A calculated decision quickly formed in the Horusan's mind. Cut the head from the serpent, and the body would die.

Without a word, Marcus sprinted forward, his heavily-armoured legs pounding a thundering rhythm on the hard floor as he ran. A thought flashed through his mind 'Normal vision', and the display of his helmet returned to normal, revealing the room's true nature; deep grey and dark, with slab-like pillars of solid-cast stone dotted around the area.

Now able to see as normal, Marcus built up his speed, fired up his thrusters, and launched himself through the air. Leaping thirty feet forward, with the air whistling past, he hurtled towards the Sirthon. The Zraenic turned his head, and his eyes bulged with alarm before he leapt out of the way, getting clear of the incoming Horusan. With a thunderous crash, Marcus pounded the ground, crushing the rock beneath his feet and landing mere inches from the Sirthon commander, who lay flat on his face nearby.

But not for long. With inhuman swiftness, the Zraenic immediately leapt to his feet and lunged with his rifle, pressing the end of the barrel into the human's chest. With a click, the alien pulled the trigger, and Marcus jumped to the side just in time as a beam of plasma flashed from the Sirthon's gun. The blast cut across his abdomen and carved a long, straight scar into the surface of his armour, but did him no harm.

Seizing the opportunity, Marcus planted his hands on the gun, held it in place, and drove his knee upwards, smashing the weapon in half. As he did so, there was a loud, ear-splitting 'crack!', followed by the vicious, squealing hiss of escaping air as the gun's ammo container was shattered into pieces.

Marcus then yanked the gun back and tossed it aside, the Sirthon Zraenic getting thrown with the weapon into a crumpled heap on the floor. However, as it landed, the alien pressed its hands to the hard ground and shoved itself back upright just as quickly as it had fallen. It landed on hooved feet in a kneeling position, the arose to it's full height, just as tall as Marcus.

Human looked Sirthon dead in the eye for the briefest of moment. The Sirthon could not see the human's eyes, and the human saw no remorse in the Sirthon's golden pupils. Only blind, unflinching loyalty to something other than itself.

Then, whether born from said loyalty, or mere desperation, the Sirthon pulled a knife from its belt and lunged at Captain Winter, the words 'The Republic forever!' crackling through the static of translator as it did so. Marcus threw his left arm out, blocked the blow against the edurium plates on his forearm, and then threw his right arm outward, clenching his hand into a tight fist.

The thrusters on his arm kicked in, the pistons of his power armour contracted then pushed outwards, and a dull thud filled the air as Sirthon commander was punched square in the face. As it happened, his tooth-lined mandibles snapped off their bony joints, the teeth within cracked and shattered apart like glass, and an eye popped out of its socket, held on by only by a thick, crimson optic nerve. Pink skin ruptured and blood poured everywhere as the alien's entire head was knocked clean from its neck, leaving the body to stumble back and collapse to the floor.

Breathing in through his respirator as he looked down, Marcus inhaled the cool air and felt a cold, icy feeling settle upon his chest when he gazed upon his fallen foe. He didn't know that Sirthon's age, or gender, or what planet it was from. But he did see something regardless, even in his enemy.

Another life wasted by war.

The sound of gunfire halted, its echoes fading away with the last remnants of the smoke and dust. Marcus looked around to see the rest of his platoon scattered around the area, some still alert while others stood at relative ease, catching their breath. Some opened their visors, revealing sweat-laden foreheads and letting air rush to their skin, but keeping the mouthparts over their faces.

After all, that was all that stood between them and the heaving stench of death.

Marcus felt their pain deep inside him. A deep-wrought ache that felt like it was dragging your mind, heart and soul downwards. Burying it deep into the earth and drowning it in a grim, black sea of depression.

He wished that he could take his men away from this... but they had a job to do.

"Everyone, sound off!" he said over the comms.

A chorus of names responded. Sakong, Ferro, Miyazi, Tenari, Nilsen and others. The only voices he didn't pick out were Robert Nactes and Megan Page.

"All right, all squads fan out! Find a way to the generator! We need this thing destroyed ASAP!"

Everyone sounded off again, accepting their orders, before dashing off to search through the vast, pillar-studded chamber. The thudding rhythm of hard soles on concrete drummed in Marcus ears as he quickly scanned the room himself, looking for a way that would lead to the generator. However, his eyes kept gazing forlornly upon all the burnt, ragged and blown apart corpses that littered the room, smeared across every surface. All of them were motionless and silent, their limbs and organs ripped apart by plasma fire. No longer filtered through thermal vision, the Sirthon showed their true colours. They wore plasteel armour as black as pitch, with garish pink skin underneath and golden eyes peering out from the twin large, translucent lenses of their helmet.

Covering each of them was a thick layer of bubbling, gooey liquid that the Commandos' plasma weaponry had blasted from their bodies. When Marcus's sight was filtered through thermal imaging, the aliens' blood had seemed orange, but it was actually a deep and pungent purple.

The same colour as the liquid which now clung his right gauntlet and forearm after he decapitated the Zraenic. A blanket of sludge that dripped from his fingertips and spattered upon the floor.

Wiping the alien ichor from his armour, Marcus' gaze fell upon another one of the dead Sirthon. One that, for a reason he couldn't explain, caught his eye. Thinking back to the firefight, he recalled that it was the one who had tried to flee and was shot by the Zraenic, its body now flopped chest-down upon the floor, its head no more than a scorched and faceless hulk of bone that had been split in two by the blaster shot.

But that wasn't the only thing about it that caught his attention. This Sirthon seemed different to the others. Seemed... smaller?

Approaching, Marcus put his weapon aside, knelt down, and peeled back a flap of the dead alien's chest armour, the thick black fibres dripping blood and strewn with strips of burnt flesh. His action revealed just how thin the Sirthon body protection was; barely a centimetre of cheap, low-quality plasteel between them and the outside world.

But it wasn't that which he found most concerning. Instead, he found his gaze locking onto the alien's gracile neck, luckily unharmed by the blaster shot that had killed the alien.

Embedded into the extra-terrestrial's throat was a line of black ink characters; letters and numbers in the Sirthon alphabet. As the sight entered his gaze, he blinked deeply and deliberately. In that instant, the software in his HUD immediately locked onto the writing, the characters appearing in glowing green writing before his face, then shifting as his computer translated them from Sirthon into Union Basic.

Marcus watched uneasily as the technology designed for deciphering enemy intelligence deconstructed the sentence, revealing the alien writing to him. It read 'Conscript 78522430189. Year of Birth: 2497. Year of Recruitment: 2511.'

Marcus' heart turned cold in his chest as the reason behind this Sirthon's smaller size became clear.

Fourteen years old.