Chapter 240: When to Play
Former Prime Commander Zalanth was lying on her side, unsoldierly and pacified, with her elbow on a luxurious pillow and her jaw resting on her knuckles, smooshing her cheek, and her tightly bound battle braids rested over her shoulder and across her collar bone. If any of her former subordinates witnessed her current state, they would assume she had been defeated in battle before being disgracefully captured and contractually enslaved. Nearly 16,000 years of dedicated military service had hardened her mind and body, but life wasn’t as simple as she had believed. That much had become clear.
She was draped by sheer golden mana-weave silks, gently caressing her pale blue skin with every slight movement. The soft fabrics accentuated the muscles and scars that she had been so proud of before, but made her seem out of place when compared to the other noble guests. If not for her garments, she would most likely be mistaken for security, as she clearly hadn’t lived the soft life of the rest of the crowd. She used her free hand to reach into a bowl of delicacies, causing the charms on her new bracelet to clink pleasantly, and selected one of the fruits that she was already growing fond of. She chewed on beads of the extraordinarily expensive namanin fruit as she contemplated the strange twists of fate.
Zalanth shifted to her back, flinging her braids away from her skin, and stretched her long limbs beneath the canopy of delicate hanging gossamer veils. Thin sheets separated her reserved section from the others on the plush floor within the main lounge of an opulent pleasure barge. The vessel calmly floated among the gaseous seas of the Lankir Sector’s galactically famous comfort moon, drifting with the currents without any guidance.
She gazed beyond the transparent ceiling, watching the patterns in the star clouds as they shifted beyond the moon’s thin atmosphere, glowing with beauty that she had never believed she could appreciate. Honestly, she didn’t. Military service had been her purpose, as it was for everyone in the Endless Empire. Anything else, and especially leisure, was for lesser beings that lacked the divine blessing of the God Empress.
She hated to admit it, but exile from the Endless Empire had resulted in extraordinarily good fortune. Her trajectory from lowly dragoon to Prime Commander was unlikely enough. It was an inspirational story for those in training, but to rub shoulders with those in an echelon of wealth that surpassed established settlements should have been impossible without drastic cosmic intervention. The other guests weren’t quite rich enough to gain independence from factions, but they were able to position themselves into ranks that afforded them such leisure that she found it obscene.
The God Empress Ministry had decreed that the Prime Commander be removed from her post in disgrace due to the poor performance of their Chosen Humans on the planet Earth. Exile from the Empire was the ultimate insult for a life of dedicated service. In fact, execution would have been more reasonable and a fate that she would have accepted with her head held high.
Frankly, Zalanth thought exile was completely uncalled for. She had merely done what she was told. She reported the obvious failings of the humans, then when her observations were proven correct, she was sentenced with the ultimate punishment. The blame was placed on her shoulders rather than admit the failings of the God Empress’s judgment. Humans had revealed the fallibility of the divine individual that had gifted her species with access to the system. Supposedly gifted them with the system, she amended her belief.
She scoffed, shocked that her mentality had shifted so quickly with regard to the quintessential being that led her former faction. It was such casual blasphemy she found herself smirking at the stars, waiting to be torn from the system in retribution. She interlocked her fingers behind her head as she watched.
The only explanation for the change in her thought patterns was that she had been infected by human mentalities when she was exposed to them during their brief encounters in their orientations. Their personalities were like a virulent disease. It was even their disgusting demands for leisure instead of diligently following her directions that had planted a seed of curiosity that led her to test the amenities of Lankir Sector’s comfort moon.
The Endless Empire lost untold riches in winning sponsorships for humans before their assimilation began, possibly even more than those who occupied the pleasure barge along with her could claim to have stashed away. Ignoring that the Primal Constructs had been the planetary sponsor, when a third of the humans simply declined the faction’s generous offers, the Empire should have known that nothing would go the way they wanted and abandoned their fanciful hopes of passive conquest. The humans of ‘Florida’ proved to be recalcitrant, to say the least. In her opinion, they were positively feral and uncontrollable.
Even those humans who accepted the sponsorship and became Chosen of the Endless Empire were obstreperous. They squawked in the faces of their betters, ignoring the obvious power disparity in an effort to demand explanations, justifications, and rationalizations for every action the Endless Empire engaged in. Did they not understand that with a flick of her finger, she could have decapitated any one of them? If not for the regulations of the system, she would have willingly demonstrated on dozens of individuals, but alas, she never crossed that line. It would have been satisfying, she was sure, no matter the penalty. Even if the system reset her level, she would have gone through with it.
And yet, it was those same humans that she had to thank for her current luxurious lifestyle. She had been sent beyond the limits of the Endless Empire, transported to a subordinate faction, and ferried to neutral planets through a series of contracts before the last one released her. Due to her sentence, it was only a matter of time before some other faction forced her into an eternity of subservience. She was strong enough to cause the weaker factions to hesitate, but it wouldn’t take long for a larger force to have the resources to subdue her.