Beyond the Apocalypse

The creatures, who had relentlessly pursued the retreating Exilon soldiers, butchering them without a shred of mercy, abruptly halted. Then, without hesitation, without so much as a sound or a signal—without any visible form of communication—every single one of them turned in perfect unison and began to retreat.

But they did not simply leave. As they withdrew, they consumed everything in their path. Their maws opened wide, tearing through bones, muscle, and sinew, devouring broken armor and discarded weapons alike. Tentacles emerged from the depths of their throats, slithering across the blood-soaked ground and sucking up every last drop of spilled blood, every fragment of biological matter. Not even the ashes of the fallen were spared.

All of it—every scrap of material—was funneled into their bodies, absorbed into what could only be described as a biological furnace. There was no waste. Every consumed object was converted into energy, fueling the infernal engines within them that made their rampages seemingly endless. Their bodies radiated waves of heat with every step, as though they were not made of flesh and bone, but forged from the very concept of destruction itself.

Behind them, they left not merely a battlefield, but a barren wasteland. Not a trace of blood remained. Not a single corpse. Not even broken steel. It was as if the Exilon soldiers had never existed at all.

Those who survived to witness the sight could hardly believe it. They stood in stunned silence, utterly speechless. What kind of enemy left behind nothing but silence and scorched earth? These creatures were not just brutal—they were completely emotionless. They felt no fear. But neither did they feel joy, or pain, or satisfaction. There was no malice in their actions, and somehow, that made them even more terrifying. Every movement, every attack, was executed with the cold, unerring precision of a machine.

"Reapers..." one Exilon soldier whispered, the word escaping his lips like a death sentence. It was the only name that felt appropriate—harvesters of life, harbingers of extinction. They were the embodiment of the end itself. Absolute. Inevitable.

Though the creatures were far out of sight by then, they heard the whispered word, carried through the air by supernatural auditory sensitivity. They did not react. They did not slow down. But something did shift—deep within them.

Each Reaper had a device embedded within the neural core of its brain—a tiny black shard, no larger than a fingernail, yet integral to their hive-mind function.

These creatures were clearly part of the Thimatos race, the new name given to the Leviathan Race that once also consumed all of Terra. Though they were created using the Obelisk that was an extension of the True Depravita of Envy, their true design had originated not from him, but from another—a mind even more dangerous.

The template for the Reapers had been created by the Xaos Kingdom’s highest geneticist, and one for which the concepts mercy and pity were non-existent, one that only care about result.

"Reapers...?" Overlord’s eyes opened slowly as the word echoed through his command network.

A grin crept across his face. "I suppose that is a good name for my greatest creations."