Magic depletion was a real pain in the head. The symptoms of it varied from one magic user to the other but they all commonly reported getting an intense headache, nausea, and tiredness that seemed to seep into the bones. Anri was no stranger to the effects but he rued the timing of it.
Grabbing the axe off the ground, Anri stood before the monster whose legs were rendered into useless stumps. Unable to move, it growled and hissed at the human.
"Yeah, let's get to work," Anri emotionlessly said to the quadruple amputee.
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It was easy enough beheading the creature after it was killed by several blows to its head. Anri then turned it over so that the velvet skinned stomach was exposed to the sky.
The axe came down on the stomach and it spilt its bloated contents for the boy to see. Anri gagged at the foul smell and the sight of partially digested human remains that came spilling out. He was so disgusted by it he convinced himself that death was a better outcome than whatever plan his fever addled mind had come up with.
Still unable to accept what was happening, Anri stood with his arms on his hips and reconsidered his options. He had none. Weary and sick as he was, the young sorcerer needed to sleep for a few hours and as soon as he could.
"Watch over me, Raila," the boy who didn't believe in the pagan gods made a sign of blessing over himself. Anri then steeled his stomach and got to his knees. It was time to burrow.
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"Sir, there's at least a hundred of them east of our location," the voice of a soldier informed his commander over their secured comm link.
Three humans in powerful armoured suits were situated on a cliff that overlooked the ramshackle collection of mud homes where the slaughtered and mostly eaten dead bodies of its previous inhabitants had painted the ground red. There was no sign of life save for the invaders who hadn't yet noticed the arrival of unit 13.
The man in the centre observed the few remaining aliens who were still in the midst of eating the dead. It wasn't uncommon to see the ravage invade their planets but this was a wasteland on the very outer fringes of the Ash colonies. There was nothing to be gained here.
"Black, I want you to clear up the town and look for survivors. Yellow, scour the periphery for Ravage ships."
"Roger that," two voices replied in unison.
There was no distinctive colour marking on their armour to differentiate the members of unit 13. But on the heads up display of their helmet visors, every member of the unit could pull up the positions of the others, displayed on a map with dotted indicators that corresponded to their designated colours.
Red, the leader of unit 13 began heading east after Black and Yellow parted ways. This mission was a classified rank D. Find and kill every Ravage spawn, destroy their ship, and evacuate the survivors if any. Planet Ash-547 wasn't supposed to be inhabited. It had been used as a supply planet when W.H.A.L.E was still mining the nearby asteroid belt for iron. So where had these people come from? Regardless, figuring out the whys of it wasn't his problem. Red had only one thing to do here and that was to kill.
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Anri was overheating inside the corpse of the monster that he was sheltering in. The sorcerer had taken off the outer layers of his clothing and crawled into the disgusting pit of black and purple ooze. It wasn't the smartest of ideas - though Anri had done far crazier things in the name of enlightenment- but it seemed the only way he could safely hide from both its kind and his own kind. He was too tired to come up with anything more sensible.
It didn't take long for the sorcerer to pass out from exhaustion. When he closed his eyes and drifted off, Anri dreamt of the undulating wheat fields that stretched out forever just beyond the window of his manor. Yellow and brown waved to him when a gust of cool wind blew. It was a hypnotising sight for a child who had spent several hours locked inside his room studying.
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"Mhm-" the boy inside the corpse stirred. His mind was less foggy but he was certain he still had to be dreaming. It was the only explanation for the unholy amount of screaming and explosions that rocked the shell he was sleeping inside. No, he realised he wasn't dreaming. There was a literal war going on outside his cosy little sleeping bag.
Anri threw the skin blanket off his body and climbed out to breathe in air that wasn't contaminated by the smell of death. He was covered from head to toe in oozing monster gore but that was the least of his problems right now. The sorcerer was in awe as he trudged slowly towards the battlefield where a single entity was tearing apart a large group of the four-legged monsters.
It looked like a knight but stranger, bigger. He would have likened it to a silver-grey golem if it didn't move like a ghost. The 'knight', as Anri had chosen to call it, for now, swapped between beating the monsters to death and riddling them full of holes with a weapon that was attached to its arm. Every second, it felled one more creature, sometimes two or three.
The spectating sorcerer sat down on a mound of earth looking far too relaxed for someone who had just experienced the horrors he had been encountering since his escape from home. If he'd had his father's pipe, which he had admittedly never smoked, he would have lit it up. The ugly truth Anri had to face was that he was completely out of his depth in this hellish place he had escaped to. Depleted of magic and with nothing to his name but an axe, he was going to die if the knight decided so. Anri smelled and felt like a dead rat that had been marinating in the sewer for a week during summer. Perhaps, he thought, a quick death would be a merciful outcome for him. He wasn't suicidal, just tired.