30. Draevik
DRAEVIK
Ileave nothing but ash in my wake. Every step I take through the scorched corridors of Sector Five feels lighter, fueled by the golden warmth of the mark.
Nyra is there, a brilliant, unwavering presence in my thoughts, her consciousness woven into the very deck plates beneath my boots.
She moves as the ghost in the machine, directing my movements as her physical manifestation of wrath.
Draevik, three more in the crawlspace above you." Nyra’s voice reverberates clearly from the bulkhead speakers, sharp and certain. "I'm locking the pressure valves to your left. Use the steam."
Skidding to a halt to let my armor absorb the ship's ambient static, I glance up at the metal ceiling, hearing it groan under the weight of hidden invaders. On her cue, a deafening hiss of superheated vapor erupts from the overhead pipes, blinding the soldiers concealed within the vent.
I leap upward, my fingers hooking into the thickened grate and tearing it away like thin parchment.
Three Korr scouts tumble out, gasping and disoriented in the white cloud of steam.
Before they can raise their high-yield weapons, I execute a brutal, sweeping arc with my leg.
The sheer force of my movement snaps their outer plating and launches them into the far bulkhead.
With a pulse of violent intent, I ensure the threat is permanently ended, sending a surge of violet power through the floor plates that seizes their hearts before they even hit the ground.
"Clear," I notify, seamlessly pushing forward. "Nyra, status on the primary engine room."
"The main cluster is there," she reports, the frantic, deliberate clicking of her keys audible in the background.
"They brought the heavy hitter, Draevik. It’s Korr himself.
He couldn't stomach running away while his men got slaughtered on the first breach.
He re-boarded with the second wave of breaching pods, strapped into heavy mechanized armor this time, and he's standing right in front of the jump-core with a dozen elites surrounding him.
He must have realized his tech specialist couldn't stop the jump remotely, so he's come back to cripple the core by hand before his main fleet arrives. "
My double-hearts beat a punishing cadence behind my plating.
Korr. The name tastes like ash. He is a ruthless, opportunistic scavenger captain, a man whose skin is more scar tissue than flesh and who thrives on power imbalances.
If he has personally boarded the core, his greed has finally outweighed his caution.
He intends to claim the vessel at the source or destroy it in a fit of spiteful glory.
"I am on my way." I break into a dead sprint.
The ship becomes a blur of flickering emergency lights and hissing hydraulics.
Nyra clears my path with surgical precision.
Doors slide open just a microsecond before I reach them; automated turrets suddenly swivel to provide cover fire against stragglers in the cross-corridors.
I eliminate every soul in my path, my movements a lethal blur as I cut down the remnants of the boarding party.
We operate as a single organism—a predator with two minds and one lethal intent.
I feel her focus, a cold, sharp edge that guides my every turn.
I burst through the heavy blast doors of the engine room. The chamber is vast, dominated by the vividly bright, translucent pillar of the jump-core. Ozone and ancient power saturate the air like a forgotten force waking.
Korr looms beside the foot of the pillar.
During his retreat to the Carrion King, he clearly raided his own heavy armory.
He is now a mountain of a man clad in heavily modified, scavenged siege armor that seems to swallow the core's light.
A brutal white scar bisects his pale cheek, while the cybernetic blue lens in his left socket tracks my movement with furious, reckless desperation.
He couldn't wait for his armada to arrive, opting instead to secure the prize with his own hands before anyone else could claim it.
He holds a massive gravity-mace, its head sparking with a distortion field.
Around him, hunkering down in a defensive perimeter, stand a dozen elite guards. They carry upgraded pulse-rifles and heavy shields, forming a wall of near-impenetrable alloy that speaks of decades of coordinated combat.
"Draevik," Korr rumbles in a gravelly rasp that echoes off the high ceilings. "The traitor returns to claim a ghost."
"This ghost has teeth, Korr." My hands ignite with concentrated energy, casting long, dancing shadows against the bulkheads.
"Nyra, now!" I command.
The room plunges into absolute darkness for a heartbeat as Nyra kills the primary lights. In the sudden void, the only things visible are the violet radiance of my own power and the stark blue glare of Korr’s cybernetic eye.
"Gravity plates at forty-five degrees!" Nyra's voice rips through the corridor, trusting the ship's ambient acoustics to relay her shout directly to my ears.
The floor tilts violently as she manipulates the internal stabilizers.
The elite guards, caught entirely off guard by the sudden shift in physics, scramble desperately for purchase.
Their heavy shields and high-yield weapons become anchors, dragging them helplessly toward the starboard wall.
I remain upright and rooted, my boots securely locked to the deck by a localized gravitational anchor Nyra routed directly to my armor’s servos.
I move like an omen in the dark, my strikes guided perfectly by the thermal overlays she feeds into my HUD.
Slugging forward, my fist connects with the joint of the first guard's helmet, shattering the metal and dropping him permanently.
I spin on my heel, narrowly ducking a pulse-rifle blast that illuminates the room in a vibrant strobe of blue light.
"Left! Two o'clock! Duck!" she shouts.
I drop low just as a gravity-mace swings dangerously over me, its displacement field tossing my hair in a miniature whirlwind.
Extending my leg, I sweep the attacker off his feet and deliver a devastating palm strike to his chest piece.
The impact sends him flying back into his comrades with lethal velocity.
I feel a surge of fierce, protective joy from Nyra radiating through our bond as I systematically dismantle their formation.
The guards reduce to a broken mess, their tactics undone by the shifting gravity and my unerring precision. I tear through their ranks, a whirlwind of ash and violet flame. Every strike serves as a testament to the absolute trust I place in the woman watching from the bridge.
Korr roars in frustration, slamming his gravity-mace into the deck to try and steady himself. The sheer force of it sends a shockwave through the floor plates. "Coward! Fight me like a Hegemony lord!"
"I am something far better now." I step out of the shadows to face him directly, the surrounding pile of shattered elite guards discarded behind me.
Korr heaves his mace upward, the air around the weapon screaming as the distortion field intensifies to a bone-crushing level.
"Nyra, give me everything," I call out into the open air of the engine room.
"You have it, Draevik," her voice washes over my mind like a warm, stabilizing caress. "I'm rerouting the core’s excess thermal bleed directly to your gauntlets. Hit him hard."
I feel the staggering surge of power—a raw, searing heat flowing from the ship’s heart straight into my veins. My gauntlets blaze white-hot, the violet fire refining into a blinding, celestial silver that distorts the air around me.
Korr charges, his mace swinging in a massive overhead arc meant to split the deck in two. I stand my ground, fully trusting the math in Nyra’s head and the devastating strength in my arms.
As the mace descends, I catch the head of the heavy weapon with my bare hands.
The gravity field flares, attempting to crush my bones, but the thermal energy channeled from the core pushes back with relentless pressure.
The violent clash ripples through the chamber, creating a vacuum that pulls at our armor.
Korr’s blue eye widens in genuine shock as his ultimate strike is halted by nothing more than my grip.
"My turn," I growl.
Twisting the mace until the sturdy metal shrieks, I wrench it from his grasp and drive my shoulder forward into his chest in one fluid, cataclysmic motion.
The impact cracks like thunder. The mountain of a man is lifted completely off his feet and hurled backward, crashing heavily into the auxiliary control station.
Machinery sparks and dies under his crushed weight.
He lies there, his matte armor broken and smoking, gasping uselessly for air. The silver fire in my hands fades back to an ambient violet. I stand over him untouched—my armor pristine, my heart rate perfectly calibrated under Nyra's watchful eye.
"The fleet is retreating from the perimeter," Nyra exclaims, her voice bubbling with a fierce, triumphant joy through the overhead speakers. "Draevik, the path to the jump gate is clear!"
Staring down at Korr, I watch the bright light in his cybernetic eye flicker like a dying ember.
He attempts to speak, his throat working to find a final insult, but the thermal energy from my strike fuses his chest plates to the console.
My palm presses flat over the his throat.
With a swift, sharp surge of violet power, I end his suffering.
His head lolls to the side, and the red lens in his eye turns dark.
"Korr is dead, Nyra," I report heavily. "The core is secure."
"And the bridge is officially ours," she exclaims with a sharp, electric pride. "When Korr fell, Selra tried to download the ship's neural architecture and sever the bond from the outside. But she forgot I was mapped directly into the core."
Nyra's eyes flash with ruthless satisfaction.