Facing Evil (Free Federation)

[Imperial Overlord]

This is a nasty piece and I'm in a nasty state of mind. You've been warned.

There was almost nothing about the woman that revealed her sex. Dirty grey power armour bulked up her frame and obscured her build, taking her height well over the two meter mark. Dark patterns moved across the armour as it shifted colour to match the graveyard of shattered buildings around her. A ten kilo beam rifle was easily held in her right hand, its muzzle covering anywhere her gaze rested. Her left arm secured her prisoner over her shoulder. Following ten meters behind her was her squadmate, covering her rear.

The package was squirming. He wore black adamantium plate over the dark red armour cloth and elaborate, bladed Collar of Thorn gorget of the Slaver Lords. Black wire secured his wrists and ankles together, cruelly biting into his flesh. A dozen three inch blades had been jabbed through the armour cloth at specific points to disrupt any attempt to channel the one power. A longer blade through his chin pinned his lower jaw to his upper. The armour had been sliced off his back and the skin there had been hastily flayed away. Blood ran sluggishly from his wounds, clotting with the accelerated speed of the augmented. The wounds had been inflicted with cold satisfaction, necessary procedures to secure the prisoner that had been designed with effectiveness in mind, not sadism.

They had enjoyed the work though. Hatred was their religion, overwhelming firepower their only god. Hatred of the Slaver Lord Autocracy. In a war where death had long been preferable to being captured alive, mercy was a executioner's shot to the back of the head. Both women had sword the No Mercy oath decades ago, upon joining the Third Legion of the Dark Guard and their initiation to the Merciless, one of the most feared and prestigious of the warrior cults that threaded their way through the Free Federation War Machine. They had killed slave soldiers beyond counting and their long skull chains only contained Slaver kills.

They stepped over rubble and brought their captive into a ruined building. The ground story was mostly intact, built to accommodate the size and bulk of sithi. Ruined couches suited for the hexapedal bodies were scattered over the entrance room, which was charred and scared by the impact of flying glass. The women took their captive inside and into the next room. Fungus had begun to attack the thick carpeting. The colourful abstract patterns on the wall were faded and coated with dust.

They brought the captive to the middle of the room. "Contact?" the second asked, peering back out the door. They were behind the front lines, but not so far a penetration strike couldn't reach them.

"One's on the way."

"Which one?"

"The Freak. He's going to pop his cherry."

"Prep him."

The first dew a black bladed dagger forty centimeters long from her hip. The energized cutting blade hummed ever so softly in her hand. Armour cloth parted like the skin of an over ripe fruit. Straps to the rune marked armour went next and then he was nude.

If he had been better shape he might have been called handsome. The Slaver was almost two meters tall, with the perfect musculature that is the product of bioengineering and sorcery maintained by metabolic manipulation and regular exercise. His skin was spaceship tan pale and his hair and eyes were dark. It was hard to tell because his genitals were shrivelled with fear, but he appeared to be well hung. The Guardswoman sneered and reached out. A scream came from his pinned lips as she crushed his scrotum into jelly. "Slaver trash," she hissed.

"He's here," the other said. A moment latter two more power armoured soldiers joined, each as sexless as their comrades. One held a bulky Nazarian radiance cannon. The other carried paired Technes Disruptor Pistols; shield crushing, nerve shredding Death's Lightning held in each fist. One of Kail's many contributions to the war.

Kail's latest apprentice strode through the door while the soldiers took up defensive positions. The Freak was one of Zaranna's projects, a crippled obscenity that only lived to be born because of a dreadful instictive use of necromancy in utero that had consumed his mother. His conception was an even greater crime. He had spent most of his first ten years enduring surgeries and gene therapy that corrected the host of mutagenic and teragenic conditions he had been born with. The Unified State had spent a fortune on him before he was ten. Too much of his early life had been spent in a vat for him to have been socialized normally, if that was even possible. Rumor said he far too mentally damaged to be let out without a leash, but that he had somehow been found fit for combat duty.

He was tall, but not extraordinarily so, and wore black armour cloth under the trench coat shaped shadow cloak that aped Kail's look. Death heads would have glittered on his throat and lightning bolts on his wrists if they hadn't shifted from silver to black for field work. Talismans anchored the network of wards and shields that was his primary protection. That wasn't unusual. Every sorcerer that had come out of Darkhold in the last century aped Kail's choices. The Lord of No Mercy had faced Daemonstraum himself and lived. Victory followed at his heels.

A short sword and longer, curved blade were belted around his waist. His hair was dark brown, with just a hint of red, and his eyes were shining blue. His stare was disturbingly intense. The journey couldn't have winded him, but he was breathing hard. There was a disconcerting, starved look to his features and a tightly wound look to his movements.

"Commander," she said, acknowledging his rank. "Your will."

"Stand sentinel," he said. His breath slowed itself and he stepped forward like a praying mantis striking. He exhaled loudly, his breath ragged. "Slaver," he hissed.

Atrocity begat atrocity. Enslavement, brain burning, rape, and ruin were the fates of the those the Slaver's conquered. The Free Federation's military had crumbled under their onslaught as genocidal bioweapons had scourged worlds, killing ninety-percent of the sithi population and almost all of the minority of humans that weren't enhanced. Decimated worlds were overrun and hell was unleashed upon the living. Only the ferocious Nazarian counter attack and Zerakis's takeover of the Free Federation military had prevented complete collapse. No measure was forbidden that might product victory and the enemy's civilians were far more guilty than their cannon fodder slave soldiers. Society twisted and distorted under the relentless pressure of six hundred years of war under the leadership of a ruthless necromancer and the relentless attacks of an enemy that did whatever it wished to the rest of the universe. To surrender to an enemy who denied morality or one that was steeped in hate was unthinkable.

The Freak reached down and stabbed his fingers into the Slaver's chest and lifted him by his ribcage. Blood ran free from the wound for a few moments and then turned into a sluggish stream as coagulants kicked in. The Freak lifted the slaver over his head while a red case floated out of a pocket of his shadow cloak. The case opened and revealed two trays full of sinister instruments. A holographic display of the slaver's nervous and circulatory system in blue and red floated by his body.

Barbed needles rose and floated in the air. Fluid loaded syringes pierced the Slaver's arms and their drug loads flowed into his system. Interrogation was a tricky art. Secrets could be coaxed from the dead, but those with secrets worth the effort were almost always equipped with countermeasures that made success unlikely. The living were easier to work with, in part because they could always be made dead if all else failed. The mind probe could tear secrets from a sophont's brain, but it was hard if he resisted, even harder if he was trained in the proper counters and had the right walls installed in his brain. Drugs and pain to shatter the will made the probe more likely to succeed. The Free Federation need little incentive to torture and the Slaver Lords none at all.

Bone crunched under The Freak's grasp. The necromancer hissed through gritted teeth as the needles orbited the Slaver's head. Cyan light poured from his eyes as he tore at the Slaver's defences. He tore his hand free, taking with it a gobbet of flesh and blood. He dropped the meat in his hand as the blood slid off his shields to drip onto the floor. Bloody light surrounded his right hand the the skin on the Slaver's chest bubbled, hissed, and sloughed off. A ragged scream came from the Slaver's mouth as slithering tendrils of emerald light slid into the Slaver's chest and burned capillary sized tunnels through his flesh and organs, seeking his nerves. The Freak's right hand clenched. Reinforced elbow and knee bones shattered. The Slaver's agony was like a feast set before a starving man.

The needles flew into the Slaver's eyes and revolved. Blood and ocular fluid spilled down the man's ruined face. The worms of light reached the Slaver's spine and he convulsed. The Freak shuddered and then became statue still. The Slaver's body descended. The needles and syrenges floated back into the case as The Freak stepped towards a corner of the room.

His hands trembled as he braced himself against the walls. His control was ragged, slipping away. I need to die, he thought. I am my father's son. His gorge rose and vomited. I have no control and the power to kill. I need to die while I'm still a man. While I'm still-

"Sir?" asked Sehadrin. The soldier was behind him with an arm outstretched.

What kind of necromancer would vomit from disgust? What about the control disciplines, the Corpse That Lives? He thinks I might be succumbing to a bioweapon. Failure, failure, failure. The evil will core me and wear my flesh like a suit. No, that's a self serving lie. There is no evil. I am the evil. It is not an other. That's just an attempt to avoid responsibility for what I am and what I've done. What I dream of doing. I would make world where one could not tell the harem from the torture chamber and I would cover it with both. I need to die soon, while I can still serve good. Before I become like them.

"I enjoyed that too much," said The Freak. He let out a laugh. "I knew I would. Do you know when they first let me in a room with other children I broke a girl's arm? I enjoyed it. I was ten. And this was once a playroom for children. Fitting that I should continue my education here." He looked into the black visor of Sehadrin's helmet. "You will kill me when the time comes?"

"If the time comes," said Sehadrin.

"Good," said The Freak straightening. "Good. Why do you like me Sehadrin? Pity I can understand, but you actually like me."

"Because you remind me of a time before the Free Federation embraced every evil that was expedient. Because a part of you hates everything about it as much as the rest craves it. There was a time when horror touched me. When the sight of a Slaver HEL lab could move me. When my heart was not dead."

There was silence for a moment. "Actionable intelligence?" Sehadrin asked.

"Nothing new," said The Freak as he walked passed the body. He paused. "Nothing new except that he feared us more than he hated us. Is that normal?"

"Now it is," said Sehadrin. "Your orders?"

"We'll link up with their squad and you will act as support."

"Support for what?"

"My attack."

"Your will, Incaradine."

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Two slinker missiles flitted above the ground of the wrecked city, whipping through the streets at three hundred kilometers an hour. A blue-white beam flashed into the third story of a ruined building, detonating a gun turret hidden within. A defence battery hidden in another the wrecked skyscrapper sliced one with laser as they darted through an intersection. A bright flash and roar marked the detonation of the other as the one kiloton fusion warhead annihilated the surrounding blocks and sent a small mushroom cloud to rise in the sky. The cloud quickly dissipated, leaving behind a large crater and even more wreckage along with the radiation. Ten seconds later Incaradine ran through the blast zone at better than two hundred kilometers an hour.

The sorcerer was almost air born as he hurled from one mound of rubble to the next. The Slavers were massing ahead. Not too closely, of course, but reading for a big push. He ran through a wrecked building and smashed through its rear wall. Behind him a dozen soldiers of the Third Legion leap-frogged from cover to cover.

The Slavers had time to react, of course. He burst out the back and was confronted by a half dozen slave-soldiers in dark red armour cloth uniforms reinforced with plasteel plates. They were scattered over a hundred meters in mutually reinforcing positions. One held a rail gun, a laughably useless weapon against the Third Legion's armour without the specialty ammo that was never issued to Slaver cannon fodder but reasonably effective against lower grade body armour. The rest held beam rifles.

They opened up on him. The beam rifles blew fist sized holes in the wall and the rail gun slugs went all the way through and kept on going. Three beams hit him, pathetically underpowered to be matched against shields reinforced with his sorcery. Incaradine swept his right hand in front of him in a broad swathe, unleashing crimson energy bolts as he did. The bolts blew the slave-soldiers to bloody fragments. They were dead and he was passed them in under two seconds, drawing his swords as he ran.

A green runes glowed balefully on the spiked hilted, blade bladed saber in his right hand. Red runes did the same on the saw toothed sword breaker in his left. Adamantium was difficult to Work, but it could be done, but the nearly indestructible substance could hold and channel power that would slag lesser materials. He leapt up.

When he was twenty meters in the air enemy weapons were tearing the air around him. Below him was a cleared space that had probably been an empty lot. Four artillery missile batteries were dug into pits. Blue-white beams tore at his shields. He pulled unsubstance from beyond the material world with the One Power. It blazed white in his hand and flashed to the ground. The detonation sent blew a fifty meter diameter crater in the grounds and erased the Slavers from in front of him as if they never where. Ghostly white tendrils of hell smoke drifted from the crater.

He dropped to the ground on the far side of the crater, firing explosive crimson hell bolts from his sword tips as he did so. The sides of buildings and rubble piles exploded, taking with them the slave-soldiers who sheltered behind them. Beams clawed at his shields, but he was freakishly, impossibly strong. The Free Federation had spent a fortune to keep him alive through the hell of his childhood to study his unusual talents. As far as he knew, they had learned nothing of value. Only by amassing Slaver skulls would the expense be justified. He sprinted forward.

Fewer and fewer shots were coming his way. Data projections from the expert system woven into his armour showed activity from the supporting Slaver formations. Let them come. He would kill them all or die. Explosions erupted around him, showering him with debris and tearing apart a five story piece of wreckage. The blasts knocked him to the ground but did not kill him.

"I am Incaradine!" he shouted. "Kill me to make it end!" A crescent wave of blue-white flame blasted out from in front of him, burning through walls and those that sheltered behind him. The arc of flew two hundred meters, expanding as it did so, before it faded. Four buildings began to collapse in its wake.

He tore through a squad with his blades and then overran a score of reinforcements deploying through the streets. Behind him, he knew, were the soldiers he was supposed to be leading. The men and women he left behind to seek death. His or the enemies.

Four figures in dark red power armour were waiting for him as he tore through five slave soldiers and bust upon a ruined square. The evil hum of a radiance cannon accompanied the shifting frequency laser than slashed through he once stood. The leaping necromancer boiled the Slaver's blood as a four barreled witchfire cannon unleashed a torrent of green flame that tore the top story off a wrecked building and flayed his shields. A hell bolt blew the Slaver apart and another two his comrades.

The Slavers were closing on him, like the jaws of a trap, but that was alright. He had penetrated their lines and was close now, close enough to almost taste it. He was across the square and into the gutted shell of the building ahead of him.

The hell bolt crashed into his shields, arresting his forward momentum and nearly knocking him off his feet. Three Slaver Lords were waiting for him, human as were all of Daemonstraum's acolytes. The woman was blond, with a biosculpt that gave her a semblance of Mirella the Accursed, but the bitch wore no orichalcum giving lie to the claim. Her double bitted axe carried a silver glow. The males were darker skinned and resembled each other enough to be brothers. Their dark hair was cut short and their cheeks were marked by glowing red runes and each held a sword encased in a bloody glow. They wore red armour cloth under pieces of adamantium plate that served as the anchors of their ward networks and as body armour. All wore spiked Collar of Thorns and the power crystal studded linked arm pieces that were as much weapons as armour.

Bloody and sapphire light flew from their talisman vambraces and tore into Incaradine's shields. Bleed through shattered ribs and burned his leg, but he could still use it. He could still fight. He survived the storm, which lasted all of a second, and was upon them.

He caught the first Slaver's sword with Flesh Ripper. He twisted the blade out of position with the sword breaker and ran Plague Bringer through the Slaver's heart. Blood sprayed and kicked the Slaver off his blade as black corruption began to eat through his chest. He parried the woman's axe with Plague Bringer. She was strong, her enhancements were formidable. Sorcery had seeped into his flesh from before birth and his teacher was Zaranna. He through her back. The other came on as the first Slaver got up. He was slower now and dying, but not yet dead.

A kick shattered the Slaver's kneecap, his shields and power Worked boots against the Slaver's and the Slaver's momentarily giving at contact. The Slaver staggered and Incaradine gutted him with Flesh Ripper. The blow pulled him further off balance and the sudden pain didn't help either. Plague Bringer cut his skull in two.

The other Slaver dog was on him, a screech coming from his lips. Lights erupted from the woman's back as her guardian was freed from the cage tattooed on her flesh. Incaradine caught the Slaver's blade on Plague Bringer and stabbed him in the chest with Flesh Ripper. The blade glanced off armour. The Slaver punched him in the face with his free hand and the blades on the talisman vambrace lacerated the necromancer's flesh as he fell with a broken cheekbone.

Incaradine parried the Slaver's next slash with Flesh Ripper. He was slower and weaker, the sorcery sustaining him failing as Plague Bringer's curse further ravaged his flesh. Incaradine stabbed him in the face, the strongest point of his ward patterns, and the Plague Bringer slid out the back of the Slaver's skull. Putrid flesh fell as Incaradine rose.

The guardian awaited, a thing of the In Between wearing pseudoflesh. It assumed the form of a eight foot tall bipedal grey wolf. Incaradine raised Flesh Ripper. Another blazing white mass of unsubstance flew from the tip of Flesh Ripper. The havoc bolts blew the demon apart and blew the Slaver bitch off her feat. Whisps for corrosive unmatter slid away from the impact point, devouring matter before they faded away.

The woman got to her feet. The sounds of battle were drifting in from behind them. Her shields were mostly intact and she fed more power into them as she raised her axe. Incaradine spat blood onto the floor, his powers at a low ebb. He was bleeding internally, he could feel it. His armour's expert system was already injecting him. He flexed his shoulders. "If I live or die, either way the State is served," he rasped. "Better though if you die, alone or with me."

"You're mad," she said. "You serve cattle for nothing, you die for them when you could live forever with anything you wanted."

"I kill Slavers." A hell bolt tore into his shields, shredding most of what was left of his shields. The second blew him out the buildings and burned the armour of his chest to his skin. The pain was excruciating. Exquisite. Pain was his earliest memory, closer than any friend or teacher and he forgot nothing. A joke, for if their was any mercy in the universe he would die young and merely a monster. Pain he could endure. He leapt up, surging not towards the Slaver but to the second story. Her hell bolt was too low and he was through the gap where there once had been a floor to ceiling window. His strength was tatters, but he had enough. Enough to blast through the floor behind the Slaver bitch. She turned to cook him and took Plague Bringer's point through her left eye.

He stood and pulled his sword from her eye. She died too quick, they all died too quick. They raped and tortured for sport, they were complicit in countless deaths and they were gone, with only a little pain. He drank it in, their suffering as well as his and found himself famished. He hungered for more.

Surprisingly, no Slavers had attempted to overrun him. The chaos of battle, he supposed. He should rejoin the Guardsmen. They would have caught up by now, or almost, and should have had no problem setting up in his wake. He checked the tac readings and his sensor net before leading the building. The Slavers' rings and finger bones were his trophies by right and he was entitled to add three skulls to his chain, but that was for later. Other business was pressing. There was no shortages of ways to die really, but he would best serve the State by selling his life as dearly as possible.

[Mayabird]

They had killed slave soldiers beyond counting and their formal

I think you left out a little something there. And are you in some sort of competition with Bladed_Crescent?
[line 2]

[Imperial Overlord]

They had killed slave soldiers beyond counting and their formal

I think you left out a little something there. And are you in some sort of competition with Bladed_Crescent?
[line 2]

Thanks for catching that Maya. And since I'm not familiar with Bladed_Crescent's work I'll have to answer "no."

[White Haven]

Wooo, more Free Federation! And a chapter long enough to sink my teeth into, is it my birthday already or something?

[Imperial Overlord]

Wooo, more Free Federation! And a chapter long enough to sink my teeth into, is it my birthday already or something?

No, as I said my head was in an unpleasant space. It's just a one shot, although you will undoubtedly see more of Incaradine in other Free Federation stories.