10.33

Ten was unsure, even if he wanted to hear stories about Darius, it didn’t seem like the story about him becoming a marshal was interesting.

“I bet you think it won’t be interesting, but I will promise you now that my ability to tell stories is good enough to take care of that.”

After hesitating a bit, Ten finally nodded, he still wanted to know and it didn’t seem like Darius would like to talk about it.

“Let me begin the story at the time I first meet Darius.”

At Ten’s disgruntled look Harry smiled for the first time today since he had to leave Simon’s room to meet the professor.

“Calm down, there are a lot of things you can learn from that time too.”

The first time Harry meet Darius was on the battle field, at that time the federation and the empire were still at war and both of them were not yet long in the military. Harry’s father had send him to the military because a lot of people had tried to assassinate him and he thought that even the war would be a saver place for his son than at home. Harry had only been fifteen when a friend of his father had taken him under his wings. The conflicts between the federation and the empire became more and more common, because of a strange number of disappearances of children on both sides. Who wouldn’t think that it was the enemy if those disappearances were mostly at the border.

Harry had been taken into a warship by the friend of his father, a general. That day where he was at the border of the two countries for the first time, after he had said goodbye to Simon, he saw how a lot of the fighter ships were shoot down by a single fighter. It turned out the pilot of that fighter was Darius, the empire’s only triple S soldier. Because of his extraordinary reflexes he was able to shoot down double the amount of even the most seasoned pilot.

Not only Harry, but every other person who saw him knew that this person would become someone great. But who would have thought that a few days later exactly this unknown pilot was attack by a strange creature.

Since the war was already ongoing for a few months both sides, the empire and the federation, had already lost a lot of fighter ships and a few war ships. As more and more of those strange creatures flooded into the battlefield it was nearly impossible for them to get rid of those.

It was the unknown little pilot, who was first attacked, who opened the common communication channel and pleaded for both countries to work together. If it hadn’t been for him, the whole army of both countries would have been destroyed and the citizen would have been eaten without even knowing what had befallen their planet.

Thought there were many different kinds of creatures, the people decided call them by one unified name ‘the zerg’. Archaeologists explained that those creatures had a lot of similarities to the insects of the ancient earth. It was likely that it was some kind of mutation.

It didn’t take long for the empire and the federation to arrange a peace treaty under the attacks of the zerg.

It took the human a few years to discover that the zerg had something they wanted to protect at any cost, that thing was the zerg queen. The zerg queen would produce most of the eggs of the common seen zergs and even a few variants. It didn’t take long after the discovery and the humans decided to get rid of the queen no matter the cost.

At that time as part of the strongest fighter from both sides, Harry and Darius were part of the infiltration of the zerg nest.

Harry had fought countless battles with those people, he had nearly lost his life countless times in the progress, and even as he laid near dead on this unknown planet, Darius didn’t abandon him even if his mission would have been a lot easier if he didn’t have to drag this dead weight.

He only left the slightly recovered Harry and another soldier in a save place when they found out about the poison of the zerg queen. The poison was everywhere in the nest, colorless, nearly odorless, it would corrode anything it touched, only someone with the highest senses would be able to go in there unscathed. Only Darius was able to come back alive, with a burn mark on his back because the blood of the queen splashed onto him.

As a reward, the participants were all raised in rank, most of them left the military shortly after because of the after effects they suffered. Darius got a honorable marshal title, but everyone knew it was only for show. The old people in the capital star were scared of what would happen if Darius got unhappy with his reward. The sixth army, the army of the honorable marshal, was only a place for the children of the nobility who wanted to try out how the life in the army was, most of them going home after one year. Everyone knew that this reward was nothing more than a joke, there was nothing honorable about Darius position.

The only good thing that came from the fight with the zerg was that the peace between the countries still wasn’t broken even two years after the dead of the queen. Every now and then a group of zerg would attack the border meeting the unified front of the two countries.

The people who participated in the hunt for the queen knew that the peace wouldn’t take long to be broken, but they were clear, they couldn’t fight each other. If the two countries were really going back to war with each other, those people had decided to leave their country and become star pirates together. They wanted to see how the country would go to war without it’s strongest fighters.

Ten starred at Harry after he had finished his story, he would never have thought that he was that good in telling stories.

Just when he wanted to ask him a few questions of things that still bugged him, the door opened.