Such was his mission that the skorpekh lord wielded his slaved warriors with the same ruthlessness that he wielded his own weapons. His Destroyers were a single entity driven by the shared desire to kill, steered by his will. Bound together by that fate, Zozar was each and every one of them, even as they were him and also nothing.

The world was proving a troublesome hunting ground. In his haste to begin the slaughter, Simut had not been diligent in his preparations. The humans were scattered across the globe, and Zozar’s force had been deployed with little thought as to how they would chase down their prey across four continents and three oceans. The skorpekh commander had dispersed his legion into hunting teams, a mix of skorpekhs, warriors and skimmer-Destroyers in each. They were given autonomy to find and slay anything they detected. Zozar used these scouting groups to locate the greatest concentrations of targets and then converged on them with overwhelming forces. Though he was not able to be present at every slaughter, he made his influence known through the cryptek network that bound his corrupted legion together. Physically, he might be on another continent, but in thought he was there, guiding through the protocols slaved to his demands.

Now his force had come to a marshalling settlement where goods were gathered for transport to orbit. It was largely automated, the great star elevators still rising and falling with empty cars, the crews that manned them distracted by the effect of the overnull. Its soul-crushing presence was weaker here, though. A few hundred armed humans had mustered an approximation of a defence at the outer walls of the facility, banded about some cult leader dressed in ornate robes and a tall hat, waving a staff tipped with a bird of prey device. The man’s exhortations seemed little more than platitudes to Zozar as he had listened in to the ranting speech, but the humans were moved by it. More precisely, the motivating oratory seemed to dissipate the effects of the overnull in the vicinity of the speaker.

The development was interesting but nothing more.

Zozar split his local army into two forces. The first was the warrior phalanx. These he sent directly against the settlement, drawing the defenders to one side of the wall. The swifter Destroyers and skorpekhs he commanded to loop about the wall seeking a weak point to exploit.

As he made these distant manoeuvres, his physical form was engaged in a far more direct conflict. A group of humans had shut themselves in a storage building. They had blocked the entrances with large ground vehicles and manned the upper windows with crude but accurate bullet firers. Zozar had only his first tier of skorpekh elites with him – twenty tripodal warriors armed with a variety of long-range energy weapons and dimensional phase blades.

It was enough, he was sure.