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3.23 - 2468 - 1985.239 Red Galaxy Standard

There's so much that I've come to experience in the four hundred and eighty nine years that I've been alive.  Some of it, well some of it would just sound down right crazy if I had the chance to go back and tell my younger self.  It would seem damn near impossible, yet all of it has come to pass.

I should be focusing on the fight at hand and the heavy sword that just took down my kinetic barrier by fifteen percent before knocking me to my knees, but I find my mind wandering back.  Besides, a maneuver like spinning on one knee while sliding my own blade into the kidney of the Thyr behind me, then standing and rotating the blade around the outside of its stomach causing guts to spill onto the ground has really become second nature at this point.  Muscle memory takes over and my body simply reacts when it comes to combat.

I've seen planets on fire with frozen subterranean surfaces, I've seen giant mammalian-like creatures that glide through space the size of a class two chariot.  I've seen two legged creatures that are three feet high, but strong enough to put a Thyr to shame and eight legged creatures that crawl through the moon of Actihan, which is made entirely of trees and their roots...even at the core.  There was one time when we discovered a colony of aliens the size of my thumb and they were vicious as hell.  But I never, ever thought I would see a wave of Mini K slamming into ten thousand Thyr.  

The Thyr don't even notice the Mini K on the north horizon and to my knowledge have never seen one.  It only took minutes for the Thyr to realize that there wasn't going to be a second round of bombing and when that fact took hold they charged.  My visor shows thirty seconds until the Thyr wave hits and when I look north it shows two minutes for the Mini K.  Holding the Thyr for a minute and a half won't be a problem.

We keep to a tight group as they descend upon us and rely off of each other's speed and situational awareness to stay alive.  It's basic hit and run tactics; we strike, injuring a Thyr enough to slow them down, then move on to the next within a specific perimeter.  By keeping the action close and the attacks swift, a Thyr falls every three seconds and gets hit by all four of us before going down for good.  They're so preoccupied with trying to catch us, that they don't even see the Mini K until it's too late.   

I leap and drive my sword into the rear shoulder of an already injured Thyr, then reach for my rifle which is still in assault mode, ride its back down as it falls forward and fire a few rounds into the chest of another Thyr that means to bring an axe down on my head.  The laser blasts tear through his body and Aden stops the axe with his sword as Aphrodite sails across the Thyr's shoulders, taking the head off with one fell swoop.  Aden kicks the body back and dodges off to the right following Aphrodite while I leap to my feet.  

I can hear the Mini K make contact with the outside wall of Thyr a hundred yards in front of us.  Between the unexpectant roar of the Thyr, the wails of the Mini K and the sound of all those massive bodies slamming together, I half expect a shock wave to knock me back.  Instead, all I see is a wall of dark limbs barreling towards us.  "LAUNCH!" I scream, hoping that everyone can hear me over the commotion.

I'm in the air.  Aden flies above the fighting, Red follows closely behind, but Aphrodite is nowhere to be seen.  The Mini K have slowed due to being bogged down, but they're still plowing through the Thyr with ease and will be on her last position in fifteen seconds.  I activate the gravity field on the bottom of my boots and shoot back down to the cracked glass surface.  "Aphrodite, talk to me!"

"Twenty feet west," she says nervously.  I dodge three Thyr who are too occupied with firing lasers and throwing weapons at the oncoming wall of beasts to attack me.  She's pinned, stomach down by the hilt of an axe that's been driven into the ground.  There are two corpses on either side and the odd position she's laying in, makes it impossible for her to reach back and remove the axe.  I run over and yank at it with all my might then toss it aside.  She's on her feet, but the Mini K are on us before we have a chance to launch.  Wrapping my arms around her, I yell "Hold on!" then activate my kinetic barrier with a two foot insulation field.

We're instantly knocked to the left by a Mini K with an overly large, oblong head and slam into the leg of another one, getting flung forward some thirty feet.  This jarring, dizzying activity lasts for another twenty seconds, wearing down the energy in my kinetic barrier until I finally have a chance to plant my feet on solid ground and launch into the air with Aphrodite still in my arms.  Red and Aden are both on their way back down as we're going up.  "Head east," Aden points behind us.  "The stampede is deep, but just less than a mile wide.  We can get off to the side of it in one jump.  Maybe two for the others."

We continue to climb and watch as Aden and Red touch down in between the chaos, then leap back out a second later, shooting off to the east.  I turn off my kinetic barrier and release Aphrodite.   "Line up and launch as soon as you hit."

"I've got it," she says.  

"Give it all you've got and you should be able to make it in one jump."  She nods in confirmation as we begin pick up speed in our decent.  Luckily we both touch down and launch without a problem and cover the stretch at our first go.  Aden and Red are keeping their distance from the edge of the stampeding chaos, which extends much further than the front lines of the Thyr attack.  If we keep out of the way, then we'll have some time to collect ourselves and formulate the next move.  Based off of what I could see from the air, we have a few minutes before the wave passes.

"Aden, any word from Kelly?" I ask, walking over to him.  

He holds a hand up to my face and nods, then looks up at me.  "Mackelson and the Plaguers will be here in minutes, but we've got another problem."  A thunderous explosion radiates down from above and we all look up to see two more warships breaking through the edge of the atmosphere.  "The Thyr rerouted two of their ships, we're about to have a lot of company."

No matter what we do, how much we fight or push back, there's always another fucking problem.  "Did Kelly say how many Plaguers Mackelson has in tow?"      

Aden shakes his head then seems to go back to his private conversation with Kelly.  Life would just be so much easier if she could open a secure, all coms channel for us, but if it comes at the cost of Erislad's men listening in, I'd rather not take the chance.  "Wait, Kelly?  Kelly come in."  Aden begins to pace.  "Shit!  The line is dead, it sounds like something hit their ship prior to the transmission going down.  Fuck!"

I walk over to Aden and grasp his left shoulder with my right hand.  "Calm down, she's a tough soldier.  So is Hoffman."  He nods.  "We've got our own problems to worry about and I need you to keep your head."

"Right, shit!" Aden exclaims as the warships leap to the front of his mind.  "That's another hundred thousand troops at least, on top of whatever survives the stampede."  

"Mackelson better have one hell of a force behind him," I mutter under my breath.  At that moment, there's a high pitched screech from the south, which causes Aphrodite to almost jump out of her suit.  We all turn to our right, looking for the source of the noise.  Red, Aden and I know the sound all too well, but it's the first time that any of us have actually welcomed it.

Perfect timing too.  The stampede of Mini K is finishing up and passing to the south, just west of the Plaguers who are coming into the area.  Some of the Plaguers begin to leap into the air, blocking out part of the Redantus's sun while the rest sweep across the blue sands like a high pitched sea of darkness.  

Mackelson falls from the sky, landing fifteen feet in front of us on his left foot and right knee.  He's wearing one of the combat suits that was previously stolen from GHC and lifts his head to look at us.  The skin from his face is peeling and pale, exposing the swelling muscle tissue underneath.  His eyes are glazed over in a ghostly two toned, light gray and all of the hair has fallen out from his head.  "Ready for another round?" he asks me with a smirk.  His men press forward into battle against the remaining Thyr on the ground, as the warships make their way towards the surface.  It won't take more than a few minutes for them to touch down and join the fight.

"With you or the Thyr?" I ask back.

"Why don't we leave our personal bullshit til after the war, or at the very least the battle." He's clearly changed, anyone could tell by looking at him, but at least he's still got that 'business first' mentality.  "Shit head," he says, nodding at Aden.

"Asshole," Aden nods back.  

"How many fighters do you have?" I ask, walking up to him.

"Ten thousand strong," he says with a hint of pride.  "They should make easy work of the Thyr.  They're matched in strength, but more agile and much quicker."

"Maybe the ones on the ground right now."  I point up to the two warships descending.  "Those carry a minimum of fifty thousand troops each."

"They're fighting for their homes," he snaps.  "They'll complete the mission."  With that Mackelson leaps into the air, disappearing into the massive crowd of Plaguers making their way towards the Thyr.

"I think that went well," Aden says.  

"I think they underestimate the Thyr," I shoot back.  Ten to one, not exactly the odds that I was hoping for.  Especially since I can see SWIFTs streaming out of the two warships above.   It's almost guaranteed that they're going to be performing bombing runs before dropping their soldiers.  "We need to do something about those SWIFTs or the Plaguers are going to get slaughtered."

As one closes on our position, a Plaguer launches above the battlefield fray, and slams onto the outside of its cockpit.  Four more follow behind him and latch on to different sections of the ship.  Despite the pilot's attempt to shake them from the hull, they hang on and breach the interior within seconds.  To my surprise, the SWIFT whips around and begins firing on the others behind it.  Well I'll be damned.  Plaguers can pilot.

"Looks like you underestimated the Plaguers," Aden says sarcastically.  

"Time for us to get back into the fight," I say, launching back towards the Thyr before anyone has a chance to reply.  Aden may be right, but I still have my doubts of our ability to turn the tide and unfortunately it doesn't take long for them to be confirmed.  The Thyr continue to fall at a rapid pace, thanks to our four man formation and the Plaguers overtaking some of their air power, but it isn't enough.  The SWIFTs start turning on their Plaguer occupied counterparts and soon there's weaponized debris in the form of metal fireballs raining down on the battle field.  Lucky for us, at least as lucky as we can get right now, the payloads are only pinpoint situational piercers instead of the incendiary rounds that Red dropped earlier.  The resulting blasts are only taking out several hundred men instead of several thousand.  

Our numbers are dwindling and even though the Thyr are dropping much faster than us, it's not enough.  The warships begin to send down troop transports that dump five hundred Thyr onto the surface per trip.  Aphrodite takes down another Thyr in front of me, but I can see her movements are becoming slightly less precise.  I can't tell if it's from stress brought on by the chaos of battle or if she's injured in some way.  My proximity sensor goes off, alerting me to an abnormally large object closing fast on our position.  "Move!" I shout, realizing that a burning SWIFT is spiraling out of control towards us.  

Aden turns and grabs Aphrodite while leaping out of the area.  I offset the balance of the Thyr I'm fighting, then push off just in time to look up and see Red's arms locked in combat.  The Thyr he's battling stares back at me with a wicked grin.  I don't have the chance to scream before the flaming scrap of metal that was once a SWIFT smashes them into the ground, igniting the ordinance attached and exploding into a fifty yard fireball.  Our suits barely survive the impact and subsequent blast.  Red had no chance.               

While Blaze's death drained me emotionally, watching Red sweeps over my entire body in the form of shock based muscle atrophy.  I want to move upon landing, but can't.  Red was always this indestructible father figure to Aden and I, and now in the time it takes me to blink, he's gone.  Aden didn't have the personal connection that I did with Blaze and while he felt bad for my loss, it didn't compare to realizing that his lifelong mentor is now fused with the newly glassed surface of the planet.  His reaction to Red's death is similar to my reaction to Blaze, minus begging the universe to reconsider.  

Reading his body language, I can see doubt, followed by blinding anger that takes over within an instant.  The surrounding Thyr close on him and Aphrodite as he drops his blade, which causes it to retract and snap into place on his thigh.  He leaps forward, clamping his left hand down on an advancing Thyr's clavicle, wraps his legs around its upper abdomen, then drives his right arm into its chest, pulling out a heart.  Aden shrieks in tormented pain as his emotions leak through, then tosses the vital organ to his right, blinding an advancing Thyr with the blood splatter and leaping to attack another on his left.  Aphrodite, though shocked by his barbarism, has her hands full and I've got Thyr advancing all around.  Hopefully Aden's rage and ferocity will help him stay alive, but it has me worried; I've never seen him this brutal.

My body reactivates and my visor throws various warnings at my eyes while the muscle memory kicks in, causing me to dodge a laser blast, then leap backwards away from an incoming sword.  Any hold that we have on this fight is rapidly declining.  The field of battle is overly saturated with laser blasts, glistening swords, axes, and SWIFTs falling from the sky at a rapid rate.  As I continue to fight and keep my eyes on the surrounding battle, it gets harder and harder for me to get a location on the Plaguers or even Aden or Aphrodite.  Everything is falling apart.

Multiple Thyr to my right roar out in unison and I'm able to offer a short lived glance in that direction to see Aphrodite's body impaled by a sword and held into the air above the crowd of savages.  Her limbs are twitching and the width of the sword extends from her stomach to just below her neck.  She's become another fallen soldier in the lost battle for Redantus.  I should care, I should feel something, but I don't have any emotions left to offer.  I think my brother and the fact that we're physically here are the only reasons that I'm still fighting.  My survival instincts kick in and I realize that I have to find him and get him out of here before they overwhelm us.  Kelly must have escaped and they still have a chance at happiness together.  We need to retreat from the battle and find Red's SWIFT to the east.

I dodge and weave, flip, rotate and slide under Thyr, slicing and firing along the way to look for my brother.  Just follow the bloody carnage, I tell myself, that's all I have to do.  Blade cuts are clean, lasers sear and burn, but the brute strength of Aden and his augmented suit is leaving a trail of bloody body parts fit for a horror story from the Void.  As I make my way through the carnage, there's a small clearing from the fighting and an arm that's slowing raising up from the bodies and shattered blue sand from my right.  Recognizing the armor, I dash over to help the owner up.  

Mackelson is torn to pieces, and looks even worse than before.  He's missing a hand, has various stab wounds in his chest and no longer has legs.  I grab an overdose of pain medication from my belt and prepare to jab it into his arm.  There's no saving him, but there's also no need for him to lay here in agony.  He grabs my hand with the one he has left.  "No.  No," he says in a calm voice.  "Let me feel the pain.  It's almost over now," he laughs weakly and coughs blood onto my suit.  "History repeats itself.  My men lay down their lives for you and your brother."  Before I have a chance to respond he grabs the back of my neck and jerks me in close.  "I'd do it all over again."  I'm not sure what to say.  He closes his eyes and rests his head back on the ground.  "Gonna die now," he says quietly, trailing off towards the end.   

It seems wrong to just leave Lieutenant Mackelson's body lying there among the dead Thyr given everything he's sacrificed for us, but I don't have much of a choice.  "Thank you," I say with a slight nod before jumping to my feet and continuing on Aden's trail.  

"Vali and Hoffman's slip was shot down," Alexander's voice comes through the comm like a megaphone, echoing through my helmet.  I stop dead in my tracks.  Tell me you didn't open the channel to Aden as well, please for love of whatever I have left, tell me it's a private channel.

There's a pause, then Aden's horrified voice asks "What?" as if he doesn't believe or understand what Alexander just said.  I start running again, frantically hoping to catch up to Aden.  The transmission was clear, no hint of movement in his voice, hopefully he's stopped.    

"I'm sorry," Alexander apologizes as though it's his fault.  "Erislad's men were able to trace their last communication to you.  He sent two SWIFTs to follow their slip."  No, no no, why the fuck are you telling Aden this right now Alexander?  It could not be a worse time!  Aden was unstable after Red's death, there's no telling what he'll do now that Kelly's gone.    

"Alexander, shut up and close the channel!" I shout, bolting across a section of barren battlefield towards Aden.  Most of the fighting has moved west, there aren't many Plaguers left, but I can see them making one hell of a last stand in the distance.  

"I just thought..."

"CLOSE THE FUCKING CHANNEL!"

The comm goes silent.  I run over the crest of a small hill and on the other side is a large crater from a downed SWIFT, with Aden kneeling on the ground in the center.  There are corpses all around, Thyr and Plaguer alike.  A majority of it is Aden's most recent handy work, I can tell by the damage done to the corpses.  The rest was a result of the downed craft that caused the crater.   Aden's helmet is retracted along with the abdominal portion of his suit.  His shoulders are slumped over and it looks like there's something in his right hand, but I can't tell what it is from this angle.

I survey the area and upon seeing no immediate threats, slowly walk down the hill towards my brother fifty yards away.  "Hey brother," I say through the comm, retracting my helmet.  I figure if he turns and sees my face, it might help more than the black, cold exterior of the armor.  The audio comes through our neural chips and the microphone is tapped into our vocal chords, so even though our helmets are retracted, we can still hear and speak like normal.  "I'm at your eight o'clock, forty yards out."  

He turns his head slightly to see me through his peripheral vision, then looks back at the ground in front of his knees.  "She's dead, Daemon."

"I heard Alexander."

"There's nothing left for me now."

"You've still got me," I say only slightly hurt by his statement as I know how painful this is for him.  Thirty yards out, I continue to scanning the area for threats; we are very exposed at the moment.

"And what do you have?" he asks.

"I've got you," I reassure.

"Do you remember when we were human?"  

"I do.  I saw it, just after passing out from the hellfire payload."

"I did too," he confirms.  "We can't ever forget that.  Forget who we once were." Twenty yards out.  He sighs. "The universe doesn't want us anymore Daemon.  We've lived too long."

Aden lifts the object in his right hand from the ground and sets it on his lap.  It's his side arm.  "Come on brother, let's get the hell out of here and make those bastards pay.  We've still got work to do."

"Not this time," he says quietly, lifting the gun.  "No more bullshit."  He presses the barrel to his chest, pointing it at his heart.

"Aden!" Fuck the perimeter, I start running towards him.  "ADEN!"  

"I'm sorry Daemon, I swore," his voice cracks.  He whispers, "I'm coming Kelly."

"NOOOO!"

There's a flash.  The laser round explodes on impact blowing a hole through his back so large that I could fit my arm through it.  The action I've just witnessed cuts out all communication from my brain, causing my body to fail.  I want to scream but nothing comes out.  My mouth won't move.  I want to continue to run, to scoop up his body and cradle it in my arms until the Thyr find me, but my legs give out and I fall face first onto the ground.  

My mind fires a single impulse, allowing me to open my mouth and wail into the shattered glass, sand, and blood beneath me.  The resulting noise is sure to be heard by any Thyr within a mile radius.  That wail gives way to nearly five hundred years of compounded emotional interest.  I lay, helpless, crying, crippled by the loss of the one true thing in this world that defined who I am.  Aden was everything that was best in me, I was his older brother and it was my job to protect him at all costs.  I failed.  First I failed the humans, then the Hemos, and finally my brother.  There's only one thing left to do.  

I must have clawed the remaining distance to Aden, though I don't remember doing so.  I'm sitting up, ass buried in blood from the Thyr corpses all around, one of which I'm leaning against, with my brother's limp body in my arms, slowly rocking back and forth.  Tears are streaming down my face, snot is leaking from my nose like a faucet, though I'm not crying with my body.  I'm just staring at Aden's carnage throughout the crater and holding his body.  All my emotions are gone, expelled by the harsh realities of the battlefield like an exorcised demon.  The physical is just trying to catch up; taking it's toll by rendering certain functions useless.  In the event that I can will my arms to move before the Thyr find me, I have every intention of following my brother.  Something moves to my left and sharp, stinging pain pierces my temple as the world goes dark.  

*          *          *      

My eyes slowly open to reveal Aden's body on my lap.  I don't know how long I was out, but it couldn't have been too long as I'm still in the same place.  Probably minutes.  Darkness again.  It's almost painful to open my eyes; lifting my groggy, wobbling head, I see Thyr all around the crater.   They must have heard my scream and come to investigate.   Judging by how many are here and how far away from the bulk of the battle we are, I'm guessing the fight is over.  They've won.  

"Whhh." My mouth isn't working too well, much like the rest of my body.  No surprise there seeing as how the mere action of keeping my eyelids open is a daunting task right now.  "Whhh.  Well.  You've won," I say slowly, looking at the feet of a particularly large Thyr approaching from the center of the pack.  It stops five feet in front of me and as I look up, it seems to extend to the outer atmosphere of the planet.  My eyelids shut for a few seconds of glorious darkness and upon opening, it's staring back down at me with a snide grin.  The mouth has long scars on either side of it that extend up to its ears.  A rifle butt to the temple doesn't provide for good memory recollection but after a few seconds it comes to me.  It's the same Thyr that climbed over the cliff wall and threw a sword at the blood tree on Earth before we launched and subsequently discovered their cloaking tech.  I remember those scars and that snide grin.  

"Small universe," I say under my breath.  "Well come onnnn!" I shout, spit and blood spraying from my mouth.  "What are you waiting for?" I blurt out in a surprisingly loud and frustrated tone.  My voice echos around the crater.  The Thyr steps to the side of me and raises his axe into the air.  I lower my head and stare at the lifeless body of my brother. "I'm coming Aden."  My eyelids feel heavy and drag the world around me into darkness, I figure it's be the last time.  

To my surprise, I open them to the sound of my executioner's head hitting the ground in front of me.  Using what little energy I have left, I lift my head to see the Thyr around me beginning to panic.  Doing my best to keep my eyes open, I see random, severed limbs fall to the ground followed by the Thyr themselves, dead, as if killed by some invisible force or ghost.  My eyes close for a few moments and when I open them, a third of the surrounding force is dead and the rest are freaking out, randomly shooting at thin air in an attempt to quell their invisible killer.  

Then I see it.  An armored soldier; a female, armored soldier wearing a smooth gray and black combat suit with a gray hood.  The armor and the mask is like nothing I've ever seen before, smooth and hard confirming to the body, yet flexible and fast.  Oh, so fast.  She disappears from the view to my right, then reappears in my left peripheral, stabs a Thyr in the back with amazing speed and precision, then disappears again.  Five more Thyr are dead before the one who was stabbed in the back slumps to his knees.  Darkness once again.  The suit's chemicals keeping my body awake and operating are beginning to burn out.

When I wake this time, two thirds of the surrounding force is dead.  The mysterious assassin is hiding less and swings her blade in an arc, separating it into smaller sections like our own.  However unlike ours, she releases the sections unto the world, using the momentum of the swing to hurl them at seven different Thyr who reel back in disorienting pain.  The hilt rebuilds another solid blade from thin air and she disappears.  She dispatches all seven before they have a chance to recover from the hits.  I lower my head to the ground, unable to lift it anymore as my remaining energy is reserved for keeping my eyes open.  

Less than a minute passes and I can no longer hear any Thyr in the area.  I'm staring at my brother's body, then look up at the executioner's head on the ground as a grey boot kicks it off to the left.  The assassin crouches down and pushes my forehead back so that I'm sitting up, leaning back a bit on the Thyr corpse behind me.  "Who are you?" I manage to squeeze out weakly.

"Someone willing to listen," says a mechanical, robotic voice.  

My eyes go wide as the assassin's helmet deconstructs, revealing her face.  

"Ellie," my voice cracks.

"Hey soldier."

I squint and zero in on her stark blue eyes.  "Free me."  She cocks her head in confusion and I'm so afraid to say the words, that my lips quiver as I quietly demand.  "Kill me."  A tear rolls down my cheek and she shakes her head slightly.  "Kill me," I say louder, almost shouting through flood of wet depression.  

"Oh Daemon."  She shakes her head more purposefully and puts her right hand on my left cheek.  "I can't."

"I want..." I try to explain, but stop.  She called me Daemon.

"I'm sorry," she cuts me off.  "This universe still needs you."  

I gasp at the sudden warmth on my cheek beneath her hand.  My consciousness starts to fade and my eyelids feel heavy.  I know what this feeling is.  My body isn't giving up, I'm not passing out from the stress, or pain, or shock.  She dosed me with an extremely potent drug meant to knock me out.  My bodily functions are normalizing, slowing, and I no longer have control.  She offers a weak smile before the entire world goes black for one last time.    

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