Daisy woke up in a cell. She was groggy and tired, and her body was sore. The ramshackle bunk she was assigned in this makeshift prison cell would have been cramped for a normal human, which meant it was grossly inadequate to contain her seven feet and four inch long body. She groaned as she shakily pulled herself up to her feet. She was tired but not quite disoriented, and the shitty meals she was given twice a day weren’t quite sufficient to leave her dramatically malnourished. On the other side of the barred door was private Gurn, a short little guy who was definitely only on guard duty because either everyone who might actually be able to contain her was busy, or there was simply no such pair of hands on deck. She was fine with that. Gurn was a plucky lad, insistent that she didn’t scare him even though he very well might have less muscle in all of his limbs combined than she did in each individual one of her massive arms. He clutched a shotgun, an old primitive weapon presumably given to him so he could hit her no matter how badly his arms shook and have a-comparatively-high chance of taking the fight out of her but not the life. The young man stared forward but bounced on the toes of his boots. They were simple things, ragged almost. He was an idealist, it was easy to tell.

“Oh, you’re awake?” He asked without turning to face her. “I wish we had better food to give you. You deserve as much.”

“I deserve my goddamn freedom,” Daisy snarled. She took a tray which had been slid under the door. Stale bread, soup made with subpar substitutions for already subpar ingredients. Some butter. She ate the bread first. It was hard and dry, but still easily edible. That would do, right now.

“Yeah, sorry,” Gurn muttered under his breath. He’d flinched at her display of anger, which pleased her somewhat. Terrorizing this young man would have made her feel a tad guilty, once, but she knew better now. He was a pawn of forces much greater than himself, and even if he earnestly saw justice in his actions the harm enacted using him as a knife was made no less damaging to the lives bled away into the dirt. “It’s just…the enemy is closing in. We need you. Why did you leave us?”

“You know damn fucking well,” Daisy growled. For a moment she was back on the Rendul, being ordered to descend on a hungry populace and “subdue” them. She remembered the feeling of her commanding officer’s jaw crumpling beneath her knuckles. It sent shivers of joy up her arms and down her spine. “When I ‘left,’ they weren’t the enemy.” She glared daggers at the back of Gurn’s head. With a well-aimed punch to the back of the head, she could probably damage the nerves that allowed him to see, or potentially give him a concussion, or kill him outright. He was standing foolishly close to the bars and even as massive as her hands were, a fist could probably fit between them. “The poor were.”

“I understand that,” Gurn mumbled. He was ashamed. It wasn’t hard to tell. The emotion saturated his voice, and his head fell as he spoke as though the very words carried enough weight that merely speaking them pull his gaze to the poorly lit tile floors. “But now the enemy is them! We…we need you! Terra assembled a weapon specifically to kill them, and nobody but you can wield it!” Gurn raised his face just enough to consider the blade hanging from the opposite wall. It was six feet long with spikes sticking out of the sides near the front, with small spines on those spikes. It wasn’t the weapon he referred to of course, it was…a model, or a prototype, or a model of a prototype, or something along those lines. She had seen the real thing, though, and it was almost majestic in its sheer violent simplicity. A mass of steel even longer than the biggest blade to ever see actual use in Terran history, capable of both vibrating at incredibly high speeds and heating itself beyond its own melting point without actually succumbing to the laws of physics. She was sure it was actually just some elusive alloy, that it had a higher melting point than metals which looked and physically behaved similarly to it, but it was nevertheless a triumph of human engineering.

The power to rewrite the world in one’s own image, to triumph over the cruelty and chaos of entropy, brought to bear in the same manner as an especially jagged stone. How utterly typical. 

Still, she wasn’t above it all. The warm blooded mammal that she was, the one which relished in combat and tests of skill and might, felt a fondness for the simplistic and violent beauty of the device. Faced with monsters that resisted the greatest weapons humanity had to bear, the idea that the solution was to wheel out one of the oldest and most enduring symbols of human conflict and roid it the fuck out appealed to her. There was something reassuring about the thought of the sword prevailing where guns and bombs and starships had failed, in a War of the Worlds kind of sense. 

Of course, the sword wasn’t perfect. To quote a certain old squadmate of hers describing why some of the Terran Accord’s older models of fighter fell out of use despite outclassing their replacements, “it has one weakness: the pilot is human.” Most of her species would struggle to carry that metal behemoth for extended periods of time, and actually wielding it in the first place was simply outside many of their bounds. That was without considering the dexterity and speed one would require to make such a cumbersome tool anything against an affini but an anchor tied to their neck and thrown out to sea. She wasn’t sure she had it, but if she didn’t…nobody did. 

“With you, they CAN be beaten! They CAN be killed!” Squeaked Gurn. A kind of fervor had infected his voice. It was the zeal of a man damned, clinging to anything resembling salvation for lack of any other option. He was beyond reason, beyond fear, beyond even his own eyes and ears. Even if she COULD kill an affini with this ridiculous weapon, she was one woman. She had arms and legs that could be grabbed, and she needed all four of them free to use it. The weapon’s weaknesses weren’t limited to the fact that no regular human would be able to use it, they were baked into the fundamental facts of its function such that no human, no matter how powerful, could overcome them. She had two arms, and could not use the blade effectively without free movement of both, and two legs, which she needed both of in order to attack or defend with it. It was a melee weapon and her attack radius swinging it, even with its absurd length, was outclassed by any attacker with some kind of reach-like, for example, a plant abomination’s countless vines. 

“An affini, maybe. Perhaps two, or three, or a dozen, or even a hundred, if they all line up to fight me one on one and let me rest after I slaughter each of their fellows like fools,” Daisy retaliated. She finished eating her bread and then downed the soup. The broth was…awful. It tasted like bones somehow felt drier than the jerky soaking in it. “A common domestic dog under the right conditions can kill a human. Would you feel safe betting money on one hound’s ability to kill one hundred men?” 

Gurn grimaced and went quiet. Daisy finished her meal, noting its acidic aftertaste, and started doing crunches on the dusty old floor. She was filthy but that was okay. Two hundred crunches. Two hundred pushups, then one hundred more using only her right hand, then one hundred using only her left. She climbed up the cell bars, hung from them with her legs, and did one hundred more crunches. Gurn’s obvious inclination of why she knew how to do that, coupled with his nervousness to actually ask, amused her as it always did. The bars probably weren’t intended to be that easy to grip or hang from, but they had some imperfection or other which let her to it anyway. As she switched to pull ups she heard the ship’s systems coming to life.

“Ennnn…..gzzzzkt! Enmy! All hnds,,,stations!” It crackled. Gurn froze.

“We’re…we’re done for! I-fuck-you have to help us!” Daisy dropped from the bars. Fear and anger started to take root. Did the affini know about her? About humanity’s last ditch effort to find something that could beat them? Damn it, damn it all. She knew she should have simply stood her ground. Her home planet couldn’t be worth invading just to claim one person-

An older and more experienced officer ran into the hall. He dragged behind him the bright white, almost primal looking implement crafted for her hands and her hands alone.

“Sir! Ma’am! We have to fight! Now!” Gurn nodded and ran past the other man, his bravery seemingly ignited by the mere image of  the grizzly weapon. The man holding it snatched a keyring from the opposite wall. “Come. Your baptism in fire has been rescheduled.”

“You’re trusting me with that?” Daisy snarked with her arms crossed. “What if I butcher you and get out of Dodge?”

“Then I will die a soldier, cut down by treasonous plantfuckers,” the man growled as he operated her cell door. The lock came undone and he slid it open. Then, with some effort, he lifted it enough to offer it to her. “Better than being abducted and turned into one of…them.” Them: the humans taken from the front lines and…changed. Little was known about them, besides rare photos captured by unmanned drones. The pictures…they boded poorly. “And if you have any sense you know that fate awaits you too unless you help. They’ll find you.”

Daisy took the sword. It was eight feet long and very heavy. For a woman with her limbs and her implants, though, it was hardly more inconvenient than a standard two handed rifle. She’d get tired if she used it for too long, though. This was a gift from the people of Terra…a gift from scum seeking to use her body as a shield. Nothing would ever change that, not even if she somehow won the war using the absurd implement in her hands. She ran her fingers over the weapon’s hilt and its crossguard, noticed an array of switches built into the latter. Presumably they operated its more futuristic features.

“From left to right, three that increase its thermal state by one stage for each that’s activated, the high frequency vibration, the chainsaw belt around the blade, and the jet.”

“The what?”

The man pointed to a small indent in one side of the blade near the tip. “Jet. If you need to make a decisive killing strike and overcommitting isn’t a factor.” There were a lot of assumptions going into the idea that such a scenario was even possible with the enemies she faced, but that wasn’t new information. The minds behind this weapon still considered the war a novel hypothetical, and they would until it threatened them personally. Perhaps they didn’t even have the frame of reference to be able to do it then. A mind with no fear of consequences inevitably became alienated from the idea of danger, after all.  

Daisy took the weapon and sprinted off towards the escape pods. She’d never been on this vessel but she knew its design from her time in the navy. The man behind her shouted orders and drew his sidearm, but he wasn’t going to shoot her. She was his ticket out of this mess.

Daisy ran. She heard grinding metal as the ship was boarded. She heard screams as men were yanked out of position and carted off. There were bursts of gunfire which never lasted long. She gripped her weapon in both hands and threw stealth aside. If she was so big, and carrying this device, there was no chance in hell she could rely on going unnoticed. She came across a door with an electronic lock. Rather than deal with it she activated two of her weapon’s thermal switches.She was afraid all three might warp the blade or damage her hands, and she was too experienced with Terran “engineering” to test it. Almost instantly the business end of her weapon lit up crimson and yellow. She swung in a wide arc that carved a big bright red swath into the ceiling and turned the door’s hinges into slag almost instantly. She raised one knee and focused in that particular way that activated her implants. The yellow lights in her brain that prevented her body from injuring itself through overexertion went silent. She slammed her thick military boot into the door once, twice, three times and brought it crashing down. On the other side was a room with the escape pods. One plant creature stood inside, some nine feet tall with a humanlike face and eight stringy legs made of vines.

“What is that?” The creature asked with genuine curiosity. It eyed her weapon like a child seeing something new and cautiously reached out-

Fear took Daisy. Anger took Daisy. She wasn’t supposed to be here. She wasn’t supposed to go out like this. Even if she reached and used the escape pod-

“Is it raining, or snowing!?” She cried, quoting a poem she remembered reading in some children’s book when she was younger by some long long dead author from Terra. “Is a hurricane a blowing!?” She swung her weapon. It left a wide trail of liquid red light as it sliced through the thin viney appendage with ease. The affini howled. It was…it was in pain. Gurn was right.

They COULD be beaten.

“RAAAARGH!” The monster screamed and flailed its injured limb wildly, a boiling mass of ruined plant stuff at its new stumpy endpoint.

They COULD be killed. 

“NOT A SPECK OF LIGHT IS SHOWING SO THE DANGER MUST BE GROWING!” She stomped forward. The beast threw out a wave of tendrils to seize her. Foolishly, they all came at once. “ARE THE FIRES OF HELL A-GLOWING!?” She swung the weapon horizontally, its blade pointed diagonally up. The edge cleaved through these vines with a bit more difficulty and the force of the impact pushed her back two steps and sent shock up her arms. The affini squealed in horror and flailed these newly truncated vines in an effort to dispel the pain. “IS THE GRIZZLY REAPER MOWING!?” Even that simple change in approach from an injured, confused, frightened affini was enough to set her back. If another confronted her she was fucked. She ran forward and swung before it could, taking out all of its legs. The beast lost four feet of its height and screamed yet again. Was it…crying? 

“YES! THE DANGER MUST BE GROWING-” She snarled and hacked at its midsection. These vines were thicker and her blade couldn’t quite penetrate them. She chipped away with one strike, then two-

Its vines started to reorganize. Shit, shit.

“FOR THE ROWER KEEPS ON ROWING!” She activated the final thermal switch. The weapon became a blinding, hateful shade of brilliant red. She had to squint now, and the affini started grabbing at her in a more wild, erratic way. She hacked away one set of vines, then another, then another, wading through the attack towards her prey. Any moment one of its comrades could come take her. This was a big ship, but it was terribly overstaffed and the majority of its crew was in the front half of it. “AND THEY’RE CERTAINLY NOT SHOWING,” She slashed again at its midsection. Each strike made a sizzling noise come squealing out of the affini’s body like bacon on a frying pan. It screamed in agony. If her prey were any other creature she’d leave it be and run. That wasn’t an option. If this affini lived, she would die tonight. Especially now that she’d actually harmed one of them. “ANY SIGN THAT THEY ARE SLOWING!” She screamed. She switched on the high frequency vibration switch and the weapon’s hilt started to heat up in that uncomfortable, machine-pushed-to-its-limits sort of way.

Still, ruining this device to become the only human to ever kill an affini in melee combat? That was a worthwhile way to spend it.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!” She screamed, pulling the hilt against her and thrusting at a spot inside the creature where she saw some kind of sphere. Green sap sprayed everywhere as her weapon cleaved through its target like butter and radiated life-ruining heat into its core. The affini screamed one last time, its body spasmed uncontrollably. Vines seized her and smashed her into a wall, but without hitting her head. The affini made a hand, tore the weapon out of itself, seemed to pant for a moment as boiling juices spurted out of its center for a moment, and squinted.

“I’m…sorry, dear human. You must be…so…frightened…” the affini muttered. The hand holding the sword found its switches and deactivated all of them. “I should…you guys…damn…” the strength left the vines holding her. The affini slowly collapsed into a heap of smoldering plant matter and singed bark. She lifted the corpse’s hand from her body, escaped from under it, and took the weapon. 

Daisy bolted into one of the escape pods, her prize in tow.


The Murxengear was lost that day, but it was one of the only human ships to ever take an affini life.