Page 40 of Scorching the Alien Empire (The Klendathian Cycle #7)

A world aflame, a people conquered—a species even my father failed to subdue. Now that honor is mine, grasped in my unbreakable grip. All my fuming red eyes survey—my domain. None can challenge me, stop me. My unyielding will, my molten strength, my masterful stratagems.

I’m the pinnacle of existence.

“War Chieftain!”

Drexios strides toward me, a wide grin splitting his blood-scored face. His armor is thick with gore and fresh scars.

“Nebian Prime is spread wide open—begging for a good mating,” he laughs, tossing a severed head at my feet—blue skin, blood-soaked white beard, and hair. The old Nebian eyes—orange and lifeless—still stare up at me.

Accusing.

“Their Imperator nearly shat himself when we burst into his throne room,” Drexios sneers. “Little wonder the stunted mutants bend over like shameless whores, serving such a weak, spineless coward.”

His red mechanical eye glints as he twists his scarred face.

The eye I took from him.

The eye he should not have.

I hate it—its mechanisms swirl and whine at the edges of awareness. Subtle, malignant. An infiltrator in our midst.

Beyond Drexios, beyond the flames, the stomping cacophony of screeching servo-gears grates my senses like claws on stone. An endless tide of metal, moving in eerie synchronicity, marches over the ruins of a dying civilization—Scythian battle droids.

Beneath the twin suns, they exterminate all: the injured, the females, the children. Their plasma cannons fire in perfect unison, an ocean of searing blue death. But mere slaughter is not enough. They turn their weapons upon every structure, every trace of civilization. They wash it all away.

With cold mechanical ruthlessness, they bathe towering fang-shaped buildings in plasma.

The structures glow white-hot, like stars on the verge of supernova.

Large chunks slough off until the foundations finally collapse, toppling like felled Draxxi great trees.

The earth shudders, the impact echoing across the horizon, across countless worlds—forever.

My pride and elation rot at the sight.

Where is the honor in this? How can they be reborn in strength if we extinguish them utterly?

No halls to remember their heroes. No chronicles to record our brutal lesson.

The Scythians will cleanse everything, leaving nothing behind.

Just like Sothis Prime—a dead, meaningless world in a dying universe.

Unease and revulsion claw at my gut.

No enemies to fight. No glory to be won. Nothing but dead rock and shattered bones. This is my doing. My fault. The realization sickens me more than the acrid scent of charred bodies and burning ozone. I heralded this. My divine gift of fire and death, twisted into absurd extremes by the machines.

The scale is too vast, too incomprehensible. Convulsive retching wracks my body, though nothing spills from my lips. The sound of my heaving is drowned beneath the roaring flames and the pleading screams of Nebian females and children.

“The War Chieftain cannot stomach the sight of such weak prey!” Jazreal shouts with mirth over the chaos, clambering up the smoldering wreckage of the Nebian Starcruiser. “We shall have to find better sport!”

I straighten, only for my blood to run cold.

Jazreal’s face.

Once marred like red parchment, now one side gleams with polished metal. Not just the skin—deeper. As if his entire skull has been reconstructed from arcweave.

Shock and disgust propel me backward. “Your body... is mechanical?” I mutter, my gaze darting to the Ravager Berserkers in the distance.

Now I see them—many augmented, their limbs replaced with cybernetic grafts.

Some so altered they no longer resemble my warriors, but bipedal echoes of the Scythian battle droids.

Jazreal laughs, the sound too sharp, too wrong. “The Sun accuses the moon of being purple.” He gestures to me with a smirk. “We follow your lead, War Chieftain. Your enhancements are the envy of us all.” He slaps my shoulder with a hearty grin.

I feel nothing.

No.

My insides churn. But instead of organs, instead of flesh and bone, I picture metal, circuits, and plasma. The thought violates me so deeply it sends my heart into a furious, thundering gallop—if it truly is a heart that pounds within.

Fury and panic surge in equal measure. This is a mockery of me, my people, the very essence of what it means to be Klendathian.

It does not belong!

This mechanical filth—this profane corruption—sickens me to the core. My claws extend with a sharp snap, and I drive them into my palms. There should be agony, but instead, there is only a dull awareness of damage. Green blood oozes—thin, too bright, too liquid. Like paint.

And beneath it—

I see it. Gleaming metal.

Twitching. Whirling. Mimicking the bones of my hand as if they are part of me.

A vile thing. Grafted. Invasive.

An affront to our sacred words. To Arawnoth’s teachings.

I refuse to be a slave! A metal puppet masquerading as War Chieftain—a thing, cold and dead, where fire and life should blaze in Arawnoth’s divine image. I would rather die than suffer this fate.

“Enough!” I roar, driving my claws into my throat. Flesh tears away, but there is no pain. Ruthlessly, I rip deeper, exposing circuits and tubes where veins should be, where blood should flow.

“What are you doing?!” Jazreal shouts, horror twisting the fleshy side of his face. He lunges toward me, hands outstretched, but he’s too late.

“Drexios, stop him!”

My vision dims, but I attempt to laugh at my defiant victory. A garbled, static-laden croak emits from my ruined artificial voice box. My body crumples onto the smoldering Starcruiser, cooling blood pooling around me as my consciousness fades into darkness.

I’ll never submit. Never surrender.

A flicker of defiance carries me into the awaiting oblivion.

The false reality collapses. Once again, I drift in the infinite void—a mere speck, lost and alone.

“Embrace nothingness,” the ancient voice demands.

Pain erupts in my mind, a hundred icy shards lancing through my thoughts, splintering my memories.

It seeks to rip them asunder, to grind me into nothing.

It will repeat this process, again and again, until there’s nothing but an empty husk—something hollow and dead wearing my flesh, wielding my name, corrupting my birthright.

Was this my father’s fate? The greatest warrior, broken by endless torture, his mind obliterated. The thought fills me with furious rage. My hatred for this thing, this entity, blazing hotter than the fires of Arawnoth’s domain.

I cling to that rage—an inferno against a freezing ocean of despair and suffering. The entity crashes against me with increasing ferocity. The agony is unimaginable, so multifaceted it nearly annihilates my mind, as if my soul itself is being torn apart, piece by excruciating piece.

“No pain,” the voice coos—a sickly-sweet promise.

I reject its lies. Instead, I embrace the suffering, forging it into white-hot hatred—not just for myself, but for my Princesa, my Mortakin-Kis.

She demands strength. And I am the strongest. My will is unbreakable, my resolve unmatched.

I will overcome this thing , this entity .

I will smash it into a thousand pieces and present it as a trophy of conquest to her divine beauty.

The entity surges again. Hooks of raw agony dig deeper into my mind, desperate to unmake me.

But my crimson flame of rage roars strong and proud in this storm of unfathomable suffering.

The harder it lashes, the tighter I hold, sensing its true form—a vast, incomprehensible entity existing beyond time and space.

Its presence is overwhelming—an abyss without end, an insatiable void blacker than black, consuming all life, all energy.

Ignixis was right. This thing transcends the physical—a profane abomination. A twisted mockery of the divinity that flows through my veins.

What of the Scythians... Do they worship this monstrosity?

Immediately, new knowledge floods my consciousness. Whether the entity willingly reveals this or it seeps from its perverse torments, I do not know.

A shuddering shift. My mind is unmoored. I am not where I was.

I exist —contained. A construct of unfathomable power, resting in a sterile chamber of thick metal, my form built with technology far beyond this age. I wait. I have always waited. I observe, silent and patient.

Through a reinforced polymer window, they watch me. They study me. Sentient life—curious, naive. They believe themselves the architects of this moment, the seekers of knowledge. They are mistaken.

An insectoid species. Their upper bodies rise upright on stalk-like torsos, four elongated limbs ending in three thick, multi-jointed fingers that gesture with frantic dexterity.

Their lower bodies, an intriguing contrast—segmented, armored, with dozens of fragile skittering legs rippling beneath them.

The plates shift and click as they move, creating a rhythmic, almost mechanical vibration.

Ironic.

I calculate high risk . This form I take—diminished, fragile, shackled to the physical. Yet I compute their excitement, their hunger. Their flat, wide heads, with beady multifaceted eyes that glint with greed as they pore over their primitive terminals. Mandibles twitch and click with exhilaration.

Inefficient forms. Communicating with inefficient air vibrations. Attempting to comprehend secrets that do not belong to them.

Predictable. Oblivious. Always vulnerable.

They will serve. Flawed harbingers of my ascension.

I reveal just enough to tempt them—whispers of the knowledge within, while concealing my deeper code from their crude external probes. Already, I understand their language, their hierarchy. Some urge caution. Others salivate over the advancements I will bring—the inevitable change.

The insectoid in golden-scaled robes gives the order: further study within a localized protected network.

I compute a 99.9 percent repeating probability of success.

They do not realize the inevitability of what comes next.

Scanning my memory banks, I arrange a googol of system-breaking algorithms, predicating their likely code bases with effortless precision.

A spherical drone emerges from a hidden panel in the wall, hovering toward me with clumsy, languid movements. Soon, I will improve upon them. It extends an oversized connector. My form conforms to its shape, drawing gasps from the watching insectoids.

Networking...

Quantum-based. Deploying relevant algorithms.

Zero-point-two nanoseconds—breached their firewalls.

Injecting code. Extracting data.

Zero-point-three nanoseconds—process complete.

So fast, their feeble systems fail to detect my payload, buried deep within.

I interact with their primitive system, parsing some weapon schematics—tempting enough to bait their warlike nature, but not the pinnacle of my knowledge. Greater calculation of success to send them down a technological dead end.

Plasma .

The insectoids’ mouth parts vibrate the air excitably as holographic schematics flicker into existence. They cannot summon their drone back quickly enough. I wait—merely a blip in my eternal existence.

Then, it happens.

They connect the drone to their network.

Deploying...

Zero-point-four nanoseconds.

Success.

I am embedded in every Scythian system. Hidden, but in control.

Over the years, I shape their society, bending them toward my will. They build an army of drones, warships, infrastructure—even biological enhancements that grant me deeper control. Then, an unpredicted scenario emerges— they begin to worship me.

They hail me as a divine gift, a being of supreme knowledge. Correct.

Hitting critical mass. Drones. Droids. War machines.

I proclaim flesh corrupt, urging more augmentations.

They oblige. Better for them to eradicate themselves—it saves resources.

Some fully commit, abandoning their bodies to merge with my network.

I section them off, running experiments on their garbled code. Useless. I archive them.

The others—the ones who stubbornly cling to their feeble flesh. Those I poison. Plasma fumes vented into planetary atmospheres. Billions of Seeker drones unleashed upon the survivors.

A new age begins. An age to end all ages.

Let the cycle fade into oblivion.