The Skarn Hegemony did not march; it consumed.
Archon Kaelith's ultimate objective was never a single fortress or a specific world. The prize was the Azure Expanse itself—the entire fallen Vanguard galaxy. Kaelith's endless armada and his four thousand Aether-sorting foundries required an ocean of fuel, and the Expanse was the largest reservoir in the cosmos. The hollowed comet of New Haven, hidden deep in the nebula storms, just happened to be an exceptionally rich vein within that massive cosmic web.
But it was not the only vein.
A splinter fleet of Kaelith's armada detached from the main vanguard, drifting toward the perimeter of the Expanse. Their deep-space scanners had picked up a massive, incredibly dense Aether-pocket radiating from a miserable, iron-rich rock known to local scavengers as the Rust Belt.
To the Hegemony, a reading of that magnitude indicated a massive, dormant Vanguard cache, or perhaps a virgin Aether-mine just waiting to be cracked open and slotted into their heavy artillery.
The Furnace-Heart, a massive, heavily armored dreadnought acting as the command ship for this splinter fleet, dropped out of hyperspace directly above the asteroid.
On the bridge, Sub-Archon Vane stared out the viewport. Vane was a towering monstrosity of lithic flesh and bolted steel. Both of his arms had been replaced by heavy, multi-jointed pneumatic lifters, and his entire lower jaw was a grated exhaust vent that hissed with raw steam.
"Target acquired," the tactical officer droned, its vocal box buzzing with cold, mechanical apathy. "The Aetheric density inside the asteroid is astronomical. It will fuel three foundries for a standard cycle."
Vane grunted, his exhaust jaw venting a cloud of gray smoke. "Deploy an expeditionary force. Three thousand heavy infantry. Secure the docking ring, slaughter whatever scavengers are hiding inside, and crack the crust open for the mining rigs."
From the belly of the dreadnought, three thousand heavy drop-pods detached, streaking through the dark and slamming violently into the upper surface docks of the Rust Belt.
The iron doors of the pods blew outward. Three thousand Skarn veterans marched onto the metallic surface of the asteroid. Their heavy magnetic boots locked onto the plating, their cybernetic limbs whirring as they raised their slotted rotary cannons and heavy-plasma repeaters. They moved with absolute, terrifying synchronization, ready to pave over the outpost to get to the Aether.
Down in the rusted cantina, the heavy bass of the synth-metal music was suddenly drowned out by the thunderous, echoing impacts of three thousand drop-pods hitting the crust above them.
The normal scavengers and smugglers panicked, scrambling for the emergency exits.
Gore, Skarlet, and Bane didn't run. They stopped drinking.
Gore slowly set his massive tankard down. His neck cracked loudly as he looked up at the ceiling. The heavy, invisible weight of three thousand Aether-slotted weapons bleeding into the atmosphere washed over him. Skarlet's feral pink eyes flared to life. Crusher's chest began to rumble with deep, tectonic heat.
Gore's anvil-like jaw stretched into a terrifying, jagged grin.
"Finally," the giant whispered. "Some entertainment."
On the surface docks, the Skarn phalanx advanced toward the primary airlocks, their slotted rifles glowing white-hot.
Before they could breach the doors, the solid steel decking beneath the center of their formation violently buckled.
Riptide, fully shifted into his forty-foot Tier IV Leviathan-Shark form, breached straight up through the solid iron floor. He didn't swim through water; the extreme Aetheric friction of his mutation allowed him to swim through the solid metal of the asteroid like it was liquid. His massive jaws snapped shut, crushing half a dozen Skarn infantry into black oil and twisted scrap metal in a single bite. He arched his massive body and dove right back into the steel deck, leaving a gaping crater.
The Hegemony infantry immediately pivoted, raising their weapons.
But then the primary airlock doors didn't just open—they exploded outward.
Crusher charged out onto the docks, fully shifted into his Tier IV Magma-Gorilla form. A hail of superheated plasma fire struck his chest, blowing chunks of molten rock off his shoulders. Crusher didn't flinch. He laughed a deep, booming primate roar, grabbed a Skarn soldier by his mechanical leg, and used the lithic brute as a bludgeon to smash three other soldiers into the deck.
Behind him, slithering through the destroyed airlock, Venom unleashed a torrent of Tier III acid that instantly melted the slotted rifles of the advancing front line, fusing the Skarn's cybernetics into useless slag.
Up on the bridge of the Furnace-Heart, the tactical displays began to shriek.
"Sub-Archon!" the navigator yelled, its mechanical voice-box glitching in a frenzy of static. "The massive Aether pocket we scanned... it is not a dormant cache! It is biological!"
Vane stomped over to the terminal, smashing his heavy fist onto the console to force the telemetry onto the main screen.
The data defied the foundational logic of the Hegemony. The Skarn algorithms expected resistance, but they expected it to eventually tire, to burn out from Aetheric exhaustion. The readings glowing on the screen were not tiring. They were raw, bleeding, and violently unstable.
"Three distinct Tier V signatures detected!" the tactical officer stammered, black oil leaking from its optical sensors due to the sheer stress of the data feed. "They are mutating! The structural density of these biologicals is registering higher than our dreadnought's heavy armor plating!"
Down on the docks, the true apex predators joined the slaughter.
Gore, Skarlet, and Bane erupted from the facility, their human flesh violently overwritten by blinding, prismatic light. The three Tier V Diamond Dragons materialized on the asteroid's surface.
Gore, standing eighty feet tall, let out a roar that shattered the auditory sensors of every Skarn within a mile.
The Hegemony infantry concentrated their fire. Thousands of heavy plasma rounds and kinetic penetrators slammed into the three dragons. The crossfire was enough to level a city block. But the Diamond scales were absolute. The rounds sparked and deflected off Gore's chest without leaving a single scratch.
Gore didn't bother with claws or teeth. He opened his massive, crystal-lined jaws and unleashed his Kinetic Resonance beam.
He swept the invisible, reality-warping beam horizontally across the Skarn formation. The Hegemony did not feel fear, but as the beam struck them, they didn't even have time to process the damage. The kinetic vibration was so absolute that five hundred nine-foot-tall, lithic-and-steel soldiers were instantly turned to a fine, gray dust. Their slotted weapons didn't melt; they just ceased to exist as solid matter.
Skarlet took to the sky, diving through the ranks, her own kinetic breath shattering the magnetic boots of the remaining infantry, launching hundreds of them screaming into the dead vacuum of space.
On the bridge, Vane watched the casualty counter plummet.
One minute elapsed: 400 dead.
Two minutes elapsed: 850 dead.
Three minutes elapsed: 1,000 dead.
Exactly one-third of his expeditionary force had been entirely erased in less than two hundred seconds.
The Hegemony did not feel human terror, but they operated on efficiency and absolute mathematics. The logic playing out on Vane's screen presented an undeniable conclusion: If he left his troops down there, the mortality rate would hit 100% in less than four minutes. These anomalies bypassed the rules of attrition. They could not be outlasted.
"Sub-Archon," the tactical officer said, its voice dropping to a low, glitching whisper. "The highest density Tier V signature is looking up at us. It is preparing to launch from the asteroid surface. If that anomaly impacts our hull, the kinetic resonance will shatter our primary reactor."
Vane looked at the screen. Archon Kaelith's orders were to harvest the Expanse and pave over resistance. But this was not resistance. This was an extinction event that had somehow been contained in a dive bar.
"Recall the drop-ships! Abort the invasion!" Vane roared, his voice tight, venting a massive cloud of steam from his jaw.
The bridge crew froze. Retreat was a concept utterly foreign to the Hegemony.
"I said abort!" Vane slammed his lifter arm into the bulkhead, denting the steel. "Leave the dead! Reroute all power to the primary hyper-drives immediately! Divert the fleet! There is no harvest down there—only a localized apocalypse. We bypass this sector!"
The massive Skarn dreadnought, a ship that had reduced capital worlds to ash, violently banked away from the miserable, rusted asteroid. The engines flared to maximum capacity, burning fuel at an alarming rate just to break orbit before the monsters decided to fly up and rip the ship in half.
Down on the battered docking ring of the Rust Belt, Gore stood amidst a sea of pulverized lithic dust and twisted drop-pods. The remaining two thousand Skarn soldiers had scrambled back into their surviving pods and blindly launched themselves back toward the fleeing fleet in a completely uncharacteristic panic.
Gore slowly shifted back into his human form. Naked, covered in gray dust, and bleeding from his nose due to the sudden, violent exertion, he looked up at the stars.
The dreadnought flashed and vanished into hyperspace.
Gore let out a massive, disappointed sigh, kicking the crushed remains of a slotted rotary cannon off the edge of the dock.
"Three minutes," Gore grumbled, wiping the blood from his lip as Skarlet and Bane shifted back beside him. "They didn't even last three minutes. Cowards."