Hellmarine: They Shall Know Fear (Hellmarine: A Slice-of-Demon Military Sci-Fi Epic Book 1) by Virgil Knightley & Alphonse Fisk

Author:Virgil Knightley & Alphonse Fisk [Knightley, Virgil & Fisk, Alphonse]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eldritch Blade
Published: 2025-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

This was what Fred Miller signed up for when he enlisted in the Marine Corps: Fighting aliens. It was all people could talk about back in the day. Regular people on the street thirsted for the blood of “filthy xenos,” blaming them for all manner of things wrong in their small, petty lives. Miller knew otherwise, but he didn’t care. The everyday hypocrisy of people was his ticket off of Ceres and out from under the watchful eye of the civil authorities. When you were a Marine, you weren’t someone they fucked with—not unless you fucked up royally.

But there wasn’t a lot of that when he finally saw action. By then, the Demons had arrived, and it wasn’t at all the same. Incursions were mostly off of the regular person’s radar because they were mainly happening in the Outer Colonies where communication was shit. Entire platoons of Marines would be dropped onto planets, with only a fraction of them making it out alive, and no one knew anything about it. If you fell in a battle against the Malur, the Ghenzul, or even some Orc pirates, they sent a nice letter home to your mother with heartfelt condolences and maybe a medal for your valor. If you fell in battle with Demons, everything was classified, and your family might never find out what happened to you—or even where your remains were.

Miller was fine with the idea of fighting for the survival of his species. He’d made his peace with that idea a long time ago. But he wanted people to know he was doing it. He wanted people to know that the short-tempered mining kid had made good. Miller had to prove to everyone back home that he wasn’t what they thought he was. He was better than that. It wasn’t just a loophole that kept him from serving life in a slam on Vesta. He’d earned it. He would keep earning it.

Wrapped in the experimental stealth technology of his armor, Miller watched from the shadows as the Hellmarine struggled with the Ghenzul piling onto him. He knew from the comms chatter that the Master Sergeant and the others had nearly all the survivors in the docking bay for evac. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Miller. He’d signed up to kill aliens, and now he was saving aliens from other aliens. Life was funny that way.

The Hellmarine, though. That guy was something else. As much as Miller hated the idea of someone created to replace them on the battlefield—to be better than them—he couldn’t argue with the guy’s decision. It was the kind of thing people sang songs about in ancient times. He’d elected to throw himself into the fray solely as a means to draw the attention of the enemy away from the survivors. Never in a million years would Miller have been so quick to come to that conclusion.

Miller was torn. There was nothing stopping him from skulking by and getting to the Shotgun Opera before it left the hellhole of an alien ship behind to be scuttled.

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