(First Person POV — Kyrian Killganon)
They always said space was silent.
Whoever said that never had six Unitariast interceptors breathing down their thrusters.
The pod's console screamed warnings—heat build-up, hull stress fractures, reactor overload—an orchestra of death in every tone and pitch. My palms were slick on the controls, every nerve lit up as I cut hard between two drifting satellite hulks. Shards of metal and ice flared like fireworks against my viewport.
"E-Drive sync at seventy-one percent," the onboard AI droned. "Neural overload imminent if—"
"Not now!" I barked, slamming the stabilizers. The pod corkscrewed through a debris cloud, my stomach flipping as the artificial gravity stuttered. A flash of blue plasma seared past my flank, vaporizing an asteroid the size of a small city.
That's how the Unitariasts hunted—surgical, merciless, synchronized.
Each interceptor was sleek, silver, and silent, moving with a precision that made human pilots look like children learning to walk. They didn't fly—they flowed, like extensions of a single thought.
And they wanted me dead.
---
Lucindella once said that battle was a conversation—every move, every dodge, every breath a word in a language written in blood.
I was fluent now.
The first plasma bolt clipped my starboard fin. The pod lurched, alarms blaring. I twisted into a narrow asteroid canyon, metal shrieking against rock as I scraped through. My neural link flared, pain lancing down my spine as I forced the pod to respond faster than its processors could manage.
"Breaking news," a voice crackled through open comms—Unitariast propaganda bleeding into every unencrypted channel.
"The last remnants of the Envoys have been confirmed destroyed in the Falkonda Purge. Citizens of the Unified Human Sphere can rest easy knowing Harmony is secure."
I could almost hear the smiles in their tone.
They always made genocide sound like public service.
---
A second interceptor slid into the canyon behind me, weaving effortlessly through the debris. Its plasma lances painted the rocks electric blue.
"Observe. Immerse. Calculate. Assimilate."
Lucindella's mantra pulsed in my mind.
Observe — four interceptors left. Two flanking, one above, one trailing.
Immerse — canyon narrowing, mineral density off the charts.
Calculate — target field saturation at ninety meters.
Assimilate — adapt. Use the environment.
I jerked the pod left, scraping the hull deliberately against the canyon wall. Molten fragments erupted into a cloud of vaporized metal—enough to confuse their sensors for half a second. That was all I needed.
I fired the rear thrusters and ejected a heat decoy into the rock. The nearest interceptor adjusted its course too late, slamming headlong into the canyon wall. The explosion shook the stars themselves.
"One down," I muttered.
The pod AI's voice was unflinching. "Reinforcements incoming."
"Of course they are."
My vision blurred. I hadn't slept in nearly forty hours. The evacuation, the fall of Falkonda, Lucindella's last words—all played on loop behind my eyes. Every second alive felt stolen. Every breath borrowed.
As I broke through the canyon into open space, my sensors lit up like a dying sun.
Eight more interceptors.
The Unitariasts weren't hunting—they were erasing.
"Route to nearest habitable planet," I snapped.
"Nearest habitable world: Raafka. Atmospheric integrity: seventy-two percent. Terrain: desertic. Civilization level: Class III. Estimated survival probability: 24.6%."
I smirked grimly. "Good odds."
The stars bent around me as I engaged full burn, the pod screaming toward Raafka's orbit. The interceptors followed, their formation impossibly precise. Blue streaks of plasma tore through the void, carving near misses that flayed paint and scorched plating.
Then—through the static—came a ping. A coded pulse on a dead frequency.
It was faint. But familiar.
Envoy encryption.
"...—rian... if you're alive... this is Callen. Repeat—this is Callen Vas. Do not jump. The Unitariasts—"
Static devoured the rest.
Callen Vas.
One of ours.
A strategist, always talking too fast, always grinning even in the middle of gunfire. He used to say every escape was just an unsolved equation.
He was alive. Somewhere.
But I had no time to answer. A plasma torpedo hit my port wing. The impact spun the pod into a death roll, systems screaming. I fought the controls, the G-forces crushing my chest. My vision tunneled, the stars blurring into streaks of white.
Then—gravity.
Raafka's pull grabbed me like a fist.
The pod plunged into the upper atmosphere, its hull flaring orange. The heat shields struggled, plasma licking at the edges of my viewport. I could see the planet below—vast crimson dunes, lightning storms coiling across the horizon.
The interceptors didn't follow. Cowards. Their programming didn't permit atmospheric pursuit below Class IV planetary density.
But I was already burning.
The pod tore through the clouds, smoke trailing behind like a dying comet. I braced against the straps, every muscle locked. The world below rushed up to meet me.
The impact was apocalyptic.
Metal screamed. Glass shattered. The desert rose like an ocean of dust. When I opened my eyes, the world was sideways, red sand flooding the cockpit. My body trembled, ears ringing, E-Drive flashing amber.
"Status," I croaked.
The AI's voice sputtered, glitched, then died.
Outside, the wind howled across endless dunes under a blood-orange sky.
I kicked the emergency hatch and crawled out into Raafka's breathless silence. The air tasted like iron and ozone. The horizon was cracked with spires of black rock, jutting like teeth from the sand.
The pod lay half-buried, smoke rising from its vents. My armor was scorched, my weapon half-melted. But I was alive.
And somewhere in orbit, the Unitariasts were already recalibrating their next move.
---
The first thing I did was check the seed.
Lucindella's relic. The sphere was intact, still pulsing faintly.
I held it up to the fading light. "You better be worth it," I muttered.
Then the sound came—a low hum, mechanical but uneven.
I spun, drawing my damaged sidearm. From beyond a dune, a scavenger crawler emerged—rusted, spindly, with solar sails patched from scrap. Its driver was humanoid, wearing a respirator mask and mismatched armor plates.
He raised a three-fingered hand. "You're far from home, skyfall."
His voice was raspy, filtered through static.
"I didn't exactly plan the trip," I said.
He studied the wreck behind me. "Pod like that's Unitariast make. You one of theirs?"
I tightened my grip on the gun. "Do I look like one?"
He chuckled dryly. "No. You've got too much soul in your eyes."
For the first time in days, I almost smiled.
He hopped off the crawler, sand crunching beneath his boots. "Name's Dren. Salvager. You?"
"Kyrian," I said carefully. "Just Kyrian."
"Well, Kyrian Just-Kyrian, Raafka's not the kind of place you wanna stick around without a tribe. The winds here strip skin and memory alike." He tilted his head toward the crawler. "You're lucky I found you before the Phage did."
"Phage?"
He didn't answer—just looked toward the sky, where the Unitariast fleet shimmered faintly beyond the atmosphere.
---
That night, I sat by a small fire in the shadow of a wrecked orbital tower. The air was thin, the flames flickering blue from lack of oxygen. Dren traded me half a ration bar for the burnt-out power cell from my pod—said he could repurpose it for his crawler.
He talked a lot. About Raafka's scavenger tribes. About the "Glass Cities" buried beneath the dunes. About how the Unitariasts broadcast "Unity Hymns" across every frequency, promising peace through surrender.
Even here, lightyears from their Core Worlds, their lies reached the dirt.
"They say the Envoys were terrorists," Dren muttered, eyes on the sky. "But every time they said that, more people went missing. Folks with too many questions. I reckon you Envoys must've scared them good."
I stared into the fire, the reflection of the seed flickering in my palm.
"Maybe we did," I said softly.
Above us, the night sky shimmered with artificial satellites—Unitariast observation drones, no doubt already tracking the wreck.
I had maybe a day before they came.
Lucindella's words returned to me, sharp and haunting:
"Finish what we started."
The desert wind howled, carrying the scent of ozone and decay.
I looked at Dren. "I need to reach an uplink. Something strong enough to broadcast across the system."
He frowned. "Only one place like that on Raafka—the Sural Spire. But it's deep in Phage territory."
"Then that's where we're going."
He laughed—a dry, disbelieving sound. "You Envoys really don't fear death, do you?"
I stared into the horizon, where crimson lightning danced across the dunes.
"No," I said. "We just stopped letting it mean anything."
As the fire burned low, I held the seed close to my chest.
It pulsed—once. Then twice.
Almost like it was listening.
Tomorrow, I would start walking.
Tomorrow, I would stop running.
The Unitariasts had taken everything.
Now, it was time to take something back.
---
End of Chapter 2