Delphi had no problem reading this second telepathic blast, it was so huge and loud.

     He had never felt hatred so strong before.

     And now, along with that hurricane of mental anguish, came images. Memories. Dreams. Fantasies. 

​     He now knew the name of the enemy he faced.

     Tika.

​     How he knew that, he had no idea. 

     Her parents had Tika with them as they moved from place to place. Never enough food. Never wanted. Years and years.

     Then Delphi saw the Criolin. 

​     The Criolin.

     They'd never known a moment of war in their several millennia long  history. They evolved on a planet rich with nutrients and ore.

     No bigger than a housecat. Furry as a puppy. Smart, though. Telepathic, it was rumored.

     Easy prey, it seemed.

​     When discovered, several predatory species arrived to plunder.

     The Azure also arrived. To defend? With the Azure, who ever knew?

     Whatever. The Blocal dropped a biological plague on the planet.

     The Criolin were wiped out within a year, after which several races fought to seize the planet that remained.

     The Blocal were not among those races, however.

     One month after dropping that plague, every Blocalian citizen died...

     at the exact same moment...

     wherever they were in the multiverse.

     Examined, nothing physically wrong could be found with any of them.

     Nothing like that in the history of the multiverse had ever happened before or since. 

     Investigations followed. Nothing ever came of any of them. 

     They just died, every single Blocalian. 

     Just like that.

     The Criolin debacle sat at the exact center of Tika's telepathic blast.

​     Delphi surmised the rest. 

     The Azurian couple. The parents of the child.

​     They were somehow involved with the conflict. 

​     Afterwards, they became outcasts. 

     They came to dwell in The Cellars.

​     They dwelled in the Cellars, and they stayed strictly away from everyone else, and they trained their child to be an Azurian warrior without armor in what they considered to be a savage land. 

     From that moment on, Delphi felt he had no other purpose, other than running Hrrm's Hive, than to track that child down and kill it, whatever it took.    

     Egri VS. eleven year old child. 

     The mere notion should have made Delphi chuckle.

​     He did not.

CONTINUE