[Tactical Mode] had three undeniable advantages. First, it activated automatically the instant a physical threat came within critical range of my body. Second, it pushed my brain into overdrive, slowing the world around me to a near standstill and giving me what felt like an eternity to assess the danger and figure out my next move. Third, my consciousness temporarily separated from my body, allowing me to drift like a disembodied spirit within a radius of several yards and take in a complete panoramic view of the battlefield. That third advantage was exactly what I was relying on now.
There was no doubt about it. The source of the system alert was a blue-violet sphere of crackling electricity racing straight toward the cave's energy dome. I had never seen Loz'an use anything like it before. Neither Selina during her lectures nor Leon in his final briefing had mentioned that the enemy possessed a weapon like this.
Tracing the frozen trail of static sparks through the air, I quickly found the one who had launched it. He stood apart from Loz'an's ordinary cannon fodder with skin the color of polished anthracite and crimson ritual tattoos wrapped around his forearms. The highest rank in their military hierarchy. The chief of staff. Worse, he held an activated laser blade in his free hand, a symbol in their culture that marked him as a member of their elite caste of swordsmen. The biggest surprise, however, was that this warlord turned out to be the second Awakened, the one whose abilities our intelligence had failed to identify before the landing began.
The analysts at headquarters had assumed the garrison commander would not fall for such an obvious provocation and would stay inside the bunker directing the defense, where Leon's assault team would be waiting to greet him. Loz'an military doctrine explicitly stated that command personnel never left a secured perimeter. As it turned out, alien generals had nerves just like everyone else, and they were just as capable of making emotional mistakes.
According to the plan, I had expected to face an entirely different Awakened here, one whose abilities were predictable and well understood. He had apparently stayed behind to guard the citadel gates instead. We got the furious commander with the glowing sword.
So much for the perfect plan. Reality had done what it always did and torn it to pieces the moment it made contact. Now it was time to improvise. Moments like this were exactly why my accelerated data analysis made me worth every resource invested in me.
First, a cold assessment of the situation. Was it really as hopeless as it looked?
[Enemy Analysis]
Name: Untranslatable Acoustic Identifier
Age: 137
Occupation: Warlord, Master Swordsman
S-Power: 96,300 / 98,000 [Control Level: Supreme]
Special Skill: [Sphere of Magnetism]
[A unique ability that generates dense spheres of electricity. Upon striking any obstacle, the sphere locks itself in place and begins functioning as a gravitational press, pulling in and crushing metallic objects until its charge is completely depleted.]
Race: Loz'an
Strength: 25
Endurance: 25
Agility: 25
Current Effects: No negative status effects.
I had been hoping for a manageable fight, but the reality was grim. Every one of the creature's physical attributes had been pushed to the absolute limit for its species. On top of that, it wielded raw energy with breathtaking precision. Even from this distance I could see the paper-thin layer of S-Power wrapped flawlessly around its skin. But the worst part of the equation was its special ability. Our energy shield might stop the electric sphere itself, but the magnetic field would activate the instant it struck. It would rip metal pipes from the cave walls and drag every soldier toward it by the metal woven into their armor. The moment the dome collapsed from the inside, Leon's turrets would never destroy the remaining Loz'an tanks in time. We would be flattened in less than thirty seconds.
There was only one option. I had to move outside the perimeter and take the hit myself.
As the final seconds of [Tactical Mode] slipped away, I sent precise mental impulses into my motor nerves. Every muscle was primed for the dash.
Reality crashed back into place with a thunderous roar, drowning me in blaring alarms and the dying screams of alien infantry beyond the ledge. In one smooth motion, I dropped the base's protective dome, kicked a thermal spear off the cave floor, and hurled it straight at the incoming electric sphere.
The two projectiles collided in midair. The Loz'an sphere froze several dozen yards from the cave before collapsing into something like a miniature black hole, tearing every scrap of metal across the battlefield toward itself. Wrecked armored transports shrieked and groaned as they crumpled into dense blocks of twisted steel.
The spectacle was mesmerizing, but time was disappearing fast. The warlord was already shaping two more electric spheres between his palms.
"Sandra, take the controls! You're running the base now!" I shouted over the scream of twisting metal. At the same time, I snatched up the last two thermal spears and launched myself out of the cave to intercept the attack. "I'm counting on you!"
While I was still airborne, I hurled both spears, intercepting the incoming spheres before they could get any closer. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sandra snap the tower's barrier shut behind me without missing a beat. Smart. I had never been completely sold on her tactical instincts, but this assignment played perfectly to her strengths. Sandra's adhesive barriers did not require constant mental focus. Once she spread them, they held on their own. That meant she could devote every ounce of concentration to keeping the dome intact.
I thought the noise around the tower had been deafening. That had been nothing. The instant I crossed the invisible boundary of the dome, I stepped into pure, unimaginable hell. The battlefield became a chaotic kaleidoscope. Laser fire slashed across the horizon from every direction while choking flames and thick, oily smoke swallowed everything in sight, and Loz'an aircraft blindly blanketed the area with acid bombs. In the middle of the chaos, the alien infantry had completely lost coordination and were firing into their own ranks in blind panic. For several seconds, I completely lost sight of the warlord.
If I wanted to survive this slaughter without depending on blind luck, I had to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of my mind.
[Special Command: Eliminate the Loz'an Chief of Staff]
Reality instantly narrowed to the eye of a needle, where a single pulsing marker burned at its center. My target. The anthracite-skinned monster was already balanced atop the wreckage of an armored walker, calmly forging another pair of blue-violet spheres and sending them straight toward the cave.
From that point on, everything felt strangely detached, as though I were watching an interactive movie in flawless high definition. The overclocked processor inside my head kept delivering perfectly calculated micro-decisions, each one optimized with mathematical precision to accomplish the mission.
One. With quick flicks of my fingers, I fired compressed bursts of S-Power that cleanly blew the locking clips off my own knee guards. Two. Like a seasoned soccer player, I drove each freed piece of armor straight into the path of the incoming electric spheres. The magnetic pull worked exactly as expected, latching onto the metal and pinning the projectiles in midair. Three. In a series of fast, efficient motions, I stripped off every remaining piece of my armor. Keeping even a pound of metal on my body around this walking electromagnet would have been suicide.
All I had left was a black compression suit hugging my skin. Splashes of superheated chemicals and drifting flakes of plasma kept striking my shoulders and thighs, but I ignored them. My personal force field was still holding. Four. With one explosive burst of speed, I closed the distance and forced the warlord into close-quarters combat, denying him any opportunity to create another electric sphere.
The fight drained every ounce of strength I had. Loz'an's elite bastard moved with impossible fluidity, springing across the wreckage like he had no weight at all. Every impact from his laser blade carved another chunk out of my barrier's remaining capacity, and his species' ability to extend its joints shattered every defensive pattern my body relied on. My only real advantages were my accelerated mind and my perfect understanding of the battlefield.
With surgical precision, my hands and feet traced one evasive arc after another, gradually steering him toward the hidden engineering traps. More specifically, toward the tiny fissures where Ted had thoughtfully planted smoldering plasma mines.
Every time the warlord planted a foot inside one of those steaming cracks, I locked him in place with a relentless stream of counterfire. The white-hot plasma beneath his boot burned through ten to fifteen thousand points of his defensive reserves in a single heartbeat.
Once, he tried to seize back the initiative. He flipped backward to break away, then raised a hand to launch another electric volley at the tower. It did not work. In one practiced motion, I kicked a tank tread off the ground and drove the massive slab of steel straight into his chest, breaking his concentration and knocking him right back into one of Ted's plasma traps.
Maybe Loz'an's military records listed him as an unmatched master swordsman, but he was fighting a living combat computer. I was reading the flow of his nervous system a hundred moves ahead.
The protective film surrounding his black skin finally thinned to nothing and burst apart. I caught the opening instantly and unleashed a lethal barrage. A second later, the warlord dropped to his knees with both arms gone and his chest ripped open, thick cerebral fluid spraying from the wound. It was over.
A biomechanical weapon like me could only be beaten if true chaos entered the equation. For example, if a Loz'an attack craft banking overhead happened to drop a heavy canister of acid directly onto the fuel tank of one of its own flamethrower carriers.
The explosion shattered my eardrums. The shockwave plucked me off the ground like a dead leaf and hurled me hundreds of yards into the dead jungle, slamming my back against the massive trunk of a charred tree. Thankfully, my personal shield absorbed most of the impact, leaving my ribs intact. The battle had faded into the distance, reduced to a muffled rumble. Judging by the occasional explosions, our people were methodically wiping out the last remnants of the shattered garrison. I needed to get back on my feet and head for the rendezvous point.
"You... think you've won...?"
The voice sounded like the low, distorted rumble of a blown-out subwoofer, freezing me where I stood. It was the harsh Loz'an dialect, the same one I had learned before stepping through the portal.
I spun around, and a wave of sickening pain stabbed through my skull. Ten steps away, sprawled across a tangle of broken branches, the chief of staff writhed in agony. The blast had thrown him here with me. He looked less like a living creature than a charred lump of rubber, and he smelled exactly the same. But the intense heat had cauterized his horrific wounds, stopping the bleeding. He was beyond saving. No one survived injuries like those. Even so, the bastard had somehow managed to wrestle a few extra minutes from death.
I stayed exactly where I was. Partly because instinct told me not to move, and partly because I knew that if I rushed him now, the mental overload would leave me vomiting my guts out. Better to wait for the migraine to pass.
"You've already lost... you bony little fool," the warlord rasped, black foam bubbling from his mouth. "You just don't know it yet. I know your whole story. Every... single... step. A primitive, dying world... then the sudden discovery of spatial rifts... scattered battles... a desperate scramble to master alien technology. Then came your first mutants. Your fake golden age. Our species walked the exact same path."
This was far beyond my clearance level. At the Academy, the Corps had buried subjects like this behind an impenetrable wall of silence. I stayed perfectly still, afraid that interrupting him would cut short his final confession.
"S-Power..." The creature forced out something between a laugh and a wheeze. "This filth gives you strength. And the same filth slowly burns your planet's core to ashes. Eventually... our portals stopped opening. Our homeworld began to die. Then... the wormhole generator appeared. A way into new worlds that were still alive. The circle closed. You changed nothing... bony soldier. Soon enough... you and your entire race... will be standing exactly where I am."
I waited. One minute. Then another. Then another. But the warlord never spoke again. His head slowly slumped forward. He was dead.
Strangely, I did not feel even the slightest hint of triumph after completing the assassination. Through every brutal day of training and every hour of ideological conditioning inside the Corps, not a single officer or analyst had ever so much as hinted that every use of this cursed energy was slowly condemning our own planet to the same fate.