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Three figures emerged like nightmares birthed from plasma, each sleek and brutal, streaking through space with unnatural speed.

They were aetheric wolves, but not like him.

Their fur rippled in erratic shades of tarnished silver and blood-matted black, their eyes glowing with red, their teeth too long and too serrated for any natural beast.

They didn’t hesitate.

They dove.

Xander shifted mid-drift.

His entire frame shimmered, body elongating, limbs rippling outward with luminous heat. Violet gold flame burst across his skin like a thousand sun-bloomed threads weaving a beast of fury and vengeance.

His transformation once more tore through the silence with majesty and menace.

The attacking wolves slammed into him, talons clashing, snarls silenced by the vacuum. Yet still their savagery was evident. They were trying to kill him.

But he wasn’t like them.

He was bigger. He was stronger. He was angrier.

He caught the first attacker mid-lunge and hurled him into the side of a broken hull fragment, impaling the creature on a twisted strut of metal from the exploded Lombardi’s gunship.

The creature dissolved in a blink, like it had never existed.

The second tried to flank, sweeping with claws that glowed with venom code.

The gilded violet alpha wolf, for he was the dominant fighter, twisted, spectral jaws snapping around its throat, crushingthrough resistance with such ferocity that his attacker burst apart in radiant fragments, limbs disintegrating before her eyes.

The last beast circled him, more cautious, its energy flickering with synthetic patches and Lombardi corruption, but even that failed.

Xander surged forward in a light pulse, grabbed the final assailant mid-dash, and ripped it open.

Violet-gold fury tore down its ribcage. Innards evaporated. The carcass tumbled in slow, unreal somersaults before vanishing entirely.

Gone.

All of them.

He was alone again, a spectral beast. Floating in the ruin-lit dark, bloodied and not even panting, still glowing like a wrathful god.

Shaking off the remnants of the battle from his spectral fur, he glimmered back into human form and retreated into his ship with a satisfied grunt.

A while later, showered and clean, he sat back in his pilot’s seat in a matte-black jumpsuit unzipped to mid-chest.

Revealing rippling deltoids dusted with gold and mauve ink, ancient language, sigils of war, and serpent coils wrapped around his clavicle like a collar.

His dark beard was neat, his sable and orchid locks falling over a broad forehead.

He pushed them back, unveiling violet-flamed eyes that raked the view outside, his neural node parsing data and intel.

He concentrated his vision on the far left quadrant.

To whereTheOdalon,buckled and broken, bled light in the vacuum of space.

Even now, husks and fragments of its hull floated from its wreck.

Her rear thrusters flaring every so often, the last flickering vestiges of a leviathan’s death.