Chapter 4
Phantoon dodged waves of asteroids as he approached his master's throneroom. He nearly ran into the spiked murderwall, but narrowly phased out of existence just long enough to pass through. Letting his anger get the better of him, he cloaked himself in blue fire and burst through the front door to the crystal palace spires.
He found himself in an expansive room that called to mind ideas of an infinite plane. The walls were lined with etchings of the Grim Reaper drawing in the dead with his insect pincers, bordered with the words of an Eldritch tongue written using the shapes of sacred animals eating their own intestines, which he had painstakingly done himself at his master's request. The ceiling was a projection of what the evil legion predicted the galaxy would look like when they were done with it. That is to say, it was a plain black slab of drywall, but he found the previous explanation much more likely to garner him a promotion. Aside from that, the room was empty save for a white carpet stained with red, green, and purple alien blood that led up to a throne made of several outdated Federation guns welded together.
"Master MB," he said as he drew near the Gun Throne, having trouble making his words audible over the sound of the lightning tornadoes raging just outside, "how are you enjoying the scrap metal from the obsolete Nightmare drone?"
MB gnawed on a bolt covered in green slime as she stroked under the chin of Ridley, who was perched on her shoulder. "I can't taste anything, but, from the sounds it makes, I'm guessing this tastes like piss."
"I've come because we have pressing matters at hand. Our indoctrinated dinosaurs stationed at the moonbases have said that entire populations have been wiped the fuck out with extreme prejudice!"
"What else is new?" MB took the bolt out of her mouth and sent a powerful telekinetic impulse through it, destroying its molecular bonds and causing it to disappear. She thought about her mother. A legion of zombified space ducks entered the room. "I'll take care of it."
"No, you don't understand!" Phantoon tried to squeeze in his words as MB started punching the ducks in the face and plucking their eyeballs out, adding a new color to the collection on the carpet: cheesy orange. "Our entire organization is motivated by revenge against the living species! If none of them are living anymore, then we'll need to bring them back to life in order to kill them ourselves again in the future, and we can't afford that kind of undertaking in this economy!"
MB drop-kicked one of the avian fiends, sending it crashing through the stained-glass windows and out into the void, where it faced sudden decompression and expired in a puff of its own pathetic tissue. "There will be no economy if the organic wastefucks are dead." She sneered at one of the zombie ducks' cries of pain when it found that it was missing a limb.
"Need I remind you that we owe our very existence to carefully maintained loops in the time stream, Master MB?" Phantoon gave up and joined in, setting the ducks ablaze and strangulating them with his rusty barbed appendages.
MB refused to entertain his thought and put her mechanical palm to her forehead, converting the other hand into her robotic warhammer: Afuckalypse, formed from a radium antimatter foundation bolstered with the petrified skeletons of its victims, spiked with rock from a billion dead planets and the shards of the mortal plane's glass ceiling, and supercharged with miniature hadron colliders. She flipped through the air and swung the hammer in a circle, removing a sect of the crowd of ducks from being.
"If we were to bring everyone back to life through use of the vortex, it would create such a powerful disruption in the balance of micromanaged networks that the timeline would be damaged severely until it's brought back to normal by a sufficient counteracting force! Assuming we'd still exist, we would probably end up whoring ourselves in the other timeline or something, and we'd have to achieve the perfect equilibrium of fuckmating in order to restore balance to the univaries!"
"You have no clue what you're talking about, do you, bugger?" MB unleashed Afuckalypse in an orange-blood streak through the air, its carapace-covered handle laughing to the tune of music of a frequency no mere mortal could hear, and ripped off five ducks' decayed beaks with that one mere swing.
"All I want is for what we're doing to have meaning, all right?"
She stopped in the midst of impaling a duck on its own laser-spear. "There's the rub, you see – there is no meaning to this. We win or we die. Tragedy in simplicity." But she agreed that they could go pillage a solar system tomorrow afternoon to make him feel better.