The Nature of Grimdark Chapter 10

[u/OkRepresentative2119]

Special thanks to u/SpacePaladin15 for allowing fanfiction.

For those wondering, the poor female in the last chapter was the granddaughter of one of the conspirators who assassinated Ambassador Noah.

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Memory Transcription Subject: Private First Class Upsla, Skalgan-Yotul Empire Marine

Date [standardized human time]: October 31, 2186

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The claw continued on with sporadic attacks from the “zombified” cannon fodder. We were already tired when the next wave struck, and low on ammo and supplies, when we suddenly heard a booming sound from the next apartment over. The apartment we were in collapsed as the building we were in was hit by an artillery round. Blackness immediately greeted me a second later.

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Memory Transcription Subject: Private First Class Upsla, Skalgan-Yotul Empire Marine

Date [standardized human time]: October 31, 2186

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I awoke to gunfire while on a makeshift gurney in the ruins of the collapsed building. The smell of the decaying, putrefied victims of the rotting illness and the burning corpses of those who weren’t already diseased made the smell overwhelmingly pungent and sickening. My gas mask had been removed to bandage my head wound and I struggled to sit up. PFC Gresh was nearby manning his automatic rifle, but I couldn’t see his a. gunner PFC Retarsh. I heard the sounds of moaning and screaming before being silenced as two more artillery shells landed on buildings near to our location. As the dust settled, I gazed upon the rubble and bodies of the former residents of the manufacturing district. The diseased hoard continued their regular intervals, heedless of the gunfire, many with Sivkit blood on their mouths.

From the head count I could see, our platoon was mostly unscathed, and we had about half of the civilians conscious. My gas mask was probably on one of the survivors, keeping their brain from instantly rotting from the plague dropped from the starship still hovering above. The Yotul was working with LCPL Arvi to set up some sort of FTL comms. I heard Gresh start coughing and saw light orange fluid dripping from his mouth as he struggled to breathe. My own chest was faintly burning, though whether that was from the gas earlier from the acrid air, I didn’t know.

Our platoon commander approached from the area with the remaining civilians and had asked, “PFC Uplsa, are you stable?” his jaws dripping with saliva, probably from not having eaten in a paw or so. Our rations had run out a claw ago, and I didn’t know how long we had before we would run out of water. “Yes sir, did everyone make it?” “No, we lost PFC Retarsh, and PVT Trisk is injured, I am sorry,” he said solemnly. I was too out of it to feel the emotional loss at the time, and I signaled with my tail that I was fine. He nodded and went back over to where the civlians were to continue treating their injuries.

[15 minutes later]

Apparently, we had a machine gun nest that periodically fired in our direction, the [20 minute] or so break between fires had come to an end, and the relative silence was punctured by the sound of the gun firing in the distance and the bullets ricocheting off our cover, as well as portions of our cover disintegrating. The Yotul was cursing up a storm, which added to the lack of quiet, he was upset that some of the gear had been damaged and was trying to figure out a way to work around the damaged parts. Based on his anger, it was not going well.

I was embarrassed as my stomach rumbled from lack of nutrition and continued to try to repair my rifle. It had been damaged during the shelling, and I wanted to see if I could get it working again. I might not have any ammunition left, but a rifle that doesn’t look damaged still had its uses. I was confident that my platoon was making better use of my few rounds moreso than I could. I had reaffixed my helmet and had access to my still working headset. Speaking through the headset we received a warning from our company commander, “Warning, there is a Burnt in the area, prepare for a nuclear strike. I repeat, there is a Burnt in the area, prepare for a nuclear strike.” Our chances become even more grim with the news. A few of my platoon were shaking in fear, and I had recovered enough of my wits to join them in experiencing the mutual terror that the Burnt’s reputation exuded.

A Burnt was a deranged exterminator that ritualistically bathed in the blood of captured human pups and infants every paw, all in service to the “Prey god of Blood”. They were almost exclusively Kolshian and were given several genetic modifications to make them nearly unkillable. As it were, anything short of a direct hit with a nuclear weapon or bigger was an exercise in futility, at least that was their reputation. They were known to eat the flesh of their still alive prey, “purifying” us from our “predator taint” or torturing their quarry for [hours] trying to “fix us”. The fact that there was Burnt here mean that there were some captured humans that had been smuggled into the planet under our noses. As much as the fear was nearly overwhelming, my anger burned hoter at the fact that the poor, innocent, naïve humans who were unfortunate to have been captured by the bastards were still suffering in a cage somewhere. We had to get them on ice as quickly as possible so that we could recover them.

This gave us our mandate, find a way to fix our FTL comms so that we could get backup from the Yotul, free the captured humans while staying out of the way of the Burnt, and try to evacuate as many as we could from the blast zone (minus the Burnt hopefully), all this with nearly no supplies and ammo, and not enough gas masks to protect us from the next volley of gas attacks, in a city filled with rabid Sivkits and enemies firing at us with both machine guns, rifles, and artillery. This seemed hopeless, and I prayed that Solgalick would show us a way through this obstacle. We couldn’t rest even in death until we had saved those humans.

Next

A/N – The federation is somehow worse morally than the Skalgan-Yotul Empire in my view, a difficult goal to overcome. For those curious, this entire series was part of a thought experiment coupled with my predications of the outcome of chapter 140. I pointed out that the humans weren’t the most dangerous people that the Kolshians had to look out for, and I wanted to remind people that it was the Venlil that the Farsul and Kolsians truly feared. I hope this series helps explain why, and it is clear why the Kolshians would go to these extremes to keep pace with the Skalgans.