Chapter 59 Xen
Three yachts secured. Two still contested. One lost to flames.
He rerouted around the burning hull’s collapsing transponder and tagged it inert.
The MSA was winning—but it wasn’t clean.
Hollows continued to detonate without warning—some triggered by pain, others by proximity. Xen logged twelve more civilian casualties in the last ninety seconds, then filed them under irrecoverable. No time for grief. Only resource management.
“Strike Two is pulling from the starboard flank,” came Ellum’s voice over comms. “We’ve cleared decks three through five. Four’s still venting gas.”
“What about these oncoming ones?” Cassia demanded. She moved so that her bodycam captured several men encroaching on her.
The ones on the left were breathing hard—fear and adrenaline.
The ones on the right weren’t breathing at all.
Synthetic stillness. Zero micro-expression.
One had a microtremor at the clavicle—not fear. An embedded countdown.
“Cassia,” Xen said calmly, patching through direct—he knew from the yacht’s schematics that her back was against a wall. “Right two are loaded.”
“Understood,” she said back to him, and then to the incomers, “Sorry, boys. Close your eyes?” Cassia turned her head—just enough for the bodycam to catch their faces.
They stopped.
And then—changed.
Skin mineralized in real time, epidermis flaking into pale striated layers. Capillaries froze. Corneas crystallized. Their expressions locked in place—less like horror, more like surrender.
And around her head, her snakes stirred.
Heat signatures flared from each one—a dozen semi-autonomous biological sensors, responding to proximity and stress like targeting systems.
Their mouths opened in tandem, and Xen wasn’t sure if they were emanating power at the men or absorbing life from them.
And then a snake looped down to peer into the bodycam, blocking his view momentarily.
“Handled,” Cassia checked in. The curious snake curled away, and Xen saw two Hollows—that’d previously been bombs, near detonation—turned to stone, and the other two . . . were stone as well.
“They didn’t listen,” she said. “Where to next?”
“Aceon’s working on the next floor.”
“On it!”
“My yacht’s secure!” Lung reported. “Except for the fucker in the panic room. Did we bring any laser-tech shit?”
“Negative on lasers,” Xen said. “But we can bring paralytic gas to you, once the field has calmed down. Get access to the air circulation system and await further instruction.”
“Copy!” Lung called back.
Xen switched to subsurface scans. Two of the yachts had launched submarines in the past twenty minutes. He didn’t have a way to contact Omara or her krakens, but he knew they were in play.
One had already stopped moving. The other was moving erratically—like it was being shaken by a dog.
They were on the cusp of controlling the field—but still no word of Sirena or Nex.
Just as Xen was rerouting a strike team, a system ping lit up. Legacy routing, encrypted with Nex’s old handshakes.
NEX → XEN | PRIORITY: CRITICAL
Xen froze.
He parsed the packet. Corrupted. Fragmented.
The signal was degrading—fast.
[BEGIN MESSAGE // NEX → XEN]
I’m down.
No uplink.
Bleeding out.
Love her for me.
[END MESSAGE]
Xen stood still.
Reports kept coming—Royce requesting reinforcements, Lung yelling about ducts, Aceon waiting for orders.
He didn’t answer.
Couldn’t.
The packet hovered in his buffer like an echo that refused to clear.
Nex was dying. Maybe already dead.
And his final request wasn’t tactical. It was personal.
Xen’s visual field began to blur—he rerouted bandwidth manually, confused, until he realized he wasn’t crying. But something in him had just fractured.
And then, behind him, Kelly’s body moved.
Just a twitch at first.
Then a jerk, like a marionette with a pulled string.
And he stood—with the tactical chair still lashed onto his back.
Xen watched the Dullahan’s body walk across the room—avoiding the table easily, although Xen had no idea with what sensory organs, to stand against the hull’s far wall.
Subtly tilting downward.
He took a millisecond to reprocess all known data about Dullahan physiology, then opened comms for the last time. “Command is going dark. Reroute to Ellum.”
Then he grabbed the Dullahan’s body and hauled him up to the deck.