Growing up I read a lot of fantasy books, played a lot of fantasy video games, did a fair bit of tabletop RPGs with my friends, and the theme of bigotry towards the other - elves and such - was tried, true, and tired. Exhausted even. It's such low hanging fruit for creating instant antagonists that pretty much everyone was doing it. Bigotry bad. EZPZ delineation between the good guys and the bad guys, EZPZ combat encounters where the protagonist gets to feel good about laying the smackdown on some fools, EZPZ hooks for surprising outcomes and long term choice and consquence.
But they never conveyed in any of those mediums how fun it is to kill elves. Holy fuck, if Dragon Age could have just portrayed how awesome it feels to slaughter the knife-eared cunts those depressing Dalish tribes would have been absolutely fucked. Unfortunately, video games just don't deliver that instant rush of satisfaction you get when you hit an elf right below the nipples with a horizontal swing of your chainsaw sword and watch the centuries old being fall to the ground in four pieces. It feels like the face of God shining down on you while he gives you a thumbs up and tells you that 'You did good, son.'
And it feels like that every single time!
So yeah. I get it now. I get why all those people in those stories and games were beating on elves and such. It's fucking fun, amigos.
I got the distinct feeling though that not everyone was feeling the good vibes stomping on the Wild Hunt and their ice crystal hounds. Kenworth certainly was as the massive metal man giddily smashed and blasted the magically delivered victims with near nonstop laughter, but others had concerns like how much ammo and energy they had left.
For the most part, if you've ever seen 'Gate - Thus The JSDF Fought There!' you have a basic understanding of how well the swords and magic elves were doing against our guns. Quite a bit worse actually due to weapons tech in Cyberpunk greatly outdoing those featured in that anime.
The problem came in just how many of their doggos and foot soldiers they were sending, subterranean tunnels giving them a reasonably advantageous setting for this fight, and our complete lack of capacity to shut down their portals, some of which were obviously connected to realms overcome by the White Frost, unleashing subzero winds into the mine. More and more my chooms were stopping to break off frost from their gear or slipping on the icy floors. Meanwhile, the elves somehow turned the permafrost into armor enabling them to take far more hits than they could before.
"F-f-f-fuck this is b-b-bad!" Rebecca stuttered as she hunched over the hot barrel of one of her heavy guns to try to warm up.
Kenworth fired his Gatling laser canon at the nearest ice belching portal, precisely hitting the event horizon with his stream of fire which flickered around each shot before the portal collapsed in on itself.
"Fuck yeah, tin man!" Jackie shouted as he popped an incendiary grenade and warmed up next to the brief but intense fire along with a gaggle of others.
"Alright people, laser weapons are capable of shutting down the portals. Just marked the Deep Freezers on the map and plotted Kenny's route. Get the big man to the portals and kill every fantasy elf you can get your hands on. And their creepy dogs too."
"Fuck an escort." Kenworth shouted as he led the way himself rather than be delivered to where we needed him.
While the big man marched on I reached into one of my hard cases and pulled out three greater Dazhbog runestones and pushed them into the guide bar of my chainsaw sword, branding three symbols like W's going ass to ass on it and causing the chain to ignite as it spun.
For shits and giggles, I sparked up the Wave Breaker and sped through the mine to a portal spewing out the frozen hounds the Wild Hunt was trying to exhaust us against. I brought my newly enchanted sword to bear against the event horizon and the blazing magical chainsaw sword bit into the rend in space rather than the other way around, cleaving the portal in two and cutting off that stream of enemy deployment, hopefully giving the enemy navigator holding it open a nasty headache too.
My experiment a success, I set about shutting down the portals ferrying the Wild Hunt wherever I could find them. Between Kenworth shutting down the cold and me stopping their influx of hounds and warriors, The Brotherhood of Steel quickly rallied, but the process left my saturnite chainsword a barely hanging together hot mess. We got our people out of the mines a score or so less than we entered with.
Between us and the helicopters, any further action from the Wild Hunt was pointless and they seemed to know that as well as no further portals opened up around us.
"We did it, we beat the bastards!" Ciri shouted in joyous realization that we'd crushed the foes she's been on the run from for years.
"What the fuck was that!" a member of the Brotherhood shouted as he came towards me.
I couldn't resist, "Oh, you're approaching me?"
"Fuck yeah I am!" the frost and blood covered man shouted, "What the fuck was all that back there?"
"Alien invasion." I answered plainly.
"What?" the man barked.
"Did you not hear me?" I answered his question with another.
"I didn't sign up to fight aliens!" the man yelled, rapidly depleting my fucks to give in this situation.
"You signed up to fight whoever I say to until this war is over." I told him and everyone else listening, "If you don't like it feel free to consult the termination section of your contract."
"Fuck you! I'm leaving." The guy shouted and turned to walk away, but found his path blocked by a mountain of chrome and death.
"In accordance with section 8.12 of your contract with Welles Arms, upon willful termination of the agreement, Welles Arms can and will repo any supplied Welles Arms products." Kenworth growled down at the man with a maniacal glow in his eyes.
"Fuck you!" the guy shouted again to further display his limited tone and vocabulary.
"Resistance recorded." the giant cyborg stated, then his jagged mouth pulled into a grin, "And appreciated."
Kenworths hand flicked out in a blur of speed and the man in front of him stood completely for a few moments before his knees collapsed to the ground and his head rolled away from his body.
"The fuck the gonk think was going to happen?" I asked rhetorically as my eyes lit up and I called the robots and drones at the Badlands Park to come clean this mess up.
I wasn't sure what I could achieve with all these dead aliens lying around but wasn't going to leave the cover up of first contact to any of my competitors. Besides, the Aen Elle can live for centuries and breed with humans. Possibility of working out some gene therapy from them is solid and very lucrative.
Almost as lucrative as the Street Cred from destroying the Wraiths, the death of Dog Killer, and throwing back an alien invasion.
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What would you guys use a bunch of dead alien bodies for?
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