Bellak
New member
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2026
- Messages
- 8
Q3, Age 900
---
Quartz City had a skyline. Glass towers and comm arrays and the flat grey sprawl of an industrial district bleeding into residential streets, all of it built by people who thought the hard part was done. They'd made it to space. They'd met the neighbors. The planet had a flag at the Interstellar Market and a seat at whatever table Humans got to sit at and all of it, every bit of it, was about to belong to someone else.
The shadow came first.
It moved across the eastern district in a shape that didn't match anything in the sky. Too wide for a ship. Too slow for a storm. The people on the ground figured it out in pieces, the way you figure out something too large to look at all at once. A foot came down on the edge of a building that had been there for forty years and wasn't anymore. Then a leg. Then the full dark mass of it against the afternoon clouds, standing at the city's edge with its head above the rooftops and its fists at its sides and its eyes going over everything below like it was counting.
Bellak looked at Quartz City and showed his teeth.
He hadn't planned to hit it on the way in. The foot just went down. That was Oozaru. The wanting that was always there, the appetite that ran underneath everything he did, scaled up with the rest of him and moved his hands before the thought caught up. The building came apart under his foot. He felt it through his sole, the crunch and give of it, and the grin split wide because that was right, that was exactly what a planet felt like when it realized it had a new owner.
He walked.
Each step opened something. A road. A wall. A section of elevated track that folded sideways and came down on the street in a cascade of sparks and screaming metal. He wasn't trying to. His feet were just big and the city was just there. Humans scattered ahead of him, which was smart, and some didn't scatter fast enough, which was their fault. He caught the spaceport to the north. A mining compound at the city's edge. A library. A coffee shop. A hundred streets that weren't going to be streets much longer.
He needed them alive. Dead people didn't pay tribute and he hadn't come all this way to conquer a graveyard. The part of him that knew this was somewhere below the Oozaru. The hands were bigger.
A comm tower caught his elbow and went sideways. He didn't look back.
By the time he cleared the residential blocks the city center opened up. Broad plazas. Glass-fronted buildings. He dragged the energy up out of his chest and threw it and it spread as it moved, too wide to go around, and hit the plaza and the plaza stopped. The building behind it peeled from its foundation in pieces. The blast spent itself two blocks further and when the light cleared there was a trench through the city center and Bellak was already pulling the next one up from the same place, deeper, hotter, and he threw that one south.
Through the glass towers. Through whatever was behind them. Out into a neighborhood that had been there before him and wasn't going to be there after. The sound rolled across the whole city. Every window that hadn't broken broke now.
He wasn't trying to destroy it.
The dust was still rising when something hit him from behind. Left shoulder. He felt it, which was the interesting part. Not much. The suggestion of a fist against three hundred meters of ape, barely registering. But he felt it, which meant she could move something, and he turned.
She was small the way everything down here was small. Brown braid across her face. Amber eyes that had settled on angry. Sun-darkened skin, calloused hands, a freight company jacket she hadn't taken off. Standing in the rubble of the plaza instead of running.
He looked at her for exactly one second.
His teeth were already showing when he swung.
The first punch came in from the right, full weight behind it, aimed at whatever part of her was closest.
The second was already moving before the first landed.
The third he threw low.
---
Quartz City had a skyline. Glass towers and comm arrays and the flat grey sprawl of an industrial district bleeding into residential streets, all of it built by people who thought the hard part was done. They'd made it to space. They'd met the neighbors. The planet had a flag at the Interstellar Market and a seat at whatever table Humans got to sit at and all of it, every bit of it, was about to belong to someone else.
The shadow came first.
It moved across the eastern district in a shape that didn't match anything in the sky. Too wide for a ship. Too slow for a storm. The people on the ground figured it out in pieces, the way you figure out something too large to look at all at once. A foot came down on the edge of a building that had been there for forty years and wasn't anymore. Then a leg. Then the full dark mass of it against the afternoon clouds, standing at the city's edge with its head above the rooftops and its fists at its sides and its eyes going over everything below like it was counting.
Bellak looked at Quartz City and showed his teeth.
He hadn't planned to hit it on the way in. The foot just went down. That was Oozaru. The wanting that was always there, the appetite that ran underneath everything he did, scaled up with the rest of him and moved his hands before the thought caught up. The building came apart under his foot. He felt it through his sole, the crunch and give of it, and the grin split wide because that was right, that was exactly what a planet felt like when it realized it had a new owner.
He walked.
Each step opened something. A road. A wall. A section of elevated track that folded sideways and came down on the street in a cascade of sparks and screaming metal. He wasn't trying to. His feet were just big and the city was just there. Humans scattered ahead of him, which was smart, and some didn't scatter fast enough, which was their fault. He caught the spaceport to the north. A mining compound at the city's edge. A library. A coffee shop. A hundred streets that weren't going to be streets much longer.
He needed them alive. Dead people didn't pay tribute and he hadn't come all this way to conquer a graveyard. The part of him that knew this was somewhere below the Oozaru. The hands were bigger.
A comm tower caught his elbow and went sideways. He didn't look back.
By the time he cleared the residential blocks the city center opened up. Broad plazas. Glass-fronted buildings. He dragged the energy up out of his chest and threw it and it spread as it moved, too wide to go around, and hit the plaza and the plaza stopped. The building behind it peeled from its foundation in pieces. The blast spent itself two blocks further and when the light cleared there was a trench through the city center and Bellak was already pulling the next one up from the same place, deeper, hotter, and he threw that one south.
Through the glass towers. Through whatever was behind them. Out into a neighborhood that had been there before him and wasn't going to be there after. The sound rolled across the whole city. Every window that hadn't broken broke now.
He wasn't trying to destroy it.
The dust was still rising when something hit him from behind. Left shoulder. He felt it, which was the interesting part. Not much. The suggestion of a fist against three hundred meters of ape, barely registering. But he felt it, which meant she could move something, and he turned.
She was small the way everything down here was small. Brown braid across her face. Amber eyes that had settled on angry. Sun-darkened skin, calloused hands, a freight company jacket she hadn't taken off. Standing in the rubble of the plaza instead of running.
He looked at her for exactly one second.
His teeth were already showing when he swung.
The first punch came in from the right, full weight behind it, aimed at whatever part of her was closest.
The second was already moving before the first landed.
The third he threw low.
