Argall stared at the corpse of the Rangdan Warrior on ground, at his feet. This was the one his father captured and brought to him. Its body was wracked his wounds. He'd removed its fingers, one by one, plucked out its eyeballs, peeled back its skin, and even doused it in fire. And the only conclusion he'd drawn out of that torture session was that these aliens felt no pain. But now he knew the truth; it was nothing more than a drone. It didn't even need to feel pain. Argall wasn't even sure if it was alive.
Though, on the bright side, he'd learned quite a bit about its nonsensical anatomy. Their regeneration, for instance, slowed down to a near-halt after healing from a burn wound. And that exposure to nuclear radiation halted their regeneration entirely. Beyond that, the Rangdan Warrior did not talk. It just stared at him the whole time.
"Throw this out with the others," He commanded the Scrappers and volunteers. Five men came up to him and grabbed the corpse. A few dozen meters from their campsite was a large hill, made up completely of Rangdan stragglers, all of them dead. After learning their weakness, Argall found it terribly easy to manufacture the proper weapons for dealing with them, such as barrel attachments that laced racing slugs with a thin layer of nuclear radiation. A few of his latest designs involved rifles that spat out beams of pure nuclear radiation, but those would have be built far from human habitation and would likely only ever be used alongside full-body suits that shielded its user from the radiation. Otherwise, his people would be dousing themselves in cancer. "And burn the bodies. Not a single trace of them can be allowed to remain."
"Yes, sir!" The Scrappers all affirmed as they got to work.
Argall marched across the temporary camp, surveying his people – the wounded and the working.
The Rangdan stragglers fought back ferociously, just as a wounded and cornered animal was at its fiercest. They injured many and killed a few. Luckily, the injured did not have to wait at all for medical care. One of Argall's many inventions was something he called simply as a Healing Gel, which was an excessively sticky substance that accelerated bodily regeneration by supplying new cells wherever necessary. Argall derived it from the blood of a Rangdan Warrior, which he then stabilized and made safe for human use with a chemically-intensive process. Simple, even if it was time-consuming. However, the results spoke for itself.
And, ultimately, once he got an actual industrial base up and running, then mass-production of the Healing Gel would become trivial. Already, however, Argall had plans to set up the first of the factories that would soon dot the landscape.
First and foremost, however, was the construction of the automated Scrapper Bots and Builder Bots, both of which already had fully-functional designed. As their names suggested, Scrapper Bots would roam the Scrapyards, searching for the necessary parts as dictated by the Builder Bots, who'd be in charge of general construction as manual labor was more or less impossible, given the low population of the entire planet, the human name for which was apparently lost to time.
He was gonna have to fix that soon.
Whatever the case, his most immediate concern, after they'd hunted down the Rangdan Stragglers, was the creation of the Builder and Scrapper Bots. This planet was in dire need of an industrial base.
"Sir, we've received a message from the survivors of Loran!" One of his people approached, carrying a sealed scroll. Loran, once known as the City of Artisans, fell during the Rangdan attack. It didn't help that many of their Scrappers weren't present during the invasion. Those who survived were the very few who made it underground, into the Tomb Complex that ran underneath the planet, where the automated defenses of the Necrons saved them from the Rangdan hordes.
Argall opened the scroll and smiled. He then turned to address the camp. "The survivors of Loran will join with us!"
His people cheered and roared. That was one more city, a total of ten. By his estimate, that meant an overall population of maybe two hundred thousand. There were a few more cities to assimilate. Even now, they lacked a stable food source. The old sister cities thrived solely through trade and specialization. The city of Driz, for instance, focused all of its efforts into farming and animal husbandry, supplying almost all the food that was available. Of course, there were wild beasts to be hunted in the open Steppes, but wild game was not a stable food source.
The solution Argall had arrived at was in the creation of synthetic food, which would – at least, for now – replace the most common form of meat.
But that was a thing for later. Food shortage wasn't an immediate problem just yet, given the surplus of dried meats that were available to them from the stockpiles of the cities they visited, meant to feed more than ten times their number.
"We resume marching in an hour!" Argall continued, addressing the thousands around him. Even those who should've been too far to hear him, stirred at his words; Argall never quite figured out how he did that. "The aliens will rue the day they came to our world!"
His people cheered again.
Soon, perhaps, they would establish a new city, one that held technological marvels, one that united all the people of the entire planet, where food was abundant and people no longer had to fear anything from anyone; it might even be built in orbit, high above the planet – the stars all around it; but that time was but a distant dream as of yet.
But, for now, Argall would have to make do with whatever was left.
And so, he and his growing number of followers roamed the steppes, hunting down the enemies of humanity that thought to hide themselves in the shadows. Days quickly turned into weeks. And, in that time, Argall united the surviving bands of Scrappers and civilians wherever he could, while hunting down the Rangdan Stragglers wherever he could find them. Day and night, repeating the same pattern, until Argall and his warriors grew so attuned to the tactics of the Rangdan that every engagement ended with zero casualties or injuries. And then, just like that, his scanner stopped picking up the bio-signature of Rangdan Stragglers on the planet.
They'd hunted down the beasts to the last.
Argall frowned as he stared down the corpse of the last Rangdan Warrior, a smoking hole on its torso, where the irradiated rounds had torn through its body. With its death, the process of uniting and rebuilding could now begin. It and others like itself, thought to hide in the dark of the Scrapyards. But the Dragons drove them out right into Argall's killing field.
Around him, Scrappers and trained militants gathered the bodies of the slain Rangdan; many of them celebrated, opening casks of alcohol and sending out praises his way. The war was far from over, as Phaeron Khoteph told him, the Rangdan were numerous enough to blot out entire stars. And so, he needed to prepare his people for the calamity that was coming. His father mentioned something interesting about the history of his own race, the Viltrumites, and how they once culled their own population to ensure that only the strong survived.
Of course, Argall wasn't about to do that. A culling would be horribly inefficient and, more importantly, just cruel. No, a more efficient way to strengthen his people was to alter their genetics, perhaps even introducing some form of augmentative solution to their diet, altering their bodies so that they grew stronger, faster, smarter, and far more resilient than they otherwise would be with mere physical training; of course, all these traits would also be imprinted onto their DNA and carried over to any offspring. With such a small population – less than a million, by Argall's estimate – full genetic engineering and natural augmentation should be within the realm of possibility. It wouldn't even be particularly difficult.
The designs to the creation of a gene-forge appeared in his mind's eye, everything he'd need to begin augmenting and improving the human population of this world, to turn them into something far greater than what they are now – an entirely new breed of humans. The solution for the population problem was similar, a clone-forge. Or, more specifically, an artificial womb that would take an embryo from a pregnant woman and then replicate it five more times, each one having minor genetic differences as to encourage genetic diversity.
Or something to that effect. Heck, he could even combine the two machines.
Something to consider, then. It was a good thing he never ran out of idea for inventions.
His ears perked up at the sound of hurried footsteps, rushing toward him. Argall turned and found one of his followers running towards him. Argall raised a brow as the man stopped and wheezed, breathing deeply. "Sir, the scan of the Rangdan Monolith is finished. You were right. Your machine was able to trace the remnant signals to... somewhere outside the galaxy."
Oh, his father wasn't going to like that news at all. He'd gone and disappeared after their discussion with the Phaeron, very likely to mourn the death of his wife, Argall's mother, Nareena, and to give her a proper burial, something he never had the chance to do. The memory of her death stung. He'd grown with her as his role model, the greatest Scrapper of her generation, a living legend. And she died in her sleep, bombarded by the Rangdan; if she'd lived, his mother would've greatly enjoyed the ensuing war. She would've waded through bodies and left behind a mountain of alien corpses in her wake.
But, if his mother hadn't perished, then his father would not have unleashed his power upon the aliens, which meant the humans would've had to deal with the Rangdan fleet by themselves as they waited for the Necrons to awaken. By the time Phaeron Khoteph fully roused from his slumber, only a handful of cities might've been left standing; after all, his father was adamant about keeping himself in the shadows, that his time for glory and conquest was over. Argall would've disagreed if his father hadn't told him his age.
To persist in a state of war for almost five thousand years was just... unthinkable. And his father had been present in almost every single battlefield his people fought in, in every theater of war imaginable. So, Argall couldn't blame him for choosing to stay away from violence.
Still, Argall nodded. "I'll go and double check the data myself. But thank you for informing me. Go ahead and join the others in celebration of this victory; you've all earned it."
After all, the machine he'd built to analyze and isolate the faint signals coming from the monolith had essentially just been hastily jury rigged from scrap material as the energies within the monolith rapidly faded. His machine wasn't perfect, but it worked, but that also meant the margin of error was rather high. At best, it could trace the signal with a 98% accuracy, but that 2%, when considering the vastness of the cosmos, could easily be in the thousands of lightyears. He wasn't sure just how fast his father could fly through the void of space – which was honestly still amazing to think about – but searching for a single planet that's somewhere between a thousand or so lightyears is just impossible. If it was truly and fully accurate, however, then Argall would inform his father immediately.
After all, assuming the Rangdan Prime did exist and it hadn't just been bluffing, then destroying it would, at worst, cripple the aliens entirely; at best, they'd cease to exist.
Argall turned away from the field of corpses and eyed his following. He'd brought ten thousand warriors here – men and women, Scrappers and Armed Militants. They'd been more than happy to gun down the Rangdan Stragglers. Even now, they celebrated with alcohol and food as the corpses blazed like a gigantic bonfire. The smell was horrendous, but nowhere close to the stench of rotting corpses.
One of his most skilled Scrappers approached him, a young man who'd been in the same Guild House as him when the Rangdan ships first came and bombed everything to hell. "What now, sir? The stragglers are all dealt with."
"Now," Argall said. "We can finally begin the Unification."
There hadn't been any conflict between his group and the other survivors, thus far. Everyone seemed happy to be assimilated under his wing. Hopefully, Argall hoped, it would stay that way.