5. Cassia #2
Landing between the combat drone and us in an explosion of concrete and dust, the sheer force of his impact cracks the floor in a radial pattern that extends ten feet all around.
His wings spread wide, dominating the confined space, horns scraping the tunnel ceiling as his blazing eyes render the corrupted drone harmless by comparison.
A sweltering aura rolls off him, blistering the confined atmosphere and causing the nearby metal bulkheads to buckle under the intense thermal pressure.
He grabs the combat drone out of the air with both hands to tear it apart.
The machine shrieks, a strangled digital scream that echoes through the tunnels, as Rhykor rips its chassis open and pours thermal energy directly into its core systems to melt it from the inside out.
Liquified circuitry drips from his fingers like metallic blood.
The drone's weapon mounts fire wildly in its death throes, pulse rounds ricocheting off tunnel walls, and Rhykor absorbs two direct hits to the right side of his torso without flinching.
He drops the slag that used to be a military-grade combat drone and turns toward the fused machine mass filling the junction room.
What follows is butchery.
Rhykor wades into the errant machines with a violence so primal and overwhelming that it defies comprehension.
Without a weapon to his name, he relies solely on his hands, tearing limbs from hybrid droids with ease.
His palms glow with a blistering heat that melts through hardened chassis, leaving molten trails across every surface he touches.
A cargo loader arm swings at his head, and he catches it and superheats the metal until it sags and deforms, using the ruined limb as a club against the three machines coming in behind it.
His wings sweep through the chaos, armored edges slicing through gnarled wiring and sensor arrays, and the movements generate another wave of heat so intense that the tunnel walls begin to glow.
My feet refuse to move. Junia pulls at my arm, screaming words lost amid the cacophony, and I stand rooted to the spot, watching him systematically annihilate an entire chamber full of maladaptive machines with his body and the fire burning inside it.
He's beautiful; the thought surfaces unbidden and horrifying, rising through the terror and the smoky, screaming metal. Beautiful like a natural disaster, it was destructive and unstoppable, magnificent in scale and terrible in consequence. The burns on his skin glow brighter with each attack, and the warrior’s record across his chest and arms seem to pulse with their own light, ancient patterns blazing against his skin like a living specimen.
The last machine collapses into a heap of molten slag and sparking wire, and silence crashes over the tunnel system like a wave.
Rhykor stands in the wreckage, chest heaving, heat bleeding from his body in visible waves. Molten metal drips from his hands. His wings spread wide, trembling with exertion, and the bandages against his hardened torso vest have burned away entirely, leaving raw, scarred skin exposed.
He turns to me. That burning gaze finds mine through the smoke and the dust, and the fury in it shifts; softens is the wrong word, because nothing about Rhykor softens. But the killing focus recedes, replaced by an urgent, searching gaze tracking me head to toe for damage.
"You're hurt." It releases as more of a growl than words.
"I'm fine." I'm shaking so hard my teeth are chattering, but nothing is broken. Junia presses against the wall behind me, scanner to her chest, staring in absolute, breathless shock. "How did you?—"
"My guards reported you entered the tunnels." Two strides and he's on me, looming, near enough that heat bleeds from his skin onto mine and the stench of melted metal fills the air. "The sealed tunnels. The ones everyone in this district avoids."
"I had a reason."
"You had a death wish," I spit, my words raw and ragged, losing every trace of the military precision I usually command. "If I'd been thirty seconds later?—"
An explosion detonates somewhere deeper in the tunnel system.
The shockwave hits from behind, a concussive blast that throws Junia into the wall and sends me stumbling forward, triggering a cascade of structural failures in the already weakened ceiling.
Concrete cracks and support beams buckle. The tunnel begins to collapse.
Moving with a speed that defies his massive frame, Rhykor closes the distance in a blur.
He grabs me and wraps his body around mine to hurl us toward the corridor leading to the surface.
Above us, his wings snap outward like a living, scarred shield that spans wall to wall, and the collapsing ceiling crashes down onto him instead of me.
I hear him snarl as the impact shudders through the points of contact between us; his muscles tense, his bones absorbing the punishment meant for me.
Burning debris lands on his wings, and I can smell the membrane scorching and hear the hiss of superheated stone against living tissue.
He takes all of it, absorbing the falling concrete and the destruction the collapsing tunnel throws at us.
When the shaking stops, we're in the corridor, alive, covered in dust and debris.
Rhykor crouches over me, wings still spread above us like a ruined cathedral ceiling, and I realize with a lurch that he's trembling.
His breath comes in shallow, ragged bursts.
The membrane of both wings is singed and torn, with new burns layering over old blemishes, and the skin across his shoulders and spine blisters and weeps where burning debris seared through.
"Move." He grits it out through his fangs, and I can hear the pain behind the command. "Toward the surface now."
Junia and I half-run, half-stumble through the access tunnel while Rhykor follows behind us, wings dragging, leaving marks on the tunnel floor. He's guarding our rear even now, a wall of torched skin and torn wings blocking whatever might come out of the caved-in tunnels at our backs.
We make it to the surface through a maintenance hatch in Sector Eight. The open air hits my lungs like a drug, and I gulp it in, bent double with my hands on my knees while Junia collapses against a wall and swears for thirty straight seconds, never once repeating a single curse.
Rhykor drops to one knee beside the hatch, and this time he stays down.