20. Draevik #2
The cheap, scavenged metal Korr used to construct this pen groans under my touch—a flimsy insult compared to the onyx bulkheads I was built to defend.
I feel the thin steel buckle and twist like wet parchment.
My synthetic vascular network drums a frantic, overheated orange as I shunt every remaining watt of power into my upper body.
The bars snap. The floor beneath the cage cracks as the bolts wrench upwards.
With a final, animalistic roar, I peel the cage open.
Selra tugs on Korr's heavy salvage gear, dragging him backward toward the umbilical of the Carrion King. “Fall back! Now!” she urges. “The line is broken; we lack the heavy ordnance to face him! We must regroup and rearm!”
Korr scrambles backward in shock, his boots sliding on the slick deck as he scurries out of the reach of my shadow, retreating into the safety of his flagship's airlock to recalculate his losses.
With a screech of shearing metal, the Carrion King violently detaches its boarding umbilical, stranding its remaining scavengers on my deck.
He doesn't jump away; the flagship merely burns its thrusters to back out of range, holding at a safe distance in the debris field to prepare a heavier, more desperate assault.
Reaching into the enclosure's darkness, I find Nyra's arms still behind her in heavy gauntlets, bound tight with high-tensile wire that has already drawn blood from her wrists.
I seize the metal restraints. With a sharp, controlled jerk of my fingers, I shear through the wire and crush the locking mechanisms of the gauntlets.
The heavy metal falls away, clattering against the diamond plate.
I catch her by the waist, my blood-slicked gauntlet feeling the heat of her skin through her patched-together clothes. I pull her out of the cage and into the wreckage of my chest.
She clings to the monster. She throws her arms around my neck, her lean fingers tangling in my shoulder-length hair. She is furious. She is shaking. She is breathing.
"You're hurt," she blabs against my collarbone, a chaotic mixture of relief and rage. "You're bleeding everywhere, you giant idiot."
"Irrelevant," I grunt.
A fresh volley of pulse-fire hisses overhead, melting the statues behind us. I must find a more defensible position. The breach is too exposed. With fluid hemorrhaging at a critical rate, the primary HUD cuts out, plunging the world into a permanent black.
Scooping her up against the ruins of my armor, I find her impossibly light.
I turn my back on Korr and Selra, ignoring the slugs whining past my head as I haul her toward the maintenance lift.
Prioritizing her safety over pursuing the enemy violates every law of my kind—and it ceases to matter to me.
We reach the lift shaft. I kick the manual release, the doors sliding shut just as a final kinetic round sparks against the surface. The lift begins its draggy, grinding descent into the belly of the ship—toward a secure area only I know of.
I sag against the wall of the lift, my strength bleeding out for a moment. Nyra is still clinging to me, her hands searching for the seams in my armor, her eyes scanning my face with a desperate, calculating intensity.
The lift groans, a deep, metal-on-metal scream that shimmies through the bottoms of my boots.
I lean my weight against the back panel, the jet-black cold seeping through the gaps in my shattered plating.
Nyra continues to press against me. Her face buries in the crook of my neck, her breath hot and frantic against my skin.
I feel the dampness of her skin against mine, a stark contrast to the drying copper fluid soaking into her tunic.
"Drae, look at me," she commands, her voice filling with a fierce, grounding demand.
I force my head up, my neck servos holding strong despite the damage.
The casual endearment strikes my audio receptors with the weight of a grounding hand, easing the combat static still lingering in my mind.
My HUD exhibits a graveyard of dead pixels, but I see her clearly.
Her brown eyes are wide, scanning the hole in my side where Korr’s slug remains lodged.
Her quick fingers move with the frantic precision of a scavenger, stripping away the dangling bits of my chest plate to reach the wound.
"The secondary reactor sub-level," I rasp. The adrenaline releases as a thick, intoxicating current in my veins, dulling the agony of the impact into a distant, manageable throb. "It is shielded. Selra’s ghosts have yet to reach the hardlines here."
“Good,” she snaps, all stubborn edge and hard focus. “Because I need you functional, and I’m not dragging eight hundred pounds of Reaper through a war zone.”
The lift doors stagger open. We are deep in Virex Prime’s belly, where grease and static press in, warm and pervasive.
The space acts as a secured bunker, built to keep engineers alive if the hull fails entirely.
I step out, my gait heavy but certain. I prioritize the security of the space, slamming my palm against the manual override.
The thick glossy slab hisses shut, the heavy deadbolts thudding home with a finality that shuts out the distant echoes of the boarders' boots.
My eyes instantly lock onto a sealed, emergency Hegemony armory cache riveted to the far wall—untouched for thousands of years.
I lock more than the physical doors. Reaching past her, I slam my palm into the terminal beside the bulkhead, biomechanical veins flaring as I sever the main data artery.
Smashed conduits spark and die, erecting an absolute, physical hardware firebreak between the systems. It won't hold Selra off forever, but it instantly dead-ends her ghost code, isolating this local grid and buying us the precious window of time my volatile biology violently demands.
We are alone. The only light comes from the low gleam of the secondary conduits and the frantic, flaring beam of the mark.
Bypassing the bench, I step deeper into the area, my secondary heart hammering aggressively as I reach for my helmet seals.
My fingers twitch with the residual energy of the slaughter, but I maintain control.
The sensors are fused, melted by the pulse-fire, yet I force the manual release with a snap of sheer strength.
The helmet comes free.
The cool, metallic air of the bunker hits my face. I breathe deep, my lungs drawing in the scent of oil and her.
"Locker," I grunt, nodding toward the recessed panel by the door. "Emergency supplies."
She moves instantly, her scavenger instincts taking over as she yanks the handle.
She pulls out a standard-issue Hegemony trauma kit—a sleek, white polymer box that has sat untouched for centuries.
She bypasses the bandages and the thermal blankets, digging until she finds the pressurized canisters of Weave—the same regenerative serum I used on her, now in a higher concentration, calibrated for the dense tissue of a Reaper.
"This is going to burn," she warns, her hands shaking as she primes the canister.
"Apply it." I brace my weight against the bench.
She presses the nozzle against the torn opening in my side.
With a hiss of compressed gas, the thick, iridescent blue-silver gel of the Weave floods the wound.
It operates on the same mechanics as what I used on her wrist, simply interacting differently with my dense tissue.
I roar, the sound bouncing off the very bulkheads, as the nanites begin their frantic work.
It is the sensation of a thousand white-hot needles stitching my muscle back together in real-time.
My biomechanical veins flare a blinding, angry violet, and I clutch the reactor housing so hard the metal indents beneath my fingers.
The bleeding lessens to a sluggish drip. The deep, hollow ache of the puncture recedes, and the itchy, crawling heat of accelerated repair replaces it. Stability returns even if wholeness remains out of reach, leaving me functional for the tasks ahead.
I reach out, my large hand wrapping gently over hers, taking the canister of Weave from her grip. "Your wrists," I grate out, my eyes locking onto the angry, bleeding welts left by the wire. "Treat them. Now."
"Drae, I'm fine?—"
"Do it," I command softly.
She sighs, digging past the intensive Weave to pull out a canister of Velox-C. Ignoring the aggressive nanites entirely, she sprays a thin layer of the basic numbing gel over her own cuts until the bleeding stops and the skin cools.
"Better?" she asks gently, returning her attention to me, her eyes searching mine for any sign of collapse.
"I am the storm," I quip, the words tasting of iron. My boast shatters almost instantly. A violent tremor wracks my massive frame, and I stagger, my knees buckling as my restraint begins to rapidly disintegrate.
"Draevik!" she yells, catching my uninjured arm as I slump back against the reactor housing.
The stasis-decay, the accumulated injuries, and the sheer trauma of the breach collide with the adrenaline of the rescue, driving my autonomic systems into a catastrophic feedback loop.
The adrenaline floods my system, accelerating the Weave's repairs and stitching the torn muscle together, but my neural control splinters.
My restraint fails, spiraling into a volatile storm of static and violet fire. A violent tremor wracks my massive frame. I stagger, my knees actually buckling as my internal matrix begins to tear itself apart.
"Draevik!" she yells, catching my uninjured arm as I slump back against the reactor housing.
Nyra watches my neck veins pulse with a frantic, aggressive light. I identify the exact moment comprehension dawns in her gaze. This isn't just a medical emergency—it is the raw, unbridled surge of a Warlord realizing how close he came to losing his heart.
"You're shaking," she breathes, her panic shifting into a fierce, steely resolve. "Draevik, you're losing control."