Humanity Endures

Part 12 - Bravery and Bloodshed | Chapter 1

"This is my finest accomplishment. I have saved my species."

— Telzivax "The Monstrous" Tekran, his last words before his death by execution. His self-inflicted war ended shortly afterwards.

***

Within minutes the battle would be unsalvageable, unless someone were able to miraculously silence the endless torrent of messages bombarding every Loyalist in the system.

Smiling wryly to herself from within her combat suit, Felcamaxa then thought, "Enter, myself."

Since she and the army's forces had breached into the battle, being informed by a courier vessel of the debilitating mental assault that the Loyalist fleet had suffered from, Prime General Felcamaxa, and every soldier amongst her marine fleet, had disabled their communications implants. As such, Felcamaxa could not watch as the Relentless, her flagship, drew closer to Nahmatiix's EWCC — she could not interface with her ship's cameras — though she still acted with the sort of sick glee that a seasoned, combat-loving soldier feels upon getting a chance to join the fray that they've so sorely missed. Surrounding her troop-transporting flagship were one thousand other cruiser-sized troop transports of the Imperatorial Army, filled to the brim with excitedly whooping marines, all of whom relished the opportunity to participate in a battle they had feared they would do nothing in. As they had breached all but on top of their target, they would soon have their chance to join the bloody fray.

"Urkah!" exclaimed the marines and enforcers around Felcamaxa, their voices but a minor part of the ten-million-strong chorus that sang throughout her fleet, accompanied by countless frenzied, bloodthirsty cheers from those who were even more excited or drugged; Felcamaxa, her enforcer lungs capable of generating roars equal to those of twenty marines, wasted no time in joining the battle-loving chorus.

Her Strategic Deployment Pod, despite being held tight by the metallic limbs of its host transport ship, shook violently; the bone-chilling grinding of metal briefly drowned out the chants of "Urkah" as a Nahmatiixian gauss round scraped against the hull of the device, but as it became clear a moment later that the thing was more-or-less intact, the cheering and chanting, interspersed with excited laughter, grew louder than ever before. Her marines had just been shot at, almost killed, and they were loving it. The Nahmatiixian warships defending their recently up-armored EWCC attempted to stem the tide of Loyalist transports, but wherever these were not boarded and commandeered by the vanguard of Loyalist craft, they were simply insufficient to repel so many heavily-armored vessels that had appeared so suddenly, and as such, only a few dozen troop transports were destroyed; any Traitor reinforcements were minutes away, and Felcamaxa's forces would have landed by then.

Felcamaxa's SDP — a deployable device containing around ten thousand soldiers for purposes of boarding ships or attacking planets — was likely quieter than it would have been if it were an enforcer-only Heavy SDP, though Felcamaxa did not mind. Deeming an "HSDP" too much of a risk to bring into a serious engagement — if it were shot down, the number of lost enforcers would be crippling — and recognizing that her marines were not lacking in enthusiasm or skill, Felcamaxa harbored no regret over her tactical choice; this was good, as Felcamaxa preferred to die without regret. Having deactivated her communications implants in the wake of the Nahmatiixian cyberattack, and as she was about to fight for the first time in years, Felcamaxa's mind was perfectly at peace — more at peace, in fact, than it had been for some time, despite her being embroiled in a pair of wars. Her numerous hearts rhythmically and steadily pounded in her twice-armored chest, protected both by metal and by carapace; her quartet of trunk-like arms rested comfortably within her suit and the SDP's restraints, and in their hands comfortably rested weapons capable of killing dozens with minimal effort. Her hulking form lay in its seat, a seat which could give way and propel her into a Traitor-filled space station at any moment, where there would inevitably emerge the greatest slaughter that the human civil war had seen so far: Felcamaxa could not be more in her element.