Viltrumite Conquest in a Galaxy Far Far Away Chapter 1 — For the Glory of Viltrum! (Patreon)

(Synopsis: Atlas was the youngest Viltrumite ever appointed to the World Betterment Committee. A distinction earned, not given. He was the firstborn of his people in the long shadow of the Scourge Virus, proof that Viltrum endured, proof that it would always endure.

Then a black hole swallowed him whole.

He emerged somewhere else.

Somewhere that had no name in any Viltrumite star chart, a galaxy that had grown fat and chaotic in the absence of a firm hand. It crawled with ancient religions and crumbling republics and children who called themselves lords of darkness. They had built civilizations on sand and called it an empire.

Atlas saw it all and felt something close to pity.

It did not matter how far the black hole had thrown him.

It did not matter that no Viltrumite boot had ever touched this soil. The mission did not change with the coordinates. Every world, every species, every flickering corner of existence was entitled to the same gift. Order. Strength. Viltrum.

The Republic would learn what it truly meant to govern. Atlas would see to it personally.

For their benefit, of course.)

Let us begin, as all honest histories must, with gratitude.

Ours is the most fortunate age the universe has ever produced, even if the universe does not always know it. For ten thousand years the Viltrumite Empire has held the spaces between the stars in its steady and loving grip. Wars that once burned for centuries have been put out like candles between two fingers. Famines that once consumed whole species have been ended in an afternoon. Where there was chaos, we placed law. Where there was cruelty, we placed strength. Where there was the small and petty tyranny of lesser kings and lesser gods, we placed the firm and impartial hand of Viltrum, and we asked nothing in return but obedience.

Some call this conquest.

Let them.

The word is ugly only in the mouths of the ungrateful.

A thousand species walk upright today because we taught them how. A thousand more breathe clean air, drink clean water, and raise their young in cities that do not burn, because a Viltrumite boot once stood upon their soil. This is the kindness of the strong. This is the burden we carry without complaint. The galaxy has never known a steward more patient, nor a teacher more willing to be hated for the lessons he gives.

And yet.

And yet there are always those who cannot be taught. The savage who bites the hand that feeds him. The animal who mistakes the cage for the cruelty and not the thing that kept him alive. In every corner of every system we have brought into the fold, there is some small and sniveling creature who calls our peace a prison and our order a theft, and who whispers to his neighbors that the old ways were better.

The old ways.

As if the old ways were not blood, starvation and the slow rot of a species too weak to save itself.

These are the ones who signed the declaration that would come to be called the Coalition of Planets

They will tell you it was noble. They will tell you that many worlds joined hands in a great circle of resistance against an oppressor. They will leave out the part where the circle was drawn in poison. They will not mention Thaddeus at all, if they can help it, because his name still burns their tongues with shame.

Thaddeus.

The Great Betrayer.

A Viltrumite born of our own mothers, raised on our own bread, lifted up by the hands of the very people he would one day murder by the billion. He walked among us and ate at our tables, all the while he was writing a sickness into the marrow of his own kind.

When the Coalition came to him with their weapon, he did not refuse. He improved it. He taught the plague how to recognize us.

And so came the Scourge.

We do not dwell on the numbers. Ninety-nine of every hundred Viltrumites who drew breath on the morning of the Scourge did not draw breath on the evening of it. Whole bloodlines ended between one heartbeat and the next. Cities that had stood for ten thousand years fell silent in an afternoon, and for the first time since the founding, the sky over Viltrum was quiet.

The Coalition celebrated for they thought they had ended us.

They had not ended us.

They had refined us.

The ones who died were the ones who were meant to die. The Scourge was not a weapon. It was a sieve. It shook us in its fist and let the weak fall through, and what remained at the bottom, what remained standing on the morning after, was the truest and hardest distillation of Viltrumite blood the universe had ever seen.

Stronger than our fathers. Stronger than our fathers' fathers. Stronger than the old men of legend who could pull moons from their orbits with one hand. If the Coalition had known what they were doing, they would have wept. They tried to kill a god and they only sharpened his teeth.

And then we began again.

Eventually children were born. Not many at first. But each one was a marvel. Each one was selected, in the womb, by the ruthless arithmetic of survival, from the strongest flesh that had ever walked. The first generation of the new Viltrum came squalling into existence and the elders knelt and wept at the sight of them, because they knew, they knew, that the empire had not ended. It had only been waiting to be reborn stronger than before.

Among those first children was one of the Strongest of his Generation.

Atlas.

He was born on a Monday, in the third year after the Scourge, in a birthing hall that still bore the scorch marks of the plague fires. His mother was a decorated field marshal of the Committee and his father was a ranking strategist of the Inner Assembly, both of them had survived the sickness by their own strength.

The boy grew quickly, as our boys do, but he grew differently. He was not merely strong, though he was the strongest of his cohort by the age of four. He was quick. He was observant. He was patient. He listened when others spoke and he remembered what he heard, and he understood, in a way that most of our kind do not understand until much later.

He was, in short, the perfect Viltrumite that would grow to become a Legend when he reached his first millennia.

If he reached his next Millenia.

_____________________________________

The first blow came without warning.

Atlas felt the air shift a fraction of a second before his father's fist connected with the side of his skull, and the impact sent him hurtling sideways through the stone column behind him, his body punching clean through it in an explosion of rock and marble that rained down across the arena floor like hail.

He didn't have time to orient himself before his mother was already there, her knee driving up into his sternum with enough force to fold him in half, he felt something crack inside his chest, a wet splintering sound that echoed through his ribcage as the breath was ripped from his lungs.

He hit the ground back first and skidded across the arena l, gouging a trench into the surface with his spine, his fingers clawing desperately at the rock to slow his momentum.

But his father was already descending on him from above, both fists locked together over his head in a hammerblow that would have caved in his skull if he hadn't moved at the last possible instant.

The the impact where his head had been a heartbeat before sent a shockwave rippling outward that cracked the arena floor in a spiderweb of fractures radiating twenty metres in every direction. Chunks of stone the size of fists erupted from the point of impact and peppered Atlas across the back and shoulders as he flew up

However his mother caught him by the ankle before he could fly up and she whipped him overhead in a brutal arc and slammed him face down into the ground. The rock buckled and split under the impact and Atlas felt his nose break. She lifted him again, hauling him up overhead a second time, and this time she hurled him directly at his father, who caught him out of the air with both hands around his throat.

His father's thumbs dug into the soft tissue beneath his jaw and squeezed, Atlas could feel the cartilage in his windpipe beginning to compress, could feel the blood vessels in his face swelling and straining as the pressure built behind his eyes.

He grabbed his father's wrists and pulled, but the man's grip was immovable, his forearms like iron columns that didn't budge even a fraction of an inch despite everything Atlas poured into the effort. His vision was going red at the edges, darkening toward black, and he could hear his own heartbeat thundering in his ears like a drum counting down the seconds he had left.

So he stopped fighting. He stopped trying to break the grip entirely, and instead drove both of his thumbs directly into his father's eyes.

The scream that tore out of his father's throat was loud and almost animalistic, the grip on Atlas's throat released instantly as his father staggered backward with both hands clutching at his ruined face. Atlas had felt the give, the sickening pop as his right thumb had punctured through the outer membrane and sunk knuckle deep into the socket. When he pulled his hand away there was vitreous fluid and blood coating his fingers in a slick translucent film.

His mother hit him from the blind side before he could press the advantage, her fist connecting with his ribs on the left side and he heard three of them breaking in rapid succession like dry branches. She followed with an elbow to the top of his skull that drove him the rest of the way down, his face smashing into the broken stone floor, and then she grabbed a fistful of his hair and hauled his head back up so she could look at him.

There was nothing in her eyes. No anger, no concern, no mercy. Just disgust.

She released his hair and stepped back, his father was already coming again, half blind and furious, blood streaming from the destroyed eye socket in thick rivulets that ran down into his beard and dripped from his jaw. He came in swinging with his right hand, a massive looping hook driven by rage rather than discipline, Atlas saw it coming from a mile away.

His father always led with the right when he was angry. Always overcommitted on the follow through. Always left his left side open for a half second after the swing because he expected the power of the blow to end the exchange before a counter could come.

Atlas ducked under the hook and drove his fist into his father's exposed left side, targeting the spot just below the ribs where the liver sat, and he put everything he had behind it, every ounce of strength compressed into a single devastating punch that landed with a sound like a thunderclap. His father's body folded around the impact and his feet actually left the ground, his mouth opening in a silent gasp as the shock of the blow radiated through his organs and locked every muscle in his torso in a spasm of agony.

But his mother was there again, always there, and she caught Atlas with a spinning backfist across the temple that sent his vision spinning into a kaleidoscope of fractured light and shadow. He stumbled sideways, blood flying from his mouth in a long arc, and she followed him, closing the distance with terrifying speed. She hit him with a straight right to his solar plexus that doubled him over, an uppercut that snapped his head back and sent two of his teeth flying, and then a front kick to the center of his chest that launched him backward through the air.

He hit another column and this time he went all the way through it and through the wall behind it, his body punching through three feet of solid stone before erupting out the other side in a shower of rubble and dust. He landed on his back in the corridor beyond the arena, staring up at the ceiling and for a moment he just lay there.

He could hear them coming, and he knew that if he was still on the ground when they reached him this was over. He forced himself to move, planting one hand against the floor and pushing, he got one foot underneath him and then the other and stood, swaying, bleeding from his nose and mouth and from a deep gash above his left eye.

His father reached him first, coming in fast with a straight right aimed at his face, this time Atlas didn't try to block it. He stepped inside the punch, letting his father's fist graze past his ear close enough that he could feel the displaced air against his skin, and he drove his elbow into his father's already ruined eye socket. His father roared again and Atlas used the opening to grab the man by the back of his head and drive his knee up into his face.

He didn't do it once, he slammed it again and again and again. When his father tried to grab him he grabbed his index finger and tore it off before jabbing it into the man's empty eye socket.

"RAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!" Atlas continued slamming his knee into the man's face until he felt bone give way beneath the impact, the jaw separating from the temporal joint on the left side with a sickening pop that he felt reverberate up through his own leg. His father's head snapped to the side at an angle that did not look natural, blood and broken teeth poured from his mouth in a grotesque waterfall that splashed across the corridor floor.

His mother's hand closed around the back of Atlas's neck and she threw him and he went through the ceiling this time, his body tearing through layers of reinforced stone and metal before exploding out into the open sky above the arena complex. The sudden brightness of the sun blinded him for an instant and then she was there, hovering above him, having followed him through the hole he had made, she drove both feet into his chest in a devastating dropkick that reversed his upward momentum and sent him rocketing back down toward the ground.

He hit the arena floor from above and the impact was catastrophic, the stone surface shattering beneath him in a crater fifty metres across, chunks of rock and debris launching upward in a mushroom cloud of dust and pulverized stone that rose hundreds of metres into the air. Atlas lay at the bottom of the crater, when father dropped down into the crater beside him, landing heavily with one hand pressed against his destroyed face.

He reached down and grabbed Atlas by the front of his uniform and lifted him off the ground with one hand, drawing back his other fist for a blow that would crush his son's skull like an egg.

Atlas was faster he caught the incoming fist in both hands, wrapping his fingers around his massive knuckles and locking his grip, then he twisted his entire body in a violent rotational movement that used his father's own forward momentum against him. The wrist snapped first, then the forearm bones followed.

His father bellowed in agony and released his grip on Atlas's uniform, but Atlas didn't let go. He kept the ruined arm locked in his grip and he swung his father sideways, using the man's own body weight and the leverage of the destroyed limb, and he drove him headfirst into the wall of the crater. The impact buried his father three feet deep into the compacted earth and stone, and Atlas was on top of him before the debris had finished falling, straddling his chest, raining punches down into his face with both fists in a savage relentless barrage that reduced what was left of his father's features to an unrecognizable ruin of torn flesh and shattered bone.

Blood sprayed upward with every impact, coating Atlas's hands and forearms and face in a warm slick layer that made his fists slide and skid across the pulverized remains of his father's face, until eventually he could feel the skull giving way beneath his knuckles, could feel the bone fragmenting and collapsing inward, but still he kept hitting, driving his fists down over and over and over until the resistance beneath them became soft and and the sounds changed from the crack of bone to the thud of meat.

His mother's boot caught him in the side of the head and sent him tumbling off his father's body and across the crater floor, when he came to a stop and looked back, he could see that it was done. His father lay motionless in the crater Atlas had pounded him into, his chest still and his arms slack at his sides, and the thing that had been his face was no longer anything at all, just a mess of red and white and grey.

Atlas tried to stand and collapsed immediately, a bolt of pain tearing through his left side so intense that his vision went white and he heard himself make a sound that was somewhere between a groan and a scream.

He pressed his hand against his ribs and felt the jagged end of bone protruding through his skin, he pushed it back in with his fingers while gritting his teeth so hard that another one cracked in the back of his mouth. He tried again, slower this time, getting one knee under him and then forcing himself upright through sheer force of will, every muscle in his body trembling with exhaustion and damage.

His mother stood at the edge of the crater, looking down at the body of her mate and then back at Atlas, the expression on her face shifted by degrees, moving through something that might have been surprise and then settling into something else entirely.

It was not warmth. Viltrumites did not do warmth. But it was acknowledgment.

She floated down into the crater and landed in front of him, and Atlas forced himself to straighten his spine despite the grinding protest of his broken ribs and the deep internal ache that pulsed through his abdomen with every heartbeat.

"You have earned your right to adulthood," she said, her voice carried no emotion whatsoever, but the words themselves were more than he had ever received from her. "Only a few in our great history find themselves able to kill one of their sires on their proving day, it signifies greatness in that one's future."

She paused and hummed for a moment. "I believe I shall allow you you to continue to call me mother."

Atlas stood up straighter despite every nerve in his body screaming at him to collapse and he nodded. "Yes mother..." he said coldly.

His mother glanced down at the corpse that lay between them, at the thing that had once been her mate and his father, and her lip curled in an expression of undisguised contempt.

"Clean yourself up," she said, her tone shifting into something coldd and dismissive. "And get rid of the weakling's body." She turned her head to the side and spat on the corpse, then she looked back at Atlas as though the thing on the ground had already ceased to exist.

His mother regarded him for another moment, and then something shifted in her posture. "You fought well," she said. "As you have purged one of us during your ascension tradition dictates that you be allowed to choose your assignment."

Atlas did not hesitate, he didn't need to, the answer had been inside him for longer than he could remember, burning in the back of his mind like a star, and it came out of his mouth before the last syllable of her offer had finished leaving hers.

"The world conquering committee."

His mother's expression shifted immediately, her brow drawing downward into a frown that carved deep lines into her otherwise ageless face, she looked at him with something that might have been incredulity if she were capable of being surprised by anything. "That assignment is reserved for experienced Viltrumites," she said. "Warriors who have spent decades proving themselves across a hundred worlds. Not fresh blood still dripping from their first real kill."

"Then they are weak." The words came out flatly. Atlas held his mother's gaze without flinching despite the fact that his left eye was nearly swollen shut and his vision was blurring at the edges from blood loss and concussion.

"I need no decades of experience," he continued. "I need no hundred worlds of practice, my power is more than enough to complete this task. I want to conquer planets in the name of the Viltrum Empire. That is what I was made for. That is my purpose."

His mother stared at him, and the silence stretched between them like a wire being drawn taut, and for a long moment Atlas genuinely did not know whether she was going to grant his request or put him through the arena floor for his presumption.

"Very well," she said. "You will have your assignment."

She turned away from him then, rising into the air. She

did not look back as she spoke her final words to him.

"Do not make me regret this, if you embarrass me then I will tear your spine out and use it to strangle you." And then she was gone, a streak of light arcing across the sky and vanishing beyond the horizon.

Atlas was alone in the crater with the body of his father and the taste of blood on his tongue. He stood there for a long time, swaying slightly on his feet, staring down at the corpse, and then he bent down and grabbed the body of the weak scum beneath him by the ankle and began to drag it toward the edge of the crater, leaving a long dark smear of red across the broken stone behind him.

_____________________________________

Atlas had waited for this moment his entire life.

Not in the way that children dream about becoming something when they grow up, not in the idle daydream fashion of lesser species who whispered wishes to themselves before sleep and hoped the universe might be generous enough to grant them.

No.

Atlas had waited for this moment with the burning, single minded intensity of a man who understood his purpose down to the molecular level, who had known since before he could form the words to articulate it that he was built for one thing and one thing only, and that thing was conquest.

The World Conquering Committee.

Even the name caused his blood to begin to rush, and excitement begin to fill his veins. The Committee was not merely a military division or a bureaucratic department tasked with expansion. It was the very engine of Viltrum's greatness, the mechanism through which the empire reached out across the void and closed its fist around world after world after world, bringing order to chaos, strength to weakness, and Viltrumite supremacy to every corner of the galaxy.

And now he was part of it.

He was an agent. A world conqueror. One of the select few entrusted with the most important mission the empire had ever undertaken, the restoration of Viltrum to its former strength after the losses and setbacks that had diminished its reach in recent centuries. Every agent sent out into the void was a thread in the web of reconquest, a single point of overwhelming force aimed at a single world with the mandate to bring it to heel by whatever means necessary, and Atlas was now one of those points, one of those threads, one of those instruments of imperial will hurtling through space toward a planet that did not yet know its destiny was at handd.

The ceremony had been brief as Viltrumites did not waste time on pageantry when there was work to be done, but what it lacked in duration it more than compensated for in significance. He had stood in the Hall of Conquest, a chamber deep in the heart of the capital where the names of every world ever claimed by the empire were etched into the walls in columns that rose from floor to ceiling.

He had stood there in his new uniform with the blood from his arena fight still crusted in the creases of his knuckles, and there the Grand Regent himself had descended from the raised platform at the far end of the hall and floated toward him.

The Grand Regent.

The supreme authority of the Viltrum Empire, the living embodiment of its power and its will, a Viltrumite so strong that the stories about him had long since crossed the line from history into something closer to legend.

He had shaken his hand.

The Grand Regent's grip had been exactly what Atlas expected it to, powerful to the point of being painful. But nevertheless he still met the Grand Regent's eyes and held themm. The the old Viltrumite had looked at him for a long moment and then nodded.

When the Greatest Amongst their race had celebrated him for he was the youngest Viltrumite to ever join the World Conquering Committee. The youngest agent in the history of the empire. Other Viltrumites, warriors and administrators and commanders who had spent decades or centuries earning their positions, had acknowledged him with nods and brief words of recognition as he had walked through the capital toward the control centre his mission parameters had been finalized.

He had never felt more pride than he had in that walk, moving through the corridors of power with the knowledge that he had earned his place among the empire's finest through blood and the absolute destruction of anyone who had stood in his way.

He had never felt more Viltrumite.

But it had all been ruined now, his good mood was gone, and the only people capable of doing that were enemies of Viltrum.

When he had been flying towards his designated planet, a Coalition fleet had appeared at the edge of his vision approximately fourteen hours into his flight, the sight of them had curdled the warm glow of pride in his chest into something black and bitter and violent.

Coalition of Planets.

The very name was an insult, a mockery of everything Viltrum stood for, a loose and pathetic confederation of weak species who had banded together under the delusion that numbers could compensate for the fundamental inadequacy that defined every single one of their member races.

They were parasites feeding on each other's weakness and calling it strength. They were cowards who hid behind treaties and alliances and diplomatic frameworks because not one of them, not a single species among their thousands, had the power to stand alone.

And now they were in his way.

There were nine ships in the fleet, arranged in a standard defensive formation with the largest vessel, a heavy cruiser that Atlas assumed was the flagship, positioned at the center, the smaller escorts and frigates arrayed around it.

They had detected him too, because their formation was already shifting, the escort ships pulling in closer to the flagship while the forward frigates angled their prows toward his approach vector and began charging their primary weapons.

Atlas did not slow down.

He accelerated.

He hit the first frigate at a velocity that turned his body into a kinetic weapon more devastating than anything the Coalition had ever mounted on one of their ships.

He went through the hull like a bullet through wet paper, punching through the outer plating, the structural supports, the interior bulkheads, the crew compartments and out the other side in a straight line that left a perfectly circular hole bored through the entire vessel from bow to stern.

The ship shuddered and then broke apart along the line of damage, its structural integrity compromised beyond any possibility of recovery, and as the two halves of the frigate separated and began to drift apart Atlas could see the crew being pulled out through the breach, their bodies tumbling into the vacuum and he smiled.

He then banked hard and came around toward the second frigate, adjusting his angle of approach so that he entered through the port side engine housing this time. As a result the explosion that occurred when he tore through the reactor containment vessel turned the entire aft section of the ship into an expanding sphere of white hot plasma that vaporized everything within a hundred meters and sent a shockwave rippling through the formation that hit the nearby escorts and sent debris pinging off their shields.

A crewman floated past him in the void, still alive, their hands clawing at his own throat as the vacuum pulled the air from his lungs and the moisture began to boil off his skin in tiny rising bubbles.

'Such weaklings...' Atlas grabbed him by the head as he passed and squeezed and the skull collapsed inward like a rotten fruit, the body went limp and spun away trailing a cloud of red mist that crystallized almost instantly in the cold.

The escorts opened fire. Energy beams and projectile weapons and torpedo salvos converged on his position from multiple angles. Atlas felt the impacts as dull thuds against his skin, a stinging warmth where the heavier weapons connected, he looked down at his forearm where one of the larger caliber energy beams had left a red welt the size of his palm and he felt nothing but contempt.

He flew through the barrage without slowing, letting the weapons wash over him like rain, and hit the next ship amidships and tore it in half with his bare hands, grabbing the edge of the hole he had made on entry and flying in another direction until the hull peeled apart like he was a tin opener; the interior of the ship was exposed to the void in a sudden catastrophic decompression that launched everything not bolted down into space.

Crew members tumbled out in clusters, some of them still strapped into their stations with chunks of the deck plating attached, and Atlas moved through them like a shark through a school of fish, twaring them apart, not because he needed to... the cold void of space would already kill them... no he did this because he enjoyed it immensely.

Even now he had a wide smile on his face as he ripped all of them apart.

One of them, an officer of some kind judging by the markings on his suit, tried to draw a sidearm in the last moments of his life but Atlas caught his wrist and ripped the arm off at the shoulder and then drove the jagged end of the severed limb through the officer's faceplate.

The remaining escorts tried to regroup, pulling back toward the flagship in a desperate attempt to consolidate their firepower, and Atlas let them run for exactly three seconds before he was among them again, moving faster than their targeting systems could track.

He punched through the bridge of one escort and emerged from the ventral hull carrying the command chair with the captain still strapped into it, he crushed the chair and its occupant into a compressed mass of metal and meat and bone that he hurled at the next ship's viewport like a cannonball, shattering the reinforced glass and decompressing the bridge in an instant.

The flagship's main battery finally fired, and this weapon was different than the others. 

The beam that hit him was a thick, blindingly white concentrated stream of energy that the Coalition reserved for capital ship engagements and planetary bombardment, and when it connected with Atlas's chest it actually stopped his forward momentum and he felt genuine pain lance through his torso, a deep burning ache that penetrated past his skin and into the muscle beneath. A second beam followed from a different battery, and then a third and for a moment he was pinned at the intersection of three converging streams of energy that were pumping enough raw power into his body to glass the surface of a small moon.

He roared into the void as skin and muscle tore from his body, he flexed every muscle in his body and pushed through, the beams sliding off him as he accelerated out of the convergence point. He could feel the pain and damage across his body but it would be nothing that would slow him down for more than the seconds it took for his body to process the pain and dismiss it.

The remaining ships broke formation.

'COWARDS!!!!!' Atlas roared as he saw what they were about to do.

Their engines flared with the distinctive energy signature of warp drives spooling up, and one by one they stretched and elongated and vanished into the compressed tunnel of faster than light travel, the flagship leading the retreat with the surviving escorts falling in behind it.

Atlas roared again, a sound that existed only inside his own skull and his own chest, a vibration of pure fury that had nowhere to go in the soundless void, and he threw himself forward into the slipstream they had left behind, catching the wake of their warp fields and riding the distortion like a surfer riding a wave, his body shuddering with the strain of matching their velocity without the benefit of a drive system to cushion the transition between real space and compressed space.

The stars stretched into lines around him and reality bent and blurred at the edges as he pushed harder, faster, refusing to let them escape, refusing to let these insects flee from the consequences of putting themselves in his path.

They dropped out of warp.

Atlas emerged from the slipstream a fraction of a second behind them and immediately felt something pull at him, a deep gravitational tug that started in his bones and radiated outward through every cell in his body.

He looked past the fleet and saw it.

A black hole. 

The black hole sat at the center of the system like a wound in the fabric of reality, a perfect sphere of absolute nothing surrounded by a swirling accretion disk of superheated matter that glowed white and orange and blue as it spiraled inward toward the event horizon.

They had led him here on purpose.

The realization hit him at the same moment that the gravitational pull intensified, the fleet having dropped out of warp close enough to the black hole that its influence was already trying to drag him inward. It was a trap. A calculated ploy designed by creatures so afraid of fighting him face to face that they would rather gamble their own lives against the pull of a collapsed star than stand and face him in open combat.

Cowards. Every last one of them.

But they failed, even if the pull was immense he still wasn't close enough that he couldn't escape it, he was a Viltrumite, and the strength in his body was more than sufficient to resist the pull at this distance. He oriented himself toward the flagship and accelerated, cutting through the void between them in seconds.

He hit the ship's hull just aft of the bridge section and tore through the outer plating and the inner bulkheads and exploded through the ceiling of the bridge itself in a shower of sparks and shattered metal and broken conduit that rained down across the command stations. The room depressurised but only for a moment as a forcefield locked in place moments after

The bridge crew froze.

Every one of them, whatever species they were, whatever training they had undergone, whatever protocols they had drilled into their reflexes, all of it abandoned them in the instant that a Viltrumite warrior erupted into their command center and landed among them.

The Captain sat in the center of the bridge in a raised command chair, and Atlas could see immediately that this one was different from the rest. There was no fear in his eyes. He wasn't sure what emotion it was, but it wouldn't matter, soon he would be dead and forgotten.

"You led me here in a poor attempt at trapping me in that dead star," Atlas said loudly, his voice shaking the bridge and terrifying the officers.

The Captain looked at him, and something that might have been a smile crossed his face. "I led you here to kill you," the Captain said. "The same way you and your kind have killed so many others."

Atlas crossed the distance between them in a single breath and grabbed the Captain by the front of his uniform and lifted him out of his chair with one hand.

"You are going to die," Atlas said. "Every single one of you on this ship is going to die. And then I am going to fly out of this system and continue on my way and I will not think about any of you ever again because you are nothing."

The Captain looked at him and then he smiled again, wider this time. "Self destruct sequence initiated," the ship's computer announced, the synthetic voice cutting through the tension on the bridge with the bland indifference of a machine that did not understand the significance of its own words. "Detonation in thirty seconds."

Atlas drove his fist through the Captain's chest.

His hand punched through the uniform, the sternum and the mass of organs behind it and erupted from the Captain's back in a spray of blood and viscera that painted the viewport behind him. The Captain's eyes went wide and then empty and Atlas pulled his hand free with a wet sucking sound and let the body drop.

He turned to the crew.

"Twenty seconds."

He could have his fun in that time.

He blitzed toward the nearest officer grabbing her by the skull and slamming her head down so hard that the console shattered and her skull shattered with it, then he was spinning toward the next one, catching him by the throat and tearing it out with his fingers. He hurled a third crew member across the bridge hard enough that the impact against the far wall left a crater in the metal and the body that slid down from it left a long red smear in its wake.

He caught two more trying to reach the escape pods, grabbed one in each hand and brought them together, their bodies colliding with a sound like raw meat being slapped against a butcher's block, he then threw the tangled remains aside and moved to the next and the next and the next.

"Ten seconds."

One of the last crew member died with Atlas's hands wrapped around his head, twisting until the vertebrae separated with a series of pops and the body went boneless and collapsed.

"Five seconds."

Time to go.

Atlas turned toward the hole he had made in the hull and went to launch himself through it, but was caught off guard when one of the last members of the crew shot him with a polarised plasma handcanon, the force was enough to send him skipping across the bridge until he embedded into one of the consoles.

"YOU'RE DEAD!!!" Atlas screamed as he shot out of the console and grabbed the last crew member by the throat.

"Zero."

The explosion was enormous, a blinding white sphere of energy that expanded outward from the flagship's position at a velocity that would have been impressive under normal circumstances, the shockwave caught Atlas and hurled him with a force that exceeded anything the ship's weapons had been capable of producing. He tumbled end over end, his vision whiting out from the intensity of the detonation.

When his sight returned and his orientation stabilized he felt the pull again, but it was stronger now, so much stronger, the explosion had thrown him closer to the black hole, close enough that the accretion disk was no longer a distant ring of light but a wall of superheated matter that filled half his field of vision.

He tried to fly away from it. He turned away from the darkness and he pushed, pouring every ounce of strength into his flight, his teeth clenched so hard that the cracked molar in the back of his mouth finally gave way and he swallowed the fragments without noticing.

He could feel himself making progress. 'HA! Even the pull of a Black Hole is not enough to smother the power of Atlas!' A smile formed on his face as he pushed himself further and further away.

Then the surviving escort ships opened fire on him.

The weapons hit him from three directions simultaneously, energy beams and torpedoes and kinetic projectiles converging on his position in a barrage that drove the air from his lungs and sent pain lancing through every bruise and fracture his body had accumulated, causing his flight to falter for just a fraction of a second, but a fraction of a second was all it took, and he felt the pull seize him with renewed force, dragging him backward.

He roared. He roared with everything in him, a scream of defiance that existed only inside his own body, and he pushed harder, faster, his entire body trembling, every fiber of every muscle straining against the gravity that was pulling him toward the event horizon.

But the ships kept firing, and every impact stole a little more of his momentum, a little more of his forward progress, and the darkness behind him grew larger and the pull grew stronger and he could feel reality beginning to distort around him, could feel time itself starting to stretch and bend as he approached the point of no return.

He pushed.

He screamed.

He fought with everything he had.

It was not enough.

The last torpedo hit him in the center of his chest and the force of it carried him past the threshold, past the invisible line in space beyond which nothing, not light, not sound, not even a Viltrumite, could escape.

The stars above him stretched into infinite lines and the darkness below him opened like a mouth.

Atlas fell through the event horizon, falling into a blackness so complete and so absolute that it swallowed him whole and left nothing behind.

(AN: I wanted to try and make things a little realistic. Sure Atlas is a prodigy, but it's very hard to beat a Viltrumite that's centuries old if not millennia. Anyway Viltrum won't feature for a while in this, it'll mostly be taking place in the Star Wars universe. Anyway hope you enjoyed.)