Another ship traveling through the void. A different one. A live one. It seemed; as much as an incomprehensibly gargantuan mass of alloys can seem anything; angry. And, with such colossal amounts of mass, that's a lot of anger. somewhere on the ship, there are navigators, bearers of the third eye. Each of them are now insane.
Elsewhere in the dreadnought, a man laments at his own misfortune and failures, unsure which was the greater cause. Soon, his despair turns to anger, which fuels the same blood drive which has claimed countless cities in the name of the man's corpse God. He looks to this new planet, and plans to bring it to war.
But the war didn't start on Algine. It started beneath it.
A dozen human figures were being rushed by a great many figures whose humanity ended around the fourth arm. A dozen gun barrels flashed and some of the creatures erupted in blood, but the rest were just a few seconds away. Then, there was the scrape of metal.
Where once there had been the form of the leading monster, there was now most of the leading monster accompanied by an unpleasant sound as something important fell to the floor.
Just in front of that stood Over-Prince Marquis, holdings an extremely elegant, bloody and - above all - sharp sword. In his other hand, he held a smoking pistol, and his face was twisted into a disturbing half-smile.
The aliens dived towards him, but he seemed to dissapate before them. A space seemed to form a few bodies into the horde, from which Marquis emerged in a tempest of pain. As the humans fired into the backs of the creatures, the Over-Prince sank into a brutal rhythm and began to mutter under his breath.
'Leg, arm, arm, head, arm...' As he listed each piece, there was a screech as the corresponding bodypart was cut of, slashed open, run through or all three at once. A roar of metal echoed as the other humans fired into the dense swarm around the Over-Prince, cutting it in half. Marquis pushed back the few bodies who had unintentionaly shielded him from the fire, then dived beneath the second hail a split-second before it impacted into the remaining monsters. A shredding of unnatural flesh, then the silence of the eviscerated.
The cavern loomed over the humans.
Marquis seemed to rotate 90 degrees, traversing from lying down to standing upright without ever appearing to be anywhere in between.
As he did, it was suddenly clear to all who were present why some called him the crooked Prince. He stood with a slight one-sided hunch, and he often tilted his head unconsciously, emphasising the deformation in his form. His face was similarly marred: it could, very nearly, be called handsome, but many subtle features came together to give it a basic ugliness, and a sharpness that almost cut the eye. His eyes were sharper still, and at times seemed like two razors, which nonetheless gleamed with a mix between animal cunning and human paranoia.
He turned to the group behind him with a flourish of his sword, sniffing the air. That couldn't have been all of the monsters.
"Everyone, search and destroy." The group splintered into two, with one team taking one of the two passageways other than the one through which they had entered. Marquis returned to the floor, sitting, the counted each of the fallen beasts. Once he had done this, he rested his head on his hands and retraced the past hour of his life in his mind.