The song itself is death, to hear it means you're gone
2021-01-01
Humanity’s discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life once and for all settled the debate of what role-playing game class is most powerful. The Bard was the most powerful by far, capable of annihilating thousands with a single power chord played on an amped-up electric guitar.
Upon discovering the incredible lethal potential of music against a new unknown alien force, humanity began doing what they do best: Genocide under the guise of protecting themselves.
In many wars, few remember who threw the first punch, but in this case, despite what the humans claim the humans threw the first punch. Or rather, strummed the first chord. A concert meant to display the highest and most iconic forms of human culture began as a testament to a beautiful peaceful co-existence. The concert instead turned into a bloodbath in a split second as the third chord of the first song’s solo caused massive hemorrhaging in the brains of the alien audience. By the time the guitarist opened his eyes all, he saw before him was a mountain of corpses as the air filled with the sweet smell of fresh death.
The galactic community was outraged at what became known as “Night of the Thousand Screams”. This was seen as a blatant act of war against all life in the galaxy and so the galactic community voted in favor of eradicating humanity.
Humanity within the early days of the war found traditional forms of warfare ineffective with missiles being unable to reach their targets and regular soldiers being quickly outnumbered and outgunned. The tides of war quickly turned with the introduction of Deathsinger Squadrons. These were specialized troops consisting of musicians trained to perform a specialized type of music known as a Deathsong. The Deathsong was a combination of Power Metal and Electro designed specifically for maximum lethality against alien targets.
Soon the losses began mounting and it was plainly clear that the galactic community was losing the war, so they made a bid for peace. As part of the treaty, humanity officially acquired the planets they had now made near desolate, by right of conquest.
Many of the now former Deathsingers settled on those planets, but some few found sharing a planet with other humans unfitting of their position and continued personal conquests, subjugating entire planets under threat of near-instantaneous genocide.
On each of these worlds, now known collectively as Dread Worlds exists some variation of the same poem known by nearly all of the inhabitants. This is an approximate translation of one of them:
“Never wonder about the sound of the Deathsong.
The song itself is death, to hear it means you’re gone.
Never peer into the eyes of the Deathsinger.
For those eyes are that of a killer.”
Written in 2021 for the prompt “Humanity is introduced to the galactic community. We welcome our neighbors with a concert but at the first guitar riff everyone dies. Turns out hearing is super sensitive across the galaxy and only a few species can survive music and musicians suddenly become humanity’s most fearsome warriors.” by u/Dogibacsi in r/WritingPrompts