The first thing to die was the sky.
What had once been a serene vault of twilight clouds and prismatic auroras now writhed in agony as the Mahasimu fleet broke atmosphere. From orbit, Admiral Kia's armada descended like a divine plague—bladed warships and transport monoliths tearing through the upper stratosphere, trailing molten streaks and cyclonic fire. The planetary shields folded in seconds, overwhelmed by brute force and null-pulse EMPs that turned defense satellites into shrapnel rain.
Millions of black-hulled drop vessels screamed earthward, each one sheathed in shadow-plasma plating. Inside, the Shadowscourge—engineered nightmares with combat drugs in their veins and neural pain-slaves fused to their armor—stood in prayerless silence, awaiting impact.
When the pods struck ground, the world cracked.
Forests vaporized beneath the initial shockwaves. Mountain ridges fractured like bone. The impact craters glowed with hellish light, from which emerged squads of elite Mahasimu troopers: obsidian armor hissing steam, their rifles humming with soul-charge rounds. In the sky above, gunships strafed the fleeing and the wounded. Shadow-laced blades dismembered Zelith militia where they stood—limbs severed mid-scream, blood jetting across crystalline pathways once used for peaceful pilgrimage.
Raluven-4, once a jewel of tranquility, was being murdered in real time.
Command from the Bridge of The Unfading
Admiral Kia stood tall upon the bridge of her command dreadnought, The Unfading, her pale eyes reflecting data streams as her battle-screens updated by the second. The holographic map of Raluven-4 pulsed in crimson with each fallen district.
"Begin full planetary encirclement," she ordered, her voice void of emotion. "No quadrant escapes our purge. I want every surface node sterilized."
Behind her, execution officers relayed the command to orbiting batteries and atmospheric crucibles. Heavy plasma cannons ignited distant cities like candles, their explosions blooming into mushroomed shadows visible from space.
The Thalor Commander's Last Stand
High Commander Sorell Vantos had known this day would come.
He had tasted it in dreams, heard it in the screams of distant worlds, felt it in the chill that gripped every Thalor veteran when the Mahasimu were named aloud. He was no stranger to war—but this was something else. This was extinction in armor.
Vantos had prepared. His forces entrenched themselves deep in the Selkara Vale—dense rainforest ridges that, until now, had never seen fire. Camouflaged turrets emerged from beneath centuries-old roots. Artillery emplacements were hidden in temple ruins. Thalor partisans, painted in dust and sap, moved like ghosts, rigging Mahasimu landing zones with energy mines and zero-flash thermal charges.
For two full cycles, they made the Mahasimu bleed.
Shadowtroopers disappeared into ravines and never emerged. Thal'Karn were caught in collapsing stone corridors or lured into toxin-laced groves. Even the cursed Scourgehounds returned limping, missing limbs.
Still, the Mahasimu came.
When Admiral Kia deployed Echelon Wrathbound, a vanguard spearhead of the Shadowscourge's most brutal legions, led by two twin Thal'Karn shadow-beasts stitched with spines and fire-slick tendons, the battle shifted. They tore through Thalor defense lines like rot through wounded flesh.
Vantos watched the fall of his third stronghold from atop a fractured ridgeline—blood running from a cauterized bolt wound in his side. He gave the last order with grit in his voice and sorrow in his chest.
"Code Larethin. Evacuate the seeds. Burn everything else."
His second-in-command detonated the inner sanctum, sacrificing herself to buy seconds. Vantos vanished into the underrock, slipping into tunnels carved during ancient wars—unseen, unbroken.
He did not look back.
The Aftermath: Flame and Silence
By the end of the planetary cycle, Raluven-4 was a wound.
Forests had been rendered into soot-stained stumps. Rivers boiled away to veins of toxic steam. Entire cities were charred carcasses, their monolithic towers collapsed and groaning under their own ash. Civilian bodies lay where they had fallen—mothers clutching children turned to glass shadows, priests crucified upside down along temple walls, eyes melted from orbital plasma glare.
Admiral Kia walked the surface alone.
Her boots crunched through burned bone. Her cloak, woven from void-silk and embroidered with the glyphs of conquest, trailed behind like mourning fog. Around her, Thal'Karn sniffed through rubble, their forked tongues tasting the air for survivors. Scourge patrols moved block by block, rounding up the broken: elderly priests, wounded militia, frightened children.
"Catalog the fallen. Melt their armor. Break their names," Kia commanded. "No mercy. No myths. No martyrs."
She arrived at a grove where once stood a shrine to Lethan, the Zelith god of remembrance. Now it was a smoldering sinkhole filled with corpses. Kia stood there long after the flames had eaten through the last stone relic, her hands clenched.
"Vantos…" she whispered, "you made me bleed. I won't forget that."
Post-Battle Operations
Search drones scattered like flies, trailing thin filaments of neural-net detectors. The Thal'Karn howled through charred temples and collapsed bunkers, dragging out survivors by the ankles. Whisper-beacons broadcast psionic lures across the mountains—illusory voices mimicking lost loved ones to lure fugitives into deathtraps.
Thousands were captured.
Tens of thousands were burned.
Admiral Kia ordered that all recovered Zelith weapons be melted and reshaped into slag, to be reforged into ceremonial brands marking the conquered system.
Yet victory did not bring satisfaction.
One had escaped.
High Commander Vantos—In Hiding
Deep beneath the scarred crust, where the Mahasimu flames could not yet reach, Commander Vantos crouched in silence within a buried sanctuary of the Ancients. Around him, a flickering map glowed dimly—tracking Mahasimu patrols with dying precision.
His body was broken, stitched crudely by field medics. His eyes were ringed with sleepless resolve. But his spirit remained razor-sharp.
"They came for conquest," he muttered, lips cracked, "but not for ghosts."
He activated a coded beacon etched into a stone disc.
A pulse whispered into deep space.
"For Raluven. For those they turned to ash."
In the silence, he lit a memorial crystal for each soul lost, pressing them one by one into the dirt before him. They glowed faintly, flickering like the last breath of stars.
Then he drew his blade, and began planning vengeance.