Golem Warriors

Elfan Nazis Side Story

Tires blasted off the front axle, sending the dune buggy soaring into the sky, its driver and passenger screamed in vain, as their cries were drowned out by artillery and bombastic explosions. Death happened as they landed on an allied buggy, sharing the same colors of war, incinerating them both as their fuel tanks combust, engulfing them in skin melting flames. 

Roasted skeleton remained in the ruined wreckage, as the battle continued on the Doomsday Highway; a sun bleached carnage ridden ground of unsanctified murder. 

Swastika rose high into the sky, above the battlements of the stone and grafted metal bulkhead of some pre-cataclysmic era. Machine Gun turrets fired decimating shrapnel at the advancing raiding party. Six dozen vehicles of war were either wrecked beyond functioning or obliterated in the firing zone. 

The gnomish invaders in their sand buggies equipped with front facing turrets, bulky tanks, and one-man jet powered speedsters were overwhelmed by those they thought helpless. Over the radio a voice of the raid commander cried out from his viewing position thirty miles away, “Fall back! Fall back! It’s a trap! A trap!” Before he could repeat his frantic command, the last tank left was shelled into scrap by a barrage of cannon fire. 

His entire war party was wiped out, those that abandoned their dead vehicles were pursued by motorbike scrappers, who sped off on their motorcycles wielding swords and morning stars to make sure none survived the assault. 

The blood, fire, and death the gnome warlord saw all through his telescope, the radio he communicated with went to static, as his attendant was the only one of his men to survive. 

“Gifter, how could this have happened?!” He used every fighting culpable man in his clan to launch the assault and was dismayed to watch how they were all eradicated. Then he remembered the intel he received, the elves had apparently fallen ill to sand blight, and didn’t have enough men to man their defenses—that was obviously a lie. 

The gnome who sold him that bad information he was going to hunt down and murder. Then as if materialized by his thoughts, that same gnome arrived, with his pasty pinkish skin, and shadowy eyes, the scoundrel had a mischievous grin on his otherwise apathetic face. 

“You!” accused the warlord. “You lied to me, you killed all my men!” Pulling out his Makarov pistol, he took aim, only for it to be shot out of his hand by an unseen gunman. Pinkish blood flowed from his half-shot off hand, as his attendant, the last of his men was shot between the eyes by the same hidden shooter. 

“Can I take this off now? It itches.” said the pasty face gnome, as he started to scratch pink flakes from his neck. 

“Might as well, the job is done.” said the voice of a dark silhouette coming out from a shroud of sand, from the incoming Doomsday Storm. 

Eagerly the traitorous informant peeled off layers of his skin, revealing a second skin, this one greener, almost scaly in texture. 

“You elf bastard!” cried the crestfallen gnome warlord, as he saw the large round ears of the gnome were pulled off, to reveal the pointed ears of his race's arch enemies. “We should’ve killed you all when we had the chance.” 

“You mean when we were slaves?” The silhouette walked out of the sand cloud and a towering elf stood there, he loomed over the gnome and even his accomplice, who still struggled with removing his disguise. “Sleesh hurry up and get the map from him, I don’t want it stained in his blood.” 

“Fuck off.” replied the bemused elf as he finally managed to get rid of the skin irritating clay he had to wear, and replaced his red gnome cap with his typical Nazi designed one he kept in his jacket pocket. “You can at least give me a chance to get out of that disguise.” he grumbled as he approached the gnome warlord, who was still nursing his wounded hand.

“Get away from me cretin.” however he was taken aback when Sleesh pulled out his switchblade. 

“You were saying?” The elf menaced the warlord with his blade, it was stained from blade, but still razor sharp from tentative attention to maintaining its throat slitting edge. Roughly he searched the gnome’s many pockets, grumbling to himself how “gnomes are so greedy, they need so many pockets to hide their ill-gotten treasures.” 

Finding some gold coins and an antique watch (that he took for himself), Sleesh did not find the map fragment. “I can’t find it in his jacket.” Sleesh then searched the gnome’s bags, as his taller accomplice stood before their captive, keeping his Mauser pistol aimed for a kill shot.

“Hurry up and find it.” ordered the taller elf, “we don’t want to be spotted by the fort's scouts.” 

Already the scavengers from the fortresses have nearly completed stripping the vehicles bare, as the scouts began to search for any remaining enemy forces. The ruse they played left little room for error, and Sleesh once again was holding up the proceedings, as he examined everything for their value, and not focused on their ultimate prize. 

“Damn it Sleesh, hurry it up, or I’ll leave you.” The tall elf didn’t make idle threats. 

“Just because you're taller Barabbas doesn’t mean you can tell me what to do.” The shorter elf made a rude gesture then went back in searching the gnome’s baggage. 

“Giver damn it—” Barabbas blasted the brains out of the gnome general, as his body slumped down into the sand. “—now hurry up or I’ll shoot off one of your ears!” The threatening command caused a surge of ire in Sleesh that had him raise his switchblade towards his comrade in an irate fit. 

“You don’t tell me what to do! Just cause you’re taller than me, and you get all the good whores doesn’t mean you can—!” as he was screaming at Barabbas, Sleesh was still searching the bags, and suddenly his eyes went hide from under the shadow of his hat. “—wait, I found it!” He pulled out leather scrolls that he unrolled to see it was the fragment they needed to find the treasure. 

Barabbas smiled widely as he lowered his pistol. “Good, now let’s get out of here before—” 

Sounds of gunfire sounded in the air, and a few bullets flew over their heads, as the scouts spotted them, and were shooting at them from an adjacent sand mound. 

“It's them!” called out one of the assailants as he rallied his comrades to them. “The traitorous pirates, Barabbas and Slush!”

An annoyed growl game from Sleesh as he heard his misspoken name echoed across the desert, and on every wanted poster that plastered his face. 

Despite wanting to fire off some returned fire for sake of his pride, Sleesh rushed to catch up to his accomplice, who with his long legs was outpacing him to their escape vehicle. Already he saw Barabbas climb the ladder grips of a massive leg that was buried in the rising sands. 

“Wait for me you bastard!” cried the diminutive elf, who just managed to launch his body onto the ladder grips before Barabbas started their Sand Golem. Scrambling up the ladder he squeezed through the automatic hatch, before it shut him out completely. 

Once inside the safety of the pilot cockpit, Sleesh brought his switchblade to Barabbas neck. “You were going to leave me behind…again!?” 

The taller elf smiled, his one eye had no fear in it, as he started the ignition on the golem, powering up the vespite crystal core that powered the bipedal vehicle. 

“I wasn’t going to leave you, you have the map after all. I only made it look that way to get your ass to move it, since you lag behind so often.” Barabbas took hold of the massive control rods on either side of the pilot’s seat, and pushed them forward, compelling the gigantic, behemoth of ancient old world technology to move forward. 

The sand golem, a semi-sentient slave, was at the command of its pilot, who would direct it into battle, or in this case into a strategic retreat. 

“Buckle yourself in Sleesh, we got trouble. Our former friends don’t take too kindly to our desertion.”

Hurriedly Sleesh went to his seat off into the spec-ops command console to the side, to give radar readings, and various data their sensors detected in the terrain. 

“Not a good Captain.” Sleesh miraculously changed to a elf of seriousness and battle experienced competency the moment he took the support role for his partner in piracy. “They don’t have any golems, but they have six tanks coming at our rear, and six bikers are going to our flanks, three one each side.” 

Smiling, Barabbas felt the anxiety of a risky battle fall over him as if he dove head first into an oasis of frigid water. Nothing both terrified and excited him as getting into a fight, even dominating a woman had little appeal compared to the undeniable thrill of militarized murder. 

Sleesh de-scrambled the radio waves of the Nazi Sand Troopers and put the audio on the speakers of the cockpit. 

“Damn it, they're using the golem they stole, we’ll have to cripple the legs before we can get at them.”

Hearing the details of their pursuers strategy for attack, Barabbas a well trained golem pilot knew the best counter measures, not only to achieve victory but to inflict maximum casualty to their enemies. Lumbering, nearly indestructible to natural forces, the golem, particularly the sand golem had only one weakness—the legs. 

However Sleesh having been an engineer in his previous career before piracy, he would work on repairing and enhancing the Elfan Reich’s golems. Despite being quite proficient, he was never permitted to alter the core design of the automaton. Since they hijacked one bound to its form by tightly packed sand pockets, it was key to keep the magnetized adjusters functional—but Sleesh made some key modifications. 

Unknown to their former comrades, the pirates had made the formerly labor oriented golem, into a machine of utter destruction. As the sands of the Doomsday Storm began to pick up, cyclones began to pick up, but the sand wasn’t moving about to the sways of the wind, they were being pulled to the golem. 

Body thickened as the grains of sand swarmed to it as if they were tiny insects, forming a behemoth that grew to nearly twice its size. The sand body was too thick and tightly compacted to be pierced by the harpoon guns that fired from its back by the tanks. 

“The harpoons didn’t stick, what is happening, is it growing?!”

The radio was abuzz with panic, before any of them could get a grasp of the danger. The bikers who were still speeding to the flanks didn’t realize they were being pulled in by the flows of the sand. Through their goggles they saw the silhouette of the gigantic golem as it tripled in height and bulk. 

Barabbas being instructed by Sleesh at the direction and distance of the bikers, heaved the controls to lift the golems arms. Flexing his arms, the tall elf forced the golem to expel its excess sand into a continuous stream of sand, that shot out with such strength it blasted the flesh of the bones of the bikers. 

Bikes deteriorating into fragments of metal were carried away by the sand streams, leaving only sand polished skeletons to be buried by the sands of the desert. 

Tanks seeing the attack through their viewers tried to retreat, as they tried to backtrack, their treads were jammed from the sand. Engines groaned, elfs swore, and before they could abandon their vehicles, they were sucked into a whirlpool of quicksand that sank them deep underground. Burying them alive in an unmarked tomb, as both Sleesh and Barabbas heard their last pitiable cries for help screech through the radio, before the signal faded into static. 

***

Cheering their newly obtained prize, the two pirates celebrated with a couple of mugs of frothy piss beer. In their hideout, hidden away from the outside world, safe from the outside sandstorm, Barabbas drank himself half-drunk, as Sleesh translated the map fragments. 

“Are you sure we got all the pieces?” The larger elf was skeptical at what he saw on the two pieces of the map. Simplistic, faded drawings of early civilization, and foreign writing that seemed to be unlike any map markers he had ever seen before. 

“Yes.” Sleesh was half-listening, as he used a battered translation dictionary to translate what was written. “I think I have it, this is the treasure map of someone named Mc…McDonalds!” 

Running his finger across the dotted patterns on the map, he pointed down on a drawing of a treasure chest. “There…” Sleesh looked up from his magnifying glass to show off his greedy smile to his cohort. “...that is where the treasure is, at the Hamburglers hideout!” 

After a few moments passed, and the rehydrated beer started to settle, they began to doubt the validity of the map they schemed and killed to obtain. 

Both of them sat in silence drinking their beer, as they came to realize more and with sobering clarity they wasted all their efforts on a children’s playmat at an extinct restaurant. 

Sleesh forcefully brushed the playmat onto the floor, and then drank down his ammonia tainted beer, trying to fight through his embarrassment. 

Sighing, Barabbas leaned back in his chair, and tried to think of something to say to dislodge the uncomfortable presence in their furnished, underground hideout. 

“Let’s just raid a gnome depot next time, they always have minerals, and at least a few slaves we can offload easily.” 

Sleesh leaned back in his chair, his face shielded by his hands. 

“Yeah alright.” the smaller elf agreed, as the two pirates drank away their feelings of inadequacy at their new chosen profession.