A One-Man War (Part 1)

A Red Shoulder stood between 2.6 and 2.8 meters tall, with a broad torso and massive weight. Pegmont, on the other hand, was 1.9 meters tall with an athletic build. When he hunched over under the cover of night and hauled the Red Shoulder onto his back, his entire body was almost completely concealed. The solitary hunter of Great Spikes was returning to his lair. Along the way, his combat boots carved deep pits into the loose sand, which were soon swept flat again by the wind. Between 55 million and 400 million kilometers away from Blue Star, this was Mars. The century-long war of survival between humanity and the Great Spikes was still being fought. If the recruit trial currently underway in Blue Star's Antarctica was categorized strictly as live-combat training, then in truth, only a single human being in all of humanity was still actively battling the powerful alien army. His name was Dario Pegmont. This was his one-man war. And this planet was his solitary battlefield of civilization. Loath to waste his source energy blocks, Pegmont made the journey back relying purely on physical strength as he carried the Red Shoulder forward. Yet even so, the silhouette of him bounding up and down through the cratered highlands still looked agile and powerful. "He's back." High on a ridge, two Red Shoulders quickly lowered their bodies, pressing themselves against the ground like crawling humans to continue observing from behind the crest. As a species that had always been ruled by a martial civilization—one bound by a brutal, rigid order—they normally felt no grief over the death of another Great Spike. But at this moment, looking down at the mountainous terrain below and watching that "flying Red Shoulder bobbing like a glitching Superman," both Red Shoulders felt a simultaneous surge of terror, sorrow, and rage. "Do you remember? When our vanguard army set out, the nobles told us humanity was merely a tiny, fragile species. As soon as we arrived, we could easily wipe them from the civilizations of the universe." "Yes, I remember." "Yet Daie is dead! Two exalted nobles, both dead, slain on that blue planet at the hands of humanity's powerhouses. And now, we are being casually tormented by one solitary human." "This species possesses things beyond our comprehension. They are growing at an impossible speed." "Yes. And as for us, there is no going back. I once heard the nobles discuss it—they said that once our journey began, neither our race nor our civilization would ever have a path back home." "...May Puta'er and Miwang descend soon and bring an end to all this." As it spoke, the Red Shoulder pressed close to the ground and cast a backward glance into the distance. In that direction, far beyond sight, a medium traction field—built with every scrap of resource they possessed—was being constructed with painstaking caution. That was the last and only hope for their army. "May Miwang subject this human to the cruelest judgment," the other Red Shoulder said, staring into the valley below. Just as it spoke, Pegmont's figure, bearing the Red Shoulder, leapt and vanished into the side of the T-class mothership. *** A Great Spike mothership naturally had a hatch. When Pegmont had first charged inside, the hatch had been open. Only after he cleared out every Great Spike within and prepared to make it his home did he realize that he had no idea how to close the door. It was human nature to find it difficult to sleep peacefully with the front door wide open. Therefore, the hatch had to be sealed, by whatever means necessary. However, the mothership was tremendously heavy and nearly impossible to push; inching it along by brute force would surely burn through massive amounts of source energy. In the end, Pegmont had adopted an ancient, primitive method: he dug out the ground beneath the ship, using gravitational tilt to let the vessel slide under its own weight until the open hatch was jammed almost completely against the cliff face, leaving only a single access opening high above. *Thud!* The Red Shoulder's heavy body tumbled down from above, slamming hard onto the dead iron deck of the cabin. The opening overhead had been so narrow that it had nearly been squashed flat. A moment later, Pegmont dropped down as well. Upon landing, he bent over, seized one of the Red Shoulder's arms, and began dragging it along. *Skrrr... Clang, clang, clang, clang, clang...* The Red Shoulder's heavy frame scraped against the dead iron floor, its armor grating harshly against the metal plating. *Thump... thump... thump...* The Red Shoulder's massive, ponderous head repeatedly bounced up and struck the deck again and again. The aesthetic standards of the Great Spike civilization did not seem particularly high, nor were they plagued by obsessive neatness. Most of their spaceship floors were uneven and pitted, looking as though they had been shaped haphazardly by hand. Furthermore, unlike human vessels, which favored division into multiple compartments, a Great Spike ship generally partitioned off only the cockpit, leaving the entire rest of the interior as a single, cavernous space. The mothership's hold was enormous. Pegmont dragged the Red Shoulder for several minutes before finally hauling it into the cockpit. Ten minutes passed, or perhaps longer. Pegmont had long since lost any precise sense of time here. He sat leaned back in a noble chair carved from stone, his legs crossed, casually swinging his war saber in his right hand as if observing and waiting for something. *Scritch.* A faint scraping sound of dead iron rang out, extraordinarily crisp in the hollow emptiness. "Cut the act. I've known you weren't dead all along," Pegmont said. Seeing no reaction, he leaned forward, slapped the flat of his blade against it, and repeated himself. He spoke as though the Red Shoulder had simply failed to hear him clearly, rather than being completely unable to understand him. "*Awoo, awoo, awoosh.*" It was a rasping howl, but the sound emerged very faintly. The Red Shoulder weakly turned its head toward Pegmont and simply stared at him. A rare standoff between human and Great Spike, looking very much like an opening for dialogue. *Sigh! If only I'd paid attention in class back then,* Pegmont thought with self-reproach. After all, he had attended the Great Spike language training course once... If he had taken the lessons more seriously, he might not have understood everything now, but he would at least recognize the meaning of certain syllables spoken by Great Spikes. Pegmont didn't have a Great Spike language simulator either. He hadn't even mastered listening, let alone speaking. When the training course wrapped up and Great Spike language simulators were handed out, Pegmont hadn't so much as glanced at one. "You!" When people were unable to communicate, they instinctively raised their volume, as if shouting would somehow make the other side understand. Pegmont waved his arms with exaggerated gestures, pointing toward the console. "You teach me how to fly this ship, and I let you go. Deal?" "You! Teach me how to fly this damn thing, and I... won't eat you!" "Don't worry, a Blue Star man keeps his word." He paced back and forth, bellowing out every syllable at the Red Shoulder. "*Wuu, buzz... nnn.*" A string of syllables that no human vocal cords could ever produce resonated from the Red Shoulder's head. It was speaking, and speaking with immense excitement... Though it hadn't understood a single word the pink human had just rattled off, a sudden flash of insight had allowed it to grasp his meaning. What it had grasped was not Pegmont's promise to spare its life or let it go, but that he wanted to learn how to pilot the ship to leave. He genuinely wanted to leave! *Fine, I'll teach you! It's simple, I'll teach you right away! Then hurry up and get out of here, go home, and have a safe voyage! Bon voyage!* Overwhelmed with excitement, the Red Shoulder's dying body twitched violently as it vocalized. "What the hell?! What are you twitching for?!" "What the fuck do you want?" Pegmont looked puzzled for a moment. He stood up with saber in hand and glared down at it. "Can you fucking understand me or not? Don't tell me you're still trying to fight back? What the hell are you puffing up for?!" *Yes, I'll teach you! Listen to me, all you have to do is face it and do it four times in a row...* This bizarre, idiotic human was finally going to leave! The traction field would be safe, and the other Great Spikes would be safe... And very soon, their main army would arrive. When that time came and humanity was annihilated, he would finally realize just how foolish a decision he had made! Filled with excitement and joy, the Red Shoulder struggled to lift its upper torso so it could turn sideways and point more clearly toward the control console. *Click, click...* Like a click beetle, it worked its neck and head up and down with great effort, trying to leverage the momentum to bounce its body upright. Once, twice, three times... It was almost there. However—*Smack! Thud!* Pegmont brought the flat of his blade down, swatting it back to the ground. The back of the Red Shoulder's head smashed heavily onto the dead iron plating. "Fuck your bullshit, stay the hell still! Twitch again and I'll chop you to pieces right now, saving me the waste of another source energy block." Pegmont finished speaking, feeling helpless and thoroughly annoyed. "You really can't communicate with stupid creatures like this." *You truly cannot communicate with an idiot human like this!* The Red Shoulder's life force was fading fast. It lay motionless for a dozen seconds, thinking until it finally realized that making sounds was completely useless. *Then what can I do?* Perhaps this struggle on the brink of death inside the T-class mothership's bridge was the most brilliant moment in the Red Shoulder's entire life. An idea struck it: *Since we can't talk, I can just demonstrate it for him! As long as he watches and mimics my fluctuation frequency and the number of activations...* *Hum!* The dying Red Shoulder activated the source energy within its body. A faint yet visible glow of red and blue surfaced from both sides of its chest, and source energy fluctuations surged forth. *It worked.* With the first surge of source energy, the connection was established. The console showed no response yet... It just needed three more times.