Down in Fang Spire City, the Asgardian warriors were in the middle of a bloody frenzy, thoroughly enjoying their little slaughter.
The Rhinocians possessed impressive physical strength, but against high-tech energy weapons, the fight was a hopelessly one-sided massacre.
Hundreds of Rhinocian corpses already littered the blood-soaked dirt.
The surviving natives had completely broken, scattering and fleeing in absolute terror.
Simple-minded as they were, they still understood the value of their own lives.
But the Asgardians were hardly going to let their prey escape so easily.
With wicked grins, the hunt began.
Just as they gave chase, a brilliant flash of light illuminated the sky.
The warriors skidded to a halt and looked up, their eyes widening in shock.
The upper atmosphere was suddenly swarming with an absolutely massive armada of unidentified warships, and they were dropping payloads straight toward the surface.
Moments later, streaks of fiery red tore through the clouds like a meteor shower.
Dozens of those burning meteors were hurtling directly toward their position.
“What the hell is going on?”
The squad leader abandoned the fleeing natives and frantically tapped the communication bracer on his wrist, trying to hail their transport ships in orbit for a sit-rep.
But the channel was completely dead.
Nothing but harsh, crackling static answered his call.
Realizing something was horribly wrong, the rest of the squad called off their hunt and quickly regrouped around their leader.
“Captain, our comms are completely jammed!
What’s happening?” “Captain, did someone blow up our ships?” “What do we do, sir?
That fleet doesn’t look friendly.” “Captain—”
“Shut up!” the squad leader barked, waving a hand to silence the rising panic.
“Go to maximum alert, now!”
The warriors instantly snapped their mouths shut, gripping their weapons tightly as they began cycling fresh power cores into their gear.
Just because they were ‘gods’ didn’t mean their equipment ran on infinite magic.
The energy shields and blaster spears they had just been spamming consumed a significant amount of power.
Fully armed and charged, the squad stared nervously at the sky.
The meteors were dropping fast, rapidly closing the distance until their true shapes finally broke through the atmospheric burn.
They were long, rectangular, pitch-black drop pods.
It was a common sight in cosmic warfare, typically deployed for rapid planetary invasions, though they could double as emergency escape pods.
A single pod of that massive size could comfortably carry around a thousand ground troops.
Staring up at the densely packed storm of drop pods blackening the sky, cold sweat began to bead on the Asgardians’ foreheads.
Were these newcomers friend or foe?
They barely bothered to engage their thrusters to brake.
Relying entirely on their impossibly durable outer hulls, the massive black pods slammed violently into the earth like kinetic bombardments.
BOOM!
BOOM!
BOOM!
A chain of deafening, earth-shattering impacts echoed endlessly across the landscape.
Fortunately, Fang Spire City’s walls were incredibly sturdy.
Though the shockwaves violently rattled the stone, the drop pods had landed far enough outside the city limits that the walls managed to hold.
The squad leader turned to one of his men.
“Ali, deploy the recon drones.
I want visual confirmation of what we’re dealing with.”
Ali gave a curt nod.
He unclipped three fist-sized metal spheres from his belt and tossed them onto the ground.
Tapping the holographic interface on his gauntlet, he brought them online.
Moments later, glowing red electronic eyes flared to life on the spheres.
Their anti-gravity thrusters kicked in, lifting them smoothly into the air.
With a few swipes of his fingers, Ali sent the three drones zipping out toward the landing zone, simultaneously projecting their live video feed onto a holographic screen for the squad to see.
As the drones closed in, the details of the drop pods became crystal clear.
They were jagged and pitch-black, their spear-like tips buried deep into the planet’s crust.
Suddenly, internal gyros engaged.
The massive pods slowly leveled out, reorienting themselves until their pointed tips aimed straight up at the sky like massive iron monoliths.
But it was the next image that flooded the Asgardians’ veins with pure, ice-cold terror.
The heavy blast doors on the pods slammed open, and a violent, surging tide of black sludge poured out onto the terrain.
Except, when Ali magnified the feed, they realized it wasn’t a tide of sludge at all.
It was a torrential swarm of ravenous, pitch-black monsters.
Towering over two meters tall, the beasts boasted heavily muscled six-limbed bodies, razor-sharp fangs, and nightmarish, eyeless faces.
Anyone active in the cosmic underworld would instantly recognize them.
They were Outriders—the mindless, utterly relentless biological shock troops of Thanos’s Black Order.
And right now, thousands of them were stampeding straight toward Fang Spire City at over a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour.
“We need to run.
Now.
Do not let them surround us!”
The others instantly snapped out of their paralyzed shock.
“Right!
Move out!” “But our ships are gone!
Where are we supposed to go?” “Anywhere but here!
Just run if you want to live!” “Exactly!
When we miss our check-in, Asgard will definitely notice.
We just need to survive long enough for the rescue fleet to arrive!”
Reaching a frantic consensus, the six warriors turned and sprinted in the direction where the enemy swarms looked the thinnest.
To their credit, Asgardians truly lived up to their reputation as the rulers of the Milky Way.
Even these ordinary foot soldiers boasted physical stats akin to superhumans.
Tearing across the ground at blinding speeds, they blasted out of the city limits in no time.
Unfortunately for them, the Outriders were just as fast.
Not long after escaping the city walls, the horizon ahead began to blur with a rapidly expanding wave of black specks.
“Dammit, they’re cutting us off!” “Captain, what do we do?!” “I don’t want to die…”
The battle hadn’t even started, yet a suffocating aura of despair had already swallowed the squad.
The enemy numbers were simply far too overwhelming.
There was absolutely zero chance of winning.
But the squad leader running at the front gritted his teeth, a fierce, resolute glare hardening his eyes.
“Warriors of Asgard!
By the All-Father!
Charge!”
Hearing the war cry, the other five found their nerve.
The panic vanished from their faces, replaced by the grim determination of condemned men.
In that moment, they finally looked like true heroes.
Even knowing that they were charging straight into certain death, they raised their weapons and sprinted toward the impossible odds, fighting for that one fleeting sliver of hope.
Seconds later, the six Asgardian warriors pierced into the endless black tide of monsters like a singular, golden spear.
But no matter how formidable their divine strength was, against the infinite, ravenous swarm of Outriders, their golden light only flickered for a few brief moments before being completely and utterly swallowed by the darkness.