This is Hadiscorpiumon, and these are my final words. Well, not my true final words, but the last words I speak that anyone living could hear.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.
All of my people saw my king declare war on the humans, but only a handful heard the prophet’s warnings. Of course, everyone who heard dismissed them. The prophet was old, going senile, we said. And off we went to war.
My king needed an easy victory, something to soothe the people and bolster himself, and for a while it worked. We had better tech, better weapons. We were smarter. But we got careless, and we underestimated exactly what we had gotten ourselves into.
We met them on fields and outmaneuvered and destroyed them. We met them in the air and shot them out of their sky. We met them on the ground and decimated them with tactics they had never seen. But still they fought, long after we thought they would stop. And then they started adapting.
They stopped meeting us on the open field. They started drawing us into the wild parts of their world, where all the tech in the world couldn’t help you anticipate an ambush. And you couldn’t use superior tactics when you couldn’t find the people you were supposed to use them against.
They fought dirty. They used themselves as traps, strapping bombs to their bodies and detonating them once they were captured.
They hid their people in secret places, places that hadn’t been walked in thousands of years. They split them up into small roving bands, impossible to find because they never stopped moving.
They stole our tech, our ships, and they reverse engineered them. And then they used what stolen ships they hadn’t taken apart to bomb us even more.
They sent assassins, took out our leaders. Everyone they could find who had influence and power they killed without honor, because humans have no honor.
They even dressed their soldiers as civilians, once they realized we wanted their non-combatants alive, so when our soldiers were expecting a passive group of soon-to-be slaves, instead they got highly armed troops.
And their civilians, they taught them how to fight too. It was almost impossible to capture any of them. So we resorted to killing. That was… that was our biggest mistake.
They adapted to everything we threw at them. Not just their generals, but their individual soldiers too. They saw something new and seemingly instantly adapted. Our command structure was too rigid, too inflexible to adapt to the new things they threw at us. We had to wait, for our superiors to figure out what was going on, for them to issue us new orders, but by then the humans had already adapted to our new strategy and were trying something different.
But that. That was not what was truly terrifying about them. My people, you see, are highly logical, but even we would not go on suicide missions. What would be the point, if all your death accomplished was the destruction of a single ship? For us, there is no honor in death. Only victory. But the humans.
They throw themselves at us, ready to die so long as they can bring some of us with them. They do impossible, stupid things, all so that they can kill as many of us as possible.
And when faced with an enemy willing to die to kill us, we quit. But the humans didn’t stop.
We didn’t realize how bloodthirsty they were. We didn’t realize how far they would go for vengeance. To them, war isn’t something cold and detached. To them war is not just another tool used in the game nations play. To them, war is personal. An attack on the humans in general is an attack on them all.
And humans do not respond well to being attacked.
They chased us to the edge of our great empire. My king is dead, and so is his family. The noble houses are in shambles, and the people are terrified. We surrendered a long time ago, but they still come, saying that if we wished for mercy then we shouldnt have killed millions.
I don’t think any of us were expecting to be brought down by the bonds between humans. It seems so stupid, that things like “friendship” and “love” destroyed an empire, but here we are. A dying empire, destroyed by irrationality and emotional ties.
We see them sometimes, see the anger in their eyes. And though we are logical beings, we’re afraid. Afraid of what that anger will do when it finally reaches the last of our kind. But I won’t be there to see it. I was a General once, and I now command our last ship. Our ship, which is currently disabled, and the only thing standing between the human fleet and the rest of my people.
I don’t even know why I’m making this recording. Despair, I guess. We are doomed. I suppose this is all I can do. Speak of the events that led us here to a recorder because I have no one left to tell them to.
I don’t know who will hear this, once I’m finished I’m launching it into space, but if anyone does. Please tell my children I am sorry. Their father failed, and has brought shame upon their name. Please, dear universe, let my children survive the humans. Please. Please.
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