Smoke corrupted the air on Nimbus Sands. War had come to the idyllic planet of oases, and its palm tree forests and vibrant dunes had been robbed of their beauty. The countless hot springs with their crystal clear pools had been tainted by by the petroleum blood of vanquished machines. Its seas of white sand marred by the wreckage and detritus of prolonged industrialized battle.

  Atop one of the taller dunes, Samuine did not look much better than the world he defended. His white and gold carapace was soiled and dulled with a varnish of singed alien flesh, blast glass and liquefied polymers. Fighting with the Pantheon had broken out on the border world months ago when an armada many times larger than intel suggested made rapid ingress in the system, sweeping past the planet’s moon and orbital defenses to make a hasty planet fall.

  It was Samuine’s task to defend the world, and for the first time in the five years following his ascension he had been given full operational command and a team of subordinate kartorim. He was House Tyvess’ rising star, and this was to be his proving ground. A string of successes on much smaller scale missions had hefted high expectations upon him. Riding high on a string of major successes, he resolved that he would take the world back completely and without complication. It would be another notch towards earning himself the coveted crown aerials the elder kartorim all bore, of that he was sure.

  The months that followed challenged this naive outlook. The Pantheon was comprised of many species, and their overall capability varied wildly depending on which ones made up a given coalition. This particular campaign was far more coordinated and capable than any force he’d yet faced, and they had thrashed the world’s local forces for months while Samuine’s ego eroded to the point he could learn how to direct efforts against them.

  As the sun fell Samuine settled in for a night of anything but sleep. Radio chatter poured in through his helm. His enhanced brain allowed him to multitask efficiently, taking in the field updates from his spearheads and garrisons and rapidly firing off orders back to keep things running. Physically he was far from the main battle, though it raged near enough for him to hear the thunder of artillery.

  He glide jumped from his dune and into the air, scanning the silicate sea for signs of encroaching Pantheon forces. The golden faux-feathered wings mounted to the back of his carapace afforded him unparalleled mobility over uneven terrain, and it had been his hope when developing them years prior that all kartorim would one day adopt them.

  “For big red’s sake slow down, you’re ditching us out here!” Fenrothyne’s twang accented protests drowned out the radio chatter in Samuine’s helm, linked kartorim comms always held priority. With a thought Samuine flipped his wing’s feathers down and activated the jump-jets hidden within to slow his descent. He settled lightly onto the sandy peak of the next dune. Behind him the other three kartorim assigned to his command plodded up the dune, their superhuman speed reduced drastically by their ever sinking steps.

  Fenrothyne, Thenrothyne, and Sathiar. They’d been with him since Nimbus Sands fell under the Pantheon’s shadow, but they’d also been part of his scion cohort. Being placed in charge of them had not been without some friction. Samuine waited for them atop the dune, using the moment to catch up on various status reports and issue out new orders to battles raging out of his sight. Just over the horizon new choruses of cannon-fire sang out in response to his commands. For not the first time he hoped the image in his head of the battle, that image being constructed entirely by verbal reports, was accurate and things events played out according to plan.

  Sand shifted and flowed behind him as his compatriots caught up. Fenrothyne was in the lead, the tan bone and copper color of House Bolundir lending itself well to unintentional camouflage in the desert environment. A pleasant coincidence, kartorim carapace did not change color once it formed for the first time. Thenrothyne plodded up behind him, his carapace the same color as Thenrothyne’s, but where Fenrothyne was a large, thickly built brute with a carapace that matched Thenrothyne was wiry and lithe. They had been joined at the hip since childhood, supposedly friends even before selection, and their adoption into the same house was surely influenced by their bond.

  Sathiar took up the rear behind them. His armor was a combination of olive green and dark grey trim, bordering on black in all but bright light. Unlike the others, Sathiar was the only kartorim of his house and his people, and consequently he carried the full name and shame of House Korman at all times. Like his people, he was a straightforward and practical individual. Samuine likened him to the kartorim equivalent of a soup cracker; not particularly special on his own but decent enough at lending structure to soup. Or, in less cannibalistic terms, offering stability to a group that would otherwise flow apart by nature.

  Considering present company this meant Samuine generally appreciated his presence, if not for him personally than for his presence helping smooth out the friction between him and the Bolundirs. Fenrothyne crested the dune’s edge and broke into an unsteady sprint, the glowing blue eyes in his helm locked furiously on to Samuine. Before Samuine realized what was happening, the brute funneled the momentum of his charge into a reared back punch square into Samuine’s jaw, the pseudo-metal of his fist cracking against Samuine’s faceplate.

  The force of the blow knocked Samuine backward onto the sand and set his head spinning, his senses amplifying the metallic ring reverberating through his helm. Fenrothyne stood over him, chest heaving. “I told you to stop ditchin’ us you prick!” Fenrothyne bend forward and lifted Samuine off the ground by his shoulders, bringing him face to face “We. Can. Not. FLY!” Samuine shoved him off and stood to his feet, shaking loose sand from his wings and armor. He waved his hand dismissively, threatening to send Fenrothyne into another attack before Thenrothyne forcefully grabbed his shoulder and turned him around. Thenrothyne shook his head no and pointed at Sathiar.

  Anger still in his eyes, Fenrothyne looked to where Thenrothyne was pointing just as Sathiar finished retracting his energy lance back into his forearm and fastening his vibrosword to his back. Samuine had not been gesturing at Fenrothyne. Calmed by the realization, Fenrothyne let out a frustrated exhale and turned back toward Samuine before speaking again.

  “We need to stick together, you know that same as us. Cut the solo shit,” Fenrothyne scolded. Samuine had his back turned to him, his attention already recaptured by commanding the worlds distant defenders. He managed an absent nod in response.

  “Heard. Let me know when I am moving too quick, and I will adjust.” Fenrothyne relaxed his posture and began to walk off to another side of the dune’s summit. “And Fenrothyne,” Samuine started again, “Do not ever strike me again.” He cast a sideways glance over his shoulder, making sure his eye met with Fenrothyne’s.

  “Sure thing boss.” Fenrothyne turned and walked of with Thenrothyne, still on the same dune but now out of direct earshot. They pretended to surveil the desert beyond, but Samuine did not anticipate their efforts would yield anything as they were looking in the direction the four had come from.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Returning to his own task of surveillance, Samuine reminded himself that the four did have a reason to be out here. Despite the battle raging on in the larger cities it was crucial that he be here, miles from the nearest city searching the dunes for… there. Ripples in the sand. Like a downdraft blowing straight onto the sand and scattering it in every direction. Visible in the day, but at night it would be imperceptible to those without the right tech or, in Samuine’s case, the near perfect night vision his physiology provided.

  “I see them. Two kiloms north west,” Samuine spoke through helm comms to the other kartorim. They quickly jogged over to him from their spaces on the dune and stood side by side with him.

  “Just looks like a dust devil in the making, what’s the fuss about?” Fenrothyne asked incredulously.

  “Negative. There are twenty-four unique disturbances moving in single file. Nothing natural about it, that’s our cloaked armor column. They must not have spotted us yet or they would have cut their engines,” Sathiar replied matter-of-factly.

  “Good eye. Saw that too, I was just testin’ ya,” Fenrothyne coped. Bursts of flame leapt out from the feather-jets on Samuine’s wings as he gunned the system back to life.

  “Not enough of them to be a threat to us. I’m going to hit the cloak field. Once I do, put the rest of these vermin in the past tense.” Another loud burst sent Samuine airborne, propelled up a hundred feet from the top of the dune and easily two hundred up from the low spot the convoy was rolling through. Or rather hovering through, on account of not using wheels.

  Adrenaline seeped into his bloodstream. Time slowed, his perception tightened, and predatory exhilaration drew a smile out beneath the kartorim’s faceplate. He cut the radio feed of the war beyond, and let himself slip into his element as he prepared for a thunderous dive-bomb. Cloak generators were more effective the closer you were to them, as a result they were usually in the middle of any given formation. The narrow band of sand dense enough to support the hover craft’s downdraft forced them into a straight line instead of encircling the generator, and with twenty four vehicles that left him a fifty-fifty chance of guessing the right one first try.

  Fortunately, the golden winged warrior liked gambling. Firing his jets to full burn, Samuine tore across the sky and cleared the two kiloms between him and the convoy in a second, whipping himself around feet first just before impact and slamming into the rearmost of the two invisible vehicles in the middle. His gamble paid off.

  As the vehicle shattered and burst apart under his impact the illusory field it had sheltered the convoy with melted away, revealing the other twenty three craft and lighting them with the blue flame of its wreckage. I love it when I win, Samuine gloated to himself as he rose from the wreckage.

  The two hover craft at the formation’s front and the two at its rear were bulky, swollen looking things with machine gun analogues mounted on their roofs. In unison they swiveled to fire on Samuine as heavy door ramps thudded open and disgorged the transport’s occupants. Cretalan, muscular saurian bipeds with mismatched and patchwork armor comprised of everything from war-forged vacsteel panels to loosely fastened sheets of tied together bone dashed out and leveled their rifles at him.

  They were among the more fearsome species of the Pantheon, like something torn from the pages of a textbook on dinosauria taught to walk upright and wage war. Despite their lack of uniformity in gear and armor, they responded with extreme time-honed discipline. Each hulking lizard raised a bulky magfed rifle and fired with trained reflex. As they fired and flame leapt from the mouths of their weapons, Samuine breathing a sigh of relief. All bullets, this’ll be fun.

  Samuine extended his left arm’s carapace shield, and the metallic substance of his armor sprang out and formed the stretched tear drop shaped implement along the length of his forearm. The flared pavis was a tool in every kartorim’s physiology, part shield, part weapon, and each learned to make heavy use of it. Drawing his white vibrosword from between his wings, Samuine grinned and went to work.

  Gunfire soared around him, but it was so… slow. Jets of searing flame launched from his wings, not taking to flight but rather using the bursts of speed to dart and dash between, under, and around the bullets lobbed toward him. Fast enough that the unaided eye could not follow the gold-clad whirlwind weaved between idling vehicles to close distance, using the cretalan’s own hardware as cover between his movements.

  The hovercraft not currently firing on him and deploying troops were all artillery pieces, excellent for ranged bombardment but useless in the frantic melee they found themselves in. Each was trying desperately to pull away and out of the column to escape the torrent of incidental friendly fire, but as they left the safety of compacted sand their lift engines dug out the sand beneath them, dropping them unevenly into traps of their own making.

  Samuine continued to weave through the chaos towards his quarry, dodging most bullets and swatting aside what he couldn’t with his vibrosword and shield as he neared the troop transports at the rear of the collapsing armor column. Guttural alien tongues hurled indecipherable threats and insults at him as he tore into them. He moved faster than they could react, their guns and eyes still trained on space he’d already left, not knowing they’d been bisected by Samuine’s vibrosword until he was already moving to his next target.

  Weapons, limbs, bullet casings and viscera hung in the air around him as rammed the flared, blunt edge of his shield into the front of the first hover transport, brushing aside armor glass and foreign steels to crush the driver’s neck into a pulp against the back of his operator seat. Samuine leapt back and away from the now driverless craft as it listed to the left into the less stable sand. Still in the air, Samuine extended the energy lance in his right arm, leveled it at the opening he’d torn in the craft’s front, and fired a devastating salvo of super heated plasma through the cockpit and into the vulnerable troop compartment behind it.

  The explosion that followed pushed Samuine back a few feet in the air, but the kartorim landed gracefully nonetheless. The rush of adrenaline began to wane, his endocrine system no longer convinced he was in any real danger. Time began to flow closer to normal as the storm of flesh and fire that followed him fell to the ground. Behind the carrier he’d shot the rearmost transport had been disabled by its companion’s explosive demise, its front end scorched and melted from the violent and rapid release of the vehicle’s reactor.

  A handful of frazzled and injured cretalan rose from the ground the wreckage of the second vehicle in a final, pathetic attempt to stop the kartorim who had laid waste to their ranks. Samuine did not bother leaping back into action with his sword. With callous reflex he raised his energy lance and executed them, delivering succinct answers to their last battle cries. He rolled the nearest body with his foot and wiped his blade clean against the dead things tunic. Its thick tail twitched even in death. Once he was satisfied that his blade was clean enough, he returned it to his back.

  Up ahead the other pair of heavy transports were being dispatched by his trio of subordinates. Already one was reduced to a flaming wreck. They can handle that, he thought as he turned his attention to the hovering artillery vehicles. They didn’t looked manned, each essentially being a shell artillery cannon mounted atop a hover platform. The cretalan probably meant to operate them remotely after moving them into position, but with all the living escorts neutralized…

  Samuine knew the moment that the last cretalan was slain at the convoy’s front. The instant it happened all nineteen of the unmanned hovercraft collapsed limply to the ground, like puppets cut from their strings. Such was the way of things with the Pantheon’s technology. Somehow all of it from the smallest communication device to the biggest vacship was rigged to render itself nonfunctional when all of its nearby Pantheon soldiers were slain. No one had yet presented a solid theory for how this was achieved so absolutely, and it made reverse engineering any of the more novel technologies they employed an utter impossibility.

  Fenrothyne, Thenrothyne, and Sathiar walked down the line of wreckage and linked back up with Samuine. Fenrothyne’s bone colored armor had been painted red and bits of pulped alien still clung to its surface, and his entire being radiated satisfaction. Sathiar and Thenrothyne were markedly less gore covered, but had the scorch marks earned from a close up battle.

  “Oowee I love it when everything goes off without a hitch!” Fenrothyne beamed, “Sorry bastards never knew what did ‘em in!” Sathiar whipped his own olive green vibrosword clean before stowing it to his back and retracting his shield and lance in one unified motion.

  “I’ve informed Tac-com that this artillery group is destroyed, they were tracking it a few hours before sunset when it dropped out of view,” Sathiar informed Samuine, who nodded in approval before re-opening his feed to the radio chatter of the whole world’s war. Bracing for a deluge of field data, he was surprised when instead of a torrent of updates and requests for direction he was met with only one voice. A stern voice with a distinctly allodoan accent.

  “Field commander Samuine, you have been relieved of duty. Report to the nearest forward post with expedience. Ensure your subordinates accompany you. This message will repea-” Samuine cut his helm audio. From the sudden silence that gripped the others, it was safe to assume they heard it too.

  Samuine retracted his helm, letting his too long hair spill out in unkempt locks. He ran his hands up his face, carapace plate scraping against the stubble he hadn’t found the time to sheer off. Nine months they’d been here, nine months with the worst intel and resources, nine months against the largest power in the galaxy. Of course it was going poorly, of course they’d been steadily losing ground, and of course the blame for it all would be placed on him because he just couldn’t swallow his fucking pride and send out a distress call for additional aid. He let out an exasperated sigh.

  “We’re cursed. We’re fucking cursed.”