Kierkegaard entered the battlefield alone.
He did this, sometimes, when he was feeling frisky. He didn’t like hiding behind his troops. He didn’t need to hide behind his troops. They were virtually always inferior to him anyway, both in magical power and in raw strength, and the few that managed to impress him… well. Those few usually wound up on the worst battlefields, destined for a terrible, tragic death, all in the line of duty.
“Line of duty,” Kierkegaard muttered to himself, stretching his stubby penguin arms. “Line of duty, line of doody. Heh. Shit jokes. I’m a class act.”
He was standing on a blasted plane, a hotly-contested battlefield on the borders of the Indy Plains that the Non and the Imperium had clashed over for almost three months. He’d sent his rawer troops here dozens of times for battle experience, knowing the stretch of bland land was of little strategic value… or at least pretending it was of little strategic value… but now, with a massive army waiting three kilometres to his back, Kierkegaard wanted it taken.
The Imperium’s blockade on the other side of the gorge, perhaps six hundred soldiers strong, watched him from a distance. The penguin hoped at least one of them had shit themselves after seeing his olive green general’s uniform in the far distance.
Shrugging his jacket aside and placing his cap atop the heap of sleeves and buttons - he didn’t want to ruin his favourite uniform, after all - Kierkegaard began to walk. His sharpened nails clicked quietly against the ground as he approached the thin land bridge separating one side of the border from the other, a dangerous bottleneck the Imperium had somehow managed to guard against some very nasty attacks.
Kierkegaard understood the value of bottlenecks in defensive strategy. He also knew they were useless against him.
The first cannons on the Imperium’s side of the gorge went off the moment Kierkegaard came into range. Dozens of ill-aimed cannonballs whistled through the sky towards him, their sheer volume enough to insure his immediate eradication. Smiling, his kinked moustache curling up to tap his bill, Kierkegaard raised a hand -
- and, almost immediately, a field of green-and-black holes tore open the sky above him. Kierkegaard grunted, pausing a moment as he focused on forming as many holes as possible. Then, satisfied that he’d caught the majority of the cannonballs, he pointed his other hand -
- towards the Imperium’s lines.
The mass of soldiers didn’t know what hit them. One moment they were staring across the battlefield at him, no doubt wondering what the hell he’d just done to protect himself; the next they were running and screaming, their protective dirt mounds, ramshackle stone blockades, and finely-beaten armour abruptly smashed by a cavalcade of iron balls from above. A network of green holes, matching the portals above Kierkegaard, floated happily above the Imperium’s heads.
All but one of the portals vanished, and a new one appeared in front of Kierkegaard with a dramatic click of his fingers. Licking his bill, Kierkegaard stepped inside, his squat penguin body abruptly stretched to titanous proportions as he moved through his own, personal section of codespace. Watching the stars pass in the distance, Kierkegaard smiled at the chill tingle of the backside of the universe.
Another portal loomed in front of him, looking down at the battlefield on the other side of the gorge. Kierkegaard slipped through… but he did not shrink as he crashed down among the panicked soldiers. His legs as thick and strong as stone pillars, his arms strong enough to lift a whale, his skeletal face as bone white as the snow he knew was coming within the week, Kierkegaard fell out of the hole in codespace as a horror.
“Line of doody,” the massive Non whispered, enjoying the wriggle of dying soldiers under his veiny toes. “Line of duty, line of doody. Get it, fellas? Oh, stop screaming already.”
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