[quote=@Tank O The Lake] *Above the world we circle. Using the scanners of our hijacked ships, we scan the surface. This reveals scattered clusters of boxy structures surrounded by sandbags or walls. The night side of the planet is dotted with the occasional, isolated bunch of yellow lights. I laugh, thinking of how easy the population would be to subdue and the joy I would savor while playing my games with them.* Get the cannon, Phantom. Phantom: Yes, Lash. *The ship with the node stuck to its gun turns around to face the opposite direction of its orbit. Then, it fires, launching the node at a retrograde trajectory, aimed to strike one of the largest population centers on the planet. In less than 10 minutes, it strikes directly onto their town square. A camera watches as dozens of curious humans dressed in 19th-century attire gather around the impact site. Then, like a blooming flower, the node opens, releasing six Withers. They speak, allowing their psychic ability to pacify the crowd. Then, they strike. They pounce onto their victims, sometimes biting them on the torso and injecting embryos to further the race, and sometimes simply swallowing them whole before regurgitating their acid-coated remains as projectiles. I am disappointed in the fact that the camera does not have an audio recorder and I cannot, therefore, hear their dying screams. I am still happy to see the crowd massacred, with some left comatose and implanted to birth new Withers. I tune off the screen once the square has been deserted and occupy the next few hours looking down at the city and watching as its lights slowly go out.* [/quote] *Six hours later, I sit in the captain's chair, watching as the surrounding suburbs are slowly consumed. The Wither population on the world has increased from six to a number a thousand times higher. The number of humans killed is twenty times that. Before I can continue watching, though, Phantom appears once more.* Are you done playing your game? Phantom: No, but there's something you need to see. *The screen flickers on to show a map of the nearby cosmos. Overlaid onto it are the results from the high-power scanners of the ship. They show a very dense, but fluctuating source of energy in an adjacent star system.* A pulsar? Phantom: There are no pulsars in this sector. The energy should not be fluctuating this much, unless... Unless? Phantom: Unless it was artificial. I think the warp engines have taken us to a battle, and a large one at that. *A curious look crosses my face.* What kind of battle? Phantom: We're not detecting any significant orbital constructs, so it's not a space battle. The source world has no known population or strategic importance, so it must be a battle between individuals. Powerful individuals. *I nod.* A war of titans, I see. Ready the fleet. We have a god to kill. *An hour later, the fleet once again returns to realspace, orbiting the source planet. Looking down, I can see a reddish-purple, roiling storm cloud. The scanners identify it as a reality storm. I am disappointed, believing that the fluctuations were merely results of the storm, and am about to turn back when, with a flash of red and blue, something resonates across the planetary surface. Seeing this, I order a drone to be sent down to survey the surface. It enters the atmosphere in an orange flash and sees a multitude of tiny forms engaged in combat. Flashes of energy dance between them. However, when the drone ascends once more, it strikes an unseen barrier and spirals back down to the surface. Curious, I send another drone down and order it to go back up, with the same result. I approximate the height of this one-way barrier to be roughly one to two kilometers above the sea level.* Phantom! Phantom: Yes, Lash? Get the Technomorph. Remember Tenebrus VIII? *Phantom looks at me with realization in his eyes, then grins.* Phantom: Oh, I'm gonna love this! *The green-black slime coating the engines of the smaller ships begins to spread and coat much of their hulls. Then, it forms tendrils, which link with nearby spacecraft and pull them towards each other. When their work is done, a dozen-odd spacecraft have been conglomerated into a projectile of astronomic size. At its heart is a reality anchor, previously possessed by the exploratory fleet for braving the warp-storms of far-flung space. Hopefully, it will protect the projectile from the reality storm. I give the order to descend. The engines of the projectile all fire at once, bringing it down towards the surface. With meteoric force, it strikes in an unoccupied corner of the battlefield, sending up a mushroom cloud of dust and debris. When the dust settles, the structure is nigh-unfazed, an ode to the durability of the already-damaged spacecraft. It sticks out of the red sand like a pale blister surrounding an infected wound. Then, it slowly begins to sink into the ground.*