“‘Sylpharia—a world with a human civilization boasting records dating back tens of thousands of years. A unique factor in predominantly human worlds is their atypical slow rate of progress. Compared to worlds with more collaborative species, such as Elves and Dwarves, human worlds are held back by their proclivity for war.
“The second major factor in their slow development is their short lifespans. Humans across the galaxy have an average life expectancy of under 50 core world star cycles. This brevity leads to a generally short-sighted nature that further hampers their growth as a species. Worse, human worlds have among the highest rates of failure as a primary species. Otherwise preventable apocalyptic events frequently go unaddressed by humans, leading to early extinction.’
“End quote. It is my belief that this supports the case to ban human worlds from interplanetary trade. This is not merely limited to Sylpharia’s heinous crimes against the Elves—rather, it is a symptom of the pox of humanity as a whole. Why subject our peoples to further suffering at the hands of an invasive and hostile species?”
-An Excerpt from an Interplanetary Judicial Court Hearing, Draconic Era Zeraxis, Year 3789
The avenues of the Global Empire of Sylpharia should have held a faint blue hue. Every underground structure had been made from a chemically treated substance that made construction and modifications simple and expedient. Each sublevel avenue was as wide as an average person’s arm span, with a grid of offices and homes separated by more paths and intersections that roughly matched the surface city above.
Instead of the cool blue hues, every intersection was scorched and pockmarked with the residue of explosions and improvised kinetic weaponry. The evidence of war was all around as Karin, leader of the slave rebellion, strode towards her target at a brisk pace.
There was no easy way to enter the palace proper, but she had plotted the most frustrating and difficult route possible to reach the building built into the waterfall at the apex of the city. Her foe had been frustratingly cunning, and it spurred her competitive nature to outwit him at every turn. If she took the easiest path, she knew there would have inevitably been a trap in her way.
The Emperor would die that day. She had vowed it, and sworn that she would be the one to lead the charge as her and the other oppressed races claimed their freedom.
She was, nominally, the leader of the Kilthien. Their oppressors had conquered the globe, then turned the people of every opposing nation into genetically modified subservient races in their desire for a willing workforce.
The first race was the Anvien. They’d been made into docile stoneworkers with naturally hardy skin and bones to better build things for the imperial war machine. They all had stocky builds with natural night vision and skin that took on the appearance of rugged, gray stone.
The second race was made to abhor disobedience. The Ravien had been the hardest ones to win over for her rebellion. They looked like normal humans, if you ignored the texture of their subtly scaled skin and snake-like eyes. The empire’s perfect soldiers were created out of a brief desperation. One war fought too soon had led to a lack of manpower. Slaves had been made to fill the ranks.
The empire had been centuries in the making. By the time the third race was made, the world had begun to realize that the empire was using various forms of intelligence warfare to concoct reasons to get into the wars they pursued. It was already too late, by then. The perfect soldiers and indomitable workforce meant the empire could grow nearly without rest.
The third race, which went unnamed, were given the genetic traits of chameleons. If properly equipped, they were allegedly impossible to detect, and they were unusual for their lack of ability to communicate with people they weren’t assigned to. Perfect spies. Karin would have loved to have brought them into her rebellion. Spies would have been better than relying on the occasional Sylpharien or human to turncoat. Instead, the empire had killed the spies off once their conquest was complete.
Fourth, the people of the empire decided to perfect themselves. After their guinea pigs paved the way to a more perfect body, the humans of old became nearly endangered. Every parent who couldn’t undergo the process wanted their children to live hundreds of years. Karin didn’t know if true humans even existed anymore.
As she stormed into the residential district of the innermost ring of the city, Karin turned to her second-in-command. Wovren chuckled at her stern expression before taking out his map. She operated off from her hearing, while he used his race’s perfect night vision. The Anvien grunted a few times as he looked over the route.
“Lady Karin.” A soft voice emerged from the dust in the air of the defensive position they’d entered. “The Bronze district has been captured, and the soldiers have been routed. What have you decided to do about the bunkers?”
“We shall use them as hostages. When we move on the palace, we will bargain with their safety to disrupt their defenses. Soldiers will not be likely to harm us with their families’ lives at stake.” Karin had adopted the strategy for all of the raids she personally commanded.
Most of the technology in the empire was biometrically restricted. Only those with proper access could use medical equipment or weaponry, among others. If too many of the Sylpharien people with that access were to die, then the city might die out as factories and hospitals lost their managers. The irony of ridding herself of one oppressive force and becoming the same towards the survivors wasn’t lost on her.
She grit her teeth as she recalled the look on the faces of the ‘officials’ that had once tried to separate her from her partner. When she’d chosen to become female in order to be with her soulmate, they’d tried to take her for the pleasure houses. But she was no whore for their use. A rebellion had begun with her first act of murder.
Once she knew she could do it, the empire’s days were numbered.
And so, Karin waited for Wovren to point and grunt down a hallway to their left. “Stairwell access a hundred paces that way. If that one’s collapsed, we’ll have to backtrack or take the stairs directly into the Gold District garrison.”
Karin nodded, then tossed the solid metal ball in her left hand gently. “Let’s get this over with.” On both of her hips, she had holsters filled with more of the small orbs.
As her squad marched down the hall, they heard a loud explosion from above that sent more dust into the air around them. Wovren glanced around at the walls and clicked his tongue a few times before rapping his knuckles on the stone. He did… something, and then nodded in satisfaction. “Won’t be buried alive just yet.”
Karin stopped and crouched suddenly, and the stocky man immediately sprang into motion. He pressed his body against the wall and grasped the surface with his fingers, easily pressing them into the hidden access in the structure. Then he pulled away with all his burly might, and the wall came with him. He pulled a foot-thick section of stone out to form a sturdy barricade that came up to Karin’s standing waistline.
“Squad! Callsign and Code, or we will eliminate you!” A fearful voice echoed out. That fear was expected from a soft garrison of soldiers that had never seen real combat and only ‘protected’ the wealthy district of the capital. They were nobodies, and Karin didn’t spare them a thought.
Her hand flashed over the barricade, and the metal orb she’d been carrying in her off hand followed it. The smooth motion led the sphere into a sudden orbit around her hand before a flick of her wrist let the shot loose. Her famous instant launch had made her the greatest athlete to ever play Magfield. It only made sense that the sport that had made her famous in her youth would become the basis for the tools she used to tear down her oppressors.
The magnetic field made by her glove would normally be used to propel a padded sphere with a small metal core. In the game, a player would wind up their shot by using the field to make the ball orbit the glove and pick up speed before release.
Karin’s weapon was simple. Don’t pad the spheres. Once she cut the padding off, her technique allowed her to launch a sphere nearly at the speed of a bullet. Truly simplistic.
And so, her shot arced over the barricade in the direction of the enemy fortified position. Her technique was impressive, but not beyond normal bounds. What truly made her special was that her hearing was superb. She’d learnt a sort of echolocation, while she had no sense of smell.
She could hear where her opponent was hiding around a corner with his back to the wall, though with his face barely peeking around the corner. Her aim was the product of decades of practice. The orb impacted him in the eyes, ripping through his skull and spraying a half dozen other soldiers with gore.
The empire had grown decadent and lazy. Their soldiers had poor training and weak reflexes. They’d spent a hundred years uncontested. Karin’s shot landed with a sickening sound, not that it was unfamiliar to her. It was the sound of the impact taking a man in the eye.
Every enemy soldier surrendered their weapons in fear after seeing their leader slaughtered. Most of them had been sick from their first time seeing a man die. Karin could sympathise. She’d been horribly sick when she’d killed the official in her hometown. Only her partner had been able to drag her to safety.
She missed him terribly. Their daughter had turned four recently. She hadn’t been home to see it. Another thing to curse the Emperor for. Her partner? If she didn’t meet him by the end of the battle, then she’d see him whenever her body finally failed her naturally. It was nice to believe in an afterlife, even if the stories weren’t logical.
They disarmed the kids playing at soldier, then moved on their way after Karin recovered the orb that had pasted the man’s face. It was covered in gore, but ammunition was in limited supply.
She moved on, then stopped near the door to the stairway, allowing her friend, Alynne, to prepare her rifle and move to the front. As a Ravien, Alynne had access to effective body armor and inertial dampeners that worked against the weapons the Sylpharien soldiers used.
Her friend was a unique sort. Alynne was the actual leader of the Ravien people, and formerly the head of the only remaining clan of her race. Under the thumbs of the empire, she was just the leader of one city’s police force. Karin had concocted a scheme to get the Sylpharien commander in charge of the clan to renege on a vow. The dishonor that the man had unwittingly committed had then freed the entire clan from their chain of command, allowing Karin to forge an alliance that had taken her years to craft.
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She had made the alliance to free the Ravien of their bonds entirely. The wording made them servants to themselves. They had restrictions, but they were nothing compared to being slaves who couldn’t even reproduce without approval. It likely saved their entire race.
It had taken months of avoiding Alynne to get across that she needn’t swear a life-debt to Karin. In the new world she would create, there would be no room for the leader of one group to owe their life to another. If that happened, there would only be more turmoil as people felt obligated to never dispute Karin’s opinions.
She shook off her thoughts as she nodded to Alynne, who then kicked the door in and stormed forward, flicking her rifle upwards. “All clear.”
Karin waited three seconds, then entered, beginning to wind up a sphere as she mounted the steps two at a time. Fresh air greeted them as the entire maintenance shed that covered the stairs had been destroyed during the bombardment.
The surface was awash with conflict, however. Once she poked her head above the flattened walls, she saw two sides at war with one another from opposite ends of the street.
The conflict was a foregone conclusion, however, as the rebels had access to the supplies of the entire globe, while the defending garrison only had the limited capacity of their own internal factories.
Regardless of how the one street was decided, the rebels had already won.
So, Karin settled the battle early. She focused on her hearing. She isolated an individual’s gunfire on the defending side, then released the whirling sphere she’d been holding. It had wound up enough that the impact tore through ballistic shielding. The resulting gore was the result of tampering with the safeties in the magnetic field glove.
Sure, she couldn’t launch those repeatedly, but she could remove threats through some buildings if she needed to.
Alynne joined her, crouching below the rubble in the stairwell beside her. The woman had a mirror on a telescoping handle that she used to scan the enemy position, then set it aside before peeking out of cover for a scant second, squeezing the trigger on her rifle, then ducking down.
Karin was able to hear the bullet piercing a Sylpharien’s forehead. Her hearing was so acute that Alynne had started using a strange rifle they’d found in a lab during one of their raids. It was interestingly quiet, making a humming sound instead of a normal gunshot. With Alynne’s sharp eyesight and aim, there was little to worry about with the low penetrative power of the weapon itself. The only issue had been ammunition. Alynne was the only one who had the accuracy it required, so it wasn’t a huge issue, but one day they would run out.
So Karin took the most shots.
Her spheres bore holes in armor and broke enemy weapons beyond repair.
Slowly, the rest of the city began to go quiet, which was unusual.
When Karin stopped to listen intently, she could hear that the defenders weren’t dead. They had lain down their weapons entirely.
When she stepped up and out of the stairwell, she joined with the rebels on the street. Four Anvien had been maintaining barricades for a group of ten Ravien and six of her fellow Kilthien. “Form up! On your toes, everyone. We’re taking the palace now. Freedom is within our grasp!”
Cheers rang out from everyone besides her own small squad. It hadn’t been much of one since Kalen had passed. Their group of four had been reduced to just Wovren, Alynne and herself. It had taught her how unkind war was, and she’d never seen fit to expand her team again.
Marching on the palace felt surreal, but with another twenty rebels at her back, Karin was filled with the righteous fury of an angel. There would be no mercy for the architects of their suffering.
As they proceeded, however, they found that every last Sylpharien had gone completely inert. They were like soulless vessels. Their hearts still beat, but the soldiers that remained cognizant of their surroundings were far too few and far between. Something was clearly wrong, because for some reason, most of the genetically ‘perfected’ people had become mindless husks all at once.
“S-stay back!” One soldier cried as he backed towards the wall into the innermost part of the city.
“No.” Karin felt no fire in her heart. There was no competition to be had. No sport. The way her own people had been conditioned into ‘entertainment’ would normally lead her blood to sing in her veins. Not once did she feel that way as she shoved the man aside and led her growing mob of rebels into the part of the city that housed their destination.
The gates had been sealed, but without any resistance, Wovren alone simply knelt and gripped the metal, then heaved it up with a heavy grunt of exertion. He’d throw out his back trying stunts like that if he were any older.
Karin and her followers surged under the gate, and she gestured towards the guardhouse to their left. One of the quicker Ravien bolted for it, and moments later, the door was lifting the rest of the way on its own.
She turned her eyes to the glimmering, blue-hued dual towers of the palace. Each rose high into the afternoon sunlight, separated by a waterfall that cascaded from the cliff that was built into the vertex of the widened ravine that housed the city.
The water fell inside of the palace grounds, then spread across the famous gardens of the Imperial Court before running down into the city through the pristine waterways that lined every district of the capital. Karin felt unusually excited at the chance to witness the beauty spoken of in rumors.
“Remember, we are not sacking the place. We need the equipment intact, the records in order, and the building left standing. This will be the seat of a new, equal council.” Karin reminded her followers before swiftly striding forward. Historically, revolutions involved a lot of vandalism and mayhem. With the emotional conditioning each race had been forced into, a lot of those impulses were unlikely to turn up, but she was always one to exercise caution.
The palace gates were standing open.
That was already a bad sign, but when they entered, there was no trap.
Karin made for the throne room, half expecting it to be empty, with the Emperor and all his attendants having fled.
What awaited her instead was a horrific sight.
The Emperor was dead, as were his attendants.
Sickeningly, the entire population of the throne room was in the same state, save for one person. Aside from one maid, the Imperial Court members all had strange devices affixed to their heads. They all stared into the distance with bulging, bloodshot eyes.
Approaching one, she laid her fingers to their carotid artery. No pulse. Checking over the corpse, she saw no major injuries. Nothing but the strange device on each of their heads.
“You. What happened here?” She looked at the maid, who was shivering on the steps behind and to the right of the Emperor.
As she received no response, Karin approached the Emperor himself.
His body was different. Hidden against the collar of the ostentatious garment he wore was the hilt of a bejeweled dagger with the blade buried upwards from below. Removing it, ignoring the blood, she found the blade to be as long as her hand was from wrist to fingertip. It had pierced the man’s brain, killing him instantly.
“Explain this.” She demanded of the maid again.
Then, standing closer, Karin noticed the blood staining the maid’s hand.
The blonde woman was young and pretty. There was no fear in her eyes, despite the rapidly growing number of rebels in the room. She just looked up at Karin with an interested expression.
Then the blonde maid opened her mouth wide.
Karin gasped, shocked even with how numb she was to war. Torture took on many forms. Having one’s tongue cut out to keep from sharing secrets was especially horrific. A sort of torture to preempt other forms of the same.
It painted a bleak picture of the woman’s life in the Imperial Court. The obvious bitterness and subsequent act of revenge seemed like a very predictable outcome.
“I believe I understand. How do you normally communicate?”
The woman made a few rapid gestures with her hands. Sign language. Karin had never had a reason to learn it. She would have to remedy that.
“It will take some time to find a translator. Is that alright with you?”
“Lady Karin, I can appreciate your willingness to spare a person who has been abused, but should we trust a Sylpharien?” One of her followers asked her from across the room.
“She has slain the Emperor. My spirit won’t allow me to steal her valor. She will be recognized as the one who did the deed.”
Karin turned back and saw the woman frowning and shaking her head.
“Hmm. No?” A nod in reply. “No… you didn’t slay the emperor?” A shaken head, followed by a nod while pointing at herself and making a gesture of thrusting the dagger. “Not that, then. No, you don’t want credit for killing him?” Again, a shake of her head, but then a gesture of wanting Karin to move backwards, then an insistent pointing at the man who’d spoken from across the room. “No… you’re not a Sylpharien?”
She finally got a nod from the mute woman.
“A natural human? I do not believe I have honestly ever met one before.” More than that, her appearance was of interest. The woman was similar in features to the lauded first Empress. Such similarity without extensive genetic sculpting could only mean one thing. The maid was a descendant of the original imperial family.
The maid shrugged, then moved to the Emperor. There was no hesitation as she soaked her hand in his blood, then began writing on the stone floor with it.
C-O-N-S-T-A-N-C-E.
“Your name? A pleasure to meet you, Constance. My name is Karin, and I was forced into the position of leader of the rebellion.”
Constance nodded emphatically, then bowed before turning towards a side door, gesturing for her to follow.
Alynne took the lead and kept her rifle half-raised, but the trio followed the mute maid through the doorway.
“You lot remain here, or begin looking over the devices on their heads. When that is done, start disposing of the bodies before they start to stink.”
Leaving the throne room, Karin sped up to a jog as the maid led them through a few corridors and down a small spiral staircase. It led them down at least four sublevels, but didn’t actually have any exits before reaching the bottom.
In the deep layers of the undercity again, though she supposed it was the Underpalace, they found themselves in a large area full of glass-enclosed labs. There were the tell-tale devices used in genetic reshaping, which made Karin’s stomach turn. It was likely that every one of their slave races had been tested and fully developed in those very labs. Likely also at the cost of thousands of lives in trial and error.
They moved to a second area right after leaving the first, however.
A place with hundreds of humanoids trapped inside of tanks of fluid.
The one in the center stood apart from the rest, and Karin approached to inspect the notes left on the table next to it.
Patient 0 - Unknown Origin
Source genetics: Supersoldier - Asymptomatic Infected
Source File Notes:
- Name: Marielle Smith/Mari Kishibe
- Henceforth known as ‘Mari’ due to linguistic conflicts
- Records state the source to have been a military commander and decorated soldier.
Recommended Course of action:
The supersoldier clone, like the source of the genetic material, contains a rare genome for assimilating the Engineered Bloodstarving Infection. This genome was recorded to be unusual and undesirable due to neither succumbing to the infection nor being outright immune, making the subject an unwitting carrier. Cryogenic freezing seems to have restricted the source’s resilience, leading to a slow infection never documented before. Testing of this genome is a high priority. A compatible alternate strain has been created for experimentation. Possibility of spread is considered negligible. Team two has modified a measure to reduce risk to zero.
Addendum:
Clone ‘Mari’ has been flagged by Administrator 0 for military clearance and equipment access. Restrictions will be removed upon sufficient maturity per Administrator approval.
Karin wasn’t sure exactly what any of the notes meant, but one thing stood out to her. The children were being used as test subjects.
“Free them all. Even if we must delay while re-establishing food supplies, release as many as we can keep fed.” She then began muttering to herself. “A supersoldier… and she is barely older than Kris is. I may have to keep an eye on this one, if not all of them.”
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