Hate.
For most of his life, Dobrey the Climber had known nothing but hate. He'd been only a child when he was taken, and had never received his proper adult name; all he had still was a nickname for his habits of play as a toddler. Neither he nor his surviving friends had ever earned an adult name; but he'd known about the war. He'd been born before it started, and if the silver-headed stranger and it's robot were correct, the war had ended before he did.
The Sky-Demons had arrived with a massive show of force; hundreds of thousands of soldiers coming down from the sky in advanced armor, with energy weapons that made the best his people had look like toys. They had launched a handful of small spacecraft, but the logistics of supplying a presence in space had proven extremely challenging; getting enough food to keep a crew alive for any lengthy period of time was virtually impossible.
These sky-demons, though... they had thousands of ships. At first, the Jernal had responded with fear. There had initially been competing calls, to surrender, or to fight to the last. But... these had ended by the first day. The monsters might have been advanced, but they were sluggish. Pathetic. Top Jernal scientists theorized that the only reason they were able to travel about in space without some form of sedation was a sluggish metabolism that allowed them to eat only once every few days without discomfort; and an even more sluggish response time.
Talking to them was painfully difficult, when the invaders chose to talk. They were slow, taking minutes between words, and drawing them out. Fighting them, on the other hand?
For the first time since the invention of gunpowder-based weapons, the pike came back into popularity. Soldiers would find joints on the invader's armor, ram spikes through them, and then move on; leaving the sluggish opponents to collapse in a pile of purple blood and agonized shouts. The initial invasion force had been completely obliterated; and the follow-up force, using some sort of energy field that made the Jernal soldiers almost as slow as the sky-demons, had been crushed as well; as this time, the Jernal had a massive arsenal of enemy weapons.
And then... the sky began to fall.
At first, a few rocks, here and there. He could remember his parents moving him from shelter to shelter, as the astronomers kept predicting new impacts; until energy weapon strikes from orbit ended the broadcasts.
His shelter had been hit. And.... he'd awoken from sedation here. On whatever hell-world this was.
His implants used some sort of strange electric impulses, beyond Jernal technology, to slow him down. His metabolism became just as sluggish as the demons, and it felt as if he were walking through a mass of gel. Even still, he could have slaughtered them in the lab. But....
The implants could inflict pain. Terrible, horrible pain. All of the 'Subjects' were children from his own shelter. His sister had died, screaming in agony. His cousin, the same. They'd left them writhing for days, right there in front of their friends and family, to bring home the point; disobedience brought pain. Attempting to harm the demons brought far, far worse.
As he'd grown older, and they trained him to fight, began using what were clearly animal-training techniques of punishiment and reward, it was hard to think of anything other than hate for his masters. They punished speaking between them, even in their cells; and never let more than one be in the same cell. The first time he'd touched his brother's face as an adult was just moments ago.
He didn't trust the silver-headed one. Undoubtedly, he was part of yet another species out there conquering others, just like the demons. Dobrey watched the figure and his mechanical companion as they surveyed the shuttle, and looked down at the demon skull in his hand. He'd plucked out each of the tiny black orbs before killing this one, and his arms were dripping with the purple ooze that filled the monster's bodies.
Still. The robot had freed him, and given him the tool to free his family. The proper, Jernal thing to do would be to simply assume ownership of the slave after killing it's masters. Instead, it was enslaving the masters, and freeing the Jernal.
It spoke to motivations Dobrey could not understand; aside from simply having the masters as enemies, and the Jernal not. He jogged to the robot at a casual pace, leaving the eyeless head to fall to the ground behind him. "Robot. My family has slain the Marrick soldiers we found outside. My friends are inside the....starship launch place... killing those inside as we speak. They have encountered a few that we are unable to kill, and my brother has been hurt in attempting to do so; but otherwise the place is mostly empty. We will continue hunting, and killing, for now, but we will need more food in the near future. They normally keep us partially sedated to reduce how much we eat; we only have a few days worth of food in the lab at the current rate."
The robot, and the silver-headed man, both tracked his approach, watching him. The silver-head wasn't nearly as sluggish as a Marrick; but still fairly slow. The robot, on the other hand, was as sluggish and clumsy as a child at moving; still far better than either the silver-head or the Marrick; but spoke and reacted even faster than one of his kin.
The robot made a gesture; clearly the beginning of a Jernal greeting; even as it spoke. "The rations that you can eat are currently in orbit, being gathered by more of my drones. If you wish to come along, they will be kept there and loaded on our ship. If you wish to remain here, they can be delivered to the starport. You are the only ones here who can consume them, so there is no point in retaining any for ourselves. My companion, Eyeball, will handle the ones you are unable to kill, if you direct him to them. I also have weapons that can allow you to do the job yourself, though they are in orbit."
Dobrey squinted at the robot. "That seems implausible. These creatures are so durable that a blade directly to the joint at the throat does not slay them. I would welcome the aid, or the weapon, or both. We are not friends, but I owe you for my freedom, and wish to kill Marrick. Are you going to be leaving this place to kill more Marrick?"
"Eventually. First, we must rebuild our ship, and we will be seeking allies."
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The Jernal nodded. "When it is time to go kill Marrick, return for us. I cannot read Marrick writing, and their translators do not work for me. I believe this world is not the home of the Marrick?"
"Negative. A species lives here that the Marrick are systematically murdering to use as food and clothing; keeping their children imprisoned, and when they reach adulthood, harvesting them. They live in a series of hives; massive metal structures they have been held in for many years by the Marrick. I will have the weapon and a translator delivered soon. For now, here is a map of the location of these hives; every Marrick settlement on this world, and the prisons of the natives."
When Dobrey heard the purpose of the facilities, the fate of the children, he let out a low hissing chitter. "Then it is not just my people they treat this way. Do they treat all people this way?"
"Affirmative. They are members of a religious cult that claims their founders created all life; and creatures like you and the natives are animals, mistakes, to be cleansed, purged."
The lean brown-skinned creature nodded. "Then we shall purge them in turn. I will get to work. Bring the weapon here, and the translator. I have work to do."
***
As Eyeball whistled to himself, checking his tenner yet again as he walked up to the front door of the starport, one of Ascension's drones walked beside him in lockstep. "So you're saying it's a good idea, but impractical to execute in the time available."
"The best option would be to, for example, dismantle a gas giant in such a way as to create a thick dusty region surrounding the system; one which the planets would slowly clear as they circled the star, but which would terribly damage approaching ships which did not slow down dramatically for years to come. As it expanded, it would create a growing region where warp travel was unsafe. This would, however, leave no paths into or out of the system, for friend or foe, without using a vessel such as those the Republic uses to clear out travel lanes."
"Okay. There's a gas giant here. Let's kill it."
The machine swiveled to face him. "We currently lack that capacity. It would require weeks to develop a weapon capable of doing so. Immobile, uninterrupted weeks without being required to move the manufacturing equipment or use it for anything else."
Eyeball chuckled, and patted the machine on the shoulder. "Oh ye of little faith. Come on now, I know how to kill anything I look at, didn't they tell you?"
"That is not how your abilities work."
***
Dobrey looked at the translator the machine had given him. He had received a message from the silver-headed man. He backed out of the building he had just entered, leaving the corpse of one of the hive guards laying amidst his fellows; who would now panic and scream, likely either running deeper into the building, or running around in fear.
~Hello there! I've got a bit of a project to help protect this world from the Marrick that I could use your help with. I need as many living Marrick prisoners as you can get; any condition is fine, missing arms and legs is fine, just alive. And these specific devices, the ones the Marrick were using to kill the natives. This is for our mutual objective of screwing with them, and you can watch them die if you'd like. Oh, and since I'll need to be getting something into space as soon as we're done, we've got the rations that are made for your species being delivered. Whether you bring the things or not, the rations are your, as well as what they call a 'Disrupter Rifle'.~
He stared at the display, and the listings. He wasn't completely certain, but it seemed to imply that the silver-headed man was going to be killing the Marrick using the same tools they had used to kill the natives. There couldn't possibly be a good reason for such nonsense; but the idea of the monsters getting to spend their last hours in fear as they were slaughtered the same way they did others....
He smiled. The first genuine smile to cross his face for most of his life; it felt strange as it crossed his face. When he casually jogged into the hive, and looked at the guards; a team of nine of them, mostly fleeing, three aiming their rifles at a place Dobrey had been whole seconds ago... he started disarming them... forcibly. Each time he yanked a gun from a limb, he deliberately broke the Marrick's arms; and selected a pair of their rifles to use to shoot out the legs of the fleeing soldiers; a single laser-rifle shot into the back of each knee.
Then, of course, each elbow. Within the next two seconds, the entire group was a mass of misery, screaming and struggling... How many could he get? Each of these hives had hundreds of them. This... was going to be hungry work.
***
At first, Ascension had been confused as to what Eyeball was doing, dragging a metal rod through the dirt. Six of the Pale Ones had arrived as he'd requested, each armed with a shovel, and one of the assault shuttles, with a disrupter rifle and the rations for the Jernals, was en route.
Almost immediately, however, references collided; and an image of the ancient Norse god, Odin, carving a rune into the ground before sacrificing a herd of cattle emerged... and summoning an apocalyptic blizzard that could have been devastating if it hadn't been brought into being specifically to stop a world-ending heatwave. Even so... it had spawned an enormous hurricane over the already devastated mexico.
But... this wasn't the gas giant. Using such a spell here would devastate this already-damaged world, not somewhere else. What exactly was he trying to accomplish?
Ascension studied the metahuman. He was following a guide from his helmet, not doing this from memory. "If you share the projection, I can assist in forming the rune."
He glanced back. "Not until I finish drawing it. Then the Pale Ones can make it deeper. We need to melt down the slaughtering tools, pour them into this shape, and then cool the metal with the freshly drawn blood of the Marrick. Ahh... do the Marrick have iron in their blood?"
"Yes. Their blood includes iron, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen."
Eyeball continued carving. "Is it funny that, despite never having really done magic with her, this makes me miss Emerald?"
The machine stepped closer; carefully avoiding the lines he was drawing. "Her father showed you the rune you're about to form?"
He stood back, looking it over... and nodded. "Precisely. Go ahead and have the pale ones start carving." He inhaled for a moment. "I'm gonna need some buckets. I'll use a plasma weapon to melt down the tools, and we want as much of them in the grooves as possible. We won't get the full effect unless it's all filled."
The walking corpses immediately began to dig; moving along the pattern dug into the earth in a precise form. "The helmets of the Republic Heavy-armor units will suffice. I will bring a few over."
"Good. We'll need to do it all in short order. Melt and pour, kill and cool with the blood, then get into space. Once this is complete, it's gonna be a devastating amount of force plugged into a tiny amount of space. Oh. How is the salvage going?"
Ascension ran a brief comms check of its various units operating on space; and send an image to Eyeball's HUD; showing the cruiser reduced to a skeleton, while the 8AD seemed closer to it's original self; more of a wedge than the box it had become, albeit without the teal Republic paintjob. An overlay appeared over it; showing a much larger space, including a series of multiple fabricators; indicating that, much like the Jeanne D'Arc, the vessel now included an entire deck that was extending into the extradimensional space that contained the fabricators.
"Everything immediately useful will be taken before we need to leave. If your spell does go off as intended, the civilians in orbit will be stranded, unable to escape for an unknown but lengthy amount of time."
"...It's honestly extremely difficult to care about that. But if I think of a good way to protect the locals and keep them alive, I'll consider it. Frankly, if they get stuck in their ships for years on end and resort to cannibalism before they all die off, it'll be no more than they deserve."