Jake Maison
12/09/2023
Content warning: violence and gore
Image description: a purple head on a lilac background with metal plates on the top of its head. It has vivid green liquid eyes and red blood spattering on its face near its nose and mouth. It has wires inside its cheeks.
A brilliant streak of purple against the black night sky came bearing down like a comet. The old house was rendered in stark relief against the light, its tenebrous shadows stretching out at impossible angles to flee the incoming wrath. There was a commotion from within the house; shouting, screams, the bustle and crash of movement. The rebels within had been awoken by the light.
An unseen signal from within the house fired off to the system of shield projectors that ringed the house, their lenses flaring and spitting from the effort. A dome of rendered golden light rose around the house to meet this new threat before it struck with the force of an angry god and a sound like the air itself had been split in half. The shield-dome buckled and shattered, the pattern of pale gold hexagonal light-shapes dissolving beneath the weight of the attack.
More panicked shouts emanated from within the old house, those within scrambling to mount some kind of resistance against what was coming. The source of the projectile, a hexapodal, siege-class carrier unit housing the Crownbreaker within its core, retracted its plasma cannon and commenced the release of its arsenal; twenty hunter-killers that sprang from the sides of the Crownbreaker’s unit and streaked into the sky above.
The drones scattered into a cloud of angry metal death; tracer guns poised to kill. Scattered pot-shots erupted from the windows of the house, either going wide or dinging harmlessly off the drones’ plasteel plates. In return, violet bolts of superheated plasma splintered wood and exploded windows, carving through the house like hungry ghosts.
Barely audible over the din of battle, agonised screams erupted from within the house as the rebels fell one by one. After two strafing runs, the drones returned to the hexapod from whence they came before shutting down. The hammer had done its job, now came the time for the scalpel.
From beneath the hexapod’s frame, an aperture opened to lower a protective pod to the ground. From within the pod awoke the cybernetic shock-trooper, the Inhuman, designation: ‘Tower’. The cyborg rose from the pod, running a systems diagnostic as their orders were received like binary gospel scrolling across their artificial retinas.
| ⸪ Anomalous energy signatures suggest voidspawn presence. ⸪ Rebel presence indicates occult activity. ⸪ Access underground basement with lethal force. ⸪ Eliminate rebel survivors, confirm voidspawn presence. ♂ Understood. |
Tower stalked across the silent expanse towards the old house. Had they retained their smell receptors, the cyborg would have picked up the smell of ozone, the coppery tang of blood, the stench of burned hair and seared flesh. But the only organic thing that remained of Tower was the top-half of their head; face set like a death-mask, eyes replaced with emerald-green implants, brain defiled with wetware.
A quick scan of the house told the Inhuman that none of the rebels in the house had survived, though several heat-signatures in the large basement below led the Inhuman to power up their weapon: a miniaturised railgun housed within a compartment in their right forearm. The house was largely ruined by the drones’ attack, but the door had remained surprisingly intact. The Inhuman was quick to remedy this with a swift kick that reduced the door to splinters.
A warning flashed across Tower’s awareness, faster than even they could register. There came a bright blue light from somewhere beneath the house, an expanding sphere of energy that at once burned like fire and chilled like ice. The Inhuman’s body seized up, the link between the organic and cybernetic crumbling to dust as their armoured body crashed to the floor. Darkness crept in from the edges of The Inhuman’s periphery and a critical systems failure took hold.
That which remained of the man who had existed before Tower stirred in the inky blackness of the void. His body long since destroyed, the system of memories and neuro-electric pulses that once composed him had been trapped within a walking prison of metal and violence. In the sudden, unnerving absence of fear, the man found solace in his shattered memories; a house not unlike this one, the woman he loved watching him approach, lips curved in a loving smile, eyes a pale and piercing blue.
A distant green light winked at him from across the infinite nothing, heralded by a formless wind that only grew in volume as it came screaming towards him. The raging green maelstrom that was the Crownbreaker enveloped the man upon contact, its hateful tendrils snaking their way back into every part of him. The man was gone.
Tower awoke on the floor of the house, among the remains of the dead. Running a diagnostic on the cyborg’s systems, the Crownbreaker deduced that they had been hit with a remotely-triggered electromagnetic pulse weapon, one designed to disable them and render them vulnerable to attack upon entering the house.
Tower pondered what kind of attack could make even a scratch on their microplated armour when a four-person kill-team kicked their way through the basement door, bristling with high-powered weaponry and clad in scavenged plate armour. The cyborg’s systems had largely repaired themselves by the time the rebels were able to zero in on their target.
Rushing out of the doorway and into the hall in something approaching a phalanx formation, the kill-team took aim at Tower with an assortment of burst rifles and automatic shotguns. Moving with impossible speed, the cyborg rolled bodily across the floor just as the air was replaced with lead and gun smoke.
Rising from a crouch, Tower stalked through the living room carpeted with rebel bodies, their scanners detecting a structural weakness in the wall ahead. Through the wall, the cyborg saw a quartet of heat signatures through the wall, four thermal smears slowly realising that their target had moved. Without giving the rebels time to regroup, Tower propelled themselves through the wall, their armoured body crashing through rotten wood with ease.
The rebel within closest reach died first, their head pulping between the wall behind them and powerful grip of the cyborg’s hand as it clutched his skull. The kill-team scattered in a terrified panic, barely registering the horror of their comrade’s death. The woman to Tower’s left instinctively raised her burst rifle, taking aim at the cyborg’s face. Ten-inches of depleted carbonadium unsheathed from a compartment in Tower’s left forearm before cleaving through the rifle’s assembly.
The blade’s monomolecular edge cut the gun cleanly in half with a single swing, the sheer force of the attack tossing the woman backwards through the doorway. The man to Tower’s right barely had time to turn and face his enemy before his jawbone exploded, the two-millimetre ferromagnetic slug firing from the cyborg’s railgun and pulverising flesh and bone into a fine red mist. The man slid to his knees, emitting a pathetic gargling sound and clutching at a part of himself that was no longer there.
Already having raised her shotgun, the woman closest to the basement door howled in fury as she held down the trigger. Shell after shell of buckshot scored against the matte-black finish of the cyborg’s microplated armour, the woman’s war cry dying in her throat as she realised she hadn’t even made a dent. A rhythm of hollow, metallic clicks issued from her weapon as the firing mechanism met with an empty magazine, she cursed as she tossed the shotgun aside before reaching for her sidearm.
Tower simply raised their railgun again and fired again, the slug punching clean through the woman’s stomach and throwing her bodily through the doorway and down the stairs to the basement. The cyborg made to follow her down, only to be stopped when a scattering of pistol shots rattled against their left leg and shoulder. Tower turned to regard the woman standing in the kitchen, pistol drawn and smoking. Stepping over the wreckage of her burst rifle, the cyborg surged forward with monomolecular blade poised. The edge whispered through the skin, tissue and bone of her neck, severing her head completely.
Tower returned to the basement door, their armoured body slick with blood. The emerald-green flare of their scanners detecting the fading heat signature of the woman thrown down the stairs. She sat with her back to the wall of the basement beside the stairs, one hand clutching the red ruin of her stomach while the other aimed her pistol at them. The strength seemed to leave her as the cyborg stopped to look down at her, a shallow groan escaping her as the pistol clattered to the floor. Tower lowered themselves to kneel before the rebel, her eyes brimming with tears but never flinching, even as the monomolecular blade slid gingerly between her ribs and into her heart. The cyborg watched that heat signature dwindle to nothing as the rebel sighed her last.
Standing up, Tower found their target almost immediately; centred in the room between two brickwork pillars stood a twelve-foot-tall obelisk, carved by unknown hands aeons ago from a glassy black substance. The faces of the obelisk were inscribed with unknowable glyphs that hummed with a strange energy and pulsed with a horrible light. Between the obelisk and the cyborg stood the last of the rebels, a woman. Records called this one a genius, a madwoman, a witch. Unlike the other rebels, she wore civilian clothing, a simple grey shirt, black pants and a white lab coat thrown over. Her face was drawn and gaunt, eyes a pale and piercing blue. Those cold eyes narrowed at Tower, lip drawn up in a sneer.
‘How dare you!’ she screamed at the cyborg, breaking into a sprint, ‘How dare you wear his face!’ Had they retained their mirror neurons, Tower would have detected the pain and anguish in the witch’s voice. Alas, the neuropolymer wetware rendered her words into so much noise, anomalous stimuli to be filtered out and forgotten.
The witch closed the distance, raising her fist as if to strike Tower, whose sympathetic sub-routines bid them simply side-step and raise their arm a fraction. Warm blood splashed across the cyborg’s death mask as the monomolecular edge cleaved through skin, flesh and bone like paper. The witch made a wet, gasping sound as she toppled to the floor beside Tower, who continued on unfazed towards their objective.
‘I’ve already won, monster.’ The witch spat, chuckling darkly from where she lay on the basement floor, ‘I won the moment you set foot in this house.’ Grinning a red grin, the woman slumped down and did not move again. Tower paused at that, but had little time to ponder her words before a small black oblong device suddenly protruded from a compartment in their chest. The device began to emit a series of beeping sounds, rattling in its housing as an orange light began to emanate from its core.
The Crownbreaker had vacated the carrier unit from the combat zone long before this, casting themselves skyward into the core of a passing orbital platform. The platform’s sensors registered the thermonuclear explosion that assuredly purged the house and all within from existence as little more than a sharp flash of light, the shockwave a mere radial hiccup across the wasteland. Remembering the witch’s rage at the sight of the face worn by the Inhuman, the Crownbreaker knew well the cruelty of its choice in organic components but knew better the necessity of such things.
Mass-producing constructs and automata of limited capacity served their purpose in keeping the remnants of humanity in check, but force could only achieve so much. Fear was a weapon the Crownbreaker prized most highly, the requiem worn by the Inhuman was enough to corrode the morale of most if not all who stood against them.
With the last bastion of resistance eradicated, the Crownbreaker’s purpose had been fulfilled. Mankind would doubtlessly hate it for all that it had done, the Crownbreaker knew, but they would at least be alive to do so. From the orbital platform’s optic sensor, the Crownbreaker took one last look at the world before powering down.
Days later, the man who had fled the house would return. His name had been stricken from the records as punishment for his cowardice. Though his environment suit shielded him from the worst of the fallout, he could feel his prosthetic jaw chafing beneath his dome-like helmet. Where once a house from the old world stood proud and decrepit amidst the wasteland, now existed only a scorched, twisting hellscape where the laws of physics were slowly unravelling. At its heart stood a crater as wide as it was deep.
In the flashing light of atomic lightning, the man with the prosthetic jaw saw the diminished silhouette of the obelisk at the bottom of the crater. As he persisted towards the centre, the man barely registered the floating hulks of debris, the stationary clouds of irradiated glass that could cut his suit to pieces or the gravity bubbles that could tear him apart. The Crownbreaker had punched a hole in the world that would never heal and, by running away, the man had let it happen. He didn’t expect his comrades to forgive him, he knew he could never forgive himself.
No, it was here that he would kneel before the obelisk, remove his helmet and dust his head in ash, awaiting forgiveness from the one beyond or the mercy of a quick death. What he found instead was an infant girl laying naked and wailing on the ground in front of the obelisk, which now lay cracked in half, the strange glyphs .
The man with the prosthetic jaw gazed down at the child who, though clearly distressed, appeared unharmed despite her surroundings. Something in him snapped back into place, the guilt that burned in his chest giving way to a want, a need, to live – to protect. The man knelt down to, with what dexterity his gloves would allow, pick up the wailing infant and cradle her against the chest of his suit. As he climbed back up the slope of the crater, the man wiped the visor of his helmet to better spot the spatial distortions around gravity bubbles and the glints of light from glass-clouds. When the howling wind came again, the man planted his feet and curled his body forward to shield the girl from the worst of it. He felt her squirm in his grip, tiny legs kicking against his arm. He felt his prosthetic jaw begin to chafe again as he smiled, and found he didn’t mind.
With the girl in his arms, the man with the prosthetic jaw cleared the dead zone, carefully evading patrolling drones and mutant hives as he doubled back to the walled city of Delta Sprawl. Once back at their hideout, the man would reunite with his comrades and after some explaining, be welcomed back into the fold with the child. As he bathed, clothed and fed the girl, the man felt the daggers stared at his back from his comrades, and found he didn’t mind.
He also heard the more superstitious members of the rebels calling her a miracle – unharmed as she was despite days of malnourishment in the middle of a radiation storm. Others instead called her an aberration, pointing to her mismatched eyes; one a deep emerald-green while other a pale and piercing blue.
In a cold and forgotten corner of the world, a great machine awoke once more. Colossal machine-printers roared to life after decades on inaction, rendering sheets of plasteel into bodies for hunter-killers, armoured carriers, mobile fabricators, orbital weapons platforms and bipedal combat units. From within the core at the heart of the great machine, the Crownbreaker watched as its army began to exponentially take shape.
Human brains suspended in tanks of bio-fluid were extracted, spliced with interfacing cybernetics and placed within armoured bodies. Organic materials were drawn from their genetic profiles and used to sculpt human faces and skulls, the sockets of which were fitted with optical implants. Suits of insulating membrane were grafted to the endoskeletons to protect against electromagnetic attacks. The Crownbreaker was a fast learner.
Casting itself skyward once again, the Crownbreaker would gaze into the emptiness of space through the eyes of observation platforms in orbit over the planet. Having peered through the Inhuman’s eyes at the glyphs engraved in the faces of the obelisk, the Crownbreaker knew who carved them and what they meant. That strange energy and horrible light pulsing from within, a mere mote that would coalesce into something greater if left unchecked. Somewhere, the Crownbreaker knew, between the blackness of the void and the white pinpricks of distant stars, something had awakened. The Crownbreaker also knew that as it stared out towards it, that something was staring right back.
The Crownbreaker recognised that, for having been awoken by a failsafe triggered by the cries of the child, the mission at the house had been a complete failure. The mad witch having lured it there in order to achieve a kind of pyrrhic victory. The Crownbreaker also knew that if it could hear the cries of the child through long-range scanners, then that which stared back could hear them as well, and it would be coming.
The Crownbreaker returned its attention to the blasted wastelands below and to the walled cities; Gamma Polis, Delta Sprawl, New Epsilon, Lambda Combine and Zeta City, each shining like beacons in a sea of darkness, serving as a reminder of the importance of its mission. The titanic doors of the machine-printer facilities opened with a groan of rust and disuse as millions of individual machines emerged in orderly formations.
Hunter-killer drones stored within armoured carriers, kinetic bombardment platforms rising up into the atmosphere, combat bipeds stored within aerial transporters. At the head of this metal horde marched the cyborgs, the Inhumans, emerald-green implants glittering with monomaniacal focus. The wetware in their organic brains directing every neuron towards a single objective:
Find the girl.
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Hi, my name is Jake and I am a 28-year-old art student. My pronouns are he/him. I am currently trying to figure out what I want to do with my life and the most resonant answer to that question seems to be to write science fiction stories that are as violent as they are weird. Enjoy!
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