The War of the Worlds - By Bridgette (A Splatoon Story of Martian Invasion)

Chapter 4-Loneliness and the Soldier from the Pit

That voice sounded quirky and young, like what I had heard just hours earlier, and that's where I slapped myself out of my phase and got up on my legs again to respond to the familiar voice. "You, I know you."

"Wait a minute," the person, who was actually the soldier from the pit, responded with familiarity after picking through the window to see me. "You're that girl I saw hours earlier."

"It's you," I said.

"What's with the tears in your eyes?" He said, questioning me.

"Nothing; some dust got into my eyes." I began to whip them away. The soldier from the pit didn't even question it further and brushed it off.

"So this is your place, huh? Can I come in? I need a place to stay after I got lost in my squad."

"Not my place, but come in; it's someone I knew."

The soldier entered the house and quickly sat down on the couch as he began removing his helmet and placing it beside him, revealing his buzzcut for me to see. He soon asked for water, and I promptly grabbed a water bottle for him to drink—it happened to be at the kichten counter.

"What happened out there?" I asked with curiosity about the current status of the war. "Are you guys winning—against the alien?"

"Martians," he scuffed after taking one sip of water, "these huge machines they got—I don't know what kind of advanced technology they have, but they are winning. They had shields and everything; all of our weapons didn't do anything. They just slid down the shield, like if the shield were a glass window and the ink coming from us were just water."

"Shield?"

"Yes," his sanity slowly began collapsing, "the shield from the fighting machine, tripod, robot, whatever you want to call it. All we know is that they are unstoppable, but we will keep on trying until we find a weakness—we still haven't even tested all of our arsenals against those three-legged bots."

"Darn..." I commented, The end is coming; those words that Shorthair told me earlier were, sadly, a lie. I sat beside the soldier as I began patting his back to comfort him—something I wish I had someone to do to me moments earlier.

"So," he said as he looked around my lover's home. "This is the reason you were out here. To look for the so-called "someone you knew?"

I nodded.

"Hm, I see why. Whoever this person was, they were probably very important."

I noticed that the sun was setting as he spoke to me, "Things are getting dark; I should turn on the light."

"I wouldn't do that if I was you." He said, stopping me, "The power went out. These tripods attacked the power station, maybe. It's like they were on a coordinated attack. Hell, maybe they have EMP technology; we don't know."

We sat on the couch silently right after as we battled our depressing thoughts. This is the end, I thought, the end of both me and the Marinekind that once ruled this world.

That how it was until the soldier weakly uttered to himself, "I can't stay here long—I gotta go back and regroup with my squad to the north."

Then it hit me—nothing is lost. Maybe Shorthair was right after all...

Luckily, I still remember where the supposed coordinates of the hideout are. I stood up as the soldier began questioning his own life choices. I searched for both a pen and pencil and soon found them in a cabinet before I started writing the coordinates. The nuisance I was creating was enough to attract the soldier—questioning—got back up on his legs too and walked up to investigate my actions. That's where he finally realize my intentions.

"Coordinates?" He said, "What are you writing, girl?"

"Don't call me a girl, soldier." I said it in annoyance. "These right here are a supposed safe place that someone told me about. They told me that it's apocalyptic-proof. We should go there."

The soldier raised his eyebrow at first, doubting its claims. "I don't know, ma'am."

"Come on! We can't just stay here and get zapped by those lazer thingys!"

The soldier, in just a single sentence, finally considered the plan. "Hm, sure then. The last thing I want in my life right now is to get grilled without putting up a fight. I will take my chances to find my company."

We gathered every necessary supply we could find in my lover's apartment. Like food and drinks for us to consume, a first-aid kit, and especially, from my lover's weapon collection, a splattershot for myself and for the soldier, a charger. Right after, after a single last glance at his home, we departed from the apartment complex. In the dusky outside, we learned the extent of the destruction occurring. There were many destroyed buildings scattered across the city, and flames rose from many of them, either destroyed or standing up. Worse of all are the dozens of tripods striding across the devestated city, and they continue to reek havoc on the people and the defenders trying to stop them, but just as the soldier stated earlier, their daring actions are utterly useless against the machines.

One of the most ominous and depressing images I had laid my eyes upon was that of one of the tripods standing beside the green Inkopolis tower, with hellish red flames surging underneath both of them right before the tripod trampled down on the tower. After gazing at the apocalyptic landscape, we continued our journey before stopping by a small, abandoned general store to help us find our exact coordinate, where we would grab a map of Splatania and pin point the location, where I realized it was located somewhere far norther than Calamari County as I first thought.

I took the map, and we continued. We attempted to hijack an abandoned car, only to realize that it was not working. We then sought to do the same to another one; it so was off too. Thats when we realized that the mysterious capacities of the machines had rendered them obsolete in our journey, so we continued by foot. The darkness that is finally settled down helps us immensely to conceal us as we soon made it out of the city and into the undeveloped section of Inkopolis. It was flat, covered in many small trees, but there were already traces of tripod footprints originating from the mountains nearby scattered across the place. It's like they were concentrating on Inkopolis before they focused on everything around them. It was surprisingly peaceful and very calming after a very eventful day—no fire, no menacing tripods, no distress, just a dark and peaceful field.

"What a sight," commented the soldier.

We resumed our journey, walking through the calming fields, and every once in a while, we peaked to look at the disaster behind us before looking up to see more green flares flying above us. More and more Martians continue to land every few hours to build up their strengths across the globe to continue their colonial war over us.

If green flairs in the sky were to be a shooting sky, I would had wished to end this madness...