Crusader King

The crying of a small, three year old child covered in blood violently ripped Cades out of his shocked state.

He was inside a warp-train, a kind of capsule that uses teleportation gates to travel through an interplanetary system and consequently get from one planet or dimension to another.

While looking at the small child with once white wings, that were now more red than white, he once again began to get lost in his thoughts about how he got here.

Half a hour ago he was just flying home as he had always done, but then suddenly everything went dark and he heard a deafening boom, which made even his ears vibrate.

Right after that, weirdly grotesque monsters suddenly began showing up.

The monsters had black skin and grotesque, black pulsating muscles, they had deformed limbs and some even had a kind of slimy goo dripping out of every opening of their body.

They had glowing yellow eyes. Nobody had any idea from where they had come.

Cades had fallen down because of the loud explosion, was barely able to retain his consciousness and was attacked by three of them.

.

.

.

One of the creatures, a 2 meter tall humanoid being with three arms, two on the left and one on the right, all of which were grotesquely pulsating, deformed and had asymmetrical muscles on them attacked him, it had sprinted towards Cades and tried to punch him down with its muscles.

Luckily Cades was able to evade.

Once he evaded he cast a fire spell to burn the monster.

In his hand a tiny ball of condensated flames build itself up and exuded a roaring sound.

He shot it towards the monster which was consequently put on fire and screamed in agony while it's oily skin was visibly making the flames even stronger.

While it was burning Cades picked up the carving knife, a small especially sharp "dagger", he had with him to use in artificing ,and killed it by cutting into it's neck.

The first creature fell to the ground, dead, but a second one, this time with four arms attacked him from behind and Cades was punched towards a tree.

Cades, wounded because of the attack from behind, was barely able to evade the second, and escape into the air.

Gaining a higher position he had a few seconds to assert the situation and saw that the monsters were everywhere.

Everything was burning.

The house was completely destroyed.

"no..."

One could not describe exactly what cades was feeling right now.

He could not feel anything.

He saw what he had feared.

His mother laid there, on the ground, it seems like she had been burned alive in the living room.

His father had more luck, he had survived the explosions that rained down everywhere, but still, he had been mauled to death by some of the monsters that were still feasting on its flesh.

Their bodies were still wet of blood, though the mothers much less so.

Time seemingly stood still for Cades, but then his heart began to cramp.

He had to kill them.

He had to.

He had to get away.

He ran away.

He had to run away.

He had to get away from this scene.

Cades had lost his family instantaneously, he had lost everything.

But he knew that he had to survive.

Cades flew away as fast as he could, towards the nearest warp-train.

While heavily breathing he flew as fast as he could, each movement of his wings being akin to torture.

After an entire hour he barely made it to the warp-trains.

They were situated far away from most cities in case that a enemy city invaded, luckily for Cades, though one can not really talk about luck in this situation, he lived particularly close to them.

The warp-trains were inside a large building that was once a beautiful example of ehetrian architecture, it had been a big wooden hall.

It was mostly filled with warp-trains looking like big, metallic, dome-shaped structures with a single door to enter them and a carousel of circular glass windows surrounding it on the sides.

Now it was burning.

The building was filled with all manners of screaming people with Cades luckily having arrived early and being able to push himself through the huge, dense mass of people running from the fire and the unknown monsters

Cades couldn't recognize anyone, the faces were all bloodied and often enough also without much hair, as it had been burned away, others were completely wet with water, probably to extinguish the flames dancing on their body.

Cades was being pushed from all sides and barely managed to get into one of the warp-trains.

Yet, he was brought back to the present as the mother of the young child picked it up, swung it over her shoulders and patted it on their back to calm it down.

She, the mother was covered in blood, just like the little boy was.

The boy was not the only one that was screaming and crying, most of the people here were, there were some that even lost parts of their body, Cades saw bloodied stumps where wings, arms or hands should've been.

Everything was chaos, there was no order.

Cades even saw a wounded warrior with a big sword but only one arm.

However, no one seemed to have any idea where this warp-train was headed to because of said chaos.

Cades broke down as well after all of the adrenaline had finally left his body.

The fleshy wound on his back caused a stabbing pain everytime he even just took a breath, and yet he just sat there staring at nothing, thinking about nothing.

Suddenly a thumping noise resounded from outside of the warp-train and a big dent appeared on the outer wall.

After the noise repeated itself and the dent consequently became bigger every time, it ruptured and it became visible that a monster was trying to force it's way into the train from outside.

Once the monster finally became visible the people began to scream even louder, however, at that very moment the 10-minute charging period of the warping train was over and it tried to move onto the next planet.

The monster, a kind of giant red land octopus, was ripped apart, with the innards being spread on top of the screaming mass, and yet the worst was still to follow.

When the pod tried to teleport to the next planet it failed and all those that were inside were violently send out of it.

Once again everything went dark for Cades.