Imagine what it feels to be immortal.
You advance through halls alien and barbaric. The dead piling up at your feet. Charred flesh floats by your feet on a sloshing river of blood. You acquire a target, you kill a target. You smash through walls on your cybernetic war-shell, enclosed around your augmented birth body. In your hands is an omnikiller. It spews death bright and piercing and death hot and clinging and death in hypervelocity micromunitions. Its growl is the most singularly pleasant thing you can imagine.
The enemy falls to you. You are a singular engine of violence. They lure you into traps, vent the atmosphere, spike you with hard radiation, force you to run through mines, but all of these are petty distractions.
You advance with your squad of immortals.
And then--
Bam. You're dead.
Just like that. Stray bullet. Hypervelocity shrapnel. Who knows what? Who cares? It was a good death.
And then you're back where you started. You don't remember what just happened, but you don't need to remember. All you need to do is advance. You strike forth once again with your squad of immortals, pausing only to strip the ammunition from your own corpse. You tread on the bodies that came before. And then-
Bam. You're dead.
And then it happens again. And again. And again. Until the enemy runs out of bullets.
You young gods, immortal and adolescent, cannot imagine dying. The MARATHON gives you the legs to sprint through the unknown country, from times and existences sideways to each other.
You have died tens of thousands of times and the lesson never sticks. It passes through your mind. You ignore the experience, or you do not bother to remember it. You are running a marathon sprint, through timelines, through worlds, and thus, you are immortal.
You are Luca gens Abunco, and you are just about having the best time of your life right now. The bureaucratic bitchwork of the whole damned thing is a faded memory. No more worrying about chaos in Centre! No more squabbling about payslips! What joy. What merriment.
"Colonel," your com buzzes. "We're aiming a devastator shot to get you through three layers. Standby."
"Understood," you reply. The ground shakes under your boots. The Rock Defiant is shaking like leaves in rain. This last standout, this last redoubt, of the fools that were brave enough to dare. You salute them-- you honor bravery. A skull breaks under your boot. It goes splat like a watermelon.
Hellish varicolored unlight washes against your shield-screens, flickering with the effort of holding matter unspooled into unmatter and exotic radiation. You catch a couple of screams, and then you go forth once again, munitions fire plinking off of you. Soon you will reach the heart. Soon you will crush this hope underfoot, to show that no matter how brave you are, no matter how defiant, no matter what kind of help the ENEMY has given you, the mailed fist of Empire will still find you. Will still break you. And you are their spearpoint.
"Advance!" You howl. "Kill. Kill! KILL!"
You are now the Marquis-Admiral, supervising the commando operation to clean out the guts of the Rock Defiant. The feed on your screen is that of Luca gens Abunco, who has died a total of nine thousand eight hundred and seventy three times. She appears to be aiming for the Big Grand.
"Oh," Suebi says, at your side. "I think I knew that guy. He was the bodyguard-captain of my… cousin? I think cousin."
"What's he doing here, then? That was a sweet gig," you have to ask. A bodyguard-captain is both ripe for abuse and your employers will generally fete you because they don't want their guy selling them out for a plummer job.
Suebi gives you a careless shrug. "My cousin never liked the Empire."
Two weeks ago you brought Division Niner Niner and eight others, the heaviest, the assault divisions, out of sunwarp in the Rock Defiant system. You smashed through the defense net around the sun, you converted the small planet nearest the sun into a rapidly expanding gas cloud before it's defenders could blink, you killed your way on a tidal wave of blood to the final defensive installation, fleets shattering against your might, the titular Rock Defiant, spinning on the furthest orbit. Losses are… okay, you've lost more than you would have liked. They've killed almost all of your screener vessels, leaving only the superheavy capitals.
That is a bigger loss than what you would have liked. It exposes you to undue risk. You have no ships fit for garrison. Well, that's a lie, you do. Your superheavies can do it, in that thousands of tonnage and firepower covereth a multitude of sins. But then you can't defeat the Rock Defiant, with hellwhips scouring the orbits around it. You can't survive the grav-warps, you can't survive the attendant fleets.
So you gathered all of your heavies, your cruisers, your hunter/killers, your dreads and your carriers, and told them to give you the Rock Defiant by the end of the month. If a reinforcement arrives, you think, you have ample time. You can detach a squadron to kill them, or finish up your business at the Rock and finish the reinforcements as well. That was your role as the Marquis-Admiral. Another bureaucratic dogsbody. The pay is good (ha!) if irregular (ha! ha!), but you are too important a person to handle everything. Your role is that of a whip. By your presence you spur your underlings to work harder.
…You hope Luca doesn't deposit a bunch of heads at your feet during the post-battle briefing. Like some kind of hellacious space cat.
The Rock Defiant dies slow. Their fleets are already gone, attrited to nothing. What remains lurk in the eaves under the crust, armored hardpoints that only leave to launch desperate sallies against your pickets. The surface weapon installations have all been burned to ash. The world is cracked and peeling. But all it has done is reveal a second layer of defensive embattlements and bastions. And then, a third, with the same amount of bastions and defenders prepared to die. And then another, and so on, and so forth. Like some sort of psycho onion.
You have landed legions of your marines. You check a counter and discover to your interest that you roughly three trillion have died, out of a total of one billion marines you have brought. Thank god (or the Empire, heh) for MARATHON.
"Colonel Luca, progress," you order.
"I-"
Splat.
You politely wait for a Luca to pop back out of MARATHON and give you her report. "Good progress. We're ninety clicks deep." Seubi brings up a report that states everyone else is forty clicks. How risky. "Working off of field generated data. We're hooking us a big fish."
You nod. "Hold fast," you order. "Wait for the front to shift towards you."
"Marquis-Admiral, I must refuse that order. The fish is right in front of me. If I can capture it this front will collapse. This is the nexus of command here. I do this, friendlies come to me. I-" another rumble. You thought this was something from Luca's end, but another look around reveals that it's on your end.
WHAT THE FUCK?
[]- AY YO WHAT UP: The ENEMY is here, the smug giggler, the self satisfied smirker. At the head of one of their Ghost Fleets! Personally taunting you, the bastard! About turn and kill him! Before they do the same to you!
[]- HOLY SHIT IT'S GODZILLA: Shrugging off the slag of the planetoid is one of the ludicrous hyper-compensatory ultradreads that people build every so often. It might be a penile aide but it's more than capable of killing you.
[]- BOW TO YOUR NEW GOD: It's one person, you want to scream. One! But it's not just one enemy soldier. It's Death Itself, dancing on the edge of possibility, killing everything it sees with 99.999% impossible shots.
