I got to ride in a helicopter. That was nice. I barely fit even though the King Ravens were built for delivering big boys to where they needed to do their big boy business and the Locust were damn set on blowing us up with their weird flying inking bio-bombs called Nemacysts. Because of my wide field of view and quite frankly insane hand eye coordination and reaction times, I had no problems protecting both gunships but we ended up landing in front of the East Barricade Academy rather than our objective, the Fenix Estate.
Some people might be miffed by having to hoof it after many hours of sustained combat operation, and I certainly was until our fireteams were set upon by a Berserker in the academy conservatory. Ten feet tall, full of muscle, with skin hard enough to survive sustained small arms fire, it was a deathmatch made in heaven.
We ran right at each other while the Gears hurriedly backed away. She was fast and bigger than me, but had no idea how to fight a being that could overpower her. She tried to truck me like she would anything else and I shot for the single leg takedown, ripping her off the ground with ease and slamming her into the conservatory floor. She weighed a ton, but I could lift her and seven of her sisters if they were kind enough to hold hands for me.
She had no idea how to grapple and I locked in an Americana with ease, internally twisting her arm off at the shoulder with the help of her struggling. The exploding of her powerful shoulder joint echoed loudly as I switched to raining down punches on the weakened foe. She had more than enough strength to throw me off, but I kept her locked tight with my thighs and she didn't know how to calmly counter my wrestling beyond savagely trying to force her way out of my control.
I quickly realized that even with my strength, I couldn't strike her hard enough to damage her head. She was too tough and built wiyh traps that enveloped her head entirely, so I reached for the hammer slung to my hip and pulled Volendrung from its ring mount. Outside of the Elder Scrolls verse, the power I gained from the stars was greatly diminished but was still there, which means Volendrung struck with more than just mean physics, she came down with magically enhanced armor penetration.
I pounded her head like a stake that refused to drive down until her skull completely collapsed. With the hammer's enchantment still in effect I felt fresh as a daisy despite the concerted violent effort.
"Grunt. Grunt. Grunt. Grunt!" Cole started chanting and soon had all the Gears joining in.
I stood and raised my hands as if to elevate the adoration of the gathered thicc bois.
"Thank you, thank you." I graciously accepted their praise, "My friends, and you are my friends. Today we have participated and spectated the good violence. As now, as it ever has been, we are grateful to our enemy for delivering herself to this holy communion, this sacrament of blood. May it never end, Amen."
"I would actually prefer it to end." One of the the helmeted 'red shirt' gears stated, "Isn't that why we are delivering the Lightmass Bombs to the Hollow? To kill the grubs and achieve peace."
"Cease your heresy, boy!" I shouted, "Abandon reason. Know only war!"
"Damn son." Cole stated, "Sign me the fuck up. I felt the spirit move me baby! The spirit of WAR!"
The Fenex estate was only a short distance from the academy, but the Locust made us fight for every inch of the house and kept popping up out of fresh emergence tunnels constantly. Slowly but surely the red shirts died. They gave their lives so that Marcus and Dom could download data on the Hollow Dr. Fenix was gathering and Baird could fix an armored personnel carrier parked in the backyard of the estate while under fire. The man does fine work under pressure.
With the data in hand we had little problem loading up into the APC and taking off for our next destination. A fucking train.
They wanted to deliver their last hope for victory on a mode of transport a handful of jackasses with horses could rob.
It is times like these I am glad that I am a giant lizard man. I do not claim these idiots as my own.
In a stunning display of being one step ahead, the Locust had raised a bridge on our route to the train, preventing our way forward.
Marcus called the obstruction into mission control and she advised them to restore power to the sector to lower the bridge.
"Or, I could save us a whole bunch of bullshit and break the drawing mechanisms on each side." I told them, "It's not like there is priority traffic going up and down this river anymore."
"That sounds way better than us fucking around for hours trying to make this happen." Baird agreed.
Five minutes later I dropped the first half of the bridge and got a running leap that got my to the other side where I performed an identical delicate precision hammer smashing to connect the bridge and get us to the train station.
The Locust were, surprise surprise, waiting for us at the station. With this level of superiority in troup positioning and enemy prediction it was no wonder the Locusts were kicking the shit out of the humans. They are constantly three steps ahead of everyone and without the for wargods comprising Delta Team this whole species would be fucked. They didn't even have the excuse of these guys being super soldiers encased in the most advanced tech in the galaxy, Delta just managed to shoot the enemy while not getting shot back better than anyone I had ever seen.
As we slayed grubs to kill time, Anya kept us up to date on the COG forces failing to keep the train through the Locust attack and how we would now be leaping onto the train as it passed through the station so that we could take back the last hope for victory against the Locust. Which the humans failed to protect. Because they put it on a train. Fucking retards.
We'd managed to kill all the local grubs by the time the train arrived making the jump fairly easy, and in the confines of the freight train the grubs had nowhere to run from me and my hammer. I picked up my second berserker kill with greater ease than the first as I didn't bother giving her any kind of fair fight.
Cole and Baird manned a pair of mounted machine guns to defend us from the huge flying squids the Locust had bio-engineered and saddled, while Marcus, Dom, and I continued to the front of the train and encountered the fucking Lambent that had somehow managed to get on the god damn train as well in the form of infected wretches.
The Lambent aren't even intelligent and they were capable of attacking humanity's last great hope. Where the fuck is Falcon when you need him to yell as someone to do better. It may have felt completely forced and cringy in his tv show, but Colonel Hoffman needs someone to scream that at him constantly. His operation has been a shit show start to finish.
At least RAAM showed up to distract me from my disappointment. 10 feet tall in some sick black armor with powers over the kyrll that make no fucking sense, the guy emerged on the scene in an entrance that would make Batman green with envy. He rested his double barrel machine gun on his shoulder and drew his serrated sword when he saw me walking at him with my hammer in hand.
"You dare to approach me?" He rasped out.
"I can't kick your ass without getting closer." I responded.
"Then come as close as you like." He hissed as we walked at each other with measured steps and loads of Jojo swagger.
"The fuck is going on?" Marcus asked his pal.
"I don't know, but it feels like that was the most badass line ever." Dom answered.
When I got close enough his swarm of kryll tried mauling me and failing, some of them landing on me and scraping their fangs ineffectually against my skin.
"Your pets can't seem to get a good taste." I chuckled before slugging the Locust General in the guts.
He coughed and then rose up to slug me in the guts.
We went back and forth like this, increasing the strength of our punches while train traveled to its doom.
"Why are they punching each other?" Dom asked in confusion, "They have weapons in their other hand, why aren't they using them."
"Dom." Marcus stated, "You haven't spent any time institutionalized so you probably don't understand what is happening. This isn't about winning and losing, or the fate of the world. What we are seeing is the perfect combustion of manly souls."
"The fuck?" Dom snapped his head at his friend in confusion.
"It's fucking beautiful." Marcus choked up.
RAAM collapsed to his knees when my strike broke his ribs, signaling his defeat. He looked me in the eyes and nodded when I smashed his head into a paste with Volendrung.
With time to spare, Marcus inputted the targeting data and we dipped on a King Raven that had already picked up Baird and Cole.
"Is that the body of General RAAM?" Colonel Hoffman looked down in awe at the corpse I held in the belly of his gunship.
"Fuck yeah it is." grinned Baird.
"What are you going to do with it?" Dom asked me.
"Eat it." I grinned.
I never miss a chance at red meat.
I nearly had an asthema attack while at work today. I am sure it was real good for moral to see the boss hunched over coughing his lungs out in the middle of a respatory plague.
In better news, a big thank you to my donor, Mrbadguy17. You are the man.
If you too want to be the man, or woman for the 2% of my audience that is registered as female on this platform, you can do so at
ko - fi . com / jmanm
Donations contribute to extra chapters I will put out on the weekends.
I arrived at my rendezvous location with Jack, but instead of a Stranded encampment I found a scrap fortress with buff dudes in red clothes and sports gear guarding it.
"No way." I stood in awe, "She couldn't have possibly done this in one weekend."
The gate guards saluted me with shouts of 'the Legate has returned!' and I moved through the fortress seeing more men dressed in red and sporting equipment drilling younger naked men furiously. The naked men performed vigorous calisthenics as well as practice drills with makeshift spears and machetes.
All around the area, men used the local rubble and scrap to create more and more fortifications and hard points within the fort itself. These murder boxes would do far more to counter Locust insurgents than walls ever could.
Every man I saw without a baseball helmet and sunglasses on had a shaved head and a thousand yard stare, and the raw number of men here was mind boggling. Jack had left with a crew of a dozen who worked as scrappers for a tribe of just over fifty including women and children, yet there were hundreds of adult males at this location.
At the center of the fort stood a large tent where I found Jack sitting on a mobile yet comfortable throne in a red dress with a bearskin hung over her shoulders and a gold chain with a heavy medallion dangling temptaciously between her heavy breasts.
"How the fuck did you make these people into Cesear's Legion?" I asked her as she smirked, "I was only gone for two days."
"Sounds like you're doubting my hustle." she grinned, "It was a lot of work conquering all the local Stranded Tribes and whipping the best of them into something worth leading, but I did it. And I did it in style."
"Please stop." I begged, "I can only become so erect!"
I spent the next three and a half months leading Jack's Legion. The first thing I did was lead scrapper teams along the path of Delta's devastation, gathering the massive amounts of guns, ammo, and armor left behind during the Lightmass offensive. It was a damn good choice as we soon needed those guns when the remaining Locust attacked the surface in their desperate bid at both revenge and escaping the Lambent. The COG lost territory daily, drawing back to the bedrock of Jacinto, and the Stranded started heading our way en masse.
No one knew how to break a man down and forge him into twisted steel better than me and Jack. In ninety days we had turned over two thousand men from desperate lawless and oftentimes gutless savages into stoic brutal killing machines. When the Locust came to attack us we thanked them for bringing us more guns and ammo and armor.
Soon I was leading platoons into the hollows to hunt down the grubs before and after attacks on our rapidly expanding fort. After a recruit finished his training he would earn the right to wear clothes and would quickly be blooded against the Locust. After his first kill he would be allowed into the female camps, and each kill after allowed return trips.
New comers complained only briefly about being stripped of their freedom and segregated by sex, but the older Legionaries quickly beat that out of them. Obedience, Discipline, Survival. Jack and I never subscribed to that bullshit about losing your humanity for the sake of victory. Humanity gets your species extinct. When all that is left of the world is ash and rubble and enemies it is time to start making sacrifices to ensure the survival of the species. The COG sure as hell couldn't do it, so we would.
Men fight and scavenge and build, women grow and raise children. If you are not participating in one of those activities then you are part of the problem. I only had to discipline a platoon once. All forty men presented themselves in their ten man squads, drew lots and the two short lots in ten were beaten to death by the other eight.
Most of those young men now wear refitted Theron Guard armor as elite Praetorians of the Legion.
For myself, I resized and reinforced RAAM's armor, mounted an underslung shotgun to his double barrel machine gun and forged some larger magazines for it, as well as reworked the receiver of a COG sniper rifle to take custom made ten round magazines and operate as a semi automatic weapon. I kept the revolvers as is. They kick ass, were made for huge hands, and made me feel cowboy as fuck.
Slowly but surely we were gaining ground against a world that just wanted to kill us all.
At the end of the Harvest month, Dom and Marcus came to the fort on a King Raven. We may have beaten the weakness out of the men of Jack's Legion, but we didn't beat the hate of the Gears and the COG out of them. The bastards are lucky I was down by the gate getting ready to lead another raid on the Locust when they showed up.
"Dude." Dom greeted, "The fuck is with all the naked guys?"
"I try not to notice but with my enhanced field of vision and 100 - 20 eyesight I am pretty much fucked on not seeing pipe non stop." I told him as we moved through the now sprawling Fort Legion, "Jack has them earn the right to wear clothes again after they complete basic. Its all a part of breaking them down and making them tough as nails. It works, so I endure the eyesore of your pathetic human genitalia."
"Ain't nothing pathetic about what I am working with." Dom thumbed his nose in pride.
"You got a pair of nuts." I told him, "I got a quad of apples."
"That's just the testicles though, I got a baby's arm holding an apple hanging left, dawg." Dom asserted his dominance.
"You people got horses on this world?" I asked him.
"Dawg, no! That ain't right yo!" Dom backed up in fear.
"Head is more spade shaped, but yeah. Don't waste your time measuring dicks with me." I chuckled.
"People think horses have big cocks?" Marcus asked in confusion.
We both looked at him in horror.
"Now I know why they were all crying." I muttered and Dom nodded his head.
"Fuck dude." He sighed, "I ain't ever been the dude with the littlest cock. This don't feel good, man."
Jack was chilling empress style when we came in.
"These Theron's are looking a bit smaller than usual." Dom commented on Jack's Praetorians.
"Post apocalyptic survival favors those best at reducing, reusing, and recycling." I grunted.
"I take it you two are here to see if Grunt can come outside and play?" Jack grinned.
"Actually to see if all the guys you two have gathered can come and play." Marcus answered.
"No deal on the minions." Jack shook her head, "I'm not giving the COG another chance to betray them to their deaths."
"And you are cool with your alien husband being the one at risk of betrayal?" Dom asked.
"The COG can go ahead and make his day by giving him more people to fight and vengeance to pursue. He is like a dog with a bone when it comes to vengeance. The last guy dumb enough to betray us got cut into three pieces with one swing."
"The Locust are winning right now, and if Operation: Hollow Storm fails then you and your people will be all that is left for them to attack." Marcus reasoned with my wife, "If we don't stand together to survive, we will all die divided."
"On the contrary," Jack mused, "I like our odds against the Locust."
"They would drown you in their blood." Marcus countered.
"Just more meat for Grunt." Jack smirked, "You get to take Grunt out for another boys weekend and he will probably make this Hollow Storm go super easy. He knows the Hollow, the Nexus, and everything down there like the back of his hand. Plus he never turns down a fight with the Locust."
"Deal." Marcus nodded and I went to pack extra ammo for our trip to the depths of Sera.
"Is that 'the' Grunt." shouted and excited Ben Carmine as we loaded up onto the armed mobile drill rig being piloted by Dizzy, a Stranded turned Gear in a cowboy hat with the most backwoods over the top accent I had heard, possibly ever.
"Yeah." I nodded my head, "The one and only."
"Oh my God!" he frantically started digging through his duffle bag and came back with a permanent marker.
"Could you please sign my chest plate?" He requested in awe.
"Sure thing." I agreed and signed it Gatatog Grunt Bearsbane Desilijic Tiure.
"Clayton is going to lose his mind when he sees this."
"Nice kid." I commented while he walked away from me.
"Hopefully he doesn't go the same way his brother did." Marcus nodded.
As we stood in companionable silence I screwed a heavy duty silencer on the end of my sniper rifle and chambered a round of my hand loaded hot rounds. Better bullet shape, more powder, way more death down range.
"You'll thank me for the can later." I started shooting the oncoming Nemecysts as they flew through the air seeking to destroy our convoy. Once upon a time I marveled at my new reptilian reflexes and dexterity. Today I put on a shooting clinic that would leave the old me in awe. Not a single damn Nemecyst got through to the convoy. I also deadeyed the Reaver riders, cutting the effectiveness of those flying squids to near nothing.
Despite taking no damage, our drill rig broke down when the engine overheated giving the Locust a chance to come at us, but the local air support cut them down to size. They performed similar feats when we came across a volcanic area with lava seeping out of the ground. From a sloping crevasse came an enormous wave of Locusts trying to overwhelm a rig to our right. They were supported by a giant Brumak, forcing us to charge ahead rather than sit around for it to fuck us up. We didn't end up duking it out with another rig piloted by the grubs, so my work keeping the airspace clear was paying dividends.
Another Brumak appeared but we just pumped rounds into its head till its skull couldn't continue to maintain its structural integrity.
"This operation is going really well." I commented as we pulled into the town of Landown and I fired a quick machine gun barrage at a wave of 'hidden' tickers that exploded causing the convoy to come to a halt.
We had to send in ground forces to sweep the area for the landmine strapped dog sized creatures. After we cleared the town the Locust began another nemecyst bombardment that I no sold. With that out of the way we were forced to clear a pitch black tunnel of the little exploding creeps and then battle a Locust mortar crew on the other side. I think Marcus must have had extensive artillery training because he commandeered their mortar guns and used them to clear the whole town and the drill site. The dude was like an artillery savant.
With the drill site cleared Marcus and Dom loaded up onto a drill pod and awaited deployment. Because of this they were completely unable to watch me blow the head off of General Skurge when he popped up out of the ground with his stupid chainsaw staff. Dumb mother fucker should have known not to lead his army from the front if he wasn't bulletproof. RAAM knew better with his weird kryll shield.
No one has plot armor when I am in range.
With him dead the Locust immediately lost morale and started to rout and the Gears began an easy insertion into the hollow. I even had my own drill pod with my name on it.
I wish I could get the sound system to play 'The Boys are Back' because with the memories of five Therons this definitely felt like a homecoming.
Do people normally kill everyone when they come home? Probably not, but I am sure there is ample president for the psychotic rampage I am about to embark on.
Over 2000 words in this chapter and the story is within spitting distance of 100,000 words. I will be posting this story on fanfiction . net once I do, but I will probobly interact with those people less than on this platform.
You can support me and my family at
ko - fi . com / jmanm
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