Carnage by Aer-ki Jyr (the chimp paradox .TXT) 📕

disintegrating a tunnel entrance where a stream of Hadarak minions were pouring out…but it didn’t stay destroyed, for within seconds more pushed their way up through the ashes of their kin and into the valley as they charged with the others towards the defense line surrounding one of Clan Kai’sa’s 4 mining sites on the enemy-held planet.

Esna was standing on the defense wall along with thousands of her troops, but she wasn’t leading them. There were Archons here that were handling that, and they were far more skilled than her. She’d learned early on to defer to them in almost everything while she planned out their conquests and considered the myriad of ideas being sent to her for upgrades and new ways of fighting the enemy.

None of that had to do with her being on the planet. She was here to fight rather than sit in one of the three Zedas in orbit…which is where the topaz beams were coming from as they provided cover fire for the mining site. The weapon itself, a Zotark, was specifically designed to fight biological enemies and not energy shields. It was one of many specializations Clan Kai’sa had made in their equipment that gave them an advantage over the Hadarak that would be a disadvantage against other opponents.

But there were no other opponents here. This entire system was owned by the Hadarak, though Esna’s troops had done a great deal of damage to them since arriving some 8 months ago. They’d wiped out their naval forces, cleared the orbit of all planets of their infestation constructions, and toppled those rising up from the planets…yet they were not in a position to cleanse them of all Hadarak, especially those burrowed deep into the planet. That was not their mission here, for the assault to reclaim the galaxy from these monsters had not yet begun.

What Esna was doing was growing her Clan, and doing it by utilizing the rich resources on the planets that had once been held by others and were now completely consumed by the Hadarak. This planet had formerly been home to a primitive race that had no idea of the Corovon deposits buried in the planet, but others had noticed it and tried to take it from them previously. A lot of history later and some interventions by stronger races had seen the system still in the hands of the primitives when the Hadarak arrived, and now the natives were extinct. None had been evacuated. They had all died, with no means of interstellar travel to get even one of them out of the warzone.

The Hadarak were consuming the Corovon, and Esna was both denying some of it to them as well as claiming it for her own. But to get it out she had to put mining stations on the planet and defend them from the Hadarak armies who were not going to tolerate their presence. Hence the defense wall and the super-sized moon hovering in the sky above them that was continuing to fire down near the mining infrastructure at the enemy troops continually gaining in number.

Same old, same old. They were not going to stop, and they had no reinforcements that were different than before. It was just endless carnage that had to be fought, and the rewards were the Corovon deposits that would help build addition weapons, armor, and more Zedas. So the longer they held here, the more they would get, and even as the hundreds of thousands of minions surrounded the circular perimeter, occasional dropships were coming and going from the site as any flying minions were downed by the anti-air turrets before they could get within 8 miles of the wall.

They weren’t trying that approach much, and were sticking with the overland version. Esna was here with rifle in hand along with a lot of Commandos from many races, all of which were now in the purple/deep gray armor of Clan Kai’sa as they waited for the next wave to get within firing range.

The wall turrets opened up before then, for they had better range, and began blasting into the biological enemies and creating bloody explosions that left orange, red, green, and purple mist clouds based on the type of minion that was being killed. The Hadarak had many different varieties, and it was assumed they had been created from other races that were either absorbed and reformed, or genetic coding that was taken and used as inspiration for new minion forms.

They came in bipeds, quadrupeds, hexpeds, hoppers, runners, plodders, and crawlers, with more versions than the Paladin could ever hope to dream of. But they were all the same in design. Biological, no technology, no shields. Just claws, teeth, poison, acid, a few biological energy weapons, and sheer muscle. They were deadly in a very primitive way, but their coordination was not primitive. They operated both individually and with a partial hive mind as certain individuals acted as leaders. Taking those out could help somewhat, but there were none that were critical to the battle. Everything was redundant and expected to die, so the only way to beat them was to engage in the carnage and kill them faster than they could kill you.

And as many as the wall turrets killed, more ran by their dead kin heading for the wall and began taking shots from Esna and the others, who were peppering them with tiny Dre’mo’don blobs that absolutely wrecked their bodies when they hit those without armor. Some tore straight through and came out the other side with energy to spare, but the minions that had biological armor on them cracked and puffed disintegrated material when the shots hit, creating a cloud that obscured those behind…but the targets themselves kept moving forward and were clearly visible up until they fell and were run over by those behind them.

Beside Esna several Commandos pulled out rocket launchers from their back racks and