29. We Are the Hunters.

Auren woke with a jump.Had he not been wrapped in Lupo's arms, the force he'd startled awake with might have caused him to fall out of the bed they'd made such a mess of the night before.

He tried to take a deep breath and relax, eventually allowing himself to settle into being held like this. Lupo was snoring slightly, and his hot breath tickled the back of Auren's neck. The older man murmured something incoherent in his sleep, his voice a sweet melody in Auren's ear, before brushing his ample, soft lips against Auren's neck, leaving a wet impression of warmth and affection where they grazed across his skin.

The fish were fighting one another over the auto-dispensed food that had just ejected itself into their environment. Auren watched them for a while, enjoying the simplicity of their existence. As far as they knew, there was nothing more in the entire universe than this room. He couldn't help but feel an irrational envy at how simple that must be—how free.

They'd slept naked, and even now, Auren could feel Lupo's manhood pressed soft and huge against his back. Last night had been the single most pleasurable physical experience of Auren's life. The fact that it had happened after his consciousness had been digitized and transmitted out of his biological body was confusing. But the abstraction of what it was to be—to exist—had become blurrier and blurrier over the past weeks.

He listened to the gentle sound of Lupo's slumber. The ship had decided to lull them all awake to the sound of ocean waves crashing on a distant shore, and the noise of exotic seabirds cawing at one another, coupled with the fish tank, was almost enough to convince Auren that they weren't heading straight back to the very thing that had started so much of this mess in the first place: Bartie.

The flash of the katana sliced through his mind.

A true killer!the shadow jabbed. Such a pity we ended up with such a weakling as a host… The whispers cackled in wicked chorus before slinking back into the depths of his mind, leaving him drenched in the unctuous residue of their terrorizing presence.

Auren began shivering uncontrollably, so much so that he woke Lupo.

"Auren, are you alright?" Lupo asked at once, drawing him closer, seeming to misinterpret him as cold in his groggy, half-awake state.

Auren tried to draw comfort from him now as he had just done but found himself unable to.

"It's them, isn't it? The shadows?" Lupo asked nervously.

Auren nodded, feeling like if he moved too much, he might wake the thing inside of him and lose himself to it entirely. He felt paralyzed. The only thing anchoring him to reality was the feeling of Lupo against him. Auren began to cry.

"Turn it up!" Fengári rasped from the dining table.

Ophion had piled enough eggs onto its surface to feed at least three times their number. Once he'd gotten used to the limitless food the ship could produce, he'd become quite zealous in exploring human cuisine.

"You know people don't eat pasta for breakfast, right?" Fengári asked him wearily.

Auren couldn't help but laugh as his brother watched the alien eat with thinly veiled disgust. Ophion flicked his tongue across the noodles, splattering the white sauce across the table and struggling to bring the slippery calories to his mouth. Eventually, he gave up and grabbed a handful with his talons, slurping down a gob of them before licking the mess he'd made off of the table.

"Aw, come on, that's just disgusting," Fengári moaned.

"Hush!" Lupo cried, rapidly increasing the volume of the holo-broadcast they'd all been watching.

Evidently, the human space fleet had arrived at the Keth home system some hours ago, and the video was only now being sent back from the front. The data networks that connected human space were beaming the spectacle of victory across human dominion. The destruction was like nothing Auren had ever seen. The sheer scale of the human fleet, coupled with the ferocity of their assault, had turned the surface of the world displayed on-screen into a molten hellscape.

Ophion dropped the plate of pasta to the ground, where it shattered and made a noodly mess. He let out a high-pitched sound, like a shriek, before going pale and silent. Auren watched him uncomfortably out of the corner of his eye. He was seated so near his brother he wouldn't be able to get to him in time should he become unhinged at the sight of his capital reduced to ruin. A foul smell emerged from him, and Auren wondered if it was a sort of fear response.

"Citizens of the polity"—the admiral who had spoken before cut into the video feed just as a pair of Keth battle cruisers exploded in unison on-screen—"you can see for yourselves what our fury has cost them. Of course, they have other worlds. But their primary star yards are burning. Their fleets are slag. Their homeworld is as dead as they made ours. And now? Now, we will chase them down wherever they try to slither off to. The void is vast, but our appetite for vengeance is unending. They thought they could wipe us from this universe. They thought they could erase us. But what they've done is make us stronger. They've united us. They've reminded us of where we started—scrambling mindlessly in the mud, fearing every sound out in the dark cold of the forest, surrounded by the unknown. Our world was teeth and fangs, poison and bloodshed. But we learned. We adapted. We overcame. And we discovered that all along, it was us. It was always us. We are the hunters. And so now, we hunt."

A series of howls erupted behind her, and they grew so loud and boisterous that the ship's speakers distorted as the camera zoomed out and revealed an entire invasion battalion standing behind her in the docking bay of one of the human battleships.

The footage clipped back to a wide shot of the Keth homeworld. A series of fresh detonations had just erupted. They sent up mushroom clouds large enough to be seen from this great distance. The resultant shockwaves ringed out over the red-hot scab of the planet's decimated surface, surely obliterating any remaining life. It was a horrifying display of the nature of war. Auren couldn't look away.

Your kind is good at this, the whispers giggled. Kill! Kill! KILL!

The sound of howling—of pure and brutal animal vengeance—continued to spill out of the ship's speakers, but it wasn't enough to drown out the shadow.

"You good, bruv?" Fengári asked, looking away from the ongoing carnage on-screen.

Auren realized he'd been clenching his jaw and let his face relax.

"Yeah, sorry. It's a lot to take in," he deflected.

"Ophion, I'm so sorry for your loss," Lupo said. He reached out and placed a hand gently on the lizard's talons.

"The Game will go on because The Game never ends," Ophion said, pulling his hand away. He rose abruptly and without his usual grace—leaving the three humans to watch what their kind was doing to his.

To Auren's relief, the whispers fell silent. He and the other men looked on at the news broadcast in rapt horror, transfixed by the glittering doom of the orbital bombardment of the Keth planet. It was odd, he thought, that something so wholly destructive could also look so ethereally beautiful. Watching his species lose a bit of their collective humanity, he felt a numb chill creep down his spine.

And as Auren observed the ongoing spectacle of their fury take place over some while, a part of him couldn't help but feel that they had all just made a terrible and irrevocable mistake.