Chapter : 2097
Date: Year 2513, Month of Sun, Day 18 – 06:47 AM
Location: The Burning Ridge
The sky was still burning from the massive explosion of the Fire Fly Mothership. The clouds swirled with orange and black smoke, but on the high ridge overlooking the ruined Ferrum Estate, the air was clear. This was the spot where the signal had co from. This was where the hack had started.
Five pillars of blue fire slamd into the rocky ground, burning the grass away instantly. When the light faded, five figures stood there. They were the Praetorians, the elite bodyguard unit of the Fire Fly Corporation. They didn't look like the standard soldiers Lloyd had fought before. Their armor was thicker, glowing with internal power sources, and they held weapons that humd with a dangerous, high-pitched whine.
In the center of them stood Commander Marcus.
He looked furious. His helt retracted with a sharp hiss, revealing a face that was twisted in pure, unadulterated rage. He looked at the man sitting at the makeshift console made of scrap tal and wires.
"You," Marcus spat. "You are the glitch. You are the one who crashed my ship."
King Liam—or Jas Khan, as he was known in a different life—didn't look up imdiately. He was busy typing a final command into his terminal. He pressed 'Enter' with a satisfied click, then slowly spun his chair around.
He looked tired. His chanic’s jumpsuit was stained with grease, and he had dark circles under his eyes. He didn't look like a King. He looked like a guy who had just finished a very long shift at a factory. But there was no fear in his eyes. He looked at the six super-soldiers surrounding him with the sa expression a person might give to a noisy neighbor.
"Hello, Marcus," Liam said. "You're late. The show is already over. The ship is gone. The needle is gone. You guys are just the cleanup crew."
"The mission is not over until you are dead," Marcus said, raising a heavy, double-barreled plasma rifle. "You destroyed billions of dollars of corporate property. You violated the protocols. You think you’re smart because you know so old code? That code won't stop a plasma bolt to the face."
The five Praetorians raised their weapons. There was a Heavy Gunner with a Gatling laser, a Shield-Bearer with a massive energy barrier, a Sniper who shimred like a ghost, a Demolitionist holding a launcher, and a slender soldier who moved like liquid.
They were a death squad. They were designed to kill gods.
"Vaporize him," Marcus ordered. "Leave nothing but ash."
Liam sighed. It was a long, heavy sigh. He stood up slowly, stretching his back until it popped. He reached down and began to pull off his dirty work gloves, finger by finger.
"You guys always make the sa mistake," Liam said softly. "You think war is about math. You think it's about who has the bigger gun or the thicker armor. You asure power in joules and watts."
He tossed the gloves onto the console.
"But we aren't fighting a math problem," Liam continued. "We're fighting for existence. You brought physics to a philosophy fight. And that’s why you’re going to lose."
Marcus sneered. "Fire!"
The Heavy Gunner pulled the trigger. The Gatling laser spun up with a scream.
But before the first beam could leave the barrel, the air behind Liam tore open.
It wasn't a normal magical summoning. Usually, when a spirit appears, there is a flash of light or a burst of fire. This was different. This was like soone had taken a knife and cut a hole in the universe. The space behind Liam turned absolute black. It wasn't the black of night; it was the black of a place where light had never existed.
From that darkness, sothing crawled out.
It was a dragon, but not a dragon of flesh and blood. It didn't have scales. It was made of distorted light and gravity. Its body looked like the night sky viewed through a warped lens. Stars seed to spin inside its wings. Its eyes were not eyes, but two tiny, spinning points of white light that looked like collapsing suns.
This was Singularity, the Event Horizon Dragon. It was the first of Liam’s Super Spirits.
"Hungry," the dragon whispered. The voice didn't co from a mouth. It vibrated directly into the bones of everyone on the ridge.
The Heavy Gunner fired. A stream of blue plasma, hot enough to lt a tank, scread toward Liam.
The dragon simply moved its head. It didn't block the shot. It opened its mouth.
The plasma beams didn't hit Liam. They curved. The laws of physics bent around the dragon. The energy was sucked straight into the dragon's mouth, spiraling down into the darkness like water going down a drain. The dragon ate the fire. It ate the light. It ate the sound.
Chapter : 2098
The Heavy Gunner stopped firing, his eyes wide behind his visor. "Weapon malfunction! Trajectory error! The beams are curving!"
"It's not an error," Liam said. "It's gravity. et the Event Horizon. Nothing escapes it. Not light. Not you."
Liam raised his hand. He pointed a finger at the Heavy Gunner and the Shield-Bearer standing next to him.
"Super Spirit Art: [Gravitational Collapse]."
The dragon roared. It wasn't a sound; it was a vacuum. The air on the ridge rushed toward the beast. The trees bent double. Rocks were ripped from the ground and flew into the dragon’s maw.
But the real target was the two soldiers.
The Shield-Bearer activated his barrier. "Shields at maximum! Nothing gets through!"
The shield was designed to stop energy. It wasn't designed to stop the concept of "Down."
A black sphere, the size of a basketball, appeared in the air right between the Gunner and the Shield-Bearer. It was a localized black hole.
The effect was instantaneous and horrific.
The shield didn't break; it was sucked in. The energy barrier warped, stretched into a long blue string, and vanished into the black sphere.
Then, the soldiers felt it.
"My legs!" the Gunner scread. "I can't... my legs are stretching!"
This was a phenonon known in astrophysics as "Spaghettification." When gravity is too strong, it pulls the feet faster than the head.
The Praetorian armor, made of the strongest alloys in the galaxy, groaned and snapped. The soldiers didn't fall down. They fell into the sphere. Their bodies began to stretch. They looked like rubber bands being pulled to the breaking point. Their arms beca long and thin. Their torsos elongated.
It happened in less than a second. One mont, they were elite soldiers standing on a ridge. The next mont, they were long, thin lines of color spiraling into the black hole.
They didn't explode. They didn't leave bodies. Their atoms were pulled apart, string by string, and fed into the void. They were erased from the tiline.
The black sphere vanished with a soft pop.
The ridge was silent. Where two n had stood, there was now nothing. Just empty air and a few loose pebbles settling on the ground.
Marcus took a step back. His face was pale. He looked at his weapon, then at the dragon made of stars.
"That's... that's impossible," Marcus stamred. "That violates the laws of conservation of mass!"
"I told you," Liam said, adjusting his collar. "It's a philosophy fight. And your philosophy just got debunked."
The remaining three Praetorians—the Sniper, the Demolitionist, and the liquid-moving "Viper"—were frozen in shock. They were soldiers. They knew how to fight enemies. They didn't know how to fight a hole in the universe.
"Don't just stand there!" Marcus scread, his voice cracking. "Kill him! Flank him! Hit him from the sides!"
The remaining soldiers snapped out of their trance. They realized they couldn't fight the dragon head-on. They split up. The Sniper faded into invisibility, moving to the left. The Demolitionist loaded a massive rocket, moving right. And Viper, the slender soldier, simply dissolved into a puddle of silver tal and surged forward along the ground, aiming to slip past the dragon and kill Liam directly.
Liam didn't move. He didn't even look at the flankers.
"Lloyd," Liam said into his comms. "You're up."
________________________________________
Date: Year 2513, Month of Sun, Day 18 – 06:47 AM
Location: The Burning Ridge
The silver puddle that was the assassin nad Viper moved with terrifying speed. He wasn't running; he was flowing. He slithered over rocks and through the grass like a stream of living rcury. His target was King Liam, who was standing exposed while his dragon dealt with the front line.
Viper’s plan was simple. He would slide under the enemy’s guard, reform into a solid shape behind him, and drive a nanite blade through the King’s heart. It was a move that had killed generals and presidents on a dozen worlds.
He was ten feet away from Liam. He began to rise, the liquid tal taking the shape of a human torso with a spear for an arm.
"Got you," Viper thought.
Then, the ground exploded.
It wasn't a bomb. It was a heavy impact. Sothing massive slamd into the earth right between Viper and the King.
A wall of black steel rose up.
Viper slamd into the obstruction. He didn't break; he splashed. His liquid form scattered against the dark tal plates. He quickly pulled himself back together, reforming a few feet away.
He looked up.
Standing between him and the King was a machine. It wasn't the sleek Aegis Mark III that had fought Lucifer. That suit was a wreck in the swamp. This was sothing uglier. Sothing aner.
It was the Aegis Mark IV-Beta.
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