Chaotic Clusterfuck 39 (Patreon)

Chaotic Clusterfuck

Chapter 39

-VB-

While the charity festival continued on in Brockton Bay, it was night in the African Archipelago and we were ready to move in to steal some xeno ships. 

The Batarians, the aliens who came down to colonize Earth, found themselves with the same problem the rest of us humans here on Earth had since the First and Second Impact: the myriad of near-fantastical and definitely fantastical creatures that had people questioning everything.

Because demons that refuse to die and kept on coming back again and again, giant kaiju reptiles,  demons that fed off emotions, and random animals suddenly growing bigger nad specifically hunting people (Batarians included)? Even they were having trouble, especially since one of those demonkinds were the Grimm from Remnant… and the Batarians had a tendency to cause all sorts of negativity that attracted the Grimm. 

As I have been observing for the past week or so on the outpost that I found, Batarians went out on their slave runs, brought their slaves, and also brought Grimm that chased after them from miles on end. 

If it wasn’t for a number of magecraft formalcraft circles keeping us completely stealthed, then I would have had to abandon the attack on the Batarians for the sheer number of Grimm they kept pulling toward their own location. 

The only reason why their small outposts weren’t overwhelmed was because their tech gave them unprecedented range. No Grimm got within a kilometer of their base because the automated turrets at each corner of the square outpost always took out any Grimm that came running. 

The only foes that Batarians really hated to fight were the other two kinds of demons.

The emotional demons came out of nowhere and sucked them dry. The hellish demons loved to target the sinful Batarians. Maybe it was because the Batarians were also very far removed from their primitive selves, they lacked any and all spiritual traditions that they could have fashioned into some kind of defense. 

Fuck, little children getting down to their knees and praying kept most small time demons at bay, but the Batarians couldn’t even do that! 

We saw long and hard how the Batarians got savaged by all manners of demons.

And saw how they came up with a solution. 

If they couldn’t do it, then why not force their human slaves to do it? 

Yup. 

Those bastards sold off the parents but kept the kids around as “barrier” between themselves and the demons. And if the kids got snapped up when a bigger demon or even human-hunting animals came along, then it was no skin off their backs. 

Except it made me angry. 

Call it human solidarity but I got angry watching kids get tied to poles and left to dry out in the sun, and they only got fed and watered if they “prayed” hard enough. If they didn’t, then they died to starvation, thirst, or any number of predators that loved young, supple human children.

There was a reason humanity as a whole hated the would-be xeno colonizers. 

And now, I was about to carry out that hate. 

… that sounded very chuuni that it hurt, but was it really chuuni when the hate was real? When I wanted to drag the Batarians back to Morocco and crucify them in public for all of the people to throw rocks at? 

The outpost we targeted was pretty far from the rest of the Batarian holdings. It was on the desert island that used to be the Adar Plateau, and at the heart of the island was the Richat Structure, the one that Atlantis believers still believe to this day to have been the site of a precursor human civilization preceding the Bronze Age … and not a geological dome that had either collapsed or eroded. Oh, and because the rings were lower than the rest of the island, it was slowly getting filled up with water. There might be a great lake here one day.

The island’s coast was mostly desert but the ocean brought life to where there was once nothing, but steep cliffs dominated the coast, ranging anywhere from a few feet to hundreds of feet. Only the southern edge of the island had anything worth being called a coast and good for harbor building.

But Batarians didn’t care about harbors since they had spaceships. So instead of settling up their outpost in the more fertile southern coast they set up their outpost in the most rugged but overall flatter northeastern coast, which provided them with better defensive position atop the coastal cliffs. The position of the outpost also prevented anyone from sneaking up on them because to its north and west, it was open ocean, and to the south and east, it was flat desert land that was very slowly becoming something like a savanna. 

And, for the Batarians, it made for a “fun” execution spot where they bet if the next human slave they tossed over the edge of the cliff would hit the water or the rocks.

I intended to burn this place down and take everything they had. 

Half of my clones scaled the cliff using chakra while keeping ourselves cloaked while the other half waited, also cloaked, just a hundred yards outside of the cheap pre-fab outpost walls. 

We had four objectives.

One, destroy the outpost. 

Two, capture the frigate that had landed to transport the slaves.

Three, free the slaves and capture any and all personnel, regardless of race and species.

Four, scavenged any and all technology found on site. 

And soon, we were in position. 

-VB-

Ratan hated his job, hated his people, and hated this world. 

He took a deep drag of the unja and let out a steady breath of air. This thing was the only thing keeping him from going ape shit, because he found himself in hell.

Because this world was hell. 

The sentient race that dominated the world … didn’t dominate the world. They only had firm  control over a third of the world’s surface (not counting the water), and, even in areas where they controlled, monsters roamed like it was their land. There were so many kinds that it boggled his mind that the local race somehow survived to become technologically advanced as they were. 

He didn’t know everything but knew enough. Kind of hard not to when he saw giant, winged, and scaly varrens flying up to a frigate and take it down using flame thrower breath. Or ice breath. Or lightning breath. Or lava breath. 

Assuming they didn’t have any other supernatural abilities to take down warships from the ground. 

And if that wasn’t all, then the local race also had similar abilities. Oh, sure, those locals made for a killer profit when they sold them to the highest bidders, but for guys like him who had to actually go out, find, and capture the bastards? There wasn’t a job that riskier or rougher. 

‘Ugh,’ he thought as he pinched the bridge of his nose as he remembered the last slave run. ‘That human bitch nearly killed everyone.’

Humans were unassuming. Even if they had a supernatural power, no one could tell unless they chose to dress themselves oddly in flashy or edgy costumes, which mostly happened in the subtropical and tropical continents instead of on this archipelago. But that kind of made it worse because no one could know before they attacked who was a supernatural among the human ranks. 

Because sometimes, a supernatural power had not a single tell or change before it killed everyone. More than a few slave runs ended with no one coming back at all because of that kind of powers.

He sighed as he leaned back against the wall of the barracks…

Then he noticed something off.

Ratan realized something was wrong the moment several of the human children he and his crew kept on base grew quieter. 

Was it another attack by the wildlife? 

He grabbed his trusty rifle and quietly came out of the barracks.

It was quiet. 

Where was the sobbing? The scream? The laughter of bastards about to get rich and high? 

He properly held up his rifle and looked around. 

His feet made little noise on the metal platform connecting most of the structure in the outpost and -.

“Gurk!” 

He paused right at the edge of the space between two barracks because he heard someone gurgling in that space and something wet splattering on the ground. His heart pounded as he waited and waited…

Someone collapsed to the ground. 

‘Shit,’ he thought. ‘We’re under attack!’

As quietly as he could, he started moving back to get his hands on a radio -.

“GAH!” Ratan screamed when he felt something stab into him. Once. Twice. Thrice. 

And then the same blade stabbed into the back of his head-.

-VB-

It took us a full hour to clear out the base in stealth and then the last ten minutes descended into violence after one of the Batarians found bloodstains on the ground that we didn’t know about. 

The entire place erupted into violence as fireballs, bullets, and mass accelerated grains wheezed and roared in the air. The control tower went down from an exploding belt of grenades. Someone tried to rush for the ship but we already had people inside killing everyone. 

By the end, we had the entire outpost secured and the following was our haul of loot:

1 small Batarian frigate. 

3 eezo-powered transport shuttles. 

41 assortment of eezo-powered devices, mostly guns and personal kinetic barriers. 

11 injured Batarians. 

37 rescued slaves. 

… It was a good day.