Chapter 6: The Wolfpack, Preparations, and An Amazing Discovery

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Well, let me say this now: I REALLY didn't expect what happened when I went after those signals underwater.

But I think I should show you what actually happened down there first.

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My subs travelled deeper into the depths, things getting darker as they progressed. As it turned out, the sources were within a pair of ocean trenches, so I was worried I'd actually have my subs implode before I reached the targets. Now that would be a humiliating way to lose my army.

Fortunately, my subs were able to reach the appropriate depth and still remain functional. Whew. Considering my depth charges had the same pressure limits as my subs, that meant they'd still work down here as well. Nice.

With my subs ready, I began exploring the trenches. A few creatures showed up on the sonar and on my sub cameras, but they just ignored me. They looked as if they were stoned, but some looked really confused. Probably had to do with my counter signal. Hopefully, they would stay that way until after I killed whatever was controlling them.

And frankly, some of them looked weird. Oh sure, some were realistic, such as giant sharks, mega-anglers, colossal squid, even the occasional overgrown woodlouse (yes they exist on Earth), but then there were fish with shrimp legs and huge barnacles that could crawl around the ocean floor. Seriously, WTF ROB?

Anyways, it was about this time that I noticed that the subs were approaching their targets. I began shutting off their camera lights, because I was really betting on this thing having bioluminescence. I mean, a lot of deep sea creatures had bioluminescence, plus it looked cool, so I doubted ROB would pass up on that chance.

Now, let's see, what should I expect these creatures to have.

The only tings I could think of were atomic breath or something similar, cause Godzilla, and giant parasites, like Clover.

Oh well, guess I was going in really blind.

Then, I noticed that lights had started appearing before my subs. According to my sensors, there were the source of the signal.

I activated the torpedoes and locked onto the signals. Time to end this. I knew one volley would probably just make them angry, but that'd probably give me a good idea of how much damage these torpedoes would do against these things.

To my surprise, the first volley went through without a hitch. After the blast lights faded, I found the water filling with bioluminescent blood. Then, to my surprise, more bioluminescent patches lit up on the creatures' bodies, which were really friggin' big. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out what they looked like.

Then each of the bodies split into a set of four smaller bodies.

Wait, what.

I checked my sensors. Yep, the eight smaller bodies were emitting the same signal as the bigger two.

This was just fucking PERFECT!

I quickly set my subs to scatter, then fired another volley of torpedoes. I also set the depth bombers to start dropping the charges, along with the torpedoes. Finally, I activated the lights, revealing my foes to be weird...arthropod...fish...things.

Alright then, BRING IT ON, YOU OVERGROWN FILLETS!

My foes quickly scattered, forcing my subs to split into smaller sub groups to chase them. The sea devils (because that's any easy name, okay) began shaking around, releasing a bunch of flecks into the water. Which suddenly began charging me. Turns out they were human sized isopods, some of which I'd seen earlier.

Called it, ROB!

Anyways, these guys were hard to kill. I mean, they took out 10 subs before I gave one sub group per sea devil horde orders to directly attack them. Even if I was playing Supreme Commander, that would have been a giant loss.

Fortunately, I'd made sure to use a few hundred subs against each devil pack. I was not going to come this far only to lose to a pair of wolf pack bosses!

Anyways, back to the fighting. One of my sub groups was right on the tail of one of the devils. I'd made sure to use three other packs to focus on its pack mates, because otherwise they wer going to tear me apart. I quickly readied a second set of torpedoes. Time to cook these fish!

Then, it turned around as the lights on its body started getting brighter and brighter. Then, it opened its mouth and shot a giant beam of light its pursuers, cutting the sub pack following it in half.

Atomic Breath. Again, CALLED IT ROB!

Anyways, I ordered the subs that were still following that particular devil to split into two groups and start firing torpedoes as fast as possible.

One of them was promptly eaten by another devil. Oh well.

I decided to turn my attention back to the other group of subs, to see how they were doing.

It turns out that they were reduced to just one sub per sea devil while I was focused on the other pack.

And said subs were now being eaten by the devils.

Well, screw you too! I promptly fired the torpedoes in the subs. If these guys were gonna cost me all my subs, I might as well give them some stomach aches before they came after my commander.

So I was pretty surprised when they, in synch, spit out my subs, vomited up a huge amount of blood, began writhing in pain for a few moments, then went stiff and began sinking.

I checked my sensors. The signal had halted from them. They were dead.

OH YES! TAKE THAT!

I really wanted to enjoy my victory, but I still had one more pack to deal with. Plus, I didn't really have a body to enjoy it with.

Anyways, back with the other pack. My subs were still doing much better than their partners, as there were no parasites in the water, barring a few fragments of exoskeleton and flesh. There was also a lot of blood pouring into the water from the devils. Oh yeah.

That was when the devils got serious. They turned to face the subs, and opened their mouths really wide.

Then, suddenly, half of my subs flew into the open mouths, were swallowed and destroyed.

Great, suction mouths.

Also, where were those depth charges?!

I checked my sub numbers and was unnerved by the results: I only had four left. The remainder had gone offline.

Time to bail.

I set my subs to begin retreating. Once I was far enough away, I'd start having them rise up, but right now they were too close to the devils for that to work. If they did, they'd show the devils right up to my doorstep, an I did not want to deal with that.

Unfortunately, the devils wised up and opened their mouths as wide as possible. I soon found my subs facing an immense amount of force pulling them toward those open maws.

CURSE YOU ROB!

Then, to my surprise, several hundred glowing lights floated down in front of the sea devils, before being sucked into their maws. I quickly checked ,y sensors.

Those lights were my depth charges.

And the sea devils had just swallowed them.

I cannot describe in words how satisfying it was to watch the devils disappear into blinding light. I mean, one minute their eyes widened, seemingly realizing exactly what they swallowed, and then they just ceased to exist. I couldn't even find a single piece of any of their boides, there was just nothing left to work with.

OH YEAH! I DID IT! SUCK IT ROB!

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Anyways, things really calmed down after that. With nothing controlling them, the wildlife went back to normal. I saw some of the eating each other, or feeding on ocean vent smoke, but most just scattered. I briefly considered wiping the planet clan of life, but decided against it; I'd rather study them and see if I could glean any advances out of them. Maybe I'd even turn some into livestock.

With all of the possible threats dealt with, I decided it was time to start working on expansion. I began setting bases up all over planet, along with a few on the other ones in the system.

In fact, my biggest focus right now was investigating the worlds in my system. What I found surprised me.

Most of the system was rather standard, including a lava world, an ice ball, a desert planet, a forest world, an ocean one, a gas giant and a... wait, is that a metal planet?

I have an annihilaser? YES!

Then I noticed an odd signal coming from the desert world. I sent a fabber to investigate and was stunned with what I found.

It was an Osiris Commander. And it was still functional.

I wasn't sure what to do. Should I repair it? Destroy it? Enslave it? So many choices-I repaired him

Or at least, started to. According to my fabber, it would take at least a week to fix him and that's using A LOT of fabbers. Oh well.

It was then that I noticed that I had received a message from ROB

I opened it, and here is what it said:

Dear Flame

Here's the blueprint for the dimension gate. Time to prove yourself, kid. IF you succeed, great. IF you fail... I'm putting you in for a Raspberry.

Sincerely, Rob.

p.s. The incoming drop is also from me. Consider my one good deed for the millennia.

I wondered what he meant when a loud scream turned my attention to the sky. I watched as a pod fell out of the sky. Cautious, I sent in a fabber vehicle to examine it.

To my surprise, It was filled with gifts. And they were all addressed to me.

But why-Wait.

Now that I wasn't under constant threat, I started counting how many days I'd been here. The resulting number confirmed my thoughts.

Today was Christmas Eve.

Tomorrow was Christmas.

I can't remember if I laughed or cried (I think I did both), but a part of me went really cold when the realization hit me that I'd spend Christmas alone for god knows how long. On the other had, I actually felt happy that ROB decided to let me have all of the gifts I was supposed to get. It wouldn't be too hard to make a system capable of playing them using my body (if they were games or movies) and I was looking forward to reading any books I got.

First, though, I made a dox that could grasp a twig firmly without breaking it. I'd need that to use half the stuff I had asked for.

In spite of the other insanity I'd had to deal with, the simple fact that I'd be able to enjoy a part of Christmas gave me some reassurance that, ultimately, things would turn out okay.

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AN: This chapter was originally posted on December 24, 2016, so it is obviously out of date. Still, it has its importance, so I'm keeping it up.

Read and Review! This is Flameal15k, signing off!