In the starry sky above System #81, the thousand Ancient Star-Eating Fire Worms were only five miles away from the gleaming brass pipes of Sun #81’s Thermostat Jacket.
The heat radiating from their five-hundred-mile lava bodies was so intense that nearby asteroids melted into glowing red droplets. At the front of the pack, the largest Fire Worm—an eight-hundred-mile alpha beast with three rows of spinning diamond teeth—opened its circular maw wide enough to swallow an entire mountain range and lunged straight at Main Boiler Valve #1!
“Bite it off!” Great General Jin Xiao stood atop his golden flagship chariot, swinging his Rank 8 Sun-Cleaving Halberd as he laughed across the sector-wide broadcast channel. “Tear that ridiculous brass tea-kettle off our sacred star! Let the two hundred billion worms on the planets below watch their last hope get chewed into scrap iron!”
Behind Jin Xiao, the 100,000 Elite Golden-Crow Chariot Warriors banged their bronze spears against their shields in a deafening rhythm:
“SWALLOW THE SUN! FREEZE THE MORTALS! SWALLOW THE SUN! FREEZE THE MORTALS!”
Down on the eight planets of System #81, billions of families huddled around their newly installed public heating radiators, watching the sky-projection in terror as the monster worm’s jaws closed to within five hundred yards of the brass pipe.
