"Medic! Keep an eye on him. He's a super-rich magnate from one of our tax source worlds, and a technical specialist sent down from above to experience life. Don't let him die before he even sees the enemy."
"Your performance is far from satisfactory, Recruit Stark. Among this batch of Earth conscripts, you are the worst I have ever—"
"Damn it, no retreat! Hold them back!"
"Servitor, freeze their weapon authorization. Military Police—execute those deserters!"
"I take that back. At least your stupidity is better than cowardice."
The sergeant hurried off in a flurry.
"..."
Lying on the ground, turning his head away so he wouldn't have to look at the mutant soldier who had died with eyes wide open, Stark stared up at the sky, pain throbbing through his body. He hadn't absorbed a single word.
Maybe I should've brought the Hulkbuster armor.
The battle was so intense. The regular forces of the Divine Empress Order were so ferocious—true fanatics, like something straight out of a religious inquisition. The Skrull soldiers were no less formidable. As expected of one of the universe's former three great empires. Even in decline, fractured by internal warlord conflicts, their assault on a mere satellite had struck Stark like a hammer to the skull.
Arrogance was unacceptable.
This was not Earth.
Most of the Skrulls purged on Earth had been refugees fleeing war in search of a new home. Their military strength was weak, filled with the elderly and infirm. And the operations had been led primarily by the Divine Empress Order.
But this was the Andromeda Galaxy—the home system of the Skrull Empire. Those who had not fled were hardened fighters, warlords determined to fight the Kree to the bitter end, regular troops.
The instinctive arrogance, the reliance on past experience—if it worked on Earth, it'll work here—had sent Iron Man soaring into the sky only to crash straight back down.
Without even straining his eyes, he could see it: the sky slanted in all directions beneath a storm of horizontal and vertical fire. Countless lethal weapons poured ammunition into the fortress city without pause. Laser beams, plasma bursts, explosive energy bolts carved dazzling streaks across the heavens. Those streaks wove together into a vast tapestry praising death as it slowly unfurled.
Higher still, beyond sight, beyond the atmosphere, continuous thunder roared and burned. From time to time, Kree starfighters and marauder-class warships were blown apart and fell, their shattered wreckage igniting in friction against the air, blazing like enormous meteors.
Interstellar warfare is too dangerous. The Iron Man armor needs upgrades... automatic reactive energy shields, refractive barriers, new materials, new manufacturing processes, nanotechnology—all of it needs to be installed... yes, the armor plating must be thickened!
Tony Stark thought silently.
He had seen counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and urban combat in New York. But true interstellar war? Never. The Chitauri invasion of New York did not count. Compared to the declining, fragmented Skrull Empire warlord forces here, the Chitauri were at best:
A somewhat larger band of space pirates.
Half mechanical, half biological, amplifying their own flaws to absurd levels. Destroy the mothership and the entire army went limp.
Their individual flesh-armored soldiers could be pierced by medium-caliber assault rifles from Earth. Forget personal vehicle shields—their command mothership lacked even energy shields and deflection fields. Aside from fearlessness and low-tier energy weapons, there was little else worth mentioning.
"Armor damage at 34%. Nanoparticles have re-sealed the plating. Bleeding has stopped. Boss, for your safety, please withdraw immediately. Clean and suture the wound to prevent infection..."
Friday's voice was cold and mechanical.
"Stop. Cut it out. In my current identity, fleeing the battlefield would get me executed. You want that?"
Friday's intelligence was still far inferior to the well-trained Jarvis. Grimacing from the pain, Stark said, "Are there any options to improve my military competence? I think I need some... cultivation."
Thud—crash—
As he spoke, trying to distract himself from the pain, Stark felt his body being dragged.
Beside the crater, a massive composite armor shield was planted upright. Several thrall medics, wearing white shoulder capes marked with a bright red spiral cross, checked the corpses of mutant soldiers with toolkits in hand. They then dragged several humans and mutants missing arms or legs to this makeshift aid station.
The second-hand, semi-full-body polymer composite carapace armor issued by the Divine Empress Order, along with high-strength Kevlar-like and carbon-fiber woven underlayers, was indeed decent. Back on Earth, they would have been elite rogues. Pure light infantry would struggle to penetrate them.
But against alien electromagnetic high-velocity shells, explosive energy bursts, overwhelming energy weapons, heavy-caliber autocannons...
It was better than nothing.
It reduced casualties. It gave those meant to die a chance to live. Turned fatal wounds into severe ones, severe into minor. At least it could block a few hits.
"That armor of yours is impressive. Much better than the junk they issued you."
Fixing Stark's head in place, the thrall medic activated the medical pack and the cutting tool mounted on his bracer, removing a charred armor plate torn open at Stark's waist and abdomen. He tapped the re-sealed nano-layer beneath with a gloved hand reinforced by sensory-enhancing soft armor.
"Your tech? Can you control the nanoparticles?"
"Not perfectly yet. Full control isn't possible." Stark replied, instructing Friday to retract the nanoparticles and reveal the mangled flesh beneath the ruptured plating.
The thrall medic nodded without further comment. Mechanical tendrils removed the shattered abdominal armor and cut away unabsorbed nano fragments. A fast-acting local anesthetic was injected. Necrotic and burnt flesh, sections of intestine, and fragments embedded in organs were meticulously extracted. The wound was irrigated, sprayed with sterilizing regenerative foam, sutured with bio-absorbable nutrient fiber, then coated with hemostatic gel, smoothed, and bandaged.
"It can't compare to the effects of a Honkai restoration injection, but it's sufficient. If you Earthlings recklessly injected one, you'd likely mutate into a mindless husk... Titanium-gold alloy composite armor... hmm? What metal is this? The hardness is high, but the proportion is too low... and the thickness is somewhat thin."
After finishing, the thrall medic commented.
"If you'd been wearing the issued 'little vest,' that Skrull high-pressure electromagnetic armor-piercing round would've cut you clean in half."
"Which means my personal equipment saved my life. By ancient Roman standards, would I count as a prime legionary or reserve? Do I qualify to attend the citizen assembly?"
Opening his faceplate, looking much improved, Stark joked lightly. His gaze drifted unconsciously toward the golden double-headed aquila emblem on the other's breastplate.
"You? Rookie?"
The thrall medic then took out several armor plates. After kneading, comparing, and cutting them into shape, he began hammering them into Stark's abdominal gap—clang, clang, clang—before solidifying them with nanoscopic particles sprayed from his mechanical tendrils.
"Wrap the plate with your suit's nanoparticles," he instructed.
"..." Stark stared at him as if he had just witnessed something unprecedented.
"Your medics need to know this too?"
There was no reply. The thrall medic simply patted Stark's shoulder.
"Continue the assault, soldier."
"..."
...
Boom! Boom!
By the time Stark forced himself back onto the battlefield from playing dead, the towering fortress wall had already been blasted open. After the energy shields overloaded and collapsed, the battlements were riddled with devastation. Automated turrets lay destroyed everywhere.
The ground trembled in waves. In the distance, colossal war machines strode forth from the ashes—the Titan Legion.
Advancing like mobile mountains of steel, they pressed forward. With a deafening roar, the already-crumbling trapezoidal bastion collapsed instantly under the thunder of a siege drill. Rubble flew in all directions. Clad in armor thicker than houses, layered with dozens of void shields, energy shields, thermal shields, and deflection fields, a Warlord-class Titan smashed straight through Skrull structures in its path.
Like the hammer of death emerging from scorching smoke, the Titan's cannons aimed dozens of kilometers ahead—toward the inner wall positions spewing fire in Stark's direction. In the next instant, overwhelming firepower poured forth without mercy.
Rumble—
The earth shook violently. Blazing, massive particle beams carved across the battlefield. Without energy shields to dilute the impact, the Titans unleashed their full destructive capacity. In the blink of an eye, the entire inner defensive line of the Skrull city was torn to shreds.
Under the shrieking fury of heavy weapons mounted upon the Titans, everything was annihilated. The solid ground rippled like waves. Vehicles, artillery emplacements, and bunkers disintegrated midair like shattered toy bricks, hurled skyward by explosions before crashing back down with a cascading clatter several breaths later.
"I have a new research direction..." Stark exhaled. "Let's just hope their friend-or-foe recognition systems are reliable."
That sector was not his unit's objective. Holding that thought, Stark followed the mutant marines into the breached fortress. This time he was smarter—he did not fly in arrogantly.
Stepping over tangled corpses, he moved down the fortress corridor, listening to dull impacts and furious roars echoing from deep within the passageways. The inner structures were cracked and peeling, riddled with damage.
Along the way, there were bodies of both allies and Skrulls—deaths gruesome beyond description.
When he rounded a corner and his view suddenly opened up, Stark's face turned ashen.
"Now that's one hell of a welcome," he muttered.
A faint crimson mist hung in the air. His optics continuously refocused. Corpses covered the ground—most of them green-skinned Skrulls. Severed limbs and mangled flesh lay everywhere. It resembled a slaughterhouse.
"Urgh—" A newly conscripted Earth soldier couldn't hold back and vomited loudly near the entrance.
"You lot! Clear Sector B9—22. Move!"
An auxiliary officer directing the rookies—having them finish off bodies and clean the battlefield—spotted Stark and his group and barked the order.
"..."
Stark opened his mouth to respond, but before he could speak—
"Die, invaders!"
A massive Super Skrull burst from a hidden transit tunnel, roaring. A heavy explosive rifle was mounted along his thick arm.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—
Caught completely off guard, seven or eight rookies who had just stepped onto the battlefield were struck. Their bodies went rigid before being pierced, shredded, and vaporized in sprays of blood mist.
In the next instant—
Crack!
A power blade sliced through flesh like a hot knife through butter.
Green skin split apart, charred purple-black blood spraying. The auxiliary officer cleaved the Super Skrull in two. The violet-red energy blade continued its arc, carving a several-meter-long gash into the metal wall.
Dozens of Skrull soldiers who had just revealed themselves to ambush were caught in the strike. Several unlucky ones were directly hit by the blade's radiance and reduced to fragments.
"There's still one alive... sir," a rookie said, staring at a female Skrull whose body had been severed at the thigh. She wailed in agony. He raised his laser rifle—but hesitated instead of pulling the trigger.
That single moment was enough.
"Die!" the female Skrull screamed, her mouth filled with sticky blood as she pressed the trigger on the plasma grenade at her waist.
Boom!
The chain detonation swallowed the corridor in electric light. When Stark opened his eyes again, he saw the rookie sitting heavily on the ground. In front of him, a thrall soldier struggled to wrap the expanding plasma sphere in violet-red cosmic energy before hurling it back into the tunnel.
A searing blue-white flame engulfed the tunnel entrance.
"Idiot! Attack! Hesitation means defeat. These green-skins—male, female, big, small, old—they all want to kill you and pluck your eyes out to snack on them!"
The officer roared in fury, slapping the stunned rookie twice across the face.
"The same goes for you! Understand?!" he barked at Stark and the other newly arrived Earth conscripts.
To experience the battlefield. To experience war—war under the doctrine of the Divine Empress Order.
That was why Stark had been thrown into this fight as well. To become one of them, to accept their philosophy—or at least part of it.
"Hey, Billy, you alright?"
A fellow countryman hurried over, carefully spraying coagulating coolant foam onto the soldier's hand and bandaging it. The plasma grenade's instant heat had melted his tactical gauntlet. His fingernails were gone, skin scorched red-brown and shriveled. The bones of his forearm were nearly visible.
The thrall soldier's hands trembled. "It's still barely manageable... maybe after the next evolution. My control over Honkai energy is still too rudimentary."
"Being able to project energy at all is already impressive. It's a gift from Sacred Selene. Dying here isn't worth it. Survive and return—promotion into the auxiliary ranks won't be a dream."
"You can barely pull a trigger like that. Come on, I'll take you to the medics—"
"There's no need for that trouble. I'll handle it."
A gentle, composed female voice interrupted.
A woman in red walked through the slaughterhouse-like scene as though untouched by it.
She had long, pale pink hair braided neatly, red eyes, and wore a red uniform. Tall and slender, with a delicate, pale face, she seemed utterly out of place amid the carnage.
"I will eradicate all poisons and all harm."
Lifting the shriveled, horrific hand of the thrall soldier, she spoke softly.
Hum.
A warm, healing light spread.
Stark had no time to observe further. His commanding officer was already moving toward Sector B9—22.
At that moment, only one thought occupied his mind.
Who was she?
An old-fashioned English red uniform, black standing collar trimmed with silver... was she from the Royal Guard Infantry?
With that question lingering, Stark followed the unit to meet the Skrull counterattack.
Rat-tat-tat—
...
Scenes like this were unfolding across every corner of the satellite. Soldiers conscripted from Earth—Avengers, X-Men, street-level heroes, mutants, criminals—were all undergoing the baptism of the Divine Empress Order.
All treated equally.
There was no furnace more suitable than war.
—
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