by Anna Carven
“N-no. The General is our boss. He is the General’s leader. You won’t get to him. He’s smarter than your Akkadian. We don’t know his name,” Rurak interrupted hastily, the arrogance bleeding from his voice as Nythian turned his attention on him. “We don’t know where he is, or where he’s from, or even what he looks like. All we know is that he is of the Bloodline, and we will follow his orders to the death. You have no idea what’s coming for you, Usurper.”
“Who are you more afraid of, Rurak? Him, or me?”
Rurak went very still and very quiet. The light in his amber eyes dulled, and he retreated into himself, almost as if he had just realized he was going to die and had accepted that very fact.
So he was more afraid of his mysterious nameless leader, hm?
Nythian shelved that tidbit of information away. Tarak would be very interested to hear that there was a self-styled Kordolian ruler out there.
And now he knew that these Kordolians were connected to the ones that had tried to harm his mate.
The red haze grew thicker.
A faint sound tickled his consciousness, and if he were anything else but First Division, he would have missed it, but he knew what it was.
Attackers.
An ambush.
He reversed his sword again and plunged it into Murkot’s neck. The Kordolian fell the floor, black blood spurting everywhere; on Nythian’s face, his chest, his hands. It didn’t matter. His parasitic nanites were hungry, and they quickly absorbed it.
Boom! Rurak pulled a plasma gun and squeezed off a shot. He didn’t have time to see it hit the wall opposite, because he was already dead, falling to the floor with a throwing knife protruding from his head.
Nythian sheathed his sword and pulled his semi-cannon from where it was holstered at his back.
He was in close quarters, with nowhere to go but forward. His enemies were approaching, and they were probably packing plasma.
He strode out of the chamber and fired, a massive blue bolt of plasma roaring down the narrow corridor, leaving the Qualum walls deformed in its wake.
No point in being subtle about it. His enemies already knew he was here.
The plasma dissipated as he strode forward through wisps of grey smoke.
Then…
Silence.
Nobody appeared. The doors on all sides of the passageway were sealed shut.
All he heard was the faint hum of the ship, a deceptively familiar and comforting sound that threatened to lull him into a false sense of calm.
“Release the restraints already.” A nervous whisper reached his ears. “Quick. He’s coming.”
“The sedation’s still wearing off. What if it’s sluggish? He’ll destroy it.”
“Doesn’t matter. That plasma blast would have woken it up. Wish it had been properly awake when that fucking paleface ambushed us.”
“It still got him good. I saw him bleed. How were we supposed to know they’d send a Silent One after us? Hurry up, or we’re dead meat. If the traitor doesn’t kill us, the General will.”
“Either way, we’re dead men already.”
A door unravelled behind him. Nythian tensed, swiveling his gun toward the sound.
Chkchkchk. A familiar skittering sound reached his ears.
Pain-in-the-ass.
Nythian didn’t bother to wait for the cursed thing to appear. He flicked a couple of throwing knives in its direction and fired a burst of plasma. How and why in the Nine Hells did these morons have a live Xargek on their ship? And they’d figured out a way to restrain it?
Even Zharek hadn’t been able to do that, and he’d created the damn things.
A deafening screech assaulted his sensitive hearing. The Xargek burst out of its cell, deadly black claws raised, its triangular head angled in his direction.
A faint red stripe ran down its head. Shit. An old one. They were annoyingly difficult to get rid of.
Nythian’s anger grew. These deserters were trying to harness Xargek? Ah, but Ashrael had warned him of this.
Nythian dodged narrowly as one massive claw carved a deadly arc right in front of his face. He pulled his swords, trying to find an opening.
The beast was enraged. He moved in with a killing stroke, but it brought up its claws, blocking his blade.
Behind him, something moved. Without looking, Nythian raised his cannon and fired.
A male swore viciously. Nythian barely heard above the spray of yellow Xargek venom.
It rushed forward, claws raised…
Thwack.
A massive claw came down as someone shot at him from behind. Boom! Boom! Boom!
Blue fire rained down around him, pushing him right into the Xargek’s field of attack. Nythian swore and brought up his sword, countering the creature’s razor-sharp foreclaws.
Shit. He’d never had to fight a red-stripe with someone else trying to kill him in the background.
Xargek were fast. Really fucking fast.
Their claws were one of the few things in the Universe that could penetrate his exo-armor.
He was reminded of that the hard way as the Xargek broke through his defenses and impaled his right shoulder.
He tried to dodge backward, but the Xargek claw wouldn’t dislodge. Emboldened by the scent of his blood, the creature pressed down, trying to crush him.
Pain exploded through his body. His nanites swarmed to the surface, trying to repair the damage.
The pain fed his anger, and the red veil became deeper, his vision blurring.
Nythian cursed and tried to pull the claw out of his shoulder, but the Xargek was coming at him again, and he had to frantically raise his blade to block its vicious claw.
Movement from behind stole his attention.
He tried to duck, but it was too late.
A blade sank into the back of his neck. Thrust with great force, it penetrated his armor and went through vertebrae and spinal cord. Only a blade made of Callidum could cut through his exo-armor. He never would have let an enemy sneak up on him like that, but he’d been dealing with this cursed red-stripe Xargek.
The strength left his arms and legs in an instant. He lost all sensation.
Paralyzed from the neck down, Nythian dropped to his knees, his sword falling out of his hand, clattering to the floor. The Xargek came down on him, plunging its remaining claw into his belly, piercing through armor, through skin and muscle and tissue and viscera.
He fell to the floor.
Fire engulfed his body. The pain was so bad he almost blacked out, but he welcomed it, because it meant his nanites had gone into overdrive to repair damaged tissue.
All he wanted to do right now was turn around and tear his attacker to pieces, but he couldn’t do a thing.
That made him furious.
The Xargek impaled his belly again and again, a terrible shriek escaping its angular maw.
But amidst the bitter smell of his own blood and the excruciating pain and the blanket of crimson that clouded his vision, he was utterly helpless.
The anger surged through his body like white hot fire, burning away the last shreds of rational thought.
“Stop,” a deep voice said. Behind him, someone flicked blood from a blade and slid it back into a long sheath.
The one who had stabbed him was different from the others. He had the precise movements of a highly trained warrior.
Fucking coward, attacking from behind.
The Xargek paused, staring at Nythian with its triangular black eyes. Then it made a soft clicking sound and fell back.
Impossible.
Xargek didn’t submit to anyone.
How had these Kordolians managed to control it?
Slow footsteps echoed in his ears. A pair of black boots swam in his vision.
He looked up.
A Kordolian stood there, staring down at him with an all-too familiar expression on his face.
This Kordolian had cold yellow eyes and the sharp-featured look of the nobility. His expressi
on was infuriatingly smug; he looked down at Nythian as if to say: you’re nothing.
Nythian knew that look all too well. There were some Kordolians who thought that the Lost Tribes and the Flatedge dwellers were so far beneath them that they wouldn’t even be worth spitting at.
“Your little uprising will come to an end eventually,” the Kordolian said, a cruel smile flickering across his lips. “You think you’ve won just because you killed Empress Vionn? Because you took Kythia? The Empire is much bigger than the Dark Planet, soori. This is only the beginning. You know why I’m bothering to tell you all this?”
Nythian remained perfectly still, not saying a word. The Xargek’s claw was still embedded in his shoulder, and his exo-armor had faded away in places, the nanites retreating to repair damage to vital organs.
The back of his neck hurt like crazy; it was close to the worst torture he’d ever experienced.
Suddenly, he was in another place and time… fully conscious and suspended in cold stasis fluid, lines and tubes running in and out of his body, his arms and legs restrained, his jaw sealed shut, eyes artificially wedged open, unable to blink…
Forced to watch an endless stream of violence as strange drugs and nanites coursed in and out of his system, as his true memories disappeared one by one.
His porous mind soaked in the violence.
Lived it.
Breathed it…
Until he became the violence.
Now his mind was doing it again.
The Xargek chittered away in the background, pulling him back into reality. He watched the Kordolian before him with a detached kind of coldness, which was at odds with the pure fury coursing through his veins.
Almost as if he were two people at once.
In the deepest, most secret part of his mind, he thought of Alexis, of what would happen to her if he died here. He quickly pushed that thought away, crushing the warm feeling that entered his chest.
She didn’t belong in this world.
He vowed to keep her away from it for as long as he lived.
And he was not going to die here, especially not at the hands of some delusional Imperial idiot.
“I’m telling you all this because you’re going to die soon, so it doesn’t matter what you know.” The Kordolian squatted on his haunches, still smiling. “In fact, the more you know that makes you understand that your existence means nothing, the better.” He reached out and pressed his bare fingers into Nythian’s wounded belly through the holes in his armor, digging into blood and flesh and viscera. His hand was Tharian blue, just like Alexis’s had been before Zharek put the patch on it. Now Nythian saw that the blue pigment extended up his neck and into his cheeks, and there was a scattering of blue scales across his cheeks.
A perfect Kordolian-Tharian hybrid.
The Kordolian extended his claws, tearing through delicate organs. He twisted his hand.
Nythian clamped his teeth shut, his fangs sinking into his lower lip, drawing bitter black blood.
He did not want to give this asshole the satisfaction of hearing him scream.
This Kordolian had no idea. He really had no fucking idea.
“I haven’t used this power on many of our kind.”
Nythian’s insides started to burn. A tingle ran through his entire body, similar to the sensation he’d experienced when Alexis used her power on him, only this time the feeling was sickening.
Ordinarily, the death-touch would have paralyzed him, but he was already paralyzed from the neck down, so it didn’t matter.
Wait…
“See, that’s the difference between Us and You. We will kill and destroy and torture to maintain our advantage. Your outdated notions of honor are ridiculous. We use our superiority to our advantage.”
He kept releasing the power—whatever it was—sending Nythian deeper and deeper into a dark hell of pain and fury.
“It took seven Tharian ghosts for me to be able to do this. The first six didn’t bond. The seventh… well, I knew what to do by then, as you can see. The Acolytes of Malku were very helpful in showing me how to use this unusual power.” The Kordolian twisted again, and Nythian’s vision went dark from the sheer agony of it all. “You see this Xargek behind me? Once you’re dead, it will go back in its box, and we will give it the stun gas, and it will become as docile as a tame Veronian, and I will have it shipped to him. A gift, if you will. You see, there’s a way to control everything, if you have the will.”
Nythian’s consciousness started to slip away. The detached feeling grew and grew. The Kordolian was still talking, but the words became blurred and indistinct as Nythian hovered between life and that other state…
He’d been here before, once.
He could ride this wave for a little while longer, just until…
Click. His vertebrae popped back into place. The idiot who was talking didn’t appear to notice above the sound of his own voice.
But although Nythian’s spinal cord had been repaired, he still couldn’t move.
That was the effect of the death-touch.
He could do one thing, though. He knew this because he’d experienced the death-touch at the most visceral level.
He shut out the world around him, shut out the sound of his enemy’s voice, shut out the immense pain.
He went to that cold, dark place inside his mind, where he could do anything.
Nythian summoned his nanites. The tiny machines withdrew, sucked through the pores of his skin and into his veins and arteries, burrowing through muscle and connective tissue and organ and bone.
He couldn’t maintain the form of his armor. It collapsed, leaving him naked and covered in his own blood and guts.
The bitter stench of blood filled the air.
The Kordolian laughed. “Your precious exo-armor not working so well now? Ah, but you’re a hard one to kill. The others went out so quickly. What exactly does it take to kill a monster like you, hmm?” He dug deeper with his claws, completely severing Nythian’s internal organs.
Nythian ignored him. He focused on the Kordolian’s hand, drawing his nanites toward it.
If his enemies decided to attack any other part of him now, he would be a dead man. Focusing all his nanites in one place was dangerous. It left the rest of him vulnerable.
But they didn’t know that.
They were about to learn that everything they thought they knew about the First Division was wrong.
He was much, much worse than what the rumors made him out to be.
He closed his eyes. The nanites surged, a dark extension of his will. They coalesced in his belly, around his guts, around the blue hand of his enemy.
After repairing the extensive damage to his body, they were hungry for protein.
Starved, in fact.
The noble’s voice drifted back into his consciousness. “You know what the lesser races on Zarhab Groht call her?” He was drunk on his own power, a fanatical look in his eyes, his expression insufferably haughty.
What an asshole.
“Devil-killer. Light in the darkness. They think she’s a fucking hero. Now they all want to bag themselves a Kordolian. Don’t you understand anything, warrior? That is why the dark-skinned human bitch must die.”
“What?” Nythian spoke for the very first time, his voice a low, dangerous hiss.
“Ah, so she is important to you?” The noble laughed. “You’ll be dead soon, so let me share a little confession with you. You see, I like the look on your face when I tell you truths you don’t like to hear.” The noble leaned forward, his voice dropping to a low hiss. “I’ve sampled a few humans, but never one like her. She intrigues me. When I capture her, I will use her as my pet for a while, and when I get bored of her, I will strip her naked and parade her on her knees around Zarhab Groht until every single moron in that place understands that she is nothing. She will die slowly, painfully, on the floor of the main trading hall, and I will…”
The Kordolian’s voice faded into the bac
kground again.
Something inside Nythian snapped.
He’d lost his temper many times before, but never quite like this.
Madness took over. He forgot all his training.
All he knew was that he had to kill this creature. This pathetic Kordolian didn’t deserve to wield this power.
Make it disappear.
The dark particles left his body.
For a heartbeat, Nythian was without his power, completely defenseless and vulnerable.
Mortal.
Ah, it was too easy to forget what this felt like.
His enemy froze, his yellow eyes widening in horror as the nanites invaded his hand.
A terrible scream erupted from his throat.
Nythian smiled. “Idiot. You know nothing about us.”
He could still feel the nanites, only they weren’t in his body anymore.
They were devouring the noble’s blue hand, surging halfway up his arm, eating the flesh off his bones and then the bones themselves, leaving him with a bloody stump.
Return. Then Nythian pulled them back inside his body and with a great shuddering gasp he rolled to his feet naked, half his guts hanging out. It didn’t matter. The tiny black machines went to work in his lower belly, repairing the badly damaged tissue.
Nythian yanked the Xargek claw from his right shoulder and threw it to the floor.
Clutching his severed arm, the noble dropped to his knees, shrieking in pain.
Behind him, two figures moved, but Nythian was faster. His claws flicked out and he caught one in the face, tearing out his eyes, then his throat.
The second one fired, and plasma hit Nythian right in the face, burning away his skin, his lips, his hair, even the thin membrane covering his eyeballs.
His vision went completely dark. Blind and furious, he spun, relying on pure instinct. His attacker thrust a blade into his side, but that was his fatal error, because it brought him inside Nythian’s reach.
Nythian wildly swung his arm and connected. The Kordolian stabbed another blade into his chest. With his lungs burning and agony spreading through his belly, Nythian roared and did the only thing he could.
He sank his fangs into his enemy’s neck.
He was a beast, a wild thing, reduced to his basest instincts.