Hatred would be a weak word to describe it.

  Yet another word thrown around like nothing, the same way “love” is used in common language. “I love this, I love that,” one would say over something they would immediately forget the next week. “I hate you”, one might shout to their partner in a heated argument, despite all previous effort.

  In this case, hatred must have a genuine meaning, a deeply personal one, tied with disillusionment towards the hypocrisy of failed systems.

  These thoughts swirled through Vertan’s head as he walked through the woods a far distance away from home by the coast, having already visited and checked in on his mother that day. With him, he carried in his bag an array of disks, drives, and documents.

  Coming through his memorized path, he arrives at a clearing and approaches his small cabin. Unassuming, humble, even primitive. Stepping inside, he moves a kitchen countertop that could be unlocked to swing out, and descends down the stairs, closing it behind him. Technically, the property was built and invested in secret without legal permission, but given how Ulminh is, oftentimes nobody ever bothers to come out and check. He is certainly not the first.

  Arriving in the basement, Vertan flicks the lights on, shining from the ceiling onto a vast space filled with a mess of documents, papers, and cross-analysis on bulletin boards. Multiple holoscreens flickered to life. On one wall, a vast arsenal of various military-grade weapons in illegal possession.

  With a forced and heavy exhale through the nostrils, in a bout of frustration, Vertan picks up a pen and throws it like a dart. It whips through the air across the room, through the flickering holoscreens, before embedding itself squarely in front of him on one of the papers pinned to the bulletin board. That document ended up being meaningless, anyhow.

  Vertan first rubbed his forehead, then his eyes.

  He knows that they know. He also figures that they know that he knows they know. A silent, passive aggressive exchange, then. Somehow it comes across as snide and arrogant to him, as though they taunted, dangling what he sought right in front of him just to demonstrate that he could never possibly find justice even as they flaunt it out in the open.

  The past several years to him have been mostly fruitless, aside from the testament that he was able to gather illegal weapons into an illegally constructed property without intervention. Or, perhaps, he was allowed to, more than able to, he sometimes thought. Even as he invested forth into domestic improvement for Ulminh, even this dignity would be taken from him; Coalition diplomats and investors trickled in slowly through the years, gaining the upper hand on influence, ever so softly steering their domain over to Coalition alignment. Now, even Coalition warships come in and out of orbit of Ulminhan skies as though it was their backyard.

  The majority of the population accepting such changes as improvements infuriated him even more.

  Coming up to a table, he sets about removing the contents of his bag, moving various other documents, disks, drives, and books out of the way that were already sitting on the table, including a manifesto he had written.

  The Coalition, he had come to discuss in it, is a cancerous plague, an anomaly that disrupted an otherwise long-standing equilibrium in the Post-Cataclysm age, all things considered when looked upon at the historical and civilizational scale. When setting aside individual outliers, it can be characterized as a set of systems, cultures, and societies that extracts more than it gives back, holds a monopoly on truth and narrative, and portrays itself as the paragon of a moral and developed civilization simultaneously as it rapes others. It was a very personal matter, for he, like many others, had once looked up to them as a shining example.

  But, this is not what Vertan is here for today.

  Continuing to spend the day reading, analyzing, and making connections, Vertan would come once again to an empty conclusion, just as he did the past several years.

  Nothing fruitful to come out of the Special Expeditions and its origins.

  Having studied the Coalition’s historical precedents, it was soon easy for Vertan to tell that the Special Expeditions are in no way truly “special” in any regard. It was all only yet another excuse, a manufactured crisis to keep its people at home on edge and distracted from their real problems. Some demons out there far away from home are the cause of their issues, not the immediate dangers of being doomed to poverty by a medication’s price tag.

  And yet, compared to all of the previous “peacekeeping” efforts and “security operations”, Vertan found himself unable to find any meaningful evidence towards the origins and true nature of the conflict.

  Happia.

  Aru.

  Happia.

  Aru from Happia.

  The names continue to orbit around in Vertan’s brain to this day.

  Unbelievable how much “credible” information there is out there, that was also all bullshit, he thought.

  Usually, the Coalition found itself no need to directly censor certain information to such an extended degree. It can trust that its citizens will do nothing about it, or spend their time fighting over meaningless virtue signals over smaller details that don’t matter.

  But nothing comes up here. Again.

  Nothing, but the same old narratives; battles between ghosts, spirits, demons, and the occasional devastating Abomination.

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  Having gotten to personally witness it allowed Vertan to see through every crack, seam, leak and lie. It was no wonder that they believed what they did, looking at all of this. Those who typically got to his level of clarity don’t ever make it back alive, while those who don’t are allowed to. But what was he going to do? Who was going to believe him? Are they going to take the words of a single loon who lives in the woods over institutions that have built credibility over so many centuries? Their science can proclaim that a society’s warmongering is tied to their genetics and inherent nature, and everyone will nod along agreeing to that justification. Nevermind that the region was specifically destabilized for resource extraction by their hands.

  Continuing to meticulously sift through the disk as it displays on the holoscreen, Vertan once again arrives at nothing, even with the most archaic information of eight standard decades ago detailing the beginnings of the Special Expeditions. The only new information he had managed to find was the documented failure of the initial strike on a so-called demon hiveworld, which he assumes led to everything else being dragged out.

  “Demon hiveworld.”

  Is that what Happia is?

  For a moment, the memories came flashing back. The horror of the ‘abomination’, and yet he remembered the dying man before him. A man with a name, hailing from a place. A man with a face not too unlike his. Having to cover up and keep this in the dark and secret in the years since. Watching his homeworld still undergo soft colonization even with his submission.

  Hilgo.

  For a single instant, Vertan receives the urge to grab one of the guns off of the wall, and blow his brains all across the room.

  In the next microsecond, his mind had already fought to suppress the urge, and it soon dissipated.

  Killing himself would be exactly what they wanted, and forever dishonoring Hilgo’s legacy, he reasoned as he shook his head.

  These new bits of information, though limited, at least allowed Vertan to connect towards some dots that had previously hung in the air.

  Another mess they started.

  Another crisis contrived.

  Another conflict worn, and dragged out.

  Yet the question still remains. What was there to gain there? Typically, he learned, the Coalition needs to have some kind of justification for being there. A mission. It’s clearly not “peace and security” among all the other bullshit reasons; surely, it had to do with power and extraction. But what resource is there that they could possibly want that must also be kept from the daylight?

  They’ve invaded people before. Why do they want to hide these people this time?

  Vertan decides to turn from the subject for a moment, and stares up at the map of the Coalition. Twenty-five member states, all extragalactic empires in their own right. Countless more cosmic domains aligned or allied with them. Population in the quintillions.

  Vertan cannot even be a drop in the oceans. How is he going to achieve anything meaningful out of that?

  The clause of the NDA he had signed all those years ago will immediately come into effect, killing him, his mother, and more importantly, any trace and evidence of his hard work and effort. So too, would this truth die with him, and who knows if another miracle would surface the next time, if it would. The spread of information can be too dangerous, and immediately traced back to him. It could only possibly have one source, and through various means, he is monitored.

  There has to be a way.

  Something.

  Anything!

  Irritated, Vertan slams down on the table.

  “By the cosmos!” he shouted, his voice ringing through the room. “God! If there is one! Drop me a miracle out of the sky, how about it?!”

  He is met with quiet isolation once again after this outburst.

  A heavy sigh. There is no god amongst the stars; even if there were one, it would be immediately commodified by the Coalition, the same as anything else—

  A thunderous impact shakes the ground, causing the lights within the basement to flicker, knocking several things from their perch.

  Alarmed for a moment, Vertan’s heart leapt. Grabbing an energy rifle and loading it with a supercharged battery, he raced up the stairs, ready to fight off whoever may come through the door.

  There’s no way they found me! No!

  But reaching the top, he finds nobody.

  His heart continued to race, but his panic slowly subsided. This wasn’t a fault line he was on in particular; it couldn’t be an earthquake. Perhaps something had fallen out of orbit.

  Looking out the window, he sees in the distance that a trail of smoke led back upwards to a hole punched clean through a mountain, an avalanche rumbling down to the thankfully unpopulated ground below. The trees appear to be brushed over by an invisible force, and Vertan instinctively ducks for cover just as the shockwave shatters all the windows of his cabin as it passes over as a thunderous clap.

  The trees, appearing somewhat fraught and frayed, slowly stood back up. Coming back up, Vertan carefully peers through the scene before jumping out through the window closest to him, taking in the surroundings.

  A wisp of smoke appears to rise in the distance, directly across from the direction it seemed to have come from the mountain.

  “Oh, great,” Vertan mutters. “So there is a god, and he hates me.”

  Slinging the rifle, Vertan makes the trek over to investigate the scene. If he’s lucky, perhaps it could contain anything valuable worth scavenging that could have survived. His money may buy him lots of things, but money can be tracked and is therefore stuck within legal boundaries.

  He eventually comes up against the rim of a massive crater, having mangled and pushed up the surrounding trees, whilst pulverizing everything else. It appeared to be a city block across. Carefully, Vertan stepped through small flaming bits of smoldered nature, attempting to gain a better vantage point to view the point of impact.

  To his surprise, in the distance, he couldn’t make out any object of a large size. Perhaps it must have been blown into smithereens, he initially thought, but there seemed to be a distinct lack of any debris to do with such an object; everything around him only appeared to be wrecked nature. Perhaps it must have vaporized or disintegrated instantly upon impact, he further reasoned.

  Pointing the rifle towards the crater’s center, Vertan peered through his scope to more closely inspect. There seemed to be a figure, small against the distance. It looked like it could be a person. But how? How could any such object survive such an impact, let alone keep its shape and form of a person’s figure?

  A sudden and near instantaneous movement of machine-like precision from the figure causes Vertan’s heart to skip a beat. He had only ever witnessed such a movement once before in his life, on the doomed fortress-world of Thoma in the midst of countless dead.

  Vertan instinctually froze and stilled his breath, continuing to stare down the scope in paralyzed terror. The figure had now stood up to look at its surroundings.

  Slowly, it turned, and Vertan once again found himself staring down those same, dim red eyes of the armored figure.

  It already knows he is there.