-hive? When we arrived, we found no answers. The assaulting forces were able to blow the zero point reactor-the base was gone, all the matter in a 500-meter radius was gone, leaving no way to tell how they achieved such a feat. That is how zero-point meltdowns work, after all. So, we were trapped on this “India” with no transportation out. We tried to get in contact with the hive of the continent of “Asia”, to no avail. We wondered amongst ourselves “Did these creatures also somehow compromise the Asia hive?”
We decided to try the mega-hive. It was thousands of kilometers away, but there was no way this species could touch it. During our kind’s great schism of eight generations ago, the reformist scum tried to assault a mega-hive. They brought eight armies of warriors to assault a mega-hive protecting a strategic port. It did not fall. The battle signaled the end of the great schism. Thankfully, the mega-hive responded, sending a transport to return us to the mega-hive. We learned upon our arrival that the sub hive and the Asian hive were not assaulted by an army, or even a battalion. No, a lone human was responsible for this.
The logistics caste was in chaos trying to figure out what happened, how this human was able to kill hundreds of our people. While in the debriefing room, we heard a low rumble and the room shook like the god of below was displeased with us. Then the alarms went off. The warrior caste was rushing to get equipped and in position. We were lined up at either flank of the main gate when an odd smell could be sensed. The smell seemed to be coming from the gate. We squinted at the gate trying to see what was wrong when we saw that the gate was ever so slightly glowing. The gate was melting! The glowing slowly got brighter and brighter until we all could no longer bear the heat and retreated to our fallback line.
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As the slag from the gate slowly fell to the ground, we saw IT, a figure of human size wrapped in a simple black cloak. All it had was a plasma pistol, supposedly looted from a dead brother. We opened fire. The shots were going straight towards the figure and it didn’t even try to move. The shots made contact and the figure went up in an explosion of super-heated plasma. We all stood there confused as the smoke was clearing. Then I heard a quiet chuckle coming from behind. I whipped around, just to see all of my brothers on the floor, decapitated. With the same figure in a cloak, this time entirely stained in the blue blood of my brothers. I switched to full-auto and emptied my entire mag into the figure’s center of mass. Once again, I heard that chuckle, the damned mocking chuckle.
“I have a fun idea” it said, in a voice sounding like a thousand industrial grinders all crying out in pain at once. I only understood through my translator, even though I learned this planet’s language. Then I felt a great dull pain to my head, and everything went black.
I awoke stripped naked, in a room that was pitch black, I couldn’t see a thing... The thing had also stripped me of my armor and my weapons. I then saw a light coming from somewhere. I looked towards the light and saw a video display of our prime-hive back on our homeworld. I was wondering how the thing managed to get there when a timer appeared on the screen. 5 minutes.
I waited and watched the timer tick down while drowning in a mix of horror and curiosity. As the timer hit the single digits I started watching more closely, looking for the tiniest change to the screen. When the timer hit zero, it happened. The screen showed a dot of black in the queen’s spire, slowly getting larger and larger. It had placed a Singularity bomb in the spire!
Trillions of my brothers and sisters would perish! I sat there, unable to do anything but despair while I watched the black hole consume the prime-hive. It took a whole five minutes for the singularity to fizzle out. Five minutes that felt like five eternities. As the blackness retreated, the view of what happened came forth. The entire hive was gone, like it never existed in the first place. The only way you would be able to tell something happened would be the massive spherical hole in the ground.
I am writing this about two cycles after the demon bombed our most populous hive. I am going to die shortly from lack of sustenance. I believe that this demon has brought our race down to where we are now the margas. We are the ants looking up to a god. We. Are. Inferior. I wrote this note to explain the downfall of our kind, the Uzrid, because of our pride as a superior kind. We let down our guard. We became complacent, thinking that we have already won. Please, if you are reading this, share our story and do not let your kind make the same mistakes. - Ca’than, 18th battalion”
As I finished reading the letter my daughter started to tug on my pants. “Daddy I wanna go home, this place is boring!” And so we left the museum of humanity's first contact with the Urzid.