Chapter 573: Interlude (2/2)

One of the Young Ones suggested that perhaps the Ancient Ones and the Old Ones would like to go ask the statues of the lemurs for wisdom, like the primitives of the planet.

Despite the disrespectful tone groups of Young Ones, Old Ones, and Ancient Ones went to the villages to examine the statues yet again.

After flaying alive the disrespectful ones and crushing their larvae while the larvae were still inside the disrespectful one's feeding tentacles.

Each group arrived at roughly the same time, all banded together in the Overmind and linked together with the shared communal mind.

The statues were where they had been since they had been placed there by the small creatures. Their feet sank deeply in the short stone blocks that only came up to the small creature's knees. They were jet black, glossy looking, massive statues of fierce looking lemurs with their faces fashioned like a lemur's skull. The eyes burned bright red, a malevolence radiating off of them.

The Atrekna stared at the statues.

Something seemed... different about them.

They suddenly moved. They raised their right upper appendage, their fingers spread wide on their hands, and waved their hands in front of their skull-like faces three times.

The statues suddenly vanished to the Atrekna's senses.

The Ancient Ones and many of the Old Ones fled, not bothering with temporal shifting to move through space and time and instantly appear in their fortresses.

Instead they fled screaming, using their psychic power to propel themselves rapidly away. Not in any particular direction.

Just... away.

The ones that fled into the grain and vegetables of the crops found that the fields were not empty. What was inside wasn't a scarecrow.

More like a scareatrekna.

These ones didn't bother waving their hands. They merely stepped out of the rows of grain, grabbed the Atrekna, and ripped off limbs or tore them in half.

The Young Ones and the Old Ones that did not flee attacked, furiously firing their psychic blasts around themselves in rippling cones of power.

The little creatures had already fled when the Atrekna had arrived.

Those that did not flee found themselves fighting for the lives against a foe that neither knew nor cared that the Atrekna were the masters of time.

The Atrekna bled.

And the massive black statues knew...

...if it bleeds, it can die.

The overmind shuddered, the communal mind reeled, as raw savage rage, hatred, and wrath pounded at it. As deaths ripped apart the communal mind.

As the Atrekna rediscovered terror.

Those in the cities discovered that there was some kind of horrible weight to the planet, to the system itself, as if each of the glossy black statues now vanished or attacking were fixed points in time. As if the bodies of the massive robots were nails affixing the temporal stream to a single timestream.

The little creatures came back, saw the dead Atrekna, and dragged the bodies into a pile. In the forests, near the rivers, near the sea shores, in the villages, they stacked up the bodies. Once the bodies were piled, they poured pitch and tar and oil and rendered fat onto the bodies and lit them on fire.

Young females danced with abandon as older females raised their voices in song. Young males danced in a circle outside the females as the older males pounded on drums and added their voices to the songs.

The Atrekna fled for their cities.

Those in the cities could see nothing out there, just the bonfires.

Some of the Younger Ones were outraged by the actions of the small creatures and left the cities to punish them, often accompanied by slavespawn or autonomous war machines.

They discovered that the robots were not unarmed as weapons deployed from the statue's bodies. Heavy cannons, restored over time, grenade launchers, missile launchers, mass drivers, plasma weapons.

The robots waded into the slavespawn, tearing them apart, blowing them into gobbets of flesh. The autonomous war machines fared worse as some kind of malevolent intellect leaped from the bodies of the statues and attacked their electronic systems, ripping through the six digit thirty-six character passwords like tissue.

The creatures passed around flasks and gourds and skins of alcoholic beverages even as clothing began to be discarded.

The statues waved their right hands across their faces and vanished once their killing was done.

The Atrekna fled to their cities.

They were not safe.

Atrekna in the city suddenly realized there was too much interference, too much static, for them to even shift a dozen miles. It was if nails had been hammered into space time.

Around the cities whole cascades of chronotrons were bursting into existence, giggling and laughing before spinning off to join the chaos of the energetic young universe. The Atrekna in the cities were almost blinded as the flaring lightshow strobed and flashed as it contracted.

They found out what was inside the strobing shower of newly birthed chronotrons.

Lemurs.

Now they could feel it. The burning rage, the searing hatred, the white hot wrath, all pouring off of what the Atrekna had thought were some kind of advanced robot. They could feel the screaming roar of denial that filled the chassis.

They realized, with dawning horror, that there were lemur brains inside the robot's chests.

The lemurs were visible now. Smashing at the city with missiles, beam weapons, mass drivers.

The Atrekna tried to put up a fight.

Tried.

It only took three days before the last of the crystalline towers shivered and collapsed under the enraged blows of the lemur cyborgs.

Under the fists of the warborgs.

The celebrations of the little creatures lasted a week. It would have only lasted four days, but on the fifth day their Gods returned. Scuffed, in some places dented and gouged, but still they returned. They stepped up onto the knee high blocks and went still.

On the sixth day the sun brightened until it was yellow, as it was in the legends on the little creature's ancestors.

On the seventh day the fertile females shaved and dyed into their fur the symbol on the shoulders of their Gods.

A red circle with a dark green border, with a triangle on the top and bottom that touched each other with the points.

At the base of each statue, on the stone blocks, the little creatures found words inscribed.

”Trust In Me”