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Another chapter is ready, and the following one already in the works. Indeed, i started out with the idea of writing a single chapter, but doing so would have resulted in something probably way too long. In addition, i think i might try and ensure the story ends right on Chapter 100, so perhaps using more, shorter chapters rather than few, big ones. We'll see how it goes. For now, i hope you enjoy the ride. As always, your comments are more than welcome.

How can a mortal worry the gods? How can a king without kingdom fill the thoughts of an Emperor and an Empress who have ascended beyond the gods?

*Chapter 87 - Not By Strength, But By Guile *

Sir John "Sandy" Hawkwood relaxed in the command chair, putting down his small black diary and the chronometer, letting out a little sigh of relief that he hoped nobody would notice. He reached over to pick up his cup, nicely decorated with the Audacious's crest, and he looked down at the bit of cold coffee still sloshing at the bottom, without enthusiasm. He and Galen had been functioning on almost exclusively sandwiches and coffee ever since they had first established contact with the vanguard of the massive RA fleet, two days earlier. The cooks of the submarine had mercifully thrown together a couple bowls of soup for variety's sake and in an attempt to give them better sustenance, but they had been too busy and focused to "waste time eating" and they had not visited the officer's mess in a while. Effectively, they were the worst fed souls on board the entire submarine, but they did not complain: they saw that as part of the burden of command. They had been particularly tense, for obvious reasons, during the long, torturing hours of high speed navigation in the narrow underwater canyon to the east of Lunis. They had spent all that time at the conn platform, starting and stopping their chronometers to ensure that they respected the times to the fraction of second. They really did not want to send the Audacious crashing in the side of a mountain, hundreds of feet beneath the surface, and they did not dare using the powerful active sonar to "ping" and paint a picture of the surrounding environment: the mountains could hide the noise of the submarine moving at high speed but were unlikely to stop the low-frequency ping from alerting half of the sonar operators in the RA fleet.

They were finally out of the underwater valley, however, and the two experienced submarines traded a gaze full of relief and satisfaction, before the old admiral extended his hand towards his best student. "Well, Galen, congratulations. Another first you can add to your service papers. It'll help with your promotion to admiral, and will make for a thrilling addition to your memoirs." Sandy softly said, half-joking, and Galen took his hand and squeezed firmly - maybe even a bit too much. Sandy suspected that Galen was using his strength to "punish" him for the teasing.

"Thanks, Sandy. But I like to command submarines... I'm in no hurry to become the skipper of a desk at the admiralty." The Audacious's commanding officer put his chronometer back into a pocket and took a sip of coffee from his own cup, which had laid abandoned for at least as long as Sandy's. "And memoirs are for old people."

"Touché." Sandy grunted, sportily accepting the little jab and stealthily rubbing at his injured hand, flexing his fingers slowly and making a little bit of a grimace as he heard the bones creaking a little. "After this mission is over and the world is rebuilt, I might just find the drive to write."

They talked in a low voice, almost whispering, because being out of the underwater canyon also meant that they were no longer hidden. They had sneaked up on the flank of the massive RA fleet and they were closer than ever before, so the need to be silent was now truly imperative. The submarine was in Silent Running status, with little lights up on the bulkhead reminding everyone that all unnecessary noise was to be avoided. The restrictions were extremely severe and extended even to talking, and to the cooks in the galley, which no longer could cook anything that required clinking of pots and other noisy procedures. The internal communications system had had its loudspeakers turned off and where necessary communications were now relayed by messengers running back and forth from the two ends of the submarine. Headphone sets did the rest.

"Conn, we are leveled. 450 feet, skipper. We are on the bottom." The maneuver officer announced, just loud enough to be heard from his position, just feet away from the chair of command, and Galen quietly acknowledged. They had brought the Audacious to a full stop in relatively shallow coastal waters between a pair of minor rocky islands that were part of an archipelago of dozens surrounding Lunis. They had carefully settled the submarine almost literally down on the seabed, which in that area was mostly made of sand. With the rocky coast behind and around them, they were as well hidden as they could be: any sonar pinging in their direction was going to have trouble telling the Audacious apart from the echoes generated by all the rocks.

They were not far from the limit of the continental shelf, which in that point fell abruptly and almost vertically down to a depth of a thousand meters. A few miles further away from the coast of Ire, far behind them, and the depth grew further, just as quickly. The western ocean was a deep, cold and hostile world, more mysterious than deep space. The seabed had only partially been mapped out, but Sandy and Galen knew the area well enough and they were confident they had foreseen the Judge's intentions with accuracy. Now that they lay still and silent, the sonarmen had the chance to listen to every little noise and tell to the two skippers whether they had been right or not.

A little red light flashed on the console of the chair of command, and Sandy picked up the phone.

"Conn, sonar."

"Conn, aye. What do you have for us?" The admiral replied, and Galen used his headset to listen in, as did the fire control officers at the plotting table, who made sure to keep the tactical picture up to date and constantly developed attack solutions for a snap torpedo launch against the nearest enemies.

"The Judge is still making high speed in deep waters, thirty miles ahead of us. I make her course a 0-3-0. She has three large cruisers on either side; their propeller noise is consistent with the Retribution class. Numerous destroyers and frigates spaced out in circles around her, but no new surface contacts..."

Sandy stood up from the chair and he and Galen walked to the plotting table, watching as the position of the various targets was updated. The enemy task group was maintaining a north-east course that would led them right to the deep waters that Sandy and Galen had earmarked.

"Nothing yet to suggest that they are preparing to open fire?" Sandy asked, knowing that, before landing their troops, the ships were going to bombard Lunis into submission. The island was a formidable fortress, even after all the damage it had suffered because of hordes of demons and because of the Audacious's cruise missiles. The Judge alone, however, had the firepower to turn it whole into a smoldering crater.

"Nothing yet, skipper. We are detecting a lot less sonobuoys in the water, and there does not seem any helicopter activity: no dipping sonars in the water. I have an awful lot of surface noise, and I can hear the waves smacking into the ships. The weather on the surface must have worsened again..." There was a pause, then the sonar watchstanders added: "Definitely a lot of noise. Freaky waves topside, skipper. We've just heard a destroyer plunge down from the back of a wave. It literally had its ass up out of the water and the propellers pushing only air. Lots of cavitation."

Sandy and Galen had been in comparable rough seas a few times when serving in the surface navy, and they knew how fearsome and awe-inspiring it was when the box of the ship first aimed skyward, then plunged down and smacked back into the water with enough violence to make the hull groan and creak while the screws came out of the water for a moment. They could imagine the torment for the sailors serving on those vessels... assuming they weren't all robots, clones and mindless drones, anyway. The helicopters were unable to fly in such atrocious conditions and apparently even the large fixed-wing aircraft taking off from the Judge were being withdrawn. That was a very welcome development, but not without unpleasant implications: they were heading to periscope depth to begin spying on the Judge in the space of minutes, and with a sea that heavy and angry it was going to be torturous.

"Enemy submarines?" Galen asked, and the sonarmen updated them about all known contacts. As they had expected, the RA submarines were in the vanguard and several of them were pushing towards the deep waters right in front of Lunis, to make sure they were safe for the Judge. Other submarines were patrolling the edge of the continental shelf, and those were the most dangerous for the Audacious, which was motionless and hidden just hundreds of meters away from the edge. They waited for several long minutes as one of those submarines drifted right ahead of them, dragging its long sonar "tail" behind, and everyone on board froze in place, nervously sneaking gazes at the ceilings and at the bulkheads, as if they could see through them. They were so close to the enemy submarine that they could almost hear its screw turning in the water. Their imagination galloped and they thought their consoles were vibrating. They thought they heard noise outside of the hull. And they all had a succession of visions about a pot falling in the kitchen, or a hatch suddenly slamming shut, or some other stupid incident generating noise and betraying their presence. They feared that the enemy submarine might hear them somehow, get suspicious and turn its sonar into active mode. They feared to hear, without warning, the active sonar pings hammering into their hull.

But nothing happened, and they all continued to barely breathe, listening to the incredible, unnerving silence within the submarine, while Sandy leaned forwards over the plotting table and asked: "Sonar, how long until the next passage?"

"Conn, we have TG21 coming from the south, on a 0-4-5 course. Moving slowly. He's just picking up after drifting. At that speed, I'll be here in twelve minutes, but he'll probably drift again in ten, according to his earlier pattern."

Galen asked if there were other targets nearby. There weren't. The weapons officer confirmed that the six torpedo tubes were all loaded. Four torpedoes; one false-target, aka a modified torpedo-drone specifically designed to generate a sound signature identical to that of the true Audacious; and a single anti-ship missile, which was fired like a torpedo but then climbed rapidly to the surface in its buoyant capsule to leap into the sky and fly against the enemy. They were as prepared as they could be. Whatever happened, they could at least fire back and hopefully create a window of opportunity for a rapid evasion. They could race forwards to the edge of the continental shelf and go deep to hide under the thermocline if shit hit the fan.

"Maneuver, bring her up to periscope depth. Slowly, and keep her leveled." Sandy ordered, trading a look with Galen. The last thing they wanted was to surface right in the middle of the RA fleet because of a freak wave pushing them upwards. And "fast" was synonymous of noisy, too: the change of pressure could cause the hull to pop and groan audibly, and they also risked to cavitate.

"We have ten minutes, more or less. We can reach periscope depth in five." Galen said, and Sandy nodded. That was the idea. By the time the nearest enemy submarine started drifting again, they hoped to be up at periscope depth and once more as silent as a tomb. Ugh. Not the most fortunate of metaphors to use right now.

Galen and Sandy rapidly drafted a mission report containing all the information gathered up to that point, and let the lieutenant in charge of maneuver work to bring the Audacious "up to the roof", as submarines sometime said. They ascended with a gentle upward angle on the diving planes, very slowly, giving the hull time to adjust without noisy poppings that could alert the enemy. As expected it took a bit more than four minutes to get from four hundred feet to just below the stormy surface, and some extra time to carefully trim the boat to ensure they didn't surface by mistake. The sea was not just heavy but flat-out ferocious, with huge waves crashing into the cliffs and rocks all around and now their advantage on surface ships was dramatically reversed: while in the deep they could have a smooth ride even during the passage of a hurricane, when they went close to the surface they were thrown around harder than any surface ship. Submarines are not the best platforms in terms of seakeeping and almost everyone on board had to brace as the boat began rocking violently with the wave action. "Up periscope." Galen commanded, picking up a small gamepad-like controller which would allow him to turn the optronic (abbreviation that means it combined optical and electronic sights) head of the periscope around. Gone were the days of the literal tube filled with complicated mirrors which physically went through the hull, the turret and up above the waves. The Audacious was a young, sophisticated boat and had a non-hull penetrating mast, entirely stored inside the conning tower when not in use, topped by an electro-optic assembly with powerful day and night cameras, thermal sensor and optics. They were still too far from the surface for the periscope to poke out of the sea, but that was entirely intentional. The periscope is not only used to look at what is going on above the waves: it can be and is employed even while still fully submerged, although only down to a certain depth. It is used while close to the surface to take a look around prior to going further up and pushing the periscope out of the water. The commander always takes a prudent look for shapes in the water that might turn out to be ships drifting in the current and not making sufficient noise to be picked up on sonar. The greater the depth, the greater the pressure, so the periscope might be damaged and water might push inside around the mast, posing physical limitations to its deployment, but in any case using the periscope too far down is pointless because there is no ambient light and visibility is zero or close to zero anyway. A quick scan, lasting mere seconds, was enough to ease Galen's worries. He ordered to pull down the periscope and to bring the Audacious the last bit up towards the surface.

"Up ESM." Galen ordered once they had leveled off as well as possible in those atrocious conditions. A telescopic mast topped by a series of antennas contained in a protective cylinder pushed up from the conning tower and poked out of the surface. The ESM (electronic support measures) antenna was composed by a multitude of receivers designed to detect radar emissions, and as soon as it pushed out of the water the computers of the electronic warfare officers began to compile an endless list of radars that were transmitting in their direction. "Conn, there are at least... 67... no, 82... surface radars whipping the air and sea. A couple of aircraft radar sets too. All too far away to detect our periscope. No helicopter radars, for now. But the count of surface radars keeps growing. I'm at 100 now. All their ships are transmitting. Navigation radars, air search radars, surface search... all possible types and bands."

"They aren't worried about being found, clearly." Sandy commented. Radars are sort of two-ended knives, because their signal can be detected by ESM at a greater distance than its useful tracking range. They can give away your position before being able to track the enemy. "But they do expect to be attacked. Guess they are particularly nervous because their helicopters can't fly. Puts a big hole in their outer layer of defence."

Satisfied that the enemy radar signals were too weak to detect their periscope, Galen finally commanded: "Up periscope, SIGINT and UHF." He already had the control pad in hand, the finger ready on the trackball. The quicker they were in taking their look, the less chances the enemy had of detecting them. SIGINT, or SIGnal INTelligence, was actually a number of separate mast antennas which were going to "suck in" all electronic noise coming from the RA ships, giving the specialists on board the chance to intercept communications and evaluate the whole range of transmissions. There was no guarantee they would be able to tap into satellite links, which used narrow "beams" of transmission aimed skywards and had very little dispersion they could listen to, but they were going to be able to listen to all radio traffic. The UHF antennas (Ultra High Frequency), receive and transmit, were among their primary tools for talking to the external world, and Sandy headed over to the position of the communications officer as the submarine sent an identification signal straight up to the Navy's satellite, which acknowledged and sent them the backlog of messages that had piled up since their last connection. For once, there actually wasn't much. No new orders, which meant their mission was unchanged. Sandy handed the mission report they had just compiled to the communications officer, and a moment later it was transmitted up to the satellite. The UHF masts were lowered immediately afterwards.

The submarine was violently rocked by a huge wave, and Sandy steadied himself by grabbing a handle above the wall covered by computer consoles, cursing under his breath as he saw that Galen had weathered the blow with just the strength of his legs and his instincts of sailor. The admiral took it as a sign that his age was really catching up to him, and he didn't like it one bit.

"I don't understand this storm." The met officer mumbled, looking at the forecasts he had been working upon in the previous twenty-four hours. "It makes no sense at all, the weather was clearing. The gales had blown the tempest front overland and they are still blowing in the same direction, so we should have a sunny, clear sky. All forecasts have turned out entirely wrong... yet all parameters continue to point to sun and clear skies."

"Don't lose your sleep on it. The traditional forecasts are not going to work for now. It'll rain and thunder and blow as long as we need it to." Galen reassured, before his lips crested in a little smile as he snorted and admitted: "Gods, I can't believe I said that while being entirely serious."

"Having God on our side is very helpful." Sandy quietly observed, while the meteorological officer looked at them with a grimace of shock and confusion, clearly unable to accept that years of study and all his precious, well-honed mathematical models could all be made completely useless like that. The admiral snorted in amusement at that, remembering how hard it had been for him to accept that Ire's fleet could just be toyed with like Alexis had done. It had completely turned the world on its head for him. "Astonishing to think about, isn't it...? So many generals and admirals in the past claimed to have god on their side, and it was never true... but it finally became true for us in this submarine."

"Certainly feel safer knowing that Killer and Alexis are on our side." Galen cheerfully added, while looking at one of the large screens set up in the control room for showing the images coming from the periscope. For a moment they saw only water, but then the mast poked up above the waves and, after an explosion of sea spray, the screen filled with images of distant ships. A number of frigates, small and nimble and heavily armed, were the nearest targets, cruising at the edges of the deep waters and dragging behind them the long "tails" of their variable depth sonars, which they could push down under the thermocline to listen for revealing mechanical noises. They all repressed a little shiver at the sight of the massive rotary launchers loaded with anti-submarine rockets. Those weapons were unguided and had a relatively short range but were specifically designed to deal with submarines in shallow waters or at periscope depth. Each rocket carried a massive amount of high explosive fuzed to explode a few meters under the surface, and each launcher could fire dozens of those, bombarding a large spot of sea water and shredding the hull of a lurking submarine long before it could dive to safety into the depths.

The warships were armed with sonar-homing torpedoes to attack submarines detected deep underwater, and more torpedoes could be delivered by the couple of helicopters embarked on each frigate and destroyer. The same torpedoes could be hurled dozens of miles away from the warship, literally strapped to the front of a rocket which was then jettisoned before splashing into the sea.

The frigates formed the outer layer of defence for the task group, but beyond them they spotted the enormous destroyers and cruisers, each of which was armed with literally hundreds of anti-air missiles. And beyond them they spotted one Retribution-class battleship, the most powerful warship ever built... of course, until the Judge had appeared.

Galen made a bit of a grimace at the sight of all those vessels but did not comment, instead moving the joystick with rapid, sharp movements, making a full 360° degrees sweep to make sure that there was not some kind of ship or other threat up from behind. The full sweep took less than 6 seconds, and after that he brought the crosshair onto the RA fleet, rapidly going from one ship to the other, his thumb flying over a small trackball to zoom in and out, taking some close up shots of the enemy vessels where his sharp eyes noticed something worth of further analysis. To take a look at the Judge, immense as she was, he had to zoom out and still it wasn't quite enough: to see the top of her mainmast, topped by the spherical radome hiding her satellite-comms dish, he had to tilt the camera skywards.

"Down periscope." He finally commanded, and the mast was rapidly lowered. It had been out of the water for less than twenty seconds in total... and that was actually an incredibly and dangerously long time. Normally Galen would have sought to map out the targets in less than seven seconds. But nothing about their current mission was normal, beginning with the sheer number of targets.

"Holy shit." Galen commented in a whisper, shaking his head slowly as the images taken by the periscope's cameras replayed on the screen. The periscope could only see some five miles away due to how low on the water the observation point was; the horrible weather conditions reduced the line of sight even further, and the immense mass of the Judge pretty much filled the horizon, hiding everything that was on her other side. Even so, the display was full of ships: the nearest frigates were merely hundreds of meters away, and they had to be thankful to the huge waves washing up onto the periscope's glass every few moments because, without them, some sailor mounting guard on the decks of one of those warships would have spotted their masts for sure. The frigates were spaced out in oblique rows, one line of warships following almost literally on the heels of the one ahead. Considering the length of the towed sonar arrays extending from the sterns of the frigates, they were keeping just enough distance between them to avoid getting tangled in each other's sensors. "Have you ever seen anything like this...? Holy shit. Even if they don't hear us, they'll end up catching us in a tangle of sonar arrays like we were goddamn fishes." Galen muttered, and Sandy made a grimace, grunting in agreement, before observing: "They are not very smart, though. Staying so bunched up together won't really help them detect anything."

"Well, they can't quite push any closer to the shore unless they fold the towed arrays away." Galen observed, before muttering: "We have to expect some of their frigates to come right where we are, pinging away like crazy with their hull sonars."

"I'm surprised they aren't doing that already." Sandy agreed. "Naval strategy is not their strong point, fortunately for us. Their weird formation is really due to the Judge herself, though: as powerful as she is, she ultimately remains a stupid design. Aircraft carrier, battleship and amphibious assault ship all in one...? Dumb. They have to bring her this close to the shore to launch her landing craft, when they could have built her a little smaller and put the assault forces on dedicate amphibious shipping instead."

"Well, I'm glad she does have some flaws. She can still blast literally everyone to smithereens, though." Galen commented, making a grimace as he fast-forwarded the video to get to the zoomed-in images of the Judge's flank, staring at the multitude of deadly, massive railgun turrets and the seemingly infinite number of laser cannons defending her tall, castle-like superstructure. "I wish we had nuclear-tipped torpedoes on board. I'd love to stick a few into her flank."

"Wouldn't we all...?" Sandy amusedly replied, before moving over to the consoles of the electronic warfare specialists, who were hard at work trying to make sense of the enemy transmissions. He looked over their shoulders, reading their displays, but he could not make much sense of it all. A lot of the radio traffic was unsurprisingly about maneuvering in a suitable position for the launch of the fleet of landing craft that was to bring the RA troops on the shores of Lunis. "Anything useful...?"

"Potentially lots, if this was a normal mission. We are classifying a whole lot of new radar and radio sets that we didn't know anything about. It is also clear that there are some large amphibious assault ships following at a distance... apparently they are having some trouble with the heavy seas and are slowing the whole operation down." The EW watchstander explained, looking up at the admiral while holding an earphone set against one ear. "With the huge number of ships involved, though, the radio traffic is surprisingly limited. They do not appear to be under radio-silence orders, they transmit far too much for that and they have every last one of their radars pumping out waves... but at the same time, they are really not talking as much as I'd expect."

"Not too surprising. It is the RA we are dealing with here... many of the crew members of those ships are most likely robots, and the few sailors made of flesh and bones must all have a Spirit device in the neck. They don't need to talk much, they are programmed like computers." Sandy quietly observed, looking thoughtfully at the screens. "If their helicopters and cargo aircraft can't take off, they are going to have problems invading. Any talk about a delay...?"

"No, skipper." One of the specialists replied, handing him a radio message they had just intercepted. "They are confident that they can take the island with just the surface assault, without the air element."

"But they will need to turn the Judge and the amphibious ships around, bow to the waves, to have a prayer at opening the doors of the well docks. Launching the boats with this weather is going to be almost worse than launching the helicopters." Galen intervened, before frowning as he picked up a satellite photo of the Judge. "Okay, no, I had forgotten this detail: the Judge has well dock doors not just in the stern, but looking towards the bow as well. In a way or another, she can launch."

"But the other amphibious ships have only the stern gate." Sandy calmly mused, before pointing his finger at an enormous cove with deep waters, protected on either side by two rocky promontories pushing from Ire's coast. "They'll head here. The bay will give them some protection from the worst of the storm. The landing craft can then hug the coast northwards and head for Lunis's main port. Do you think they'll dare directly assaulting the jetties...?"

"I think they might. They don't have that many options." Galen said, studying the map and pointing at Lunis with a bit of a grimace: "The only reason why Lunis managed to remain an independent nation-state right on Ire's doorstep is that it is incredibly difficult to conquer. Cliffs everywhere. You can't land troops in front of a vertical wall of stone eight hundred feet high and topped by bunkers and artillery towers. There are perhaps... three places were the beach gradient would allow a major amphibious assault, but even those beaches only have one or two narrow, steep exits. My grandmother could stop an invasion coming from there just by shooting her double-barrel shotgun from her rocking chair."

Sandy snorted in entertainment at the mental image, but Galen was of course right. Lunis's coast was hostile, steep when not vertical, and made of black stone and basalt, because the island was an extinct volcano, surrounded by a number of smaller cliffs and reefs and islands generated by ancient eruptions and by the abrupt cooling of the magma into the sea. Water depth increased very quickly with the coast plunging down into the sea in almost all areas, and there were little to no coves and bays of any relevance. To build their only great port the population had had to work hard for centuries, expanding the only original half-decent cove with anything from pickaxes and shovels to high explosive and gigantic dredgers. Now Lunis's port was one of the largest and most active worldwide, able to welcome even the largest containerships, but it hadn't always been so: it had taken countless years of hard work and numerous successive expansions to get there. To ease the traffic in and out of the port they had had to cut down miles and miles of mountain, tearing down one of the walls of the crater. The people of Lunis had used all the stone obtained and all the dredged up material to build a couple of peninsulas to create a large and safe bay. Artificial breakwaters and titanic protective walls had completed the project, which had immediately been followed by another to widen the two peninsulas to build two airports, one for civilian use and one, impressively fortified, for the air force.

The little Lunis, island-state not far from the continent, had always been fiercely proud and defensive of its independence and it had always had to defend itself from the rapacious appetites of its neighbor, the gigantic super-state of Ire. It didn't surprise, as a consequence, that Lunis had pursued technological developments, especially in the field of weaponry and warfare, as a way to balance the colossal numerical advantage enjoyed by Ire. Lunis was a fortress: it started building castles and towers on the edge of the crater, overlooking the sea, early on in ancient times and had only ever added and modernized the fortifications. It was so well defended that it had been able to resist surprisingly well even against demons, and the edges of the extinct volcano were still overgrown with bunkers, rail gun emplacements and vertical missile launcher silos deeply buried in concrete and steel and titanium. Lunis was also, arguably, a single, immense metropolis where, by the look of it, the most common form of competition was building the tallest, most impressive building. There had once been several different towns spread over the gentle, fertile terrain within the immense crater, but the demographic growth over the centuries had been incredible and the urbanization had been impossible to contain and regulate, so that the capital had engulfed all other cities and turned them into its districts, while old buildings were demolished and replaced again and again by skyscrapers that dared higher and higher. Very little had remained in terms of green spaces on the whole island, and those were city parks and rooftop gardens; traditional agriculture was pretty much completely gone. Technology had supplemented it with crops grown underground in special greenhouses with lamps making up for the lack of solar light; but even so Lunis continued to largely depend on food coming in by ship. During the war, with commerce almost completely wiped out and with no civilian ships daring the seas filled with monsters, the island-state had become an inferno: the food reserves had run out pretty quickly and famine had tormented the immense population, opening the way for multiple epidemics that had soon followed. Lunis had been one of the most crowded states in the whole world, but now its hundreds of incredible skyscrapers were largely empty and in ruin, while most of the factories still stood but were no longer active. What was left of Lunis's population was surviving thanks to shipments of food, medicines and other necessities coming from Kesteven, created personally by Killer but distributed, for the most part, with the work of mortals. Citizens of Lunis had been encouraged and helped in restoring a few ships that had been sitting on their keels in the port, damaged but salvageable, and they now were making regular trips to a port in northern Lunis, where they embarked the food and stores. Killer was firmly determined to help the mortals get back on their feet, but equally determined to never just heft them up himself. It would have been easy for him to just fix everything right away, but he was convinced that it would have done more harm than good in the long run. Several activities in Lunis had restarted, beginning with distribution services and land transportation to distribute the food coming in by ship, and agriculture in the cavernous underground greenhouses was restarting after the Corruption had been cleaned out. In other words, Killer's plan was working out pretty well... and in turn, Lunis's population was expending most of its energies tearing down old temples and religious symbols, to replace them all with a new and glorious temple in the very center of the island, consecrated to the new and only God.

"The port is heavily defended, but with the guns of the Judge at their disposal there is no fortification they can't destroy..." Sandy said, looking thoughtfully at the maps of Lunis. The entrance to the port was protected with fields of remotely operated mines lying dormant on the seabed. The defenders could active them from inside their bunkers. The two artificial peninsulas were defended by two massive fortresses armed with rail guns and batteries of anti-ship missiles, and the only way out of the port was through a series of mammoth security gates made of gigantic chunks of reinforced concrete moving on train rails. The walls and gates were meant to trap any landing force in the enormous parking lots behind the docks, in full sight of the defenders hiding in the bunkers up on the mountains on either side. It was a perfectly engineered killing zone where an entire army could rapidly be exterminated by the crossfire raining down from above.

On the other hand, the port was the only area of the coast which was very well connected to the earth of the metropolis: a gigantic motorway with a multitude of lanes reached deep into Lunis. "They'll open fire in four hours, at most."

"Assuming they don't use the Judge's main artillery. Otherwise they could start the bombardment even sooner." Galen remarked, but Sandy shook his head slowly and countered: "I'm pretty sure they could have opened fire many, many hours ago if they wanted to use the big guns. But that would cause too much damage. No, they don't want to raze the country to the ground, they want to capture it. The factories are still mostly intact... maybe those are their target. Or there might be something else they want to steal."

"I guess you are right on that. The range of those guns is monstrous; Lunis must have been in range for a while." Galen conceded, before turning to the EW officers, asking: "Anything useful?"

"No, Sir. We can't intercept their satellite communications, and the radio chatter isn't revealing anything decisive. They are just very surprised and annoyed by the weather: nobody understands why there's a storm when all parameters announced otherwise."

"I understand them!" The Audacious's own very frustrated meteorological officer grumbled, throwing a bunch of sheets down on his small table and sighing dejectedly, basically surrendering to the unexplainable.

"Conn, sonar!" The voice coming in the earphones had a clear note of urgency about it, and Sandy and Galen traded a worried look, fully expecting the information that came right afterwards: "Enemy frigates are pushing towards the shore. At least four active sonars in the water; they have started pinging on 0-1-0, 0-2-0, 0-3-0 and 0-4-0 courses. They are coming right this way."

"Their radars have started illuminating our masts." The EW officer added, looking at his screen. "Not yet close enough to see them, but it is a matter of minutes."

"All masts down." Galen immediately ordered, rapidly heading towards the maneuver consoles as he added: "Bring us down. We're going to settle on the bottom and crawl towards the reef. We are going to become as silent as rocks. We need to look like part of the reef by the time they are here."

Within seconds, all the masts had been withdrawn inside the sail and the submarine was diving, as quickly as they dared to move. The last thing they wanted was to cavitate or to generate noise in any other way. Sandy led them with careful maneuvers towards the very edge of one of the rocky formations to the south of their position, while the RA frigates drew nearer and nearer.

When they came near enough, everyone inside the Audacious shivered and looked instinctively at the bulkheads of the hull, or at the ceiling, as the "song" of sonars in active search became audible to the bare ears, piercing through the hull: about four seconds of "music", with a first note, a Mi of sorts, stretching on for twice as long as the following two, Ti - La. "Pings" are not actually pings outside of the movies. Each transmission was followed by a brief silence as the frigate listened to the echoes generated, before the massive array of hydrophones hidden in the bulging dome under the bow pumped out another signal.

Sandy and Galen began to quietly whistle the same tune, trying to keep their nerves under control and giving an image of confidence to the rest of the crew.

They were crawling on the sandy seabed, moving slowly and hiding behind the reef, trying to ensure that, whatever echo they might generate when the frigates got too close for the anechoic tiles to absorb the entirety of the ping, it would not stand out clearly on the screens of the sonar operators inside the RA ships. Inside the control room the watchstanders were frozen stiff in their seats, their fingers almost caressing the keyboards and the trackballs, as if even the clicking of a button could betray their presence. The sailors "enjoying" their turn of rest froze in their bunks and looked nervously at the floor or at the ceiling, listening, and everyone in the machinery spaces checked obsessively the shock-attenuating, rubber mountings on which every moving mechanism was installed in order to keep noise and vibrations from propagating to the hull.

The first frigate rushed over their heads while they were carefully and slowly maneuvering o hide behind a rocky ridge, and in those relatively shallow waters they briefly heard even the noise made by the screws of the vessel. The sonar "music" continued to bombard them as the frigates worked to sanitize the coastal area, and Sandy smiled and reminded to the ones in the control room: "It's only bad if the tune changes."

Sonar operators on board the frigates, in fact, would have immediately switched to a short two-tune burst of sound, pumped out at much shorter intervals, to "paint" them if they suspected of their presence, and if they obtained echoes suggesting the presence of a submarine they would have passed to the "attack" sonar mode. Sandy had heard it a few times and remembered every second of it: it was a long burst of very strong, short pulses of sound that generated enough echoes to "define" the target, measuring its approximate size and position, allowing the operators to understand its orientation of the sub in relation to the transmitting sonar. It was an extremely unpleasant sound to hear, like a jackhammer working nearby, and it was further unnerving because hearing it meant that torpedoes would very rapidly follow.

They hugged the reef as close as they dared going, and then cut back the power to the bare minimum needed to maintain the position, turning the Audacious into a black hole, completely silent. Actually, like all nuclear submarines they had on board some machinery that just could never be shut down, such as the pumps of the coolant liquid for the reactor, but the noise was buried deep inside the insulated hull. The frigates rushed past them, their sonar signals fading away to the north of their position, and the sonar officers confirmed that they didn't seem to have any suspect about their presence.

"There will be more passages." Galen quietly noted, and Sandy nodded, silently thanking Killer once more for the atrocious weather conditions which kept the helicopters out of the picture. "Staying at periscope depth for any significant period of time is going to be impossible."

"Yes, but it is pretty clear that we are not going to find out anything truly important anyway. We need to work on the underwater hypothesis, and see if we can find out something useful there." Sandy replied, and they both made their way to the little sonar compartment after leaving the conn in the hands of Galen's second in command. The watchstander welcomed them into the small space, and they were given a couple of chairs and headphones so they could personally listen to the cacophony of sounds in those crowded waters. Sandy was not a sonar operator by trade, but he knew enough to recognize many of the noises he heard: cavitation here and there from reckless maneuvers, the sudden burst of noise from enemy submarines sprinting and the ruckus coming from dozens upon dozens of propeller screws as the armada of surface ships advanced through the storm. There was a lot of surface noise because of the storm, and the depths were quite loud as well: all sorts of life forms disturbed by so many ships sailing by, plus the sound waves coming from the sonars in active search mode, beginning with the Judge's own, which had a deep, powerful voice. Like everything else about the monstrous super-battleship, the hull sonar was immense and pumped out a huge variety of frequencies. The signal processors of the Audacious's integrated sonar system filtered most of the noise out, but every few minutes the sonar operators switched the computer off to listen to the raw, unimpeded soundtrack to make sure that the filters weren't hiding anything important. The banks of computers working to process the noise captured by the gigantic arrays arranged all along the Audacious's length were incredibly powerful. The most advanced hardware in the whole navy, in fact, as were the arrays themselves: the submarine had a massive spherical sonar in the bow and three enormous arrays built into either flank, and in addition there was the mile-long towed array, the most sensible of all and the only one which was more or less unaffected by the Audacious's own noise, at least from a certain point of its length onwards. But computers are only as good as their software: they are programmed to do one thing, and they can't know when they are overdoing it.

"What are we looking for?" The watchstander asked, and Sandy leaned forwards over the console, clapping his hands lightly and resting his chin over the thumbs, looking thoughtful.

"Any underwater signal that might hide a communication. Maybe a classical GERTRUDE, maybe something more advanced. I suspect the Judge is acting as the antenna and periscope for... for something else. But if it is, it must communicate with said something, and I don't think they are directly connected with an "umbilical cord". A cable would impose too many limitations to how the two platforms can maneuver." The old admiral finally said, before reaching forwards to switch one of the filters off as he focused on the sound coming to his earphones. "Obviously, if there is some kind of underwater monstrosity hiding in the depths not far from the Judge, we should also be able to pick up some sort of revealing noise. But the RA technology is incredibly advanced, and we don't know what they might have achieved. Maybe they use a radically new kind of propulsion, or some sound-masking system."

"The computer is going to hinder more than help us, this time." Galen added, and he worked to exclude the filters, one by one. "If the thing we are looking for exists, we probably have nothing of her in the databases. Knowing the RA, we can safely assume it is something big, new and probably insanely over-the-top. We have no real clue what sound it might make, so don't write off anything. If you hear something weird, talk about it. We are going to have to guess a lot."

The sonar specialists looked at their captain in silence, their faces betraying their confusion and some disbelief at being basically tasked with finding something which might or might not exist in the first place, but they did not complain. They trusted their commander, having seen him in action for many months. The chief sonar officer and current watchstander, Lieutenant Sebastian Vega, had been with Galen from the very beginning of his now almost two years at the helm of the Audacious and he had zero doubts about the skills of the bulky, muscular tiger. Sebastian and Galen were physically quite similar: same sapphire eyes, same remarkably handsome features. Sebastian was shorter and far less muscular, but still well built, with strong biceps stretching the sleeves of his coverall. There was an explanation for the resemblance: Galen and Vega were actually stepbrothers. Admittedly, that didn't mean much in the Northlands: with a society founded around the king's harem, stepbrothers were incredibly numerous. Being stepbrothers was even less surprising within the vast borders of Killer's territory, where the legendary virility of the king had generated by far the highest number of stepbrothers and stepsisters worldwide. Galen and Sebastian, like so many others, shared the same father, but they had grown up thousands of miles apart, in entirely different countries and ways, and had only met each other in the Navy, when they were both well grown up. Sebastian was pretty sure that they hadn't even talked around being stepbrothers. It was a fact of life, as normal and common as breathing.

Sebastian was, like Galen, one of Killer's sons, but as his southern surname suggested, her mother was not from the Northlands. She wasn't even a tiger, but actually a graceful Akita with a fit, shapely body, a free spirit and a side-undercut mane of white hair framing emerald eyes and features which would have been almost angelically innocent wasn't for her attitude, which was not innocent at all. Juana Vega was 16 years old when Killer became a porn actor in Ire, at the age of 14 himself. Juana was a problematic girl, forever at war with her father because she liked parties too much and tolerated school too little. Juana knew what she wanted and when a friend showed her a porn clip of Killer in action she found her true religion and her purpose in life. She was one of the very first KO - Killer Owned girls which were to become so numerous in the next six years, and when her father had locked her up in her room because of her new, scandalous tattoo, she had embraced the crazy idea of e-mailing Killer. After a couple months of live chats and messages that cemented her pride in being a "traitor of her race", as her daddy angrily barked, she laughed in cruel delight when Killer showed up at their house with a couple of bitch-boy cameramen following him. Killer effortlessly beat her father into a broken heap and basically conquered the house and the family: he impregnated Juana, her mother and the two sisters as well, one two years older and one two years younger than Juana. The father of Juana did not last more than ten minutes: in front of the obscene power and sizes of the 14-year old behemoth he had almost lost his mind, turning into a broken, eager cuckold slave who did nothing other than worshipping Killer and slaving away to pay him for fucking his wife and daughters. When Killer moved on towards other households to conquer and ruin, Juana ran away from home and lied on her age to become a porn star just so she could get repeat acts with Killer. She became extremely famous worldwide and also incredibly rich by being a hardcore, loyal "Killer Only" priestess. She used her movies and interviews and social media to praise and worship Killer like he was a god and she was deliberately nasty to any and all other males, humiliating them with a ferocity that became proverbial. To Killer's amusement, she made fabulous amounts of money by demanding payments from boys in order to humiliate them, insult them, be mean to them. The young alpha male could barely believe how many boys were eager to pay just to get to stare at her while she insulted them and told them how superior Killer was.

In six years she was pregnant 8 times, going literally from one pregnancy to the next, offering her womb to Killer as soon as it had emptied again. She became even more famous because she was one of the most vocal supporters of Killer womb-conquering the world. She threatened her paying slave-boys with extinction by showing off her pregnant belly, her children - all ligers like their father, never canines like her - and by telling them how more and more females were following her example. Juana, completely Killer-drunk, had also been the first to accept having sex with Killer even during the late months of her pregnancies, despite the murderous hazard it represented for the unborn children. Killer was careful and never ravaged her womb in those movies, but the images of his colossal shaft pushing into the swollen, pregnant sex of the Akita were some of the most popular and shocking on the web. The photos of his immense black shaft sprawled across the bulging belly were just as epic and famous.

Sebastian and his forty-eight brothers and daughters born out of those 8 pregnancies would have happily done without all that popularity, because in Ire they were either adored like "sons of god" by fans of Killer or violently hated by people with political ideas tending to the NWOA anti-tiger positions. Killer's exploits in six years of porn career had been so monumental that countless groups had grown out of the initiatives of frustrated boys and men who saw the world filling up with KO tattoos, pregnant bellies and young ligers at such a rhythm that they feared the literal extinction of their own species. What had started out as an attempt to improve relations between Kesteven and Ire undoubtedly pushed many terrified boys into joining the NWOA. Killer's exploits did not cause the war, but certainly didn't help the peace either.

After a bit more than six years, Killer was forced to return home to lead Kesteven's army against the NWOA invasion forces commanded by Dark. During the war he crushed uncountable young volunteers who had joined the NWOA literally because of his movies, and that only made him more popular among the part of Ire's population that was in absolute love with him and his impossible strength. Killer's movies became propaganda gold and true psychological weapons: he kept shooting new ones directly on the battlefield. Countless female members of the NWOA defected and crawled to him. Countless more he took by violence, until the NWOA was forced to order the remaining women away from the battlefield. The males of the NWOA were psychologically destroyed: a huge number committed suicide, an even greater number ran away, deserting Dark's army, and many crawled to Killer as eager cuckolds and slaves. And all of this was widely documented in movies that took the world by storm, causing a further, dramatic spread of the "KO religion" across the world. Obviously, many enemies only had their hate and resolve intensified by those developments, but it wasn't enough. When Dark begged Ire to intervene directly into the war, Juana and countless other KO women, supported by hordes of eager cuckolds and by an armada of young but hulking, powerful liger sons and daughters, took to the streets and manifested and rioted across the whole continent, revealing the sheer immensity of the "contagion" and causing so much trouble that the government of the superpower decided not to enter the war directly in support of the NWOA. Killer's sons, in particular, were so numerous and so strong that Ire literally feared it would not be able to control them in the event of an all out rebellion. Ire, of course, continued to provide plenty of unofficial support to Dark, but that retreat was an immense humiliation for Ire at the time... and, with hindsight, a prelude to Killer's eventual conquest.

That was the high point of Killer's youth. That was when he was known as Wyvern, the invincible, the conqueror, the breeder, the master, the apex of the Northlands' strength. The one whose cock had forced the world's richest and strongest nation to cower away. The closest thing to a God to walk the earth.

Dark's army was finally annihilated in the battle of Wycherley, in the south of Kesteven, and the whole world was given a live stream of Killer destroying his rival and fucking Dark's wife first into delirious submission and then into bloody pieces. It was the right ending for a war that Killer had started winning a long time before.

Ire was not formally defeated, but in truth it was. The governments that followed tried to control the KO crowd and the huge number of young ligers through secret paramilitaries, secret police and racist laws, but it was way too last for that to have any real effect. What saved Ire was the fact that many of the KO girls and most of the ligers migrated northwards of their own accord, reaching Killer in Kesteven. Juana and her sons and daughters were among the first moving out of Ire and into Kesteven, and they brought along Juana's mother as well. Juana's father, reduced to a sissy slave, was left behind in Ire. He kept sending money for years afterwards, obeying to Killer's order to foot the bill for the children, until he vanished and was never heard of again, most likely suicidal after giving up every last penny, every last breath of energy and every last scrap of dignity. He was one of many. Ire sighed in relief, but their illusion of safety was soon shattered when a bored, stronger than ever and ferocious Killer left Kesteven to wander the world. Fully aware of his almost godlike power, Killer spent the following seven years ravaging the world, raping, destroying, pillaging, desecrating, bullying entire nations into humiliating, helpless slavery, until Athena and Joy had somehow convinced him that building up an actual, permanent empire would be more rewarding in the long run.

In Kesteven Juana and her sons and daughters were safe and were made to feel welcome. Killer was not around, much to Juana's dismay, but their life in the kingdom was happy. Sebastian had eventually been the first of his brothers to join the armed forces. He had originally wanted to enter in the Royal Marines, but then he heard that his fine musical ear could be especially valuable on submarines and that persuaded him to radically change course. Sebastian and Galen had crossed paths early on while in the Navy. They had served together on a frigate, Galen already a lieutenant and Sebastian just a junior rate, before going their separate ways again. Galen's career had been spectacularly rapid and he had gone right for the top job, while Sebastian had found real satisfaction in the art of making sense of sonar signals and had followed a slower, different path, but the navy eventually reunited them. Sebastian had been happy when Galen had taken command of the Audacious because he knew him both as a likeable, friendly person and a very competent officer. In two years they had accomplished incredible things with the Audacious... they had been wonderful years, admittedly even too adventurous. Now they had to accomplish an even greater feat.

Sebastian immediately picked up his earphones and excluded the various filters. He squinted his sapphire eyes as he studied a first weird sound, but it clearly became evident that there was no pattern of regularity to it, so it was ascribable to natural sources, such as fishes or other underwater life forms rather than to any kind of machinery. He idly picked up a pencil and started spinning it idly into his fingers, every now and then tapping its tip on a little block notes, making quick annotations whenever he found something. The problem, of course, was the distance. The Judge was miles away and there were dozens of ships in the water between them and her, all making noise. Her enormous sonar tormented them with its regular, powerful signals, sending literal pain into their minds as they pressed the headphones tight against their heads and tried to pick up... something. Some sort of mechanical noise, they supposed: the faint humming of a pump cooling a nuclear reactor, or hints of cavitation around a propeller, or even noise generated by the careless action of a crew member. Sandy tore a page off the scratch pad and noted the time on it, while the sonarmen nearby worked on the controls to make some adjustments to the gain, already near the top of the scale, but they all winced and recoiled as the cacophony of disparate noises threatened to make their heads explode. They did their best to tolerate them, but one by one they had to work with the manual controls to progressively mute off some of the worst high-frequency noises.

They were not helped by their position, as one side of the submarine was walled in by the rocky cliff hiding them, while the towed array had had to be winded back inside its fairing in the stern because dragging such a long, thick cable behind the sub while scraping the bottom of shallow coastal water meant searching for trouble: the least that could happen was snagging the tail into some underwater object and end up losing it. It meant that their best "ear" was out of action and some of the other arrays were badly positioned. Besides, the Judge was sailing over very deep waters, and whatever might be hiding beneath her was probably as far down as it could go, hiding under one or more thermoclines, the semi-permeable "walls" that separate one layer of water at a warmer temperature from the deeper, colder layer directly beneath. Thermoclines dramatically screwed up the transmission of sound waves in the water, "trapping" noise beneath the layer.

"We are badly positioned." Sandy finally muttered, voicing a thought that had been in all of their minds for several long minutes. They had just tried to ignore it, because trying to reach a better listening position meant getting even deeper into the enemy task group, with all the dangers this entailed. "We will need our tail fully extended and operational to have a prayer to ever catch a hint. And we need to get closer."

"But how...?" Galen asked, to no one in particular, just voicing the problem they were all contending with. It seemed impossible to move any further forwards without all those ships and submarines catching a hit of their presence.

"We will have to hide under their hulls, and slip from one to the next in line." Sandy quietly said, looking at the screens and trying to ignore the stares of disbelief he was getting from the sonarmen and, to a lesser extent, from Galen.

"We all have hidden in the wake of civilian ships, sometimes even sneaked behind or under an enemy warship, but this is... something new entirely. We very much risk getting tangled in some towed sonar array, and we might very well crash into an enemy submarine while blindly trying to take position beneath it." Galen cautioned, trying to control his voice to hide both his fear and his disbelief. He didn't want to pass as a coward in front of his legendary teacher, but he also didn't want to condemn his boat and all the lives within her. "And when we move from under one hull to the next, we are without cover. We cannot move across too slowly or they'll just leave us behind; and we can't move quickly or they'll hear us."

"Indeed." Sandy calmly admitted, before adding: "But this task group is enormous and bunched up far too close to the shore for its own group. They'll soon start to put to sea boats and hovercrafts for the invasion, and that will cause a lot of noise. And if they hear us for a moment, they won't be able to tell if we are enemy or allies. If they start shooting, they are more likely to hit their own than to hit us."

"Against another adversary I might be tempted to agree. But this is the RA, admiral. They don't care how many of their own they sink. They'll open fire no matter the risk." Galen countered, and Sandy sucked in air between his teeth before making a grimace as he admitted: "That's true, I'm afraid..." He paused, then shrugged a bit and forced a thin, tired smile on his lips as he joked: "But look at the positives, I guess: that will make up for our scarce reserve of torpedoes."

"Oh, God..." Galen murmured, before sitting back in his chair, which groaned under the weight of his massive, hulking form while he forced himself to respond to the joke with another, not to be undone: "You think that if we pray my father loud enough he can fill up our racks with new torpedoes...?"

"He actually might." Sandy seriously replied, and Galen blinked for a moment, silenced and left wondering but the old admiral's comment. Sandy, however, softened his "victory" by adding, in a tone of agreement with Galen's skepticism, "Even if we had the torpedoes we probably wouldn't be able to fire that many before they got to us."

The sonarmen stared at the two submariners with badly concealed shock, astonished by the idea the two commanders were cultivating, but after a moment Lieutenant Vega found the strength to go back to the headphones, listening specifically to the sounds coming from the Judge's enormous sonar. It was painful, even as he worked to lower the audio, but there was something that just didn't sound right. He couldn't tell what it was yet, but he had the distinct feeling that something in the echoes generated by those signals wasn't right. He squinted his eyes and almost angrily scribbled on the block notes ahead of him, and his subordinates took immediate notice of it: they knew him well and had seen him get that focused in other occasions. He very rarely did that for no reason.

Galen noticed it too. Even though as commander of the submarine he didn't normally sit into the sonar compartment, he visited it more than often enough during complex operations to recognize that state of almost trance. Sandy noticed the sudden silence and, following the gaze of Galen, he realized what was happening and tensed in his chair, swallowing a bit as his heart beat a bit faster, some hope stirring in his chest that they were indeed on to something. Having at least an idea of what to look for... hell, even just having a reason other than instinct to believe that something was out there would have made a hell of a lot of difference. They waited, not daring to make any noise while Sebastian worked his magic. Sandy noticed that the lieutenant scribbled on his block notes: automatic filters were cutting this out! Need new parameters!

And then, finally, Sebastian turned slightly towards Sandy and Galen and announced: "There is something weird in the echoing of the Judge's sonar. Southwards, some miles behind the Judge. Skipper, can we move ahead a bit and bring the port side arrays to bear? We might be able to hear more."

Sandy and Galen traded a look, and the Audacious's commanding officer stood up with a nod and rushed out of the small compartment, ducking sideways through the door to fit. Within moments, a slight shudder went through the submarine as they crawled forwards on the seabed, slowly and carefully, making almost no noise at all, before turning to starboard on a northwards course, pointing all three the port side arrays towards the Judge.

"There definitely is something weird." Sebastian said after a moment, just as Galen poked his head inside the compartment. "Faint, cap'n. And I'm not even sure what it is. But it is there."

"Something with the echo, you said...?" Sandy quietly asked, working on the gain controls and trying to focus on the noise in the distance as the sonar officer nodded in confirmation. Sandy listened, squinting his eyes, then closing them as he focused entirely on the echoes, but he couldn't understand what had spooked Sebastian... until a weird echo resounded in his headphones. Something slightly out of tune with the other returns.

"This one was loud." Sebastian commented, looking straight into Sandy's eyes, and the admiral bit his lower lip before observing: "It seemed... late. I heard the echo coming from the seabed and from a large cliff, and then... then it sounded almost like a different noise altogether. A second echo, slightly out of time. As if the signal had split in half."

"Exactly." Sebastian confirmed, and Galen picked up a headphone to listen. "I have never heard an effect like that. It is like... like half of the echo went through a disruption. A delay caused by... I don't know what."

"We need to get closer and find it out." Sandy said, dropping the headphones and standing up, heading out of the compartment as Galen sidestepped out of the way. "Keep listening, and keep us updated. We will try to figure out a path through the enemy task group."

The admiral and Galen rapidly got back to the conn, and their first order was to crawl slowly on the bottom, towards the edge of the continental shelf. They were confident about their invisibility against passive sonars, but the frigates pinging away with their hull sonars were an enormous concern. They all expected to hear depth charges and torpedoes falling into the water at any moment, with no warning. They did not dare making more than 5 knots, because speed meant noise, but that meant the Judge gained a lot of ground on them, as she was four times faster even while punching through the monstrous waves in the middle of the storm.

"We are going to lose them." Galen muttered, before ordering to dive deeper as they moved past the edge of the shelf. Water was allowed into the ballast tanks and a downward angle was put on the hydroplanes, leading the Audacious steadily deeper until they were well beneath the thermocline. Sonar waves bounced largely back against the thermal layer in the water, but they still couldn't afford to move much faster or stand out in any way because several of the RA ships towed variable depth sonars which had a receiver/transmitter module at the end of the array whose buoyancy could be controlled, so that it could be sent scouting down under the thermocline.

"We will follow the edge of the continental shelf", Galen announced before ordering the Audacious on a northwards course. They maneuvered to stay so close to the immense underwater cliff to their starboard side that they feared they might crash right into a jutting rock, but Galen and Sandy, standing by the plotting table, issued a constant stream of orders and adjustments to the route. They picked up speed and followed the task group while keeping the port side sonar arrays aimed as best as they could towards the wake of the Judge, where the anomaly in the sound propagation continued to manifest itself. They considered deploying the long towed array again, but the risk of snagging it on some rock or other obstacle, wreck or natural formation while speeding to close to the cliff was too high and they were forced to pass up on that. Pinging frigates moved all around them, and the sound waves often punched through the hull and filled their ears, but thankfully their position was still not known to the enemy.

On the Audacious, nobody was able to sleep or rest in any way: the sailors who had been in their off time had all crawled out of their bunks, unnerved by the sonar pings, and the control room was more crowded than usual as the members of the other shifts stepped in to help the watchstanders in charge. The sonarmen were all hard at work as well. Sebastian had instructed them on what he had found and what they should be listening to and now they were all trying to make sense of that distortion, while simultaneously keeping up guard for the movements of the other warships and submarines in the area.

"Conn, sonar."

"Speak, sonar." Galen said, throwing his head backwards and closing his eyes for a moment, tired and nervous. Staying countless hours on the edge was taking its toll on every one of them.

"Two cruisers, TG04 and TG06, are making full speed ahead. Lots of cavitation from the sudden acceleration. They have veered on a northeastern course, I make it 0-4-5... The frigates on the outer layer of defence are all turning for 0-4-5 as well. The layer is making it hard to distinguish the other noises." The sonar operators called "layer" the thermocline, which as always kept them well hidden but also partially deafened their own sonar.

"They are putting their bow to the enemy." Galen concluded, and Sandy nodded, adding: "Lunis must have some aircraft still able to fly."

One of the sonarmen indirectly confirmed their guess by announcing: "Vibrations in the water. Faint noise of explosions in the air... they have just fired their decoys."

"Should we go up and take a look...?" Galen asked, jerking his head towards the large screen for the periscope imagery, but he was only half-serious. There was no real reason for them to go up to periscope depth: too much danger and far too little to gain. Sandy snorted in entertainment at the question, and shook his head slowly. "It isn't going to be pretty." The old submariner cautioned, despite the curiosity he felt. He would have loved to hide in the wake of an enemy warship, push out the periscope and take a good look at Lunis's offensive. He was curious to see what they could do, but he was not optimist about the outcome of their attempt, and there was a huge probability to get caught if they tried to sneak up on a frigate or destroyer.

He could easily imagine the scene on the surface, having gone through similar situations far too often during the war while serving on the Ark Royal. The explosions that the sonar had heard were from decoy rounds fired high up in the sky by the various warships: some of the rounds blasted out huge clouds of metallic strings and strips, known as Chaff, especially cut to generate radar reflections in the various frequencies. The clouds took a long time to fall back into the water and until they floated around the ship they generated fake ship profiles in the radar picture of incoming missiles, confusing them.

Other decoy rounds, known as Flares, burned at high temperature while slowly falling back towards the surface of the sea, in order to lure infra-red guided missiles away from the warship. Other decoy rounds, more complex and effective, released sophisticated devices which, hanging from a parachute, pumped out electromagnetic noise to jam the seekers of incoming weapons; or produced signals that accurately mimicked the warship they had been fired from. All together they resembled a fireworks display to a casual observer, but their use was a deadly serious matter.

The frigates were turning towards the incoming missiles to face them with the bow, the most solid and narrowest of their profiles, easier to miss and less visible on the missile's radar seekers. Moreover, each ship was carefully veering to hide between the clouds of chaff and flares it had just put up into the air. Accurate positioning was crucial to ensure that the missile was tricked into going harmlessly through a cloud of chaff rather than hitting the real target.

The massive, heavily armed cruisers were loaded with anti-air missiles and were rushing forwards to fire their weapons and protect the frigates, much more lightly armed, further away from the center of the task group.

As expected, within moments the sonar compartment called again and announced: "Hatches opened. Both cruisers are firing SAMs."

"They don't have airborne early warning assets up." Galen calmly observed. "That should mean they are pretty late to react." The expert commander was thinking of the physical limitations to the useful tracking horizon of a radar installed on the surface, or anyway close to it. The radars mounted on the mast of a warship normally sit just a few dozen meters above sea level, and because of the terrestrial curvature they had a limited field of view against low-flying targets, such as sea-skimming anti-ship missiles. Fleets countered that by flying large surveillance radars on special aircraft and helicopters, but the RA fleet enjoyed no such cover because of the storm, while Killer had made sure to keep clear skies above Lunis's airports. The proud people of Lunis were trying to exploit their God's gift, but Sandy did not expect great results. He sighed and shook his head slowly, reminding: "The Judge's mast is like a mountain, and the radar in it is enormous. It burns through clutter through its sheer power, and at one mile of height it gets a pretty good field of view."

"Yeah, you are right." Galen admitted, making a grimace as he leaned onto the rail near the chair of command. "I still have troubles keeping in mind that the Judge does exist for real. She is just... insane. But we can make good use of this diversion, I suggest."

"Indeed." Sandy agreed, before ordering: "Come to 3-4-0, and get her to 20 knots. I want to hide right under TG03."

Galen looked at the plotting table and nodded with a little whistle. It was a huge gamble, but TG03 was one of the huge air defence cruisers arrayed around the Judge and if they could hide under its stern while the frigates were distracted by the threat of air attack they could get a lot closer to their main target. The officers in the control room visibly tensed up as the Audacious shuddered a bit while it picked up speed and turned on a north-west course, heading straight for the massive cruiser. To do what Sandy suggested meant moving out from under the thermocline, climbing into the warmer waters close to the surface, where the enemy had far greater chances to hear them.

"Conn, sonar here. We have noise of explosions out of the water, five miles north-east, on a 0-4-6 heading."

Sandy and Galen nodded, knowing what it meant: some of the surface-air missiles (SAMs) fired by the RA cruisers had intercepted the incoming anti-ship weapons and destroyed them in flight. The question is: did some get through...?

And within an instant they all heard an explosion reverberating through the water, and sonar announced: "One of the frigates has been struck. One propeller stopped, the other is cavitating like crazy... secondary explosions on board the enemy ship..."

"Another frigate has been hit, one mile to starboard!" Another sonar operator announced, but they heard, albeit faintly, the blast as the supersonic missile struck through the bridge and disintegrated in a massive explosion while burning pieces of metal and rocket fuel tore literally through the entire vessel, splashing into the water far beyond the stern after shooting through the helicopter hangar, setting the two folded-up helicopters on fire. The resulting fires had to be terrifying, because there was another immense explosion after just a few moments, probably the result of ammunition stored unsafely. Maybe there were live weapons on the helicopters, or in the hangar ready to be installed on the aircraft.

"Her keel broke." The sonar announced, and Sebastian made a grimace as he listened in horror at the cacophony of sounds typical of a ship in agony as the hull of the first frigate was broken in half by an enormous explosion, while water loudly rushed into the hull and dragged it to the bottom. Galen and Sandy traded a look at that, and silently decided that they had to exploit the moment and press their luck.

"Bring her to 25 knots, 5 degrees upwards on the planes. We'll hide in the surface noise, and get ready to level off right under the cruiser's keel." The old admiral ordered, tapping his hand quietly on his thigh out of sheer nervousness and tension. Accelerating further was a great risk, even though the Audacious was incredibly stealthy. They were dangerously close to a whole lot of enemy warships and uncomfortably vulnerable because of it. Almost instantaneously they could find themselves bombarded by barrages of rocket-depth charges, with little to no time to react in any way, and they were all painfully aware of their vulnerability. The amount of surface noise above and around them was steadily increasing, however, and Sebastian's voice came into Sandy's and Galen's headphones as he announced: "Lunis fighters are flying in, low enough on the water that we hear them with amazing clarity. They are dropping bombs from close distance... some of them dumb, I think. They are bouncing."

"They are giving their all." Galen whispered, bowing his head slightly in sign of respect. Lunis's resources were clearly limited after the devastations caused by the war, yet they were willing to run straight against the RA ships to drop even old, unguided "heaps of iron" bombs at the advanced enemy vessels. Amazingly, the dumb bombs were almost more successful than the more sophisticated guided weapons, but there was a good reason for that: the "dumb" bombs were not affected by decoys and they were tossed forwards at high speed while the aircraft pulled up to fly past the masts of their target. The bombs flew forwards at incredibly high speed and either directly impacted the ship or smashed into the water... and often bounced upwards in another deadly arch, followed by another, until they impacted either the waves or a ship with their tips, activating the fuzes, or sunk without exploding.

The RA ships had turned to offer the bow to the missiles, as it was their narrower profile, easier to hide among the decoys... but that obviously meant that they were now offering their entire length, bow to stern, to the bouncing bombs. The dumb bombs bouncing on top of the angry waves flew right above the bows of the RA vessels and, instead of falling into the ocean on the other side, they crashed right into the superstructures.

"The frigates are all veering to port to offer their side." The sonarmen reported, but Sandy grinned a bit because he knew it was too late. Before they could put their beam, much shorter than their length, in front of the bouncing bombs, several of the latter found their targets. The weapons, weighting thousands of pounds each, did not always explode but even when they didn't they tore through the superstructure with tremendous violence, ripping off radar masts, turning bridges into scenes of bloody carnage, sometimes holing flight decks. One frigate was hit by two bombs, one of which exploded roughly amidship after tearing right through the radar mast: the enormous blast devastated a large section of the ship and tore to bits the funnel mast, sending fire and debris rushing down into the gas turbine and machinery spaces. Fire immediately engulfed the top decks as the vessel listed and drifted out of formation, losing speed until it was dead in the water, battered by the huge waves.

There were numerous other explosions, however: some bombs hitting the waves, but mostly the Lunis fighter-bombers being blasted out of the sky one after the other by the missiles and shells coming from the warships all around them. It was quick and brutal, and the crew of the Audacious lived it through the announcements of the sonar operators, who tried to make sense of the noise coming from above the waves. The horrible cacophony of sounds coming from the sinking wreckage of downed aircraft and from at least three RA ships was a symphony of death that sent shivers down the backs of all sonar operators. Metal groaning, sailors screaming, the rhythmic beating of hands or tools against the bulkheads as men found themselves trapped inside rapidly flooding compartments, and then the roaring and crackling of the fire ravaging the damaged vessels. And after that, they listened in horror as the first couple of frigates vanished beneath the waves and rapidly plunged towards the bottom: they were above the deep waters of the open ocean, away from the continental shelf, which meant that within minutes the wrecks were down to thousands of meters of depth... and that was when the sonar operators winced in horror as the pressure grew so intense as to loudly crush and deform the hulls and completely annihilate the corpses of the sailors that had died inside the ships.

Sandy and Galen tried not to think about it. For them, the fact that the RA had lost three anti-submarine frigates was a good development, and they tried to focus on the positives. Moreover, they were fully focused on carefully maneuvering towards TG03's keel: they needed to get their approach right at the first try, because they were already far too exposed as it was.

"TG03 has a draft of at least 11 meters." Galen warned, running the calculations in his mind before instructing the maneuver officer to turn the boat northwards, mimicking the movements of the massive cruiser above their heads. Their aim was to park the Audacious just beneath "03", at a distance of mere meters from the top of their conning tower to the enemy keel: for that, they had to trim the submarine with incredible accuracy. Any mistake could bring them smashing right into the fat bottom of the RA vessel, with disastrous consequences.

To match the cruiser's speed they were racing along with it at well over twenty knots, and that was leaving them almost entirely blind: the sonar had to deal with a lot of noise and was further hampered by the thermal layer which kept them hidden but also muffled any noise coming from above.

TG03 was one of the Judge's bodyguards, sailing in close formation with the leviathan and adding its weapons to the already monstrous firepower of the gigantic battleship. If they could exploit the noise of its machinery to hide their own signature, and stay close enough that even active sonar would not immediately distinguish them from 03's hull, they would then have a chance to listen to the weird underwater "anomaly" from a much shorter distance.

"Bring her up. 3 degrees on the planes, and be ready to level it off right away." Sandy ordered, and they all tensed up as high pressure air was unleashed inside the tanks, pushing water out and causing the Audacious to move upwards steadily, until they pushed through the thermocline. Immediately, the sonar team called and gave an update about the contacts around them: 03 was right above, keeping the same heading and the same speed, and there seemed to be little or nothing going on in terms of rescue operations in favor of the survivors of the stricken ships. As expected, the RA seemed to simply not care about its own men... And that in turn means that everyone, or almost everyone on board these ships is either a robot or a mindless puppet controlled by a Spirit device. No sailor with a working mind would continue to serve in a navy that completely ignores the fate of its men and women without an imminent danger forcing them to.

"You think they know we are here...?" Galen quietly asked, thinking the same thing. The commanders of surface warships know that speed and movement greatly complicate the life of enemy submariners trying to launch their attack, so the suspected presence of enemy subs in the water is a common reason for not stopping by a sinking ship to offer help to the survivors.

"If they had any suspect about us being literally here, we'd know it. We'd be under constant bombardment." Sandy calmly replied, before making a bit of a grimace and adding: "But they clearly expect submarines to sneak up on them, that's definite. Still, I don't think their fear of submarines is what is preventing them from making any rescue attempt. They could at least put some boats into the water; perhaps use some of the Judge's large landing craft. But they are doing nothing. They... they just don't care." The admiral fell silent, and Galen made a grimace of contempt, muttering: "monsters..."

"Conn, sonar." Sebastian's voice was evidently worried and a note of urgency about it, so the attention of both high officers immediately shifted to him as he announced: "Submarine ahead of us, two miles away to starboard. 0-2-7, perhaps 0-2-8. We just heard the reactor cooling pump. It's drifting, skipper. It's listening."

Sandy and Galen traded a worried look, rapidly trying to decide whether they should dive back down under the thermocline or continue to go up. It was the matter of an instant, but even that was almost too much, because time was one of many commodities they could not afford.

"Keep going up." Sandy calmly said, and the maneuver officer acknowledged, while Sebastian went back to listening to the faint sound coming from the otherwise entirely silent enemy submarine. They were rapidly getting closer to it as they continued to follow 03, hiding beneath it, and the sonar specialist couldn't help but bite his lower lip, his hand nervously sketching a small submarine on the corner of the sketchbook page ahead of him.

"Up periscope." Galen commanded as they got closer to the surface, and he grabbed the small controller, immediately working on the trackball to tilt the optics on top of the mast upwards. Galen ran a quick 360 degrees scan of their surroundings, like he had done earlier, to make sure that it was safe to push further up and raised the periscope optics clear out of the water. The submarine heard on the sonar, as close to them as it was, was not visible. It was at a greater depth, a black shadow in those dark waters, and even though Galen knew the approximate position he couldn't even get a hint of its shape. It was like searching for a ghost. But Galen lost no time there, instead tilting the optics upwards, towards the light, which in that stormy morning came from lightning bolts more than anything else, and he took a careful look at the many hulls above, and principally at 03's keel. This was nothing new for him or Sandy: during their brilliant careers they had done similar "hull inspections" countless times: in several occasions they had been sent in the waters of hostile or potentially hostile countries to take close looks beneath brand new warships. The periscope camera was a valuable intelligence gathering asset: it was particularly important to document the shape and dimensions of the sonar domes of new enemy warships, as well as the number and shape of their screws and rudders. The design of a warship screw is far more complex than civilians realize: the shape and width of each blade is the result of painstaking research in how to minimize cavitation while achieving maximum power efficiency.

And of course, during training exercises, cocky submarine commanders, and that meant pretty much all of them, loved to take hull photos of the targets they played with. To a submariner, every surface ship is just another target, and all submarine commanders love to make fun of their surface colleagues by presenting them with underwater photos of their ships. "I could totally have sent you to the bottom" being the implied message.

Galen took quite a few pictures, in particular of the turning screws of the gigantic cruiser, and then of the bulbous sonar dome at the other extremity, while giving accurate instructions to the maneuver officer to regulate the speed of the Audacious and level it off safely beneath "03"'s keel.

"Crazy Ivan!" Sebastian loudly warned, almost breaking the "ultra-quiet" order by practically shouting it. "Turning to port!" His warning referred to the drifting submarine he had found and reported earlier, and it meant that the enemy submarine, less than a thousand yards away, had just accelerated and started a radical turn to the left. The "crazy Ivan" maneuver consisted in turning the submarine around in a complete circle to bring the large bow-mounted sonar array to bear on anyone hiding in boat's baffles. Crucially, it also meant that the RA submarine's torpedo tubes were turning around to glare straight at the Audacious's own bow. "He must have heard something, and wants to check." Galen murmured, to no one in particular. Normally, in a similar situation he would have ordered an all stop and to rig ship for ultra-quiet, but they already were in ultra-quiet... while, contradictorily, sliding forwards at a healthy twenty knots speed. The fact was that they could not slow down, otherwise 03 would leave them behind, unshielded.

"He's deeper down than us. At least one hundred meters further down." Sebastian assured, meaning that there was no risk of collision. At least that nightmare was out of their minds for the moment. Sandy and Galen had both followed enemy submarines from really, really close and had both been in fearsome near-misses because of sudden Crazy Ivans. It was always a terrible experience... and there had been several collisions in the story of the submarine navy, too. At least four northern empire submarines had returned to port with a damaged, crumpled hull or turret over the years, and even though the official line always talked about icebergs, Irenic submarines had coincidentally returned to their own ports with damage on board right in the same periods. In a couple of dramatic cases involving other navies, submarines had never made it back to port again. Collision or torpedo, no one knew for sure: in the depths of the ocean, in the world of submarine warfare, peacetime was a weak label. Not all boats lost to "incidents" over the years had been lost without an adversary having a role in it. It all happened far away from the eyes and ears of the world, and it was all hushed away. Like special forces, submarines were at war every day, even in peacetime. Sometimes the underwater clash was fought without using torpedoes, but in plenty of other occasions weapons were employed and then the whole event was cancelled from the official records.

Sandy tapped his fingers lightly on his thigh, but he was confident that they would get through undetected: due to the difference in depth and speed, they were effectively already moving past the enemy submarine.

The warfare officer looked up from his console, staring at Galen in what was an obvious question, even though he did not dare voicing it: shouldn't we open the torpedo tubes?

The hull sections covering the torpedo tubes have to be opened before firing, and it takes a brief period of time before a launch is possible. Normally it was no problem, but with the enemy submarine turning to face them down it was unnerving to be unable to timely respond to fire. But the flooding of the tubes is noisy and would have been more than audible at such close range. Sandy and Galen knew that all what mattered was not giving off any other revealing noise.

"If he tried to torpedo us, we could just keep moving forward. We are too close for the fuzes to even activate." Galen said, smirking a bit despite the churning inside his stomach. The officers in the control room welcomed his words with what hoped to pass as a sound of hilarity, but of course no one could actually laugh of the situation. It was true, the enemy torpedoes would not activate: the fuzes built inside the warheads only activate after the engine has pushed the weapon a safe distance away from the launching submarine, and they were well inside that range. At most, the torpedo would slam into the outer hull, denting it but being deflected away, likely to sink to the bottom because of the damage sustained in the impact with the far larger and more solid submarine. But they all knew that if it came to such a scenario, that first torpedo would have been rapidly followed by countless other weapons.

"They have not opened their torpedo tubes." Sebastian announced, his voice trembling slightly in a mixture of relief and anxiousness at what might still happen.

"Will they ping...?" Galen wondered, and Sandy bit his lower lip, finding no good answer to give. It depended on what the enemy sonar operator had heard, and how suspicious and bold the enemy commander was. Pinging with the sonar in active mode would reveal the Audacious and give the enemy sub an immediate firing solution. But just like all other submarine commanders worldwide, the RA skipper certainly was aware that pinging would broadcast his own position to everyone, giving any enemy submarine nearby an equally easy solution for torpedoing him in return.

"Thank gods the cruiser is noisy." Sandy said, looking up at the orderly but still impressive tangle of tubes and cables on the ceiling as if he could see through it, through the two hulls of the Audacious and through the water, right up to 03's keel. The warship above them was built to track and take down targets in the air, not underwater, and it was a lot noisier than the frigates built specifically for Anti-Submarine Warfare, ASW. Which can also be read as "Awfully Slow Warfare"... Sandy mused, smiling slightly. Fighting underwater is always a rather slow affair: it can take days to sneak up on a prey, hours to get in position for a shot, and minutes for a torpedo to reach its target. And it was torturingly slow even now as they continued to steam on at twenty knots, hiding under the cruiser, while the enemy submarine turned around. Will it hear us...?

"Target still turning right. We are leaving it behind." Sebastian finally announced. "No pinging."

The tension in the control room finally began to loosen up, but conversations continued to be muted, every word whispered, every movement instinctively almost carried out in slow motion as everyone aboard the Audacious did his part to ensure the boat could continue to avoid detection.

Galen sent the periscope up to take another look at 03's stern, and once he was satisfied he ordered the mast down, bringing the images up on the screen. "Our friend upstairs does not have a towed array. At least not a deployed one." He announced, and Sandy nodded silently, looking at the images on the display: there was nothing stretching out of the stern of the giant cruiser. There were just the two enormous screws, turning and churning in the water as the ship heaved and pitched in the huge waves that continued to shake the Audacious as well, making their ride far less steady and comfortable than usual.

"Those screws going up and down like that worry me some... but we have to do it, haven't we...?" Sandy quietly commented, before ordering: "Deploy the tail."

Within moments, the long, tube-like towed sonar array began to stretch out once more from an opening in the stern, trailing behind the Audacious. Sebastian immediately brought to his screens the data from the hyper-sensible line of hydrophones, and brought the raw sound into his headphones, focusing on the noise that came from their port side. The Judge was there, protected by another line of even larger and more heavily armed cruisers.

The weird delay in the echoes beneath her keel was also still there, and Sebastian did his best to make sense of it, while the massive RA fleet closed in on Lunis, heading for the enclosed but deep waters that Sandy and Galen had identified as probable destination. From there, the Judge and the large amphibious assault vessels following her would have launched wave after wave of landing crafts filled with Unmanned Combat Walkers and tanks and troops and equipment.

At the same time, but eight hours further into the day due to the different time zone, Killer and Alexis stepped on Alfaya's sandy, scorching-hot ground, right under the burning sun of the early afternoon. The sun, however, was barely visible through horrible, heavy, thick clouds of black smoke. The first thing the two gods noticed was the smell of burning petroleum, and the second was the sinister, dancing, dirty orange light coming from countless immense arsons in the distance. Many of the oil fields had been destroyed, either intentionally by the retreating forces of Alfaya or by the advancing NWOA troops, and now the crude oil was pouring out of the wells, burning endlessly and obscuring the sky, filling it with smelly, poisonous smoke. The smell was overwhelming.

It was not just a matter of destroyed wells and refineries, however: ahead of them, where the soft dunes of sand gave way to a vast plain of arid but more solid ground, the defenders of Alfaya had dug a complex network of deep canals and anti-tank ditches. Several civilian excavators were still working hard to dig new ditches, stretching towards the horizon for miles and miles. The dirt that was dug up was then used to create massive, wide embankments, too steep for tanks to climb them and too massive to be easily pushed away by bulldozers. Some of the largest canals were filled to the brim with crude oil, and other ditches were being flooded as well, while groups of tiger warriors stood guard to piles of barrels of oil hidden behind the embankments. Their intent was clear: as soon as they spotted the NWOA tanks rushing forwards they were going to set fire to some of the drums before throwing them down the outer slope of the embankment. The drums were going to splash into the black rivers of crude oil, causing them to erupt into flames as well. Fires that would have lasted for many, many hours, making it much harder for the NWOA to bridge the ditches and carry on with their offensive. The warriors of Alfaya, terribly short of any form of advanced weaponry, were doing their best to employ the only resource they had in abundance to slow down the NWOA and make its battle tanks vulnerable. Trapped in a maze of ditches, with their thermal cameras made almost useless by the fires all around them and with the normal optics obscured by the smoke, the terrible tanks ceased to be unstoppable and became vulnerable.

The wreckage and corpses left behind by an early, explorative attack by the NWOA's vanguard force were there to testimony how vicious the fight could become once the massive armoured vehicles could no longer move freely: the NWOA had successfully launched a number of assault bridges over a first anti-tank ditch, and the battle tanks had pushed forwards, together with a number of heavily armoured breaching vehicles of the combat engineers. These were modified tanks armed with a short-barrel, high caliber cannon specifically meant for demolishing obstacles and buildings, massive dozer blades or mine ploughs at the front to clear a path for follow on forces and a couple of launchers for rocket-propelled mine-clearing charges which were, effectively, hundreds of meters worth of a special "rope" made of blocks of C4 explosive. The rockets dragged the rope ahead of the tank and once the linear charge was on the ground it exploded, causing any hidden mine or trap to also detonate, leaving behind a wide, safe corridor.

The combat engineering vehicles and the tanks had opened fire against the embankment ahead, and more assault bridging vehicles, another vehicle obtained by modifying tank hulls and replacing their turret with a mechanism that launched dozens of meters of sturdy, foldable steel bridge; had pushed forth to bridge the second ditch. A multitude of craters and scorch marks in the ground testified to the ferocity of the covering fire provided by the NWOA battle tanks, but the defenders had nonetheless courageously crawled to the top of the embankment and had thrown burning drums of petroleum down the steep wall. Fire had enveloped the tanks and the bridging vehicles, and the oil on the bottom of the ditch had turned into a roaring inferno of fire that had made the bridges unusable. They were still there, blackened and deformed, half-molten by the tremendous heat.

The valorous tiger warriors had then pushed forwards, using shoulder-fired rockets to destroy two bridgelayers, three breaching vehicles and eight tanks. Another pair of tanks, while hurriedly retreating from the massacre, had not been able to reverse onto the narrow bridges and had fallen down into the first ditch. The two massive vehicles were still mostly intact, but the tigers had crawled up to them, immobilized and helpless, and had smashed the hatches open before pulling out the crew members: their dismembered, destroyed bodies were strewn all over their vehicles. The large chunks of bloody gore were black because of the ungodly number of flies covering them, and even the long ropes of intestine were almost entirely covered in hungry, uncaring bugs. The corpses of numerous NWOA infantry soldiers were similarly being tormented by the flies where they lay in ugly heaps around the wrecked tanks. The charred corpse of a tank commander hung from the hatch of one of the vehicles, half in and half out. Other hatches were still shut: the crew hadn't even had a chance to escape before being incinerated as the ammunition cooked off.

Countless deep track marks in the arid ground showed the paths followed by the other armoured vehicles, which had rapidly retreated far into the distance. There was not a single tiger corpse on the field, but that was only because they had been recovered by merciful comrades and hurriedly buried inside deep trenches dug for that exact purpose. There had been little time and even less manpower available to dig individual graves. Many of Alfaya's proud warriors had not received any kind of burial at all simply because their bodies had been incinerated or disintegrated by artillery barrages or by the explosion of shells fired by tanks. Others had been mowed down and torn into pieces by lethal airbursting rounds that exploded in midair and projected deadly shrapnel over a wide area, hitting even behind cover. The tigers hiding behind the embankments had been showered with a huge amount of such rounds, and the metallic shrapnel still glinted on the ground. Others had been pulped by the cruel "flechette" shells, containers that split apart at supersonic speed, projecting thin steel darts forwards with such force that even near misses were lethal, causing tremendous internal damage and often literally stripping the skin off the flesh and bones. Alfaya was not prepared for modern warfare, and the courageous warriors of the kingdom were paying a terrible price for it. Their formidable strength and physical superiority over every NWOA soldier were not enough to contrast the concentrated fire of hundreds of heavy artillery pieces, or the literal storms of rockets raining down from the sky like the rage of a divinity. The strongest among the tigers could literally grind a tank to a full stop with just the power of their muscles, and many tigers were powerful enough to tear the armoured hatches off the tanks, revealing the vulnerable crew members inside, but every tank they tried to take down in that way ended up costing numerous proud warriors. It was an unfair fight that they had no chance to win. The well armed mercenaries that had once served alongside the tigers, bankrolled by the Raja family, had stabbed them in the back, joining the NWOA without warning, and now what remained of the army of Alfaya was basically preparing to go down in a blaze of glory. Raja's money was suddenly useless, because Cerberus's old allies were now all supporters of the NWOA and the tiger kingdoms were both exhausted by the demonic war that had just ended and determined not to help the Raja family in any way. The Rajas had made the southerners strong by fueling their technology, literally, in order to cover themselves in gold, so the hostility of the other royal families was easy to understand. The few kingdoms that Alfaya used to be in good relations with had ceased to exist, destroyed during the war against Hell.

The proud warriors of the desert had no chance at all of winning the war against the NWOA. What was amazing was that none of those noble fighters had turned against the weak king to finally replace him. Perhaps they suspected that the adventure of replacing the king would still have ended in their death due to the NWOA declared intent to topple the "oppressive, tyrannical rule of the tigers". Perhaps they were just too proud to betray their king right while an enemy that they considered inferior and worthless was defeating them thanks to armoured vehicles, missiles, aircraft and heavy artillery. For a tiger, losing against a bunch of small, frail "preys", even if the latter were hidden inside a massive battle tank, was an unacceptable humiliation.

Killer made a grimace at the sight of countless wounded warriors, roughly bandaged and stitched up, still standing proud and ready to fight further. Many others, missing entire limbs or wounded far too grievously to be able to stand up, lay into shallow holes hurriedly dug into the ground, scattered in small groups, or even one by one When they were lucky their hole was covered by a torn, shredded tent perforated by countless bullets and shrapnel; but most hadn't even that little bit of comfort. They couldn't stay grouped together because there was no substantial air defence system available and every time an NWOA aircraft or helicopter passed by their only chance of survival was hiding and staying well far one from the other, to give the enemy no easy gain. Unfortunately, the NWOA was eager to bombard the tigers one by one if necessary: each tiger warrior was strong enough to slaughter countless "preys" if he managed to get past the armoured vehicles and into the infantry, and that meant that every single tiger was a high priority target. Killer and Alexis traded a look of horror at the sight of such misery, of such waste. They had both been raised according to the warrior ethos of the Northlands, and to see so many gallant fighters left without a hope by the shortsightedness of their king hurt them to the very core.

Kesteven and Glacial could have met the same humiliating end had their ancestors not been the wise leaders they were. Kesteven and Glacial, and to a lesser measure most other kingdoms, had timely accepted the reality of a changed world and had adapted. Alfaya had refused to see the truth.

Killer had all but gone south, into Ire, to study and to experience first-hand the tactics and the technologies of the most advanced armed forces in the world, and when he had returned home he had tirelessly worked to modernize Kesteven's warriors until they had become by far the best soldiers. Not just the strongest, but the most versatile and adaptable, and often the ones with the best equipment. In moments like that, in front of Alfaya's ruin, he was truly thankful for everything his ancestors, his father, William, Sandy and ultimately he himself had done.

Killer and Alexis had teleported into Alfaya directly from the Ark Royal's flight deck, leaving the Praetorians and Disciples behind as planned. The fleet was going to sit off Alfaya's coast, over the horizon, out of sight but close enough to be able to rapidly intervene if necessary. Obviously, despite all of their firepower, the ships were by far the weakest element in the plan. If Killer and Alexis's terrifying power somehow didn't prove enough, the Praetorians and Disciples were ready to add their own godly strength.

Obviously, the New World Order Army was not a worry at all. Their entire army could be erased like a stain with just a lazy thought. Killer could have literally just walked up in front of the NWOA armada, pulled out his cock and washed the whole force out of existence with just his piss.

Cerberus Raja, instead, worried them. Appearances suggested that he was just a scared mortal, less than a speck of dust to Killer and Alexis, but they suspected that the truth was far more complex and dangerous.

There was no telling what exactly Cerberus was hiding, but the fact that he could hide something from Alexis's senses was enough of a reason to worry in the first place. And Cerberus might well not be alone: Vera, Sikanjal and Thanathos were still somewhere out in the world, with their own aims and their own plans. Maybe Cerberus was their ally, maybe no. They just didn't know. They didn't even know where to find Cerberus. The king of Alfaya had promised them that he would show up, and they had warned him to be fast otherwise they would abandon him to his fate at the hands of the NWOA, but they had no clue about where exactly he was hiding. It didn't take their vast experience of war to realize that the whole situation smelled of set up. They were walking right into some kind of trap, of betrayal, and they were fully aware of it. Indeed, they were trying to purposefully set the trap into motion, confident that they had the strength to turn the situation to their advantage, no matter what.

Killer wondered, not for the first time, whether he was getting overconfident and overeager. He felt powerful. He felt invincible. And he wanted to find out where his last few enemies were hiding. He wanted to crush them under his heel, and he wanted, perhaps even more intensely, to understand the role that every one of them had played in the war. He wanted to find out who was hiding behind the pompous "Lord Skyfall" name, and he wanted to ascertain whether everything he had had to go through had been planned out and organized by a single mind, or by a group. He wanted clarity, and revenge. And after that, he wanted to explore other worlds. No, that was not sincere. He wanted to _conquer_other worlds. The "Swarm" of power-hungry gods was still out there, somewhere in space, heading straight for Earth. They had no Estimated Time of Arrival for the Swarm, but he was almost impatient. The rational part of him kept warning that he couldn't just challenge thousands of alien, unknown gods. That it was insane to crave their arrival, because even if no one within the swarm turned out being as strong as him, they could still overwhelm him with their number. But part of him was hungry. Ferocious. Arrogant. He felt like he was barely beginning to scrape the surface of his true power and he wanted the Swarm as a punching ball to train with. As food to devour. As fuel to power himself to even greater heights. He wanted to dominate and destroy, as unspeakably and viciously as possible. He was eager to put himself to the test with something truly massive. Something difficult to even comprehend. Something that would truly push the limits. Something utterly devastating. He wanted a crowd of gods and the immensity of open space at his disposal, in order to have enough room and a solid enough target to truly show off his power and revel in ruination and destruction and conquest.

But he had to restrain himself instead, snorting in contempt as the ground rattled under his foot with his mere step, magma glowing in his deep footprints as the sand turned into obsidian under him, because of the sheer heat and power radiating violently out of him.

Alexis smirked at that, licking her lips slowly and flexing eagerly as she looked in the distance at the white towers of Alfaya, the capital of Cerberus's kingdom. Most of the vast town was nothing but a messy pile of slums built all over the hills surrounding a large oasis. Small, simple houses of reddish stone or even just of bricks made of dried mud were disorderly massed up around tortuous, narrow streets and alleyways. Only the center of the town was modern and spacious and luxurious. The great white palaces, often decorated in gold, were all built near to the vast lake in the middle. And of course, no palace was even remotely comparable to the absurd, excessive splendor of the royal castle, with its many towers topped by golden Moorish domes. "Careful there, Lion, or Alfaya will crumble away to a puff of dust. It might be fun to fuck in every room of that obscenely garish palace before razing it to the ground."

Killer snorted in amusement at the suggestion, and gave a little nod of agreement while rolling his shoulders slowly, doing his best to rein in his hungers and the terrifying power that oozed out of his being. Absorbing Typhon and Juggernaut had made it very hard for him to control his own energies, which seemed to constantly increase, multiplying with every passing moment. The last Seal was more battered and frail than ever, but he still hadn't really pushed against it: he was determined to only do that when he felt ready for it... or when he was left with no other alternative. He worried, however, that the Seal might soon crumble away without him doing anything at all, just because of the constant growth of his power. Whenever he thought of how little a percentage of his strength he was actually using, he was torn between delight and horror. He had no idea how such power could ever possibly be controlled. He sighed, closing his eyes for a moment and clamping down on his own excessive vigor, and then he slowly looked up to the castle in the distance, grumbling a bit at its opulence. Cerberus Raja had never defeated another king in a real duel, outside of tournaments, but he nonetheless had an extremely high opinion of himself: the outside of the castle was decorated by countless statues depicting him as a victorious hero and conqueror. The Moorish domes were made of solid gold and were said to be blindingly luminous under the clear sky of the desert. Every inch of them was covered in chiseled figures and decorations, even though nobody could quite guess the images from down below. That was obviously beside the point, anyway: what Cerberus wanted was to make clear how much better, or at least how much richer, he was than anybody else, even while most of his subjects still lived in huts made of dried mud. There was no imagining how absurdly luxurious the inside had to be. "We'll have time to explore every corner." Killer promised, and Alexis licked her lips slowly, eyes glowing with lust and hunger.

They made their way down the shifting dune, the sand turning into obsidian beneath their feet, forming a comfortable, jet black staircase leading into the valley beneath. Alexis had taken a page from Elaine's book and had clad herself in a spectacular form-fitting leather suit that was skin-tight over the curves of her godly body and stretched out over every powerful chord of muscle. A tight corset squeezed on her prodigious breasts, accenting even more her breath-taking cleavage while leaving most of her mighty abs and strong back on full, glorious display. With her usual high-heeled boots adding even more to her height, and with her huge handguns holstered and strapped to her almighty quads, she was simply divine. Killer was clad in his black armor, but even the thick plates made of godly dark essence could only accent the perfection of his hulking musculature, following the profile of his herculean build. Each of their steps rattled the ground and sent cracks spreading in it, fire glowing through the fissures and magma bubbling up in their footprints while reality trembled visibly around their forms, and an incandescent wind of pure energy roared over the desert, blowing back the petroleum smoke and replacing them with stormy, thunderous clouds overcharged with electricity. The soldiers down in the valley shivered and looked upwards in awe and terror, spotting the two gods. Some of the warriors ran away, others froze in place, unable to tear their eyes off the two titans... and then, finally, someone ordered a patrol to head out and meet the two gods.

"Oh, gods. Is that the best they could come up with...?" Killer incredulously muttered when a large dune buggy with ridiculously huge tires charged up the dune with a roar from its enhanced engine. The once open-topped vehicle had been crudely modified into a "tank" of sorts by welding huge, thick metal plates over a modified steel frame. The armor plates had been evidently torn off a wrecked NWOA tank, and the symbol of the anti-tiger organization had been crudely covered up with a stylized Raja-family coat of arms. A hatch complete of its optical sights had been installed in front of the driver to give him a degree of visibility while staying under armour while the main armament was a pintle mount on top, fitted with a couple of heavy machine guns and a bank of shoulder-fired rocket launchers. A tiger standing up in one of the buggy's seats, with half his body out of the top of the vehicle, trailed the heavy mount and fired the weapons. It was a truly miserable imitation of what a true armoured vehicle could offer, but at least it was fast and agile. Three tank shapes had been drawn on the side of the vehicle, meaning that, as incredible as it sounded, the warriors had been able to put their creation to good use.

The warrior sticking out of the top of the vehicle held on to the edges of the hatch as the buggy bounced over hidden rocks in the sand, looking up at Killer and Alexis in a mix of awe and complete panic, sweat rolling down his cheeks in long rivulets as the vehicle finally came to a stop in a cloud of dust, a few meters away from the two gods. The driver shrunk in his seat and pretended not to exist, while the soldier on top opened and closed his mouth slowly without producing any real sound, causing Alexis to fold her huge arms with a snort of entertainment, her eyes glowing as she looked down at him. "You are here to lead us to your king, soldier...?"

The terrified warrior shuddered visibly, looking up at her with wide-open eyes and trying to respond only for a sort of mewl to come out, along with a little rope of drool as he contemplated Alexis's prodigious beauty. Finally, he managed to give a little, hesitant nod.

"Good boy." Alexis playfully said, smiling softly, and the bulky soldier beamed and instinctively pushed out his chest, straightening and trying to look his best for her, while his eyes faded away, replaced by pits of white light. He was already under her spell, literally. She could have sucked him dry with a mere thought, or commanded him to kill himself for her, and he would have immediately complied, with no hesitation at all.

Thankfully for him, she only snapped her fingers to summon Wrath and Ruin, and the two massive, muscular stallions erupted into being with an explosion of fire that caused a scream from inside the armored vehicle and a violent recoiling movement from the mind-washed tiger on top.

Killer and Alexis snickered at that, patting their mighty horses on the necks and easily mounting up into the saddles before the goddess invited the two warriors in the armoured car to lead the way. Ruin and Wrath had no difficulty following the buggy, no matter how fast it went whenever the driver stomped on the gas because spooked by the angry stallions snorting and half-charging at the vehicle. They moved up the valley towards the city of Alfaya until its great walls and towers were in sight: they were a spectacle in themselves, built as they were with huge blocks of the red stone of the desert and decorated with countless little statues tangled in scenes of combat. Unfortunately they were also completely useless, since they had received no real modernization since the ancient days of warfare. They were tall, but they were relatively thin and could not hope to stand up to the cannons of the NWOA.

The buggy did not led them into the town, however, but down a rocky slope and straight into a wadi, in other words a sort of small canyon, bed to a dried river that only filled with water during the raining season, if at all. A long stretch of the wadi had been cleverly covered with camouflage nets and with tarpaulin painted in such a way to trick the eye of observers looking down from the sky, creating a sort of safe "cave" where to hide the headquarters and other supports. The NWOA could have found them relatively easily with an accurate scansion with infra-red and thermal sensors, but evidently they hadn't enough of a suspect yet to begin such a reconnaissance effort.

Killer and Alexis galloped past a car park and a busy workshop where a number of tigers were busy modifying engines and welding stolen armor plates and simple sheets and beams of metal on top of several other dune buggies, plus some civilian excavators and even a bus which was being turned into a sort of mobile bunker armed with a multitude of rocket launchers and machine guns poking out of lateral ports. Pick up trucks were being crudely armoured, with metallic skirts hiding even the wheels and with heavy weaponry being installed on the back, and Killer even spotted a dump truck that was being converted into a rocket launcher, installing stolen NWOA artillery rockets into the dumping bed. Some solutions were ingenious, but that didn't change the fact that it was a desperate attempt, doomed to failure.

They moved past a second workshop, where three captured, badly damaged NWOA tanks were being cut into parts to be recycled, their cannons carefully craned out to be employed as anti-tank defences once crudely installed on the back of large requisitioned civilian trucks.

A couple of guards looked up with concern as Ruin and Wrath galloped past, but they did nothing, either because they knew the king was waiting for the two gods to arrive or just because of fear. The tigers in the wadi quickly moved out to the sides, giving wide berth to the two running stallions as they turned a corner, following the curves and twists of the wadi. They emerged into a field hospital horrendously crammed full with mutilated and bloodied warriors, and their hearts skipped a beat at the realization of what was truly unnerving about the scene: the silence. Unreal, unbelievable silence that was due to the warrior's courage and stubbornness: they refused to give voice to their agony and fears, no matter how intense.

And then, after a couple of checkpoints where the guards once more rapidly shrunk out of the way, cowed into submission, they reached an enormous, colorful tent held up by golden, chiseled poles.

A smaller, still luxurious tent was connected to the circus-like palace by an enclosed corridor, and a number of motorbikes were parked outside, with a few tigers in uniform waiting for orders. They were messengers ready to race out to the forward positions carrying orders that were still, for the most part, relayed directly by voice and by sealed papers. Killer spotted a number of other tigers talking nervously into cheap, commercial mobile phones which had probably been rushed into military use by the lack of appropriate, secure radios. The frustration was almost certainly due to the line being disturbed: the NWOA was certainly taking down antennas and using electronic warfare to saturate the frequencies with noise. There was nothing secure about trying to run a war through commercial phones, and Killer could only hope the warriors of Alfaya were aware that all their calls could be easily intercepted.

A pompous sign with the coat of arms of the Raja royal family proudly declared that the smaller of the two huge tents was the supreme headquarter of the field army.

The two tigers in the modified dune buggy didn't even try to go near the tent, which clearly was off limits, reserved for the rich and aristocratic generals and for the king. The two soldiers, driver included, poked their heads out of the vehicle to salute Alexis, drooling at the sight of her, and they finally drove off, looking dreamy and lost. Some of the high-ranking officers in the HQ tent glared at them from the entrance, but as soon as they looked at the mighty goddess they fell into the exact same helpless trance.

Killer and Alexis stepped off their mounts and walked directly towards the entrance to the great tent, leaving the generals staring in awe and fear, while more than one phone loudly fell to the ground. One of the guards tremblingly stepped forwards, almost physically pushed by one of the generals, and he stopped near Alexis, trying to bark the halt but only managing to produce a pathetic little whimper, before he babbled: "Queen... no, empress... no, sorry, Goddess... your majesties, the... access to the headquarters is restricted. And... and no one can carry weapons..."

Killer looked flatly down at the far smaller male, who trembled violently and instantaneously recoiled, clutching his undersized assault rifle, no doubt stolen from a killed NWOA soldier. Alexis snorted in entertainment at that, and smirked down at the puny mortal, pushing her foot slightly forwards, her open boot leaving her toes exposed, the big one adorned by ring of bone that Killer had made for her with the remains of a defeated god. Immediately, the terrified tiger fell down to his knees and crawled forwards to reverently kiss it, and all of her toes when she playfully wiggled them in a silent command.

"We are going inside, and we are keeping our weapons. And your king will better crawl out of his hiding hole really quickly. We grow bored fast." Alexis softly said, smiling, but the gentleness of her voice only made her command more powerful. The poor soldier whimpered and then loudly cried out in confirmation: "Of course, goddess. Naturally, goddess. Forgive me, goddess!"

The generals who had urged the guard forwards looked at the scene with gapes of shock and terror, but when Killer lazily turned his head towards them they hurriedly went down to all fours and crawled forwards like maggots, forming two lines and preparing to worship the two gods as they walked past.

Killer and Alexis traded a smirk, then walked forwards between them, paying no attention to the generals and soldiers as they all hurriedly craned their necks forwards to kiss at their boots and toes, whispering words of worship. The huge male hurried his step at the last moment to shove aside the flap of the tent, holding it open for his beloved goddess, and Alexis smiled at him in entertainment, walking past with the natural, seductive, irresistible sway of her hips, her long tail arching up to delicately brush under his chin. He snorted in amusement at what, ducking through the opening and letting go of the heavy tarpaulin just as the most courageous - or stupid - general began to crawl towards the entrance. The tent slapped lightly on his face, and Killer lazily looked back over his shoulder, shaking his head slowly.

The inside of the tent, as expected, was absurdly luxurious: an immense table, chiseled in solid gold, was in the middle of the room, completely covered in maps and papers and messages received from the various fronts. The table had very short legs because it was meant to be used by people sitting comfortably in the mountains of golden and red cushions piled up all around it. Even so, it looked absurdly heavy, even for the standards of tigers, and Killer made a grimace at the thought of all the energies and time wasted just to lug that piece of metal around in the middle of a war. It wasn't even the worst part, however: every single pillar in the tent's structure was a chiseled, elaborate work of art. They were, of course, golden, but Killer hoped they were actually made of wood and then covered with a thin layer of the precious, heavy metal. Silk veils and tents divided the rest of space into "offices" for the various generals and high-rank officers, which were more aristocratic friends to the kings than actual warriors. For the little Killer could see through the openings, every single cubicle was filled with huge, elaborate desks and all throne-like chairs and a lot of superfluous trinkets. The maps room itself was crowded by heavy statues depicting Cerberus in various triumphal poses and outfits, and there was a golden gong in a corner, probably kept just so the king didn't need to shout to call his servants. The only thing that had remotely sense and reason to be there was another massive table covered by a few ruggerized laptops, a couple of large sitcom radio sets, a printer and a long row of mobile phones. Apparently that was the best communications means the entire Alfaya army could muster, despite the amount of pointless gold surrounding them. And this isn't even the king's tent. I don't even want to imagine what's in there.

Females, perhaps. Alexis teasingly suggested, directly in his mind, and he snorted, grinning a bit at her as she turned towards him with her splendid sapphire eyes glinting mischievously. Unless he is a total and irremediable faggot obsessed with your cock. Which he probably is.

"Perhaps we should check, later on..." He suggested in a whisper, and she let out a little murr of delighted approval even as the cowed generals crawled inside the tent, eyes low, pushing the heavy tarpaulin aside like pets going through their little doors. They were all clad in luxurious armors, made of white plating shaped to mimic the profile of their musculature and adorned with silvery little figures on the chest. Some of them looked like actual warriors, sported some scars and had some gashes and dents on their armor, but most looked like they had come straight out of a parade. They were generals merely because many years earlier they had chosen Cerberus's gold and comfortable aristocratic titles and associated privileges over the chance of fighting the king, defeating and replacing him. Killer felt nothing but contempt for them. They had nothing of the warrior honor and ethos associated with the northlands: they were worse than the corrupt "preys" they despised.

Out of habit, Killer and Alexis walked up to the table and took a look at the map, studying the battlefield, the disposition of the troops, the latest orders and planned movements. It was all meaningless at that point, with their power so great that they could annihilate both sides plus the very battlefield itself without as much as flicking their pinkies, but they had been leaders of armies for all their life and old habits refused to die. The generals silently crawled to their places around the table, and Killer lazily looked up at them, arching an eyebrow as he realized that every one of them was supposed to stand always in same position. They literally had their own cushions, probably assigned depending on own much Cerberus liked them, and Killer found it incredibly pathetic. He only approved one fact: every last one of them was at least smart enough to wait on all fours on the rich carpets that formed the floor. None of them dared going for the comfort of the cushions without the permission of the gods... permission that was not going to arrive. Had they been warriors worth of the title, Killer would have welcomed them as peers and allowed them to stand, but they were nothing but vermin.

And finally, crawling on all fours just like his generals, came Cerberus himself, meekly squeezing under the silk curtains closing the corridor that connected the HQ to the king's palace-like tent. Cerberus wore a whole new set of luxurious armor and clothes, very similar to those he had worn earlier in front of the camera, but new. He creamed his pants front and rear at the sight of your cock. For once he had an actual reason to order new clothes made for him. Alexis commented in Killer's mind, and the god snorted in entertainment. That little sound was enough to make Cerberus shudder visibly as he crawled slowly up to his own, oversized, golden cushion, looking at it almost with longing for a brief instant before kneeling on the floor, trying to make himself as small as possible. Alexis, however, turned slowly around to look down at him like he was a particularly ugly bug, and he scrambled forwards with a whimper of terror, rushing to her boot to lick the dust and sand off it before reverently kissing her toes, one by one, before he choked audibly, sobbing breathlessly as he moved over to Killer's own feet, beginning to polish the heavy black boots with his tongue. "Hello, fuckrag. You finally found the guts to crawl out of your hole...?" Killer softly asked, smirking as Cerberus groaned, tearing his tongue apart over the sharp, cruel ridges of the overlapping black metal plates covering Killer's toes, but he only took longer licks, venturing between the almighty toes. "Worthless dreg..." Killer contemptibly commented when Cerberus moved on to his other boot, before pulling up his heavy foot to settle it down on the tiger's back, crushing him flat against the ground. Cerberus whimpered miserably, like a needy pet, sniffing loudly at the air made thick and heavy by Killer's rich, formidable scent of pure, almighty maleness, and Killer snickered and teased: "Sniff harder, bitch."

Cerberus did just that, without hesitation, crying out weakly under the weight of Killer's huge foot, and the generals meekly watched on, gaping in shock while the huge god idly wiped clean first one sole and then the other, ripping Cerberus's expensive armor and clothes into shreds and drawing blood as some large bangs of fur were torn off the king's body. "Maybe you can have some usefulness as a bedside rug." Killer idly commented, grinding the cruel, spiked sole of his boot into Cerberus's flesh while the tiger whimpered and cried weakly, whispering words of thanks and praise, his eyes sparkling and filling with tears as he gazed upwards at the towering goliath. Killer ignored him for a moment, even while knowing all too well that Cerberus was gazing straight up at the leather loincloth that struggled to hide his titanic cock, and instead he studied the map before stepping off Cerberus's back only to kick him lightly in the side, rolling him over. "So, what have you been doing? Where is the rest of your army?"

"We... we achieved a glorious victory!" Cerberus squeaked, propping himself up with his elbows and trying to look a little bit less miserable as he smirked and added: "When they tried to push through the defences in the valley we hit them hard, and they ran away like the cowardly preys they are."

Alexis and Killer traded a gaze filled something that was almost pity for the deluded king's stupidity. "We saw the leftovers of the battle. It was little more than a reconnaissance in force." Alexis coldly replied, tapping her finger on the map. "Definitely not what a three army groups worth of armoured divisions look like when they attack for real."

"We wore their forces down!" Cerberus protested, slamming a fist on the carpeted floor as he added: "Every meter of my kingdom I had to give up, I made them pay a huge price for!"

Alexis snorted derisively at that, knowing full well that despite the best efforts of Alfaya's valorous warriors the actual losses inflicted to the NWOA were far from decisive. Had Alfaya been half as successful as Cerberus liked to believe, they wouldn't have been repealed all the way back to the gates of the capital. "You did nothing at all, apart from hiding." Alexis mercilessly reminded, before looking at the generals as well as she added: "Some of your warriors fought like true heroes; honor to them. But you are firmly on the losing side of the war, and the NWOA's divisions are still healthy."

"Then where are they?" Cerberus squealed, looking triumphantly up at her, smirking as if challenging her to find a counter to that argument... and Alexis gazed flatly back at him, shaking her head slowly. "That, you idiot, is something you should know, but of course you failed to give your army any effective system for reconnaissance of the battlefield. The NWOA pulled back away from your sight and you immediately wetted your pants thinking you had won, haven't you...?"

"We pursued the retreating NWOA and hit them with everything we had. We've pushed them back more than forty miles." One of the generals proudly announced, but he was one of the ones with the new, immaculate armors that had probably never been used on the actual battlefield, and the evident unease on the faces of the few true, scarred warriors around the table was pretty telling.

"The NWOA's infantry retreated on top of this hill and dug trenches to maintain the position, but we charged up the slope and tore them apart. The survivors fled into the desert!" Another young general said, crawling forwards on his knees to lean over the map and point at the vast ridge at the edge of the endless, unforgiving desert to the east of the capital. The ridge was a low group of hills stretching north to south with a front of around eight kilometers, and an altitude that didn't go past the three hundred meters at best. They sloped gently towards the desert, while the side that the tigers of Alfaya had frontally assaulted was far steeper, reason why it made sense for the NWOA to fortify it. The "hills" had nothing impressive around them in general terms, but they were by far the highest ground feature in the entire area, since the desert's dunes were at most dozens of meters tall, depending on how the wind toyed with the rust-colored sand. "They tried to turn the ridge into a fortress, and to direct their artillery from up there, but it only took us six hours to kick them out of their trenches."

"And none of you poor idiots realized you were just charging right into a trap?" Alexis idly asked, arching an eyebrow as the gazed at every one of them with contempt. "They offered you a target pretending that it had any value to them and you rushed right there, massing up exactly where they want to have you."

They looked surprised, staring at her in confusion, until Cerberus dumbly countered: "No one would ever willingly give up the high ground and the advantages it gives!"

Alexis snorted in contempt at that, muttering: "That's how a last-minute wannabe strategist reasons." She traded a look with Killer, and he smiled and gestured with his hand to proceed. She stepped forwards and pointed to a complex network of wadis to the north-west of the ridge, stating firmly: "You don't have the exclusive on camouflage and clever use of wadis. That's where the NWOA is hiding its tanks and its depots of ammunition. And the rest of their divisions are probably hiding in reverse slope behind the dunes, just outside of your field of view. All they have allowed you to conquer is a little trench, not even deep enough to be of any use to your warriors." She pointed at the map, making them notice how gentle the slope of the hill was on the side looking out over the desert, and how flat, open ground essentially surrounded the entire group of hills, making it look almost like an island in the middle of a sea of sand. "Your troops have their backs to an almost vertical cliff and their front to a gentle slope that the NWOA's tanks will have no trouble climbing. Even if your warriors manage to get off the ridge in time, they will have to walk forty miles back to the crude oil trenches here in the valley, which are the only line of defence they have a little chance of successfully holding. And every step of the way they will enjoy no cover and no protection from the enemy tanks sweeping in from either side of the ridge. They'll be bombarded by the artillery from start to finish, caught in the middle of two armoured assaults and annihilated".

One general, older and scarred, an actual warrior, nodded in sad agreement while the others looked dumbly at the map, unable to find any good counter to what she had just forced them to see.

Cerberus seemed lost for a long few moments, as if unable to grasp the implications of what he had just heard, before he squealed: "My... my army...! All will be lost! You have to help me! You have to bring my army out of there!"

"You are not the one who gives orders. And your girly squeaks are aggravating me." Killer muttered, and when Cerberus curled up on his knees to beg he immediately silenced him by adding: "Shut up. It is not the NWOA that should worry you: when the time comes I will crush them all out of existence. But I have yet to decide whether I should first stomp you into a stain like the bug you are."

"My almighty God, my emperor... I swear... I don't know, I do not have the answers you seek..." Cerberus whined, bowing his head down all the way until his forehead touched the floor.

Killer snorted in contempt at that, hating Cerberus and increasingly disturbed by how impenetrable his mind was proving to be, as Alexis hissed in frustration and held up one hand, smirking as a heavy steel collar clamped shut around the tiger's throat and a sturdy leather leash extended from it to her fingers. She yanked lightly on it, dragging Cerberus across the room, his face grinding into the carpets that completely covered the floor of the tent as she easily commented: "We'll see, little bitch. We'll see. Now we shall go out for walkies. It's about time you experienced an actual battlefield in person, rather than just through your fantasies."

The generals looked startled at that rough, humiliating treatment of their king, but they didn't dare moving... and Killer actually spotted some relief on their faces while he and Alexis began to teleport away from the tent, carrying Cerberus away. He had no doubt that Cerberus would have ordered some or all of his generals executed, otherwise. Certainly he would have blamed his arrogant and brash young generals for leading the army right into a trap, no matter how he had enthusiastically encouraged them to do exactly that. He would also probably have ordered the death of the few generals who had warned him, though, just because of the humiliation of discovering that they were right and he was wrong.

Instead, Cerberus awkwardly landed into the hot red sand of the desert, his arms failing to catch him in time to avoid his face crashing into the soft dune, startling him and sending him scampering backwards, spluttering out sand and dust. They stood on top of the northern extremity of the ridge, closer to the wadis that, without a doubt, the NWOA was exploiting to hide much of its mechanized strike force. The trenches that the warriors of Alfaya had conquered were, of course, too far back on top of the hills to be of any real use: they were on the wrong side of the slope, so soldiers hiding inside them had no visibility over the desert ahead, where the enemy was preparing its next move. And it was way too small to be of any use for tigers in general: it was a simple furrow, almost too small to serve even the much smaller southerners that made up the NWOA's force. How could anyone genuinely believe that such a position was important in any way, and how could an army rush forwards to conquer it, taking heavy losses, was something that Killer and Alexis could not even imagine. They were warriors in every sense of the world: they had the muscles but they also had the brains. They knew the art of war and the art of the possible. They knew what the war machines of the NWOA could and could not do, so for them the trap was almost painfully obvious... but the generals of Alfaya still reasoned purely in terms of spears and swords, and the high ground, of course, to them was always a key tactical advantage. Everything else, they were oblivious to.

Some of Alfaya's warriors looked up in shock at the crackling sound of Killer and Alexis teleporting in, and they fell on their knees with expressions of awe and terror, bowing deeply before the mighty divinities. It took them a while to notice that their king was there as well, on all fours and leashed like a feral dog, and if they even cared at all about it, they did not show it. No one made a move to help him or acknowledge him in any way. The warriors were busy digging deep holes and trenches on the side of the ridge looking towards the enemy, even though the sun above, not hidden by clouds of smoke, hammered viciously on their skulls. The enemy artillery thundered monotonously in the distance, tormenting them with a steady stream of small barrages that targeted now this, now that segment of the ridge, forcing the tigers to dive for whatever little bit of hard cover was available. Digging trenches was one of many things that tigers had, for centuries, considered dishonorable and pointless: for tigers, war was a clash of brains and of muscle. Quick, brutal, loyal and definitive. Of course, when the "preys" had started developing weapons that eroded the value of the tigers' physical supremacy, some changes had been inevitable... but not in Alfaya. The warriors of the desert were only now coming to terms with the cruel reality, learning it all in a bloody and accelerated course. Digging foxholes and trenches continued to be something they loathed, but it was also the only action that had a chance of saving their lives from the NWOA's constant bombardment. Every tiger warrior now carried a shovel into battle.

Cerberus whined weakly as the sinister whistle of incoming artillery shells became louder and louder, heading straight for their corner of the ridge, and the tigers on their knees ahead of Killer and Alexis trembled but did not dare moving. The gods were far more dangerous than even the incoming shells.

Alexis and Killer traded an amused gaze because of it, but before it was too late Alexis mercifully turned towards the cowering mortals and flatly commented: "Well? Are you eager to die? Hide already!"

The warriors immediately and gratefully leapt into their half-finished trenches and curled up as best they could, but when Cerberus tried to scamper towards a large rock sticking out of the sand, Alexis yanked hard back on the leash with a snort of contempt. In the same moment, the massive shells exploded in midair, a few meters above the ground, hurling deadly, incandescent shrapnel in every direction, the large pieces of sharp metal smashing into the ground sending up clouds of dust and dirt while someone screamed in agony from a distant foxhole, and Cerberus let out a squeal of pure terror, hiding behind Alexis's formidable, muscular leg... before realizing that the slivers of metal dissolved harmlessly in midair well before they could disturb the two gods in any way.

"You... you are invincible..." Cerberus whispered, shuddering in awe and admiration and excitement, looking up at the two titans with reverence, with envy, with utter adoration. Alexis and Killer traded a little smirk at that, and the goddess idly flexed her powerful thigh, causing her monumental quads to bulge in full, epic definition. "You poor little thing, so easily amazed..." She teased, before grinning as Cerberus moaned in lust and uncontrollable pleasure, stains appearing on the crotch of his pants as he lost control in front of her beauty and power and incredible strength. She laughed cruelly at that, mocking him as she pushed lightly into Killer's side, languidly stroking a hand down his formidable abs before tugging suggestively at the thick, sturdy bangs of curling hair that went up in a thick line from his crotch to his navel. She leaned back against Killer and idly flexed her musculature, grinning as Cerberus gulped and sweat streaked down the sides of his head, his eyes open wide to admire her beauty and power and perfection... and there, on her glorious thigh, was the blood-red tattoo that simultaneously aroused and crushed every boy admiring her glory: KO, Killer Owned. Cerberus whimpered pathetically at the sight of it, and Alexis only grinned wider, flexing her muscles just to make it stand out all the more while her hand slowly stroked down the telling length of Killer's groin armor.

Killer snorted in entertainment at the sight of the look of fearful awe on Cerberus's face, but then he looked up and gazed towards the south, in the hope of spotting something, anything at all which might give them a clue of some sort about what they were walking into. The barren top of the ridge, however, did not offer any interesting sight and did not reveal anything useful: there were only sand, rocks, some razor wire that the NWOA had put up more to make their bait more believable than as part of effective plans for defence of the position, and nothing else. How were they going to make Cerberus talk and reveal his secrets? Had they imagined everything?

They could wait for the NWOA's tanks to rush en masse up along the gentle slope that went down from the top of the ridge to the desert below, and use fear... or they could use him like a toy, and overwhelm his body and his mind with their sheer power, with their otherworldly dominance. Alexis tilted her head backwards and looked invertedly up at him, smirking slightly: it was clear what option she favored, and for once Killer didn't felt like denying her the fun. He nodded almost imperceptibly, and she grinned as she felt him tensing slightly, his huge muscles flexing and bulging with power and merciless eagerness at the thought of turning an entire army into nothing but bloody pulp and dust.

"Would you like to come along, pet...?" Alexis teased, idly yanking on the leash and dragging Cerberus in the dirt. "Would you like to watch as we stomp the NWOA out of its misery, little cuck?"

Cerberus shuddered visibly, delighted and terrified in equal measure by the "proposal", and he looked up with a groan. His eyes studied the horizon for a moment, with an expression that Killer couldn't quite read: there was fear, that was definite, but there was something else he couldn't quite identify. Impatience, maybe...? Part of him thought that Cerberus was waiting for something. The king of Alfaya was clearly scared, it was no fiction, but he seemed also frustrated, as if something he had planned out wasn't quite going in the way he had expected. As if something was late on arrival.

"What is it, bitch...? Scared?" Alexis taunted, but what she really wanted was for Cerberus to betray himself in some, in any way. "You only have to be afraid of us. No one hurts our toys but us." The goddess added, and she effortlessly gripped the leash and hefted Cerberus clear off the ground, making him cry out in shock and pain, clawing uselessly at his collar and kicking at the air as she dangled him slowly like a hanged man. "No one... no one but you, my gods... nobody compares!" Cerberus spluttered, and Alexis unceremoniously dropped him into the dirt, narrowing her eyes as she studied his reactions... but the tiger, as if sensing their suspects, hurriedly scampered towards her boot and kissed her high stiletto heel, eagerly crying out: "I'd love to come, my goddess! I'm not worthy, but there is nothing I'd like more than to admire your strength in action!"

Killer snorted in a mix of amusement and irritation at that, loving how low Cerberus was forced to crawl but at the same time feeling like he was still, even from down in the dirt, playing with them, denying them the information they craved, keeping them in the uncertainty that they hated. And so he reached down for the buckles of his belts, undoing them and dropping the heavy plate of armor, shoving the leather out of the way to reveal his monstrously massive black shaft, grinning darkly at the sight of Cerberus's eyes going wide with shock and panic and envy, his lower jaw dropping in disbelief. Killer's massive, yet still fully flaccid cock swung ponderously back and forth, an impossible length and girth looming over Cerberus and making him feel truly helpless as Killer towered above him, his monstrous member pulsing, lined with thick veins across dark flesh, over monumental balls. "That's the first thing you say that actually makes sense, bitch. You are not worthy. Useless fuckrags like you aren't even good as toilet paper..." Killer reached down and squeezed into his colossal member, demonstrating how, even while flaccid, it was harder than steel, hefting the gigantic member up and stroking himself idly, pulling back just enough to make the thick foreskin slurp back from the huge, flanged head. "I am your Master. I am your God. Being my slave is an honor and a blessing you do not deserve".

"It's true... I... I am nothing before you... not even dirt..." Cerberus whimpered, staring at the titanic black shaft with wide, shocked eyes, tears rolling down his cheeks as he attempted to move backwards, away from him... but instead only fell forwards on all fours, whining weakly as Alexis grinned and seized the monster cock in both hands, squeezing almost viciously into it yet only getting Killer to rumble in pleasure and approval. "Watch, vermin..." Alexis softly commanded, and she slowly stroked up along the titanic shaft, right up to the fat, huge head, scooping up a thick, dark substance that coated her fingers and accumulated the further up she went. "Watch in awe at this... mere sweat... more powerful, more fertile, more unforgiving than the semen of all previous gods of fertility put together." Alexis growled, revealing how the immense cock was already slimy with thick, dark, corruptive and addicting fluid that reeked of spectacular, unmatched virility and had the consistence almost of tar, full as it was of gigantic, almighty sperms. "This is the nectar that enslaved Heaven. If Heaven could do nothing against just his sweat, where does that leave you...?"

Cerberus shivered violently at that, whimpering weakly and looking up in awe and fear as killer snorted in contempt and grasped the base of his cock, swinging it lightly so that the top of the monstrous shaft slapped the ruined kind across the face: it struck him with a thick, meaty thud and enough force to break his muzzle, blood spurting from Cerberus's nose as he recoiled in shock and agony, but before he could go anywhere Killer mockingly took his feet under one of his own and pinned him in place like a toy, and he spread his legs slightly wider, leaning back a little and resting his hands on his hips as Alexis eagerly aimed the colossal cock for him, grinning widely as she pulled back the thick foreskin. "Open up your mouth, bitch, and don't you dare wasting a drop. If it drowns you, and it is likely, be thankful for it: it's an honor you don't deserve. An honor that whores would kill their own families and children a hundred times over for." The goddess mercilessly taunted, before licking her lips as she felt the surge of hot fluid in the enormous channel of Killer's shaft. It erupted a moment later, a huge spray of incandescent, golden piss blasting out and splashing right into Cerberus's mouth, immediately making him choke hard, gargling and coughing as the thick fluid flooded down his throat and filled his jaws, overflowing out over his chest. "Swallow, bitch! Gulp it down!" Alexis cruelly teased, but no matter how he tried, Cerberus could not possibly deal with the thick jet and with the massive throw-away sperms in the rich fluid, so she laughed and angled the massive cock to hose him down with the reeking essence of masculine power, strafing down to his crotch, making him wince in humiliation and pain at the heat and acid force of the fluid.

Alexis shook every last heavy, large drop off the great shaft, grinning down at the miserable, humiliated king spluttering and choking on the ground in front of them, and then she grinned as the huge male flexed his hulking musculature and arched his back with a lazy growl, his form immediately growing. Cerberus squealed in shock, crawling backwards as Killer's large toes became enormous, pushing towards him and threatening to crush him like a bug as the god more than doubled in size, and then grew again, doubling his height again, massive muscles bulging outwards immensely as his whole body thrummed with power, his head tilting back with a grin. Alexis admired him for a moment, then closed her eyes and growled a bit, hungrily, eagerly... and when her eyes opened again she towered over the world, matching her lover's new sizes and flexing her own glorious muscles before slowly squatting down over Cerberus, dwarfing him and casting him whole into the murderous shadow projected by her mighty legs. He didn't even attempt to flee, petrified by the sight of her, and she plucked him up like a toy, dropping him on top of her big toe before straightening, easily recommending: "You'll better hold on real tight, bitch-boy."

Cerberus leaned down against her toe, half-hugging it as best he could and trying to brace himself, his hands reverently massaging her digit even as he gulped in fear and leaned sideway to look down past the edge of her perfect talon. "Oh, my gods... my mistress... you are so glorious... show me! Let me admire you... from here... as your steps break the world..."

Killer and Alexis rumbled in amusement, trading a grin as they walked forwards into the desert, crushing the soft dunes into deep craters, the tremendous heat turning the sand into magma and then obsidian as they advanced towards the wadis. Unsurprisingly, the NWOA frantically opened fire: in the distance, the sky filled with flashes of light as hundreds of heavy artillery pieces that had been hidden behind tall dunes to create an illusion of weakness now were fired all together, throwing barrage after barrage up against the two gods. It was entirely useless: their attack went completely unnoticed as the heavy shells were incinerated and dissolved in midair, long before having any chance of touching the two lovers, who only laughed darkly as they realized once more how far above mortals they stood. In any instant, without needing to even just flick a finger, they could have annihilated them utterly and completely and there was nothing the NWOA could do about it. The soldiers realized it too, and their shrieks of denial and despair rose high enough that Killer and Alexis could hear them clearly, as well as hear their desperate prayers as they groveled in the dirt and begged for mercy. The NWOA members begged Killer to let them go, prayed him to be merciful, even to side with them against Cerberus in what they thought would be an act of justice... but all their prayers only added to the dark amusement of the two lovers, who grinned mockingly down at them and continued to leisurely stroll forwards. The tens of thousands of NWOA soldiers were bounced into the air like toys as the ground rattled with every step of the two gods, more and more violently as they got closer and closer, and they cried and whined hopelessly before recoiling in agony, blood exploding out of their nostrils, mouths and ears when Alexis's voice resounded inside and outside of their minds, booming over the world, more powerful than all thunder, as she callously remarked: "Insects and toys and weaklings.. that's all you are." Her eyes glowed solid sapphire and energy crackled audibly around her, reality shivering in fear of her terrifying psychic abilities before the thousands of artillery shells shooting through the sky absurdly ground to a dead stop, floating impossibly in the air as the soldiers whimpered and stared, pissing themselves in terror as the shells slowly spun tip-down, seeming to glare down at them as Alexis smirked and mockingly remarked: "I already won. I can kill every last one of you with your own weapons..." She closed her eyes as she allowed the shells to rain down to earth, and she grinned as countless screams combined in a single, loud, high-pitched whine of misery... before she sent the shells flying away from the NWOA tank parks, allowing the terrified mortals to live and stare in disbelief as the bombs exploded all around them, forming a ring of fire that claimed not a single life, but left every last one of them painfully aware of how utterly doomed they were. "But this is too easy. Too fast. Boring." Alexis taunted, and she slowly licked her muzzle while effortlessly lifting every last enemy soldier and tank and vehicle clear off the ground, hefting them high up into the sky, out of their hiding holes, so that what had looked like more or less an empty, dead desert suddenly revealed tens of thousands of tiny, powerless creatures that trashed and shrieked uselessly in midair, staring at her with eyes wide with panic and, at the same time, adoration and arousal and lust, their hearts racing violently as they looked over her spectacular body. "Yes... take a look at what you will never have, worthless vermin..." Alexis softly commented, smirking as she felt their craving, their arousal, their pitiful energies burning bright as their hips bucked wildly, their backs arching as they shuddered and helplessly came, their orgasms soaking their pants as their eyes glowed with blank, brain-dead light. "Yes... worship your goddess..." Alexis taunted, before grinning, revealing her perfect fangs as she inspired lightly through her teeth, and every last man and woman howled in delirious, painful ecstasy as orgasm after violent orgasm tore through their bodies, draining them until they had not another drop to give, even as their cock flexed so hard they bled and their vaginas clenched hard enough to tear themselves apart. Within a moment, their bodies began to wither and decay, muscles deflating and flesh vanishing away, leaving behind little more than skin hanging from skeletons that rapidly became frail, the bones flaking and almost falling away to dust as even the screams died down, the lungs shrinking and decaying, the forces becoming too insignificant to even give voice to the agony. Alexis smirked cruelly, tasting their energies for a moment before idly breathing air out of her mouth, allowing all vital forces to return to their barely alive owners, rapidly restoring the bodies that had been on the point of falling away into clouds of dust. "You are so weak... you puny fleas..." Alexis mercilessly commented, and she allowed the huge cloud of floating mortals and combat vehicles to descend back to earth, letting them fall the last few meters of the way, the soldiers crying and shouting as they crashed on top of each other and hurriedly rolled out of the way of falling tanks and trucks and jeeps and artillery pieces, shivering when thousands of tons of military hardware smacked hard into the ground, half-sinking into the sand, looking pathetic and miserable. Not everyone was able to get out of the way quickly enough, and blood sprayed out in sick red waves, the sick wet crunches audible even by the two titanic gods. "It is so easy... you useless bugs..." The empress callously commented, making a grimace before contemptibly spitting towards one of the wadis, and that meteor of saliva tore through the sky before hammering down into the shallow canyon, killing countless soldiers and sending limbs and bloody pieces flying in every direction, several tanks crushed out of shape by the weight of her drool alone, more of them washed away like toys and sent spinning wildly until they crashed into the steep wall of stone and sediments, crushing soldiers into splatters of crimson. The goddess laughed darkly as her spit crumbled the stone walls on either side and sent rocks and debris smashing down onto the powerless mortals, burying them alive while her drool flooded the canyon in either direction with acidic, hot death. She flexed idly, bringing her arms up behind her head, showing off her glorious musculature and turning lazily to the side to kill the peak of her enormous bicep while the powerless mortals stared in awe and did what little they could to try and resist, to oppose the cruel whims of the two divinities. Artillery opened fire again, disorderly, frantically, as every gun crew just focused on firing again and again and again, the barrels of the great howitzers smoldering and then beginning to literally glow. Killer and Alexis traded a grin and then looked down at Cerberus, who pathetically clung on to her big toe, his feet nestled under the first strap of her boot as he did his best not to be flung all the way to the moon with each and every one of her steps.

"I love having an audience." Alexis teasingly said, and Killer laughed, grinning down at the microscopic, terrified slave-king, teasingly asking: "Enjoying the show, little bitch? Do you hear them screaming for us, useless gnat? Do you hear their prayers? Their shrieks?"

"I do, I do...!" Cerberus screamed at the top of his lungs, panting harshly, his hands moving constantly over Alexis's toe, stroking, caressing, worshipping her as best he could, aware that she could barely even feel his presence at all, but unable to resist: she deserved the praise. He couldn't help but buck his hips, hugging her toe and groaning as he felt his cock flex and tense painfully, trying to spill out semen he no longer had, his body completely drained and yet burning with lust, with pleasure, with need.

"Make that claw shine, bitch-boy! Show me that you have some use!" Alexis commanded, and Cerberus whimpered and began to lick at her spectacular, long talon even as her foot rose into the sky, the size difference making him feel like he had been shot towards deep space as air roared in his ears and pushed down against his back, the gravity force crushing him all the harder into the invincible claw... before her foot began to settle, and the air now rushed upwards hard enough to make him slip down her toe, nearly blown off like nothing but a speck of dirt. Which was what he was, anyway, and what he felt like as a tall cliff of red stone filled his vision and he ducked, pressing his face against the mighty toe and shutting his mouth, but not his eyes, as the goddess's foot erased the great block of stone like it was just a pile of flour, the dust blowing in his face and making him choke, making his eyes fill with tears... but he had to watch, he needed to see every moment of that glorious stroll, as the NWOA desperately fought back, firing with every cannon, with every rifle, every gun, as the wadis came into sight, filled with tanks and infantry fighting vehicles parked up in rows. What had been an orderly camp, well concealed under camouflage nets, was now an inferno of confusion, with the vehicles scattered over the remains of tents and refuges, and some tanks had landed on top of other tanks as well. Countless soldiers swarmed disorderly around the vehicles, hurrying into the tanks, cramming full every armoured carrier they could reach, as if those tiny metal boxes could protect them in any way... and all their efforts went unheeded, are unimportant, unable to even throw dust upon the two lovers as every shell and missile just burned out in midair, exploding and dissolving long before touching the gods.

"This is it, worthless dregs... Watch in awe at this..." Alexis taunted as she reached down to grasp Killer's monstrous member and she hefted it, grinning as she idly stroked the veiny shaft and then swung it playfully in the palm of her other hand, once, twice, thrice, each meaty thwack booming like thunder over the desert, drowning out the sound of hundreds of cannons firing, of thousands of engines roaring and revving up as the entire army broke and attempted to turn around and make a run for it... even though they all knew there was nowhere to go. Killer growled in amusement and leaned back slightly, his massive, still-flaccid cock giving an immense throb in her hands, his gigantic length flexing and visibly, obscenely swelling even larger, forcing her hands and fingers apart and growing longer as well, by more than one of her hands could cradle. She hefted the titanic member up with a grin, slapping it between her spectacular breasts and bending forwards slightly to kiss the fat, colossal head, wrapping her long, forked tongue around it and suckling loudly, hungrily, slurping on the thick hypermasculine slime. Killer rested his hands on his hips and looked down at the vast armada of mortals with contempt, grimacing as if they were vermin deserving nothing but annihilation, and he callously observed: "I could crush you all beneath my cock. Destroy you under my balls. Rape every being here until there is nothing left but pulp and crimson sand..."

He paused, allowing his booming, thunderous voice to crush every mortal into sheer terror, before smirking as he added: "But that would be too quick, too easy, too boring."

Alexis slowly ran one hand up along his gigantic shaft, grinning as the thick dark slime of sweat and lubricant fluids coated her fingers, streaking down the back of her hand as she pulled it up and licked the dark stuff off with a murr of delight... before she easily flicked first one finger, then the other, and the other, sending huge drops flying like meteors, shooting past the wadis and striking the artillery positions further away. And the drops of sweat alone were so heavy, so big, so powerful that they tore through dunes and several cliffs and rocks before slamming into the ground, crushing the self-propelled artillery pieces into unrecognizable wreckage, squishing the gunners into little crimson stains and disintegrating the trucks loaded with pallets upon pallets of shells and launch charges, floods of cockslime rushing over and through entire regiments of armoured artillery in veritable tsunamis of hypervirile fluid that half-melted, half-crushed the tank-like artillery pieces, washing them away like toys. But worse still were the huge throw-away sperms, bigger than sharks, that rapidly, vigorously swam and tore their way through the vehicles and the piles of ammunition, propelling themselves with spiked, muscular tails that whip-lashed even through steel, crushing every life they come across. "Fuck, yes..." Killer commented, grinning predatorily as he let his head fall back, wrapping an arm around her waist and squeezing into her solid, perfect buttock while she hungrily pumped the titanic member, licking her lips at the loud squelching of hypervirile fluids as her hands became caked with the dark stuff and huge drops smashed down to earth like comets, crushing countless lives into pulp that was then rapidly dissolved by the incandescent, masculine slime, leaving behind no remain, like they had never been there at all, erasing them like they had no right to exist. His omnipotent cock throbbed almost ferociously and swelled even further, bouncing vigorously up as it hardened and grew, casting a murderous shadow over thousands upon thousands of helpless mortals who shrieked and shoved each other away in the futile attempt to run away, to get to a safety that was completely illusory, to a shelter that could never exist against gods who could have destroyed the entire planet with utter, terrifying ease. Many among the NWOA soldiers realized it and understood that they had no hope, no chance, and they trembled and dropped to their knees before him, crying, whimpering, begging for the gods to be merciful, shrieking their prayers and apologies while they pissed themselves in terror, and orgasmed in helpless awe, crawling forwards through the dirt even as countless others stupidly ran in the opposite direction, shrieking and clawing, pushing and shoving and kicking through the crowd, unable to get anywhere but desperately, insanely struggling all the same, mercilessly trampling those who fell and couldn't defend themselves. The narrow confines of the wadis, that had hidden the army and kept it safe, now walled in thousands of terrified souls, and those who attempted to climb up the almost vertical walls of gravel and stone ruined their fingers and nails but ultimately fell back down into the inferno as the frail hillside crumbled and rushed down in small and large landslides. Even the generals, who had led the armada deep into Alfaya promising the toppling of the thrones of tigers, stumbled and fell, groveling in the dirt at the sight of the titan, who didn't so much as turn to gaze down at the tens of thousands of screaming mortals as Alexis two-fistedly stroked his gigantic cock and grinned, openly taunting: "We will take it slow with you maggots...we will start slow, and we will drag it out... give you time to panic, to cry, to despair..."

The mortals trembled helplessly under the crushing weight of her words, realizing that they were nothing but toys, that what was left of their existences was entirely in the hands of the two lovers as Killer stepped forwards, smirking as he went for the first wadi in line, murring in dark delight as he slowly settled it down upon a group of howling mortals, reducing them to nothing but bloody pulp and turning a tank into nothing but a flattened piece of metal, like a discarded tin can.

The NWOA soldiers shrieked as the huge foot, sporting cruel, terrible toe-claws made all the more terrible by the segmented plates of dark metal covering them, slowly and deliberately rushed down against them, but there was nothing they could do to stop it, even as those near the edge of the murderous shadow howled and roared and shouldered the other unlucky souls ahead, trying to smash their ways through the crowd. There was a terrible, sick sound of crunching bones and squishing organs, and the screaming of metal as vehicles were flattened like toys, and then those who were running away were racked hard by the settling of the immense talons and strong toes. Dozens of bodies were sent flying like bloody comets above the heads of the others crammed in the narrow wadi, crashing hundreds of feet away, blood and torn limbs raining down over the crowd. Killer laughed as he moved another lazy step, and his foot came down slowly but as inexorably as death itself, settling upon a large group of soldiers knocked flat by his first movement: there was a sickening, loud crack which abruptly ended the shrieks of terror, and a thick splatter of blood and gore burst out from under the mighty toes and up through them as the warriors were crushed like bugs, the skulls shattered to dust, the bodies bursting apart from the pressure in a ugly stain of red gore and blood. Killer didn't even notice, walking onwards like nothing had happened at all, the behemoth too powerful to care for the bugs around him. Bugs got caught underfoot at times, it was normal. They should have been careful. They should have watched his step for their own good.

Alexis grinned as she strolled easily forwards, settling one boot down into another wadi, tilting her head slightly backwards as she licked her lips as she heard and felt the wet crackling and squelching of helpless bodies caught under her boot, her heel spearing right through a battle tank, tearing its armor like it was paper, while bullets and rockets and tank shells smacked uselessly against the solid wall of energy radiating out of her spectacular form. Cerberus trembled in terror, shuddering and shrinking in his shoulders whenever a missile exploded harmlessly ahead of her foot, and he shivered seeing the massive armor-piercing darts fired by the tanks ahead slam into an invisible but solid wall of her immense, godlike force, bouncing back in a hail of useless fragments. "Yeah... we don't want to rush. We have all the time we desire. Try to be good sports and amuse us." The goddess softly said, and it was the most terrifying sound the NWOA soldiers had ever heard... at least until she cruelly laughed and idly flicked her finger, and the people that had been just been squashed by Killer's boot reformed, brought forcefully back to life to stand, terrified and confused, in the middle of a deep, immense footprint, surrounded by unrecognizable wreckage and wallowing into ugly lakes of blood and gore that had been their original bodies until moments before. She smirked at the result of her little experiment, and she clenched her hand into a fist as she softly said: "Not even death will save you from us."

The group of newly revived soldiers shrieked in denial and horror, the men scampering pathetically out of the lake of gore, desperately trying to climb out of the deep footprint only to slide back down to the bottom, sinking in the messy, crimson mud formed by sand, dust and blood. Alexis gazed at their efforts for a few moments, then pushed her foot forward, tilting the tip of her boot downwards and wiggling her exposed toes, stretching the big one forth. Cerberus let out a shriek of panic, sliding down the great toe and barely managing to claw into her boot's strap not to fall to the earth, his eyes opening painfully wide as he looked down while she singled out the terrified soldiers, using her big toe to crush them one by one deep into the crimson, macabre mud, stroking a hand idly down her spectacular abs and snickering as the soldiers shrieked and pathetically struggled, pushing back against her toe... "Gotta give you some hope... you are more fun when you still dare dreaming of surviving..." Alexis taunted, holding her toe up that little that was necessary to keep the terrified soldiers shrieking and trashing, their arms trembling as they pushed up with every ounce of their strength, the bones in their hands shattered as their pathetically weak and tiny fists hammered uselessly against her toe... until she grew bored and she pressed down, crushing them deep into the hard, solid ground beneath and crumpling them into nothing but pulp that bubbled up disgustingly around her toe as she planted them like seeds, one by one. "Ultimately, you are nothing but insignificant dust mites." Alexis sentenced, wiggling her bloodstained toe to send blood and gore raining down on the crowd, while Cerberus squealed pathetically and braced as best he could, his body burning with helpless awe and lust as he shrieked: "Yes, Mistress! Yes, Goddess! You are glorious! Invincible! You are the best!"

Alexis snickered at that, spotting a tiny general who was sprinting away, leaping up on top of a tank and running over its turret to try and get past the traffic jam of vehicles and terrified soldiers, and she grinned as she easily pushed her foot in his direction, stabbing her talon into his back and piercing him from side to side in a thick splatter of blood and gore, the front of his body bursting open as the perfect claw tore neatly through. Cerberus squeaked in a mix of terror and arousal as the blood of the large bull in four-stars uniform exploded all over him, the corpse impaled so deeply by her talon that what was left of him slid down all the way to smack wetly into her toe, the head dangling forwards lifelessly, frozen in a silent shriek of anguish. "You are incredible, Mistress!"

"Shut up and paint my claws crimson, bitch." Alexis easily commanded, smirking as she stepped over another large group of crying soldiers, grinding them out of existence as she twisted her foot over them like she was shutting the butt of a cigarette. "There should be plenty of paint you can use".

Down below, the terrified soldiers turned around with a look of shock as a tank crew completely lost it and rushed forwards, running straight into the crowd, the driver's face hard and desperate as he poked out of his hatch and yelled for the crowd to get out of his way. But there was no space, and several soldiers ended up crushed under the heavy tracks, their blood splattering up on those that somehow managed to get out of the way. The soldiers around screamed and howled and roared insults and curses, but it was immediately clear that the driver wasn't going to listen, and someone shot towards him, but missed as the small guy ducked inside and locked his armoured hatch, stomping on the gas and charging right into the hellish tangle of bodies ahead of him.

"Oh, no, you don't." Killer easily said, grinning as he let his foot come down on top of the dashing tank, almost gently. The weight of the massive talons was enough to crumple the roof of the tank, compressing the turret like it was made of putty. Everyone heard the screams from inside the crumpling vehicle, and the driver shrieked in panic and hammering his fists against the periscopes as he ducked under the falling ceiling, while the road wheels were crushed until they popped off the sides of the tank, while the armoured hull half-sunk into the solid ground. "You are killing my toys. That's not good. They'll run out all too soon as it is." The gigantic male smirked down at the astonished bugs staring at him in terror and awe, and he slid his foot back a little, dragging the ruined tank backwards even as the driver continued to stomp uselessly on the gas, one track still dragging, digging into the ground, while the other had fallen off. Killer waited a short moment that felt like all eternity in hell for the powerless, puny creatures beneath him, before he allowed his weight to shift, and the vehicle immediately crumpled like a toy, crushed flat into the ground in a concert of crashing, groaning metal, before Killer's toes settled fully, the ground cracking as it was crushed into dust, the foot sinking into the earth, leaving a deep footprint. The tiny people ahead shrieked in panic: one second they were watching the tank rushing towards them, and the next they were staring at a set of enormous, curved talons that were far more powerful and merciless than the vehicle. Shaking, unsure if they were actually alive or if they were already dead and their souls imprisoned by the titan, they slowly looked up, their gaze travelling up along a powerful leg, to massive, colossal testicles looming over them like apocalypse itself, and to a gigantic, impossible black shaft that crushed their beings even more, making them feel truly and completely helpless. The liger's giant toes curled as his foot tilted forward, and then lifted, talons kicking back the flattened wreckage of the tank like it weighted nothing. Blood on the wrecked metal was all what they could see of the four men that had been inside... but their minds did not really register that, as they trembled in the shadow of the huge male, simply staring, awestruck, as that mighty foot glided forward through the air, moving above them, the muscles of the leg flexing elegantly and bulging powerfully as the toes spread once again... powerful, almighty, thick, masculine, beautiful and glorious, freezing them in place, forcing them to stare in awe and worship... before those great, bloodied toes began to descend.

They let out a scream of horror, terribly aware that the only effect of it was to amuse the titan even further but unable to choke it down as they fell over on their asses and admired the omnipotent foot rushing down... before gasping in shock as it avoided them and settled upon the thick crowd ahead of them, purposefully sparing them, prolonging their helpless agony. They watched in horrified silence as the great toes smashed into the crowd and turned dozens of people into a fine red mist while raking dozens more into the sky like they were footballs, sending their bodies crashing miles away, smacking into the walls of the canyon or falling like meteors back into the tightly-packed crowd. And then the great foot settled, covering a large group of pathetic soldiers who uselessly emptied their powerless rifles and rocket launchers against the great pads. They heard the shrieks, and then the abrupt silence and the sick cracks of bones crumbling into dust as the foot sank into the ground, rattling seemingly the entire world as the titan rumbled in merciless pleasure. And then, when the foot lifted again, many vomited at the sight of the blood and gore filling the enormous footprint, as disgusting pulp stuck to the horrible, shapeless stains on the liger's pads, ropes of gorey pulp stretching between the toes and the ground before snapping... and again they were unable to shut up, to deny the titan at least the amusement of listening to their cries as Killer brought his foot back right above them, spreading his toes teasingly, sending a macabre rain of blood and gore falling upon them... before he slowly, torturously slowly settled his foot down, snuffing out their shrieks with a last, wet crushing sound.

Cerberus laughed and whined, cackled and shrieked, sounding completely insane as he squealed in fear whenever he was almost sent flying off Alexis's toe and groaning in delight when her boot settled upon the powerless army below, crushing entire formations into nothing but footprints flooded with blood. Angry NWOA soldiers all but fired at him, at the laughing bug that for some reason was allowed to live while they were stomped out of existence and toyed with, but that only made Cerberus laugh even louder as the bullets were vaporized by Alexis's fearsome aura of solid, burning power. The little king was delirious with awe, never blinking, fixated on each glorious show of power from the two titans, drooling helplessly as he shouted words of praise and worships, cheering them on. He clumsily undid the fly of his pants and grabbed his painfully hard member, jerking off furiously even as his energies were devoured away by Alexis's ever growing form. His dick was painfully, incredibly aroused and yet it struggled to stay hard, pulsing hard but only ever leaking out sterile, watery fluid, his semen neutered by Killer's presence, by his hypervirile stench in the air. He could barely breathe, gasping continuously and almost needing to chew the air made as thick as steak by the sheer potency of Killer's scent, so rich and virile that it made his eyes fill with tears while his testicles retreated and shrunk away as if trying to escape that terrible, unfair comparison. Cerberus was rapidly shrinking smaller and weaker as a whole, yet that only made him laugh and cheer even louder, one arm working to hold on to the great, almighty toe of the goddess while the other hand rapidly stroked his large cock, which flexed painfully, trying to push out semen he no longer had, spurting out only useless fluid as he reveled in the destruction, in the terrible ease of it all, in the anticipation of more to come, looking at the carnage around him as the goddess squished dozens of lives and expensive battle tanks out of existence with each little, slow, deliberate step she moved.

Killer looked down at the shrieking mob of terrified soldiers trying to squeeze past the uselessly firing tanks, and then he playfully kicked into their midst, laughing as a huge cloud of crimson burst up against his toes while uncountable shattered bodies and no less than seven tanks and a pair of trucks were thrown up into the sky, flying over the desert like comets that left behind long tails of blood and wreckage and body parts, before they crashed down to earth many miles away, smacking into the ground and disintegrating. Killer couldn't resist mercilessly teasing the powerless insects beneath, and he smirked down at them with scorn. His gigantic foot rose ponderously, accompanied by a chorus of shrieks, then it swept slowly forward and just hovered there, high above them. A steady shower of pulverized pavement and bits of raw, disgusting gore rained down upon the terrified soldiers, who shrieked in powerless panic as they expected the almighty toes to descend at any moment... But the foot did not fall; rather, it simply hung tormentingly in the sky above them, casting them all in its unforgiving shadow, breaking their minds and souls with the terror it drove into them as they ventured to glance upward and saw the pitifully tiny outlines of bodies dotting the vast undersurface, all twisted into grotesque shapes, each squashed as flat as paper and stuck to the gargantuan sole by a thick red paste. The great foot began to glide slowly from side to side, shifting the awful spectacle tauntingly over first one part of the crowd and then another, as Killer crushed their sanity and soul before crushing their bodies. He began to mercilessly torment the powerless crowd by teasingly wiggling his toes before lowering them towards the ground... but the omnipotent foot never settled, instead slowly moving above the crowd, making the god laugh cruelly at the way the crowd wobbled and moved as thousands of helpless mortals fought each other to get out from under the terrifying rain of blood and dirt and slurry of body parts and wreckage. Killer deliberately hovered his foot above them, moving it left to right and back, just to make them all go insane with panic in turns, huge masses of tiny people running first in one direction, then in the other, in the hopeless attempt of getting out from the darkness cast by his bloodied toes. He purposefully missed the thick of the crowd, stepping on the edges, settling his toes upon the top of the canyon and causing a large part of its wall to landslide down over the screaming bugs, sending enormous boulders crashing down into them in a bloody, terrible bowling, before pulling his foot up again, grinning predatorily as they squealed and veered away from him once more, before he abruptly stopped them by stretching his leg forth, digging his big toe into the ground near the edge of the canyon and effortlessly causing another landslide that to him was a mere puff of dust under his toe but to them was an insuperable obstacle that blocked the wadi entirely. The combat engineers and their vehicles did their best to reach the mountain of rubble and clear it, with bulldozers and explosives alike, but they were all crying. Nobody was going to survive, and they knew it.

Killer took another slow, small step, chuckling scornfully as the entire pack veered again and again, and he began to walk forward very slowly, herding them from side to side with each footfall, the terrorized crowd running away as best it could, moving so slowly that it was almost pitiful. There was nowhere to go, no escape possible, but many were completely lost to panic, and could not realize it. They just tried to run away from the mocking, booming storm of laughter coming from the huge male liger, and from his bloody steps. Those who did not react swiftly enough were smashed into shapeless red stains at the bottom of deep foot-shaped craters as Killer judged them with a simple word: "Pathetic." The others were left with just two choices: wait for death at the impassable pile of ruins, or rush towards death by offering their puny lives to the god's glorious toes.

Killer walked along the canyon, deliberately stepping on top of the steep walls of stone and gravel on either side, crumbling them under his toes, sending countless tons of rubble collapsing over the terrified crowd, forcing them to squeeze even tighter together in the middle of the wadi, those on the outermost rows all assaulting their comrades with bayonets and pistols and rifles, killing them to try and open an escape route towards the centre, away from the toes of the god... their terrified minds unable to understand that crowding the centre only gave Killer a more rewarding target.

Killer's titanic shaft swung heavily between his legs, slapping thunderously against his thighs and even smashing with devastating force into the edges of the wadi, sending the walls of stone crumbling down into piles of dust and rubble. The liger's mere presence, and his shows of power above them had a terrible effect on the crowds, as the minds of the powerless mortals were overwhelmed by those displays, filling with envy, despair, powerless rage, and countless other feelings. More and more of the micros went down to their knees in worship and in acceptation of their fate. Many all but ran towards his immense toes, eager to be compressed down into mere paste. They were nothing more than frightened ants, just as frail, and just as powerless, and even in their terror many were lucid enough to realize it, throwing their weapons away and just dropping to their knees, or down to all fours, crying and cowering in the shadow of the immense male, praying and begging... cursing the unfairness of the insane power of the gigantic male... envying his omnipotence... adoring it... sacrificing their lives willingly to provide him with a comfy carpet. For the huge male, each step came with a warm, soft feeling. The sound of bones breaking sounded almost like a symphony, accompanied by the shrieks of terror and wailing of vehicles. Killer brought a foot down atop a large troop carrying vehicle, then twisted his foot to grind it into the pavement with a screech, squishing dozens into red mist. Countless soldiers fell victim of uncontrollable horror-ecstasy as his powers flooded their senses and overwhelmed their little minds, supercharging their emotions in a thousand different ways, with a thousand different effects. The crowd went wild, screaming, clawing at each other, throwing themselves at his feet and worshiping, yelling, begging him to accept their sacrifice. "You bugs always last so short a time. So frail... always gone before I even start playing." The gigantic male laughed cruelly and looked down over the crowd, people going insane just from the power of his gaze, as hundreds fell to their knees and then groveled in the dirt, crawling back towards the god like the bugs they were, howling their praise of the power of their destroyer as they humbly dragged themselves under his bloody toes as he lazily wiggled and raised them. "You know it, worthless dregs... you know you are just worthless dust unworthy of living..." Killer smirked and methodically crushed them out of existence, slowly flexing his toeclaws downward as they threw themselves willingly under his talons. Those caught directly under the solid pad were crushed and burst apart instantaneously, but the slight curve of his claws sometimes left bodies trapped, wriggling and helpless, under the massive digits: unable to move, screaming in terror and despair beneath the pressure that's more than enough to keep them pinned but not nearly enough to kill them. Not until the titan idly flexed his toes, bearing down on them enough to turn them to paste against the dirt under his foot, their bodies and innards splashing up between his digits.

Others eagerly leapt down in the deep, vast footprint-crater left by the god. They crashed hard, breaking their bones, splashing down into the macabre red sea sloshing on the bottom of the footprints, to swim in that ocean of blood and pathetic, crushed remains floating on the surface. Blood and gore rained down from above, in the absolute, terrifying darkness as the god's foot loomed above them. It was Hell, and the master of that hell effortlessly crushed them out of existence every few moments, almost gently settling down his foot again, taking his time squishing them into paste, before grinding even that down to liquid and vapor, twisting his foot over them as the crater became deeper every time, the earth cracking and caving, revolting under the massive toes as the world trembled as if in terror under the power of that lazy movement.

And the dark god looked with cruel amusement down at large crowd remained ahead of him, trapped between his feet and the stone wall, and he let himself squat with a laugh, his massive testicles falling like planets, like the whole sky was collapsing on top of those unlucky souls, settling heavily onto the ground and blocking the passage between his feet and squishing the last soldiers that still had a bit of fight left in them, crushing them in the dozens beneath their massive weight, just as they made a mad dash for safety.

The giant seized the base of his gigantic shaft in a hand and stroked himself leisurely as he squatted down, his gigantic testicles before Killer swung his semi-hard, gigantic shaft downwards, cockslapping the crowd into a fine red mist, as the colossal cock smashed into the ground with all the force of its goliath size and weight, crushing everyone, thousands of lives and dozens of tanks at once, turning them all into a red mush, hot and wet, that clung to the underside of the gargantuan member, making the god rumble lightly in delight as he leisurely smeared the pulp along his monstrous shaft.

The liger grinned widely as energy crackled around him, his godlike shaft pulsing with power in front of him, so gargantuan and heavy it threatened to weigh itself down beneath the countless feet of heavy, veiny black flesh, his testicles so enormous they crushed the ground down, cracking it, digging a deep crater with their weight, pulsing with heat and power as enormous globes of thick pre leaked from the monstrous cockmaw and splattered down over the earth, each droplet large enough by itself to smash tanks into flattened wreckage and squish soldiers into nothing but liquid, washing away the tiny creatures and their entire lives like the coming of a hurricane, while his colossal, ferocious sperms devoured the soldiers whole, crushing others under their powerful bodies and slapping the tanks out of their way as their muscular, spiked tails tore through the crowd like hellish scourges, shredding bodies like pieces of paper.

Alexis laughed cruelly at that sight, leaning over and gripping into his titanic, semi-hard cock to hungrily smear the bloody pulp all over it, grinning as the colossal girth proved way too vast to be painted with just those thousands upon thousands of lives. She reached past the pile of rubble that had imprisoned Killer's toys under his shaft, and she plucked up a handful of squirming, shrieking mortals from the other side, effortlessly hefting them and several great tanks and trucks and vehicles high up into the air, licking her lips at the warm feel of blood leaking out in rivers through her fingers and against her palm. She smirked at him and then pushed her prodigious cleavage forwards, while squeezing almost gently into the tangle of helpless bodies and vehicles, listening to the groaning of steel and the squishing of frail bodies she could barely feel in her hand. Blood cascaded over her huge breasts, painting them crimson and beginning to form a lake in her cleavage while he watched on with a low rumble of delight. Licking his lips slowly and then leaning forwards to lick the blood off her boobs, to nuzzle into them, to feel the crimson cascade on his head as she playfully caked his Mohawk red with blood and gore... and then she tilted her head backwards with a growl and opened her jaws wide, holding her fist above her mouth and squeezing hard, squishing the whole mass of lives into an abundant but short-lived deluge of crimson juice that she hungrily devoured, before she almost absently tossed away the flattened, wrecked tanks, hurling them across the desert like they were pebbles. And then, while he watched with adoration and hunger, she ran her hand down one cheek and the side of her neck, smearing blood all over herself.

"You always look delicious in red..." Killer teased, and she murred in amusement, nodding even as she reached into the wadi once more, scooping up another huge number of mortals, making a mockery of their efforts, of their dreams, hopes and fears, just picking them up like the toys they were, before she pushed them all into the vast side of his cock, grinning at the spurting and bubbling of blood as she pressed down and wrapped her fingers around the monstrous shaft as best she could. "You too, Lion..." She softly replied, beginning to stroke slowly up and down the immense cock, smirking knowingly as he grunted in pleasure and arched his back slightly, thrusting idly into her grip. There were battle tanks there, grinding into his semi-hard cock, but even their segmented tracks could only give him pleasure, the steel crumpling like nothing but paper as Alexis squeezed harder and ground them in... and Killer's colossal member throbbed powerfully and grew even further, its length increasing so much that the great member protruded past the wall of rubble which had blocked the wadi. Beyond the pile of rubble and the bloody scars in the ground dug by her fingers while she grabbed her toys, the rest of the NWOA army was finally managing to move a bit faster, running away as rapidly as it could.

"Our toys are getting away..." Killer teased, and Alexis snorted in entertainment without even looking at them. They could run all they wanted, they were not going to get anywhere. The artillery and then tanks were sill firing at them, but not a single shell had been able to get to them without literally melting into vapor in midair, still a long distance away from their bodies. Alexis gave them a few more moments of sweet illusion, then easily flexed one foot, pressing into the ground, sending cracks spreading through the desert, the whole region rippling and rattling under her tremendous strength before a colossal wall of stone and tentacle-like thorny vines erupted upwards at the end of the wadi, cutting the escape route of the terrified mortals.

There was absolutely no hope for the NWOA army. Killer's and Alexis's power had grown to truly obscene levels in just a short period of time. After the fall of Satan, their might had grown rapidly and immensely, probably because more and more they were beginning to explore and experiment what they could do, instead of hiding from their own power. They were taking greater risks, and they were listening more to their dark urges. They were finally aware of just how powerful they were... and aware that they were just scraping the surface. They had finally started pursuing the unlocking of their power rather than fearing it.

And since then it had been like an avalanche: unstoppable once put in motion. Realizing what they could do, learning that there weren't truly limits, was truly making them stronger and stronger with every day that passed. With every minute, almost... And in the rare occasions in which they allowed themselves to just abuse of it without remorse, like in that moment, the growth was even quicker.

They both looked up as they finally heard a number of larger explosions in the air around them, and they smirked as they realized they were large cruise missiles, fired from incoming jets as well as from rocket launchers on land, hundreds of miles away. The large warheads exploded harmlessly in midair, causing nothing but noise that they could barely notice over the wet slapping of Killer's thick foreskin as Alexis continued to hungrily stroke his monstrous shaft. That was how pathetic the mortals were... and the two lovers traded matching grins before slowly standing up, the huge male spreading his legs, his gargantuan cock and godlike testicles mocking the powerless bugs on the ground. He chuckled as he saw the dozens of missiles incoming, before they began to smash into his body as he allowed them to get through his energies... but the bunker-buster warheads that tried to pierce into his muscles before exploding failed miserably at even tickling him, making his snicker rise into dark, cruel laughter.

"I'm bored of you bugs... the only challenge you pose is trying not to wipe you out too quickly." The god grinned cruelly, his eyes glowing with power as he flexed his powerful body... and the immense energy radiating from his form crushed the other cruise missiles when they were still far away, the weapons crumbling and exploding well before touching him, as the fearsome force hit the wadis like a solid shockwave, slapping heavy battle tanks flying like toys, crushing armoured infantry carriers like tin cans, crumpling them until blood burst out of every fissure, as countless mortals were blown into the air and sent flying without the huge male ever moving, as the liger's huge muscles bulged even larger, and he grew even taller, hundreds of feet in the space of a blink, his feet sinking deeper into the ground as he growled: "It's hard to hold back this much... you puny maggots will better find a way to amuse us better."

He looked up to see the squadrons of NWOA fighter bombers rushing against them with long blue flames stretching out of their engines as they engaged the afterburners and went supersonic for a desperate attack run with their shorter-range missiles, bombs and guns. They hoped that their speed would keep them safe... but they were no more than three times as fast as sound. To the god's eyes, they might as well have been motionless. "A flock of gnats is not going to last long." Killer easily commented, before simply flexing his enormous musculature and allowing even more of his power to flood his veins, his body growing and his height increasing so much that, as the jets flew in, they suddenly found the sky blocked by massive, mountainous, invincible muscles. Several managed to veer away from him, but many more couldn't avoid the impact as he lazily spread his arms and grinned, snickering as the frail machines smashed into invincible abs and biceps and pecs only to explode into pieces. Killer laughed of their helpless weakness as he casually swung out with a hand and slapped more of the jets into tiny pieces, swatting them out of the sky like the gnats they were.

A volley of bombs and missiles collided with his chest, but the explosions were miniscule in comparison to his titanic muscle, leaving not so much as a single mark against his body. The jet that had fired them began to veer away, moving fast... but without needing to spare a glance in the direction of the war machine, the huge male was faster, reaching out and slapping it out of the air like a child's toy.

He grinned slightly, watching as the jets that remained tried to veer away, but he easily flicked one powerful arm out and enormous tentacles as thick as buildings burst free from his shoulder and forearm, whip-lashing high into the sky before snapping around the vehicles... but twining tightly, not crushing, not yet. The dark god laughed as he drew this tentacles back in front of his face, looking with entertainment down at the pilots as they panicked, beating their tiny fists on the armored glass, some of them all but trying to eject even though it meant only crashing into the hard black meat of the tentacle, becoming ugly red stains. The proud aces of the sky were given all the time to understand that their expensive, powerful fighter-bombers were now nothing more than metal coffins before Killer smirked and flexed his mighty tentacles.

Metal was torn to ribbon and glass crushed to dust, as bodies became nothing more than red paste before the enormous tentacles easily lashed out, hurling a rain of crimson and shrapnel over a vast area, showering the puny mortals below with wreckage and gore.

Killer grinned widely and growled in entertainment, his eyes glowing as Alexis continued to stroke his gargantuan, massive member, smearing his member with his own slick, dark, hypervirile sludge of sweat and virile essence. The blood and gore that had stained his cock crimson were already gone, invisible, eagerly consumed and absorbed into him to give him the strength of the thousands of mortals he had destroyed. It was an insignificant addition, less than a drop to an ocean, but it always amused him to so easily and contemptibly stealing away every last of life and strength from his victims to add just another infinitesimal iota to his endless power. His thick, dense precum now leaked copiously down his shaft, and the goddess eagerly rubbed it all over the towering, titanic member, at the same time angling it this way or that as it pulsed heavily and unleashed blasts of precum that shot across the sky and smashed enemy airplanes into nothing but shreds of metal and plastic, catching other fighters into the sticky, heavy essence like they were just flies and dragging them down to earth. The heavy ropes of hypervirile stuff smashed down into the desert, tearing through stone, cliffs, tanks and vehicles, flooding the wadis and crushing victims beneath their weight, tearing swathes through the crowd below and leaving behind unending carnage as the titanic sperms rampaged all over the defenceless mortals. But being crushed, dissolved, washed away or devoured by titanic sperms were actually the merciful ends, the ones many others ended up craving as the thick, potent essence spared many lives, the fluid seeming to literally avoid some mortals here and there as if it had some sadistic life of their own: it gave a few victims a moment of hope before the slick juices twisted and flooded themselves around whatever happened to be in their way, suffocating them, drowning them, tormenting them, burning them out of existence as they flooded into every orifice, filled bodies, made their deaths a thousand times more painful. .

And yet at the same time, there were other mortals that, either more worthy or more cursed, were toyed with in other ways: they spasmed in floods and deluge of precum, their frail, worthless little mortal bodies saturated with the essence of the god, driven mad with pain and pleasure and sudden wanting. Those weak, insignificant little creatures were given a gift in their last moments of life, one even the most fearful and most pained glorified in. Males spasmed, their bodies filling with strength and arousal as they were tormented by huge erections and the sudden, most intense orgasms of their lives; females screamed in delight, choking down seed, their bellies bulging with full pregnancies and new life... moments before their lives ended with looks of horrified bliss on their faces, staring sightlessly up through the dark batter, their only regrets in their insane minds that they couldn't better please the god that had bestowed such wonderment upon them.

Killer's eyes glowed as he felt it all and reveled in it. His body flexed with raw power, feeding off the energy, growing stronger by the moment, more and more restraint falling away as he devoured their very essence, their energies, their terror, their worship. Old and ugly, young and beautiful females alike were reshaped into goddesses, turned beautiful and strong, far taller than they had been as mortals, growing huge breasts and long, shapely legs, their sex quaking, tearing apart in a succession of agonizing, delicious orgasms, as bellies bulged out, filled with new life. The males first grew massive and muscular, their cocks growing because of the exposition to the incredible virility of the god... and they were broken by enormous, painful orgasms before their unworthy, puny mortal bodies were warped and changed into something more useful to a universe who already had gods of such virility: all the males quickly turned into females, undergoing the same torture of pleasure and agony of the women.

Killer's gargantuan blasts of precum tore new canyons open across the desert, annihilating whole regiments of tanks on the trajectory and sending virile, potent essence flooding entire wadis, drowning and crushing the mortals, as sperms of enormous proportions assaulted every hole, breaking into bellies already full with life, making pregnant the unborn females and tearing them and the mothers apart in the process, Killer throwing his head back with a sharkish grin as he enjoyed it all, spreading his legs wider and letting his obscene, powerful virility warp the world in his stead... before he flexed his enormous musculature, and his eyes glowed sapphire as the sky became crimson and the ground beneath his feet burned and decayed into a black, exhausted wasteland, before the ground cracked apart all around him.

Magma surged up through the cracks, trapping the mortals for good into that new Hell, leaving them no hope, before colossal tentacle-cocks as thick as mountains broke out of the ground and stretched high towards the dark, murderous sky, shattering everything they met on their path. The tentacles twisted together, rubbing one against the other with vicious hunger, as their fleshy, thick bases absorbed everything they touched, instantaneously consuming vehicles and soldiers alike. It was the beginning of an eternity of despair and brutality in that new, dark temple of flesh, as countless smaller, but still immense, tentacles swarmed over and into the survivors, fucking every orifice into gore, breaking bodies apart with obscene brutality, as chocked, gargling screams echoed loudly from inside that nightmare-world. For the mortals there no longer were a ground, a sky, a horizon. The mortals were suspended on the tentacle-cocks ripping into them, while other tentacles, so immense that they couldn't even imagine them, writhed around them like alive walls. Blood and gore rained in every direction onto the dying victims, and bodies and souls were snuffed out of existence again and again... only to be brought back immediately after, to suffer a new, ferocious end.

And Killer laughed cruelly, drinking of it all, loving the feeling of that brutal annihilation, all that blood and screams that only added to his lust and to his power, grinning viciously as the victims turned into praying, begging, crying, eager toys, which groveled asking for more and for worse, even as they were ripped apart.

Alexis growled in delight and hunger at that, flexing and arching her back, her enormous musculature bulging explosively as she easily grew to match Killer's terrifying sizes, her spectacular body filling up with ever growing might, the beyond-goddess growing even more immense with every passing moment, her boots ripping the fragile crust of the planet apart as her power burned the ground, the stone, the mountains, making the water boil and turn bloodred and poisonous as the trees died and writhed, decaying and turning into alive, ferocious monstrosities, each branch becoming a spike as hard as diamond, a fang, a ragged tooth, as the plants become deadly predators stretching out of corrupted, annihilated earth burned to obsidian. Merciless waves of incandescent magma surged up from the cracks, washing over the nightmare world, and each little, insignificant flex of the beyond-goddess's toes brought more and more destruction, snuffing out in seconds what had been slowly built up in millennia. "Oh, are we starting to play, finally...?" She teased, grinning widely before slowly, idly flexing a huge arm, causing an entire, crowded wadi to seemingly explode as massive black-fleshed tentacles tore out of the earth, tearing through bodies, ripping and penetrating victims from every angle, tearing to shreds even as they fuck and rape all in their path. "This is a bit funnier... but the downside is, it will be over quickly."

"Yes, but we can drag it out a little..." Killer teasingly replied, his eyes burning with cruel lust as the torn-apart bodies of victims reform around his tentacles, impaled on the fleshy members, coming back to life choking and squirming helplessly on those ruthless appendages. The tentacles jerk and twist back and forth, then rip those bodies apart: but again, they reform, helplessly caught in an endless cycle of death and reformation, nothing but toys for the tentacles to destroy again and again. And it is never enough, as the monstrous tentacle-cock search out life whenever it hides, and tearing through tanks and vehicles from side to side, coiling around them, crushing them like cans, ripping apart bodies, devastating entire platoons in great, powerful thrusts: countless corpses are skewered and hefted up into the air like long strings of candy on his black, endless flesh, and yet the great god-being barely acknowledges them as he steps forwards, his tentacles ripping through the air around him in a storm of flesh before they suddenly lash forwards, tossing bodies and gore through the air as the god grew even bigger, making a mockery not just of the NWOA, but of all mortals. No, of every other being, because it is not like "gods" like Lemuel can do any better than the mortals if he starts playing.

The world stares in awe and terror as the god grows even bigger, crushing crowds under his toes as he viciously smears another handful of lives against his monstrous, spectacular cock, turning them all, who knew how many, into nothing but slush against his dark meat, while his terrible tentacles caused a carnage down into the crowd of terrified bugs. And yet, the titan's massive shaft wasn't even fully hard yet. He was not trying. He hasn't even started. And Cerberus, a literal flea forgotten on Alexis's big toe, shrieked in awe and terror at that incredible, mind-shattering awareness.

Killer growled in dark delight as he flexed, his enormous musculature bulging explosively, veins bulging through his skin as his own muscles seemed to be about to rip their way out as they grew and swelled and hardened, their perfect tone defying definition as they filled up with ever growing might, the beyond-god growing even more immense with every passing moment, his toes ripping the fragile crust of the planet apart, cracking the world like an egg as his power burned the ground, warping the entire desert, then the mountains beyond that, as the large lake in the center of Alfaya began to boil, the water bubbling and steaming as it turned bloodred and poisonous. The huge, ancient palms of the oasis died and writhed, decaying and turning into alive, ferocious monstrosities, each branch becoming a spike as hard as diamond, a fang, a ragged tooth, as the plants become deadly predators stretching out of corrupted, annihilated earth burned into obsidian. The Royal Palace stood in place, amazingly, but only because Killer willed it: while the population stared in awe, the castle changed, evolved, grew larger and richer still, dwarfing the town even more. The statues of Cerberus crumbled away into nothing but clouds of dust, replaced by far greater sculptures that depicted Killer, nude and powerful, using women of all races and social stance, from schoolgirls to queens, from presidents to goddesses. Alexis smirked at that, flexing her powerful body and wiggling her toes with a rumble of delight before adding her own touch, reshaping the decorations and the towers, creating immense halls with beds as large as town squares, before she idly flicked her wrist, and the castle split in the middle, the two halves sliding to the opposite sides like the parts of a toy, before four of the largest towers grew connected by suspended corridors, hundreds of meters above the ground, before veils of solid darkness formed the curtains of what clearly became a colossal canopy bed that was larger than the whole town of Alfaya, dwarfing its poor buildings with a colossal structure of black marble and solid light. The purpose of the whole castle became entirely clear, and as the people of Alfaya watched on in awe and terror she easily commented: "This will serve us when we are in the mood for an exotic background for a good fuck... and you bugs get to be our cuckolds. Say thank you, ungrateful vermin."

And the powerless mortals, trembling in awe, went down to their knees and did just that, praying to her and Killer, singing praise to them both as they made their entire country just another bedroom for their pleasure. Killer threw his head back with a snarling laughter, and that little shift in his stance was enough to send merciless waves of incandescent magma surging up from the cracks like blood from wounds that were squeezed and tormented. Rivers of liquid fire washed over that nightmare world, turning the desert into a whole new environment, hostile and beautiful, deadly and alive. Countless volcanoes pushed out of the ground, rising towards the dark sky, and cascades and rivers of magma connected them in a breathtaking scenario of destructive beauty. A perfect, fiery background for Killer and Alexis's ferocious lovemaking, but at the same time an inferno where mortals could not possibly survive. The dark god grinned as he grew even more imposing, gazing down at the doomed world and slowly stroking his colossal, monstrous black shaft, walking forwards and loving the way the very ground gave way to his weight and mass, crumbling under his toes, caving in deep enough that he could feel magma surging from beneath, burning everything on the surface, and warming his feet so pleasurably... before he looked with dark amusement down at what was very clearly a large, rich and ancient temple. He wasn't sure what gods Alfaya kept in most esteem, but in any case it was not important: the energies permeating the holy place were pitifully small in comparison to Killer's terrifying power. Moreover, even though numerous inhabitants of Alfaya were rushing into the temple to beg their divinities for help, those energies were only becoming weaker, fading away, suggesting that the dwarfed lesser gods were all but trying to hide from the titan, who turned directly towards the cracked, ruined holy place and slowly, lazily stroked his mountainous member, letting the prodigious immensity of his cock do the talking as he cast the temple into unforgiving darkness, growling in pleasure as his body flexed, his massive member throbbing with power and glistening with his dark pre as he felt his excitement growing higher, higher, and higher by the moment. Alexis licked her lips at the sight of the countless tiny, worthless specks of dirt impaled and destroyed by his glorious tentacle-cocks, and her eyes burned with entertainment as she gazed at the far edge of the crowd of panicking soldiers, spotting the distant rearguard elements, the artillery regiments, the long convoys of trucks loaded with ammunition and spare parts, the headquarters full of terrified officers. They were all running away as quickly as they could, as if they had a chance of survival at all... and their naïve hope made her laugh as she stepped forwards, crunching countless tiny lives under her sole while easily flicking one almighty arm down, causing her own tentacles to erupt out of the strong limb to whiplash down through their ranks, sweeping an entire tented headquarter out of existence, scooping up the last of the grunts and the very best of the generals, demonstrating how they were all nothing but pathetic zeroes. The tentacles smashed through their ranks, demolished trucks, tore apart tanks and self propelled artillery pieces, threw containers and vehicles into the sky, constricted war machines like empty tin cans, crushed uncountable bodies and sent up a veritable cloud of blood and gore.

She pulled up her other arm and lazily aimed it at Alfaya, sending a tangle of four enormous, flexing, flailing tentacles looming over the helpless town just so she could hear the shrieks of utter terror and the pathetic prayers for mercy. All she had to do was let even just one of her tentacles flop down over it... and Cerberus squealed in a mix of terror and awe, half of him craving to see that cruel, merciless spectacle even as he begged: "No, my goddess, please... I pray you... not my capital... my town..."

"My toy." Alexis easily corrected, flicking her toe so that the minuscule king was send flying up into the air before crashing ruinously back against her perfect talon, which he was still working to paint crimson with blood. He squealed in pain at the terrible impact, and he babbled his apologies... but despite his true excitement, his true adoration for that display of omnipotence, his mind still refused to give up its secrets, and Alexis started to wonder whether there were secrets at all. Of course there are. She harshly corrected herself in her mind. It was arrogant of her to think that no one could resist her mind reading powers. Clearly, Cerberus was somehow protected, and she was getting more and more eager to find out how that was possible and who was responsible for it. The wiser part of her also warned that whoever could put up such mental resistance was to be feared, but it was extremely hard to be humble in any way while possessing the unrivalled strength that she was flaunting over Alfaya. She turned her attention directly to the temple, licking her lips as she distinctly felt the energies of the old gods tremble and then vanish, extinguished like candles in the wind, overwhelmed by their tremendous force, and she squeezed into Killer's gigantic cock, stroking it hungrily as she commented: "Did you feel that...? I think we might have killed them for real, whoever they were..."

The huge male grinned darkly at that and nodded, licking his lips as he added: "I think we have absorbed them, but they were too much of a bunch of pipsqueaks to know for sure... I can't distinguish their... willing contribute to our strength. It is just another drop in the ocean."

She nodded hungrily at that, savoring the fact that they had just annihilated three ancient divinities without even getting to see their faces, before she grinned as her tentacles tore into the ground around the temple and effortlessly ripped a large swath of land off the surface of the planet, hefting the entire temple upwards as the gigantic tentacles lengthened even further, arching majestically into the dark sky before they twisted downwards and wrapped around the temple, easily trapping it and squeezing into it, crushing its stone columns and its massive structure until it began to collapse, the great statues crumbling, the altars cracking apart as shrieks came from inside while the entire structure was ground against her dark meat. Killer's own tentacles, pushing out of the ground in the middle of the desert, reared up majestically and a huge tangle of the dark members split open, looking like a terrible maw eager for food. Killer and Alexis traded a grin, and the goddess easily moved the ruins over to those fleshy black jaws of destruction, dropping the temple inside it and watching as they swallowed the warped temple down to the bottom of the corrupt, alive pyramid of black flesh, squeezing on it teasingly at first, then brutally, as the tangle of tentacles writhed and moved ferociously, sending cascades of blood and gore down into the sea of magma below as the NWOA army and the temple of the old gods were destroyed together, in one single, immense inferno of hot, hypermasculine fluids and hard, invincible flesh.

Killer walked forwards to the huge tangle of tentacles, caressing one of the monstrous, gigantic ones forming the outside, before he spread his powerful legs wider and angled his gigantic cock down, as the tentacles smoothed out and opened a passage at the top, wrapping around his colossal shaft and welcoming it in, sucking him in as he began to thrust powerfully down into the core of the alive-mountain, his colossal shaft adding to the devastation as it rammed into the tiny victims inside, crushing them into splatters of blood and gore which only added to the beyond-god's pleasure.

"Now they are truly, utterly and royally fucked." Alexis teasingly commented, grinning widely as she admired the easy thrusts of the muscular titan, and he smiled back as they listened together to the last feelings, thoughts and shrieks of all the victims. They dropped their heads backwards with matching grins as they tasted their despair on their tongues as if it was a physical nectar, hearing their cries and laughing of their desperate, opposed feelings: many died with a last thought of hate for their old gods, who had not come to rescue them, who had turned out puny and useless against the titan who was crushing them out of existence... many more, in front of such a display of limitless power, died almost happy, feeling envious adoration for the almighty destroyers.

The huge male grinned viciously as he felt the world around them beginning to quake and rupture, feeling his power and Alexis's own beginning to overwhelm the fragile, vulnerable planet, the earth itself beginning to crumble away into nothing but burning hell that would surely soon rupture upon itself: even the planet was nothing compared to their might and majesty, bowed to the smallest exertion from their most absent urges. The world shook beneath their feet, broke with the tide of magma and the swells and crackling of the earth, and the enormous liger growled in delight as his hand lazily moved up and down his goliath shaft, feeling the planet's life giving away to them and enjoying it as much as he enjoyed the feeling of the countless lives of countless prey being crushed and broken beneath them, as their power expanded far beyond the desert, while the huge tentacles squeezed hard on his cock, massaging it, milking it, pushing up pieces of the temple and huge groups of tanks and vehicles and soldiers just so they could be smeared all over his shaft and ground out of existence. Nothing was safe, nothing was spared, as the two lovers flexed their spectacular forms, feeling their powers growing ever greater they more they dared to let go, to unleash their true force, their eyes glowing with delight even as they silently agreed that they had to stop, that they had to tune it down, that they had to restrain themselves before the planet would truly break. Still, Killer snickered darkly as he rammed forwards another lazy and yet so mighty thrust, feeling thousands upon thousands of lives being snuffed out of existence by that simple movement, as countless worthless mortal bodies were ground into liquid against his dark-fleshed shaft, before he grinned wider as the tentacles shoved another load of reformed, resurrected mortal souls into the folds of his thick foreskin, just behind the colossal head of his gigantic cock. Killer growled softly in dark, merciless amusement, slowing down and almost stopping his movements for a brief moment to just enjoy the shrieking and the wriggling of the tiny beings moving against the sensitive flesh, as more and more were added... and then he licked his lips as he felt their miserable, pointless struggling as they were trapped and smothered by the flesh around them, almost burned instantaneously by the tremendous heat and the sheer power radiating from the godlike shaft, as thick precum covered many of them and drowned and dissolved them... before Killer laughed and thrust forwards again, and the simple movement of the foreskin crushed all of the mortals into pulp and smegma with one sick, messy squelch.

"These worthless gnats have learned what their place is... and nobody will ever forget what happened here, today." Killer easily said, his eyes glowing sapphire as he slowly flexed his immense body, muscles bulging with devastating power as he growled in delight, rolling his shoulders idly, before Alexis sensually slid a hand down his muscular front and gripped firmly into the base of his cock, making him grunt in pleasure. She gracefully slid behind him, and her other hand went down to reverently heft one ponderous, colossal testicle, squeezing into it and rolling it slowly in her pal. Her huge, spectacular breasts pushed gently but firmly into his back as she leaned into him, teasingly resting her chin on his shoulder as she pressed her groin against his solid, muscular buttocks... and he grunted in delight as he felt, even through the thick leather of her skin-tight vest, the heat and wetness of her ravenous sex. She began to stroke and pump his gigantic shaft with insatiable hunger, squeezing into the hard black flesh with almost brutal strength... enough to easily crush a planet into powder, for sure, but he only grunted in approval and thrust forwards even harder, moving into her grip and urging her to be rougher... and she happily obliged, her hand moving rapidly up and down, rolling every now and then over the monstrous girth, that in no way could be covered by just one hand, and she all but punched into the tentacles rubbing into his shaft from down below, meeting them at the end of every long stroke. Her other hand fondled his huge balls, exploring their tremendous immensity and pulling them even further down, stretching his thick, musky sack and smearing his dark, omnipotent, virile sweat all over her hands. She murred in delight, then began to mimic his strong, rapid movements, thrusting together with him, her hips teasingly working in time with his own as she whispered a single word that dripped with hunger and sensuality: "Harder..."

Killer grinned widely and slammed forwards with savage force, burying his immense cock deep down into the tangle of tentacles until he briefly felt the broken walls of the temple laying at the bottom, before they simply crumbled as his colossal member smashed right through, pulverizing the holy place and crushing the few mortals that had still been hiding inside it, barely feeling the little splatters of warm wetness against his titanic shaft as he began to saw himself in and out even faster, loving the feel of the tentacles twisting around him as they pushed up huge masses of powerless, tiny mortals just so they could crush them all into pulp against his hard flesh.

Killer and Alexis moved together, growling in pleasure and amusement and hunger, at a powerful yet easy pace, towering over a world that could do nothing but watch on in awe and fear. Cerberus looked up at the scene in shock, his eyes wide, his chest heaving with his awe, his whole body shuddering as he helplessly jerked his shrinking, impotent member, which throbbed in painful, tremendous arousal even though it could no longer properly harden up, fried as it was by Killer's glorious presence, by his overwhelming stench of hypervirile masculinity. Killer and Alexis almost forgot about his presence, so insignificant he was, and they paid no attention to his prayers, to his shrieks, to his words of praise. They enjoyed each other's presence instead, grinning as the great tentacles swept up the NWOA soldiers by the thousands and smeared them all over Killer's behemoth cock, trying to pain it crimson... but the helpless mortals couldn't even do that because every last drop of their blood was quickly dissolved, absorbed into the titanic shaft and replaced by thick, dark, almighty cock-slime made of sweat and hypervirile lubricant, while Killer's precum erupted out in gigantic blasts that tore deep into the ground and caused the entire continent to rattle, earthquakes making the world tremble as the thick, potent essence tore deep craters into the crust of the planet, forming new seas of masculine nectar, inhabited by monstrous, titanic sperms greater and more terrible than any sea monster of myth.

And yet, just as the world cowered before them, Alexis clearly felt psychic energies pushing against her mind, as mental fingers paged through her thoughts and memories, and she gritted her fangs, eyes widening in shock, in complete surprise at the sudden intrusion, at the fact that someone had been able to get into her mind without her sensing it until the last moment. She felt Killer tensing up in the same kind of surprise and horror, and she growled as she shut her eyes, trying to eradicate the elusive invader from both of their minds. Killer straightened and reached up for his temples with a snarl of pain and frustration, doing his best to oppose fingers that were turning into claws, savagely ripping through the pages of his memory. Alexis's body glowed with sapphire energy as she shielded herself and finally struck back against the unknown invader, grunting as her psychic force collided with the alien and knocked it back, before she staggered backwards as it charged forwards again, causing blood to burst out of her nostrils as she felt her head pounding so viciously that she thought her skull would explode. She focused on the incandescent, cruel claws in her mind and seized them with all the psychic force she could muster, and growled as she closed her eyes and mentally "twisted" that invading hand around until it loudly broke, and the fingers dissolved away. She immediately pushed her hand against Killer's solid back as she saw blood streaking out of his nostrils and ears, and the same terrible force she had just sealed out of her mind attacked her again, one "hand" wrestling her back while the other continued to brutally page through Killer's memory even as the huge male pushed back with all his strength...

And then both Killer and Alexis saw it. Kesteven. The route to the extreme north coast. The arctic pack. Syrane, with the immense monument depicting a victorious young Killer, there were he had won a key victory against an enemy invading force that had wanted to capture the ice Eden to blackmail the Huxley family into submission... and then ice, everywhere, in every direction... the North Pole... and there, hidden under a cliff of eternal ice, the anonymous crevice which led to the entrance to the Ice Eden... the great double door, flanked by a multitude of gigantic and beautiful states of ice depicting all the gods of the ancient pantheon the tigers had venerated for millennia... and then glorious, spiraling stairs, monumental for size and beauty, suspended as they were in a wonderful, indescribable sapphire light as the ice reflected the light and seemed to literally glow.

"No...!" Killer roared, and a supreme effort he slammed the "book" of his memories closed, panting as the pain tormented him, his mind seeming to be leaping against his skull, trying to break out of his head. He slapped the incandescent psychic talons away from his mind, and then furiously reached forth after them: with Alexis's help, he used his own psychic force to grab them and crush them out of existence, snarling in the awareness that it was too late, that the unknown enemy had already discovered what it needed: the location of the Ice Eden, and thus of the mortal world's Anchor. The two lovers traded a look of horror at that awareness, before Alexis glared down at Cerberus, extending one powerful arm and which crackled with terrifying energy. The tiny mortal was yanked brutally upwards, with an acceleration so merciless that he vomited, bent in half and shuddering in pain as several of his bones audibly cracked while he shot skywards and then began to helplessly float in front of her gritted fangs.

"You." The goddess angrily hissed, all hints of playfulness and diplomacy gone now as she leaned closer to his tiny, miserable form, her eyes burning sapphire. "What was that? Who did it?"

"I don't know! I don't know, my goddess, I swear! I swear it! I swear it!" Cerberus squealed, before howling in pain as she squeezed his little body in her psychic grip, grunting in annoyance. "I don't know... I don't know... the NWOA might know... they... they must be it!"

"Liar!" The goddess snarled, her instinct and senses telling her that something about Cerberus was wrong... but the miserable mortal only howled out in agony, his skeleton loudly crumbling, and she hesitatingly relaxed her grip. He was frail and helpless and broken. He was more dead than alive, and another little squeeze would have turned him into nothing but a crimson stain on her fingers, without revealing any of his secrets. Did he truly lie? Yes, he does. But then, why was he doing that? And hoping to achieve what, if his life was so fragile and literally in her grip?

She traded a gaze with Killer, but the huge male was just as uncertain, and he only shook his head slightly, wiping his blood off from his muzzle using the back of one huge fist. The tentacles retreated and vanished, leaving behind a devastated, warped and corrupted wasteland literally covered in huge, sinister lakes of blood and gore that had been an immense army until moments before. He and Alexis looked out in the distance, at the last remains of the NWOA force as they rushed up along the wadis, trying to get away from their destructive force, and Cerberus squeaked: "Don't let them run away, your Highness! My God, my Goddess, my Master, my Mistress... don't let them go! They might have the answer! Kill them all!"

"I heard something." Sebastian announced, and Sandy turned sideways to gaze at him with interest and with something like amazement. The old admiral had the sonar headphones on as well, but had noticed nothing at all. "During the slight delay in the echo." Sebastian added, squinting his eyes and tapping the pencil on the block notes. He had worked for a long while with the settings of the computer system to drown out the noise coming from the propellers and hull of TG03, the cruiser under which they were still hidden, and now all his attention was focused on the noise captured by the long towed array.

Sandy bit his lower lip and closed his eyes, focusing even more and waiting for the Judge's sonar to ping once more, and for the echo that would then follow. "Here it comes..." Sebastian murmured, to himself more than to everybody else in the small sonar compartment, and when the low, drawn-out, low-frequency sequence of notes went out he was already working on the commands to focus the sensors in the direction from which the first weird hint of noise had come.

Again, the echo came with a tiny delay, barely noticeable, and in that minuscule fraction of time Sandy suddenly perceived a distant, muffled but definitely metallic noise.

"There truly is something out there." Sebastian said, shaking his head slowly in a sort of disbelief. "They have opened... something. A hatch, or a tube... there was a hint of cavitation as well. Bubbles."

"Torpedoes?" Sandy urgently asked, feeling a shiver going down his spine at the thought of a torpedo suddenly bursting out of the wall of noise and shooting right towards the Audacious's stern.

"No. That was the sound of a much larger kind of hatch." Sebastian easily commented, with seraphic tranquility, musing for a moment on what he had heard before he added: "It reminds me of when I listened to one of our new SSBNs opening the missile tubes."

The experienced, skilled sonar operator dropped that hint like it was merely part of his sound-hunting hobby, but the SSBNs tubes were filled with massive ballistic missiles tipped with a multitude of nuclear warheads. Listening to the tests of new units just put into service was one thing, but hearing the same noise coming from whatever was hiding behind the Judge, during war, had terrifying implications. Sandy almost snapped angrily at the lieutenant, but then his common sense yanked on the reins and he calmed himself as his brain noted: Sebastian is not an idiot. Evidently he doesn't think a missile is being fired.

Another "ping". Another echo. And in the brief interval they heard a new noise. "A hell of a lot of bubbles. They have launched something... something big and fast. Might be a missile, but I think it was... something else." Sebastian announced, his voice taking on a nervous note as he, Sandy and all the other sonar operators tried to make sense of the bits of noise they had heard.

Galen rushed from the conn to the compartment with such momentum that Sandy nearly leapt off his chair thinking the huge male was going to run all over them, dragging the narrow door frame after him. "Have they just launched a nuke? Is it a boomer?" The young captain urgently asked, his eyes wide with horror at the idea that at least a dozen nuclear warheads might already be on their way to a target that could be literally anywhere in the world. The ballistic missile could strike over 10 thousand miles away in the space of half an hour or so. "Boomer" is the nickname with which the deadly SSBNs are collectively known.

"I don't know. It didn't quite sound like a missile, but I don't know." Sebastian replied, with as much calm as he managed to maintain.

"It broke out of the water now." Another sonar officer announced. They had not heard the object ascending from the depths to the surface, hidden as it was behind the delayed echo, but the sonar heard loud and clear the sound of something massive pushing violently out of the water, leaping high into the air. Galen picked up a headphone and, together with all the others, waited to hear the blast of the rocket engine igniting to propel the ballistic missile into space. Missiles are ejected from submerged SSBNs through a massive release of high-pressure gas that sends the weapon, weighting dozens upon dozens of tons, up to the surface and into the air, where the first stage rocket ignites and pushes the weapon skywards. A second stage takes the missile out of the atmosphere, where the multiple warheads are released and begin their hypersonic fall back into the atmosphere, raining down upon targets spread over many miles.

"No rocket ignition." Sebastian reported, voicing everyone's surprise and confusion, a mix of relief and terror. "But it flies. Whatever it is, it flies. And damn fast, too! Straight northwards. It is not ballistic. And not aimed at Lunis."

"Does not sound like a cruise missile either." Sandy noted, before muttering: "What the hell did we just hear?"

"In a world of gods and monsters, it might be something worse than the nukes." Galen muttered, making a grimace and leaning against the frame of the door. "Are they launching anything else?"

"Nothing, skipper. Hatch closed. All noise ceased."

"What do we do now? We should turn around and sink that thing before it launches anything else." Galen muttered, looking towards Sandy, seeking his advice, but the admiral did not immediately reply, leaning back into his seat and closing his eyes for a moment, repressing a shiver. On the long list of the many, many things he had done as a submarine commander, sinking a SSBN while it was launching its world-ending payload of nuclear fire was not present. He had trained to do it, sure. Many times he had guided a submarine close to the bases of Ire's own SSBNs, waiting for one of the gigantic boomers to slip silently out at sea. He had followed them, stealthily spying their actions, taking note of their habits and favorite hiding zones at sea, and in several occasions he had had to rapidly avoid their Crazy Ivan moves... but he had never before had to listen to a live launch, in wartime. He knew a couple of submariners had had to, during the early phases of the war, when Ire had launched its nuclear missiles against Kesteven: they had sunk a couple of Irenic SSBNs and prevented the take off of more than four hundred nuclear warheads. Unfortunately, Ire had another dozen of boats, plus all the missiles in the silos on land...

He knew his duty was to sink an SSBN immediately if it launched... but their current situation was complex and unclear like no others.

"We don't know what was launched, nor what exactly is hiding out there." Sandy quietly reminded, making a grimace as he was forced to admit their impotence. "We have no firing solution on the unknown contact. We have only a very rough idea of where it is. If we turn around and open the torpedo tubes now, firing blind, we are almost certainly going to be sunk without achieving any hit. Our torpedoes might miss by miles, assuming we'd be given enough time to launch them in the first place."

"We can't just stay idle. Who knows what they just launched, and what else they might have on board!" Galen urgently remarked, making a grimace at the thought of that unknown object flying at absurd speed towards the north. Towards home. Keep a cool head, Galen. There is a lot of stuff up north. You don't know where it is going. Maybe it is targeting another kingdom. Another town, or another colony... Galen repressed a shiver and swallowed, trying to clear his mouth from the horrible taste that had suddenly filled it. Maybe Kesteven wasn't the target and his mother was safe. Maybe Faslane was also safe, and his girlfriend was not at risk... maybe, maybe, maybe. But another colony might be about to get wiped out, and thousands of lives erased. How could anyone stomach such a thought, especially when such a vast part of the world's population had already been annihilated by the war and by the demonic invasion. The thought of losing even just another colony was simply terrifying. And even a single ballistic missile could strike twelve or more targets in one go...

The worst part was not knowing what was happening on land, at home, so many miles away. Faslane and Kesteven could potentially already have been turned into radioactive wastelands for all they knew: many hours had passed since they had last received a message. The last time they had put the antenna up there was nothing for them, and now they were deep underwater, unreachable. Moreover, the navy's policy was to not communicate bad news to submariners deployed away from home, unless the circumstances were truly exceptional. His girlfriend or his mother might already be dead, and the navy HQ would not inform him about it. Bereavements were big burdens on the mind and submariners needed to be absolutely focused on the mission at hand, so if somebody in the family dies, the news is kept under wraps until the submarine returns to port. It might seem cruel, but it is actually pretty rational and, in a way, gentle: even if the close relative of a crew member dies, even if someone dear to the commander falls ill or dies, the submarine is still not going to be allowed to turn around and make for port. Extracting someone from a submarine at sea is complex, expensive and risky and is only done in the most extreme cases. During some missions, even with all the best intentions, it could be entirely impossible to reach the submarine with a boat or helicopter without the enemy interfering. So there is nothing that a submariner can do to help the family in such moments. Informing a submariner out at sea of a tragic loss back at home will only destroy its morale and distracting it from its tasks. Mourning is a luxury that submariners cannot afford while out at sea. Bad news only ever reach them in port, upon their return. They compile their last wills before sailing, and leave them at the base, locked inside a safe, together with any last message to their loved ones. It is a harsh, unforgiving career. Galen had often felt the weight that his career imposed upon his life and his affects, but the fear and the sense of impotence that tormented him in that moment were unprecedented, worse than anything else he had had to live through. He felt the desperate need to run. To rush. To do something. What could he do? He did not know. But he couldn't stand the thought of doing nothing.

"Do you believe I like it...? Do you believe it is easy for me to just carry on?" Sandy snapped back, smacking the table with his fists, but he immediately regretted it and dropped his head back with a drawn-out sigh. Galen's massive form tensed and for a moment his face contorted in fury, his overall squeaking and almost ripping as his muscles bulged against the cloth while his hands clenched into fists... but he too immediately froze in place, closing his eyes as he did his best to be rational, cold and professional like he had been trained to be. A furious, irrational commanding officer is the very last thing a submarine community needs, and he tried to remind himself of it and of his responsibilities towards all the souls closed into the submarine with him. He breathed hard a few times, and then muttered: "Sorry, I... started thinking of a million things..."

"I think we all did." Sandy quietly replied, shaking his head slowly. "But right now we have no target. We can't even try sinking something we haven't properly located yet. And if we are sunk trying, then we truly become useless. If we want to help our families at home, we must carry on with our mission."

Galen nodded in agreement, but nervously watched at his expensive wristwatch, swallowing thickly. They had already lost a couple of minutes. "We should at least warn them."

Sandy bit his lower lip at that, thinking as quickly and rationally as he could, but it was a struggle as his emotions threatened to run wild at any moment. If they had heard some kind of missile, within half an hour it could strike almost anywhere in the world. There would be no time to even attempt an evacuation. Perhaps just enough time to send everyone hiding in the basement, at most. If it was a ballistic missile, radars would soon spot it as it ascended towards orbit, but for what they had heard through the sonar it flew close to the surface of the sea, like a cruise missile. An enormous one.

Their very vague warning had only little chances to save lives, considering the likely timeframes and how little they actually knew, but still he felt that they indeed must at least send out a warning. How, though? Going up to periscope depth to put a mast out of the water was completely out of the question, surrounded as they were by enemy warships.

"Killer said he'd hear our prayers." Sandy quietly reminded, feeling kind of stupid at bringing that up. Even after all they had seen and experienced first-hand, believing to the whole God story and all its implications was still complex. Galen himself frowned in a way that pretty much said: "are you kidding me?". It only lasted for a brief moment, though, before the bulky male remembered the fall of Ire and the surrender of the entire world before his father's unstoppable power... and he muttered: "Fine. Let's try that. But I say we drop out a buoy, too. I feel more at ease with my conscience relaying on the... old methods."

Sandy made a bit of a grimace at the suggestion. Loading the message into a small buoy and ejecting it towards the surface with a set delay was a much safer alternative to going up at periscope depth, but it was far from riskless. The buoy was going to slowly ascend towards the surface, poke out almost imperceptibly, deploy an inflatable antenna and, after waiting a set amount of time to allow the submarine to move away from the area, it would transmit the report to the satellite. After a while, the buoy was going to sink to the bottom, leaving behind no sign of its existence.

Obviously, however, Galen intended to set a minimal delay on the buoy, otherwise their warning would prove completely pointless, arriving to the HQ way too late. Transmitting from the very center of the RA's fleet was asking for trouble. The chance of the transmission being intercepted was enormous, and they could only delay the transmission by a few minutes. At 20 knots, that meant putting just three or so kilometers between them and the buoy before the latter began transmitting. Way too little.

The old admiral hesitated for a moment, but finally nodded, silencing all his fears. Galen smiled a little, with an expression that made it clear that he was just as aware of the risks, but they both knew they had to try anyway. The young skipper walked out of the compartment, rushing to the communications consoles to order the buoy out, and Sandy sighed and dropped his head forwards, rubbing at his eyes tiredly and yet trying to put a little, confident smile on his muzzle, aware that the sonar operators were watching, terrified at the idea of a buoy going up. "Don't worry. They won't hear it." The admiral finally said, even though he just couldn't believe to it. All his studies, experience and technical knowledge told him that yes, they would hear it. He turned towards Sebastian and squeezed gently on the huge male's shoulder, quickly changing argument as he said: "Boy, I need you to tell me what's out there, and why we can't get a proper contact reading on... on that thing."

"I have an idea about that, actually." Sebastian calmly replied, smirking a bit as he idly sketched the shape of a submarine on the notebook ahead of him, before adding a multitude of smaller vehicles arrayed around it. The sonar operator sitting nearby leaned in and peeked curiously at the paper, but he only looked confused until Sebastian shushed them all and invited them to listen to a new echo.

"I'm beginning to think that the sounds we are listening to aren't actual echoes at all, but a sound generated and transmitted right back to the sender." Sebastian finally explained when Sandy arched an eyebrow in a mix of curiosity and frustration at the sonar's officer seraphic composure and half-expressed thoughts. When it came to listening to any kind of sound and understand them, Sebastian was simply formidable: he knew more than all of them, and he showed it all the time, voluntarily and involuntarily. Some things just made immediate sense to him, and he took a moment to realize the others hadn't picked up what to him had sounded obvious.

"I think they have an active sound cancellation system that hides their signature completely." Sebastian finally explained, picking up the notebook to help his words with some schematics, but he suddenly heard something else in the headphones and scrambled for the recording function in the sonar computer system. "There it is!" The lieutenant excitedly exclaimed, and Sandy picked up the set of headphones that Sebastian offered, before squinting his eyes as he listened intently to the extremely short registration. It was the echo, once more, and at first he couldn't understand what he was supposed to notice, but then Vega hit replay once. Then twice. And Sandy's eyes widened as his attention was caught by a secondary, background bit of noise that clearly came from a pod of cetaceans disturbed by the Judge's sonar and by all the other noise and unwanted traffic. "The computer would have filtered them out by just telling me this noise was caused by a whale or something... and normally that would be helpful. But in this case, the information here is another one entirely." Sebastian said, and Sandy nodded, having finally understood what he was listening to. "The exact same sound... is repeated twice in extremely rapid succession."

"Exactly, sir!" Sebastian enthusiastically approved, nodding before adding: "The rapid succession, you'll notice, is perfectly timed with the delay in the echo."

Sandy listened intently as the tape played back again, and knowing what to search for he was finally able to ascertain that yes, the two anomalies worked on the same timeframe. "So we are... listening to a registration? A signal that is deliberately blasted out in our direction?"

Sebastian snapped his fingers with a big grin and nodded, sketching a rough image of the seabed, with cliffs, cracks, rocks, fishes and even a stick-figure whale. Then he rapidly drew the rough shape of a submarine and surrounded it with dots. "This is how I can imagine it: a deployed array of recorders / loudspeakers, so to speak, which record the surrounding noise in real time and pump it out almost at the same time. Each recorder must be appropriately position to ensure the sound is not too distorted to give the trick away."

"Drones?" Sandy guessed, and Sebastian shrugged but offered: "I can't know, but it seems the logic explanation. Unmanned underwater vehicles arrayed out around the actual submarine. They are almost certainly tethered, so they can receive power from the mothership and continue to work without interruptions. They must stay at quite some distance from the hull of the submarine, though: if they hovered too close they would not have enough time to record the sounds properly."

"They would also end up recording the sound signature of the mothership, no matter how stealthy, and that would make the whole exercise damaging rather than helpful." The old admiral observed, and the sonar officer nodded in agreement.

"They must navigate very accurately and keep the exact position at all times if the system is to work... which means our mysterious friend does not like coastal waters. He needs a lot of open water without obstacles in the way, otherwise the drones are forced out of position."

"You are on to something." Galen's voice approved, and the two looked up in surprise, having completely failed to notice the return of the commanding officer with how focused they were on finding explanations for what they believed they had found.

"The delay in the echo, then, is due to that tiny fraction of time needed between recording and reproducing. In that small gap, a loud noise can still filter out... that's how we heard them earlier." Galen guessed after looking at Sebastian's notes, and the lieutenant nodded in approval.

"Really, the Judge is helping us in this one. Their noise cancellation system would work better if it hadn't to send back a full seabed echo because of her sonar pinging away like crazy." Sebastian exclaimed, shaking his head a little. "They are being too ambitious, I think. They want to have the best possible underwater picture, while also staying completely hidden. Not even their system can do it all."

"Without you and your men, Vega, we would have never gotten this far. Another sonar operator wouldn't have been able to pick up that delay." Galen replied, sincerely impressed and grateful. "I will make absolutely the Navy board has you promoted the moment we enter into port. Holy hell, you deserve every penny they pay you. I'll make sure they know everything you did for this boat and for this mission."

"And I'll do the same." Sandy immediately added, smiling at the young officer. "Good job, boy. Real masterpiece."

"But it is not over yet, is it...?" Sebastian asked after thanking both legends of the navy for their kind words. With their support, his promotion was assured, as was a medal and probably even a retroactive uplift to his pay... all wonderful things, on a normal day, but just dreams in that situation. To get anything, they fist needed to survive... and then needed to be successful in their mission, because otherwise there might not be a homeland to return to. "We must discover more about that... thing."

"If possible, yes." Sandy quietly confirmed, before looking at Galen. Both were thinking of the communication buoy that was up "on the roof", transmitting to the satellite. If the RA detected the transmission, all hell would break loose upon them. He knew he had to get better information and a better fix on the unknown target, ideally... and admittedly the daring submarine commander in him wanted to press on with the hunt; craved to pierce through that wall of false sound signatures and get in firing position. As always, the underwater battle was not just a clash of machines, but of minds and hearts, and he felt, stronger than ever, the desire to prove that he was better, more competent than his adversary.

The rational part of him, however, urged prudence.

"We will continue to listen while we find a way to send out a proper report to our emperor. He has the power to wipe out the RA fleet, including this unknown monstrosity... our primary mission, really, is to stay alive and communicate."

That was what Killer had said all along. Don't risk more than is absolutely necessary.

Killer and Alexis heard the "prayer" coming from the Audacious, and they traded a horrified look. An unknown object flying northwards, right after someone had stolen the location of the Ice Eden out of Killer's memories...? It couldn't be just a coincidence. Alexis attempted to communicate with the other goddesses, even with Riaku, who had headed north specifically to help protect the sanctuary, but the enemy force that had invaded their minds still lingered around them, disturbing all the voices and pushing furiously back against her, making it impossible to establish any sort of connection.

Cerberus, even broken and bloodied as he was, even while he floated pathetically in midair near Alexis's shoulder, continued to squeak his pathetic prayers and requests, begging them to pursue what was left of the NWOA to completely erase it... and the two gods snarled in frustration, unsure of what to do at that point. They had expected to walk into a trap, that was true... but they had admittedly not expected it to be quite so effective and articulated. They had hoped to see Cerberus's true colors quite quickly, forcing whoever was pulling the strings to come out in the open, but that was not happening.

Alexis looked furiously up at the disorderly columns of NWOA vehicles hurriedly retreating through the desert and, in frustration, she stepped towards them, snarling as she prepared to just stroll all over the convoys, crushing them flat into the ground even as her mind raced in completely different directions, trying to find answers. Trying to connect with some of the others, to urge them to reinforce the Ice Eden's defences. Should we go in person...?

She began to turn back towards Killer to discuss the matter with him, but she growled instead as she sensed a new energy signature approaching, a ghost-image appearing in her mind, showing the immediate future, and she turned towards a tall cliff of red stone to their left, spotting a tiny figure running up towards the top. The minuscule creature began to grow, the figure starting to glow as flames of energy of an intense emerald shade burst into being around the powerful, beautiful body, and within a few steps the Doberman was hundreds of feet tall, her steps cracking the large cliff and sending dust and boulders falling down into the sea of sand beneath. Vera Raider was still small compared to the immense forms of Killer and Alexis, but enormous from any other point of view, and as she pulled both hands up to signal that she came in peace, Killer admired her perfect body and wondered for a moment whether she had always possessed the ability to grow to such formidable proportions. When we first met, it would have been a real problem to face a giant Vera... did she deliberately hold back?

Vera's features were enchanting as always, and her eyes burned emerald, glowing with supernatural energy. Her long mane of black hair was as always collected into a simple ponytail, but with long bangs left free to fall over one eye, framing the other in a splendid fashion. The spiraling, tribal flames tattooed down the left side of her neck and then further down, on the shoulder and arm, glowed through her skin because of the energy pumping in her veins, making it look like she had incandescent magma flowing inside her. She had trained and fought a lot from their last meeting: her musculature was much bulkier and had a formidable tone to it, her biceps bulging and her quads swelling beautifully with every step she moved. Scars were visible over her abs and arms, proving that she had not been idle during the war, and that made Killer even more alert, aware of how dangerous she was.

Vera, in turn, stared at the two lovers in pure awe, admiring Alexis's glorious form and then gazing into Killer's eyes with something like craving, licking her lips slowly and winking at him before very evidently gazing down at his broad, masculine chest and then further down at the rippling abs and then down, down, down along the goliath, monumental black shaft, pulling lightly at the neck of the simple black tank top she wore. Killer could see her perky, large nipples tenting the cloth, and guess the shape of the piercing rings hanging from them. She wore nothing under the top, but then again she didn't need to: her breasts were not just huge and perfectly shaped but also wonderfully firm and proud, standing up on her muscular chest.

Her abs were bare and she only wore a pair of very short shorts of leather, ripped and worn, held up by a heavy, thick belt. Her high-heeled boots reached up past the knee, but were open at the toes, displaying her sharp talons. Killer, a well known lover of strong female legs, took a moment to study her mighty, thick quads with almost as much hunger as she studied his goliath member.

"What are you doing here, bitch? I liked our little duels a lot, but now I'm way above your league." Alexis taunted, smirking and tilting her head to the side, crossing her powerful arms. "The fight would not be very entertaining this time around."

"We are not enemies." Vera replied, with unusual urgency and without reacting to Alexis's teasing. "I'm here to warn you: don't move another step forwards, this is a trap."

"We know." Killer easily replied, but the strong female made a grimace and shook her head in denial, countering: "I'm sure of it, but it... is much worse than you think!"

"How do you know? And what is your side? NWOA, RA... you change your flag too frequently to be trusted in any way." Alexis snapped, glaring at the Doberman and then at the convoys of trucks and tanks and terrified soldiers running away even though it meant attempting to cross the most inhospitable of deserts. "Maybe you just want to buy time for your comrades to run away."

"Don't be silly, Alexis!" Vera exclaimed, looking exasperated and instinctively reaching out to stop her when she moved a step forwards, even though there was no way she could even just slow down the far greater, towering goddess. "Read my mind! I'm not lying, it has all been set up to take you two down! Don't follow that bunch of idiots, they are no threat to you or anyone else at this point... the morons have been tricked and used all along! They are not fighting for what they think, but for him!" Vera pointed her finger towards Cerberus, and Killer looked from one to the other in confusion, unsure of what he should believe...

But Alexis finally managed to access Vera's mind as the Suicide Maker let down her defences and welcomed her in... and the goddess's eyes widened, her fangs gritted in fury as she reached up to grab the tiny, ruined mortal king floating helplessly in her psychic grip.

Cerberus vanished from the spot, however, and she snarled in rage, moving into a ready position and turning around to face the ridge where Alfaya's warriors were still attempting to dig their trenches and foxholes. Killer immediately followed her example, knowing all too well that her sixth sense was guiding her actions, and he growled in rage and disgust as Cerberus's voice boomed across the sky with a cackle, before taking on a venomous note as he addressed Vera: "Your betrayal was expected, you stupid whore! I knew you'd fall for the illusion of a powerful savior... but no one is going to save you, or anyone else! It is so easy to forecast every last action and decision of you bunch of idiots, that I'm well prepared for this little, unwanted disruption!"

The ridge ahead of them simply exploded in a massive, terrifying blast. One moment they were looking at a long line of hills and rocky cliffs, the next they were blinded by supernatural, incandescent light while the entire ridge shattered into a multitude of massive fragments, each one shaped like a blade and deadly sharp at the edges. The terrible weapons shot through the desert aiming for Killer and Alexis, and the two lovers instinctively backstepped, rising their arms and forming shields of energy as the first titanic daggers of stone aimed straight for their eyes, smacking into the barriers and disintegrating into gravel while both ligers stumbled backwards with the force of the impacts. The huge blades smashed into the shields with tremendous ferocity, hammering the two gods with an endless succession of impacts, and before they could react in any way groups of enormous boulders began to orbit around them, spinning at incredible speed and then converging towards the middle to crush them like nuts.

Alexis snarled and flexed, spreading her arms and sending a spherical blast of psychic force out against the projectiles coming at her from all sides, and Killer swung his arms out with a roar, punching the enormous boulders into clouds of dust, but the powder immediately began to wrap all over their bodies, augmented by countless tons of sand as unnatural, impossible winds picked up the dunes around them and carried the incandescent sand in a vortex, encasing the two lovers in the center of a hurricane of sand and dust.

The force of the infernal tornado swept Killer and Alexis off the ground and carried them away even as they pushed against the storm and tore their way through the solid waves of sand. They barely managed to see the sky for a brief moment before the tornado engulfed them again, and the sand savagely attacked their eyes, tearing into them, forcing them painfully open and almost literally clawing into them. Killer let out a howl of agony as he felt the incandescent sand pushing over and around his eyes, feeling it spearing into his skull as blood streaked down his cheeks and horrible agony threatened to shut down his mind. He barely heard Alexis's own scream because the sand viciously filled up his ears as well, and his nostrils, and his mouth, invading his throat and suffocating him, grinding his insides into a bloody pulp even as he blindly pushed through the inferno. With horror, he realized that the sand covering him, inside and outside, was coagulating together and rapidly hardening into stone and marble, slowing down his movements and turning the inside of his mouth, and then of his throat, into a dry, solid, dusty cave. The sensation was alien and terrifying and he could already feel the very chords of his muscles turning stiff and brittle, breaking apart painfully instead of flexing... and already the sand was wrapping around his heart. He stumbled backwards with a cry of pain that resounded only in his mind since his lungs were already turning into detailed sculptures of white marble, and he found it increasingly hard to focus, to get his mind to work on anything other than fear. Fear of that impossible, terrible feeling of suffocation and loss, as his body ceased to respond to him. In a mix or rage and terror, he let his energies explode like a fire, blowing the center of the hurricane into a swollen, massive sphere of sand and stone for a brief moment... and he blindly reached forwards, his stiff fingers bumping that frail wall before he charged right through it, sending pieces and dust flying in every direction. His feet suddenly lost contact with the ground and before he could think about floating he had fallen all the way down to crash heavily into the ground, his stiff body literally cracking in half as he soundlessly hissed in agony... before the energy radiating out of his heart shattered the layer of marble, dissolving it and allowing the organ to beat again with full, unhindered force.

Golden flames of energy spread rapidly through his insides, consuming the sand and burning the stone into nothing but vapor, and he threw his head back with a roar of pain, fear and relief all mixed together, large chunks of stone falling off his face and finally allowing his voice to boom out of his lips again. He pushed up to his feet as he flexed against the sand and mud that still tried to solidify and turn him into a statue, and he forced his eyes to open again even though the agony threatened to break him, as blood spilled out through the cracks.

His regeneration kicked in with its full force, rebuilding his eyes from the pulp they had been turned into, and he winced as the darkness was suddenly pierced by a ray of sunlight, intense and ferocious... and then he managed to blink, and when his vision cleared a little he spotted a group of enormous warriors charging at him. He had an instant to realize that their features were completely alien and eldritch, before a gigantic bug-like monstrosity slammed a sort of titanic hammer-blade into his chest, smacking him backwards with terrible force and causing chunks of stone to peel painfully off his abs and chest, leaving behind exposed, bloodied muscle and sometimes even bones, as parts of his body literally shattered and fell off.

He crashed onto his shoulders with a grunt of agony, but he was reactive enough to slam a hand into the ground, tearing a trench into it as he stopped his ruinous skidding and turned the momentum to his advantage, flipping backwards and landing on his feet just as another gigantic monster stomped his way towards him, swinging out a terrifying bardiche. Killer snarled and pushed one hand up towards the great blade, his black armor shifting and morphing to cover his fingers with a magnificent gauntlet before the bardiche smacked into his palm. It failed to tear through the thick armor even as sparkles and crackles of energy exploded from the impact, and Killer grinned in savage satisfaction as he seized the blade with all his strength and twisted sideways, hefting the incredulous alien divinity off the ground and then ramming him face first into the dirt, stomping one heavy black boot onto the armored skull. The bug-like alien had a large and heavily armored head, clad like the rest of his body in an exoskeleton of flexible but adamantine metal-bone, but the force of Killer's stomp made his skull creak audibly as it dented visibly inwards... and Killer immediately landed a second blow, grinning viciously as he simultaneously spun the bardiche tip-down, stabbing it through the alien's body with such force that it nearly shot completely through him and deep into the ground, away from sight. The alien squealed in agony and shock, but it was a short lived lament as his head burst into pieces and pulped gore only a moment later, when Killer's foot smashed down and twisted savagely on the spot.

Immediately, the other massive alien from earlier charged forwards, pushing forth his enormous hammer to ram into Killer, and the liger slammed his massive fists together with a roar, leaning forwards to grab the edges of the building-sized mass of adamantine metal, wrestling it backwards. The alien god snarled something in a language that sounded to Killer like nothing but a succession of metallic screeches and hisses that made him wince in distaste, before he flexed and stomped his foot into the ground to propel himself forwards, laughing darkly as the alien began to skid helplessly backwards. Other beasts charged forth from all sides, but Killer only gritted his fangs and arched his back, hefting the ungodly hammer up, up, up above his head, lifting the alien god off the ground as it stupidly refused to let go of the long pole, and then the liger swung the heavy, monolithic weapon first to the right, then to the left, knocking back another pair of beasts and sending dark green blood splattering thickly out. The alien divinity holding the hammer finally let go of the pole and landed on his feet, spreading his arms wide and snarling as two long, thin, Katana-like blades erupted out of his wrists, but before he could slash them, Killer had already arched his back again, lifting the gigantic weapon up into the air and then hurling it with all of his terrifying strength. The alien had enough time to gape in shock before the titanic block of metal smashed into him with the force of a meteor, stabbing the thick, long pole through his body and making him gargle weakly as he flew helplessly through the desert. The blooding metallic pole tore through another two bug-aliens, skewering them like tender morsels as the gigantic weapon flew at absurd speed across the desert of Alfaya, finally smacking violently into one of the towers of the royal palace, many miles away, shattering it into nothing but rubble and dust.

Killer urgently turned to the side, searching for Alexis even as he drew Wyvern out and swung it hard up into an incoming axe, knocking it away from his face and then punching the head neatly off its yielder, turning helmet, skull and brain into an undistinguishable cloud of pulp. Alexis winked at him while elegantly ducking under the assault of a group of aliens, Blue Vixen sailing rapidly through the air in a blur of sapphire light and slashing the legs off from under one of the beasts before slicing a second in half from crotch to forehead, finally decapitating a third as she gracefully straightened and pushed into the ranks of her enemies, laughing darkly and slashing up her free hand to catch another beast by the throat, hefting him effortlessly off the ground and then squeezing so hard on his neck that the head flew off in an explosion of ugly green blood, like the cork from a bottle of wine.

Her spending leather vest was torn open in several places and her flesh and muscles, just like his, had turned into stone and then large chunks had shattered, but even bloodied as she was she was easily tearing apart the alien gods swarming her from all sides, while her wounds rapidly healed, her body steadily regenerating. He turned his attention towards the rocky cliff where Vera had stood, and he gaped in horror as he saw it turned into nothing but a pile of rubble, before his eyes fixed upon a massive hurricane of sand and mud that was twisting and flexing like an alive thing, clearly trying to "digest" a struggling prey. For a brief instant, Killer hesitated, wondering whether he could and should trust Vera in any way. She had prevented them from digging up the data that would have exposed the whole network that funded the NWOA, prolonging the war... she had repeatedly tried to kill him and Alexis... she had repeatedly hacked the communications and computer systems of Kesteven's armed forces during the war, almost driving Siegfried insane as he desperately and unsuccessfully tried to eradicate her from the network, and she had undoubtedly worked to put infinite other obstacles on their path. Rationally, he should have wished for her death, yet a part of him did not want her harmed. He couldn't quite tell whether his instinct was trying to tell him something about the Doberman or whether his body was just greedily demanding her splendid body to be saved so he could conquer it, use it, abuse it and enjoy it, but he knew he didn't want to lose her. He was attracted by her, in more ways than one. And he was eager to learn the truth about her actions, because much as she had fought against them, she had never truly desired to kill them. Every time their swords had crossed, Vera had seemed to be putting them to the test more than anything else.

"Oh, fuck it..." Killer muttered under his breath, charging in the direction of the cyclone of sand even as other alien divinities assaulted him from all sides. Did the Swarm get here undetected...?

Killer had been convinced that the Swarm was still a great distance away, sailing through deep space and swelling greater and greater as more and more gods and their fleets joined forces to march against him, but now the desert swarmed with death as unknown, eldritch entities charged out of portals opening in midair or literally emerged from cliffs of stone that exploded into fragments, bombarding him with barrages of sharp, deadly fragments.

He traded a gaze with Alexis as she tore an alien divinity in half like it was made of paper, pushing through the corpse and looking splendid and terrible as she dripped blood from head to toe, and she gave him a little nod before charging forth on a parallel course to his, just as beasts of all sorts lunged at them from every side, and the fury of all four elements and of countless forms of magic was unleashed against them in a storm of colored lightning bolts, explosions and bursts of fire and ice.

Cerberus was nowhere to be seen. Somehow, though, he had been part of a plan even more astute than Killer and Alexis had suspected. Now they were exactly where Cerberus, or someone else above him, wanted them to be, and they had to deal with the consequences.