Chapter 69 19:
Those unsuspecting lithari, covered in dust and filth, tried to beg for mercy because they did not know what was happening outside, but Nouwlan killed them in less than a second. Males, females, children, and elders, he killed them without any distinction other than that of their species.
Some lost their heads from a single blow, while others received a punch to the chest that split them in half.
Some were trampled until they became living pulp and others had the fortune of only dying through decapitation by the edge of the instructor's hand.
He kept advancing, murdering, massacring, generating a systematic genocide of an entire race.
No traces of mercy remained nor any room for diplomacy, only the payment of death.
There was no place for peace in this underground hell.
After having finished off even the last of the lithari, Nouwlan exited the tunnel and flew toward the Dorymathos.
Inside the towers, the massacre continued.
The instructors had opened every hatch, every chamber, every hiding place where the lithari might have taken refuge. And in each one of them, they found the slaves, both those who had participated in the rebellion, and those who had not.
They killed them all equally, without the slightest trace of pity.
This was viltrum, the incarnation of imperial supremacy over everything that existed. Everything considered opposed or harmful to the interests of the empire was regarded as an enemy to be eradicated even from the very idea of its concept.
Nowl-an felt that he had done well, it was what was expected of a soldier of the empire. He had been trained not to feel anything before the death of inferiors, much less for those cockroaches who dared to attack the imperial capital. The lithari were nothing more than slaves who lived by the mercy of the great regent.
Therefore, every slave who rebelled deserved death.
That was the logic of the empire, and he liked the logic of the empire. It was the only one he knew, and the only one for which he fought. Everything outside that logic was nonsense to nowl-an or any other viltrumite.
And Nouwl-an, despite the doubts that Korr-add's diary had planted in his mind, was still a soldier of the empire.
When the sweep ended, when the instructors gathered in the great plaza before the towers, Nouwl-an did not need to mentally count the corpses.
Thousands of lithari had died, probably millions, and even more of them would continue dying, until the last one inside and probably outside this planet. The exact number did not matter, only that the threat had been neutralized.
Or so Nouwl-an believed.
"Has anyone seen the natos of quadrant N-07?" Tula asked, lazily cleaning the blood from her knife.
Tula's question caused Nouwl-an to become alarmed. That quadrant belonged to him, and his squad was there. Something twisted in his stomach, those natos, those senseless natos, of course there was a possibility that they were not there.
"They were in their barracks," said Nowl-an, but his voice did not sound certain. "When the attack began, they should have remained there, it is protocol."
"Protocol," repeated the senior instructor harshly in his words. "nowl-an, in the name of argall, if anything happens to even a single nato under your command, I will make sure to execute you personally, do you understand, officer?"
Nowl-an nodded, placing his hand firmly over his chest.
"this subordinate understands his superior." He said.
With that, he turned around, giving his back to the rest of the instructors.
He shot off flying, his eyes scanning the Dorymathos in search of some sign, some indication of what had happened to his natos during his absence.
As was to be expected, none of the natos were in the barracks. That situation made him scream in fury, striking the wall forcefully, cracking it.
But he did not stop, he kept flying, searching for the natos, although by then, nouwl-an believed they were all dead.
He kept searching until he reached the training plain where he stopped dead.
Nouwl-an fell silent before the sight he considered unreal.
The ground was covered in corpses, but they did not belong to the natos under his command.
Lithari corpses, hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, lay scattered across the gray surface. Their armor was destroyed, their bodies dismembered, their blood mixing into pools that reflected the violet sky.
But that was not what impacted Nouwl-an the most. What left him speechless were those natos, his natos.
All the natos of his batch, the twenty-four assigned to him, were gathered in a circle at the center of the plain. They were standing, some kneeling, others simply floating half a meter above the ground.
All of them were crying, like newborn infants.
Nouwlan descended slowly, his eyes scanning the childish faces in search of some explanation. Vespera's face was dirty with soot and tears, her red hair more disheveled than ever. Vulc-an and Kang were embracing, something Nouwl-an had never seen.
The tall boy, the one who always threatened to smash heads, had bloodied knuckles and a lost stare, fixed on some point at the center of the circle.
The short boy, the one who always challenged him, was kneeling, his shoulders sunken, his breathing broken by sobs.
Nul-lam, that nato who annoyed him so much, remained kneeling at the center of the circle, with an object he did not recognize shaped like a Viltrumite warrior pressed against his chest.
His face was bathed in tears as he looked at the only nato who remained on the ground, completely motionless.
"damn the lithari," the instructor thought furiously.