Chapter 17 Valtron
VALTRON
The scent of hot metal and ozone greets me before I’m fully inside the production corridor. The smell catches on my throat, ragged, like I forgot how to breathe in the compound’s belly. Arena lights behind steel-glass panels pulse in a rhythm that matches my heartbeat—boom-boom-boom.
I was planning on reading old footage tonight. Tracing logs. Chasing shadows. But I veer off the path. I take the maintenance ladder down. I slip past the guards. I move silent—because I’ve trained in silence. Because I know what I want.
And I find a door, half-open. A hall of little techs, drones, staging gear, remote rigs. Children’s laughter echoes from down a service shaft. I pause.
I shouldn’t go in.
But I do.
The hatch leads to a side corridor, dim, unused for main traffic. I follow the sound. Light from a hatch glows weak orange. I step in.
There she is.
A small figure crouched beside a cracked service window. Loose wires. A fallen drone. Her hair is flaxen. Her shoulders squared with the gravity of the moment.
Rhea’s daughter.
Ripley.
My chest tight-ropes across my ribs. I want to throttle myself for stepping in. For watching. For recognising her.
She hasn’t seen me yet.
I crouch behind a barrel. The hiss of a leaking coolant pipe drowns everything except the pounding in my ears.
Ripley’s muttering.
“Come on, come on… Mr. Blastaar’s too tall. Too loud. Too big. But maybe he’ll help.”
Help? My name.
Her boots scuff against the concrete while she tries to drag the drone aside. Her small hands flex around the panel.
I swallow.
My mind scrambles.
This is a trap.
My public image. Rhea’s hidden life. The kid who has more right to call me dad than she knows.
But for now she’s just a little girl tangled in electronics.
I stand.
Footsteps soft. I step into the halo of orange light.
She doesn’t jump.
She doesn’t say anything yet.
I clear my throat.
“Need a hand?”
Her head whips up.
Blue eyes. Golden-yellow rim. My eyes.
She blinks twice.
“I… I’m okay.”
She lies.
I crouch and place a finger on a loose wire. My scale-red forearm catches the light. She stares.
“You sure?”
She nods. I reach in.
I fix the drone’s wire. The panel clicks. The drone hums faintly.
Her face lights.
“Thanks, Mr. Blastaar.”
That stops me.
My voice sticks.
I’m a professional gladiator. I’ve faced mountain beasts. Black-ops retrieval missions. I’ve watched friends die. But this… this broke me in two.
“Not… not ‘Mr. Blastaar’,” I manage. “Call me Valtron.”
She looks at me. I tilt my head. She hesitates.
“Valtron.”
She nods. “Okay, Valtron.” Then she smiles.
And the smile folds the world.
“Thanks, Valtron.”
She scampers off with the drone.
I stand in the corridor, heart pounding like a war-drum. The lights flicker.
Pain rattles down my spine.
Because I saw her.
The kid that looks just like I did at that age.
Later, the arena medic—old man Sahlun—catches me after training. My muscles ache differently tonight. Exhaustion is laced with something else: dread, hope, fear.
He tucks me into the recovery bay.
Curtains drawn.
Soft biolumin-light bathing my torso in violet glow.
He checks my vitals, smirks.
“You look shook.”
“I’m fine.”
“No you’re not.”
He taps my shoulder.
“She has your eyes.”
My head snaps up.
“Who?”
He just shrugs.
“You know who.”
I lean back.
“Then tell the girl. Or lose them both.”
Silence.
It crashes through me harder than any spear.
Because Sahlun doesn’t beg.
He warns.
And he’s right.
That night I can’t sleep either.
I stare at myself in the holo-mirror. The man they pay to fight for spectacle. The man they pay to adore. The man I built when I thought the mission took me far from all of this.
But I came back.
Because she is here.
And I don’t know if I dare let her in.
Because I don’t know if my world has room for her.
And I don’t know if I can keep up the facade of celebrity while chasing ghosts of what I left behind.
Back in the slow hours, I replay the moment in the training bay.
I see her face. The way she tensed when I spoke. The way she said Mr. Blastaar first—and how fast she adopted Valtron when I corrected.
I hear her voice giggle when the drone hummed again.
I smell the coolant pipe. The warm metal. The oil-smell that always follows me like regret.
I taste the bitterness of time wasted.
And what terrifies me most:
I want her.
My daughter.
And maybe a chance to make it right.
But can I?
Can I step out of the ring and into the shadows of fatherhood?
Rhea warned me once—“You’re not the only one with scars.”
Now I see hers. And I see mine. And I realise they might not heal. But maybe they can hold, if I let them.
The next day I walk past the press pods with the edge of the training bay behind me. I don’t look at her. Not this time.
But I feel her.
I feel her presence the way a distant star flickers despite the dark.
I feel her watching.
And I don’t flinch.
Hours later I approach her room in the compound’s private wing. The call-beep echoes softly. The panel glows.
But I stop.
I don’t knock.
I don’t wait.
I just step away.
Because I’m not ready.
And because I’m terrified.
And because I know what happens if I cross that threshold.
And I don’t know if I want to risk losing her again.
The compound’s unusually quiet for midday.
No shouting from the rings, no PR flunkies yapping into comms. Even the omnipresent hum of the production drones seems subdued—like the place itself knows it fucked up.
The holoboards around the complex keep flickering between scheduled matches and emergency messages from NovaCast’s exec team, their apologies thin and panicked.
Words like “unauthorized leak,” “pending review,” “temporary suspension,” and “nonrepresentative views” flash across the screens in corporate gray.
But everyone knows what it is.
They leaked her segment.
Rhea’s.
The one about Yorrick—the trainer who put three rookies in recovery tanks last season and called it “conditioning.” She’d worked weeks on that story. Verified every detail. Interviewed whistleblowers, scraped the truth from frightened interns, embedded with med-techs off the record.
It was good journalism.
Too good.
Somebody at NovaCast saw it, panicked, and pulled the trigger early. No polish. No legal vetting. Just dumped it mid-stream like throwing meat to wolves.
The public’s howling. Sponsors are pulling ads. Yorrick’s issued a hollow denial and gone dark. And Rhea—Rhea’s been thrown under the bus faster than you can say “brand realignment.”
She’s off the schedule.
Account suspended.
Security clearance revoked.
They’re feeding her to the machine she used to run.
And I’m gonna burn for it.
I find her outside the arena.
She’s sitting on the edge of a loading dock, back to the concrete wall, knees pulled tight under her chin. She’s got a jacket draped over her shoulders like armor, but her hands shake every time she exhales.
No cameras here. No crowd.
Just the back lot. Smells like coolant, ozone, and cigarette ash. The sky overhead is washed-out gray, no stars visible even though the dome's transparent. A drizzle of static rain flickers along the shield above us, castoff from a passing freighter.
She doesn’t hear me at first.
Or maybe she does and just doesn’t care.
I don’t say anything.
I sit.
Not close.
But close enough.
After a while, she speaks.
“They didn’t even call me.”
Her voice is flat.
“I found out when my access badge stopped working.”
I nod.
She keeps talking. Her gaze stays on the rain-flecked skyline, but her words are razor-sharp.
“Did everything by the book. Triple-sourced. Cross-referenced. Legal vet signed off last week. Someone wanted it buried.”
“I know.”
She glances at me.
Then back to the sky.
“I used to think if I just told the truth loud enough, people would care.”
“They do.”
“Not the right people.”
A long silence stretches between us. I don’t rush her. I know what this is. Not just a professional implosion. It’s personal.
It’s everything.
She’s unraveling right in front of me.
And she’s letting me see it.
Finally.
“I was pregnant when you left,” she says.
No buildup. No warning. Just drops the grenade in my lap and watches me flinch.
I don’t speak.
Not yet.
She deserves the silence.
“The second I knew, I ran. I changed names, faces, blood types. Dowron’s people helped. But only if I cut all ties. No messages. No hints. No tracks.”
She swallows hard.
“I wanted to tell you. But I thought—I thought if I did, it’d get you killed. Or worse.”
My throat’s dry. My hands tremble in fists.
She wipes at her face but doesn’t cry.
Not really.
Her eyes are already too burned-out for that.
“I raised her alone. Taught her how to be brave, and loud, and sharp enough to bite back at the galaxy if it ever came for her. But every night when she asked about her dad, I had to lie.”
I breathe out, slow.
“Why me?” I ask. “Why here, now, after all this time?”
She laughs.
Bitter.
“That’s the galaxy’s joke, isn’t it? I thought I was done with pain. I thought I was safe. And then you came crashing back, larger than life, goddamn Blastaar.”
She spits the name like it offends her.
Maybe it should.
But it’s mine now.
“Do you hate me for it?” I ask.
She looks at me, finally.
Her eyes are stormy.
“Not as much as I want to.”
That hits harder than a blow.
And I deserve every ounce of it.
“I didn’t die,” I say. “Not really. But I wanted to.”
She frowns.
I glance away.
“After that last mission... things went dark. No team. No credits. No backup. Combine had agents in every port. I was just a ghost with too many scars and no place left to bleed.”
“You could’ve come back.”
“I couldn’t even crawl.”
The silence turns heavier.
Then I speak again.
“I ended up in the pit fights. Backwater station called Quen’s Halo. No rules. No sponsors. Just blood and bone and grit. You win, you eat. You lose, you bleed. That simple.”
She stiffens.
I don’t stop.
“I didn’t go in to win. I went in to disappear. Figured I’d burn out. Leave nothing. But I kept surviving. And one day, someone called me Blastaar. And the crowd roared.”
I meet her eyes.
“It was the first time I felt real in years.”
She doesn’t speak.
I keep going.
“I told myself I was surviving. But what I was really doing… was searching. Every system I entered, every fight I booked—I made sure the press was there. Made sure my name reached across the stars.”
I lean forward.
“And then I saw her.”
Rhea closes her eyes.
“I saw her in the hall, clutching that drone like it was the most important thing in the universe. And when she smiled… I knew. I knew I’d found more than I ever deserved.”
She opens her mouth.
Closes it.
Breathes.
And whispers, “She loves stars, you know.”
“I believe it.”
“She builds models of freighters from junk she finds. Says she wants to be a pilot. Or a reporter. Depends on the day.”
I smile.
Pain in my chest. Pure and brutal.
“She’s got fire.”
“She’s got you.”
Silence again.
But it’s warmer now.
Less jagged.
More like an old scar than a fresh wound.
I shift beside her, resting my elbows on my knees.
“What now?”
She shrugs.
“Now? I lose my job. Get smeared across syndicate tabloids. Probably blacklisted. Again.”
“Rhea—”
“And I keep raising her. No matter what.”
My throat tightens.
I nod.
Then I ask the one thing I don’t have the right to ask.
“Can I see her? Really see her?”
She doesn’t answer.
Not right away.
But she doesn’t say no.
And in the ache between her silence and my breath, there’s hope.
Small.
Flickering.
But alive.