'There is no time that I feel alive as much as I feel it in battle'

The thought crossed Alecto's mind as he strode proudly across the battlefield, his shiny, black obsidian armour and enormous cape made him look like a lesser deity to the soldiers around him. And they did swarm around him, aiming at the enemy and firing their gauss rifles. They were the fodder in this fight.

Alecto strode to the front line, a ragged barricade of overturned cars in the middle of the street. Soldiers fired relentlessly, sending blazing, red streaks of fire at the enemy, the Outsiders that hopped relentlessly toward the barricade. They were huge and tendriled, froglike beings that writhed and oozed forward. Deeplings, the first wave. Each was pathetically weak, but they came in ridiculously overwhelming numbers. Several were hit by pulse fire, and vanished into clouds of oily smoke, as all Outsiders did when they died.

Alecto could feel nothing more than complete exultation as he walked forth. The Deeplings had no ranged weapons to speak of, so he would be safe from fire. He looked down, as his cybernetically enhanced, bodysuit wreathed feet carried him to the top of the barricade, and couldn't help but feel pity for the soldiers around him. They would know nothing more than the paltry existance they had known for so long. They would never know the power Alecto, as a Black Sun Adept, wielded every day of his life. Still, he thought, it was for the best. The Black Sun Order did not take in weak-willed cannon fodder. They excepted only the finest children. Perhaps, thought Alecto, I will show them some of my power, to show them the lives they so brazenly reject. They think us brainwashed fools, but in truth, the Black Suns were the true fighters in this war, not the pathetic, neurotypical meatshields.

His cape swirled behind him dramatically, as Alecto began focusing Starflame, the energy from the same unknown planar spheres his star-spawned foes had come from, and drew it into him. The wind picked up, and the cape was flung back violently, though not by the wind, and rather the excess psychic energy Alecto discharged into the earth. His eyes crackled with pure, white lightning, far too bright to look at directly. See what you have forsaken, human dogs, he thought, feeling the energy build up within him, hightening to such intensity that small bolts of lightning crackled around his fingertips. When he felt the energy had been built up too far for him to hold in, he released it forward into the approaching Deeplings.

A collumn of pure, elemental flame, drawn from the white-hot heart of the stars that illuminated the depthless night of space exploded forth from Alecto's fingertips, obliterating the entire section of freeway in front of him and reducing any deeplings in its path to subatomic particles. So intense was the blast as to be colorless, it also left those untrained eyes of the soldierfolk blinded and stunned for several seconds. Alecto, uncaring waved his gloved hands and swept the fire upward, like talons of lightning raking across the road and finishing off the remaining Deeplings. he smiled down at the blinded, stunned footman and smiled mockingly. For all their jeers and jabs, for all their infuriating little words and thoughts, Alecto and his brethren had power. More power than most could hope to see in their lives, the Black Sun wielded every day. He stepped down on the road, ignoring the oily black clouds still evaporating from Deepling corpses.

The battle was won, though the Planar War was far from over. Without waiting for leave from the commander of the unit, Alecto walked behind the garrison of still moaning, still partially blinded men. Drawing Starflame into him, he released it slowly into reality, bending space and time, and folding himself into the aether. An instant later, the soldiers would wake up, wondering what had happened. they would joke about what had happened, and would jest about a Black Sun stepping into a shower and electricuting himself with his own power and so on. None would be thankful at all. Still, the war woulf continue, and the Outsiders would pour from their world. And wherever humanity was threatened, their hateful protectors, the Black Sun Order would be there to protect them, as always.

For the right price of course.