The Last Emperor’s fishbelly-white tentacles spilled from the forward flight-deck of the nuclear-powered aircraft-carrier Naval Dominance Brought to You By Syntech™, thicker than train-cars, trailing in the black water alongside the massive ship of war and raising strange prismatic wakes in which diseased and twisted sea-life came to frolic from amidst the furthest shoals of space and time. Every time the massive abomination shifted its weight, the carrier’s internal gyrostabilizers groaned perilously under the strain of keeping the vessel on an even keel.
Rory was strangely quiet. Syntech mercenaries swarmed over the flight-deck amidships, in the shadow of the superstructure, making ready their gear and preparing to transfer to smaller vessels and landing craft for the upcoming operation. The horrifying penguinoid titan was sorely tempted to chat them up: they looked like d00ds who could be persuaded to let someone else handle the delicate task of growing their life-savings, or to invest in a property development scheme based only on a brochure and a well-appointed rented office.
He had quickly discovered, however, that making himself understood as the Last Emperor was a challenge. Presumably that was something he would have learned to do if he’d done the whole prophecy instead of skipping right to the end, but as it stood he could only manage short sentences without degenerating into a guttural, arhythmic, high-pitched elder-speech that even he couldn’t comprehend.
Even an entrepreneur of Rory’s caliber couldn’t bamboozle someone in ten words or less. “YOUR 401k – GIVE IT TO ME, MANG” just wasn’t the kind of sales pitch he thought he could pull off; For that to work, it would have to be more of a mugging-type-situation.
Fortunately, things were about to get interesting: For the last thirty minutes they’d been sailing into the teeth of a bitingly chill breeze; now the little task-force slowed to a stop as a swirling curtain of sleet, snow and icy mist rose up from the sea before them.
Somewhere in that blustery mess , there was an island, and it was the Last Emperor’s job to do as any self-respecting monarch does with newly-discovered islands and oppress the hell out of the natives.
The ship’s public address system crackled to life.
“T-Minus three minutes to landing party. Nightmare Chicken, you are cleared to deploy.”
Nightmare Chicken?
In a slithering avalanche of tentacles, the Last Emperor turned all the way around on the flight deck to face the ship’s bridge. Somewhere below decks, the stabilizers screamed.
THAT’S HURTFUL AND RACIST. YOU’RE LUCKY YOU’RE MY RIDE, MANG.
The PA crackled again.
“Hey, I didn’t come up with your callsign. Just… please go clear the nightmares off the beach? I guarantee you you’re getting paid better than us.”
The Last Emperor nodded, his tractor-sized eyes sharpening as he was reminded why he was doing this in the first place. The carrier bucked and heaved as its hull was abruptly relieved of one-hundred-thousand tons of additional weight, walls of spray drenching the decks as the monster slithered into the sea. The task-force's smaller vessels, the carrier’s corvette and light-cruiser escorts, were tossed but unphased by the scheduled turbulence.
FAT STACKS, D00D. CASH CASH MONEY.
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The wind howled as the Last Emperor crashed ashore, a gnarled penguin monolith atop a palanquin of writhing tentacles, taller than the Statue of Liberty. Gale-driven snow drifted upon his cracked and twisted bill, and ice crystals battered his impervious hide. Ice-crusted rock formations crumbled, ground to dust beneath the oncoming wall of pulsating briny flesh, tentacles shifting, stretching and contracting and twisting and rolling, steamrolling anything in the Emperor’s path.
Rory looked around, squinting into the wind.
There was a lot of ice, a lot of snow-drifts, and a little patch of trees, wrong for this climate and looking none too happy. There were some low rocky hills. Nothing beside was in evidence.
D000000D, he bellowed. In response, the wind howled louder.
And a snowball the size of a four-door sedan hit him in the face.
WHAT THE CRAP –
It happened again. And then again. Out of sheer surprise, the penguin titan staggered, shocked but unhurt as the weather turned from merely bad to flat-out-impossible, snow clumping together into massive missiles, striking him from every direction, rising up from the soil of the island to form golems of ice, two-stories high and built like great crystalline trolls, charging forward en-masse.
Rory shielded his face with one flipper, squinting furiously. He lashed out with his tentacles, sweeping aside anything that got close, rapidly stripping the ice and snow from his immediate area as his enormous appendages churned the earth in passing. It was like being attacked by an army of fragile children’s toys while annoying hidden crumb-bums bombarded him with tennis-balls.
D00D. STOP IT.
They did not. Instead, his mysterious opponent, seemingly the island itself, changed tactics. There was a momentary lull – and a fresh wave of icy monstrosities coalesced from the drifting snow and the howling wind, fewer in number but greater in size. The storm stopped throwing great snowy blobs and began hurling beachball-sized hail; it shattered against the Last Emperor’s crusty hide, but oh it stung. He shielded his face with both flippers and bellowed incoherently.
The latest golems charged forward, howling and screeching – and a single tentacle swept through their ranks like a baseball-bat through a well-insured collection of priceless artisanal glass figurines.
They were still a lot smaller than the Emperor, no larger than a city bus stood on end. Still, this felt like the kind of thing that could go on for a while, and Rory didn’t want to wait around and see where it was headed: If someone was doing this, they had to be around here somewhere – and there was one really obvious hiding place.
From out of the writhing mass of the Last Emperor’s manyfold limbs, four behemoth tentacles arose, each with a glowing prism pulsing at its tip, reaching as high as the arctic titan’s eye-level. They quivered and twisted. They swung too and fro, as though searching.
FUCK THOSE TREES, D00D.
They found their target.
BREEEEEN
BYOOOOO
VRRRRRN
BZZZZZOW
Four beams of coruscating aurora, focused columns of light in green and purple and deep crimson red carved the little stand of bushes and frozen palms into pieces, flickering on and off with laser-show precision.
Rising above the abruptly diminished wind, the occult whispers underpinning the overlap between Rory’s overwrought consciousness and the Last Emperor’s eldritch mind grew louder. There was something they desperately wanted to say, questions they desperately wanted to ask and secrets they were duty-bound to tell… but now really wasn’t the time.
Something had just stumbled out of the burning runs of the little stand of trees. It’s body was compacted snow, with hollow pits for eyes and a gaping maw filled with pointed teeth made of blue ice. Armored spikes of the same material jutted from its back, from its knees and elbows, and its hands and feet were festooned with razor-edged icy claws.
It was huge- a hulking, trollish beast, as big as a house - but still only one tenth the Emperor’s size. Scorched and partially melted, it looked up at Rory and roared.
FUCK, MANG, IT’S ADORABLE.
Riding on a tide of roiling limbs, the ground rumbled as the Last Emperor advanced upon his foe. The wind rose again to a gale-force wail as a fresh wave of icy golems erupted from the snowy earth, materialized from the storm, emerged from within the sea. Somewhere at ground level, the tiny shouts of mortal men and the miniscule sound of gunfire were swallowed by the tempest.
I’MMA EAT IT.
