If hell was real, it must have very strongly resembled Abregado-Rae.
With the Mandalorians roundly beaten and pushed off-planet, Helix's forces began the long and tedious process of material salvage. The supercrawler was intact, but inoperational. Damage suffered during battle had ensured that it could limp off the field, but little more than that.
The scale of the devastation was difficult to quantify (let along describe), and had made the process sluggish so far. The planet was effectively one large blob of consuming mold now. Radiation hotspots, his own handiwork, were common, and spanned hundreds of kilometers in some areas. Monsters of all sizes and descriptions roamed freely, unleashed by the Sith or mutated from local fauna and flora.
Still, there were treasures to be found. Helix's forces had managed to salvage moderate quantities of beskar, peeled from the remains of their former owners and tossed unceremoniously in piles. Droid salvage teams worked everywhere, plucking wealth from the enemy's scattered coffers.
Survivors, where they could be found, were stripped of armor and weapons, then herded into armored dropships. As horrific as the planet was now, what awaited them was almost certainly worse. Helix was intent on assimilating the strongest among their number. Skill was as valuable as anything else to be collected here.
The warlord's gaze swept the nightmare horizon appraisingly, then tilted upwards to the heavens.
If anything, the sky was worse. Something the Sith had done had rent open a fissure into somewhere darker and hungrier than this galaxy. Even at this great distance, his superhumanly-acute sight could detect things emerging from it, some of them almost incomprehensibly large.
Some of these shapes descended to the world below, no doubt intent on picking it clean of another sort of prize entirely. None came near him; the creatures of the beyond knew better than to risk his attention. Helix had created horrors that would send even those ethereal predators screaming back to their nests with tails between legs.
It had been a risky and costly battle, and had set him back no small quantity of credits, munitions, materiel, and droids. Yet, if Mercy was as good as her word, it would all be more than worth it. One could hardly put a value on the reward that had been offered; some things extended far beyond the umbrella of finite numbers and figures.
It was all so poetic, in its way. So much fury and horror, belched onto a tiny world that most people probably couldn't point to on a navigation chart. So much blood spilled defending it, too. The Mandos would need to collect a lot of war orphans to recover from this one.
As ever, of course, warrior will had been no match for the horrors the Sith could inflict on frail human minds and bodies. Helix had watched nation after nation, enemy after enemy, believe they were equal to it. One by one, all had been proven dead wrong.
His own part in the ground invasion had been a simple but crucial one: remove the enemy army. By his count, he'd succeeded. The crawler alone recorded a casualty count higher than a good-sized city. The enemy had simply failed to react quickly enough and strongly enough until the damage had already been done, pinched between overwhelming force and scalpel-precise sabotage.
Indeed, from what he could glean of the after-action reports, this had been true across all fronts. They'd showed up to a war and gotten a clinical extermination instead.
This in mind, Helix believed was more than entitled to a generous cut of the spoils, and intended to put the Mandalorians' precious metals to far more productive uses.
So here he was, just one more devil among the thousands picking the world's bones.
Still, he flattered himself that he was the worst of the lot. After all, that was what the Empress had paid for, and Helix was never one to leave a job half-done.
The gangly mechanical monster sat down on a collapsed pile of masonry, appreciating the scenery. While she had poor taste in friends, he couldn't deny Madrona A’Mia's artistic touch. Abregado-Rae, like most things, looked better in red.
He couldn't appreciate it long. He had to grab as much as he could, as fast as he could, before others did the same. Then, he was off-planet and into the next warzone with nary a chance to catch his proverbial breath. The drums of war beat loudly over Thyferra, and another enemy needed to be reminded of the costs of resistance.
After a few more moments, Helix stood, and resumed his grim work.
