Chapter 22: Occultation

Just as it was, one year ago in the Augusta battle, the defenders of the human race had to suffer the freezing January air on their faces as they stared down the forces of Dominion. It was late in the morning with heavy overcast, and the western sky was smudged with the wings of the unholy. The soldiers, men from the last free nations on Earth, shivered in their boots, not just from the winter sting, but from what they were up against. They had seen the footage of the Augusta battle, they knew what the spawn were capable of. What’s more, they had seen that beam of energy that Dominion launched. It soared over their heads, brighter than a bolt of lightning.

Having feasted on a decadent breakfast that perked up his sour mood, Dominion sat in the throne room, watching the nearing coast with his outsight. He was rather surprised that the UN had figured out his plan to invade Normandy, but he was overjoyed as well. After all, he picked this spot for historical irony, so his invasion force needed an enemy firing down on them, otherwise, there would be no point. Not even in the battle of Stalingrad had so many men been gathered. This would be the greatest battle in history, as well as the last decent fight Dominion could expect from the human race. Well, decent in the sense that they wouldn’t half-ass it. Their efforts would amount to nothing.

First came the navies of every nation, hundreds of gun-bearing vessels spread across the sea. The smaller boats, closer to the water, were coated in ice from the ocean spray and the winter wind. Every weapon onboard these ships was aimed upward and unleashed. Gatling guns, heavy artillery, and missiles were fired into the sky towards Dominion’s forces. Their aim was focused on the sphinxes, trying to blast them out of the sky, but their flight did not rely on machinery or aerodynamics. The undersides of the sphinxes were bombarded with explosions and bullet holes, but they were built to withstand such attacks and maintain hull integrity.

Upon reaching the fleet, the sphinxes shined their lights upon the smaller vessels, lifting them up out of the water and into the air. The men onboard tried to escape by jumping into the water, preferring to take their chances in the deathly cold ocean, but as soon as they stepped into the light, they were hooked like fish. The screaming men were separated from their ships and drawn into the sphinxes for processing. Then, the floating boats, held in suspension within the light, were dropped onto the larger vessels like anvils.

The same power that lifted them up fired them down with force beyond simply gravity, pulverizing even the largest ships and dooming them to the bottom of the ocean. When the men came out to try and escape their sinking ships, they were once more caught in the light and collected. This was repeated over and over again until the entire armada was destroyed, with most of the troops captured.

Now came the air force, thousands of planes, jets, and helicopters. They unleashed their payloads, so many bullets and missiles that not even Dominion’s outsight could keep up. He could feel the silver in every round and ordered the vultures to retreat to the sphinxes while the hulks protected them. The hulks used their telekinesis to stop and destroy the missiles, but the silver-coated bullets were completely immune to physic powers and had to be either dodged or endured.

Like in the Augusta battle, all these hulks had been layered in molten metal that fused to their exoskeletons. While not enough to actually stop the armor-piercing bullets, they did slow them down enough to prevent them from reaching the muscles underneath their bone armor and protected them from silver shrapnel and mercury fumes.

‘Kill them all,’ Dominion ordered.

Galvanized by their Master’s command, the hulks abandoned defense and focused on offense. They met the airborne fleet head-on, dodging bullets and knocking the crafts out of the sky. Smoke darkened the clouds and wreckage dirtied the sea as helicopters, jets, and planes were demolished by the mighty fists of the hulks, or shot out of the sky by blasts of psychic energy. The spawn were meticulous in their slaughter, not letting a single pilot or passenger escape. Ejection seats were seized in the air with the screaming men still buckled in, though most didn’t even have the chance to bail before Dominion’s monsters smashed through the windshield.

While the most agile crafts tried to overcome the hulks in a dogfight, the heavily-armed bombers and gunships went after the sphinxes. They assaulted the floating fortresses with everything in their arsenal, but their thick metal hides endured the onslaught. The vultures were redeployed, now shielding themselves with psychic energy to make them invisible. They latched onto the planes like parasites and used their beaks to disable their engines. Rather than simply letting them fall out of the sky, the planes were carried back to the sphinxes so that the pilots could be extracted and imprisoned. Not one soul was to be wasted.

By the time the air force was defeated, Dominion’s army had entered the range of the long-distance artillery. He heard the cracks and saw the bombs fly, thousands of them, all heading for his airborne militia. He snapped his fingers and his flying fortress began to glow. Electricity curled around the buildings of the ascending tiers, reaching the central palace. The crackling coils arched between the two spires like a Jacob’s Ladder. From the tips of the spires, the lightning was released and spread across the sky like a net. The clouds looked like they were set ablaze from the charge, the light blinding to those who looked at it. Assaulted by this wave of plasma, every airborne round detonated in the air, with nothing the human defenders could do to stop it.

‘Begin the ground assault.’

The hulks dropped out of the sky and landed in the water. Their dense bodies, coated in metal, sank like stones, but they were immune from things like drowning. They walked across the ocean floor, smashing through sunken ships and aircrafts, and reached the coast. The soldiers in their bunkers tried not to soil themselves in terror as they watched the titanic beasts walk out of the sea and take their first steps onto the beach.

They opened fire, both with machineguns and rocket launchers, raining hellfire down upon the invaders. The bunkers had been so heavily armed and stocked with so many weapons—guns, on top of guns, on top of guns—that they were hidden behind a wall of light created from the combined muzzle flashes. So many bullets filled the air that their flights were producing their own wind current, and the spark of the tracer rounds was enough to induce an epileptic seizure. Within the first ten seconds of firing, the troops were standing in an ankle-deep marsh of ejected casings.

However, while any human army would be quite literally turned into bloody pulp, the hulks took it all in stride. The silver bullets neutralized their healing, but they had an inhuman pain threshold and their powerful bodies could never be hindered by any number of such shallow injuries. Even rockets, if successful in breaching their exterior defenses, were still just shrugged off. Maybe a few of the beasts might take a knee to try and heal themselves if they sensed danger to their S2 Engines, but really, the only thing actually slowing them down was the combined kinetic force of all the bullets.

The beaches had landmines every few feet, but the hulks were so heavy and dense that when they stepped on them, it was like an M80 firecracker going off under a tractor tire. Upon coming across the anti-tank barriers, the hulks were anything but hindered. They simply picked up and threw them like they were made of Styrofoam. The barriers, made from crossed I-beams, struck the bunkers with more force than a wrecking ball, smashing concrete and crumpling the men’s weapons. Then the hulks reached the soldiers and resumed their slaughter.

With the beach defenses cleared, the rest of the spawn began to disembark to join the battle. They moved past the destroyed bunkers and met the main infantry force, more than a million armed men hiding in trenches and behind walls of sandbags. The hulks played decoy, drawing fire while the sentinels and wolves went to work. They thundered across the battlefield like a stampede, their mighty fists splattering men cowering behind sandbags, and their massive feet eviscerating the skulls of anyone foolish enough to raise their heads out of the trenches.

The sentinels were fast, faster than the troops could have ever imagined, dodging bullets, leaping over barriers, and killing with demonic skill. They’d snap men’s necks, skewer their brains with their long fingers shoved into the eye sockets, or even pierce chests and rip out hearts with their bare hands. When the soldiers fired upon them, they’d disappear behind cover or even use slain soldiers as shields.

The wolves stayed low, hiding in the trenches and going for surprise attacks. Soldiers in a trench would look ahead to the trench in front of theirs, and see men suddenly drop out of sight while screaming bloody murder. The way they zigzagged across the battlefield, clearing one trench and then moving on to the next, it almost looked like they were advancing across a board game.

The soldiers, their fingers stiff from the cold, their noses filled with the stink of blood and frozen earth, screamed in terror while shooting at the oncoming wave of death. Their breakfast, unfortunately, the last meal they’d ever eat, was beginning to rise into their throats as they were poisoned by fear. Orders were shouted in a vast spectrum of languages, many of which were cut off when the commanders giving them had their throats ripped out.

Men who were wounded, whether minor or fatal, collapsed and played dead. They didn’t even bother trying to get back up and resume fighting, for they had realized that there was no point. They couldn’t oppose this, they could not defeat it, they couldn’t even resist it. They wept and vomited from their helplessness, from the agony of the giant cavity where their last bit of hope for the human race used to be.

The last thing they dared hope for was that these unholy monsters would walk right by without checking to make sure that they were dead, that the battlefield would be abandoned, and under the cover of night, they could crawl away and find a place to hide for the rest of their lives, but that wasn’t the case. As ethereal beings, the spawn had had an innate skill for differentiating the living from the dead, just as easily as they could tell hot from cold. They could sense the souls still present in the bodies, still yet to be collected, and performed a very thorough mop-up.

Then, the world trembled. Everyone, human and spawn alike, shuddered as an aura, divine in its intensity but spine-chilling in its inhumanity, washed over the earth. The battle was halted, no one moving other than to blink. All was silent, save for the insidious laugh echoing through the throne room.

“Ishtar! Adam! Blight!” Three of his four horsemen appeared before him with their heads bowed. The fourth was where he already needed to be. “I leave the remainder of the battle and the UN to the four of you. As for me, I have a date to get to.”

“Yes, Lord Dominion!”

Then he launched himself into the sky through the oculus overhead and rocketed southeast, flying so fast that he created a sonic boom. He crossed France and the Mediterranean and entered Africa. He zeroed in on the epicenter, in the heart of the Sahara in northern Chad. He dropped out of the sky, landing on one of a billion sand dunes in the sea of arid earth. All was quiet, but the power he could sense was coming from straight below.

“How long are you going to keep me waiting?”

He replied with a pulse of energy of his own, identical to the octopus’s, like he was teasing this new Guardian with the death of its kin. Whether or not it actually felt rage towards Dominion or the octopus’s death, the Guardian made itself known with a continent-shaking earthquake. The Sahara trembled with violent force, leveling all of the sand dunes. Below the desert, the tectonic plate was being broken by something bursting free. A great fissure opened up across the landscape, large enough to swallow entire megacities. The pyramid Dominion had made out of New York could be dropped into the abyss without ever touching the sides. So much dust was kicked up from the activity that it blocked out the sun, but even without his outsight, Dominion sensed the new presence, sensed the arrival of the Guardian simply by the air being pushed out of the way.

Then, the dust cloud settled with unnatural force, as if every grain of airborne sand was forced to prostrate itself before this child of the Old Gods. Yet while the dust cloud was gone, the sun remained blocked. Floating just under the vacuum of space, with a wingspan that could be measured in miles, was a gargantuan angel-like being. Its body was like that of a moth, with an insect’s abdomen, but instead of multiple legs, it had a single pair of arms, with hands resembling the feet of an eagle. Its head looked like a turtle shell, with a single glowing eye visible within.

The Guardian floated with an upright posture in the sky, levitating with telekinesis, rather than its unflapping wings, and casting its vast shadow upon Dominion and the landscape. From a mouth he could not see, it released a blaring, almost mechanical drone.

“Well aren’t you a sight to behold? And to think you’d wake up and put on this display for little old me. Unfortunately, it would have been better for you to remain slumbering in the—”

The ground underneath Dominion exploded, sand and dust sent skyward in a great mushroom cloud. Dominion dispelled it and cleared the air. With pursed lips, he looked down, seeing that the end of his foot had been vaporized. The explosion had been the result of an energy blast drilling straight through his foot and continuing down and striking the ground. The blast actually contained very little energy, at least compared to Dominion, but it was so heavily condensed that it was like an armor-piercing ethereal bullet. As his wound was mended, Dominion glanced up at the Guardian, its unblinking eye focused on him and transmitting otherworldly bloodlust.

“Huh. It’s very rude to interrupt people when they are speak—”

No more warning shots, the winged being unleashed a firestorm of energy blasts from its wings down upon Dominion’s location. He shot off across the desert to avoid them, but the creature’s reaction speed was too great. It was already anticipating where he would end up and firing down. Shots were piercing Dominion’s body and riddling him with holes faster than he could regenerate. He boosted his speed even further, but an omnidirectional wave of blasts was raining down upon the planet.

Dominion focused his outsight, zeroing in on the source of the blasts. Its wings were feathered, but the feathers themselves weren’t ordinary. The shafts were hollow with an open end at the tip, and the hairs branching out were glowing in sequence. He saw the blasts being fired from the openings of the shafts; the feathers were cannon barrels of ethereal energy, and the hairs seemed to help compress the energy before firing, taking what would have been a blast only strong enough to singe his skin and turning it into a weapon of maximum penetration. It had billions of feathers, each one firing in perfect synchronicity, and it seemed to be able to control the path of the blasts like guided missiles.

He was taking too much damage, he had to counter! While zooming over the sand, Dominion brought his hands together and began charging a planet-killer blast. There was no escaping the onslaught, so he had to grit his teeth and bear the enemy attacks to fire his own. He pointed his hands at the angel and unleashed his power in a mile-wide laser, darkening the sky as it outshined the sun.

The angel swerved out of the way faster than Dominion had anticipated, bordering on teleportation. The blast soared into space and he swung his gaze around, trying to find his target. He chased after it with a blast, like trying to hit a moving target with a jet of water. Regardless of how fast he swung his hands, the angel dodged every time, without even flapping its wings.

Then, it shot across the sky and appeared directly over Dominion, and before he could react, a volley was set loose straight down onto his position. Dominion cursed as the blasts rained down on him, chopping him into pieces and opening up a great crater in the desert. As dust filled the air, the splattered remains transformed into liquid shadow and burrowed under the ground.

From the abyssal fissure that the angel had created in its ascension, colossal tentacles reached out of the darkness and into the sky. They were the tentacles of the octopus, just as large and powerful as when Dominion fought it. They lunged for the angel, but without showing any hesitation, it began firing from all of its feathers at once and directed the blasts at the tentacles. They ripped through the spongey flesh without issue, spilling black blood and sending liquified flesh pouring like rain. So many blasts were being fired at once, that before the tentacles could even reach the angel, they were eviscerated beyond regeneration.

The angel then focused its attack on the fissure, expanding it in its search for Dominion. Away from the blast area, great pillars of stone, the size of skyscrapers, broke free from the earth and were launched towards the angel. Without even looking, the angel redirected a portion of its bombardment to shoot them out of the sky, crushing every piece of stone into dust.

Deep under the ground, Dominion tried to plan out his next move.

‘Its defenses are so great that it can nullify just about any physical attack, and it’s fast enough to be able to dodge ethereal attacks. It’s generating a psychic field to prevent me from teleporting, and if I try to get close any other way, I’ll be shot out of the sky.

Well, at least I’m no longer bored.’

Reports came in to the UN from the battlefield, but as much as they wanted to cry, no one had any tears left to shed. The human race had failed, Dominion had won. There was no weapon they possessed that could stop him. Humanity’s future was nothing but enslavement and inevitable extinction.

Then they got an alert, sightings of the sphinxes. They were forming a ring around Paris about forty miles in diameter and had deployed some kind of barrier, just like in the American cities, and were closing in. Citizens were forced to abandon their homes as the barrier advanced, crushing houses and flattening the land like a giant iron. They flocked into Paris, disorganized, frantic, and screaming. The world leaders looked out the windows and saw the streets swarming with refugees, with everyone screaming in fear and begging God for protection. So pitiful, so fragile. To think that the human age had reached its end.

Then the area around the building went dark, and looking up, they saw a lone sphinx floating overhead, casting its own barrier to keep them locked in. The men and women all exchanged fearful glances. Their time had come, time to meet the Devil himself. They still had one final nuclear bomb down in the basement. It was coated in silver, something that would hopefully prevent its detection, and the chairman of the EU had the detonator. Even if the bomb didn’t kill Dominion, just managing to catch him in the blast would be a respectable last act of defiance by the world. Plus, everyone within the blast radius would probably be better off dead than enslaved.

The building shook as something struck the roof. Just like that messenger, someone broke through the ceiling and landed in the center of the room. However, rather than the one figure they hoped for, three appeared. A towering muscular man, wearing a metal skirt. A gorgeous woman with demonic features and an alluring outfit. A fully-suited SS officer, missing all swastikas and nazi symbols, as well as his face.

They landed with perfect posture, not even bending their knees. Everyone silently cursed at this turn of events. They wanted Dominion, not his henchmen.

The woman stepped forth. “I am Ishtar, servant of Lord Dominion, the high priestess of the one true God. We have come here to accept the world’s surrender to our glorious ruler.”