Character Development
They stood together on the ridgetop, Arcturus and Garbados, garbed in robes ragged and torn, looking out over the earthen wastes that now filled with soldiers and zhuoldar. Garbados warily scanned the adobe sky and dusty horizons, "This is wrong. Where are the warships?"
"It is curious," Arcturus drank in the sounds of battle, "Man has not seen a war like this in centuries, a war of hordes and armies, of such enormous melee as this."
Steel pods smashed through the heavens and exploded into the human ranks, each one's walls blasting into the chaos and releasing the urukanar, the pinnacle of ajvic might and fury, ajve guarded from head to hoof in metal plates, their forearms bristling with weaponry. Their blades swept through bodies like leaves in the wind, their guns blazing like little suns. Following just behind their pinpricks in the clouds, two nygazujar pushed aside the sky to sit over the massacre, bullets against their hulls ringing like bells. Man's defiant warcries became the panicked screams of a startled herd at the sight of them.
"There they are. Why did they wait so long?"
"But I suppose that for the genocide of a noble resistor, wholesale slaughter is appropriate. How else to cull the weak so quickly, so efficiently, than to tease their sense of destiny and lure them into waiting claws?"
One nygazujan shifted forward, its engines playing a gentle refrain to the battle's roar until all sound vanished in the instant before the beast let burst from its belly the white beam of an ion blast, cracking through the air like lightning into the hill behind the resistance, ripping a trench in the mound. Those unable to stop fell to their deaths in the pit, while those who resisted faced the horde in all its fury.
Garbados shifted uncomfortably, "No casualties, just the elimination of a retreat. This is just a game."
"We have become complacent, Garbados. We have made our makers, once rivals of Bori himself, into cattle, into sport; tactics and strategy be damned, for we are the aijhavic mainar, the greatest creatures to ever stalk the earth's expanses. We are become as proud law: invincible and aware."
As the warships slipped back into the heavens, as the hordes lifted themselves back to space, as the bloodthirsty slit the last human throats, the bleeding sun began to set on the observing pair.
"This was a massacre."
"Just like all the others."
"It is curious," Arcturus drank in the sounds of battle, "Man has not seen a war like this in centuries, a war of hordes and armies, of such enormous melee as this."
Steel pods smashed through the heavens and exploded into the human ranks, each one's walls blasting into the chaos and releasing the urukanar, the pinnacle of ajvic might and fury, ajve guarded from head to hoof in metal plates, their forearms bristling with weaponry. Their blades swept through bodies like leaves in the wind, their guns blazing like little suns. Following just behind their pinpricks in the clouds, two nygazujar pushed aside the sky to sit over the massacre, bullets against their hulls ringing like bells. Man's defiant warcries became the panicked screams of a startled herd at the sight of them.
"There they are. Why did they wait so long?"
"But I suppose that for the genocide of a noble resistor, wholesale slaughter is appropriate. How else to cull the weak so quickly, so efficiently, than to tease their sense of destiny and lure them into waiting claws?"
One nygazujan shifted forward, its engines playing a gentle refrain to the battle's roar until all sound vanished in the instant before the beast let burst from its belly the white beam of an ion blast, cracking through the air like lightning into the hill behind the resistance, ripping a trench in the mound. Those unable to stop fell to their deaths in the pit, while those who resisted faced the horde in all its fury.
Garbados shifted uncomfortably, "No casualties, just the elimination of a retreat. This is just a game."
"We have become complacent, Garbados. We have made our makers, once rivals of Bori himself, into cattle, into sport; tactics and strategy be damned, for we are the aijhavic mainar, the greatest creatures to ever stalk the earth's expanses. We are become as proud law: invincible and aware."
As the warships slipped back into the heavens, as the hordes lifted themselves back to space, as the bloodthirsty slit the last human throats, the bleeding sun began to set on the observing pair.
"This was a massacre."
"Just like all the others."