Chapter 54 4:
"Try it and let's find out who ends up using their head as wall decoration."
The child looked him directly in the eyes, wanted to clench his fists, but Korr had already risen and approached close enough, almost suddenly, to frighten him with the surprise movement.
The child took a step back, but managed to calm himself. Nevertheless, he desisted from the confrontation against Korr, for now.
The children looked at one another and finally, to Korr's relief, calmed down.
"Yeeees, Korr-add is the best!"
It was heard from the back, causing Korr's gaze to direct itself toward that direction like a whip.
"What did I just say, Vespera?!" Korr frowned at the redheaded girl who hid behind her friends who squealed with megalomaniacal laughter.
"God, these children." He thought, shaking his head, deciding that he needed to clear his mind, and change the soaked sheets.
The last thing he wished for was to discover that apparently some sort of fan club toward his person had appeared some time ago.
With the redheaded girl at the head.
Seriously he did not wish to be in these types of situations so he turned away from the matter, ignoring everything.
Korr sighed heavily, massaging the bridge of his nose.
Ever since he had managed to reduce the childish chaos into occasional murmurs and small restrained laughs, he definitely needed to clear his head.
That nightmare was still lodged in his mind like a thorn, and remaining locked inside that room full of little hyperactive demons was not precisely helping improve his mental state.
So he took clean sheets from one of the metallic compartments and left the room.
He had decided to spend the dawn outside this time.
Could this mean punishment on his part for not remaining inside the barracks? Effectively.
But he was already used to it.
The automatic doors opened with that characteristic mechanical hiss, revealing that whitish, cold and silent hallway.
That space was illuminated by those long white lines embedded in the ceiling of the Dorymathos installation.
Korr walked through it diligently. The faster he reached his destination, the better.
He had also decided to walk, his steps echoed against the floor reinforced with that metallic granite, while he tried to organize his thoughts.
Night on Viltrum was absurdly long, but also beautiful.
Viltrum's night sky was one of the most beautiful things Korr had seen in both lives.
The technology here had advanced alongside ecology. How had they managed to do it? No idea.
But this absolutely totalitarian and genocidal empire had managed to create a contrast between nature and its technological advancement, in such a way that pollution was reduced to the minimum, extremely controlled in isolated zones.
From time to time he loved that instructor Vexa took him to see the stars.
There was even a saying from the equivalents of Viltrumite astronomers, who boasted in saying that their planet was the center of the universe.
Obviously it was not, but they were indeed in such a privileged point that they could well consider themselves the central part of their own galaxy.
The planet's galactic position allowed the observation of sectors of deep space invisible from Earth.
The stars did not seem like simple distant dots, and space traffic was lower than in any other galactic sector.
This allowed better navigation through space during the empire's early years of exploration.
The entire firmament was covered by brilliant clusters, bluish nebulas and luminous bands that crossed the sky like cosmic rivers, only surpassed by a particular sector which seemed to possess some kind of cosmic tree and of which little was known.
Some constellations were so enormous that they occupied a good part of the horizon, formed by binary systems and red giants visible even to the naked eye.
It was a beauty difficult to describe.
Korr still found it difficult to accept that a world so brutal and ruthless, nucleus of a colossal empire that dragged that same brutality to the confines of known space, could exist beneath such an absurdly magnificent sky.
But that was the reality of the universe.
Sometimes, beauty could be found even in the least kind places.
Korr pushed those thoughts from his mind when his senses caught something following him from a distance.
"What the hell?" He said to himself in a very low voice. He had felt soft and clumsy footsteps echoing behind him through the metallic hallway.
He was able to do so because effectively it was many footsteps, one more shameless than the other.
He decided to look back to indeed see nothing, but deep down he knew that whatever was following him, was there.
So he walked again, and the footsteps followed him once more.
It did not take adding two and two together to more or less know who the culprits were,
Korr felt a twitch in his eye, and cursed under his breath.
So at a given moment he had decided to take the longest hallway possible, such that the moment he was halfway through, he turned around suddenly this time, much faster than the pursuers could react.
As expected, he managed to see several heads clumsily hiding behind the tallest nato, all lined up in single file.
One child even let out a squeal upon hitting the wall while trying to hide too quickly.
The following silence was ridiculously uncomfortable for everyone, especially for the natos who had been caught.
Korr kept staring at them until he finally let out a heavy and long sigh.
"In the name of... Argall why the hell are you following me?" Korr asked them. He had wanted to say in the name of God but managed to control his tongue at the last moment.
The existence of God as such did not exist on Viltrum. The closest thing to religion on this planet was the reverence and worship held toward the first emperor Argall himself.
Slowly, one by one, the children began peeking out from behind the tall nato. Vulc-an was the first, then Kang, and then Vespera and so on.
And finally at the end of the line, Nul-lam, still hugging that stuffed toy against his chest.
"We wanted to follow our immediate leader," responded Vespera while smiling nervously.
She grabbed her messy red hair and twisted it between her fingers as though she were an elementary schoolgirl.
"We also want 'stuffed toys,'" one of the children shouted from the back while the chubbier one also exclaimed.
"Yeees, stuffed toys that can talk and fight."
Stuffed toys, that word did not exist on this planet either. Only two people knew its meaning, he was one and the other was...
"Nul-lam what did you tell them?"
Effectively, Nul-lam had ratted him out.
The child in question began trembling as though he were gelatin, while nervously squeezing his Warrior stuffed toy against his chest.
"I-I couldn't help it sir, they forced me to do it." He defended himself while seeming on the verge of tears. "They wanted to rip Warrior V's head off."
Warrior V was the name of his stuffed toy. V was the initial letter of his father's name.
"Nul-lam why didn't you tell me before?" Korr wanted to reprimand him but was interrupted by one of the children.
"He says you do many strange things, like using metal uniforms or ships with wheels," said Kang quickly. "Or stuffed toys that walk and fight. You always do interesting things when you go out alone."
"And fun things," Vespera added while raising her hand.
"One time I heard you broke a Lithari supervisor's nose in the ship area," another nato recalled with absolute admiration.
"That was an accident," Korr growled immediately, remembering that on that occasion he had made a rocket and accidentally activated it. The thing went directly toward that alien's head, fortunately only that had happened.
"It was incredible," responded Vulc-an. Probably thinking that Korr had performed that action on purpose.
The latter felt genuine desires to throw himself into the vacuum of space.
He observed all those children looking at him as though he were some sort of rebel leader.
They were children and they wanted to imitate him. They believed he was the "cool" but "weird and mysterious" one of the group.
Just like humans, Viltrumites also possessed that irresistible desire to go against the natural order of things.
Korr finally let out a long sigh.
This was definitely going to get him into trouble, of that he had no doubt.
And all of them would carry the weight of that situation, Nouwlan loved training rebels, there was a reason that instructor was obsessed with him.
He looked at the children and knew that he would be burdened with them from now on. If he tried to force them to return… they would probably follow him anyway or perhaps end up doing something even worse.
So he ended up defeated before even beginning.
"Fine," he finally muttered. "But if any of you make noise or break something, I'm going to smash you against the floor."