Mune'stahr and Pylott: HELLMARROW, a tale of the Ventriculum

Part 3, "And the Darkness We Shall Battle..."

*** Eye-searingly bright flashes from a myriad of explosions danced before his vision, the dazzlingly intense glow from the concussive detonations burning past the protective, adaptive anti-glare coating of his helmet's wavefront optics eye lenses. Opthas Kandyruu quickly flew past the explosions, courtesy of his armored exosuit's gyroscopically-stabilized hip and rear shoulder blade-mounted jet-thrusters, re-sighted along the observable grid, acquiring new targeting objectives, and calculated the distance-ranging for his weapon system's Flamebolt las-cannons. His targeting computer identified and isolated seven new mobile objectives, calculating their rate of motion, and scanned them to adapt the las-cannons' fire-penetration to match the target's physical composition. Destruction, when he triggered the weapons' bursts, would be absolute.

Of all the Black Sun Seraphs, none were so loyal or ruthless or devout. He was the most exquisite of Devils among the demonic horde. He was a legend of mass homicide. Opthas Kandyruu, centuries-old and battle-tested, a spawn of science and military technology run amok.

Incapacitate, mutilate, mangle and murder. Bring to the Enemy, whoever they be and wherever they hide, the Righteous Fire of Judgment demanded by Queen Infernyya Rebekkon. This was what he lived for, this was his purpose and his joy. It was the Glory of Duty. It was spitting in the face of Creation. It was his ultimate expression of hatred for all things Divine. This, the endless warfare he waged, was, for Kandyruu, Life Itself. ***

If it weren't for the extreme bleakness inherent in the situation, the display to which he was witness would have been breathtakingly majestic... But bearing witness to the violent and bloody deaths of so many beings was anything but grand or sublime.

It was horrible.

Riktonn Mune'stahr's Streek-craft veloci-cruiser was running through the voidal tide tacking alongside a Dysonstream mini-gunboat, an Astroshift Class vessel with a crew capacity of three people, perpendicular to the vertical horizon's Y-axis above the Wrathbeurne Hive Domes. Although the veloci-cruiser and the mini-gunboat were technological designs born of different civilizations, they shared multi-connection processing-centric controls based on the same electrophysical properties. The semi-autonomous navigational computer of Mune'stahr's Streek-craft was easily able to interface with the Dysonstream Astroshift vessel's omnidirectional steerage director and so the two Metaflow transport flight-vehicles were able to match velocity and angle of approach to a minute degree. Mune'stahr was in the process of re-acquiring the targeting vector on a supremely swift, heavily-armored object that was strafing the area with focused-packet Blazer cannon pulses. The object was roughly humanoid in morphological aspect, but the true dimensions of its height and mass were hidden under the external layer of the highly-wrought and imposing carapace encasing him. He stood two and three-quarters meters tall and was a meter and a half wide, easily possessed of three hundred and sixty-three kilograms in weight, his armored mass nearly doubling with the addition of the sectional, accordian-articulated metal enveloping him. He wielded both a heavy war-axe and an ornately-forged longsword, the black-bladed, serrated-edged, energy-emitting sword being one and a half meters in length. Decked out in gray-green colored, plate-layered trauma armor decorated with raised, copper-hued insignia depicting a mighty, reptilian bird of prey, Opthas Kandyruu immolated and pulverized anything in range of his weapons system's focal isolators.

The Dysonstream mini-gunboat was presently piloted by Protective Squadron Commander Neuronia Syngulareus, a Lieutenant Commander in the Argossyan Naval Defense Force. Lt. Commander Syngulareus was a hybridized cyborg-anthrobot, possessed of a body of multi-purpose components controlled by a linked web of nanite bio-processors, and the mini-gunboat, a ship resembling a mechanized pelagic stingray from Earth-Terra, was cybernetically controlled as if it were an extension of her body.