His Destroyers were an extension of his hate. Each had been touched by his grief and found a loss of their own, a seed of anger from which his will could spring unfettered into their thoughts. Their worlds had orbited stars millions of times since they had lost their loved ones, since they had been shamed, since they had been fooled by the promises of the star gods and their own nobles. An eternity to their former selves, rendered a deathless sleep by the artifice of the soul-theft.

Emptiness. Emptiness ruled. Not to be filled by the designs and desires of the ghoulish flesh-wearers, nor ignored by the transcendent post-life canoptek engine-folk. What was lost could never be regained. It was not flesh and blood, to be put on like a fresh robe. The sanctity of being, the soul that had carried their lives and their meaning, had been taken away. Only nothingness held refuge, but there could be no oblivion while life still remained.

A highly energetic pulse caught Zozar on the arm. The star-heat briefly glistened across artificial bones, melting the limb.

He turned, focused the ire of his cannon on the human wielding the armament. Ultrasenses detected the magnetic and radiative pulses coming from the gun’s harnessing chamber. Rudimentary fields kept ravening energy at bay.

A captured star in miniature.

The reminder set a fresh tide of rage piling up through Zozar’s cortical field, flaring from his weapon as a bolt of disintegrating force. The human disappeared, the wall behind seared in a faint outline of their running form.

There was only the most basic strategy to the attack. Defensive walls had become the jaws of the trap, and it was simply a matter of time before annihilation was accomplished. Counter-attacks and stiffer resistance shaped the Destroyers’ advance, but they gave no heed to their own preservation except with the thought that total destruction would be delayed by their demise. Those counter-attacks that threatened to stall the slaughter were met and quashed with overwhelming force. The pockets of resistance were surrounded and extinguished.

Zozar had a faint sense that the higher he climbed, the higher the ranks of the foes he would face. Humans often conflated hierarchy with physical position. He no longer cared for such things. Kings and slaves still perpetrated the crime of life in equal measure.

The noticeable consequence was an improvement in the armour and weaponry of those that fell before his attack. Several times he was forced to pause for canoptek assistance, his assumed form suffering increasing amounts of critical damage.

Each delay served only to spur on his rage.

+ALL MUST BE DESTROYED.+