The lump of semi-molten metal the Ascension drone provided was orange-hot and not much bigger than Eyeball's thumb; and represented the largest intact piece of a much larger projectile that had caused the devastation around them. He studied it for a moment, nodding. "I need a pole, to serve as a handle for what we're about to make. Same materials as here if you can find it. Something long enough for Dancer."
The two pirates stepped back; one of them sprinting off into the ruins, having apparently spotted something suitable, as Eyeball pried a chunk of some sort of composite armor material that had once protected the underground shelter out, laying it on one knee; steam rising from the surface. "This stuff is still hot; and the corpses still fresh. This is the perfect situation for it. I'm carving the proper symbols into this block right here..."
He popped out his Osmium-backed K-Bar, using it in a manner far from intended as he started cutting into the surface, gouging out a symbol, as Dancer watched closely. "I know the runes fairly well now, but my helmet has a heads-up-display projecting them over my vision, and helping guide my hands." He also had precognition that could predict his mistakes before he made them, but best not say that.
Once the carving was finished, he carved a hole into the chunk of composite; the K-bar, despite its durability, starting to go dull cutting the heated material. When the Shoork pirate returned with a rough metal rod with a pointed tip that was likely once a signpost, Eyeball jammed it through the composite; right through the hole, and out the other side. "There we go. Now. I'm going to heat up the impact slug a bit more, and use it to hold the block onto the pole. Then, we dip the whole mess into the blood of those corpses down there."
Dancer stared, shaking back and forth in his floating pod. "This... is somewhere between disgusting and horrible. This is the best way to make a Focus?"
Eyeball stepped down into the parking structure; and settled the orange-hot mass into the pool of blood and viscera within the buried shelter. He focused on it. Channeling his disgust and horror at what the Republic had done here; and his anger, his desire to put an end to it.
As Dancer watched, the mass glowed. The blood steamed and boiled away... and the rough, horrible-looking hammer was raised up from the darkness, thick grey-blue blood dripping off of it in the light of day, and what looked to be a lump of a digestive track sizzling, hanging from the jagged spike at its tip. He focused on it. This.... was a focus. It was the second most powerful one he'd ever seen; the only one he'd seen stronger was Eyeball's sidearm.
Eyeball extended the handle of it to Dancer; who looked at it, then up at him. "What!?"
"Your people use hammers. Those aren't really my style. This is yours. We'll be making smaller, weaker ones from the less fresh sites here on this world before I leave. My payment for teaching me your version of magic."
"....Our magic is a far more joyous, contemplative thing. We use solidarity, compassion, love, happiness, and create our foci with lengthy rituals and careful work. This...." He accepted the hammer. "This is monstrous. I, on my own, could throw a person into orbit with this. You could do it to a starship! And it looks like something a child threw together!"
Eyeball nodded slowly. "Really. Why don't you show me. Lets get a bit further out from the epicenter, where its a bit cooler, so you can demonstrate. And, well. Magic is life force. The soul, as you would, of living things. The souls of all of these Klendath here have passed on, but left behind an echo of their rage, their sorrow, their pain, their fear. The most powerful focuses aren't just created out of powerful emotion, but of mass deaths; and are further empowered as they are used for violent ends, to cause even more death."
He raised the handgun. "Magic might not be an inherently dark, evil force. It can be a force of joy, created by love and hope, to bring life and peace. But. The darkest aspects of it are what generate the most power. That doesn't stop them from being used for positive ends, however."
***
"We appear to have suffered from some sort of orbital strike from the unknown enemy starship. Commander Chikrut, how long should it be before the enemy ship is taken out and rescue operations can begin?" The reporter was staring at him from a few feet away, as the Commander gently removed the tablet from Charsi's hands, and rested his hand on her helmet for a moment, looking through the visor at her now permanently closed eyes.
The reporter somehow didn't seem to grasp the situation here; despite the close confines, the air filled with dust and smoke, the corpses... she seemed to think this was somehow a temporary setback, and tomorrow she would be recording more propaganda videos of killing hideous bugs. He glanced up at her.
"Ma'am. We're dead. We would already have died if the scientists hadn't dug down into the first shelter the Founders established when they colonized this place. Everything big enough to pose a threat to that ship is gone, and I've ordered the rest to flee the system. If any of them come back for us, it'll be to their own deaths. I've still got sensor access to orbit, and can see..." He held up the tablet.
"They're scavenging whats left of our ships. Stealing anything valuable. We won't get backup for months... or longer. They're pulling ships back from the front to protect a special project further in. Even if that ship decided not to fire again once it realized we were still alive... the natives would dig us out and kill us sometime in the next few days."
She blinked; all six eyes flickering as if she were undergoing a stroke. "But... but the natives are already beaten. We bombed them and fried them and, and... used chemicals, and that new disease!"
Chikrut shook his head slowly. "The first bio-weapon caused mass casualties. All but a few of their children, a third of the adults. Every one since has caused less; they're too good at quarantining the moment any symptoms are seen now, so our most recent one is more of a slow burn one; made so they won't even notice it for months, so that it'll spread throughout their society before having any impact. They'll be extinct, sure. But the first ones to die from the new plague won't be until sometime next year. And we have, maybe, a day or two. Less; they'll have already picked up your transmission, so there's no point in pretending we're all dead."
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The camera mounted to her shoulder finally died... and she sat on the dusty floor, staring up at him; then looking at Charsi. "This.... This isn't supposed to happen. We're the most advanced, the most intelligent, the best there is!"
The commander had fallen silent. Something was stirring the dust and the smoke; there were apparently still air currents running through... or no.
He collapsed. She had a momentary vision of a figure in a sleek armor suit that seemed barely more than a vacuum suit, skin-tight and demonstrating a very tall, narrow form; dripping with blood as it moved through the darkness. The commander made a gasping wheeze; as she crawled closer, she could see that a needle had been rammed through his armor, into his lungs; he was going to be choking on his own blood until he passed. His eyes... he was blind. That needle had been rammed through the visor into each of his eyes before being pressed into his chest, and left there.
It would be a slow death. A horrible one, blind, lying in darkness. Why? Surely whoever had done this could have simply instantly finished him off. Were they being taken prisoner? Was this...
She felt a sudden, terrible force; and horrible agony, as the world went turned red. She could hear her translator chatter in her ears for a few seconds after the pain started. ~This is no worse than you deserve, demon.~
***
"The key is to keep them active, and to keep feeding the same amount of power into them. If you put too much, you slam it into the roof. Too little, it falls. It's an art that takes quite a bit of time; but is simple enough to start."
The gunship was flying over the ruined plains, so many impact craters on the ground that most of them ended just at the edge of another crater; and Dancer had opened the pod of his armor, showing Eyeball the runes for 'movement'. "We use them for launching spacecraft, for flying, and, rarely, for fighting; this sort of rune doesn't impart nearly as much speed as, say, a railgun, and not even a fraction as much as a particle cannon, so it isn't really of much use in space combat unless you're already within arm's reach of the enemy."
Eyeball was nodding slowly. Their second stop had seen far weaker results; the city had been gone for months, the corpses old and rotten; if the local scavengers hadn't been wiped out by bio-weapons, there likely would have been nothing left. The short length of cable he had enchanted, however, was still impressive, according to Dancer. He held up his artificial arm, and focused on one of the gestures that he'd seen Dancer make, aiming out the open hatch of the gunship.
He could see results. If he twisted his finger this way, the gunship would collapse. That way, Dancer would go flying out the hatch, already dead before he'd even started falling.
If, though, he held his hand just like this... A chunk of debris on the ground simply exploded. He frowned. He couldn't figure out any gesture, any method that didn't result in the target just... splattering. He actually tried it a few times, to feel how the magic flowed through it... with Dancer watching in horrified fascination.
"...You have a great deal of intrinsic power, and are using an extremely powerful focus. I would recommend using a far weaker focus for more delicate work, or it will be... difficult. Like trying to crack only the first pane of a window with a hammer without breaking through."
Eyeball chuckled. "Well. The gun is right out then. What would you recommend? Honestly, even this far weaker one.." He held up the short length of coil, made from the heated remnant of an old impact round. "Would probably be too much for most applications."
"...Deliberately make a terrible focus? Just use something with no emotional attachment, no impact? Perhaps just carve the symbols into some ordinary gloves?"
He nodded. "Well. Worth trying. We'll stop at some more of these ruins, use all the more recent ones. Though... I'm sensing something special in this direction. Not sure just what it might be, but there's at least a couple of living Klendath in the ruins, and I might as well talk with some before we leave."
***
Riikstiitlt had been at the shrine for weeks now. He'd planned to die, here; with the children, whenever the monsters had reached it in their expanding circle of death... but for some reason, they'd passed it by. He didn't know if they simply hadn't seen him; or if he was too insignificant for him to care. But he knew that this was where he would die, along with all the hopes of his species.
Until then, he would tend to the shrine. He dusted off the list of names at the top. The simple metal plaque was enormous, sitting atop the tomb, and he couldn't help but let out a keening wail of sorrow for the thousandth time as he cleaned it off.
Children didn't receive a name until they reached a certain threshold. Riik's kind simply weren't really intelligent until then; more beast than sentient. For each name on the plaque, he knew there were a hundred unnamed children in the tomb; in what had once been on the outskirts of the largest, most populous of the people's cities, and was now... just a ruin.
There were graves in every direction; for most of them, a single marker representing a family, which would be lifted each time a new body was added. This shrine was unique. The only one of its kind.
When the dark-eye illness had spread, it had been devastating. For adults, it had rendered half of the sufferers blind at first, and then killed most of them; the survivors usually took weeks to recover. For the children... virtually all of them had gone blind. Been driven mad by their blindness... and torn each other apart in their creches. Riik settled one tendril on the plaque. Seventeen of his own children were buried here. Only two old enough to have a name.
He heard engines flying overhead, and looked to the sky. The craft that approached was familiar; one of the monsters typical landing craft, with guns to rain fire on defenders, able to carry a handful of troops. He'd seen a few, over the past weeks. None approaching, though; they were always heading out to decimate some army or other.
The first sign this one was different... was before it landed. A tall, lean creature seemed to simply appear amidst the graves, carrying the corpse of a monster in its arms; or not a corpse. The pale-skinned creature had holes in its skull where the eyes should be, its limbs dangled uselessly, and it smoked with the heat of whatever had brought it here; but the weak, pitiful wails it released showed that it was still alive.
Riik studied the creature, and the broken Monster; before the creature vanished, leaving it behind, as the gunship settled in to land. He could see, for a moment, a group of creatures; some the right size and shape for monsters, one of them almost People-like; talking. The tall creature appeared beside them; and then vanished again.
Riik watched them approach, confused. The Monsters were from the stars. Clearly, that tall one didn't like the Monsters. What of the rest? He resolved to find out; as he approached the broken monster, and ended its suffering with a quick jab of one fore-leg, the spiked digit slamming through the creature's throat in a quick movement. Best to end its suffering before its wailing attracted more of its kind.