The Bloodbath

The plan is simple, at least in theory it is. The first thing to do is to get out of the cell unnoticed. And by unnoticed, I mean by even the other slaves. As much as releasing them sounds like the greatest distraction, causing great levels of confusion for us to escape, there is a very high mortality chance for us by their use of scare tactics using big and powerful weapons. Over these years I've seen slaves mercilessly beaten to death while other guards were laughing their fly asses off at their suffering. The good thing about this was that I was able to see their physical capabilities, and with that came their potential weaknesses. They are well equipped, but their actual physical strength is really low, and from what I've gathered nothing big has happened to put any of them on guard, just slightly raising our chances.

In order to get out of the cell, a key is needed. Thankfully the same key seems to be used for all of the cells in our block, one of the only things in our favor, so with Dahlia's Zeltron pheromones we can hopefully get the guard off guard and take the keys silently. From there we would be in hot waters, no going back because if we kill the guard then their body would be found even before the morning, and if we didn't kill the guard he would easily remember our faces, cell, and our life would be a lot more difficult even after escaping.

The second step, after getting the keys and making it out of the cell, and eventually the block, is to navigate our way through the guards patrolling the halls and rooms along the way. The only time we've seen any guards actually there is when they're playing some sort of card game I can't recognize, so the chances there will be anyone actually doing their job is very low. When it comes to this portion of the plan, our best bet is Callista; her higher flexibility, her physical capabilities, and her knack for stealth put her at the lowest risk for catching attention from the guards on break.

The important part of this step is killing as many of the guards as we can and as fast as possible. I can tell Callista and Dahlia don't like the idea of killing, and that is fair, they are still teenagers after all, but AJ seems to be perfectly okay with it, so it will be up to us two to kill the majority of the guards. It helps that I have experience, and he has the strength to just brute force it, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

The third step, after all of the sneaking through the hallways and past each cell block and post, comes the locating of the spaceships that will allow us to get out of here. Honestly, this is probably one of the hardest, if not the hardest, because of the simple fact that this place is massive. Honestly, despite the fact that I've been here for three years and have been in all of the slave working positions, I've barely seen even 45% of the whole compound. I can safely assume the functions of about 25% of the other facilities, and none of them are the hangar.

Thankfully, all of that is mostly useless as it is pretty hard to miss the massive ships that float down every other month, assumingly to transport supplies either in or out of the compound. With the general direction towards the hangar understood, it left only about 5% of the grounds to cover, potentially with locks and other things. Though it doesn't sound like a lot, that amount of ground would take almost a week to cover completely.

The fourth step along the way is actually the most integral portion of the plan, and that is the deactivating of the slave chips. I had wondered, after getting here, if the chips put into Anakin and his mother would be a problem to worry about, and in my second year here I finally was able to subtly coerce another new slave into escape. All of the guards took potshots as he escaped, thankfully all of them missed because I was able to figure out that there is, indeed, a chip. And by god is it terrifying to know such a thing is inside me.

The first thing to note is that there is no chance of surviving that since there was literally nothing but blood and mush left of the boys who were exploded. Yes, boys, because there were some other slaves doing their jobs nearby and they also got their chips activated, which could mean a couple of things. The foremost is that there could be a single activator since this is such a large colony, that activates every chip within a certain distance since having an individual one for even just whole blocks would take too much preparation and time.

The second thing is that the explosion is bigger than it looked, which activated the other chips and caused a sort of chain reaction, but the distance between the bodies and the splatters of pieces from them show that this definitely shouldn't be the case, as all of them had a similar pattern without a so-called "starting point".

The last one is that they only activated the one, and it sent a short and small pulse that activated the chips of the slaves around the originally activated one, but this also means that it could just be a much smaller scale of the first one that sends a shockwave through the masses. Though this has another big flaw, and that is the fact that if there are just enough slaves within distance they could cause enough deaths to practically wipe out the whole colony, and there are way too many slaves for that to be even slightly profitable. We're talking about the deaths of potentially millions, that's how big the colony is as a whole. Plus they could lose a lot of their guards in collateral, and that's definitely a no-go.

So now that I think about it, there is probably no merit in trying to find the chip activator since just destroying it could potentially backfire and it's definitely unable to be taken, either from size or trackability, so step 4 is going to have to change. Either way, that leaves us with the final step of the plan, and that is getting out of here. With the chip activator being a bust, honestly, it's brought the chances of survival even further down than they were because we don't know if there's a signal cutting off that will make them explode. The only problem in this part of the escape is a very small detail that we quickly found made this plan even harder.

"None of us know how to fly a ship." This line was the consensus of me, after gathering that all of us were too young when captured to know how to fly a ship, or in my case, I was brought here while in slavery so I didn't even have a chance.

"That's a very big problem. How in the hell are we going to get out of here if we can't pilot our escape vehicle?" AJ seemed exasperated, and for good reason. We would soon be enacting the plan and this was a big roadblock.

"Well we'll just have to wing it, I guess." This was Callista's input, and it was something I was considering as we were quickly running out of time. "We have to hope it's in Galactic Basic to understand even some of it, then maybe with our brains together we can find our way to another, hopefully, more friendly, planet."

And with those words, the final step had been set up for use, and we would hopefully get out of here. At least, that was how it was supposed to go. We had finally gotten back to our cell, all of us too anxious to even think about sleep, when loud footsteps could be heard as guards barged into our block 3 days ahead of schedule. I swear if there was a god of fate he would be grinning cruelly at us as the guards marched straight to our cell, yanked open our cell door, and started pulling Callista out of the cell.

This, of course, got us riled up as I charged at the guards… 'What am I doing?!' My careful to a fault and plotting side was screaming at me, yelling to stop what I was doing and just sit down so the plan didn't fail, but I didn't listen. I couldn't listen, because emotions I hadn't felt for the past 10 years welled up inside me, and they lined up with the feelings from the mining cavern the day I saved Callista for just a split second.

That was all I needed.

"NO!" Letting out an almighty bellow I didn't know I was capable of giving, I launched myself at the guard at a speed I knew I shouldn't be able to reach as a human and ripped his arm off.

Yeah, ripped it off. I shouldn't be that strong, but I did it. I couldn't process it though, because even though they were astonished at what I did, the guards were used to seeing big shows of strength from the slaves from multitudes of races. So with swift recovery speed, after I just tore off the armless guard's head, they quickly apprehended me, or at least tried to.

"Come at me then!" My sanity had been brought back in a wave akin to a freezing bucket of ice water once I saw just how many armed guards there were, but I could feel the strength still with me, so without giving them any time to think I jumped right at them, reaching the frontline in less than a millisecond before punching as hard as I could into the first guard that I saw, and that's where the bloodbath began.

Once my fist came into contact with his chest armor, which I believe is metal, it dented inwards followed by a loud bang and blood exploding out of his mouth and nose. Not letting up, I took the guard by the head and threw him into 3 other guards that were to my right, and watched them fly back into some bars behind them, making another loud bang. Before they fell to the ground, I was onto the next 4 guards to my left, instantly by their side as I threw both of my fists to the sides, feeling the crushing of rib bones as each guard flew away from me by the force of my punches. Before the other 2 guards could process what just happened, I leapt from my spot and planted my foot squarely on one guard's face, breaking more than just his nose as I pushed him away into the group of guards charging my way.

Hooking my ankle around the neck of the last guard as I am still in the air, I pull him harshly to the ground underneath me just as another guard rushes forward with his spear gun in hand. Dodging slightly to the right, I thrust my hand forward in a point as I pierced through his armor and chest, grabbing what I believe to be his heart, and grabbed his head as I pulled it out. Now with a lifeless guard in one hand, his still-beating heart in the other, and his friend's head underneath my foot, I look up towards the other guards, who were hesitating now that I had just effectively killed or knocked out 10 of them in only 7 seconds with purely my hands like a raving beast. My eyes shone a shine of bloodthirst, as the malicious grin I adopted along with all of the blood on me made me look like a lunatic.

Without saying anything, I threw the body of the heartless corpse into the still open cell containing my friends, crushed the heart in an explosion of blood, and stomped down hard enough to slightly crack the floor as the guard's head spewed brain matter everywhere in a 3-meter radius. In that moment of stomping, I felt a new surge of strength flow through my body, making me feel stronger.

I loved it.

All I wanted to do was kill them all.

I had forgotten why I was killing them in the first place.

All I wanted was to continue ripping out hearts and crushing skulls.

I can't remember the last time I had so much fun.

All of my worries seemed to leave me at that moment, as I leapt forward with speed they couldn't quite catch with their eyes. "Peekaboo~" As I said this, I reached out and ruthlessly gouged out the eyes of the guard nearest me, before tearing off the front portion of his skull and shoving that down another guard's throat. Pure ecstasy flew through me as I saw the terrified expression on the faces of the guards, which only stood to make my strength grow and my lust for their suffering and destruction stronger by the second.

The next guard got both of my arms through his torso, as I tore him in half with pure strength and spartan kicked his friend behind him, caving in his chest as he knocked down 7 guards on his flight path backward. Holding each half of the Toydarian body I had torn in half, I threw them violently towards two groups of guards where they were showered in the blood and organs of their dead ally before being knocked out by the pure impact force given from the body.

Thrusting my hand backward, I stabbed it through a guard I didn't even know was there and pulled out his intestines and used them as a whip against two more guards, making the intestines blow apart from the impact, and the guards hit were given large lacerations despite the fact that intestines are not sharp nor hard in any way.

By now there was a slowly building pile of corpses around me, and I was quite proud of it. I was happy for the first time since Caroline's death, until of course, I looked toward a certain cell. In there I saw the faces of my friends, those I've spent the last 3 years with, the people I was willing to risk my life for even the slightest chance to save, and they were looking at me like I grew a third head, as just two wouldn't satisfy the look they gave me. I stopped, my malicious grin slowly left me as I locked eyes with Callista, and I saw what looked like terror in them. Tears could be seen falling from her eyes as she seemingly searched for any sign of humanity left inside me, and all I could do was stare back, seeing not just Callista, but Caroline.

I saw a terrified Caroline, one that would have seen how I acted for the 7 years after her death and the 3 years I've spent here, I saw her pained expression, and it hurt more than anything I've felt for the past 10 years. I had let her down. I had changed. I am no longer fit to be called her fiance, much less the father of her child. I'm not even fit to be called human in those eyes, and I couldn't take it anymore. Tears slowly started coming out of my eyes as I felt my strength fade, falling to my knees as the guards surrounded me, blocking my line of sight of Callista. And with that, I fell unconscious, unaware and uncaring of what was happening around me.