The small group of five made it to the door leading to the outside world, a trail of bodies in their wake. None of them held back. They all knew that the heartless monsters employed in this laboratory wouldn't think twice about inflicting the most pain anyone had ever experienced on them, and indeed they had before.
Currently, Ares was using his telekinesis to try to unlock the door, which was several inches thick and made of Fildost Steel. Even Hercules wouldn't be able to punch through it.
From the way they came, they heard shouting and the sound of many footsteps rapidly hitting the ground. Someone was running towards them, it seemed. Hades and Hercules got ready to fight, and Null ran ahead to see what the commotion was.
A few minutes later, he came back with blood splattered all over him, drenching his shirt and painting his face. Next to him was Apollo, covered in burns but otherwise clean.
Finally, Ares opened the door, and they saw the sky for the first time in a decade. They stood there in awe for a moment, gazing at the gorgeous blue expanse, before shouting from behind them broke them out of their trance. They hurried out into the clearing the door opened to, but they were too late.
A large explosion went off behind them, breaking the door off its hinges and flinging it and them away from the mound leading into the lab. Null stumbled to his feet, swinging his head around to check on the others.
Everyone else was also getting to their feet, knees wobbly but otherwise fine. Everyone except Apollo. 'Apol — Gavyn, was in the rear,' he realized with horror. Out of the corner of his eye, he could tell the other four had noticed as well. It looked like Hera was about to cry, but the others were angry.
Angry that these lab coat-wearing monsters in human skin took yet another thing they loved from them. Angry that a trick of fate caused the guards to use the one thing Gavyn couldn't defend against.
Angry that those same guards, pouring out of the opening, had similar looks of anger on their faces, as if *they* were the ones that had everything taken from them and were forced to endure torture for years on end.
Null shared looks with his friends. They nodded to each other. None of the Advanced would leave here alive.
Their efforts finally paid off. After weeks of tracking, capturing, and interrogating, they now hovered in space, gazing upon the world that held the hideout of the Advanced. Except it couldn't really be called a hideout. Almost the entire planet was covered in strange, white metal skyscrapers and large warehouses miles long encompassing every inch of the planet. Even the three moons were not spared from this.
Fate tapped his Ex Ear. "Ready?"
The other four answered simultaneously: "Ready."
Fate and Nikolas activated their cloaking systems and steered their ships to the massive planet, deciding to touch down on the only mountain they could see that wasn't ravaged by expansionism.
Thousands of lightyears away from the planet of the Advanced, Cragalan was experiencing hell. The Atlases were providing constant bombardment on the planet, destroying a hive with every shot and shattering the ground. Three of the hundred Atlases were engaged in an aerial battle with a pair of Octoloss.
Neither party could easily harm the other. The Atlases' shields could withstand hundreds of strikes from an Octoloss blade, and despite their poor agility in an atmosphere, the Octoloss were as agile in space as an octopus was in the water.
The many Phoenixes were likewise engaged with Cragoloss and Cragolo, with millions of Firebirds to support them. It was no understatement to say that this was the biggest battle in history. Space was filled with fire and shrapnel, and the surface of Cragalan was hundreds of times worse.
The planet was covered in so much fire that it looked like a bootleg sun, not a single scrap of it untouched. But the Atlases kept firing. They wouldn't stop until this source of despair was wiped from the map.
Hours of bombardment later, the planet cracked, then cracked again. Within minutes, it burst into a rain of mountain-sized rocks that decimated anything that came in contact. The first Atlas casualty in history resulted from this, along with the second and third.
A quarter of the Phoenixes were wiped out, along with thousands of Firebirds. With the eyesore gone, the remaining human forces turned their weaponry on the surviving Cragost forces, wiping them out in under thirty minutes.
The humans were for once glad that the Cragost fought to the last soldier, as not a single one tried to run or surrender. Not that the humans would have allowed them to escape, but chasing them down would have been annoying. When there was only a handful of Cragolo left, they started doing kamikazes, crashing ineffectually against the shields of Atlases and Phoenixes.
With the Cragost forces now crippled, the human ships moved on to the next planet, intent on destroying every trace of the Cragost.
The Hand of Styx made their way down the mountain, not bothering with stealth. They knew from experience that the Advanced monitored every inch of their territory. If it weren't for Tom's special skills, they wouldn't have been able to discuss their plan of escape, all those years ago. Instead of stealth, they strolled through the city-planet like they owned it. They made their way to the largest building on the planet, receiving several weird looks on the way.
When they were around a mile away from the building, they encountered resistance. A lot of it.
The Advanced had strange, large oval floating platforms hovering above the building, the fronts of which had large rotary machine guns manned by indifferent soldiers, and the backs of which had large thrusters to maneuver. The sides had guard rails.
There were five of them, each pointed at the members of Styx, along with three large hover tanks with barrels that ended in a strange dish shape about the size of a head and several dozen soldiers armed to the teeth and outfitted in armor as white as everything else on this planet.
At the forefront of this group stood a bespectacled man in a lab coat. He sneered at the members of Styx. "So, the Prodigies return. I hope you enjoyed destroying our labs, killing our people, and ruining millennia of hard work, because your rampage ends here."