PLANET KORENCHKA, GALI SYSTEM
RUINS OF THE CITY NOFFKARA, 1994 AD
She was born for this.
Sailor Chloria laughed madly as she strode amongst the chaos, revelling in the carnage around her. Any second-guesses about her path had long been sent to rest. The mistake of her birth, the absence of a true Sailor Crystal and its passage to her youngest sister, had been rectified with the assistance of Galaxia. Now it was she who was truly the ruler of her world, and all she had needed to do was sell the collective souls of a world.
It was worth every scream. Chloria moved amongst the city like a wraith, quietly hunting down the survivors of the army while the chaos-animated corpses of those already slain sniffed out the civilians who had somehow managed to stay alive through the initial attacks. The work was bloody, terrible, and would have been almost unthinkable mere months ago... before her investiture, and before the betrayal of Sailor Korenchka.
She closed her eyes and listened to the wind, letting her long, green hair billow out behind her like the clouds of death she commanded. The soldiers who survived were all equipped with standard nuclear, biological, and chemical protection... and as such, simply blanketing the city with a toxic fog would be insufficient to do her work. It was just as well, really; if all she did was lay down a cloud of gas, it denied her the delight of watching people slowly choke themselves on their own blood.
Somewhere in the distance, she could hear the rumble of a collapsing building. Chloria paid it little heed; she had ordered her minions to lay waste to the city and reduce it to the ground. It had been one of her sister's favorite places; the gardens that grew here played host to some of the rarest species of flowers that grew on this otherwise desolate world. Chloria had spent extra time in there, drawing deeply on her strengths to make sure that everything there was dead, dead, dead.
There was no force that could resist her left on this world. Her new Sailor Crystal would sustain her on what was left for as long as she desired to, until the Lady called her to bring her death and destruction to another world. Her loyalty was complete, her powers irresistable, her person invulnerable... untouchable.
Another building fell, this one more close to her. Chloria paused in her walk to watch it fall, cocking her ear as the gruesome howls of the ghouls in her service preceded its collapse... and suddenly realized with a start that these were not howls of delight.
They were something else.
The Animamate lifted a hand and murmured a call to power, channelling the dust cloud that was billowing towards her into the sky so that she could see the building's new ruins more clearly. Yes, she thought with some displeasure, there was something there-- some source of power, not hers, not Galaxia's, moving amidst the ghouls, untouched, and systematically destroying them.
Displeased, she turned from her original course and began stalking through the charred, blackened ruins of the city. The universe responded to her emotions, shrouding her in her signature green haze; when she finally arrived at the scene, she could see the being who was defying her rule. At first glance, she thought she was dealing with a rogue member of the Order of the Divine Fist-- the loose robes he wore over his upper body contrasted sharply with popular styles and the military uniform-- but as he turned towards her, the last of the ghouls rent in twain by a massive tearing motion, she could see him for his true self.
He was an alien, and all the more hideous for how closely he resembled her own race... and how closely he resembled the Lady Galaxia. His hands had too many fingers, flailing like little tentacles; his face was smooth and fleshy, bearing none of the decorative crests that decorated the males of her own species. And his smile... there was something truly unnatural about it.
And while she took a step back, her own expression dipping into the disgusted, the alien merely gave her a speculative look and nodded. "Nice bracers," he mused. "Give them to me."
In a flash, her revulsion hardened into contempt. "Arrogant," Chlora sneered, and placed her fingertips together. The haze that surrounded her thickened, becoming almost palpable, before it lashed out at the trespasser-- but, incredibly, as the cloud rushed towards him, he merely draw a facemask from his trousers that should not have fit there and pulled it over his head. The cloud rushed over him, saturating the air, and he stood firm.
"I warn you, demon," the Senshi growled, taking a step forward. "This land is mine, given to me by right of Sailor Galaxia-sama. I will not tolerate trespassers."
"Okay, then," the alien responded cheerily, the face-mask giving his voice an odd resonance. "I'll be happy to go, but I'm not leaving without your bracers. Hand them over, and I'll be out of your hair, lickety-split."
"You must be mad," she sneered, not sure what lickety-split meant but presuming it meant something along the lines of 'quickly'. "Surely you have seen my powers? Surely you must be aware that it is I who am responsible for the destruction of this city, and a dozen others before it..."
"Yeah, I kind of figured that." He folded his hands behind his back and leaned forward. "The trail of destruction sort of leads here, so I decided it'd be best to look here first... so I did, and here we are."
"Yet you do not ask a bargain," Chloria said darkly.
The alien shrugged. "I probably don't have anything you want, to be honest."
The Senshi snorted derisively, taking another step towards him. "If you were stronger than I, you would have simply taken it." Another step forward, eyes gleaming hungrily. "If you were my equal, you would have brought something to barter with."
"That's an interesting chain of logic," he mused, head cocked to the side.
A savage grin manifested on Chloria's face. "I do not know whose powers you think you have, creature, but they cannot possibly stand up to the might of a true Sailor Crystal. You think yourself impervious to my powers with your little technological toy?"
"Well, no, not really, but--"
"KORENCHKA STRATOSPHERE STRIKE!" she screeched, drawing her hands back and manifesting a brilliant green burst of ki. Two beams lanced out from each of her hands, crossing the distance towards the alien and spearing clean through him four times. The alien choked a bit, then staggered backwards and collapsed in a heap.
How quickly they fall, Chloria mused with a sneer, and turned around... only to stop when she heard a decisively not-dead grumble from behind her. She whirled around towards the alien and watched, awe-struck, as he slowly shambled to his feet, four holes cleanly visible in his clothing... with flesh completely unmarred.
They stood apart, eyeing one another for a long moment, with the one's disbelief written on her face and the other's resignation clearly evident in his stance. "This isn't a fight you can win," the alien said dryly. "I've fought your kind a dozen times before, Sailor Chloria. Killing me has always been and will always be beyond your ability."
"...that is a very impressive talent of yours," Chloria replied, suddenly clamping down on her emotions. That he knew her name was not unusual-- the survivors of any attack who made it to other cities often told of her divine retribution. Of course, he must have heard it from some other party. "Your talents might be better served," she added, lips curling in a greedy smile, turning her wrists so that the green and purple stones on her bracelets faced him, "when you join my armies!"
"Jebus," he sighed, shaking his head. "Not agai--"
The starseed extractors flared with a brilliant light, propelling a pair of spheres of energy towards him. He did not, or could not dodge; the impact sent him staggering back, sinking to his knees with all the energy of the dead.
Now, Chloria, thought, she would find out what made him so unusual. She relaxed her guard and strolled towards him, a definite smile at the edge of her face. Even if he did not draw his power from a Sailor Crystal-- which she acknowledged might be the case-- if he could regenerate his injuries so quickly as a mortal, his powers as a phage might be even more impressive. He would make a fine warband leader...
The fact that something was wrong began dawning on her when she came within five feet of her defeated enemy. The dust cloud above was still masking a good deal of the light, but there should have been a distinct sparkle of a starseed in front of his forehead... but there was nothing there. Not even the faintest hint of reflected light.
When his eyes opened fully, she realized the depth of her mistake.
"GOTCHA!" he shrieked giddily, seizing her collar and pulling her towards him. "You guys ALWAYS buy it! I can't tell you HOW many times I've played that joke on you and yours and it NEVER gets old!"
"Galaxia-sama!" Chloria sputtered, dislodging his grip and backing away. "What in the name of the gods below ARE you?!"
The alien's hand flicked to the side, snapping a golden fan open with a foreign insignia emblazoned on the center. "What I am, Sailor Chloria," he said pleasantly, fanning himself idly, "is beyond your power to touch... now, and forever. I will ask you one more time-- give me your bracers, before I take them from you."
"NEVER!" she screamed, pulling her hands back and summoning her power again. "KORENCHKA STRATOSPHERE STRIKE!"
The four beams of light emerged from her hands, hurling themselves towards the alien again. This time, though, he reacted, swiped savagely at the incoming attack with his fan-- and to her shock and dismay, actually deflecting each beam to the side. The bursts of energy dug deeply into the streets, excavating four seperate chasms before her eyes. "Impossible," she murmured, stepping back again and drawing her energy for a third strike. "This can't--"
--and with the same sudden, blinding speed, he was suddenly next to her. There was a flash of golden light, flickering in and out, before her eyes suddenly dimmed and the pain caught up to her.
Chloria screamed incoherently, clutching the stump of her right arm with her left as her own blood seeped out through her hand and onto the streets. "Don't feel too bad," the alien said soothingly, stripping off his face-mask with a single, smooth motion. "It's nothing personal, see-- I just happen to need what you have. You never make it to Earth, anyway; even in my own past, your space fleet comes back and turns you into a crater with an orbital weapons bombardment."
Despite the agonizing fire in what had been her arm, she managed to glance up at the alien's serene expression-- and found herself unable to look away. "Don't worry about your people," he added, smiling as he took her chin in his free hand. "Galaxia sends a second wave when she discovers your failure, and she takes into account what you fail to remember. There are no survivors, for what it's worth... which actually reminds me of something."
He released her and took a step back, the serenity of his expression turning to something far more unpleasant to behold. "I cut a few deals to find you," he added off-handedly, snapping his fingers. As if waiting for his signal, the shadows about them in all directions suddenly grew many shades deeper. "You left no shortage of the hungry dead in your little rampage, you know," the alien added, pleased. "You wouldn't BELIEVE how happy they were to help me hunt you down and prime you for a feast..."
And to her horror, she suddenly recognized that the shadows emerging from the dark corners of the city had very, very familiar faces.
She screamed again and staggered to her feet, arm still clutching uselessly at her wound, but the shrill noise that echoed from her throat was not a scream of pain. Sailor Chloria turned on her heel, away from the faces of her sisters, her brother, her mother and father, her friends and family-- and started running for what was left of her life, only getting so far before the figures cloaked in shadow and darkness began closing the gap between her and them.
The alien's gleeful smile widened further as a dozen more spectral shapes emerged from the darkness behind him, passing him by with such speed that his clothes rippled in the wind. "I always did like a happy ending," he observed with a contented sigh.
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