Tyrants Always Win

Rebuild

Chapter 1: I managed to start a story without a child being raped or a baby being eaten. I must have gone soft.

A/N: Scrapping the first chapter of this and rebuilding this to be the story I want it to be now, not the one I wanted it to be in 2014. I have spent the past two weeks trying to make a continuation of that story, but it's just not happening. I want to get back into writing, but it's not going to happen with the story that I had set up. My style has no doubt changed after months upon months of inactivity, and I doubt it'll be any good at first, but I'm going to try, at least. Sorry to come back with yet more random OC's, but I have to set the world stage in the timeskip from C+1 to this.

Hopefully you can enjoy this, and aren't too mad at me for taking a personal...6 months? ;-; I swear I'm back. Weekly update basis, hopefully. Maybe more frequently. We'll see.

"Odd to see you back here so quickly. You look like you've seen a ghost, Major." The sun was setting behind the mountains, leaving the command room darker by the minute. Sitting in the position of power, General Homes peered at the younger man, less than happy to see an officer under his command desert his post to report directly to him. Not only that, he had stolen a Humvee from his station and driven six hours in broad daylight to the outpost that was hopefully hidden from the enemy. Why the sudden break of protocol? The base he came from had gone dark, but a simple communications lapse wasn't enough to send the CO all the way across the West Coast to inform him of something, even major.

"I have, sir. So many ghosts. Yesterday I called them my friends and fellow soldiers. Today, they're only ghosts of days past." The General sat up straighter in his chair. This wasn't the beginning of irrational man rambling about imagined monsters. He steeled himself for the inevitable explanation.

"We were called down to the pier to investigate a convoy that was blockading civilian ships from getting to shore. Seven Asian Confederacy Trading Union vessels, all staffed by women. That should have been our first clue, but we were too worried they would attack us outright. We ordered them to hold, and the coast guard sent in divers to make sure they weren't mining the waters. They came back with nothing, and we headed in with a translator to resolve the issue.

These girls were absolutely terrified of us. They wouldn't look us in the eye, kept babbling to each other in broken Japanese, and our translator was having trouble keeping up. He kept getting the phrase "we're here now, we're not going back there, not now, not ever.", which didn't make any sense.

It took hours to realize we weren't going to make any headway, so we convinced them to come with us back to the base. We impounded all of the vessels at the docks, set up patrols to make sure no-one would get anywhere near any of them, and scheduled a convoy to take us back through the city to the base.

I thought it was weird that most of the girls kept their heads down the whole trip, not bothering to look at the sights and sounds of what I'd assume was their first American city.

After some food, they were more open with us, but still horribly cryptic. Sergeant Edokawa joined the conversation and gave us the same message, but emphasized that these girls were not going back to the AC. This shit went around in a few more circles and wasted more of our times, until command decided it could wait until the morning.

A morning that just didn't come for us.

I woke up to the scream of my bunkmate. By the time I jumped out of bed, I saw what was happening to him. One of the girls was hunched over him, tearing off his limbs in a bloody fury. I swear I have never seen anything so scary before in my life. That girl looked at me, and her eyes were shining red, bright as the evening sun.

I grabbed my sidearm and emptied the whole damn clip into this girl, but she didn't bleed. I ran after that.

Everyone else was up from the sounds of my shots, but no one knew what was going on. I told my men to kill those girls, if they could. Those girls weren't the only ones who killed this morning, Sir. Most of them didn't know what was going on, and fell by the dozen. My men couldn't bear killing civilians after making their way through most all of them.

I can still hear the screams, Sir. That one girl followed us, terrorized us, and once we were cornered, stripped us all bare and ate us alive. All of us. I felt myself die, General. What came after was much worse."

General Homes brought his revolver out from under the desk and aimed it straight at the Major's face. To the Major's credit, he didn't blink.

"I'm not here to kill anyone, Sir. I'm here to relay the message. I know what I have to do. I wasn't brought back to life for any purpose but to tell the tale. For any other aggressor on the planet, I'd be the last one left alive, sent to tell the others. I wish I was that lucky. This monster didn't give me the chance. I tried to run, I really did. She punched through my rib cage like it was paper, and I could feel my life slipping away from me, and see my organs go flying onto the pavement.

I was eaten alive by this girl. I could feel and hear the screams of a million other poor souls trapped in an eternity of pain. But I was ripped apart from all of that, away from my resting place. I was given my body back, somehow, and now I'm here, human again. But I don't feel human, Sir. I don't feel hungry, or tired. I can feel myself coiling through different types of flesh all the time. I'm a monster, and I want to die now more than ever. Help me. Help others never end up like me."

The older man's eyes flicked past the manic Major, towards the door. The Major didn't need to turn around. He could feel the power emanating from the doorway, a power he was intimately familiar with, only hours after being made aware to it.

"So the stories are true, miss. You couldn't leave well enough alone, and now you're killing my men here, in the greatest country in the world. Even great minds like yourself can be fools."

The young woman stepped forward, her footsteps making no noise at all, but her bare feet leaving solid red, bloodied footprints on the thick carpet.

Her smile belied no humour, and her twinkling eyes belied nothing even remotely similar to positivity.

She pointed at the Major, who felt the grip of her overtake him. He was going back to where people like him belonged. Rotting in the hell of her mind and flesh. He tried to resist, but there was no use to it. He just felt like going quietly would mean this monster had truly won him over.

General Homes watched in abject horror as all of the Major's flesh drained from his skeleton and snaked along the floor, being sucked back to its' source. Next came the bones, flinging themselves against her, crushing themselves into a fine powder, which entered her mouth as she opened it.

"You could just kill me now and continue your conquest unhindered, ma'am." He knew who she was. Not many did, but those who did know were well versed in her methodology, though that changed all the time, becoming more and more erratic.

She, for the first time, looked the General in the eye, instead of letting her eyes wander around the room. Her eyes were mis-matched, their shades changing constantly, going back to a sharp, dark blue more often than not, sometimes spiking to colors as unique or bright as orange and black.

She advanced on him, taking the seat without asking. Monsters like her would never ask. They would just take and take. Perhaps they would just take some more.

"I'm sure you know why I haven't killed you. I like playing with my food. I'm going to burn this country down either way, but why wouldn't I make it a challenge to myself? There's half a billion men, women, and children sitting between me and complete and total rule of the world powers. I think the world can get by just fine, losing half a billion lives. It will make ruling over the remaining 9 billion just that much easier.

I'm not such a monster that I wouldn't force a fight no-one could possibly win, could I?"

The General knew the answer to this question, but said nothing. Instead, he held up his other hand, revealing the cell phone he had been holding. The camera light blinked on, shining as it took a video.

He looked down at the phone and said, "This is what we're dealing with. May the Lord have mercy on us all."

The phone started rising out of his hand, and to his credit, he looked back to the girl in front of him, not missing a beat. It turned around, so it was showing the man sitting in his seat.

She leaned over, resting her ice-cold hand on the General's.

"Don't worry, it won't hurt a bit."

The blood gouts covered the camera lens far before the video was turned off, but right before the screams were silenced, a message was delivered in the monster's tongue, only deciphered days later, after the declaration of war was made against the Asian Confederacy.

That message was short and sweet, it's meaning lost to no-one.

"One million doctors will not be able to close your wounds now."

-end of archival scene-

-beginning of comments-

HistoryMajorX writes:

June 28th, 20XX. The day the phantom war began. Curiously, it did not start off the slaughter everyone feared it to be.

Perhaps that made it just that much worse? Instead of the cities running red with gore, only those in uniform were targeted. But unlike previous wars, where you could fight back against a clearly outlined force, when the enemy numbered but one, the battle became a psychological prison for those entrenched in battle. Waiting around until one day, your entire base was wiped out in one fell swoop. It was always personal. Every time, she brought back one person to tell of their failures, and sometimes, instead of consuming them again, she let them wander, cursed with their fate, unable to die, wishing only to do so.

Just what was this woman going to do once she had the whole world under her heel? Crush it and live out her days as the last of a race of failures? Or shape it towards something better? We don't yet know, but this historian, like many before me, fears to live in a world where the only flag is held high by a monster.

It feels horribly inevitable, and growing closer by the day. My loyalty to my flag wavers, as the monster grows ever nearer.

-end of comments-

-beginning of comments contd.-

SilkymetroMorning writes:

I don't think any of this is true. I'm not disputing that someone made a message and everything, but this is all highly dubious. Your country has been aggrieving us for years, and yet they claim that one single person, and a girl at that, has been killing scores of your soldiers? That's right out of a story book. There was that girl that was conjured, years back in Tokyo, but she disappeared with the rest of her cult, and though it must be nice to pin the blame on something in your head, you'd really hope a superpower, or, in America's case, former superpower, would be able to do more than lie about some internal threat that's killing their soldiers. I'd love to be proven wrong, but until there's some real hard evidence that this isn't bullshit sensationalist journalism, i'll keep on treating it exactly as such.

The amount of people who post things like this around all the time can't be terribly intelligent. If any of this were true, wouldn't they, you know, attack us? Try to force this mystical, planet-killing force back to the homeland where it apparently is from, and get it to demonstrate itself with defending the people it is apparently all for.

Try again, Americans. You can add "writing bullshit lies to back up a declaration of war" to the list of things you do with aplomb, along with having more debt than there is money in existence. Can't understand how you managed to bend everyone over hard enough to make that happen.

I fully expect the glorious US of A to be off the map within the next ten years, whether from your imagined war, or through their own stupidity.

-end of comments contd.-

A/N: There is literally six documents in my folder with titles like " ". Thankfully this is actually the one, and while I am removing the other "first chapter" for now, it's not actually being retconned out. I'm just starting at a different point now. That chapter is actually more like the 20th-ish one? I don't want to delve into the characters living in each of the countries just yet. I have to focus on the whole surrounding goofiness.

The Library's theme, if you could call it that, was revenge. Calamity Plus One was about trying to fix everything when what you've worked for goes horribly, horribly wrong. With Tyrants, I'm going for "This is the world we've created, now we have to live with the consequences." As such, it will be slightly more focused on the implications of having to live in this utterly CrapSack World (do I get bonus points for naming the trope outright? Probably not.) The Americans lose. The Asian Confederates lose. The Europeans lose. Everyone loses, because this world sucks.

The remaining Lucky Star characters who aren't dead, and one who is, will obviously have their hand in trying to fix things, but with such massive events going on, even they can't do much...can they? If they do, it would have Mary Sue written all over it. If they didn't, then what the hell is the purpose of this story? I have a plan, I swear. And hopefully it won't take...50 chapters * 6 months...25 years to tell.

See you all in a week.

NEXT CHAPTER: An older American man talks with his Japanese pen pal about how life used to be.

-Arkytal