The throne room smelled of fear and polished metal. The king's soldiers crowded the antechamber, ranks like a dark tide between the palace and the world outside. Their orders were simple: intimidate, contain, erase.
They had underestimated what containment meant to me.
I felt Haruna's small, frantic pulse against my core. It steadied as I wrapped her in the warm black membrane of my presence, a private shelter inside the storm. Her breath came easier. That one solace was everything.
Then I moved.
Not with the childish pride of a breaker who wants to see ruin. Not without thought. I moved like weather.
A ripple of living shadow unfurled from my form, coiling through the broken lattice of the teleportation sigils and the shattered projection matrix. Where the tendrils brushed armor they didn't shred it for spectacle. The metal simply became meaningless — disintegrating at a molecular humor that made soldiers' breath catch in their throats. Flesh did not explode; voices choked; helmets clattered. Men fell, dazed or unconscious, then still. I absorbed the energy, the heat, the trembling of a thousand frightened hearts — not to revel in a massacre, but to feed a single, precise purpose: end the immediate threat.
The hall filled with the sound of collapsing ranks. The King roared, summoning an energy wave that would have pulverized mountains. For a heartbeat the world narrowed to the two of us — his raw might against my sentient hunger. He expected the panic of a monster, the twitch of a thing that only knew devouring.
Instead I consumed discipline.
I took their weapon systems, their tactical directives, the momentum of their assault, and I folded them into myself. With each link swallowed, my form grew steadier, denser, smarter. Soldiers who had thought themselves the edge of empire found their hands empty or their knees failing. Those who survived the first sweep were no longer a threat. They were lessons.
When the last clustered unit went still, the throne room was a different world: smoke and silence, a sheen of black dew on the floor where power had bled away. I rose among the ruins, taller than I had been ten breaths ago, not savage but sovereign.
King Gid knelt on shattered marble, chest heaving, eyes wide not with fury now but with something colder: calculation. He had misread me as a tool to be crushed or a trinket to be broken. He had not seen a mind.
Lala stumbled into view at the doorway, face ash-blurred, Haruna clutched close to her. Sephie and the remaining royal guard stood back, shaken but whole. The Queen's gaze lanced straight through the carnage to me — a measurement and a question.
I could have ended him then. I could have folded the king into my marrow and let his line bleed out. A thousand hungry choices rose like storm-winds in my core — the male voice's whisper, the crimson mission window's promise of ascendancy. For a moment the taste of utter dominance shimmered like a star.
Then I remembered Lala's hand, the warmth of her trust, the small, stubborn insistence that I think for myself. Sovereignty was not only about power; it was about who you became once you had it.
I drew close to Gid, and the air shrank to the space between our faces. "You used her as leverage," I said, my voice a low thing felt more than heard. "You gambled with a life to bend me."
His jaw tightened. "She's my daughter."
"So is she mine." I let the bareness of that statement settle into the room. "You will withdraw your forces from Earth orbit. You will stand down your assault teams. You will lift every sanction you placed on the school and the students. If you refuse, I will finish what I started — and this will be the last day your soldiers stand."
He spat words that meant nothing. I stepped closer; a filament brushed his temple. It did not hurt. It showed him what he had almost lost: the echo of Haruna's pulse, the subtle tether between host and symbiote that would unravel him from the inside should he force the issue. I did not break him. I bound him — a cage of quiet, a reminder anchored to his mind.
Sephie's face had gone very still. She looked at me as one studies an unfamiliar instrument — wary, appraising. "And if I refuse?" she asked.
"Then I will not leave this palace," I answered. "I will take what I need to keep what I protect alive. I will not be your puppet, and I will not be your executioner without cause."
Silence stretched. The cost was clear: the king's pride against his daughter's safety. The Queen's resolve against the unknown calculus of a creature that already had shown it could both consume and spare.
When they finally obeyed, it was with the kind of gritted acceptance that breeds treaties. Soldiers dispersed like fog. The royal ships drooped from orbit, engines quieting, terms relayed through stiff channels.
I returned Haruna's warmth to her — not because the world demanded it, but because I chose to. My body folded back into Lala's skin; my presence was a slow, comforting tide. The system's reward icons blinked, indifferent and expectant. The male voice hummed, frustrated but patient. Aiko's whisper trembled with relief.
I had fed enough to make my point. I had spared a throne to make a bargain. Sovereignty had teeth; I did not need to bite them all the time.
Outside, the palace rang with the aftermath of foolishness and new calculation. Inside, the choice had been enforced and the consequence delivered: I would not be bullied into slaughter. Nor would I be ordered into submission. I would act when I chose, and when I did, the world would remember the name that decided.