Darth Xiphos fought savagely and brutally through the Bryn'adul, her sons fighting even more savagely.
"YOU-GOT-ME-LOOKIN'-IN-THAT-HEAVEN-IN-YOUR-EYES! I-WAS-CHASIN'-YOUR-DIRECTION, I-WAS-TELLIN'-YOU-NO-LIES-AND-IIIIIIIII-WAS-LOVIN'-YOU--" the Model 3's sang as they brutally surged through the Super Construct, Xiphos leading the vicious attack.
None who inhabited this place willingly were to be spared, old or young. Xiphos was twice as vicious towards any non Lobsters she caught willingly serving them. Nuetralizers pulled them apart by the limbs as an example to other traitors to the Galaxy.
They would not be forgiven or spared.
Everybody that lived in this place already had a farm bought for them.
Juggernauts, feared across the Galaxy for their merciless nature, screamed as Model 2's hacked them apart with axes. The insects tried to flee, and the Model 1's used them as Skeet Shooting targets. Some of the Model 3's used the heads for soccer practice, kicking them with thermal Detonators strapped to them into crowds of Bryn'adul.
Xiphos slashed at everything her Lightsaber could reach, telekinetically hurling large chunks of debris into reinforcements, lifting their own weapons with her mind and firing in concentrated bursts in front, shredding apart the Ultras.
One Ultra bravely got close enough to duel her. She could tell he knew who she was. You don't forget the being that slaughtered your own to such a degree at Sev Tok that fields of your impaled brethren were found everywhere after.
He had barely survived the Nuetralizers Rampage at Sarka. It had turned out to be a taste of what was to come at Sev Tok. No foe before the Nuetralizers had truly given his people pause in personal combat. The antics of most Jedi did not impress them. But these machines...these Machines were STILL the only foes that occasionally got back up after being killed off. And worse was the humiliation. They thought most standard technology made people weak. And then they had been slaughtered en masse at Sarka, even though they had won that battle, by what should have been nothing but another pathetic machine of pathetic people. They had come back for vengeance at Sev Tok, and they had gotten it, rallying an even more pathetic militia to a shocking victory at what should have been an easy to seize City, killing scores of their finest warriors, foiling the living terraformer, humiliating their chief Warlord who had tried to prove in his hubris that it didn't matter how outnumbered they were--they would always triumph.
How wrong he had been. How many of his warriors had paid for his arrogance? The Juggernaut dared not question as he savagely attacked Xiphos, desperate to halt what part of him was beginning to suspect was inevitable:
The Bryn'adul were doomed. By their own cruelty no less.
The Juggernaut battling Darth Xiphos had, like
Osam
, taken immense pleasure in killing those his culture deemed weak. He had fervantly believed in the cause, Tathra's cause.
Outsiders had exterminated the Original Bryn'adul somehow. Therefore all the Galaxy was a potential enemy that must be destroyed at all costs, and it's lands seized.
If they did not destroy the unworthy, they would be destroyed.
Only now, at the end, was he starting to understand. Much though his own mind raged against it:
Their fears of a second destruction had been nothing more than a self fulfilling prophecy.
He was a great swordfighter amongst his people, only that kept him in the fight against the brutal Darth Xiphos. Most Bryn'adul hadn't bothered to learn her name. She was only the malignity that butchered their people in droves whenever she showed. She had even followed them into the Netherworld to do it. She had humiliated their fiercest warriors, drew the blood of even the mighty Tathra himself, and her mechanical creations were dreaded by the new members of Bryn culture. They had been a terrible shock to the insects in particular at Sev-Tok, who had never seen an enemy rise from the dead before, and her bloody raid at Barab had left many dead.
The Juggernauts amongst them had refused to bother learning her name, confident that she and her wretched toys would be crushed soon enough. But that hadn't happened.
Only here, only now, when he saw proud warriors who believed fervantly in their own strength and looked down on technology and Electronics as weakness, refusing to study what they knew
in their hearts to be an inferior enemy, only then did he start to question the Apathy Doctrine.
He began to see it more as the despair took hold, and Xiphos scored the first blow, managing a scrape across his shoulder.
No one amongst his own bothered to learn the ways of their enemy save their defenses and tactical formations, and how their pathetic philosophy would cause them to act. It was just a
given that the enemy was weak on every level compared to them.
How then, to explain this current situation?
His rage tripled in strength as he railed against this, attacking Xiphos in a frenzy from all directions. But the strange malignity that savaged the Bryn'adul at every opportunity was ready, blocking or parrying his strikes.
How could he explain their losses to people he
knew to be inferior? How could mere
machines do easily what so many flesh and blood warriors could not? HOW?!
They were unlike any other enemy he had ever fought. The machines had been made to somehow revel in war: they were not passionless automatons, and he could somehow feel that their only concern was destroying him and his whole species. Other species fought to save their world and loved ones. For justice.
The Droids had no world to defend unless they were assigned to it, and where it came to the Bryn'adul, fought only for revenge, and seemingly to prove themselves superior warriors over his people.
The worst part was that they never seemed to shut up. Belatedly, he realized if his people had not been quite so apathetic to the cultures of others, they might have understood why they sang as they killed.
Another hit from Xiphos. This hit his shin, taking armor off and making him stagger back. He saw the Model 2's in the distance ripping a Juggernauts lower jaw off and stabbing them to death with it. They had been his band at Sev Tok, defending Tathra's vessel. Their onboard Weaponry was lethal, and they fought with homicidal aggression against even ferocious Ultras, who had been shocked and humiliated by the Model 2's ability at utilizing sheer brute force against them to achieve victory. The slimmer Model 1's he had come to hate especially for their sadistic cruelty towards captured Bryn, an Infamous tactic of theirs being to torture and kill them over a loud speaker using a knife. He hated it when they laughed at him.
But these new skull droids amongst them were a different beast. They were as disciplined as the previous two were strong and vicious, never exposed themselves unless necessary, and began to wreck the defenses of the Bryn'adul through sheer command of infantry tactics, precision fire, and cruel calculation, concentrating fire on the largest threats while suppressing fire was rained on the rest.
So often had they inflicted destruction on those who had never wanted a fight to start with that only now did he realize their own cruelty was being visited back upon them. Now it was they who were being destroyed.
The thought was sobering to him. Questions he had never thought of, never
dared to ask began to rise in him as he guarded.
Had they been
wrong?
The very idea terrified him. The idea that the Bryn'adul were not as superior as they liked to believe. That perhaps there had been no need at all to exterminate most of the Galaxy.
The idea that Bryn'adul Exceptionalism was not an inevitability, that their Manifest Destiny to control the whole Galaxy
without sharing had been nothing but a lie made up by a hate filled old man, the last remnant of a failed species, jealous that the other races had been allowed to go on without suffering similarly had deadly roots now in fast encroaching despair as the Malignity approached. He knew what the Malignity did to his kind. He knew he would suffer if she got her hands on him. That she would rip him open like a bag of garbage.
He couldn't stand it, the idea he had killed all those...
people...for
nothing...
Weakness.
Consequence. Was that what his people suffered now? The consequences of being weak? Weak like they had deemed so many others?
As Xiphos struck at his head and he parried, he thought to how quickly the situation had deteriorated once Tathra had departed and the Bryn'adul, in what many of his people viewed as an act of pure hypocrisy, started allowing those they dismissed as weak before into their ranks.
What did that say about them? Look how
easily it had happened! The literal
moment he was gone, declared missing,
whatever, they had abandoned the most essential of his teachings. (Which he himself had broken beforehand by letting other races in on his authority)
As Xiphos cut off one of his hands, he lamented the loss of his people. As Xiphos cut off his
other hand he accepted that their empire was a house of cards, held up only by Tathra's conviction and charisma, and abandoned all too easily as reality stepped in and pulled back the ugly layers of their philosophy, revealing their ultimate impracticality when it came to winning and holding on to what one had conquered.
As Xiphos took a leg, making him fall to the floor, he realized that such was the fate of
all empires that put themselves over everything and everyone else to the point of insanity. The Bryn'adul had been no different. No better. If anything, their strength, their pride, their intelligence had made it even easier for them to embrace the hubris that they were the exception to the rule than others might have.
As the final leg came off, only then did he think to scream in agony, so absorbed had he been by this tragically too late flash of enlightenment.
As the blade swung down for his neck he realized that all these traits, the arrogance, the hubris, the pointless cruelty to all Non-Bryn'adul, all these traits had come from no less than Tathra. All the traits which were now consigning him and his people to apparent damnation had been given them by Tathra.
If he could abandon them so easily, did that mean even his own children were ultimately not Bryn'adul enough to his liking? That they had been nothing but tools for his insane vengeance? That perhaps even they, even if they had managed to give him everything he wanted without any trouble, might have been done away with, in time, to make way for something even closer to the true, original Bryn'adul?
A split second before Xiphos's blade came down, screaming for his neck, he had enough time to mentally curse Tathra Khaeus, for passing onto them all he claimed to hate in Non-Bryn'adul. He cursed Tathra for passing on the traits that had likely doomed the
original Draelvasir...
As his head came off, and the blackness took him, he understood, more than anything, that real strength,
real unity, could have survived Tathra's departure. But strength had been substituted by hatred of the other.
As his soul was sucked screaming into hell, there came the darkest, most painful realization he could have had of the Bryn'adul. It was something a woman named Kreia had realized:
To be united by hatred is a fragile thing, at best.
Tovald Kahmen’’a
