LOG-006.
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN KNIGHTMARE IS FIGHTING THE WARDENS!?"
General Infernus winced from his position at the table, the crackling flames that made up his fiery form flickering slightly in the face of his Lord's (and former commanding officer's) rage, all currently being focused on the crystal ball floating just in front of the Gamma Legion's great leader, depicting a familiar armoured figure currently engaging in obscene amounts of acrobatics while lasers and explosions flew through the air.
"P-Perhaps he sought to create another distraction, my Lord? He is rather fond of those…"
Three baleful eyes blinked at him in response to that, even as the rest of the table let out muttered agreements and hesitant notes of support, before their hammerheaded leader slowly reached forward from his throne to grasp one of the delectably packaged rations Knightmare's latest raid had netted the legion.
"But…but it's burger night! We don't need any distractions right now! I specifically sent Lovelace to go tell him we'd be putting off the grand assault on the Hsitirb history museum for another day so we could all take a break!"
The gaggle of assembled Generals watched as their Lord reached for the communicator sitting at his side, everyone politely electing not to mention that he could have simply called Knightmare personally and likely averted this whole mess in the first place.
It was public knowledge that Armageddon was in on the Knightlace betting pool, after all.
"LOVELACE! WHY HAVE YOU NOT BROUGHT ME KNIGHTMARE!?"
An incoherent wail, sharp enough to send even the leader of the Legion reeling back with a hiss of his mandibles, echoed from the comm unit, babbling ensuing for a moment before their Lord roared at the dinky little device clutched in his massive paws.
"GET A HOLD OF YOURSELF GENERAL! WHAT HAPPENED?!"
A few growls and sniffles followed, before the small projection of Infernus' fellow General hung her head.
"I got stuck…"
Silence followed, before General Chrysalis, newly promoted in the face of her uncle Carapace's renewed incarceration, snorted, feminine yet doubletoned voice filling the air as the insectoid infiltrator flicked a clawed finger at her counterpart, contempt dripping from every part of her shelled form.
"That's fifteen skullcoins to me, I told you all he had his private quarters booby trapped! But did you listen?! No! Because of course the General specialised in sneaking into places she's not supposed to be in wouldn't know anything about stuff like that! HAH!"
Grumbles and groans left various parts of the table as skullcoins exchanged hands while Chrysalis let out a triumphant cackle, all while Lovelace continued to…wiggle? He couldn't quite tell with just her head in view, but it seemed to be a wiggling motion.
"It's not my fault! He used reinforced Gamma strings!"
More wiggling. More failed attempts at escaping her bound state, presumably.
"Ugh, that brilliant, brilliant man! That's my thing! How am I supposed to counter something like that!? It's not like I carry a pair of plasma scissors around! Those are meant to be for the bedroom!"
Armageddon stared for a long moment, before cutting the call with a grunt and turning back to face Infernus, which promptly brought the rest of the table's attention back onto the flame-fueled General, prompting him to stiffen slightly.
"...Reorient the Animus for growth beam generation, Knightmare's a smart sort. I'll just lend him a quick power boost, then he'll escape like he always does and we can get back to burger night!"
Bowing his head in submission, Infernus tried not to question how being the size of a building would help in matters of evasion.
Such was not his place, after all.
—
"Red Assault! Tri-beam SLASH!"
I was breathing heavily in the face of the forces being levelled against me, something I hoped the Wardens were picking up on as the fight progressed.
"Combat stance: Shadow Bulkwark!"
The cascading crimson energy washed over my form, mostly deflected or absorbed by the cloak of darkness I had thrown over myself.
"Knightmaaaare! You'll pay for kidnapping the Doctor! No one abducts our friends and gets away with it!"
Everything had gone according to plan. My loyalists had fled the scene upon my order, taking aeroshuttles and short ranged dimensional portals to escape, while I'd remained behind and continued prying secrets loose from Doctor Korbin's laughter filled mouth.
"Yeah! Surrender Knightmare! We've got you surrounded this time, so you're as good as done!"
Most of it had been technobabble based nonsense, of course. Stuff the likes of which I'd heard muttered more than once by the Legion's head researcher, who was still locked up, as far as I knew.
"Bah! Combat stance: Shade Strike!"
Snapping off a blast of energy of my own using my lance, I watched as Warden Yellow yelped, ducking beneath the attack just in time for it to slam into a screaming Green, who was sent flying into and then through a distant shed with a crackle of snapping wood.
"I don't think so, jailer!"
The underlying principles of energy to matter transmutation, interdimensional breaching technology, and void energy absorption practices were all well and good, but I wouldn't pretend to be smart enough to truly understand any of that. Minds like Korbin's came once in a millennium after all, and it'd be the height of arrogance to assume mine was anywhere close to the same kind of caliber.
"Come on gang, altogether now! Uh-except for Green! You take a second to recover pal!"
"Ow…"
No, what truly mattered was an innocuous question I'd asked in regards to Warden badge-recognition protocols. Knowledge that would-
"UNIFIED ARREST! WARDEN SMASH!"
My thoughts were thrown about in a chaotic mess as my armour cracked in response to several giant glowing fists slamming into me, sending me spinning end over end until I impacted a nearby wall, shattering it in a cloud of dust and broken concrete.
"Ugh…augh that smarts…"
I could taste blood beneath my helmet, and the enormous dent caving in the torso of the modified riot armour the Legion had loaned me wasn't too reassuring either.
"Wait-did we-hey! We got him! We actually got him!"
The consequences of my current deception.
After all, there was a reason I never prolonged fights with the Wardens, and it was because they were a team of overpowered, augment enhanced supercops with cutting edge tech backing them up.
They were used to fighting interdimensional aliens who could take on conventional armies with ease, their casual bending of physics making the old kinds of combat impossible. In response, the Wardens bent physics harder.
"Ha! We've never gotten this far with him before-yikes! Get to him before Lord Armaggedon-!"
In comparison to that, I was just a man using outdated prison riot control equipment that had been juryrigged into something more useful by a bunch of convicts. Something that I was being made very aware of as five figures sprinted towards me, a thunderous voice calling out from somewhere beyond the heavens.
"Forces of darkness! Bold and evil! Make my Legionnaire GROW!"
All at once, it was like there was liquid lightning coursing through my veins, visible crackles of green Gamma energy coursing across my form as it began to distort, as if we were all in a videogame and I was a glitching character.
Painful, yet so, so very invigorating. Was this what it was like for my other Generals when Armageddon grew them up? Or was my experience as a human different?
Pulling myself to my feet and using my trusty lance as a makeshift brace as my enemies all stumbled backwards in response to the ground shaking around us, I stared them down as they got smaller, and smaller, and smaller…
"At last."
Until it felt like I could touch the very sky with my fingertips. Something I could only afford to indulge in for a moment before the flashes of the Wardens summoning in their damned mechaconstructs pulled my attention back to the situation at hand.
"I'll crush you and the rest of this wretched city, you colour coded pests! Combat stance: TITAN OF SHADOWS!"
Day turned to night, and unstable arcs of energy swarmed forth from my monolithic form, only to be batted aside by a sword the size of a skyscraper as an enormous combined mechaconstruct gestured towards me with a yellow hand, five combined voices coming out as a cybernetic roar.
"YOU ARE CHARGED WITH RESISTING ARREST, GENERAL KNIGHTMARE! PREPARE FOR IMMEDIATE INCARCERATION!"
I grinned with teeth that had to have been the size of small cars as I took a ready stance, levelling my lance at the giant robot and roaring back in defiance.
"YOU'LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE YOU LAW ABIDING LOSERS!"
Excellent, everything was still going exactly according to plan, now I just needed to give everyone an appropriately dramatic show…
—
I'd been given a thorough history lesson, back when I'd first been inducted into the Gamma Legion. And it had confirmed that, once upon a time, this world had been far more serious than it was now.
I'd had questions, of course. Namely on things like just how the evil organisation had come to be in the first place. Where its alien membership had come from. Why they were on Earth. Why they had such massive beef with the Wardens. Those kinds of things.
The true, uncensored answer, was that there had been a war.
One between humanity, and a combined coalition of energy-based species who simply called themselves Chaos.
Yeah, literally just Chaos. Wacky stuff. I'd spoken about it with Infernus once, and apparently it was some cultural facet in regards to the fact that they were all composed of potential energy, and only had actual physical bodies which they made up using local material from wherever they first emerged in any given world they were invading.
The flaming General himself had first appeared in a bonfire, Lovelace had manifested in a clothing shop, Shellshock had woken up inside of a clam, that kind of stuff.
But that came back to the Gamma Legion itself, or as they'd been called at the time, Legion Gamma. The Third Legion of Chaos, and the vanguard of the invasion of this dimension.
Chaos' motives were…vague, according to most of my colleagues. They'd all technically been military, yes, but they weren't the ones truly in command. Rather, they'd been the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) boots on the ground, serving the interests of the Chaos government, whatever that might be.
Even Lord Armageddon had just been a field commander at the time, per his own admission. Most of the current Generals had been lesser officers as well. Lieutenants and sergeants, presumably, or whatever the Chaos equivalent of those ranks might have been.
Regardless, humanity faced an onslaught from a reality alien to their own, and in the face of that onslaught, humanity did what they did best.
They survived. They adapted. They innovated.
The first major human victory was brought about by the Interdimensional Defenders. The precursors of the Interdimensional Wardens.
Individuals of great power, and equally great moral character, the Defenders had pushed back Legion Gamma, from one battlefront to the next, until the war had left Earth entirely, instead taking place in a space between spaces, one that Chaos had been using to pour troops from their dimension into this one.
Unspace.
That was when the Third Legion had been betrayed by its high command, according to Armageddon.
Facing the risk of the enemy actually pushing through the portal connecting their realm to Unspace and taking the fight directly to them, Chaos had retreated and sealed the portal in a hurry, abandoning assets, war material, and most importantly, personnel in their desperation to slam the door shut in the Defenders' masked faces, evacuating only the most highly ranked and valuable members of their deployed vanguard.
With no way home and now stranded in Unspace, Legion Gamma had been forced into a full fledged unconditional surrender. Thousands of alien soldiers, who knew no other life than that of conquest, suddenly stuck sitting around while the Defenders tried to figure out what to do with them.
Apparently the humans of this universe had been far more merciful than I anticipated my own native humanity might have been. It was agreed upon that with the war finally concluded, the humane thing to do was to imprison the fallen army that was the Third Legion.
Thus began the construction of the Unspace Confinement Facility, or the UCF for short. Designed to contain the entirety of the Legion, it had been initially staffed by the Defenders, now the Wardens, and had withstood the test of time for almost twenty years after the war.
And in that time, peace had reigned. The old Defenders got old and retired. The new Wardens grew fat, lazy and content in their simple routine of making sure cells were locked and convicts weren't beating each other up over minor grievances.
Of course then Armageddon had gotten sick of sitting around eating prison food, and subsequently organised a massive riot that had sundered the place.
Or maybe he'd been planning it from the start, who knew? Naturally I'd gone and done my own research separately of course, in order to ensure I wasn't being manipulated. But it was hard to refute the various Defender statues around the world, or the historical articles one could easily find on the internet confirming the alien's claims.
Regardless, the broken Legion Gamma had been refashioned into the distinctly less professional Gamma Legion, the old hints of military organisation thrown aside in favour of a more casual framework, one built around the fundamental truth that the Legion were no longer a hostile, invading force, but rather a mass of escaped prisoners with nowhere else to go, and nothing else to do.
The UCF had been ransacked, the Animus hijacked and stolen, and the Legion had fled Unspace with all due speed, escaping to Earth, where they now lived a life of dangerous freedom, ever on the run from the newly reinvigorated Wardens that sought to return the former soldiers back to their isolated prison.
Which brought me to the present day, my battered and battle damaged form twitching and writhing as five distinctly colour coded figures surrounded me, their badges wrapping me up in strings of pure energy that were slowly but steadily pulling me towards a rift in reality, the inside of a cell visible on the other side.
I'd lost the latter half of my fight, as a matter of course. Couldn't be helped, really. I'd never been a giant before, and even still, I was only human, operating with outdated, inferior equipment to what the Wardens had. Nothing like the cutting edge Defender-based tech they were lugging about these days, fabricated fresh from the UCF.
With a final, somewhat embarrassing tug, I was tossed through the portal, brain briefly going haywire and the urge to vomit rising rapidly as my armoured form impacted the ground, a grunt escaping my lips as I landed in a heap of bruised flesh and possibly broken ribs.
But I was alive, and more importantly…
"Prisoner designation Knightmare, you have been incarcerated as per the protocols of the Legion Gamma act of 2079. You have the right to remain silent, though you will not be afforded a visit to a court of law despite the destruction of the records pertaining to your previous crimes, as per the protocols of the aforementioned act. In turn, you have the right to…wait, huh?!"
…I was a human being inside the UCF. A facility designed to contain the energy-based beings of Chaos, and nothing else.
Heh.
All according to plan.