Not the Bad Guy
Every hole the lasers made disappeared shortly after under bubbling flesh.
With how rapidly Cait was firing, Ythmun was starting to look like someone had set his flesh to boiling. His skin writhed and seethed, repairing the wounds as fast as Cait made them. Ythmun continued to ignore her, placing his foot on Fate's head. With a snarl, he stomped down, hard, and Fate's vision swam.
Fate tried to push himself up, but Ythmun's relentless Divine Reach kept him pinned to the ground. The monarch ground his foot into the back of Fate's head, filling his eyes with dirt.
"You, a stranger to this world, know nothing of the hardships I've endured for my people," Ythmun said, face contorted in rage. "The things I've sacrificed, the choices I had to make.
"You are an off-worlder; a foreigner. You were not there three hundred years ago when I burned my life force to save our planet from destruction. You weren't there when our planet was starving due to the infertile soil, and I fixed it at great personal cost.
"You weren't anywhere even near this galaxy when the Advanced offered me a path to salvation, a way to save my planet from the slow death it's been suffering from for eons. You weren't there for anything, and yet you have the gall to judge me? ME?"
Stomp. "*I* was the one who gave up a quarter of my lifespan to heal this world's soil and allow crops to grow once more!" Stomp. "*I* was the one who discovered our planet had scant millennia left before it withered from the inside, and have been working to fix the planet's core ever since!"
Stomp. "*I* was the one that weighed my choices, and accepted the Advanced's offer, not for myself, but for MY PEOPLE!" STOMP. "I have given EVERY SECOND of my life to this world, to raise it from the dust that it once squandered in, and to risk my wellbeing to stave off invaders and eradicate dangerous species!
"And HOW was I repaid?" STOMP! CRACK. "With ungrateful fools that did not mourn my perceived death, but relished it, CHEERED for it! So what if the Advanced are evil, selfish beings that want nothing but to experiment on my people? They'll still be alive, which is more than I can say if they stay here, on this dying ball of dirt!"
Getting tired of Cait's assault, he reached out a hand and clenched it into a fist. The pistol crumbled like paper in Cait's hand, prompting her to toss it as far as possible. The energy cell inside ruptured, detonating into a small explosion. Ythmun gestured with his hand, and Cait slammed down on her knees, then onto her forehead. Garrett was likewise incapacitated.
"I'm not the bad guy here," Ythmun said quietly, glancing between Cait and Garrett. "You are."
"Tell that to Samnul, murderer." Cait hissed.
"Why exactly are you crying for a dead man you didn't even know?" The monarch asked, his bubbling face settling down and revealing his confused expression. "Were you even aware of what he did? What he tried to do?"
He chuckled mirthlessly at the flicker in Cait's eye. "You don't. And yet you still have the gall to act like I'm the one in the wrong. You should know better though, Garrett. You were the one who delved into his memories after he refused to talk."
"What he had in mind was still better than what you wanted to let the Advanced subject us to," Garrett said, his confidence causing Ythmun to raise an eyebrow.
"Really? Such confidence from one as old as you is never unfounded." The emperor looked at Fate, still smooshed under his boot.
"One of these ones showed you, didn't they? No matter, because you haven't properly thought about what Samnul's plan would mean. I've seen what the Advanced do. Trust me, I have. Every brutal experiment, the nonstop training and tests. But I've also seen what comes out of the other end of those tests and training sessions: powerful men and women.
"People that can't be trifled with lightly. These two 'heroes' are evidence enough of that. They're so much weaker than I am, yet they've caused me so much harm. Yes, my people will suffer for a short while, but the reward is the power to stand up for oneself, to prevent oneself from ever going through such pain again."
Ythmun retracted his boot, striding over to Garrett and bending down. He raised the kowtowing man and Cait to a kneeling position as he met Garrett's eyes.
"Samnul's way looks better on paper," he said quietly, yet loud enough for Cait and Fate to hear, "but it yields nothing but a temporary respite." He turned to Cait, his black eyes suffused with the conviction and determination of one who knows they are right as they stared into Cait's furious brown eyes. "You don't know what Samnul wanted, do you? I'll tell you.
"He wanted us to leave this world, to steal the marvelous 'space ships' the Advanced send to pick up recruits, and use it to find a new world to call our own." He grinned when Cait's eyes narrowed.
"You found the problem immediately, didn't you? The Advanced are strong, far too strong for even I to stand up to at my current Level. They are also *everywhere,* in the dark corners and hidden pockets behind stars of every single galaxy.
"There's no possibility of us stealing from them and getting off scot-free. Samnul's plan would give us a year or two of peace before they found us and wiped us from whatever planet we latched ourselves onto. They have powerhouses capable of killing me with a thought, of sundering this planet into millions of pieces with a sneeze or condemning us to slow, agonizing deaths with some gruesome disease."
He leaned forward, whispering into Garrett's ear, yet the wind carried the words to the other two without difficulty. "They have Manifested. Five of them."
Garrett's eyes widened in shock as his blood ran cold.