Authors: Greg Fish
The infuriated monster turned to see Ace standing on the relic, twirling his sword. The cyborg’s eyes burned as if he was possessed, the aura around him and his sword danced with surging flashes of radiation, reflecting the raw fury directing his blade.
“Ah, sorry about that,” he mocked the Dark Ones. “I forgot about how much this Cube means to you. After all, you spent a million years staring at it, thinking about it, basing your whole culture on what the texts carved on it say. You were so dependent on the Shape Shifters for everything, weren’t you? You took their technology because you weren’t smart enough to build your own, you took their knowledge because you had none, and you had to take their myths because you couldn’t come up them by yourself.”
The shocked, insulted Dark Gods seethed with low frequency grumbles. They could squash him, but there was a chance they could damage their sacred relic. Who knows what kind of damage the Cube may have taken? Maybe there was already a chip somewhere and in the gloom they couldn’t see it well enough to identify?
“And you weren’t smart enough to figure out that the War Demon was just a metaphor,” continued Ace, the expression on his face turning more and more ferocious. “You went out of your way to comb through the galaxy looking for his descendants? What the hell is wrong with you? You had to go all the way to Earth to find a humanoid form and for what? To give yourself the impression that you were going to have an army of War Demons fighting on our side as you became Titans? Idiocy. Absolute, sheer, unabridged, inexcusable fucking idiocy!”
The Dark Ones glared at him with an icy silence.
“Oh so the human knows something, huh?” Ace taunted. “What do you think, I never wondered why you chose humans? I never asked around? You gave me the address of who to ask!”
The Reaper jumped on the Cube, his scythe primed for a battle but rather than slash for Ace, he hesitated. Holding his blade in an attack stance, he contemplated something. The four Dark Gods moved in closer, surrounding the Cube. They growled at the Reaper. The human has survived long enough, they said. He should die today.
“I know I told you that the next time we meet, we’ll meet as opponents,” said the Reaper, eyeing the alien monsters around him.
The Dark Gods settled in and breathlessly waited for the first slash.
“But now that we meet again...” he said, pausing as the tension of his masters built.
Ace readied his sword and armed his free claw. The Reaper cocked his head and smiled slyly under the darkness of his hood.
“... under the current circumstances... “he continued. “I don’t think now is the best time for another go at it.”
[ chapter _ 044 ]
The Reaper’s last words stunned the Dark Ones. What in the hell was going on around here? Before they could think, the Reaper cast off his cloak and collapsed into his true Shape Shifter form. His tube-like body was black, nine feet long and covered with scales. The compound eye around his core was green. For the first time in eons he flexed his spine-like pairs of legs and jumped for the closest Dark God to him. He changed shape in mid-flight like a Guardian, stretching into an amorphous strip of organic matter and nanobots.
Wrapping himself tightly around the Dark God’s neck, he began to squeeze. The alien monster struggled, roaring as something in its long neck strained, about to give way. It began to lose its balance, stumbling around, ready to fall at any moment. The Nation’s robots moved back and the other Dark Gods still fighting around the wreckage of their Tower turned around and froze in confusion and horror. The spawns, robots, and cyborgs nearby instantly stopped their battle, drawn to the bizarre event taking place in front of the Cube.
Seconds after the Reaper’s attack, Ace surged towards another Dark God. Unleashing a powerful wave of energy at the base of its neck, he forced it to take several steps back. At the apex of his jump, just above the top of the alien’s head, he summoned the same dual red circle with odd runes that he used on Earth to deflect a pulse from a giant, three legged monster. Igniting his aura and his sword to full power, he unleashed a terrifying shockwave that quickly twisted into a spiral.
The red corkscrew collapsed into the dual circle, turning white hot and detonating with devastating force. Concentrated into one spot, the energy of the explosion cracked through the Dark God’s thick outer shell and split its spine. Its body broke apart, electrical components failing and separating from the organic. The Dark God fell to the ground dead in a vast pool of blood as Ace jumped back to the Cube, propelled by the shockwave of the blast.
Next to its corpse, the Reaper finally caught its grip and snapped the neck of its victim, separating the brain stem from the synthetic components keeping its organics functioning. Mortally wounded, the creature collapsed with a final, wheezing gasp.
Not to lose momentum, Ace and the Reaper attacked the second pair of Dark Gods. Seeing how they could take the alien monsters down, the Nation’s ground troops rushed to help, swarming the now hapless aliens. Guardians ripped open their soft underbellies. OctoBots and rovers carved deep gashes into their sides. Siege Machines knocked them off balance. Unable to use the canards on their tails to help themselves, the alien giants could put up only a minimal defense. Those ground troops unable to get at the living Dark Gods, dismembered what was left of their defenders. Without their masters’ help, the spawns, drones and robots couldn’t hold back the tsunami of the Nation’s enraged war machines and the cyborgs laying heavy suppressive fire for their advance.
Wrapped around the neck of his second victim, the Reaper produced a set of sharp blades around his body. These blades stuck out like spikes on a studded collar. With a savage, sickening crack, he drove them deep into the alien’s neck and spun wildly around his axis. The creature roared in agonizing pain as it was slowly decapitated. Its body scarred and gouged open by the Nation’s robots fell. Its severed head tumbled a few dozen yards down the street as the Reaper tore out its cervical vertebra.
Meanwhile, a moment after landing back on the Cube, Ace turned and sent out another powerful wave, continuing a single, fluid motion. The wave collapsed on itself, turning into a pulse with a blinding flash and driving itself through a nearby Dark God’s center of mass. It shot right through, carving the giant alien apart and forcing it to back into a Shape Shifter spire. On the verge of death, its body was ripped to shreds by dozens of Guardians and OctoBots attached to the building.
As the two remaining Dark Ones tried to retreat into the wreckage of the Tower, they were yanked back into the city streets and surrounded by Guardians and OctoBots. Siege Machines pointed the glowing barrels of their pulse cannons at them, ready to fire at any moment. The killer worms growled and roared, struggling to break away but to no avail. Their forces were subdued. The battle was coming to an end across the planet. And now, the Dark Ones were trapped. When Ace and the Reaper landed on a ledge of a building, eye level with them, they fell silent, directing their attention at the cyborg and the Shape Shifter. One of them growled as something snapped in its throat.
“There’s no need to kill us,” it said, it voice translated by a device implanted in its vocal cords. “We can discuss this before you do anything rash.”
“Actually there is,” replied Ace. “You killed my friend. That means I’m going to kill as many of you as I want until I’m satisfied.”
The Dark God stepped back.
“That won’t bring him back,” it said.
“I know, but it will make me feel better.”
“We didn’t kill your friend,” the Dark God turned its whole body towards the cyborg. “We were just defending ourselves. If anything, you killed him. If you didn’t go behind our backs to make a deal with the Reaper and start this war, he would still be alive. All the casualties of this war would still be alive.”
The Reaper glanced at Ace and in fright, scuttled away. The cyborg was on the verge of exploding with rage. Lunging at the alien monstrosity, he unleashed a wave powerful enough to tip it over. The Dark God stumbled and fell on its back, its countless spines embedding in the ground, almost fusing it to the street. Ace landed on its collar, his sword ablaze and his aura churning with infernal intensity.
“Wrong answer,” he growled and summoning all his remaining strength brought every last joule of energy he could spare down on the alien’s neck with a feral growl.
Arcs of blood shot upwards along with the Dark God’s head and much of his neck, fractured and broken in several places. The head flipped several times in the air before it fell and tumbled over a block away from the rest of the body. The massive feet armed with shearing claws stopped kicking as the last bit of life in the cadaver extinguished itself.
Standing on the remnants of the shattered spine, Ace turned to the last Dark God. His aura faded to a mere afterglow. He was exhausted after depleting so much energy, but he knew that the Reaper had his back and that the Nation’s machines effectively neutralized the invaders’ ground forces. Now, to make it official. Pointing his sword at the terrified alien, now crouching down submissively just a few hundred feet away, he snarled, flashing his gleaming fangs.
“Now you have a choice,” he said coldly. “You can either surrender now, or I’m going to call what’s left of my fleet and turn it on your home world. You lost most of your forces. I still have another three million destroyers. You can end it here, get into one of your battle cruisers, go home, pack whatever crap you can carry and get the fuck out of our galaxy or you can have us come to you and burn your planet down before you have to run for it. If you want to fight a fleet just as big as you fought today with a quarter of the military, I’m happy to oblige, worm.”
The Dark God sunk. It knew that its all-in strategy backfired. Blindly plowing into a field of IGFs, killing one of the Nation’s beloved leaders and sending its armies into a frenzied, homicidal rage, giving an enemy agent access to their deepest, darkest military secrets for countless ages, and having him turn on the Dark Ones at the last possible second, instantly upsetting the balance of power on the battlefield certainly didn’t help matters. Looking back at it, the alien realized in horror just how many mistakes they made in their rush to secure their place in the universe.
“Very well,” it said. “The galaxy is yours.”
Ace lowered his sword and let out a deep breath. Just like that, the war was over and the status of Sentry changed hands. The final shots of the War of the Sentries rang out in the distance and fell silent as the Dark Gods’ army surrendered.
“You have to understand that you didn’t exactly instill any confidence in me about your intentions” he said. “I was just trying to protect my species and the only way to do that was to make sure you weren’t Sentries anymore. And the only way to challenge you was to make a deal with the Reaper and take you down at the first possible opportunity. Attacking us now just made the inevitable come faster for you. Maybe someday, you’ll find a place where you would appreciate your position as a Sentry instead of just exploiting it. But it won’t be in this galaxy. You don’t deserve it.”
The Dark God looked up at the Reaper who stood silently on the ledge of a spire.
“How do you know they won’t want to take back their title?” it asked.
“I don’t,” shrugged Ace. “But I know they figured out that their time was past and eventually another species has to take their place. They just didn’t want it to be you. I’m sure many on your home world already know what’s going to happen next. You should get going.”
The Dark God got up and was escorted out of the City of Ghosts. In space, destroyers, space cities, and planet killers that survived the brutal battle were joined by what would’ve been reinforcements if there was a battle cruiser or a gunship left to fight. They would escort the fallen Sentry back to its home world and out of the galaxy. As the pod carrying the last Dark One drifted into the middle of their formation, the creature within had resigned itself to its fate. Just over two years after the Rexx attacked the Earth, there was a new Sentry in the Milky Way. The Shadow Nation could finally stop fighting. The life’s work of its founders was complete.
Ace and the Reaper in his humanoid, robed form strolled through the Nation’s devastated capital. There would be a lot to rebuild and a lot to recover from the ruins. But it was ok. They had time now. They could rebuild the city to be even bigger and grander than it was for the last thousand years. Maybe they could even give it a name.
“So I guess you didn’t get your rematch,” Ace noted.
“Eh,” shrugged the Reaper, “we don’t always get what we want. It just made sense to go right for the worm’s throat.”
Ace nodded in silent agreement.
“I’ve been wondering about something,” he said. “Why did you help the Dark Gods in getting to space? What did you see in them?”
“Me? Nothing. But some of my ancestors thought that they could ‘civilize’ them, whatever that meant. So they gave them technology, taught them a lot about space, and biology, and physics. But they did something absolutely ridiculous in my humble opinion. These ‘scientists’ kept reminding them how inferior they were by comparison and how we were doing the galaxy a favor by educating a feral species. So the worms got fed up with being considered intellectual and technological equivalents of single celled bacteria and well... you know the rest.”
“I do.”
“They should’ve never been treated that way and they shouldn’t have been made into Sentries. I had to fix my ancestors’ mistake. I couldn’t undo what was done, but I could help a species with the potential to be a Sentry and give them a hand, a nudge, a tip here and there, loan or sell them some technology and make them work for their achievements. Then in due time, let them pursue the role on their own. Not antagonize them into it, not cajole them. Just help them out if I could. You were one of seven species and you had the most drive, ambition, and energy. This is why you’re now Sentries.”