Somewhere in the Shadow Dominion's Imperial War Room, a room so vast and cold it felt like the void of space itself, the Emperor slammed his fist onto the holographic table. The table, which had just been displaying a 3D model of the warship Aetherion had sneezed away, shuddered and flickered before stabilizing.
"That sneeze… that sneeze destroyed a warship. A warship! Do you people understand the implications?" The Emperor's voice, a high-pitched squeal of pure, unbridled fury, echoed off the crystalline walls. The implications were clear: every single piece of military might the Dominion possessed was, at its core, utterly useless.
The room was silent, filled with a gathering of the galaxy's most feared generals and tacticians, all of them standing with their heads bowed in shame. A single general, one with a particularly unfortunate and itchy throat, risked a small, nervous cough. The Emperor's eye twitched, a tiny muscle spasm of pure, concentrated rage. The general immediately stopped breathing.
"Fine," the Emperor said, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous growl. "Brute force has failed. It is time for a more... surgical approach. Send the Dread Talons."
A collective gasp swept through the room. The Dread Talons—the deadliest assassins in the known galaxy. Trained from birth in the dark arts of stealth and murder, they were ghost-like figures who could kill a man with the shadow of a thought. Their weapons were forged in the heart of black holes, their armor cloaked in a permanent field of anti-light. Their mission, now burned into the mind of every single person in the room: assassinate the man called Aetherion.
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Meanwhile, on a bustling, high-tech street in the city, Aetherion was completely unaware of the cosmic murder-plot against him. He was lounging on a park bench, humming a tune from a show he'd been binge-watching. His prize money from the tournament, a frankly ridiculous sum, was gone. All of it. Spent on what he considered to be a necessary investment: a truly magnificent array of galactic sandwiches.
But the sandwiches had run out. His stomach, in a betrayal of the highest order, growled with a profound, aching emptiness. "Ugh… wish the delivery guy would hurry up…" he muttered, staring at the screen of his phone, which showed a small icon of a spaceship slowly approaching his location.
Just then, a shadow fell over him, a shadow so complete and unnatural it seemed to drink in the light of the sun. He looked up to see five figures in black armor, faces hidden behind masks shaped like screaming, tormented skulls. Each one held a weapon that hummed with a quiet, menacing energy and seemed to drink in the light, leaving a void-like distortion around its edges. They were the Dread Talons.
Aetherion's eyes lit up, not with fear, but with the joyous anticipation of a man about to eat.
"Oh, you guys are from 'Galaxy Eats'?" he asked, a genuine smile on his face. "That was fast! You must have taken a wormhole or something. Did you bring the triple-meat cosmic sub with the meteor-spice sauce?"
The five assassins exchanged a moment of confused, silent glances. Their leader, a tall, imposing figure whose aura screamed death and misery, tilted his head slightly. He had been trained to deliver a monologue of pure, concentrated dread before the killing blow. Instead, he found himself improvising.
"…Yes," he hissed, his voice a low, terrifying growl. "We brought… the sauce."
They moved in, each a silent, deadly phantom. The first assassin vanished into thin air, a master of stealth and void-based travel, and reappeared directly behind Aetherion, his dagger—a weapon that could sever a soul from a body—raised high.
Aetherion, feeling a vague pressure in the air behind him, stretched out his back, letting out a satisfied yawn. As he did, his elbow casually swung back, accidentally connecting with the assassin's face. The impact was not so much a blow as it was a complete and utter violation of physics. The assassin shot straight up into the atmosphere, a screaming, armor-clad dot that would eventually become a very fast-moving satellite.
Two more assassins, a pair of twins who specialized in coordinated attacks, charged from the front, their daggers a blur of deadly motion. Aetherion, completely absorbed in the task at hand, began to unwrap his sandwich, the crinkly sound of the paper a stark contrast to the death that was hurtling towards him. A casual flick of the wrapper, a careless motion to get it out of the way, sent it fluttering through the air. The tiny, harmless piece of paper, imbued with the raw, chaotic power of Aetherion's will, sliced through both assassins' void-weapons like a laser, leaving them standing there with useless, half-blades in their hands.
The leader lunged next, the most skilled of them all. His blades, an intricate lattice of star-forged metal, whirled with enough speed to create a miniature hurricane. Aetherion leaned back, a casual, lazy motion, to take a massive bite of his sandwich. The leader's strike missed by a hair's breadth, a fatal miss that instead of hitting a man, hit a parked hovercar. The car, unable to handle the impact of such a powerful attack, exploded into a shower of confetti and a puff of harmless, bubble-gum-scented smoke.
The last assassin, a master of stealth and observation, watched the carnage unfold with a growing sense of dread. The elbow, the sandwich wrapper, the hovercar confetti—this wasn't a mission, it was a joke. He dropped his sword, a weapon capable of carving a planet, and raised his hands in surrender. "This isn't worth my paycheck…" he muttered, turning and bolting down the street with a speed born of pure, primal fear.
Aetherion, completely oblivious, shrugged, chewing his sandwich. He looked at the smoking hovercar confetti and the fleeing assassin. "Man, delivery guys these days are so jumpy…"
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Far away, in the Emperor's palace, a messenger knelt before the throne, his voice trembling with a mixture of fear and disbelief. "Sire… the Dread Talons have failed. The report… it states they were defeated by a man with a sandwich."
The Emperor's eye twitched again, a violent, almost seizure-like spasm. He looked at the messenger, then at his generals, all of whom were now trying very hard to be invisible. "Fine. If assassins won't work… we'll just put a bounty so high on his head, the entire galaxy will hunt him down." He let out a maniacal, bitter laugh. "Let's see him eat a sandwich with a trillion bounty hunters at his door!"