Voss’s POV The massive, shattered remains of the Mawqueen lay in a twitching heap on the asphalt.
The endless, terrifying roar of the monster swarm was just…
gone.
Even the ash-heavy rain finally slowed down, turning into a quiet, gentle drizzle.
For a long minute, the battlefield was dead silent.
Then, the tactical comms erupted.
It started as a few ragged, exhausted breaths, bleeding into breathless laughter.
Then, full-blown cheers rang out across the ruined intersection.
“Holy shit,” Vanguard gasped over the open channel.
“She’s dead.
The ugly bitch is actually dead!” Another voice keyed in, breathless and full of raw awe.
“Who…
what the hell was that?
Was that… a Hunter?
Jesus Christ, it just deleted a Disaster-Class just by looking at it.” Around Voss, the surviving Hunters let their guard down.
Weapons clattered against the broken road as veterans loosened their grips.
Drained of adrenaline, they dropped to their knees in the mud.
Some collapsed flat on their backs on the cracked concrete, staring up at the quiet sky, laughing wildly.
They had survived a Disaster-Class invasion.
Voss didn’t join them.
He stood dead still in the middle of the celebrating platoons.
His boots remained planted in the pulverized stone, and he didn’t lower his guard for a single second.
A faint, dark smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
It wasn’t a happy smile.
It was the grim, cynical smirk of a veteran who knew the universe never handed out free miracles.
He was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
And it did.
Lost in their cheers and relief, not a single celebrating Hunter noticed the floating boy.
They didn’t see him slowly turn his head.
They didn’t realize those glowing, razor-slit eyes were now locked directly onto them.
Voss’s smile vanished.
The air above Sector 135 suddenly stopped feeling like air.
It felt like compressed glass, vibrating at a sickening frequency that made Voss’s teeth ache inside his skull.
Directly above the boy’s head, the atmosphere violently warped.
It wasn’t a heat wave or a gravity pull.
It was a spatial nightmare where the clouds themselves bent inward, flattening into a terrifyingly dense, clear disc of heavy pressure.
The weight of the air spiked in a fraction of a second, dragging all the moisture out of the environment until the silence became absolute, swallowing the cheers and the wind.
Voss’s instincts, forged in a hundred high-casualty deployments, didn’t just scream.
They burned.
“All units, break formation!” Voss’s voice tore through the comms like a jagged whip, raw and frantic.
“Fall back!
Retr—” The order was premature.
And it was too late.
The boy didn’t move a single muscle.
But the ancient, suffocating malice bleeding from his silhouette expanded by a fraction of an inch.
The nearest standing Hunters vanished.
Their bodies were erased by the sheer shockwave of the entity’s intent.
There was no blood, no debris, no lingering scream.
One moment, three veteran trackers were laughing in the rain; the next, the space they occupied was perfectly, geometrically empty.
The shockwave rippled outward, flattening the surrounding ruins into a perfectly smooth, scooped-out stone bowl.
The entity raised a small, bloody hand, preparing to crush the remaining city block into dust.
The air screamed as an invisible wave of death rushed toward the surviving soldiers, erasing the pavement as it moved.
THUMP.
Voss threw himself directly into the blast radius.
He stepped cleanly between the deadly, absolute void and his men.
He gathered every single ounce of his e-cells’ charge into his right fist, condensing the blinding blue light into a single, hyper-dense point of kinetic power.
He wasn’t just throwing a punch.
He was anchoring reality itself.
“Don’t look past me!” Voss roared, driving his glowing fist straight into the invisible wall of crushing pressure.
The collision shattered the very air between them.
The charged energy met the compressed space in a massive shockwave.
A ripple tore through the atmosphere, igniting the air into burning plasma.
The sheer, opposing force dragged both Voss and the possessed boy backward, their bodies carving deep, smoking trenches into the bedrock of the city.
Voss’s muscles screamed under the impossible strain, tearing beneath his skin.
He could feel the absolute, terrifying scale of the monster’s power.
If the entity possessed a body that was whole, Voss knew he would have been turned to dust the second they clashed.
But he saw the blood pouring from the boy’s eyes.
He saw the shattered arm and the splintering shins.
The monster was vastly stronger, but its human cage was breaking apart, choking off its true power.
A hard, reckless smile broke across Voss’s bloodied face.
He laughed through gritted teeth, spitting blood.
“This…
this is what you call a goddamn nightmare.” ⋙ ──── ✦ ──── ⋘ Lucen’s POV The massive shockwave of Voss’s punch vibrated right through the boy’s bones.
And deep inside that suffocating darkness, feeling that exact tremor, Lucen woke up.
He didn’t wake to darkness.
He woke up inside the workshop.
The heavy smell of rusted iron and ancient dust filled his lungs, but the normally dead, silent room was tearing itself apart.
The stone floor violently trembled beneath his feet.
Through the massive, shattered window of the forge, Lucen wasn’t looking at a landscape.
He was looking out of his own eyes.
He was a prisoner trapped behind the glass, forced to watch his own small, bloody hands orchestrate a massacre.
He watched the massive, black-suited Hunter step in front of the killing blow, glowing blue as he fought back the crushing void.
Alexander Voss?
Lucen realized exactly what was happening.
This faceless thing was using his body to slaughter people who were just trying to survive.
The sheer horror of the day burned out Lucen’s fear, leaving only a cold, feral grit.
Like hell you will.
Lucen threw his energy forward, trying to seize control of the window.
But the moment he moved, the workshop groaned in agony.
He turned around.
The heavy, chaotic presence he had felt lingering in his mind before was no longer just a distant feeling.
It was inside the room.
Massive, pulsing ropes of raw, violet energy were aggressively slithering through the stone walls, wrapping tight around the central pillars of the workshop.
The entity wasn’t just controlling his body; it was actively consuming his mind, crushing his sanctuary to dust.
Lucen raised his hands, desperately trying to push his own origin energy outward to fight the ropes, but it was like holding a candle against a hurricane.
The entity was impossibly old, a bottomless well of power that effortlessly suffocated his fragile human spark.
The heavy stone pillars began to crack.
The violet ropes tightened.
The roof started to cave in.
Then, through the falling dust, Lucen saw it.
The central workbench.
The massive block of stone beneath decades of grime; deep carvings were suddenly glowing with a fierce, blinding white light.
It wasn’t a warning.
It was ancient, rolling syllables carved directly into the stone, written in that same imperious language.
“Bisa aelion rhaenas zȳrha dārys.” [This domain demands its master.] In that split second, the truth slammed into Lucen’s mind.
The workshop wasn’t just some random room pulled from another world.
It was anchored deep inside his own head, his absolute sanctuary.
The entire place was a dormant construct.
A weapon.
And it had been waiting for an owner to finally claim it.
Lucen didn’t hesitate.
As the massive violet ropes lunged toward him, he threw himself across the trembling floor and slammed his bleeding hand directly onto the glowing runes of the workbench.
He didn’t hold back.
He pushed every single drop of his origin energy to survive, straight into the ancient stone.
The workshop roared.
The white energy acted like a blinding guillotine, slicing through the massive violet ropes in a single, devastating flash.
But the severed ends didn’t just fade away.
Thick, bleeding cables of raw, chaotic power snapped backward like whipped snakes.
Because Lucen had pushed every last drop of his own energy into the workbench, he had zero defenses left.
He was a wide-open vacuum.
The jagged, burning ends of the violet ropes lashed out and plunged straight into the center of his chest.
Lucen’s back arched so hard his spine popped.
There was no blood.
The pain bypassed flesh and bone entirely, tearing directly into his core.
It felt like a fistful of boiling glass had just been violently shoved into his soul.
He could actually feel the alien energy twisting inside him, its jagged roots aggressively hooking and permanently knotting themselves into his fragile human spark.
His mouth ripped open, but the scream was instantly incinerated in his throat.
He was choking on the heat of a dying star.
On the outside, the entity felt its absolute control violently shatter.
Through the haze of blinding, white-hot agony, Lucen’s vision snapped violently back to the ruined street.
His body had abruptly stopped responding to the ancient beast’s will.
The crushing anti-gravity short-circuited, and gravity slammed back down on him.
He was back behind his own eyes, gasping for a breath he couldn’t take.
Through his blurred, tearing vision, he watched Voss route every last drop of his resonance directly into his fists.
“Go back to whatever hell you crawled from,” Voss roared.
Lucen couldn’t move.
He couldn’t even brace himself.
He just watched the massive, glowing fist launch forward and drive directly into the center of his chest.
The impact deafened him.
It sounded like an artillery shell detonating right against his ribs.
The sheer kinetic force lifted Lucen off his feet.
The smoky sky spun violently as he was launched backward like a fired missile, his broken body skipping brutally across the pulverized stone.
He was unable to stop his momentum.
He could feel the pulling, freezing chill of the cosmic Spiral Rift tearing at the air directly behind him.
But right before he hit the event horizon, a dark, deeply amused presence brushed against the fading edges of his mind.
“Interesting…” the double-toned voice whispered directly into his thoughts, cutting perfectly through the roaring wind.
“We will meet again, Lucen Mercer.” Then, Lucen’s back slammed into the shimmering edge of the Rift.
The cosmic gateway swallowed him whole.
The absolute zero of the void violently ripped him out of his own world, dragging his dormant workshop, his newly fused chaotic energy, and the fractured obsidian horn into the dark with him.
A deafening sonic boom shattered his eardrums as the Rift collapsed.
And then, there was only silence.
⋙ ──── ✦ ──── ⋘ The violet light vanished.
Gravity returned with a vengeance.
Thousands of tons of suspended concrete, steel, and debris crashed back into the city all at once.
A massive hurricane of gray dust erupted through the sector, blinding the sky and burying the crater in absolute ruin.
Alexander Voss stood alone in the center of the destruction.
His suit vented hissing clouds of superheated steam.
His right hand was scorched black from the sheer heat of his final strike.
He lowered his trembling arm.
His icy eyes locked onto the empty space where the Rift had been seconds prior.
The anomaly was gone.
The boy was gone.
The dust slowly settled, revealing the true, horrific scale of the aftermath.
Sector 135 wasn’t just damaged; it was erased.
What used to be a thriving city block was now a massive, scooped-out graveyard of pulverized stone and thousands of dead monsters.
The sheer brutality of the last hour hung in the air, thick and metallic.
The tactical communicator in Voss’s ear crackled back to life, breaking the absolute silence with sharp, demanding bursts of static.
“Alexander!
Report!
The spatial spike just flatlined.
What the hell is going on down there?” Voss stood perfectly still as the gray snow drifted over his frame.
He turned slowly, his boots crunching on the rubble as he started the long walk back toward the surviving members of his squad.
“…The target has been neutralized,” Voss rasped, his voice heavy with exhaustion.
“The gateway is sealed.” He looked up at the broken, smoky sky.
“The battle is over.”