The battlefield was quiet.

  Not peaceful.

  Just quiet.

  A red star burned low behind drifting debris and broken bodies, its light spilling across shattered armor, ruined weapons, and a landscape torn apart by violence.

  Velkorr staggered forward.

  Metal protruded from his body at several angles. A fractured blade was buried deep through his side. A jagged spear had punched through his chest and snapped off near his spine. Fragments of armor and weapon tips remained lodged in muscle and bone.

  His blood floated around him in slow drifting strands.

  It glowed faintly.

  A strange mixture of red, blue, and purple light shimmered through the liquid as it escaped his wounds, the colors folding into each other like living embers in the air.

  He coughed.

  More of it drifted out.

  The battlefield stretched across the fractured surface of a dead moon.

  The ground had been shattered not by explosives, but by bombardment. Massive chunks of stone and metal had been hurled from orbit during the battle. The impacts had punched enormous craters into the surface, leaving jagged pits and torn ridges of blackened rock. Some of the projectiles were still embedded in the ground—sections of fortress plating, collapsed artillery frames, broken structural beams.

  Velkorr moved through the wreckage.

  Weapons.

  He needed weapons.

  

  Not for this fight.

  This fight was already finished.

  But something else would come eventually.

  It always did.

  He dragged a body aside.

  The corpse wore a war harness built from thick layered plates and reinforced joints. Velkorr ripped the chest unit open and removed two compact rail cannons mounted inside the armor frame.

  Both damaged.

  He discarded them.

  Another body.

  This one still clutched a blade.

  Velkorr pulled it free and examined the weapon briefly before attaching it to the salvage harness forming across his back.

  Above him the bodies of the fallen drifted slowly through the weak gravity of the moon.

  Dozens of them floated silently across the sky—warriors, shattered armor fragments, torn weapons spinning slowly through the dark.

  Their shadows passed over the battlefield like drifting clouds.

  Velkorr moved beneath them.

  He fell to one knee.

  The ground cracked beneath the impact.

  Another cough forced glowing blood into the air.

  His vision blurred.

  He forced himself upright again.

  The battlefield shifted through the layered perception of his mind.

  Structural damage.

  Energy residue.

  fractures in the terrain.

  Nothing immediately useful.

  Ahead of him lay the broken carcass of one of the siege engines.

  Velkorr approached.

  The machine had once been a towering battlefield weapon nearly thirty meters tall. Its construction was brutal rather than elegant—thick armored plating wrapped around a skeletal frame of reinforced support beams. Heavy rotational cannons had been mounted along its shoulders, and its core housed a bombardment launcher designed to hurl massive kinetic projectiles across planetary distances.

  Now it lay shattered.

  One leg had been torn off completely. The upper frame had collapsed into the crater beneath it. One of the bombardment arms had snapped and embedded itself deep into the ground several hundred meters away.

  Velkorr climbed onto the broken frame.

  Inside the exposed chassis he located the power core.

  Still active.

  He tore it loose.

  The dense engine pulsed faintly with stored energy as he slung it across his back.

  The additional weight nearly forced him back down.

  He steadied himself and continued forward.

  Behind him something moved.

  A scraping sound.

  Velkorr turned slightly.

  Among the scattered bodies, one of the warriors still lived.

  The man had been nearly cut in half during the battle. His armor had split open along the torso, exposing shattered ribs and internal damage that should have killed him already.

  But he was still conscious.

  His head lifted slowly.

  His eyes found Velkorr.

  Hatred burned inside them.

  “You… monster…”

  Blood spilled from his mouth as he dragged himself forward across the broken ground.

  “My brothers…”

  He coughed violently.

  The effort alone looked painful.

  “You killed them…”

  The man gestured weakly toward the battlefield.

  Thirty warriors had stood with Ooga.

  Thirty elite fighters who had defended their commander with everything they had.

  Their bodies now littered the moon’s surface.

  The man’s gaze shifted toward the distant horizon.

  Half buried in fractured rock lay the massive corpse of the being they had followed.

  Ooga.

  Twenty feet tall even in death.

  His enormous body had collapsed across a shattered ridge of stone where the final clash had taken place.

  The warrior stared at the fallen giant.

  “Ooga protected twelve systems…”

  His voice trembled with grief.

  “He kept worlds safe…”

  The man looked back toward Velkorr.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “And you butchered him…”

  Velkorr continued walking.

  The wounded soldier’s breathing grew ragged.

  “You hunted him…”

  The man clawed at the ground weakly.

  “You destroyed everything…”

  Velkorr kept moving.

  The soldier tried to rise.

  His body failed.

  He collapsed back into the dust.

  “You don’t even care…”

  Velkorr walked away from him.

  Velkorr continued across the battlefield.

  The broken terrain sloped upward toward the ridge where the final clash had taken place. Shattered rock surrounded the enormous body lying half buried in the ground.

  Ooga.

  Even in death the giant looked formidable.

  His twenty-foot frame was thick and heavy, built with layers of dense muscle beneath folds of pale blubber-like skin that had hardened from years of battle. Several massive wounds tore through his torso where Velkorr’s strikes had landed earlier. The ground beneath him had been driven inward from the force of the collapse.

  Velkorr reached the body.

  He grabbed one of Ooga’s massive arms and pulled.

  The corpse shifted with a heavy grinding sound as stone cracked beneath its weight. It took several seconds before Velkorr managed to drag the giant fully onto his back.

  The exposed torso revealed what Velkorr had been looking for.

  A small bulge beneath the thick abdominal tissue.

  Velkorr knelt beside the body and reached into his salvage harness. From the cluster of collected weapons he pulled a device no larger than a finger.

  A micro-laser cutter.

  The tool activated with a narrow beam of white light.

  Velkorr pressed it against Ooga’s skin.

  The giant’s hide was thick—dense layers of blubber reinforced with fibrous muscle that resisted normal blades. The laser carved slowly through it, burning a narrow incision through the surface. Smoke rose from the cut as the beam worked deeper.

  Velkorr widened the opening.

  Then reached inside.

  Blood and thick tissue parted as he dug through the cavity until his hand closed around something solid.

  He pulled it free.

  A statue.

  Small enough to sit in his palm.

  It resembled a strange alien amphibian—elongated limbs folded inward, a wide mouth carved into a silent scream, and hollow eyes that seemed far too deep for something so small. Its surface looked ancient, dark stone veined with faint glowing lines.

  The moment it left Ooga’s body the air around it shifted.

  This statue had a purpose.

  It absorbed pain.

  Every death in its proximity left an imprint within it.

  The agony of warriors, the terror of final moments, the suffering of bodies breaking apart—all of it pulled inward and stored inside the object.

  If the statue was ever pointed toward someone…

  They would feel it.

  Every death.

  Every scream.

  Every final moment experienced by those it had consumed.

  Velkorr turned it in his hand briefly, confirming the structure was intact.

  Behind him something moved quickly.

  Footsteps.

  A surviving warrior rushed forward.

  Velkorr did not turn.

  The soldier dropped to his knees beside the giant corpse and began speaking rapidly in an alien language. His voice trembled as he raised both hands toward the statue.

  A prayer.

  His words came in desperate bursts—pleading, reverent, broken by grief.

  Velkorr ignored him.

  The statue disappeared into Velkorr’s salvage harness.

  The soldier continued praying.

  Then the sky split open.

  Thunder cracked across the moon.

  Above the battlefield space tore apart as a fleet forced its way into orbit.

  Dozens of warships emerged through violent warp distortions. Their arrival shook the sky with rolling thunder as gravitational shockwaves rippled outward from the warp points.

  They had come for Ooga.

  And they had found what remained.

  The ships did not hesitate.

  Weapons fired immediately.

  Heavy bombardment rained down toward the moon.

  Velkorr raised his arm.

  A force field deployed around him—a low-power defensive barrier that snapped into existence just as the first barrage struck the ground.

  The shield cracked instantly.

  Explosions tore across the surface as artillery fire slammed into the moon. Shockwaves rolled across the battlefield, sending rock and debris into the air.

  The barrier spider-webbed with fractures.

  It would not hold.

  Velkorr reached into his harness and pulled several small glowing spheres from a compartment at his side.

  He threw them.

  The mechanical balls shot upward at extreme speed, leaving thin streaks of light behind them as they exited the moon’s weak gravity and streaked toward orbit.

  Seconds later they detonated.

  With interference.

  A burst of energy rippled outward, scrambling targeting systems and temporarily blinding several of the ships’ weapon platforms.

  The bombardment stuttered.

  Velkorr moved immediately.

  He sprinted across the battlefield toward a location he had prepared earlier during the fight.

  A cluster of shattered rocks near the edge of the ridge.

  Hidden among the debris was a device he had planted hours earlier during the battle.

  A smoke generator.

  Velkorr reached it just as the fleet began regaining targeting control.

  Several ships fired again.

  Bolts of heavy artillery slammed into the moon behind him, tearing trenches through the ground.

  Velkorr activated the device.

  The smoke bomb detonated instantly.

  A massive dome of thick grey smoke erupted outward, expanding rapidly until it covered nearly ten miles of the moon’s surface.

  Within seconds the battlefield vanished inside the cloud.

  The fleet responded immediately.

  They opened fire.

  

  Bombardment ripped into the smoke-covered terrain as artillery shells and energy blasts slammed into the hidden battlefield.

  The ground trembled violently.

  Explosions flashed inside the smoke like lightning inside a storm cloud.

  Then the sky lit up again.

  From high orbit a massive dark silhouette dove downward through the smoke.

  The Harrow.

  Velkorr’s war platform roared into the battle.

  Rail cannons fired first.

  Massive tungsten rounds tore through several of the attacking ships, punching through hull plating and detonating internal systems.

  Eight hundred millimeter rocket batteries followed.

  Missiles streaked through the sky before erupting into violent explosions among the fleet.

  Then the miniguns opened.

  Rows of 110mm rotary cannons spun to life along the Harrow’s underside, spraying streams of armor-piercing rounds across the orbiting vessels.

  The sky became chaos.

  Ships broke formation as the Harrow carved directly through the center of the fleet.

  Below, Velkorr moved through the smoke toward the incoming vessel.

  More bombardment struck the moon.

  Shockwaves rolled across the battlefield.

  Velkorr stumbled once but continued forward.

  The Harrow dropped lower.

  A boarding ramp extended from its underside as it passed across the smoke dome.

  Velkorr sprinted.

  Several ships recovered quickly enough to fire again.

  Heavy artillery slammed into the terrain around him.

  One blast knocked him off his feet.

  He hit the ground hard.

  For a moment the world spun.

  Then Velkorr forced himself upright and continued moving.

  The ramp descended closer.

  Velkorr reached it just as another barrage struck nearby.

  He grabbed the edge and pulled himself inside.

  The ramp sealed shut immediately.

  Outside the smoke dome the fleet began repositioning for another attack.

  

  They never got the chance.

  The Harrow did not climb.

  It dove.

  Engines screamed as the massive war platform plunged straight downward into the moon’s surface.

  Rock shattered.

  The Harrow burrowed deep into the moon like a spear of metal and fire.

  The crust collapsed around it.

  Fractures ripped across the moon’s surface in every direction as the ship tore through its interior layers.

  For a moment the battlefield went silent.

  Then the moon broke.

  A massive eruption detonated from beneath the surface as internal pressure collapsed inward.

  Entire sections of the moon’s crust blasted outward into space in a violent explosion of rock, dust, and molten debris.

  The shockwave rolled outward toward the fleet.

  Fragments of the dying moon scattered across orbit.

  Within the chaos of the collapse, deep beneath the shattered surface, the Harrow’s engines ignited again.

  Warp space tore open.

  The war platform vanished.

  Behind it, the moon continued to disintegrate.

  Debris expanded outward into orbit.

  The fleet scattered as the explosion spread through space.

  Whether the blast destroyed them or not…

  No one on the battlefield remained to see.

  Velkorr was already gone.