But his eyes are on the far gate.
The one that opens now with a hiss of sealed metal and the thunder of mechanical footsteps.
Drayxon Varn walks through in powered armor so thick it looks like a mobile fortress. Plasma cannons on both shoulders. Reinforced plating down his arms. His face half-hidden under a tactical HUD visor that gleams with targeting data.
“You should’ve died in the blackout zone,” he sneers. His voice is amplified, mechanical, booming across the arena.
Valtron straightens. Spits blood.
“You should’ve stayed dead.”
Varn raises a fist—and the ring becomes a battlefield.
And I’m already moving.
CHAPTER 25
VALTRON
Pain is a language I’ve forgotten how to translate.
The moment Varn’s suppression fields kick in, it’s like my blood turns against me. Like my bones start rejecting the weight of my own body. The armor he wears hums with purpose-built tech—dirty Combine relics tuned specifically to shut down Vakutan physiology.
And it’s working.
Every instinct I have screams to move, to fight, but my limbs drag like I’m knee-deep in a gravity swamp. The muscles in my back spasm. My vision fuzzes out at the edges.
He circles me slow, like a predator toying with a broken kill.
“Not so mighty now,” Varn purrs through his speaker array. “You always were just another project. A piece of meat in a lab. A hammer looking for something to break.”
I lurch forward. My fist connects with his armor and nothing happens but the crunch of my own knuckles.
He slams into me with one gauntlet, throwing me ten meters across the ring.
The world spins.
My skull cracks the sand, ears ringing, lungs screaming for air. Something inside my chest tears. Ribs, maybe. I can’t tell. Too much hurts at once.
I try to stand. Collapse.
Varn stalks closer. “You’re a relic. A failed experiment wrapped in flesh. They should’ve let you rot.”
He lifts his arm. Power cores whine.
I close my eyes.
And then?—
A crack.
Not thunder.
Closer. Sharper.
Like electricity arcing off steel.
My eyes snap open just in time to see Rhea leap onto Varn’s back, shock baton in both hands. She slams it into the junction point of his suppression field.
