The metal door sighed open with a mechanical hiss. Anissa was slumped against the far wall, her good arm wrapped protectively around the other. The cast looked crude against her Viltrumite uniform—plaster white against the deep gray. Her hair clung to her temples, strands glued in place by sweat and dirt. She didn't move when I stepped in, didn't even glance up. I leaned against the frame, crossing my arms. "Heard you've stopped eating."
Her head snapped up. Eyes like burning ice locked on me. "Get out, ape." The words hit with venom, sharp enough to taste. Her gaze flicked over my frame—the white-and-orange Sovereign suit stretched tight over muscle—then back to my face. Her lip curled. "Filthy animal."
I stepped inside anyway. The barrier hummed closed behind me. "That arm's on me," I said, nodding toward the cast. "Shouldn't've broken it that clean." My tone came out even, low. She bristled, trying to stand, teeth gritted as her body protested. The torn fabric at her thigh revealed skin and the faintest tremor of tension. My eyes lingered before I could stop them. "Hurts, doesn't it? Real pain. Something you're not used to."
She flinched. "Your eyes are crawling all over me again, ape." Her voice tried for fury, but it fractured halfway through. Color crept up her throat. I stepped closer, slow. The air between us thickened—sweat, metal, antiseptic, and something else I couldn't quite name.
"Call it research," I murmured. My gaze traced the line of her neck down to where her uniform clung to her collarbone. "Trying to understand what makes your kind tick. Especially the ones who fight like cornered predators." She didn't pull away. Her good hand clenched into a fist. "You broke my arm," she hissed, though the bite was gone. Her pupils were wide, black swallowing blue.
I leaned in, close enough to feel her breath stall. "It was war. You'd have done worse." Her scent—ozone and iron, like air after a lightning strike—coiled around us. Her hand twitched, hovering between striking and holding. Instead, her eyes drifted across my jaw, down to the line of my chest. A muscle in her throat jumped. "You reek of desperation," she whispered, voice trembling.
I smiled—slow, deliberate. "And you? What's that blush about? Anger? Or something else?" My knuckle brushed her wrist. She jolted, but didn't move away. Her skin was hot under my touch. "Admit it," I said, voice barely above a whisper. "You've never been taken apart like this. Not by a human." Her breathing turned shallow, quick. The plaster scraped against the wall as she shifted, hips angling without thought. My gaze followed. "Bet you've thought about it."
She spat near my boots, missing by inches. "You disgust me." But her voice had gone low, unsteady. Her eyes stayed locked on mine—defiant, yes, but drowning in something raw. I leaned close enough that my breath touched her ear. "Liar." The word made her shiver. Her good hand shot up, clutching my collar and dragging me against her. For a heartbeat, we were pressed together—heat, muscle, tension. Her teeth grazed my lip.
Then she shoved me back, chest heaving. "Get out," she rasped. "Before I break you." But her eyes flicked down my frame again, pupils still blown wide.
I straightened my collar, her scent clinging to the fabric. "Sorry about the arm," I said, voice rough. "You asked for it." She glared, but didn't speak. Just slid down the wall, the rip in her uniform widening as she settled. The muscle in her thigh flexed. "War's still going," I added, turning toward the barrier. "Your people won't yield. We're going to crack Viltrum open. Split the core."
Anissa laughed once—short and sharp. "You think rubble breaks us? Viltrumites endure." She stretched her leg, slow, deliberate, widening the tear. "We rebuild. We breed from ruin." Her gaze lingered on my back as I paused at the barrier. "Your Coalition bleeds hope. We bleed purpose."
I didn't turn around. "Purpose didn't save your arm," I said, stepping through the flickering barrier. Her scent followed me out—lightning and salt. "Or your pride." The corridor outside was all glare and sterile hum. Boots clattered against steel. Alarms screamed in the distance. War doesn't rest.
Thaedus waited at the hangar, massive shoulders blocking the flagship beyond. "She talk?" His voice rumbled, low and tectonic. Nolan and Mark stood nearby, tension rolling off them. Oliver fidgeted. Allen's single eye caught my wrinkled collar and narrowed.
"Enough," I said, straightening it. Her scent still clung faintly. "Viltrumites don't bend. They break."
Thaedus grunted. "Then we'll break harder." He turned toward the ramp. "Sovereign, you're with Battle Beast and Allen—distraction unit. Oliver, stay with your brother. Mark, Nolan—you hit the core. No room for mistakes." His gaze swept over us, lingering on Battle Beast's refitted jetpack and the gleam of his bubble helmet. "Space Racer's wrangling the Ragnars. We move now."
We boarded without a word. The hangar swallowed us in metal and recycled air that stank faintly of rust. I dropped into a seat, legs stretched out. Battle Beast's jetpack hissed as he lumbered past, muttering. "This contraption insults the hunt," he growled, claws flexing. Allen snorted, rubbing his knuckles with a rag that smelled like cheap synth-whiskey.
Oliver slid into the seat beside me, tapping his thigh. "Nervous?" I asked. He glared—his father's glare. "Just thinking about Mom. Back home. She doesn't even know." His voice cracked at the end. Still a kid, really, and here we were, about to light up a planet.
Mark squeezed his shoulder. "It ends today," he said quietly. His knuckles were white on the armrest. Nolan stared out the viewport, silent as stone. The air grew heavy. Battle Beast's low growl and the faint hiss of his pack filled the space. Acrid smoke curled from the vents.
The jump engaged. Stars smeared into streaks of light. The cabin filled with that familiar tang—ozone and nerves. Oliver's knee bounced. "What if we can't do it?" he asked too loud. "What if they're stronger?"
Nolan didn't look away from the window. "Then we die fighting. Like Viltrumites." The words landed like stones. Mark's jaw clenched.
Battle Beast roared suddenly, thumping his chest. "Failure is prey's talk! We hunt!" His jetpack flared, scorching the bulkhead. Allen chuckled, shaking his head. "He's not wrong," he muttered, leaning close enough for his breath to sting my eyes. "Still—numbers look bad. Even with Ragnars." He tilted his head, eye gleaming. "That Viltrumite back there didn't give you much, huh? Looked... heated."
My jaw worked. Anissa's teeth on my lip, her voice—low, trembling—flashed uninvited in my mind. I shoved the thought away. "She gave me enough," I said finally. "More than she meant to."
The ship bucked hard, metal groaning as alarms strobed crimson. Thaedus' voice tore through the comms: "Viltrum's outer perimeter. Brace for exit!" The ramp split open with a hiss. The void yawned wide—black, silent, endless—and below, Viltrum loomed: a wounded world of jagged peaks and deep, silver scars. Nolan shot out first, cautious, Mark and Oliver shadowing him like twin echoes. Allen followed, his massive form blotting out the stars. "Stay sharp, kitten," he rumbled to Battle Beast. The feline snarled, jetpack igniting with a guttural roar that vibrated through my bones. His helmet fogged instantly. "This cage mocks me! I will breathe true air or perish!"
Thaedus lingered at the edge of the ramp, his silhouette swallowing the light. He turned that heavy head toward me. "Sovereign. Coordinates are live. Don't linger." His voice was raw iron. "And clean your collar. It reeks of her." He didn't wait for acknowledgment—just stepped into the vacuum, his armor flaring as he dove toward Viltrum's dark side. The ramp stayed open behind him, the silence thick enough to choke on.
I drifted up beside Allen and Battle Beast. Below us, Viltrum hung like a bruised planet, but it wasn't the surface that held me—it was the ring. A crown of the dead. Thousands of frozen Viltrumites circling their homeworld, corpses twisted in agony, armor fractured, faces frozen mid-scream. A halo made of pride and punishment.
I'd seen the images before—grainy surveillance captures, briefings, sanitized reports—but nothing matched the reality. The Ring of the Fallen. It wasn't debris; it was a warning carved in flesh and bone.
Thaedus' voice cut back in, taut with focus. "Stay tight. That ring's not just wreckage—it's an ambush waiting to happen." His figure moved ahead, weaving through the drifting tangle of limbs and shattered metal. I edged closer to Allen, unwilling to be a lone target in that graveyard, no matter my enhancements.
Movement flickered. A shimmer of motion behind a massive ice-locked corpse—then Thula. Her braided hair lashed out, the blade woven through it flashing like lightning. She moved too fast to think. The hair-sword screeched across Thaedus' backplate, slicing through reinforced alloy. Blood burst out in a frozen spray of crimson shards. Thaedus roared, pain raw in the comms. "Ambush!" Allen thundered.
Thula didn't pause. She lunged again, fury carved into her face. My body moved before thought caught up. I shot forward, airless space offering no drag. My fist slammed into her temple with a silent crack. Her body went limp, drifting. I caught her by the collar, shoving her into the tangle of frozen Viltrumites where the dead would hold her still. "Stay down," I muttered, useless words swallowed by vacuum.
Thaedus steadied himself, somehow upright, blood crystals drifting off him like dying stars. "Good hit, Sovereign," he rasped, voice strained but unbroken. "Eyes open. They won't stop there."
We cleared the ring fast, the dead falling away behind us. Viltrum filled our vision—a world both beautiful and battered. Oceans glimmered like glass, continents torn with wounds that still smoked. Then the comms erupted, a voice so raw it seemed to tear through the airless void itself. Thragg. "You bring your stink to our world, vermin?"
They came from the planet like hornets from a nest—hundreds of Viltrumites, an avalanche of muscle and rage. Thragg led the swarm, his chest marked with the sigil, his body a monument to brutality. His eyes burned with cold hatred. "I will strip the flesh from your bones!" he roared. "I'll feast on your hearts while your comrades scream!"
The sheer weight of them was suffocating. Nolan cursed under his breath. Mark's breathing hitched, Oliver froze, trembling. Battle Beast strained against his harness, eyes wild. "UNLEASH ME! LET ME DIE IN THEIR TEETH!" Allen gritted his jaw. "This isn't distraction, Thaedus. This is suicide."
Thragg's grin was all teeth and cruelty. "Kill them all. Leave the traitors to me." The swarm surged, a living storm of destruction. I braced, instincts firing—angles, counters, kill zones—all useless against that flood. Oliver whimpered. Mark pushed him behind Nolan, jaw locked tight. We all knew what was coming.
Then the dark lit up. Not sound—light. A blazing trail ripped through the void. Space Racer. His cosmic cycle tore across the stars, Ragnars swarming behind him like living meteors. "Sorry I'm late!" his voice barked through the comms, jagged with adrenaline. "Getting these monsters wasn't exactly easy!" The Ragnars weren't just beasts; they were extinction given teeth.
Thragg's expression cracked for the first time as the creatures hit. One Ragnar—a mountain of red hide and claws—snatched a Viltrumite mid-flight and crushed him like fruit. Another, sleek and scaled, tore through three more with a single swipe. Space Racer carved through the chaos, blasting anything that twitched. "Let's move, people!" he shouted. The tide flipped in seconds. The predators became prey, Viltrumites shredded by creatures bred to destroy them. Allen roared and launched into the melee, fists flashing. Battle Beast howled, jetpack flaring as he slammed into a cluster of them, claws carving arcs of blood and light.
Thragg hung motionless in the void, untouched by chaos, his gaze cold and measuring. Not fear—never that—but a kind of predatory awareness carved the lines of his face. "Ragnars," he spat, the word tasting of old hatred. "Scavengers of the dark. Even we keep our distance from their hunger." Below him, one of the beasts tore through a Viltrumite with mechanical efficiency, blood freezing into drifting rubies. "A coward's weapon," he muttered, though his fists tightened, veins standing like cords. He could see it, even if he'd never admit it—the wild, ancient power in them, raw enough to unsettle a god.
My pulse thundered in my ears. Thragg. The alpha of alphas. The source of Viltrum's endless wrath. Instinct said stay away, but curiosity—the dangerous kind—pressed closer. How strong was he? Could I measure myself against that legend, even for a heartbeat? I needed to know. Not for pride. For truth. For the cold calculus of what it meant to face the beast at the top of the chain.
I moved before I thought. White and orange streak across the chaos. To my left, Ragnars gutted Viltrumites like harvesters cutting through wheat; to my right, Space Racer's cycle spun arcs of light and death. And in the center of it all—Thragg, a shadow carved from arrogance, watching it unfold as though the universe burned for his amusement. He didn't look my way. Or maybe he did and simply didn't care. My fist found his jaw, hard and true. The impact shot up my arm, rattled my teeth, and for a fraction of a second his head turned. Just that. No more.
He straightened slowly. A line of blood traced from the corner of his mouth, dark as old wine. He let it stay there. His lips lifted in something that wasn't quite a smile. "That," he said, voice a low quake in my bones, "was a fly's kiss." His gaze drifted over me, assessing, clinical. "The famed Sovereign. The ape who broke Anissa's arm. This is what passes for strength?" His chuckle scraped across my nerves like gravel. "Your Coalition must be starving for heroes."
I never saw the counterpunch. It wasn't speed—it was absence, like reality blinked. One heartbeat he hovered, the next his fist buried itself in my chest. My suit shrieked. Every molecule of air fled my lungs. The universe flashed white behind my eyes as the blow sent me tumbling, weightless, through drifting bodies and shards of armor. I struck a frozen Viltrumite corpse; it exploded into glittering fragments. Pain roared through me, deep and total. I'd taken hits that could split mountains, shrugged off blasts that melted steel. This was different. This was annihilation made flesh. My body's adaptations—my entire evolution—folded under him like paper.
I barely knew where I was when his shadow fell across me again. Thragg was already there, closing the distance in a blink. His hand clamped around my throat, massive and unyielding. He hoisted me up like a disobedient child. "You broke Anissa's arm?" His voice was quiet now, too quiet. "A child's trick against a distracted warrior." His other fist slammed into my ribs. I felt the bones go, one by one, like twigs snapping underfoot. The pain was a living thing, clawing through every nerve. He wasn't just strong—he was absolute. A walking law of physics, indifferent to resistance. Every part of me that had ever believed in my own power shattered in that moment. There was no adapting to this. No surviving it.
He didn't pause. He didn't gloat. He worked. His next blow came for my shoulder—a single, perfect strike. Something inside me cracked like glass under heat. My right arm tore free in a burst of red that froze midair. I screamed, soundless, blood vapor trailing like comet dust. Thragg held the limb a second, studying it as though inspecting a broken tool, then flung it aside. "One," he said evenly. My remaining hand struck out of pure instinct, a useless reflex. He caught it. Twisted. The bone gave way, brittle in his grip. Another jerk, precise as surgery, and my left arm tore loose, scattering ice and blood. "Two." He held me by the throat now, a ruined carcass leaking frozen life into the void. The pain was so vast it blurred into silence.
His eyes met mine—bottomless, merciless. "You touched her," he said softly. "You broke her." His free hand pressed against my chest, fingers sinking through what was left of my armor. I felt the heat of his palm, the grind of bone under his knuckles. "This heart," he murmured, "stops now." His fist drew back, deliberate, steady, like a hammer raised over the final nail. His face was calm—too calm. No anger left. Only purpose. The void around us dimmed. My vision tunneled. Even the sounds of the battle fell away. There was just Thragg, his fist, and the inevitability of the end. Sovereign, undone by the hand of a god.
Then, Viltrum screamed.
Not with sound, but with light—a white-hot, wordless detonation that turned night into a second sun. The shockwave reached us first, hammering through the void, striking Thragg squarely between the shoulders. The god stumbled. His final strike faltered, grazing my chest instead of crushing it. The blow broke his hold, and I fell, tumbling like refuse through a storm of debris. Below, the world was coming undone—not dying, but unraveling. Continents split like cracked porcelain. Oceans boiled into vapor, freezing into ghostly clouds. The core split open, bleeding fire into the stars. Thaedus and the Graysons had done it. They'd broken the world. It was terrible. It was beautiful.
Thragg's roar tore through the silence, felt rather than heard, a pulse of pure incandescent rage. He turned, eyes wild, scanning the chaos. His legions were being devoured. Ragnars feasted. Space Racer's cycle burned arcs through the dark. Allen and Battle Beast carved through Viltrumites like reapers in a field. And I—broken, drifting—still lived. I was the crack in his focus. The reason he hadn't seen the core split open. Because of me, his empire was ash.
"You miserable insect." The thought slammed into me, a voice in my skull, raw and psychic. His eyes found mine, burning hotter than the sun behind him. "You cost me everything." Then he moved. Not with speed, but inevitability, like gravity wearing a man's shape. He crossed the void in one stride, his fist already driving forward. It pierced armor, bone, the fabric of what I was. The world went white. His hand closed around my heart. The crush was almost gentle. Cold flooded through me, hollowing me out from within. My lungs failed, and a trail of frozen blood drifted from my lips, painting my chin with red frost. I met his gaze—saw not fury, but something older. The wrath of a god denied his dominion. Because of me. He'd turned his eyes from the planet to kill the fly. And the fire had consumed his throne.
He tore his arm back, flinging a spray of frozen viscera into the dark. My body convulsed once, a marionette with cut strings, and began to drift. I felt myself thinning, fading, the edges of my sight collapsing inward.
Thragg wasted nothing. His rage honed to purpose, he swept the battlefield with a hunter's precision. He found Thaedus regrouping with the Graysons, blood crystalized along his side. The betrayal—his betrayal—flashed across Thragg's face like lightning across stone. He vanished.
Not movement, but erasure. One instant he was gone, the next he was there, before Thaedus. The force of his arrival rippled through the debris, scattering ice and blood like petals. Thaedus turned, eyes widening, hand rising too slow. Thragg struck—not with a fist, but with two open hands. One clamped the crown of Thaedus's head. The other locked beneath his jaw. No words. No roar. Only execution. He twisted. A wet, grinding snap reverberated through our comms. Flesh parted. Bone tore. In one smooth, merciless motion, Thragg ripped the head free.
Blood erupted in frozen arcs, blooming into crimson frost. Thaedus's body hung there, rigid for a heartbeat before collapsing into the drift. His head remained in Thragg's grasp, eyes open, uncomprehending. The Emperor raised it, not in triumph, but in judgment. A warning carved into the dark. His gaze swept the survivors—Nolan, Mark, Oliver—the traitor and his sons. The meaning required no words: You're next.
My own blood congealed in my suit, sticky and cold. The pain in my stumps had faded to a dull ache beneath the numb spreading from my core. His strike hadn't just broken my heart; it had wrecked everything else inside me. I drifted through the ruin, the planet's death throes casting everything in a red, ruinous glow. The battle raged on—Ragnars feeding, Racer's guns flaring, Allen's war cry echoing, Battle Beast lost to his frenzy—but it all felt far away, like watching through glass. My vision trembled, stars winking out one by one. Cold. So cold.
Then came clarity, sharp as a knife. Anissa's face flickered in my mind—not the fury in her cell, but that moment of raw disbelief when I'd shattered her arm. The heat of her breath. The smell of ozone and blood. Thaedus's severed head drifted into my dimming sightline, still clutched in Thragg's hand. Because of me. The thought wasn't regret—just recognition. My arrogance had lit the fuse. My need to test myself had cost the Coalition its anchor and doomed me beside him. The irony was bitter as metal on my tongue. Sovereign, the unbreakable, left in pieces beneath the Emperor's gaze. The void pressed closer, swallowing light and sound until only silence remained.