Monomachiarum is a multifandom experiece that takes the characters into the chaotic future of the 30th century in the great expanse of space. Our lore is a combination of worlds brought in from other franchises, lore created by the site founder, and user-submitted information in order to make a vast and diverse setting. Add your pages to our grand story no matter who your characters might be or where they came from before. This is a place meant to explore possibilities and open new doors. Canons and OCs are welcome, just so long as they can fit into the setting with a little bit of reasonable modification here and there if necessary. So what are you waiting for? Join us today! If you'd like to get to know our community more, feel free to check out our Discord channel.
May 2023 It's been hectic this last year, but we are alive and celebrating our fifth year of adventure and tales. A lot has been worked on to help make the Monoverse one that everyone can enjoy and explore their story while becoming a part of the greater cosmos. All of you, new and long time players, stay safe, and see you in the Sea of Stars!
The sound of crunching exoskeleton and crumbling architecture had become a sort of semi-ambience from the busied hours leading up to now. Once more, the familiar grip of the bladed baton was felt against his claws and the familiar resistance of the body part impaled by it. He jerked it up and down, roughly continuing until the blade was free of its prison and the kromus arm-cannon severed of its body.
It thudded to the floor with a dry whack, joining debris organic and inorganic. Fragments of charred armour, furniture smashed into pieces, berry blue kromus blood, black hydraulic fluid of the wrecked drones among them, rifles and arm-cannons, and more kromus corpses. Some crawled and crept; hot knives sank into downed forms. Begging throats were answered with plunging claws. Black bags placed over the heads of once triumphant warriors; leaders of legions, butcherers of worlds, and now bearers of the final humiliation of defeat. Punished once for arrogance, twice for inferiority, and a third for crimes more severe. Blindness was the last mercy they would be granted.
The familiar weight swung in his hand now lightened with the fresh bloodthirst and vindicated revenge of he and his kind. Visceral satisfaction in the absence of compassion. He leaned down and picked up another familiar weight; a modified hellhammer rifle, specially made for the recently formed wraithscourge. Three deep wounds of clawing desperation marked onto its side, scars from a frantic defence before its stock concussed and caved in the skull of the foe. A foamy purple stuck to it and he brushed it against one of his digits, smearing it over his fangs.
He would remember this taste, this scent, the sensation of utmost annihilation well. Picking up the severed arm, he attached it to a clasper. They’d research it when they returned from this outpost.
To his left, a hulking figure 13 and a half feet tall craned its head. The walls had given out from the tenacity of their gunfire; the enormous autocannons attached to both of his huge claws had done most of that. Segmented armour with mottled patterns, arranged in lengthy interlocking segments, bore the marks of burns and rends. A stench of burning meat emerged from a few of the holes. A face devoid of flesh quietly scanned the devastation of similar scenes elsewhere before it stopped at Czyereck.
A series of harsh, unintelligible growls exited his mandibles, obscured behind the paradox of bestial savagery and dispassionate cold that was his helmet. Their language was some parody of speech; grating layers of white noise torture bent into shapes impossible by conventional tongue, lung, and teeth and comprised of multiple sonic voices of atonal texture.
“Sryvyorna; intel status – location of listening outpost. Communication records with high value targets. Observation data on the unknown vessels.” His own voice growled, screeched, and shuddered. The wounds on the enormous creature’s body would have slain countless scores of its enemies. They were agony but the sort ignored with chemical cocktails injected in the midst of battle and dampened by forms hardened into flesh machinery forged from hatred.
“Secured; data-wipe disrupted. Kromus replication-transmission sequence aborted. Electronic warfare presence effectively silenced.” A new smell entered; pheromones. Sryvyorna was still yet his excitement was invigorating; the rush of violence had not missed his stoic self and a satisfaction could be smelled and the olfactory message was difficult to ignore.
His larger mandibles curved and rearranged themselves; four arrows like a crosshair, smaller feelers and clawed appendages taking the space between them. The smears of blood and flecks of viscera could be seen as well now that the helmet segmented itself into his armour. His antennae pulled back and formed an almost arrow shape pointing forward. Their happiness; his own – one and the same.
He walked past the enormous eskradion as he heard the sound of gunfire. Short, sharp, crackling roars but before that, gasps and cries. Begging, crying, pleading, all in languages he did and did not recognize and answered by the sounds of weaponry he very much did. The sound of flesh thudding against the dirt followed. His expression sharpened and he felt his own pheromones momentarily come close to hiding the smell of burning plasteel and the freshly slaughtered.
Now, there was coughing and wheezing as bodies squirmed against the dirt before a deep trench as he continued his walk. Some were the jagged and predatory forms of the kromus but others were smaller and diminutive. They had four limbs, hair, soft flesh, and they begged through teary eyes for an end to the butchery. Czyereck did not turn his head; the others would let them scream and writhe with only the mechanical indifference of the wraithscourge to accompany their final moments.
At the back of the compound, two sets of masks greeted him – the kromus leaders tied to makeshift poles and the humans who had willingly sold out their own to them on one end, their limbs tied to the back and heads hung forwards. On the opposite end, eskradion quietly clicking between the firing modes of their weapons. Fresh bayonets were attached at each barrel.
Curses greeted him from the kromus and the smell of emptied bowels from humanity. He walked to the end of the foul procession and turned. His hand gripped a bag over one head and his clawed hands slowly tore it open. Blue eyes stared into him but anger was burned into them. Fear too; but anger was frequently its cloak and that was all too clear here.
“Don’t you fucking dare!” He snarled at Czyereck, the soot and cuts on his face distorting as his features scrunched. Unrecognizable from whatever he had been before, he laid into the arthropod. “Don’t you fucking dare lecture me now you filth, not after having to put up from it from those ungrateful fools you’ve brainwashed! PEACE, you stupid animals, probably too big a concept for your inbred sub-sentient brains to comprehend. Did you ever think about that when you armed them? When they came for US?!”
Czyereck paused and a chorus of murmurs and low snarls picked up the pace. The governor’s fury was justified; he knew what an eskradion smile looked like. He knelt down to get to his level, face to face, neither visage flinching.
“THIS WORLD, this world was safe! Not an ounce of blood to be shed! None other than those idiot fanatics from the jungles and plains. Why are you fighting for their dead-end utopia you useless trash-gobbler? Why why WHY? Was civilization some sort of affront to whatever hive of barbarity you dwell in? The savages, those damn savages, I know you know what they would do beforehand. Kill one another in their stupid territory wars, shoot down our own aid convoys! Is that the damn legacy you plan on leaving here? You’re infinitely worse than the kromus would be!”
Someone was struggling against his bonds; kromus with the sound of the strain. Another imploring that he listen to the voice of reason, civility, and galactic law.
A series of clicks underscored by a droning electric buzz answered them as he looked to his compatriots. Their faces immobile but he followed the feelers, antennae, additional limbs, and mouthparts. Validation was sweet.
He turned back to the governor.
“Rousing; I can see why you won your elections regardless of your assistance. Hollow as well, sterile specifically.” Czyereck spoke, the chainsaw-filter tone that shrouded his words drilling into his ears “Tell me do you read the works of Klyantarsky? You have a similar style – pompously righteous indignation, a few calls to fluffy higher principles, civilization-this-civilization-that, dirty filthbloods… I mean, rabble-rousers at the gates. I should be taken aback but… no, just an interesting anomaly. Such things are out of fashion elsewhere. A man of the classics, culture, and upbringing.”
Before he could continue, wet fluid splattered against his visor. The HUD system analysed it for biohazards; common human mouth bacteria. Impressive, the fire on this one.
“More effective if you were-“
“I don’t give a damn. Do you know what happens if you pull that damn trigger? Your head on a platter, cockroach. All of yours and the idiot band of uptopians you cobbled. This world is not alone; kromus or not, the line you’ve crossed and in full sight of the-“
“Truthfully, I don’t give a damn either. Your guild’s management board might, but would they even admit such a thing now that they all know? The news travels fast, governor. Your idea of prosperity and policy implementation is puzzling from a purely political angle.” He paused for a few moments and the human’s clenched teeth opened slightly. One of Czyereck’s eyes noticed a palm tightening. “However it is brave of you to protect the investments and data of your kromus friends and I applaud that sort of dedication. Consider that… an extension of your stay.”
The bonds restraining one kromus jerked and stretched and the pole shuddered forwards. Weakened but still powerful yet no move was made. All could smell the reek from deep wounds in its body and the way one of his legs shook as he tried to stand.
“You see, you’re right that that I’m the bad guy here. That I ruined this peace between your humble frontier world and the reasonable Kromus who like you, could settle on compromise rather than conflict. Yet how little effort I had to make to listen in as you quietly signed away housing facility after housing facility in the re-settlement zones, picked up by the shell companies, and the workforce parameters quietly laid out by your extraterrestrial friends. They quite enjoyed the taste of wine; I guess they really are more civilized than us eskradion if they could attend your parties. A skilled diplomat is a key to a thousand doors, as Klyantarsky said.”
He walked away for a moment and a static buzz sounded over his speaker system. He was being greedy but he had earned this. The people’s front had other places to sate their all-hallowed vengeance. In the corner of his eye, the glare of burning mansions and citadel-fortresses shone against his cold black eyes. He turned back to the human, casually strolling as if mimicking one of their own, resting a hand on the wall behind them and pushing himself out to remain face to face.
“Whatever sort of well-read primitive you’re pretending to be, no court will buy it. Even if the kromus are guilty, this is just a back-alley murder and I’ll laugh at you from whatever hell you’ll wish I was in. There are rules, rules that govern all of us, even them. And you just crossed one of those rubicons that separate the Federation from everything it opposes.” He flinched as a spider-leg finger shot before his face, right between his eyes, hovering just above his skin. An uncomfortable tingling followed.
“… Who says that it’s the galactic criminal court playing judge here? Conclusions, hasty conclusions… tsk tsk, as mankind likes to say. The jury is gathered and waiting, have been since they saw the footage of the labour campus and all the familiar faces therein. You really didn’t think you’d fool the board on those productivity numbers within such a short timeframe, did you? Oh they’re on your side, we both know that, but look at how the currents swing, the outrage teeming on the holoboards, and the kromus pulling out of the planet? You should have known better than to have expected loyalty among swine, no matter how blue their blood or how deep your connections went.”
Even better, the Kromus were leaving into the range of inner-atmosphere ambushes. Savagery had become reluctance and cowardice. Into the waiting jaws of long range missiles and rail guns the invaders had flown. He looked to the others; they too watched their spike-like ships become little more than carcasses blossoming with fire and fragmentation. One last graveside mockery awaited.
His mandibles clicked as the governor fumed and shouted, joined by his compatriots as the eskradion and his comrades turned and began to leave the area.
“Do you really think…” Czyereck paused. A pirate spoke, his voice every bit as distorted and incisive as his own. The others followed suite but he waved to them. A little slowly, they resumed. “That you have outdone us? That your stalwart band of heroes, empowered by a pathetic victory carried on the backs of peasantry, somehow can call itself a thorn in the side of the Kromus?”
Czyereck walked back cautiously. The pole shifted in the dirt and the insect’s bad leg was not bleeding but pouring, staining the shrubbery beneath a berry purple. The faint yellow of its eyes glared behind the fabric of the bag.
“I heard the screams and the cries. Your savagery is a child’s resentment at a bully’s playground blows, your vengefulness that of a kicked mange-ridden dog biting at the boots of its superiors with teeth long since rotted out. Did you think I would feel anger and contempt; that I would understand your pain if you repaid it in this pitiful display?”
Something clicked at the back of his mind. A memory from years ago and a psychological wound on all eskradion. Familiar words chanted his mind and he found himself chanting in tune with practiced insult and profane diatribes to spew. The wounds went deep into the psyche of his people and time still struggled to heal them.
“I know your kind. You are more arrogant than any human here could be; the sort of arrogance that only comes from the quiet fear of the natural order; supremacy and intolerance, the sole law of these stars. You were prey but not just ours. But you quietly knew that, didn’t you? Did you tell them? Stand at the monuments to your gutter-borne dead and whisper it to their ears? Tell me, womb-vomited worm, what heritage of hunters and conquerors do you think you secretly descend from? You fear that you were little more than detritus amongst the stars. The butchery we exacted helped you hide from that with your weak, inconsequential hatred and whatever delusion of hidden power you held.”
His hands tightened and muscular memory yearned for the handle of a familiar weapon, for another head to collect, and that deathlust lurking in his psyche to feast and silence the hungry indignation and vengefulness stirring in its guts.
Yet they loosened soon. He looked away for a second and paused. The real victors were nearing.
“Obliterate as many of us as you like if it soothes your angry tears. Take our skulls as trophies. Wear our flags as spoils and mount our armour as totems. Whatever semblance of civilization you’ll build out of the sewage of your society, know that it will always be defined by the kromus as pretenders to our throne. Your quiet watchers know this well and they are waiting for you there.”
He began walking back. So these Kromus did know about the distant watchers after all and it appeared that it went beyond an anomaly.
“There is so much that you could only vainly hope to understand. I pity that you think your plan will be some great wound to us. Far worse things are waiting for you and next time, no downtrodden vermin will be there to bleed for you.”
Czyereck stopped in front of him, just a few feet away. Not close enough to attack yet he didn’t feel that anger. Something about his words mystified him. The watchers he referenced specifically as it appeared to hint at a possible theory of his about the Hive Ship attack.
“You’re an interesting Kromus. A dumb one as well given your choice in partners. I’m sorry to say that there will be more of us the next time if you felt this war was unfair enough. I hope your rhetoric can impress my friends on another note. I hear they love those.”
He paid no attention to the howls and snarls as he walked as the sound of hover-engines and treads went from a distant ambience to a surrounding roar. Older issue military surplus, retrofitted and upgunned, and manned by rebels and defectors. Stomping out in armoured frames and basic exoskeletal setups, flexi-plating roughly attached over vitals and organs. A few of them paused as he towered over them but their pulse rifles and plasma launchers remained lowered.
Czyereck turned his head to the back of the partially demolished building and the bound, bagged figures. Their struggles grew more desperate as their wrists grew red and cries sounded louder. Czyereck walked past them, towards the location marked on his visual array. The sound of weapons loading and screams from dry, dehydrated throats followed that of loud animalistic shrieks.
He walked a little slower, waiting for the last of those cries. The others couldn’t fault him for coming a little late to the exfil site before their departure.
