Just a Scratch
The air in the lower rings of the mining facility was a toxic cocktail of sulfur, vaporized coolant, and burning flesh.
The primary ventilation systems were dead.
Thick black smoke crawled across the floor grates and wrapped around my boots like a wet, hot shroud.
Down here, the constant wail of the alarm sirens had mutated into a distorted, mechanical screech I could feel in my teeth.
We’d driven them into a corner, level by level. The meat grinder was working flawlessly.
I crouched behind a head-high crate of ribbed titanium.
In front of me, the emergency terminal for Sector Three flickered.
My fingers slipped on the blood-smeared display.
I ignored the burning pain in my scraped knees and hammered the override code into the keyboard.
The progress bar crawled toward one hundred percent at an agonizing pace.
Fifteen meters ahead, Raze held the corridor chokepoint.
He wasn’t just a barrier anymore. He was a whirling engine of destruction.
His massive violet body was drenched in the black and gray blood of the mutineers.
The war hammer in his right hand hummed at such an aggressive frequency that the air around the energy core shimmered.
Three heavily armored mutants threw themselves at him simultaneously.
He shattered the first one’s ribcage with a vertical strike that splintered bone like rotten wood.
His thick tail whipped beneath the blow, swept the second one’s legs out, and in the same motion wrapped around the third one’s throat, crushing his windpipe with a dry crack.
“Sector Four fire doors drop in ten seconds!” I shouted over the deafening roar of the firefight. I racked the imperial blaster with my free hand and rested the barrel on the edge of the titanium crate. “They’ve got no escape route left!”
Raze didn’t answer with words. A deep, bone-rattling roar tore from his throat as he raised the hammer and nailed the next attacker to the steel wall.
I tore my gaze from the terminal and scanned the blind spot on the right flank. The console’s infrared sensors blinked a warning.
A loud hiss cut through the smoke. Someone kicked open a manual maintenance hatch barely three meters from my position—brute force, no finesse.
The watch commander. Kael’s second-in-command.
He wore the thick, ash-gray armor of the elite guard. His face was a mask of hatred and raw desperation. Blood seeped from a gaping wound at his temple. He charged through, heavy plasma burner at the ready.
He stared at Raze. Saw the mechanical annihilation at the end of the corridor. Saw three of his best men torn apart in seconds. Reality slammed into his mind: against this monster, there was no winning in close combat.
His gaze jerked left. He found me.
The small, vulnerable human strategist working the terminal. The weak link in the chain. The leverage he needed to bring the warlord to his knees—or at least destroy what he valued most.
I didn’t hesitate for a millisecond. My mind blanked out everything but the silhouette of the charging giant. I pressed the blaster’s stock into my shoulder, curled my finger, and squeezed the trigger.
Two white-hot plasma bolts shot through the room.
The first hit him square in the right shoulder.
The armor melted away with a hiss, burned flesh steaming.
The watch commander let out a guttural roar and jerked his shoulder back, but his forward momentum didn’t break.
Adrenaline and sheer alien mass overrode the pain.
He dropped the heavy plasma rifle—his right arm hung useless.
But his left hand drew a long, serrated vibro-blade from his belt. The weapon’s high-frequency whine cut through the air.
I aimed at his head, tried to line up the third shot.
He was too close. He was too strong.
He threw his entire body weight forward. No tactics. No parry. A raw, ballistic impact.
His shoulder rammed into my chest. The force was indescribable—like being hit by a speeding freight train. The impact drove the air from my lungs in a hard gasp. My boots lost their grip on the grating. I flew almost two meters backward.
My back slammed into the hard steel casing of the wall piping. A stabbing white pain exploded through my spine and tore through my already bruised ribs. The blaster slipped from my numb fingers and clattered across the floor, far out of reach.
I slid down the wall, gasping for air, my vision going black at the edges.
The watch commander gave me no time to recover.
He was on me instantly—a mountain of gray skin, heated metal, and blind hatred.
He threw himself on top of me, rammed his heavy knee between my thighs, and pinned me to the hot floor grating.
His left hand fisted the front of my tactical shirt and wrenched me upward while he brought the whining vibro-blade to my throat.
Survival instinct took over. I threw both hands up, grabbed his thick armored wrist with every ounce of strength my human body could muster, and pushed back against the blade. The heat of the high-frequency weapon radiated onto my face. The smell of ozone burned in my nose.
He pressed down. His muscles pulsed. Against this raw alien mass, my resistance was a joke. The blade inched closer to my throat, millimeter by millimeter.
I didn’t block the arm. I changed the angle. I threw my body weight to the right, twisted my shoulder, and pulled him just slightly off balance.
The blade missed my carotid artery.
Instead, the serrated, whining metal bit into my left forearm.
The steel ate through the black fabric of my shirt and sank mercilessly into my flesh. A sharp, searing pain ripped through my arm. The blade tore open the skin, slid across the muscle, and carved a deep, ten-centimeter gash down my forearm.
I didn’t scream. I clenched my teeth so hard I tasted copper on my tongue. A strangled gasp escaped my lips.
Blood sprayed. Crimson and boiling hot against the cooler air. It stained the commander’s armor, splattered across my face, and rained in thick heavy drops onto the hot grating. The metal hissed as the red liquid sizzled away.
The acrid, metallic smell of fresh human blood exploded through the smoky room. Iron. Salt. Life.
It took a fraction of a second.
Fifteen meters away, all movement stopped.
Raze stood over a shattered body. His hammer hung suspended in mid-swing. His chest, which had been heaving in a hard, aggressive rhythm, went still.
He lifted his head. His nostrils flared. He breathed in the hot, smoky air.
The scent of my blood reached him.
Reality tore in two. The controlled tactics we'd planned together, the strategic alliance, the calculating mind of the ruler—all of it was erased in a single, brutal tenth of a second.
What remained was the demon. The raw, unbound monster from the deepest abyss of his genetics.
I lay pinned beneath the watch commander's weight, blood streaming from my arm, but my gaze stayed locked on the warlord at the end of the corridor.
The transformation was physical, violent, and terrifying.
The glowing gold of his amber eyes vanished. A deep, abyssal black consumed the iris completely, spreading across the entire cornea. Only in the center did a glowing red ring of pure fire pulse.
His deep violet skin darkened until it turned the color of liquid obsidian.
The muscles in his neck, shoulders, and chest swelled with an audible, sickening grinding of cartilage and tendons.
The thick scars on his torso split slightly under the sudden expansion of mass.
His military pants strained to their limit.
The thick tail that had been swinging calmly behind him shot upward like an anaconda. The scales stood on end, jagged and razor-sharp.
He dropped the war hammer. He didn't need it anymore.
He threw his head back. A sound broke from his throat—nothing like speech or a battle cry. It was a deafening, guttural roar, so deep and penetrating that the remaining glass panels of the emergency monitors shattered with a ringing crash. The sound wave made the floor vibrate beneath my back.
The watch commander above me froze. The vibro-blade in his hand trembled. He turned his head, raw terror carving into his features as he stared at his death incarnate—the black demon.
The warlord didn't run. He exploded.
His boots launched off the floor. The stone beneath him cracked. Fifteen meters shrank to nothing. He flew through the space, a black, raging mass of muscle, claws, and raw annihilation. The air burned around him.
The commander tried to raise the blade. A pathetic, useless reflex.
He would not leave this room alive.
The impact was a force of nature. He slammed into the watch commander like a meteor. The sheer force tore the mutant off me.
I pressed myself flat against the grating as the fight exploded above me. It wasn't a fight. It was an execution.
The watch commander staggered backward, raised the vibro-blade, but the movement was laughably slow against the black, raging mass before him.
Raze used no weapon. His massive left hand shot forward.
The pitch-black claws punched through the ash-gray armor at the traitor's shoulder as if it were wet paper.
He dug his fingers deep into the flesh, down to the joint.
At the same time, his right hand grabbed the commander's forearm.
A brutal, unstoppable flex of his chest muscles.
A wet, sickening tearing of cartilage, thick tendons, and muscle tissue drowned out the sirens.
He ripped the commander's entire left arm, weapon and all, from the shoulder joint.
Boiling blood fountained from the severed artery and sprayed across the wall piping.
The traitor's mouth opened in a silent scream.
The scream never left his throat.
Raze's thick, obsidian-colored tail whipped upward. The raised, razor-sharp scales wrapped like a steel garrote around the commander's thick neck. The warlord didn't just tighten. He wrenched the tail in the opposite direction with a brutal jerk.