Brad

As Brad’s troops began the long trek back to their base, Brad surveyed the corpse-and-debris-strewn battlefield he had nearly died on just hours ago. The ground around his boots was a swamp of blood and viscera. His war-ragged army of humans marched in solemn silence as Brad recalled how excited they had been just a little while ago when they had watched the hell-cursed army fall apart.

“I’m still not sure it was the wisest move to make peace with those traitors,” Casey remarked. “When humanity was at its most dire, they were doing nothing but thinking about themselves. We shouldn’t let them get away with it.”

“It is impossible to deny the tribulations of our times. If we stand divided by our history, then we will have no future. We must put aside our differences and unite against our common foes—lest we be swept away,” Brad replied in his usual grandstanding tone and the best fanciful rhetoric he could come up with, hoping the gibberish coming out of his mouth would be enough to appease his follower. He looked around at the faces of his remaining soldiers. The bloodlust had worn off, and despite none of the people that mattered to him dying, only the disposable cannon fodder being thrown to the front lines, the remainder’s mood was anything but jubilant.

He had delivered them a beautiful steak, and yet they mourned the cow he had to butcher to feed them. They had leveled up, they had gotten free stat points, they had harvested more cards in one day than in the entire apocalypse so far, and yet they were moping along, hearts rent and acting like someone had dumped them on Valentine’s Day.

He wondered what he could do to get their heads back in the game so he could make a move on some other base on the journey home if the opportunity arose. But then his eyes caught sight of insectoids departing from the other side of the base. They started to march toward the bridge Brad had built, their numbers remarkably few. The giant multi-limbed creatures were led by a fierce and beautiful chimera, part red-haired woman, part insect, her wings flaring with fire and a malicious gleam in her eyes as she strode nearer.

Brad couldn’t help but feel annoyed the moment he saw them. Fucking alien scum, he thought, a phrase that was more common among his followers than “how are you” or “good morning.”

“It’s him!” shrieked the crazy half-human, half-insect woman, clearly recognizing him the moment their eyes met.

“Me?” Brad said, unable to suppress a little smile as he realized how much his very existence angered this freak who could do absolutely nothing about it.

“I’m going to fucking kill him!” she threatened, fire erupting off her body as she began to close the distance between them, her insect counterparts rushing to keep up with her as they sloshed through the thick pools of blood. “I’m going to fucking kill you for what you did to Dave!”

Dave? What the hell is this— Brad’s mind stopped for a moment, and then he suddenly realized who she was. She’s Candy! That crazy bitch who used to be with those assholes, Chedderfield and Archimedes.

“You think you can take me?” Brad called out, waiting for her to get closer.

Before she could attack, however, she was stopped by what looked like one of her subordinates, a giant stag beetle who was urging her to drop the matter, saying, “Another day. The Phiilon demands our return.”

With that, looking defeated, Candy gave up on her charge and put on a polite face as she and her cohorts began marching toward the only usable bridge while Brad stopped his followers from crossing, letting her go ahead of him.

Just when she was about to start crossing though, he stopped her. “Did you also negotiate something with the base? Did they pay you the quest reward?”

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“They had to. They promised the system,” Candy answered tersely, her jaw clenched. “Why? Is there an issue?”

“Yeah, I was just wondering what they gave a filthy bitch like you to get you to bark on command and come running when called,” Brad asked in such a low voice that he wasn’t even sure if she fully heard him.

Candy whirled, her eyes blazing, her wings fluttering. She gnashed her teeth and raised her weapon. But before she could do more, a restraining hand from the beetle fell on her shoulder. Candy snarled, “We're leaving, but don’t think that I’ve forgotten what you did to my Davey. I swear that I’ll get you some other day, and not even your army will be able to protect you.”

Brad considered just letting the woman go. She’d killed enough hell-cursed that he could make up some excuse to his disgruntled followers, plus she still had a group of giant insects with her. But the threat and insult could not be forgiven. He sneered at Candy and laughed as he replied, “For you, the day I entered your pathetic world was the most important day of your life. For me? It was just a Tuesday.”

“It was Friday, you asshole!” Candy screamed, no longer able to control her rage. She lunged out at Brad, her flaming golden rapier blurring as she tried to stab him.

But before she could run him through, Brad’s bone golem grabbed her in an iron grip, lifting her into the air until her feet couldn’t touch the ground. She thrashed in its grasp and let out a furious cry, only for it to be cut off as the hand slowly squeezed the life from her lungs like a vice until nothing remained but a tortured gasp for air.

“You know, you might have been worth keeping around,” Brad laughed as the golem squeezed tighter. Her delicate wings snapped. Her ribs cracked and broke, piercing her lungs. “I could have even forgiven you for your hatred, but . . . you just had to side with those fucking insects. Do you think that lover of yours could even stomach the sight of you now, you filthy, fucking cockroach?”

Brad watched as Candy’s mouth moved like she was trying to curse at him, her tongue flailing around in the open mouth as if she was trying to scream, yell, and draw more attention to them than Brad wanted, but he knew enough now about the anatomy of a person to know that the amount of pressure he was using was just enough so that she couldn’t breathe, much less talk. By now, blood from her broken ribs would already be filling up her punctured lungs anyway.

“Oh well, humanity will carry on . . . even without you,” Brad remarked, continuing his monologue as the golem tossed Candy’s broken and dying body to the ground right in front of him. “And we’ll do to those filthy fucking bugs of yours what we’ve done to every bug for generations: squash them beneath our boots.”

With that, Brad lifted his steel-toed boot and smashed it down on her head, her brains splattering out of her mutated skull as the surrounding insects watched in horror.

“How?! How could you betray us like this?! We fought for you! We defended that human base with you!” the mutated stag beetle exclaimed as it stared Brad down.

“Do not make me laugh. You no more fought for us today than you fought against us yesterday. If you viewed humanity as a greater force than the hell-cursed, you’d be side by side with them to destroy us. Humanity cannot tolerate the invasion of our world by anyone. Not you, not the demons.” His eyes briefly glanced back at the power plant before continuing. “Not anyone!”

With Brad’s final words, a barrage of glowing gunfire from his followers shredded the beetle’s body. The assault ripped through one insectoid after another. The flanked bugs didn’t even get a chance to run before Brad’s followers that had circled them mowed them down.

A minute later, as nothing more than corpses and cards remained, Brad turned to his followers, ready to give another one of his speeches about how this was for humanity, how this was for the sake of the future, and how he was doing what he had to do for his people’s future. However, before he could even begin, Casey stepped forward.

“That’s right! This is what they’ll all get!” Casey shouted, her red hair flowing in the breeze as she fired off a few more shots into an already dead body. “KILL THEM ALL!”

“Yeah! Fuck every alien who thinks they can come to our planet and fuck with our shit!” Clare shouted right alongside Casey.

Without Brad even saying a word, his mob of followers had whipped themselves up into a frenzy, their bloodlust palpable as their eyes, filled with fire and hate, shone beautifully in the sun.

As Brad watched them, part of him was a little scared. He knew that he had created a formidable monster, an army of bloodthirsty fanatics that would kill anything and everything that posed a threat to him, but he worried that the monster had outgrown its collar. As he thought back to the secret relationship he had with the Graikoi, he realized that, now more than ever, he needed to be careful. He needed to remove all evidence of his dealings before the monster he made caught a whiff of his guilt—and bit its master.