The lights overhead shatter.
The sky goes red.
The floor beneath me trembles.
I see them—those faceless assassins—stumble mid-escape. Their cloaking tech shorts out. Their neural implants misfire. One grabs his head and screams until his brain cooks inside his skull. Another drops, convulsing, froth spraying from his mouth.
It’s not just sound. It’s pressure. A sonic cascade that flays thought from flesh, rips control from muscle. Reaper biology is voice, is dominance, is power so pure it makes lesser species forget what breathing feels like.
I walk through it all like a revenant.
Blood soaking my boots. My own, theirs—I can’t tell anymore. Doesn’t matter. My mouth still moves, the war cry shaping around every cracked tooth like prophecy. I can taste metal and ozone, the sharp tang of my own fury splitting the air.
Aria’s still behind me. I hear her scream something. My name? Maybe. But her voice is miles away, underwater. My heartbeat is thunder. My bones are fire.
Three assassins still moving. I see them blinking through the chaos, hunched like cornered dogs. One raises his weapon.
Too slow.
I lunge—nothing elegant, just brute force. I crash into him shoulder-first, slam him against the reinforced bulkhead hard enough to dent it. My claws dig in. He screams.
I twist.
The next swings his blade, screaming in Varnox. It’s meant to scare. Intimidate. I smile. Blood teeth.
I catch the blade mid-arc with my bare hand. It slices me, but I don’t care. I pull him close—close enough to smell his fear—and I whisper one word in Old Reaper.
“Die.”
His body folds in on itself.
The third tries to run.
I don’t chase.
Because Aria’s scream finally slices through the fog.
“AEBON!”
I turn—just in time to see the fourth. Hidden. Waiting. Coward.
The blade is raised.
Aria’s gun is empty.
I throw my glaive.
It hums through the air like a vengeful spirit, finds home in the assassin’s spine. He drops like a puppet with its strings cut.
Silence.
Real silence.
The kind that only comes after slaughter.
And that’s when my knees buckle.
My legs just... give. Like the rage was the only thing holding me together, and now that it’s gone, I’m just a sack of ruined muscle and fractured bone.
