I stare at the swarm in the hologram.

  Over the last six months, the column has grown into something monstrous. From every corner of Hive space, they've pulled back—abandoning front lines, stripping worlds bare. And all of it is heading here.

  The counter ticks up again.

  [2,324,981 ships.]

  Different shapes. Different sizes. All of them infected. All of them hungry.

  Do the two fleets parked in front of us even stand a chance?

  Fuck no.

  [17,328 ships on the left flank. 21,345 on the right.]

  Valicar’s voice cuts through my thoughts. Clinical. Detached.

  On paper, maybe—if the numbers were even. They've got superior firepower. Precision weapons. Shields that can hold for hours.

  But the Hive doesn’t conquer. It devours. Carbon life is absorbed. Everything else—machines, lithoids—just gets wiped away.

  So it doesn’t matter how proud they are of their tech. They’re hopelessly outnumbered—and if they’re not careful, they won’t weaken the Hive, they’ll feed it. Ships, bodies, biomass. Carbon-based life dominates the galaxy. This fleet is no exception. So, their only shot now is our plan.

  The Hive’s vanguard—a splinter force of just [28,602 ships]—is already inbound, days ahead of the main swarm. But it won’t stay small. A second wave—[up to 50,000 ships]—will arrive within the day.

  And once they’re here, this entire region is lost.

  Unless the plan works.

  For years this world has been the Senate’s favorite slug-fest—two Council seats dangle from its flag, and fleets have bled here for nothing, volley after volley with no real solution.

  That’s where Vorathel steps in—our sponsor, our puppet, Korvsvax’s “savior.” He’ll drop in at the peak, hammer the vanguard, and the galaxy will call it a miracle.

  Vorathel wraps it all in a single broadcast: the Hive pushed back, rival fleets burning, cameras rolling. He walks away spotless—no real losses, no baggage—while their credibility goes up in flames.

  But only if we time it right. We jump just outside the system, drop the signal, let the Hive chase our phantom. They’ll cheer, Korvsvax survives, and we vanish—

  Straight to the Council chamber.

  Before anyone adds up the cost.

  We’ve watched them for weeks through hacked security feeds, and the hour I’ve stood here shows nothing new. This so-called war? It’s theater. Every engagement is choreographed—salvo for salvo, two sides trading punches for show, then breaking off before the kill shot. No one ever lands a fatal blow, and the planet stays untouched.

  It’s dragged on so long it’s become background noise to the people down there.

  And what a planet. Blue and green, shining like Earth used to. Massive megacities. Industrial hubs. Strategically vital. And well-defended, too.

  But the funny part? Neither of them actually controls it.

  This planet’s influence stretches far beyond politics. It’s a cultural giant—birthplace of alien holo-films, art, and wealth, with twenty thousand years of multicultural history behind it.

  In a galaxy where Senate seats shape power, that kind of legacy counts for more than any fleet ever will.

  And yet—to see thousands of powerful ships just sitting here, wasting time. Vessels that could’ve saved lives, rescued colonies, pushed back the swarm.

  It… It pisses me off.

  Lion’s right. The Council, this so-called democracy—it’s corrupt. Incompetent. They had the tools to save themselves, and they didn’t!

  Instead, they posture. Guarding territory like dogs fighting over a bone.

  One side is the Clanker—brutalist tech, blocky ships armored to hell and back, ugly weapons that work.

  The other is the Sea Baroness—graceful curves, energy sails, smooth lines, and way too much pride.

  I don’t remember their real names anymore.

  Doesn’t matter.

  Lion’s pointed out their flaws a hundred times. How broken the Council really is. How easily they get distracted by old titles, ancient grudges, and forgotten wars.

  And now the Hive is nearly here.

  The fleets have noticed us. They’re moving, boxing us in. Both sides lining up—finally agreeing on something, for once.

  Lion’s voice crackles through the comms, calm as ever.

  “All is going to plan.”

  I sigh, leaning against the railing.

  So this is what it takes.

  Leading the Hive straight to their doorstep… just to make them fight.

  Just to make them wake up.

  All this war machine muscle. All this time. They could’ve saved entire systems. Whole sectors might still be breathing if they hadn’t been too proud to act.

  And now, the whole galaxy’s watching.

  Even his rivals—hell, even the neutrals—won’t be able to ignore a win like this. Doesn’t matter how far they are from the Hive. Doesn’t matter how safe they think they are.

  They’ll see who showed up.

  Who didn’t make it.

  They’ll see the hero—if he got the message in time, anyway.

  Crazy, right? Our whole mission hinges on some stranger—the same creep who signed off on my abduction. Kael’s still working for Vorathel; he just passed the messages along. Lion handled whatever side deals got cooked up. Me? I just had to pull the pin and get out of the way.

  The comms crackle—both sides fighting to see who can claim the credit first. Some half-bored voice tells us to surrender. Same speech as always—safety guaranteed, justice, peace, blah blah blah.

  We’ve been hearing it for months.

  But this time—first time since my last failed negotiation—I tell them to pull it up.

  The display flares to life.

  An alien I’ve never seen before fills the screen—long-bodied, oceanic, braincase like a cathedral wrapped in bioluminescent tendrils. I didn’t know the species name, but I recognized the type.

  Great admirals. Deepwater tacticians. Brains too dense to survive gravity—built for pressure. And that oversized cortex? Made them brilliant strategists.

  “Under the authority of the Council,” it began, “you stand in violation of multiple high-order decrees—specifically the Elders’ Ban on Forbidden Technologies. Biological heresy. Class-Z augmentation. Possession and deployment of weaponized tech in the form of—”

  And on. And on.

  I stopped listening around the word heresy.

  At least the pirates and bounty hunters were honest. They wanted money. No speeches. No lies.

  But these guys? Coalition Navy, or whatever badge they’re hiding behind today—they wrap it all in pretty words. “Protecting the galaxy.” “Enforcing order.” It’s all fake.

  I don’t know if I buy into everything Lion says… but he’s not wrong about this part.

  Everyone just wants to get paid.

  Kael’s hunched over the console, flanked by two Rue. Their bioluminescent eyes flicker in rhythm, speaking in golden runes too fast for human eyes to follow. He’s translating the mess pouring in—trying to keep up.

  Coalition command keeps screaming for surrender.

  Some pirate lord’s offering a “discreet extraction route” through a plasma storm.

  Smugglers ping us with fake coordinates, pretending it’s an ambush warning.

  A black-market AI wants to negotiate rights to our corpse if we lose.

  Even a mining barge is begging to sell us fuel—at triple markup.

  Everyone’s still talking, all of them trying to claw relevance from the moment.

  I turn back toward the display. The same woman from before—some noble-sounding admiral, half fish, half ego—is still mid-threat.

  “Power down your shields and—”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  I tune her out again.

  A few crew members hover near the bulkhead, shifting on their feet, throwing nervous glances my way.

  Staring down almost forty thousand ships’ll do that to you.

  I take a swig from my flask.

  They haven’t looked me in the eye since the last time I killed someone up here.

  I don’t blame them.

  “Go fuck yourself, fish.”

  I cut the display.

  A double ping hits the HUD right after.

  [WARNING: Target lock and weapons power-up detected among the Hfav’Ragneas Huasta.]

  I cut in before it finishes—annoyed just hearing the name.

  “Just say Sea Baroness, Val.”

  [Noted. Sea Baroness fleet is preparing a salvo.]

  Another ping.

  [WARNING: Local shield weakening. Hive approach detected. System-wide visibility imminent.]

  “Good,” I mutter.

  I reach over and kill the shield. They’d find me soon enough anyway—this close, it didn’t matter.

  Valicar pulses once.

  The quantum veil collapses like breath on glass. We’re visible to the entire Hive.

  My ears twitch.

  I hear him.

  Queen Mother… the hunt led us true. A bountiful gift lies before us. Oh, Little Phoenix—glorious spark of the void—we feast in your name.

  The Devil roars through my skull—joy and bloodlust woven together, echoing through every bone in my body.

  But there were others.

  Too many.

  Join us, Queen Mother—before he gets you.

  Orion’s voice, cold and close, coils behind my eyes like a warning wrapped in static.

  I slap the shield back online—but it won’t matter.

  The Hive scouts hit us instantly, drones tearing into the system from warp—like they’d been waiting.

  Bio-signals spike. They've found me.

  But the fleets?

  No way they’ve seen it yet. Not the way they’re acting—comms still flaring with ego and threats, weapons still trained on us like it’s just another day at the office.

  Too late to run now.

  The channels flood—commands, counter-commands, civilian chatter leaking in from colony relays, panic rising in the static. A few smart ships start to shift. Most don’t.

  Targeting locks stumble. You can feel it—the moment some of them finally notice something’s wrong.

  They should’ve known how close the front was.

  Should’ve seen this coming.

  But no. Lion was right. Again.

  All that tech, all that firepower… and not one brain between them paying attention.

  And then—

  They arrive.

  The Hive warps into reality behind us, fully encircling the battlefield. Between them and the Coalition, we’re boxed in.

  Thousands of vessels bloom from the void—dark, pulsing things shaped like nightmares. Some stretch miles wide, city-sized behemoths bristling with living weaponry. Others dart like hornets, twitching with organic thrusters and jerking limbs.

  The sky behind us becomes a mouth. A black maw lined with teeth.

  Every Coalition ship stops playing soldier. The open-channel bravado dies in an instant. Formations snap tight. Targeting systems shift. Shields bloom to life in shimmering blue halos.

  It’s not just a few anymore.

  Now the whole damn fleet is either scrambling to fight or running for their lives.

  I swear I can hear their prayers—quiet, cracked repetitions bleeding through the static. The same words my own crew mutter when I start to change.

  Kael is shouting into comms, Rue technicians scrambling beside him. The others move like ghosts—half-glancing at me, half at the enemy.

  And then—hell hits.

  Railgun slugs crack the void open, punching straight through Hive carapace and metal alike. Plasma lances paint space with searing arcs, blinding and brutal. Laser fire stitches the dark with lines of fire, carving apart anything caught mid-move. Antimatter torpedoes streak out like burning spears—slamming into targets with flashes that swallow entire ships.

  The Hive answers in kind.

  Organic cannons rupture, flinging acid and irradiated bone-spikes. Tendrils lash from larger beasts, reeling in enemy ships to be peeled apart—hull by hull, screaming metal and meat. Drones pour from swollen carriers like wasps from a corpse, swarming anything with a heat signature.

  No two ships are the same.

  Most are alien wrecks or Hive-grown nightmares—but none of the originals. No Orion. No Devil.

  The bulk are Rue-inspired: ships born, not built—grown like forests on worlds stripped bare of life. Roots in flesh, bark made of bone, cartilage and muscle layered over living hulls. Cells replicate by coded instinct, all of it infected—every strand rewritten by the virus. The Hive devoured the idea, twisted it, made it worse.

  Now it breeds its own from anything with cells—trees, bacteria, corpses.

  But the real nightmares? The ones it steals. Muscle-wrapped metal. Cannons that bleed. Wiring made from nerves. Ships that molt mid-fight—flesh fused to steel, evolving in real time.

  I spot three Lueaseg dreadnoughts drifting in the swarm. Once legend. Now Hive.

  They hunt the living.

  And anything they can’t consume?

  They vaporize. I see one open fire—crystal-core charged—ripping a synth ship in half like it was paper.

  No more speeches.

  No more orders.

  Just war.

  The thing Lion does best—whether he’s a general, a diplomat, a soldier, or apparently now a pilot.

  The bastard really is perfect at everything. Engineer too. Makes sense, being Dad’s son. Almost as old. Superhuman, of course. Figures.

  He’s already in his throne—some twisted hybrid of a cockpit and a spinal interface he’s spent months reforging with Jericho’s tech. He rewired the Stormbreaker with brute force and sheer genius, cornering the terrified alien crew and giving them a choice: serve, or die. Most chose to serve. The ones who didn’t… aren’t here anymore.

  Now it obeys him.

  When Lion straps in, the Stormbreaker changes—faster, hungrier. The lights slip from white to a deep amber glow, and the hum beneath my boots shifts pitch, as if the ship’s heart just synced to his pulse. Shields lock down like bone plates, plasma coils priming as though afraid to lag behind. He doesn’t simply pilot; he merges. Gunners swear the controls move before his hands do, the ship already guessing his next thought. His Dragon Drive pours raw power straight from his suit into every reactor, and the Stormbreaker roars like a god waking up angry.

  We fly like murder incarnate.

  The bridge shakes under my boots—again. Somewhere behind me, something pops and hisses as coolant vents. The Stormbreaker groans like it’s alive, metal ribs grinding against the stress of the turn. I taste copper and burnt ozone in the air. My HUD flickers with incoming threat vectors—too many to track. Warning tones bleed together into a constant howl, only barely tuned out by Valicar’s neural dampers. I suck in a breath and brace as another railgun barrage splits a carrier nearby in half—its insides venting like a dying lung. The void is on fire.

  The Stormbreaker darts between wreckage and battleships like a ghost with claws.

  Lion doesn’t flinch.

  He sees in every direction—through hulls, through clouds of shrapnel, through the eyes of drones and scanners and gods. He fires before they even blink—vaporizing a Hive destroyer in one perfect salvo—then whips the Stormbreaker sideways, sliding past a dreadnought’s clawed grapples like smoke around a blade.

  The bridge rattles again. Explosions ripple along our starboard. Hull integrity warning flashes red on the displays before vanishing—Lion already compensated.

  The battle is madness.

  Thousands of capital ships clash—dreadnoughts bristling with gunmetal spires, destroyers swarming like armored wolves, carriers vomiting out endless waves of fighters. Railgun salvos light up the black like slow lightning. Torpedoes scream across kilometers before they're intercepted by flak or vanish behind kinetic barriers.

  And everywhere—the Hive.

  Monstrous ships, pulsing with organic plating and twitching tentacles of living metal, wedge into formation like tumors. Swarms of drones pour from their mouths, gullet-like bays disgorging thousands more every minute. Fighter wings vanish into their mass like stones into the sea.

  Coalition ships are winning—but only just. Not without loss.

  Hundreds of vessels have already gone dark. Some boarded and overrun. Some detonated their cores the second they lost control—taking themselves out before the Hive could turn them. Others were destroyed by panicked allies unwilling to risk another infection.

  The dead light up the void. Static bleeds into our systems from the graveyard we fight in.

  We dodge another barrage—plasma shells bloom across the shields. They flare blinding gold. I flinch as the entire bridge shudders, heat and force washing over the hull. I catch myself gripping the armrest too tight. The storm is thick now—wreckage, bodies, smoke. I can’t tell what’s debris and what’s alive. My gut says we’ve stayed too long. One more lucky shot, and this becomes our grave.

  We're not going to survive this. I think.

  Then everything changes.

  Out the viewport, new ships drop in—sleek, dark, fast. Thousands of them.

  Vorathel’s fleet.

  [29,611 Coalition ships have entered the system.]

  Nearly thirty thousand strong, and not a single hull out of place. Midnight-black vessels with mirrored fins and obsidian plating, gliding like predators through the void. They move in perfect silence, like the war was choreographed.

  They don’t announce themselves. They don’t need to.

  The moment they arrive, the battlefield shifts.

  Clean formations slice through the chaos. Precision strikes hammer Hive carriers. Fighters streak by in tight, surgical clusters—blades through rot—burning clear lanes through the swarm with cold, ruthless grace.

  The Hive staggers. For the first time in hours, they’re pushed back.

  We have a chance now. A real one. We can get out of here. Fucking finally—

  [ALERT: Internal Breach Detected – Deck 9]

  A single red icon flares on the center screen. Not outside.

  Inside.

  Lion’s voice hits my neural link a beat later. Calm. Focused.

  “Sol. We’ve been boarded. One pod made it through.”

  Another alarm rolls across the HUD—movement, spreading.

  “We’re cutting out, but we can’t jump till it’s dead. If we leave now, they’ll trace us.”

  He doesn’t wait for an answer.

  “It’s on you. Clear the deck.”

  And just like that, I’m running.

  I check the display. One pod. One blip. That’s all it ever takes. Valicar pulls it into focus—blinking red in the lower corner of my HUD, surrounded by status readouts. Oxygen trace. Minor hull breach. Heat signature active. It’s pulsing steadily. It knows it’s been seen. Threat level spikes on the overlay. I tag it. Valicar pings back—[Priority 1: Biological Contaminant. Lethality: Unknown.]

  Through the neural link, Valicar’s overlay flickers to life—clean lines, shifting readouts, red highlights pulsing over the intruder’s location. It paints the threat across my vision in a quiet, clinical glow.

  The bulkhead hisses open. I grab a plasma sword in one hand, a pistol in the other.

  My armor activates—Valicar, dark blue streaked with red, its anti-core glowing like a half-lidded eye. Liquid metal spills across my skin like memory, cold and fast and hungry. The plates bloom from my spine, sweep over my ribs, flow down my arms, and wrap my legs like steel ivy. I feel every connection—tiny magnetic locks clicking into place against my bones. It tightens around me like it remembers my shape better than I do. Silence drops like a curtain.

  I was already wearing the cuirass. The rest just grew over me like it never left.

  I take a long pull from my flask.

  Then another. Then finish it.

  The burn steadies my hands.

  The helmet locks into place, sealing tight around my scalp. Nanites surge down every strand of hair, lacing them in living metal—stronger than steel, still able to flow.

  Power floods my limbs.

  [Threat proximity: 198 meters. Single lifeform. Mutation unknown. Likely high-threat. Recommendation: eliminate with extreme prejudice.]

  My heart’s pounding.

  Breathe.

  Find it before it finds the crew.

  It’s been years since I fought for real. I’ve trained—drilled every day—but when I think about it...

  I’ve never actually killed Hive up close.

  Not since the mutant on the Hemlock.

  Dozens of aliens have died by my hands—pirates, slavers, mercs—but not drones.

  I used to think they were monsters.

  Then I learned they were family.

  My ears throb against the helmet’s padding. Damn things never fit right. The helmet was modified to house the pointed bastards, but there’s still not enough room. Pressure presses against the tips, and it just makes me more aware.

  The bulkhead closes behind me with a final hiss.

  No turning back now.

  I drop the shield for half a second—just long enough.

  And I feel it.

  A flash of heat behind my eyes. A snarl inside my head. It feels me back. Gnawing at the link. Hungry. Fast. Wrong.

  [Entity has detected neural sync. Behavioral shift observed. Predicting direct engagement.]

  Found you. Let’s see who hunts who first.

  And I’m off at a sprint.