Zero Sum

Open Season

The plain is silent enough to be able to hear the shrubbery wilting its leaves during the first awkward weeks before winter. The weeks where it isn't entirely warm enough to still be autumn however it is not depressing enough to be called winter quite yet. The lazy hill polluted country side dips and weaves into the horizon like the stubborn folds that appear on the blanket of recently slept-in bed covers.

This though is not the country side of the heartland. Nor of any hearts' land to speak of. Reason being that the entire planet is an unoccupied relative wasteland. Well for the sake of argument one might call the drones of the coalition, who stand vigilant against an unseen barely existent threat, as currently occupying the planet. Although you spend a year in the decidedly torturous brain cleansing regimen all "recruits" must go through. A few weeks in the body modifications plant. Or even sitting a few hours through the drill captain's initiation speech and try to convince someone that these drones have any semblance of a thinking mind inhabiting their skulls even as their single minded marching boots inhabit this barren landscape.

Seriously, it is a dump. You look at the dull grey washed coral like weeds. Or the green haze atmosphere fit not even to pollute the lungs of a whooping death bovine. The incoherent language uttered by these hills in the patterns that they trace along the nameless wastes. There is no discernable reason for the drones to be setting foot and tank tread on this sour tasting planet. But then again the coalition is not very well known for working on reason. Nor has it seen fit to issue to their foot troops a uniform body schema (one could say for the sake of empirical overlord mindedness an army made entirely of a single body type, say of bipedal marrow hounds, would instill a great fear like no other into an opposing army) as one can see in the unusual menagerie of insectiod, reptilian, crustacean, living tongue and sentient hornet colony bodies.

Now it is in this silence that a single possibly deranged but definitely efficient warrior strolls into the veritable death squad of attack drones. Regardless of the boldness in his approach he raised no immediate alarm in the troops. Cloaked to all forms of visible, invisible and imaginary wavelengths in the immensely equipped but entirely compact stealth and combat suit. However well endowed with the preemptive nature of his position of stealth allowed to him, he abandons subtlety and instead, purely for violence's sake struts behind a two tongued gorilla dragon and snaps its neck with all the effort of one who sneaks a quick crotch scratch while surrounded in a public transport cubicle.

Despite the blatant execution, one must never undermine the effectiveness of the metal white washing given to these foot troopers. They still gaze absent mindedly at the corpse and each other in a mental debate over whether their comrade spontaneously snapped his own neck over some notion of the futile nature of life or if his death was anything other than accidental.

As they are contemplating this, an unseen blade glides through a massive shark toothed bovine soldier first along his wrist separating his weapon from his person then stabbed through two of his four hearts and was afterwards lifted by his non severed arm and tossed over an unseen back so the invisible knife was at the base of his skull and pierces the vertebrae ending in last minute gargles reverberating from its bulky frame.

This leaves no room for doubt and the remaining soldiers go into high alert firing desperately at what is perceived as the source of the attack and firing their weapons hit nothing but the pathetic corpse of the shark tooth. In the confusion a blue lipped prawn has his aim commandeered by the invisible hand and in an instant his weapon fire crosses into his comrades and pelts them with ammunition before he even knows what is happening.

In their rage the ones able to escape the barrage then turn their weapons on the prawn and fire. Whether they aim their shots at their invisible enemy or their perceived traitorous former comrade one simply cannot say. Clear of the fire from behind the prawn, the invisible agent finishes the target practice by reaching his blade over and above the prawns skull and jabbing his blade into it and pulling it back. What results looks like a rotten grapefruit being peeled all the way back to the stem as the inner makings of the prawns skull oozes out of the separated peels of skull.