The Savage Brawl [Round 5: Battletopia]

Originally posted on MSPA by Ixcalibur.

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Ziirphael had not found a convenient entrance to the mothership like there had been to Gormand's flying school/burger abomination. Lacking such a convenient entrance he had involuntarily morphed an arm into an enormous drill made of bone, and had drilled through the metal hull of the saucer, emerging in a corridor that was plucked straight from a cheap science fiction film. Shiny white plastic and pointless lights twinkling away on every surface simply to make them look cool and high-tech. Ziir supposed that since this was actually reality some of these lights might actually have some kind of purpose but he wouldn't have bet upon it.

He radioed back into his new 'master' Konka Rar, teaching him proper radio etiquette as he did so, and then began to make his way through the ship, still effectively invisible though now weighted down by his drill arm. As he moved through the ship as stealthily as he could manage, he reached a doorway that was being guarded by a pair of insectoid aliens. They had dark green carapaces, black segmented eyes, twitching mandibles, a whole mess of antennae, a couple of pairs of arms and runtish retractable wings, which is Ziir had been in the mood for guessing he would have guessed were an evolutionary throwback.

He had been caught by surprise; everything so far had been so stereotypically b-movie he was almost certain that when he did bump into aliens they would be little green men in silver spacesuits, or, as was more prevalent nowadays, little grey men with large foreheads. But what did it matter; the end result would be the same no matter what manner of creature stood in his way. He would have preferred to dispose with this attempt at stealth and slaughter the aliens where they stood but his body seemed to be coming up with its own interpretations of Rar’s orders.

As he snuck through the corridor, he fumed. He was a god of death; he was supposed to cause chaos and destruction. Stealth missions were not exactly in his wheelhouse.
Whether it was because he was particularly bad at stealth, or whether it was because the aliens happened to have particularly acute hearing he wasn’t sure. He watched as one of the antennae of the nearest alien twitched to attention at his approach. The alien quickly produced a weapon, a shining white pistol with flashing blue lights that made it look very high-tech and aimed it at the spot where Ziir was stood.

For a quick moment the two aliens spoke in a language that Ziirphael could not understand. To him it sounded like a hurried series of scratches and squeaks and their conversation was over less than a second after it had begun. Without any further hesitation the aliens opened fire, unleashing a barrage of laser rounds at Ziirphael.

The first shot slammed into Ziirphael’s side, but after that he was moving, darting and dodging up the corridor towards the bug aliens. He brought around his drill arm slamming it into the face of the closest alien. There was a sickening snap as the alien’s mandible disconnected from its face and its carapace cracked under the force of the blow, spilling forth sickly white liquid. One pair of limbs pressed to its face, the alien’s knees, or equivalent thereof, buckled and it collapsed to the floor.

Ziirphael whirled around ready to launch an attack on the other but found that his left side was rapidly going numb. His blade arm hung limply and he was forced to draw back and attempt another attack with his drill arm, one which despite Ziirphael’s camouflage the alien easily saw coming and neatly sidestepped. Numbness spread swiftly through his body, before he even managed to right himself from the swing he collapsed, tumbling into unconsciousness.

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This was perhaps the worst Collection that High Admiral Sla’thuin had ever had the misfortune to be part of. He had chosen this sleepy little backwoods town for the express purpose of collecting a sample of the native population without causing uproar throughout the rest of the planet. This had not gone exactly to plan. Some hours before the jammers had been primed and put in place and the potential subjects contained the fleet were suddenly mere miles above the town they had intended to strike.

As if this development had not been bad enough on it’s own it had been swiftly followed by some kind of calamity in the town that one engineer was telling him was some kind of wormhole/black hole thing. Sla’thuin didn’t really care about the technical details, all he cared about was that it was freaky and hadn’t been in their plan. Then there were reports of a necrotic semi-mechanical titanic native which had appeared and promptly vanished, and the engineer from before had been sending messages saying that it was because of the wormhole thing and it was just making Sla’thuin more and more stressed out.

He’d thought that the bewildering invasion of terrestrial meat products had been the final straw, until he’d heard that there was some kind of camouflaged native onboard the mothership itself. He couldn’t help but wonder if these ‘humans’ were really worth the trouble.

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Ziirphael, as always, dreamed of death. He dreamed of old victories, specifically the first day when he had ever been called a god. The body he had at the time hailed from a tribe of particularly notorious warmongers. They were in their physical peak and had smelted basic weaponry when most of their peers had not yet invented the forge. They were at war with another tribe, one more advanced and more numerous than them. Ziir had opted to lead the charge. On the battlefield he had changed as ever, his limbs replaced by blades, his skin becoming thick exoskeleton. He sliced and diced and hopped from one body to another when it suited him to do so. When the battle was finally over and ‘his side’ were the only ones left alive he stood before them, dripping with blood, faceless and monstrous.

They had not turned and fled like others that had seen him as such. They had cheered as he had transformed and slaughtered. They had hailed him as a god of battle and gave thanks to him. He had brought them a victory they had not believed attainable. This was the first time he had ever really thought about what he was, and finding the notion of a god of death suited him it stuck; as did the name of the warrior whose body he had taken; Ziirphael.

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Ziirphael awoke in a Perspex enclosure just large enough for him to lie down inside. Through the plastic he could see that this was one of many enclosures equally spaced around a massive chamber. In the other enclosures he saw alien creatures of various sizes and shapes. Standing just outside this enclosure were a pair of aliens almost identical to the ones he had seen before and one with a pale yellow carapace. It held its hands behind its back and regarded Ziirphael with equal parts annoyance and intrigue.

“You are not human.” High Admiral Sla’thuin said. “You will explain what is going on here, and what manner of creature you are.” Ziirphael pushed himself up from the floor and glared at the alien.

“I am a god.” He said plainly.

“Nonsense.” Sla’thuin replied. “There is no such thing. What are you really?”

Ziirphael hesitated for a second, rattled by his dream. “I am a god of death.” He insisted. “I will end you all and take this ship for my own.”

Sla’thuin smiled thinly. “I think you don’t know what you are…” He said. “How interesting…”