Xeena laid, skin burnt and muscles twitching. What had happened? She had penetrated the casing of Zafar’s helmet, but still he stood. The seared scent of flesh snapped her back to the moment she fell away. His suit had shocked her, somehow, and her muscles seized up leaving her immobile. Looking across the floor, Titus also laid, broken and battered. With his single functioning arm, he was desperately crawling towards the broken remains of Erohin’s Masslock rifle, desperate to wield it in spite of both his and the weapon’s shattered state. Little Stannock groaned in the corner, his legs twisted at an awful angle whilst Big Stannock had also fallen to the ground, shocked and writhing in agony.
It was only due to Xeena’s previous adaptations for increased neural sheathing that she could even think straight. Zafar had crouched to one knee as he tore away the translucent cover from his helmet, spiderwebbed with cracks, grumbling angrily.
“Stupid aliens. When will you learn that your position in the galaxy is in the ground?” His face now clearly visible, Xeena could make out the metallic mandible affixed to a fleshy upper jaw, grinding his teeth together. Strings of greasy hair trailed across his red face, puffed up in exertion and anger. “Time to put you all down.”
For a moment, it looked like the warlord was going to intercept the slowly crawling analyst, his one arm working frantically to drag him closer to the ex-bartender’s remains. Instead, Zafar turned and looked at Xeena. A sick grin split his face in half as he stood up and strolled over to her.
“Well, well, well. Not so nimble now, are we?”
Cracking his neck, Zafar raised up a heavy armoured foot, ready to send it down onto Xeena.
Was this it? No, Xeena refused to believe it. Not out of some sense of illusion that the current situation was not reality; Xeena’s pain and spasming muscles told her that much. No, there had to be a solution to this, there always was. Sal had turned her away when she failed to understand human social cues and she had solved that. When Starheart was at risk of being blown to dust from Erohin’s bomb, she had solved that with Sal. And when he tore his heart open for her to scrutinize, she accepted every part of him, from his weakness to his determination.
So, even when the end was above her, the light of the bridge obscured by the warlord’s foot, Xeena would not believe in such things. Her mind sprang back to the genetic adaptions that she had been working through as quick as possible. Why did they not fully match up? XNA was highly variable, but there had always been some structural issues preventing even the most efficient gene combinations from achieving their full potential. Even with all the code provided from the Reward, there was still something potent missing from the puzzle.
Almost as if the universe was answering her, from deep within herself, she felt something giving her a cue to adapt, to adjust, to grow.
<hr>
Elijah had just about had enough of the aliens. Unable to produce any outgoing messages after ‘Jeff’ had accidently broken the biological circuit responsible for that task, he had been forced to listen to the communications between Zeentach and Titus’ group like an invalid. Waiting for a new board to be constructed, he bit his lip to the sounds of Xeena and the others desperately fighting Zafar Ironskin, the bastard. Of all the people to be stuck in a room with, there were few choices worse.
When all had gone quiet, his heart sunk. No resounding shot or death rattle from the disgusting pig of a man had signalled the crew had been successful. Elijah hung his head. When a strange feeling overtook his senses, Elijah initially associated it with an incoming migraine from the overwhelming stress of the entire day and the emotional distress of losing his crew. Waving his hand around, he chalked up the faint blur effect of his digits to a headache. Beyond the throbbing within his skull, the afterimage gave him a similar feeling of discomfort to that of his last S-Jump.
Incredibly quick, lasting less than a few seconds, Elijah had a flash of a strange dream before he awoke in his tank on the upper officers’ deck. When he mentioned to his Keeper, the manufactured man couldn’t give him a straight answer and left him scratching his head like an imbecile. Now, Elijah felt that same feeling, albeit thrumming strongly through his entire body.
It was only when he decided to clench his hand that he noticed that it was not some aftertrail from his movement.
Instead, the shadowy outline of his callused fingers moved into a fist before he even made the move. His vision saw the hand moving before he actually did so.
<hr>
The feeling deep within Xeena was far more than an emotional response, it was as if her organs were twisting against her, trying to tell her something. Focusing on the feeling, ignoring the impending death above her, it was localized to two spots – one in her midsection, her digestive tract, and another… lower. It was, oddly, within her mimicked uteral tissues she had evolved to have intercourse with Sal. The response was not coming from her own cells directly but instead inside her internal linings she felt it reacting. Sal’s emissions were, somehow, her answer. In the past, she had joked with Sal about analysing his DNA, to which he seemed rather concerned about his genome being dissected so closely.
Now, however, she forced her body to breakdown and absorb as much information from his expulsions as possible. As if all the power of a star had erupted within her, the instant her genome made contact with Sal’s genetic code, she felt new bonds and connections being forced within in her genetic structure that had been lacking definition and support. Ribose structures twisting and bonding in between her segments of XNA, the key had found its lock and swung the sealed door open. Every series of genes that would have taken weeks or months to adapt to create proteins and other organic molecules morphed and evolved in seconds. With the last her energy, she dumped as much effort as she could into every new evolution she could think of.
Snapping back to reality, the warlord heaved downward, stomping with all his weight onto Xeena. The sound of Zafar’s whirring motors cut off with a thunderous clang. Confused, he lurched back to survey his work. Instead of the crushed pile of alien remains he had seemingly expected, Xeena crouched, skin sealing closed from the electrical burns in seconds, her skin hardened like diamonds.
“What… the fuck?” the once prideful clan heir spat, fear clenching his vocal cords like a noose.
Standing straight, feeling her muscles reform and achieve a density that exceeded the strongest of Delkars, Xeena flared her claws out. In seconds her injured form had recovered as a second wind overtook her deep weariness. Zafar didn’t waste any time before running forward to deliver a heavy kick. Xeena, reactions like lightning, sidestepped the swing and struck at the limb as it passed. To Zafar’s horror and Xeena’s triumph, her newly sharpened claws had sliced through the metal, biting deep into the internal mechanisms.
Attempting to steady himself as he stepped back, Zafar took a boxer’s stance. An exchange of blows rang out, with Xeena deflecting and occasionally matching his blows head on, his steel fists against her organic ones. Though her body internally screamed with every blow, her mass still limited by her stored bioenergy, the fact she could match the tank of a man was incredible. Big Stannock had recovered enough to scurry away from the fight, dodging the now flailing cyborg’s heavy backsteps.
After an especially quick trade of swings Zafar snapped out of his haze and quickly reached for his flechette gun, jumping backwards with the assistance of his thrusters. Xeena was on him in a second. With an outstretched arm, he levelled the weapon at her but quickly found himself retreating once more when Xeena split the weapon in two with a slash from her reformed tail. She had shaped the regrown tip into a curved, scythe-like blade.
Eyes lost in panic, Zafar drew his machete and switched tempo. Instead of charging in, he kept Xeena at range, using wide sweeps and thrusts to keep her back. She didn’t trust her newly grown armour to deflect such a weapon yet and instead weaved in and out of his unfocused slashes.
“Die! Die you bitch!” Zafar shouted, his voice a wailing cry.
Any composure the man once held had evaporated. Xeena cleaved out chunks of metal from across his exosuit, once even slicing his cheek open with a tail swipe as she danced about. His damaged leg limped when he moved, and the man’s bloodshot eyes struggled to follow her pirouettes and dodges around his swipes. After he overextended after a particularly unsteady overhead chop, Xeena surged forward and brought down all her strength towards his head. At the last second however, he leaned to the side, thrusters burning white. The effort was not wasted on Xeena’s part, however, as she severed Zafar’s right arm at the shoulder with her claw instead, thrusting deep before tearing the socket apart.
She intended to follow through with the momentum and spike him in the face with her tail but was blown back by a fast blow from his remaining arm. The thrusters on his remaining arm’s elbow had fired so strongly that the wall behind him had burned and melted away in an instant. Armour only able to block so much of the hit, Xeena was stunned from the strong attack, her internal muscles tearing as she flew back. Stomping forward, he delivered a train of hits that knocked her about as she felt the frisson of her initial superiority fading. A particularly rough uppercut knocked a number of teeth from her mouth, the triangular shards flying across the room, as her central neural column snapped. Battered and paralysed, she fell to the floor. As if he were reclaiming a prize, Zafar reached down and held her aloft in his bulky metal hand.
“That… was fun,” He panted. “If I capture some more of you spindly freaks, I’ll train one to fight for my amusement. Maybe I’ll even fuck it, if it does well.”
Wrenched into the air, Xeena could feel that her limbs were mostly broken, the nerves temporarily severed below the neck, and all her energy had been exhausted by the sudden transformation. The weakness, the inability to save oneself – was this how Sal felt when he couldn’t go on? When the darkness of the space took him on Tartarus Nine? What of her dreams, ever since she was a spliceling? The ship she had been born into was not affiliated with any of the major factions, just serving as a spot for Cambiar to drop off their offspring after birth for designation. Even then, staring into the endless darkness, she had always hoped that there was something out in the tinkling night looking back. Was it all for naught? In some ways, it felt like the time to give in had come. That would be, if Xeena didn’t think she would see Sal again.
So no, Xeena wouldn’t surrender. She still had skies to see with Salvador Vigino.
No matter what.
Although she had little energy left in her body, most of her biomass and stored resources burnt up in seconds to fuel her rapid transformation, and she couldn’t adapt anything below the neck, there was one last opportunity she could try.
“You know, Sal showed me a lot of things.” Xeena croaked out.
“What? Who?” Zafar cocked an eyebrow, seemingly intrigued.
“He showed me that you have to fight for what you want, even if it seems impossible. Like a scar, sometimes the pain never goes away, but you learn to live with it.”
“What are yo-“
“But the most important thing he showed me?”
Zafar cocked his head slightly, bringing her face closer.
Xeena opened her jaws wide, revealing a long, black tendril, dripping with fluid and tipped with curved fangs.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“Sal showed me Alien.” She extended her digestive tentacle, strengthened and dripping acid, tearing straight through Zafar’s exposed head and out the back of his skull. Whipping the organ about for a second or two, she retracted it, and the lifeless barbarian dropped to his knees. A second later, a gurgle sputtered from the spasming corpse as he tipped to the side and relaxed his grip on Xeena. Coughing on the floor, blood dripping from her inner mouth, she watched him for signs of movement.
After a few twitches, he ceased all motion. Zafar Ironskin was dead.
<hr>
Glinting in the ambient blue light, Protheus’ claw shot downwards. Sal felt death upon him.
Yet, before it made contact, Sal reflexively made a move to deflect it as best he could. He was surprised to see the claw was shadowed, echoey, as if it were some delusion of his injured mind. Even with his sluggish movements, he saw the attack and deflected it. Sal was shocked to see that as his arm came to where this odd vision was, Protheus’ limb had moved in that spot in a flash, previously relaxed as the alien rolled his shoulder. Even with his slow movements, he had pushed the lightning quick attack away by blocking pre-emptively.
Sal had seen the move, a strike that shot out as fast as a cobra, coming before the limb had even moved.
Another strike was deflected and lightly clipped Sal’s shoulder instead of impaling him through the neck. Protheus stepped back in confusion. A feeling of lightness, as if his bones were being strung up by puppet strings, encouraged the engineer to stand once more. Knees rock solid, Sal adjusted his stance and met the alien’s glare. Protheus shook off his puzzlement and went for a flurry of attacks. Before each one even came close to landing, Sal could see an outline of each stab or slash moving ahead of the actual limb. A shadowy copy, absorbing and refracting light around its edges, had stepped out ahead of Protheus and Sal could see when, where, and even with how much force the alien would attack with. His body screaming in pain, Sal could make blocks or parries with his forearms by knowing when to move and how best to divert every strike.
After a solid ten seconds of Protheus being unable to land a clean hit, the Rexia stepped back.
“What on Prime Nexus?” the alien said. “How are you doing this? You should be dead.” The alien shook his head. “No, you are dead, you just don’t know it yet.”
“You’re wrong. I have not… come this far… to die now.” Sal grunted out.
Gritting his teeth, he pushed on the strange feeling has far as it could go. Around him, the battlefield shifted and twisted. He saw his own echo moving in dozens of directions, each one ending with him freezing in place, a blow from Protheus killing him in a possible future. A few however, resulted in him either making distance or repositioning. One such shadowy Sal saw him kick down on a specific part of the floor, flicking something to the air. Sal could barely believe his eyes. Was his exhausted mind giving him fanciful illusion before his death? His gut told him otherwise; all across his body his nerves tingled with excitement, as if they were feeling the air for the very first time. Sal didn’t have time to consider the strangeness of the moment. He had a foe to fight.
Following the movements he saw last, like acting out some pantomime on stage, Sal lurched over to the exact spot and stomped hard. The area was right next to a gold and red coated Doctrine officer, his rank denoted by an emblem on his cape. Beneath the corpses and gore of the scene, he clipped the edge of a familiar syringe, the exact same sort that Mikhail had injected him with earlier, sending it flying into the air. Catching it with his injured hand, he slammed the auto-injector into heart, the icy-blue of the liquid within draining into him. The freezing, numbing feeling that spread out across his arteries brought relief to Sal as he grinned fiercely. If his muscles were weakened by the chemical, as they had been the last time he was healed, Sal couldn’t feel it. Instead, a resonation from within burned his muscles, urging him to move.
Picking up a crude blade from another corpse, he strode towards Protheus, who was watching in abject horror as Sal’s various cuts and gashes sealed before his eyes.
“Ready for round two?” Sal beckoned him closer with the two fingers on his mangled hand.
The enraged alien let out a growl as they clashed. Normally, Sal would stand no chance against such a terrifying opponent, one who was skilled beyond him in every facet of combat. But being able to see his every move seconds in advance, and knowing how best to respond, gave Sal plenty of time to counter and riposte every swing or thrust. As if his mind was soaking in more information than he could ever normally comprehend, he could feel the layout of the bodies around him without even looking. Acting by reflex, his body casually twisted and danced over the obstacles of the battlefield whereas Protheus stumbled and occasionally fell backwards in his frantic movements.
Even when the alien, frustrated with being put on the backfoot, reached down and activated a smoke grenade, Sal could feel the next attack from beyond the mist. Diverting around a thrust from a spearlike appendage, Sal grabbed the assaulting limb and severed it in a single motion. With his newfound vision, he could sense the trail of orange blood streaming away as black shadows followed by the Rexia’s cry of frustration and pain. Stepping beyond the cloud, he saw Protheus had backed onto the lowered catwalk leading to the control station, blades at the ready. Eager to finish it, Sal stepped closer.
A sudden palpitation of his heart stuck Sal dead in his tracks. All his bluster vanished as the shadowy echoes faded from his sight, the detail of foresight available to Sal fading by the second. Damn it, he had to finish this quickly. In a rush, Sal sprinted forwards and mistimed a deflection as all but the last vision winked away. Protheus, seeing his chance, pinned Sal’s left arm to the side and twisted his right up in the air, yanking Sal’s blade into the blue chasm. Trapped, and unable to move, the Cambiar spread his vicious smirk wide.
“Got you now, human. That was a clever trick, whatever that was, but you can’t escape your fate. You can’t escape me.”
The last image Sal had seen only gave him limited information to work with but nevertheless, he had bet it all on one shot.
With pride, Sal stuck out his chest. “Why don’t you prove it, xeno?”
Sal dumped as much venom as possible into the insult. Shaking with rage, Protheus lurched back and thrust at Sal’s chest, intending to impale the man with his claws. Once again, the alien was left shocked. His fingertips sunk into the man’s skin only an inch, cutting through his outer skin and muscle, but obstructed against a hard surface. With great strain, Protheus attempted to pull his hand free, but found the impossible presence of metal below Sal’s skin had hardened after the initial impact, holding the alien’s claws in place. Sal was right; his surgical plates had stopped the blow long enough to keep Protheus still. The last vision had not been some premonition of his death – it was his last chance for success.
The issue was the follow-up. Arms pinned, Sal had only one choice left.
Sal grinned madly, “If you still think humans are weak, then you’re in for a shock.”
With a flick of the switch, he activated the shock baton in his back pocket, the tip pressed against his own rear. Current coursed through Sal’s body, stiffening him straight. His lungs refused to work as his teeth crushed against one another, a stream of pained cries escaping his throat. Arms pinned in place, Sal’s balled his hands into tight fists, his nails cutting into his palms. In his haste, he had flicked the baton to ‘lethal’, a decision he was now seriously regretting. That was, until he saw his opponent.
Frozen in place, current running through Sal and into his foe, the alien’s eyes were inches from his own. The black orbs, filled with hate, stared daggers into him from beyond the translucent dome of its head as Protheus’ jaws snapped open and shut every millisecond. From the grim smell and violent shaking, the Rexia was suffering the electricity far worse than Sal. Hate streamed out of every drop of Protheus’ glare. Despite the agony, his eyes displayed no intention of relinquishing Sal; this was a battle of endurance to the death. The Cambiar’s skin began to sear and wrinkle around the joints as his claws bit into Sal’s skin. Eventually, the smell of burning consumed the air around them as both Sal and Protheus twitched on the spot, shouting in agony. As Sal’s skin was beginning to show red welts and burns, Protheus’ skin blackened – eyes still fixed on the human’s.
Just w Sal was reaching the limits of his pain, his hair burning at the tips, Protheus planted his head against Sal’s. Frantically twitching beyond his cranium plate, his optical marbles swivelled madly before they froze in place. Then, a moment later, they popped. One by one as dark-orange blood splattered the translucent surface and filled the ocular space, Protheus’ eyes burst open. A scream erupted from both of their mouths as the battery on the baton finally died out and the suffocating grip of electricity around their lungs was released. Skin smoking, Sal collapsed to the floor of the catwalk. Every inch of himself was pure suffering, a deep pain that stretched far inside him. He considered that the only reason his heart had not given out was from the aftereffects of using the nano-serum just before. Aching dreadfully, he looked up at Protheus. Having released his grip on Sal, the alien was leaning heavily on one of the guardrails, his once red and green skin charred into an awful black all over. If he had any eyes left, they weren’t visible beyond the splattered viscera of his head’s clear plating.
The alien’s breathing was a rasping heave, his chest shaking with every intake. With the last of his strength, Protheus attempted to stagger towards Sal but found himself positioned too far over the guard rail, and the shifting of his weight forced the bar to bend. Tipped over the edge, limbs flailing and tail attempting to coil at anything to support him, the extraterrestrial fell to his doom. A distant thud resounded as Protheus likely hit the core or some other structure in the shaft below. He was gone. With intense effort, Sal climbed to his feet and tried to ignore the smell emitting from his burns. Morbidly, it reminded him of burnt pork, the sort Sal smelt during the occasional self-serve barbeque on Starheart thanks to Abel’s substandard cooking skills. Mind awash with pain, Salvador lightly laughed to himself – the Rexia was gone, and he could fix the engine at last. Still, it was hard to disregard the inexplicable fight that had just occurred. Where on earth did he get such reflexes or predictive abilities from? Some deep part of Sal felt reminded of feeling he had after the last S-Jump, just as he had broken the water’s surface in his dream. It was something to consider, but not whilst the ship was at immediate risk of being burnt to a crisp.
Step by step, he made his way down the rickety catwalk, cables well out of maintenance and under strain from several stray gunshots and explosions from Protheus’ previous battle. He cast a gaze backwards, spying the prone figure of his friend. He hoped that Abel could hold on until he got back. Maybe there were other nano-serums lying about? For now, he had to focus. Below, he cast a gaze into the abyss. The roughly spherical shape of the main fusion core was covered in thousands of plating sections that could move around independent of one another, with special designated spots for the hundreds of control rods to move about and insert from. Occasionally, marking the Juhgler’s path to destruction, part of the raw inner lining would be exposed, releasing the blue pulse of light from within. Sal was very glad that the fusion engine below was not actually radioactive in pre-voidspace terming for the word – the term was often thrown around for non-atomic decay mechanisms out of a misplaced sense of tradition. Had this been an older Beria Class fusion engine, one that actually produced radiation, he would have melted into a puddle the second the door to the chamber opened up from the gamma rays.
Looking up again, Sal lurched his way to the small building attached to the catwalk. The spindly wires that held it aloft left Sal wishing for more support. His head throbbed badly following the almost unreal experience of his fight with Protheus, as well as shocking himself to a crisp. Eyes bleary, he entered the metal shack and struggled to read the output from the fusion engine. Based on the display screens littered about the room. the current situation was near fatal, but not unsalvageable. Rushing between two management consoles in the open-plan room, windows bleeding in blue light from below in increasingly fast pulses, Sal hurried to figure out what he needed to do.
A number of accurate movements were required to be issued but only set to be executed once it was prepared. Any mistiming in the control rod insertion could tip the now dangerously-close-to-discharge engine over the edge. Mind in a daze, he quickly ran the math, planned out a simple but reliable insertion procedure he had often used back on Tartarus, and input the sequence. Finger shaking, he pressed the ‘execute’ key and waited for he results. Would his time at the edge of CCH space, stuck on his own and studying the comparatively tiny engine be enough to save everyone? With the situation out of his hands, he hobbled over to the outer balcony of the building and leant over the guard rail to watch. Below, almost as if he were looking into a mechanic’s idea of hell, the shifting mass of plating around the fusion engine swivelled into position. Syraline ‘atom-stopper’ control rods swivelled around the mass, a crawling swarm of metal and glass.
To his overwhelming joy, he saw the programmed safety locks fit into place, the rods sliding into the core’s centre, and the pulsing of the light slowed. The only light remaining was the dull leakage from between the plates. Muscles drained of energy, Sal slumped down, and let out a howl of triumph. He had done it! Fuck yeah! The fusion engine was secured, and Fifth Spoke would live another day. As he chuckled to himself in fugue of hysterical victory, he looked over into the far distance.
His stomach dropped as he saw a black figure far away. Protheus clung to the side of the wall of the chamber.
“You! I do remember you!” The alien shouted, his voice at a fever pitch as it echoed about the chamber. His hand dug into the wiring of the vertical shaft, Protheus aimed a limb tipped with an organic firearm at his direction. “One of the first arrivals here. I saw the look in your eyes, in Titus’ eyes. You had already communicated with one of our own. Already, you had corrupted us. Your kind deserve nothing… nothing but servitude. Or better yet… to die in disgrace… at the hands of your superiors!”
With a scream taking all the Cambiar’s strength, he pulled his limb back before unleashing a spray of white, bony projectiles towards Sal as exhaustion took the Rexia. Limb still outstretched, Protheus fell, this time for good, his body tumbling far below to the core. Sal dived weakly to the side, though the shot was already wide. Thankfully, patting himself down, he could see he was unharmed. However, to Sal’s dismay, he looked up to see the shot had struck some of the supporting wires for the whole control building. Reaching the last of their strength, the remaining cables started snapping with loud twangs as the entire platform swung below him. The light of the core closed in on him. Clutching for dear life, he gripped the grated floor as the entire structure jolted downwards.
Down towards an all-encompassing blue void.