There was a pause with that question, overshadowed only by the screeching of the machines.
"The emperor?" Kaelen-thor whispered, before assuring. "the emperor can also be detained. But to ensure our chances of success, we managed to obtain information that the emperor is not here."
"What did you say?" Veth-ak asked, surprised.
"That's right, the great emperor, tragg, is not on the planet," Kaelen-thor replied. "Spies in other sectors confirmed it. It has been three cycles since his ship departed, for war matters on the frontiers. Viltrumite casualties have been recorded due to some unknown weapon he wishes to investigate on his own."
"I ask our ancestors that he dies far from his home." Veth-ak cursed, but Kaelen-thor interrupted him.
"do not curse in vain, my friend. Our suffering will soon end, but we cannot allow ourselves to fall into blind faith. Now that we have an opportunity, maintain your rationality as much as possible, for the ancestors will not help you in the process of our strike."
Veth-ak exhaled, without responding. Immediately, he returned to the most crucial matter.
"And the bomb?" he asked.
"It is already ready. Our revenge is already ready."
The two lithari returned to their work in silence, finalizing the preparations, a few couplings away from continuing with another section. Neither added anything more regarding their plan, it was not necessary. It took them the equivalent of 200 years of their world, and many more to obtain the proper pieces. But they were ready, and the sins of these demonic beings, countless as they were, would meet the just karma according to divine justice.
Above, on the surface, the viltrumites continued their routine without knowing that, beneath their feet, the resistance hidden among the four million slaves had stopped waiting.
Surface of Dorymathos. Six months later.
Nouwlan had been born in cycle 4187, after argal, subjected to a gestation chamber identical to all the others as soon as his mother, whom he had never seen again, had given birth.
His first awareness was fear and confusion in the silent immensity of his fortress, being trained by the only figure he had until that moment, the support upon which to place his trust, his father.
He was nothing more than a class 17 soldier, who had been subjected by his mother as soon as he had been given the order to procreate to increase the empire's birthrate with a new batch of elite viltrumites.
The doctors also registered him as "abnormally receptive," a quality that his father, an officer who had achieved great merits, enough to be only one expedition away from being decorated general, considered promising.
At three cycles, his smart atoms manifested before the average, which proved to be a success for his father, who took care to instruct him in the manifests of the great emperor argal, insinuating that very soon, he would do great things for the empire. Nouwl-an believed it as well.
His father never smiled at him, never praised him without reservations. Everything seemed insufficient to him, or acceptable, but over time he understood that only in that way would he form the best warrior the empire could possess.
Nouwl-an also understood that the universe had no space for weakness, and his years as a recruit in Dorymathos had taught him much. It had made him suffer, he had gone through hardships that followed him in his dreams throughout his life, but it had hardened him.
By the time he completed his first orbit of life, Nouwl-an had already learned to kill. His first execution was his own combat partner in his first imperial exam. His second execution was a slave prisoner who refused to cooperate. Then it was the destruction of an imperial mining planet, in which a rebellion had arisen.
Nouwl-an accepted his deaths without blinking, he has always slept deeply, and had never had defects of compassion for others, for he was convinced that the empire had turned him into what he was meant to be. An excellent warrior.
At nineteen cycles, he reached the rank of instructor, thus earning two bars on his chest after his first incursion as an elite warrior on a rebel planet.
And since then, he had spent the rest of his time training more than four hundred natos, all the same, until his call to the ranks of war.
He had made sure they were obedient, although they were predictable and boring.
He trained them in absolute obedience, loyalty to the emperor, racial superiority, militarized blind obedience, desubjectification of the enemy, the glorification of war and imperial expansion, the suppression of critical thinking, and personal sacrifice as a sacred duty toward the Empire.
He taught them all that and more. He taught them to fly, he taught them to kill, he taught them to be viltrumite.
Until he met Korr-add.
That day, when that child had tried to kill him, Nouwl-an felt something he had not experienced since his childhood, bewilderment.
That is why he dismissed the death penalty of the nato, in favor of vindicating the anomaly represented by the abstraction of this scrawny rebel.
And the best part was that, well, it was a challenge to his boring life, and he was determined to change the nato's mentality by any means.
In the physical training yard, the children lay scattered over the dust of the grayish plain.
All rested after having covered seven thousand eight hundred standard steps, barely remaining on their feet, their eyes closed by sweat and exhaustion.
The natos did everything possible to gulp down breaths of air, while they remained lying on their backs.
The children, despite being optimized, were not having it easy either.
Their outfits were no longer the simple uniform they would wear for the rest of their lives, instead, they wore gray super-intelligent suits used by the recruits of Dorymathos.
These suits were composed of a military-grade nanotechnology system, made up of billions of interconnected nanofibers that adhered to the user's skin like a second epidermis.
Each nano-unit responded to a command memory controlled by a central system located in a motherboard positioned in the central part of the back, with the purpose of performing resistance contractions.
When a recruit attempted to make a movement, these solidified in his muscle fibers, simulating a rigidity equivalent to three times his body weight.
And when he attempted to fly, the suit activated magnetic anchoring fields that dragged the natos toward the ground, reducing their lifting capacity to 0% effective inertia.
This served as a good restriction to the optimized capabilities of the natos. At least, until the suits became completely inefficient with the passage of time, given the exponential increase of the natos during the development process.
The suits also monitored every vital sign of the nato. His heart rate, oxygenation, cortisol levels, muscle fatigue, etc. If a recruit reached his limit, the suit adjusted the resistance to avoid unnecessary or harmful damage.
Some vomited the morning nutrition gel, while others trembled in silence, their legs wrinkled like wet paper.
Others cried, trying to resist, unable to control their choked hiccups.
The small Vespera, the impulsive redhead who from time to time burst into impulsiveness, was on her back, staring at the violet sky.
Her chest expanded with difficulty. She had white sand tangled in her hair and a crust of dried blood under her nose due to having fallen face-first during the running process.
At her side, the chubby class 12 boy, the one she had mocked on the first day, breathed like a bellows, but refused to close his eyes. Ironically, he seemed the most relaxed compared to the other children.
The tall boy who always threatened to smash heads was on his knees, with his hands resting on the ground. He had run well, he had placed among the first five, he was the strongest, as his father told him. but even so he felt that his lungs were going to explode.
And then there was Korr. Korr-add, son of general voraht, the most controversial child among the batch under his command, was still running.
While everyone else rested or tried to rest on the hot surface of the plain, the tiny figure of Korr-add still continued moving in the distance.
His silhouette was barely a trembling dot in the training field, feeling that he would die with each step. His arms pumped with a rhythm that already seemed mechanical, but he felt his body falter with every lap.
He had to complete twenty-one thousand standard steps, triple that of his companions, as corrective punishment for having refused an order imposed by his instructor nouwl-an.