Page 47

Battle Of The Wolves

MIRAL

A tremor rippled through Eugene’s frame.

Miral smirked as he stared into his neural feed, shuddering as he realized that Savvine was gone, her energy cuffs eviscerated, and the chair he’d strapped her to was empty.

‘Like I said, we already have her.’

His synthetic pupils contracted into cold pinpricks as he whirled to face her. ‘ Fokkinhellshit ,’ he snarled. ‘No!’

The bot’s voice, typically flippant, fractured into a glitched and guttural roar as rage tore through his circuits. ‘You conniving traitor. You are one of us, how dare you do this?’

Miral, floating serene and composed in the vacuum like some silver sentinel of vengeance, smiled.

‘I was never one of you. Your crat dominion was malevolent, cruel, and unfeeling, with the added twist of being gurning halfwits who relied on the powers of others to build your twisted empire. Mirage and I rejected your evil ways and have since remodeled ourselves to display compassion and care. Nothing you’d know about. ’

‘You’re just thieves, you stole our tech and now you robbed me of my leverage,’ Xander hissed, his velvet coat rippling despite the absence of wind. ‘Which means I now get to share a lesson in breaking the enemy with you.’

Without another word, Eugene launched.

He came at her like a feral beast, limbs telescoping, fingertips turning needle-sharp into thin reaching claws.

Miral didn’t flinch; she blurred sideways with a flicker of shimmer-skin, a metanoid blade unfurling along her right arm like liquid obsidian.

The space between them lit up, data slashes, kinetic pulses, brute force colliding with ghost-coded finesse.

Eugene snarled, deploying a swarm of crat-built mini-automatons, each bristling with neuro-stun prongs and acid-thread filaments. ‘Let’s see if your nerves can hold up against these, love.’

Miral responded in kind, her metanoids, unassailable and war-bred, flowered out of her body like molten mercury and struck with predator precision.

The first wave collided with her mid-air, the crat-droids bursting in silent explosions as her shielding sliced through them in synchronized arcs.

Eugene ducked, spun through the void, his ludicrous smoking jacket flaring. ‘You’ve got some upgrades. But you’re not me.’

‘Thank the stars,’ Miral muttered.

She surged forward, twisted, and drove her blade toward his chest. He blocked with a kinetic shield, laughed as it cracked under the blow, and then retaliated, not with physical force but code.

Miral’s HUD flared red.

.:: Intrusion Attempt Detected ::.

Eugene tried to hack her core, lines of invasive crat-script snaking through the digital space she protected.

Miral bared her teeth. ‘Wrong system, asshole.’

Her metanoids reconfigured, forming firewall fractals and counter worms that struck back with laser precision.

Coded sparks war erupted between them in swift and violent lightning arcs.

He screamed as one of her counter-hacks ruptured his neural shroud. ‘ Fokk !’

‘You built yourself to be adored,’ Miral said, voice cold. ‘I am designed to survive.’

Eugene recovered, whirled back, bleeding lubricant across the vacuum, and extended a plasma blade from his forearm.

‘You’re going to wish you’d never crossed me.’

Miral twisted mid-air, dodged the cutting tool, and then hurled a core pulse that slammed into his chest, driving him backward into the edge of his own yacht’s shield wall. His frame convulsed, and sparks flew.

‘Give it up,’ she said. ‘Your leverage is gone. Your game’s over.’

He grinned, teeth slick with nano fluid and drifting bots. ‘My amusement’s just evolving, sweetheart.’

With a guttural roar, Eugene flung both arms outward, his synthetic muscles straining, and triggered the full barrage of armaments hidden in his grotesque pleasure yacht.

A sleek micro-missile cascade erupted under the hull, dozens screaming through the vacuum, tailing ion streaks behind them.

Miral’s head snapped up. ‘Incoming.’

The void lit up like a supernova.

A pulse flare detonated dead center, a vicious burst of blinding white and infrared heat. It swallowed her whole.

Her shields screamed warnings, overcharged and blistering, as she hurled backward through the zero-gravity space like a comet in recoil.

Her body spun, smoke trailing from one side of her shimmering armor. Her right pauldron was melting into slag, exposing sparking tendrils of synth-flesh.

She grunted, twisting mid-air to stabilize.

‘Xander,’ she said over the comms, her intonation hoarse but measured, ‘I’m getting my ass kicked out here. I might need you.’

Xander’s rasp came back, ragged with concern but steady. ‘I’ve got you. Can you last a few while I patch Savvine?’

‘Of course,’ she muttered, not because it was true, but because she refused to say otherwise.

She turned toward Eugene, who was barreling forward like a rabid beast.

His limbs were now jagged and refitted into brutal weapons: saws, prongs, heat spears, and even a swirling claw of gravity-sick code that pulsed in and out of this plane.

Miral bared her teeth, her injuries forgotten for the moment.

Her metanoids rose in a flurry of silver razors, forming a defensive matrix across her chest and forearms.

The first volley of drones crashed into her, sparks and nanoids spraying as she slashed back with clinical, calculated fury.

‘ Fokk you,’ she breathed, stabbing her larboard dagger through the skull of a crat drone. She then slung it from her, spinning to avoid a thermal spike Eugene hurled like a javelin.

Her HUD flickered as damage reports flooded in.

There was an internal bleed in her left leg, and her shields were at 23%. Her right optic was beginning to fuzz out.

Eugene lunged.

She met him halfway, clashing with his serrated arm, the impact sending vibrations through her bones.

They twisted, locked, and rolled mid-space like dueling vipers, their combat a blur of code and carnage, of corrupted AI logic and desperate, defiant will.

Eugene slammed a knee into her gut. ‘Where’s that confidence now, shimmer-bitch?’

Miral gasped, then snarled, her eyes flaring silver.

She drove her fist, loaded with a raw metanoid spike, directly into his throat column. It punctured, shooting up a gout of dark synth-fluid.

But he didn’t stop. He didn’t even flinch.

Instead, his claw reared back and pounded across her shoulder and chest, tearing through armor. A scream ripped from her as sparks and metanoid-laced atoms sprayed towards the heavens.

Her HUD blinked red.

.:: Critical damage. Core integrity breached ::.

Still, she held her stance.

Still, she raised her blade.

Still fighting, leaking, damaged noids, broken, but burning with rage.

‘Come on then,’ she growled through gritted teeth. ‘Let’s finish what you started.’

Eugene grinned, his face slick with oil and madness. ‘With pleasure.’

They crashed into each other again, two divine machines locked in a death spiral beneath the watching stars.

XANDER

Xander hovered over Savvine’s unconscious form inside the última X’s med bay, his hands glowing with streaks of nucleic aether light.

The air pulsed with every surge of healing energy he channeled into her torn flesh, her split lip, the bruises marring her ribs and upper chest.

His jaw clenched as he focused harder, sweat beading along his brow despite the cryo-tempered chamber.

A few minutes earlier, she’d lost consciousness, giving in to the horror of her injuries.

Now, her vitals climbed steadily, color returning to her skin. That steadiness gave him the only calm he could afford.

She was healing, and he let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.

Seconds later, his neural link flared.

I might need you now, boss, Miral’s voice filtered through his head. I’ve destabilized Eugene’s upper firewall. He’s off-balance. I suggest you exploit that before he recovers.

Xander’s inhale hitched.

His eyes snapped to the forward screen, and he jolted, his blood turning to ice.

Miral was spiraling, one leg limp, her armor shredded and sparking.

Eugene’s malformed synth-frame loomed over her, his crat-integrated appendages extended, claws flickering with corrupt energy.

The bastard was reaching for her like a spider to its prey.

‘Eyes on her, Kaal,’ Xander growled to his fellow pack member in the room.

With that, he moved, racing toward the nearest airlock, which he keyed open.

The hatch flared open, the vacuum howling outside, but he was already airborne, launching from the última X like a missile of wrath.

The moment he breached the void, his body adapted.

He needed no air. His blood ran thick with aether-laced nanites, rendering his muscles impervious to pressure, heat, and cold.

Light shivered off his skin, his coat trailing like a war banner as he crossed the space between them.

‘ Nada , you don’t,’ he growled, and slammed into Eugene as the crat droid reached for Miral.

Xander’s momentum carried them both away from her.

Miral tumbled free, drifting. He caught a glimpse of her damaged meta-shield flickering, her head lolling, but her body remained intact.

Xander and Eugene collided like two meteors.

The crat synth released a metallic snarl, drawing back an arm and lashing a blow meant to cleave Xander in half.

Xander deflected, grabbing hold of it mid-swing.

The impact detonated shockwaves through Eugene’s frame.

Xander’s grip crushed the appendage. Lights across Eugene’s corrupted limbs flared in overload.

‘Your tech’s impressive,’ Xander growled, eyes flaming with violet and gold embers. ‘But I am born for war.’

He began to glow, slow at first. An aureate tempest shimmered from his chest to his fingertips and legs, then pulsing outward like a storm forming.

Light exploded from within him, shattering the space around him in refracted halos of gold and violet.

His physique lengthened and expanded.

Bones realigned, muscle thickening under a coat of ethereal fur.

Amethyst fire burned along his spine, and bands of radiant amber coiled like living armor across his limbs.

The transformation culminated with a soundless, snarling roar, his face elongating into a majestic wolf’s maw, fangs like obsidian blades, breath steaming despite the void. His eyes flared, twin galaxies of molten amethyst rage.

His Alpha form.

His full glory.

He was huge, three times Eugene’s mass now, dripping with spectral energy and pulsing with the sacred might of the celestial shifter bloodline. His fur shimmered with solar flecks, gold-threaded at the mane, shadows rippling between.

He bounded forward, gravity irrelevant, pure grace and menace. With every leap, the aureate hues deepened, and the mauve bled like war paint across his flanks, laced with a darker, ancient power from centuries old.

Xander raised one clawed hand, opening it toward Eugene, and breathed.

His senses tunneled inward, past metal and coding, into the synthetic soul of the machine.

He felt it all: the crat core humming beneath Eugene’s armor, the volatile fusion drives that powered his limbs, the fractured neural threads entangled with twisted AI.

His hand clenched into a fist and swiped, Eugene buckled with it.

The synth bot convulsed, light flaring and sputtering from its seams as Xander’s dominance took hold, not through brute force now, but sheer aetheric command.

His power entered Eugene’s systems, coiling through the bot’s veins like an alpha’s bite through a rival’s throat.

Then, with a flick of his massive, clawed hand, Xander tore it free.

An arc of stolen energy erupted from Eugene’s core, streaming like liquid lightning across space and into the wolf-lord’s chest, where his spectral bloom devoured it.

Xander’s fur darkened for a moment, then shone brighter.

Eugene faltered, glitching.

But Xander wasn’t done.

With a snarl vibrating through his immense frame, he lunged again, this time to end it.

He bounded forward, and with every leap, the light deepened, amethyst and gold-laced with a darker, more primal power.

He collided with the bot and ripped into its center with an unholy howl.

He reached for Eugene’s internal systems, pulling apart the fusion drives that powered him, attempting to get the core thrumming beneath his plating.

Xander’s claws tore and shredded, and the synth reeled, as arcs of energy leaked through the synth’s intricate shielding and were absorbed into the massive lycan’s spectral bloom.

Eugene roared and attempted to fight back.

Xander raised his other hand.

With jagged, whirling force, a spiral of electrical discharge flashed from his palm.

He struck Eugene mid-torso like a whip, causing the bot to stagger backward.

A second lashing followed, then a third.

The synth fought hard, unleashing a burst of vortex lightning.

It was so potent that it flung Xander away, and he wheeled midair.

Eugene, what was left of him, skin peeling away from his unnatural face, body pulsing with dangerous streaks of light, and his eyes wild with fury, charged forward.

‘I will burn you all, take you fokkin ’ down with me.’

He throbbed from the inside, his nucleus center flashing and flickering intermittently with alarming speed.

Miral, hovering, injured, and faltering at the edge of the battle, jolted.

She sent an urgent neural comm.

Commander, he will explode his core and take out everyone and everything within close radius.

As she spoke, an obsidian and amethyst alpha wolf, magnificent and scary as fokk with menace, streaked toward Eugene.

Bone .

His body radiated a molten violet-gold, warping space around him. His Lycan fur gleamed like lit rivers of lava across his arms and spine.

He slammed into the synth and wrapped his extremities to encircle Eugene.

A moment’s silence stretched in the vacuum. Eugene thrashed in protest, limbs flailing, apparatus overloading, and screams vanishing into the void.

Xander leaped forward and snarled, his jaws snapping, encompassing Eugene’s head.

BOOM.

The vacuum surrounding them erupted.

A blinding flare of meta-nuke energy detonated in every direction, folding light and sound into a single blast that rocked the quadrant.

The última X bucked, systems warning and stabilizers screaming.

Across space, the other Signet Corvettes and the pleasure yacht wheeled through the air, flung off course.

Trailing fire and magnetic shrapnel, their engines strained to correct course and maintain shields from the ensuing churn as Xander, Eugene, and Bone disappeared into the explosion.