Chapter 50 49:
Prince Aizir raised his hammer, incredulous for a moment, before shouting.
"damn you, you demon, and your entire race. The universe will punish your arrogance".
"the universe prefers us, corrupt and repulsive being", tragg interrupted him.
Both knew the prince would die, but that would not stop him from fighting.
"my body may die today, but Valhalla awaits me, and when I drink and fight in the celestial war, I will descend to the physical plane once more and search for the last of your species with whom I shall crush their skulls with my hammer".
The prince shouted, and at the same time, those words had been imbued with magic. It had been not only a curse imposed against the regent, but it had also allowed him to separate a fragment of his soul, together with a drop of blood, imbued into the hammer.
His body would die today, but the prince, as long as the hammer existed, would remain eternal.
"waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar".
The prince roared, performing a lateral step-drag characteristic of terrestrial heavyweight boxing, shifting his center of gravity 0.3 seconds before the impact.
The hammer struck the surface of the genocidal destroyer before him, the lightning seemed to break space itself, extending the bolt for kilometers in distance.
The shockwave attempted to fracture the regent's body, but the crude reality was that he did not move in the slightest.
However, he did not let that affront pass.
The regent began by delivering an ascending uppercut to the sternum, resulting in Thragg's hand penetrating Aizir's thoracic plate like a hydraulic drill.
Immediately after, he launched a left hook to the pectoral that produced a fracture of the zygomatic bone.
Then he delivered a right cross to the angle of the jaw, causing the prince's mandibular joint to dislocate toward the right side with a rotation of 90 degrees.
The giant had been sent flying like a shooting star, followed by the regent, ready to maximize the punishment upon his enemy.
Aizir, who for a moment had fallen into unconsciousness, managed to regain clarity in terrestrial seconds. His hammer still remained with him, his fist attached to it like welded iron.
He felt his body pass through a battleship, part of the warriors, until striking a moon and returning to space once more. But with all his effort, he managed to stop himself ready to counterattack the regent who followed him very closely.
Without thinking twice, he attempted an Inverted Hammer Sweep, spinning the hammer in a low sweeping strike to fracture Thragg's kneecaps, but he did not manage to complete it.
Thragg caught the hammer's handle with one hand and ripped it from the prince's fingers.
"ghahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa", the prince roared with force, from the pain and the rage.
Three phalanges remained adhered to the metal, but Thragg ignored them. He directly wielded the hammer by the end of the handle, using it as a mere club.
Then, Thragg brought the hammer down upon Aizir's left parietal, cracking his skull, then, he placed the edge of the hammer between the prince's third and fourth rib, and pressed.
The ribs split outward like petals, and the bone fragments pierced the giant's lungs, which began to deflate with a sharp whistle.
Thragg lifted the prince by the Adam's apple, with the rear spike of the hammer, and introduced the tool into Aizir's right eye socket.
And with a 45 degree twist, the eyeball burst.
Thragg, even more annoyed by the fragility of these beings so insolent, threw the hammer into the void, where it pierced through the entire battle line, getting lost through space in the direction of the nebula.
No one knew it yet, but said hammer, after colliding with the great anomalous nebula, was swallowed by a spatial fold that, after advancing through its interior, ended up transporting itself to the solar system 4000 years earlier, where it fell like a meteorite in the forested zones that millennia later would be known as Norway.
In space, the grand regent placed his hands upon the prince's shoulders. With a flex of lumbar and quadriceps, he inserted his fingers beneath Aizir's subclavian plates.
Thragg's nails hooked the principal tendons of the right arm and he pulled with force.
The tearing, which took a process of two and a half seconds, was brutal. The shoulder skin ripped like wet paper. Then, the muscles of the rotator cuff separated from their bony insertions and finally, the joints gave way.
Prince Aizir's right arm remained in Thragg's hand, leaving behind a cascade of arterial blood.
Even at this point, Thragg did not stop.
He repeated the process on the left arm, and then did it with both legs. The prince's torso, now reduced to a cylindrical block of flesh and partially exposed organs, continued emitting nervous signals, he still seemed to be alive, or the runes prevented his death.
But at no moment did he ask for mercy nor scream in pain. He roared whenever possible, but it was only from fury, shame and indignation over such a tragic death.
Thragg grabbed the prince's head with one hand, while the other held the base of the skull, and with a twisting motion, separated the cervical column vertebra by vertebra. The spinal cord stretched like a whitish elastic for a meter and a half before breaking from traction.
Thragg, after having finished with the alien prince, observed the decapitated head. He held it before the starry void, where ships burned at every angle of the visible spectrum.
And then, he simply released it to one side. At the same time, one of his council guardians had held the prince's head, knowing what to do with it.
Apparently, the regent wanted it to be part of his trophy collection.
Thragg cleaned the blood from his hand with a lazy movement and searched for captain Cosmos, who despite having been completely disabled, was still alive.
The warrior of the Cosmos Empire attempted to flee, despite lacking her super core. After witnessing the deaths of her two allies, she knew what awaited her would be no less merciful.
Thragg reached her in two seconds, grabbed her by the exposed golden hair and stopped her dead in her tracks.
"Nobody who insults the empire escapes from me", he whispered in a thought.
The captain wanted to surrender, attempt to engage in words, curse him moments before her end, whatever it took to find some solution or comfort to her situation. but she had no time whatsoever.
Tragg's other hand ripped the Dyson core from her chest and pressed it inward. Captain Cosmos shrieked, a high-pitched sound that cut off when Thragg squeezed the core until shattering it to pieces, destabilizing it in the process.
The released energy was enough to illuminate the entire battle line for several seconds, and captain cosmos, the heroine of an entire civilization, was reduced to nothing more than gas particles.
Thragg floated in the middle of the explosion, his skin slightly irritated, since, apparently, the energy inside that core was momentarily far superior to the temperature of the sun's surface.
The battle, which was expected to last entire cycles, with the grand regent at the head, had not lasted even less than 70 fractions.
The rest was simple to resolve for the viltrumite forces, in which there was only one casualty from among their own, plus one wounded, who had been the general assigned to the colonial forces.
As for the rest, they merely swept through the lines crossing the forces as if they swam in water.
Worse still, without their principal commanders and leaders, representatives of their respective races, the Luminus Coalition collapsed in an instant.
The Aizir, upon seeing their prince fall, entered into panic or simply surrendered themselves to the battle in a suicidal manner.
Their formations, once impenetrable, dissolved into a disordered attack or retreat.
The Cosmic Force attempted to cover the retreat, but without the captain's coordination and high morale, their attacks became erratic. The Lanther Force, the most disciplined, formed a defensive rearguard, but it was already too late, given the ruthless advance of the imperial hounds.
Thragg had also given a very specific order that no one dared take lightly.
"Pursue them, all of them. Their warriors, citizens, allies and slaves. Cleanse the sector, let none escape." He decreed.
The viltrumites launched themselves after the enemy fleet. Behind them, the surviving Venatici and the colonial infantry formed a tide of death.
The viltrumite swarm ships reorganized and began the pursuit bombardment.
For every terrestrial hour, thousands of enemy ships were destroyed. The Aizir, in their flight, abandoned their wounded who offered themselves to give their brothers the opportunity to live.
The Cosmic Force, demoralized, threw away their weapons, surrendering to the empire.
As for the Lanther Force, only they fought until the end, and for that they died to the last one.
The war deployed in the luminus sector ended with this final great battle.
Later, by the time everything ended, the sector was silent. The bodies floated by hundreds of thousands of billions. The remains of the ships formed a belt of debris that surrounded a distance of half a solar system.
The Viltrumite Empire had won.
Leaving another general in command for the pacification of the newly annexed territory, Thragg, who turned around his flagship cruiser, knew it was time to return to viltrum.
Somewhere, in the frozen void between the stars, the remnants of the Luminus Coalition attempted to regroup, though only to make a jump to other parts of the universe in order to survive extinction.
They tried with all their hearts to destroy the great nebula, but this was completely impossible.
They knew the Empire would not stop, so they had no other option than to grow other roots somewhere else in the universe, and when they managed to recover their strength, reclaim vengeance.
That sooner or later, their prayers and curses would become reality, the universe would hear them and the viltrumite empire would fall. It was only a matter of time.
However, for now and for a long time, the Luminus sector would from this day onward form part of viltrumite territory, in the name of the wise argall, all for the empire.