Ushkram registered the sluggish passage of time in the present moment with a sort of detachedness. He could barely, faintly register that everything happened too quickly for him to rationally process through.

He hadn't the wherewithal to register the powerful metal arm of the demon colliding into him. In one quarter heartbeat, he had been swept effortlessly out of its way. Mere moments prior, the yhnktare soldier stood in the machine's path, his detachment long having fled--taken to the skies in hasty retreat. Ushkram had remained on the ground, alone, intending to draw the attention of the belligerent to himself. Evidently, the maneuver had worked: he emptied his rifle into the chest of the towering humanoid, prompting it to turn on him instantly; it moved in a single fluid motion to strike the soldier, effectively throwing him a dozen feet off to the side before he remade contact with the ground.

The yhnktare, ragged and beautiful, tattered and torn, looked to have been molded from the earth he slumped helplessly against. Dazedly, he attempted to right himself, to shove his useless body back onto its feet. The warlord before him, stygian and unassailable, was carved from his nightmares. Sharp lines and dark steel held ruby eyes that harbored a profound malice.

The yhnktare's umber plumage blended seamlessly into his sun-darkened skin. Flecks of sanguine iridesced magnificently across his membranous wings where the light struck them, serving to complement the deep earthen tones of his physique. There seemed to be so little natural light out that day. He couldn’t tell through the hazy skies whether or not the sun was obscured from smoke or cloud cover.

He licked about his lips, tasting nothing but the blood on his teeth and the bile in his throat. His thoughts reeled.

Nothing he had done mattered.

Ushkram, seething mad for his own helplessness, clutched his service weapon in a veritable white-knuckled grip. A dizzying cocktail of stress hormones and animal instinct coursed like liquid fire through his veins, causing his heart to feel as though it were trying to punch through his ribcage. He had been doomed to fail from the start, condemned to a meaningless death against an impossible enemy on a world whose inhabitants would not mourn him. What did his passion get him? What had his loyalty earned him? Why was he thinking

He had been subservient and unquestioningly loyal to Xor, immersing himself in the cultural values and norms of a society that othered him the moment he lost his flight. The whole entire world - as he now experienced it with the burden of disability on his shoulders - became an indecipherable and unscalable wall. What had once been a society he fit seamlessly into became an impossibly cruel, inaccessibly alien puzzle to him. For all intents and purposes it felt almost as though conspired to strip him of his remaining personhood, layer by layer, until nothing remained--until his only recourse was to throw himself into the maws of the walking apocalypse set on razing everything he had ever known to the ground.

He received no real pushback when he volunteered himself. Xor was willing to sacrifice such a wretch as himself, and he was equally willing to make the effort count. Ushkram would perish, and it would be with his head held high in Xor’s name. It was his only consolation, and it would have to count for something. This conqueror's rampage was a blessing in hideous disguise.

The sounds of a largely-useless battle continued to sound out all around the two of them for miles, in the form of mostly targeted assaults upon the warship languidly hanging in the sky; its own automated defensive systems making easy work of the mining colony's limited arsenal. Somewhere amidst Ushkram's roiling, spiraling breakdown, the towering harbinger spoke as it once more approached him. Its voice was grating, cacophonous--the fraying seams of Ushkram's mind were not yet loose apart enough to filter out its words from the rest of the devastation unfolding around him.

Nothing he had done mattered.

It had taken notice, then, that the yhnktare was not flying off. Ushkram realized it had taken notice because the construct had ceased merely observing him with its impassive, condescending bemusement, and instead began to advance upon him in earnest. The winged soldier could only begin to back away, stiff, almost rigid for the pain racking his body and near-stumbling in his backpedaling.

For only a moment was Ushkram able to still his trembling hands, and with whiplike speed and precision borne of necessity, the yhnktare brought to bear the sidearm once hidden in his uniform’s holster. He aimed, and fired into the chest of the machine with all the surety of a dead man walking. The sound of gunfire was swallowed up by the vast emptiness of a leveled city, in exactly the same fashion the robot's armor had rendered ineffective all the offensive power of the Xor colony.

He did not hesitate. The man’s training had kicked in, evidently, as he used both arms and a single eye to focus down the sights of his weapon. With the other, he steadied his keen gaze; he kept his arms tense but not so tense that they could not eat the shock of the inevitable recoil. The yhnktare inhaled; one single, sharp breath inward, and counted. Ushkram squeezed the trigger. He repeated the motion six times, and then seven. On the eighth, something seemed to shift in his thinking. His rationale crumbled.

The man’s arms dropped in front of him. He shrugged his shoulders and seemed to shake them loose of an accumulated tension before stopping partway through some new series of motions, either reloading the gun or inexplicably fiddling with it. It remained unclear, at least from the perspective of the enemy combatant--a combatant the yhnktare remained agonizingly, acutely aware was merely humoring him at this point. Ushkram stalled and stalled and stalled and--

He put the barrel to his head, looked the machine in the eyes, and then pulled the trigger.

Anxious, shuddering laughter bubbled up from nowhere and tore itself from his throat the moment the weapon failed to discharge. All of a sudden, it seemed, Ushkram's mind was set. He made his decision, and to the brief confusion of his audience, continued to laugh up at the terrifying visage of the warlord as he pressed the barrel of the gun to his temple even rougher than before. Click. Click.

Useless, futile clicks; nothing.

The silence was deafening.

Nothing he had done had ever mattered at all.