BT - Chapter 5

Five days later

News spread of the Sun Jin Empire sending an envoy after Arken burned. A representative called it “an investigation”. The timing gnawed at me. The Empire was neck-deep in their own war, and yet here they were, reaching out to us, a territory so small we barely registered on any map worth reading. My adopted mother had processed the request herself and told me the envoy seemed warm, even generous. That tracked. The Sun Jin had a reputation: they would add you to their boarders, yes, but they would also feed your hungry, clothe your poor, and advance your medical technology, and they meant every word of it. Still, something about their timing felt less like diplomacy and more like a hand extended over a grave. We would find out enough.

It arrived with its own weather. One moment the sky was open and blue, and the next it was split by a lattice of lightning that didn't arc naturally but seemed to reach downward in unnatural lines, as though something above was pulling the electricity toward itself. The humming came next, low at first, felt in the chest before it was heard in the ears, then climbing until it was less a sound than a condition, something that made the joints of the jaw ache and turned the inside of the skull into a resonating chamber. The boom that followed was less a sound than a physical event, a wall of force that knocked loose roof tiles and sent birds scattering in every direction at once. Then, through the churning storm clouds it had dragged in behind it, the ship materialized. There was no other word for it. It seemed to literally teleport here, ripping the air around it to shreds. One second there was only cloud, and then there was hull, dark, vast, and so close to the surface that its shadow swallowed the entire settlement whole. It was too large to have a silhouette. We could not see where it began or ended. All we could see was its underside: a geography of plating and exhaust ports and launch bays yawning open to release fighter craft the way a wound releases blood. The ground beneath it groaned. Loose stones rolled. I would later learn it was the Esther, the Sun Jin Empire’s capital command ship, the largest vessel, or thing, ever constructed by any known civilization. In that moment, we only knew that the sky had been replaced by something else.

The sky lit up with a brilliant orange light, and I felt the energy emanating from it - burning, powerful, unstoppable. It was the Sun Jin laser weaponry technology that the Systems Alliance had been trying to replicate, but this time, we were facing it firsthand. All around me, buildings crumbled in its wake, leaving nothing but dust and rubble behind. The ground tore open with an explosive force as the laser beams sliced it open, splitting the ground like a scalpel through flesh. People screamed in fear, yet all I could do was stand helplessly in the open side-cargo bay door of an already airborne transport shuttle, watching my home be destroyed before my eyes. My vision blurred and my throat tightened as I jabbed at the communications panel, cycling through channel after channel of dead static. Even if I saw details of the ship attacking us, it would have been futile; our primitive technology meant nothing against this seemingly alien monster in the sky.

As the pilot started to make evasive maneuvers, the shuttle shook and I watched as Sun Jin fighter craft pursued us. Bullets and tracer rounds flew everywhere, and I dove out of the way of one of the open side ports just in time to avoid being hit. Glancing out the opening, I saw one of the fighter ships explode; what had caused it? Before I could figure it out, the other plane sped toward us faster than I'd ever seen one move.

This is where it all started. This is where it happened. Time froze as I watched out the window at the sleek and predatory fighter craft. I felt something … different. The back of my neck pulled tight. Something had changed in the air the way air changes before a strike of lightning. Not a sound, not a sight, just a wrongness that the body knows before the mind does. He had arrived.

What came next was not a weapon. Weapons have edges, limits, sources. This had none. A column of dark-purple energy dropped from somewhere above and erased the fighter craft from existence. Not destroyed it, erased it. Trailing black particles that bled outward like ink in water, red lightning convulsing around the pillar in a frenzy that had no business looking as alive as it did. The shockwave didn't travel. It simply was, everywhere at once, and the shuttle stopped being a shuttle and became a piece of debris. My hands lost the door frame. The open side took me.

No ground rushing up. No time. Just the open air taking me, and the Esther above filling the entire sky like a ceiling of the world, its laser fire walking across the settlement in long deliberate strides. Debris from the shuttle tumbled past me—a seat harness, a panel, a boot—each piece tracing its own arc down. I was one of those pieces now.

I did not think of my family in words. I thought of them in images: my mother's hands, the underground corridor that smelled like copper and old stone, my friend laughing at something I'd said. Was the underground city beneath the surface settlement going to look like gored out pit of twisted metal and fire after this? The images came fast and then faster and then they were gone because the screech arrived, physical and wrong, a frequency that had no business existing, and the air around me began to change.

Blue. Threads of it first, thin as hair, curling outward from nothing. Then thickening. Then pulling wide into shapes that beat against the wind with real force, real weight, scattering the smoke around me in downdraft pulses. I could feel them before I could understand them. The screech cut off like a door slamming shut.

Then the arm. Heavy, black-furred, absolute. It closed around my torso and crushed me backward against a chest that felt less like a body and more like a wall that had decided to move. I wrenched my head to the side trying to see it. One impression reached me before everything else did: mass, darkness, something vast and barely contained. Then the firm embrace of being held against its chest, and then, not on my skin but somewhere behind my sternum, the burning began.

The pain arrived before anything else did. Not at the skin, not at the edges, but at the center, somewhere behind the stomach, a point of pressure that expanded outward through the chest and into the arms and up the throat like something being born that had no business being born. My eyelids clamped shut. My teeth found each other. The darkness that moved through me was not like cold and it was not like heat; it was like being filled with something that had been waiting, that knew exactly where to go, that had done this before. A thousand voices I had never heard tore through the space behind my eyes all at once, and beneath them, beneath all of it, his red eyes, still and certain in the black.

And then, underneath the agony, underneath the shaking and the retching and the roar of it was something else. A warmth that had no right to be there. It did not cancel the pain. It simply existed alongside it, pressing back against the terror the way a hand presses against a wound: not healing it, just present. Insistent. The images of my city, the laser fire walking through the streets and for one impossible moment I was not afraid. It breathed. Whatever this was, it breathed. It had a pulse that was not my pulse. It was alive, and it knew that I knew, and it was not finished.

My world was lost, my loved ones likely swallowed by the void. The only thing left was the writhing thing inside my ribs, a parasite of despair that feasted on my loneliness. In moments of clarity, I would scavenge for food and attempt to survive among the trees of my new home, yet it never failed to return in full force - lurking in the shadows of my mind. Fear and misery were its fuel to manifest itself within me, unchained and uncontrolled. Hard. Dirty. It had a power to it. A satisfying clench of my fist viewed from my bloody face. It felt good?

I dodged the blade, stole his weapon. A sudden shrieking unnatural scream in my ear. I leaped into the air over rifle shot. A vision of thousands being vaporized on the surface of Danje. I cut the soldier in half. I won. I blocked one of their swords with my bare arms. I was the stronger. I was the alpha.

I first learned this forest planet was populated when I came across a military outpost. The aftermath of the carnage left me both shaken and confused. The entire occupancy had been wiped out in a matter of minutes by my own hand, and I could hardly believe that it had been me. A shocked cracked laugh escaped my maw. I clutched the life from one of them with my claws around his neck. I felt no remorse or guilt – only a sense of dread... from myself. Using energies I'd never known existed, I ruined their bodies, taking a sick pleasure in the carnage. Hunched over the bodies, I took several deep breaths, holding the sword I stole from one of them. I was covered in it. The blood.

My body shook with adrenaline as I stumbled away from the carnage, numb. A part of me screamed to run, to get away from what I'd become. But a deeper, darker part whispered a different command.

Don't stop. Don't think. Don't look back.

With every step, its grip on me seemed to grow stronger, until eventually it became almost like an addiction. My newfound strength offered an escape from my sadness and loneliness, allowing me to ignore reality for just a few moments longer. However, soon after every instance of violence came regret and sorrow. A reminder that deep down something was still wrong with me.

Don't stop. Don't think. Don't wake up.

The smashing of metal on metal rang through my bloody matted ears.

Forza?

You are cursed with this affliction like me, yet you manage to keep it at bay. You appear tranquil and steady, as if you've transcended the anguish that has crippled my body and soul. Yet I can still feel your sorrow emanating from within. I don't know what evils befell you, how that black-feathered demigod caught us both in his web, or how you manage to suppress this horror, but I know our paths will cross again.

My armored fist crashed into the metal again at my side. And again, my eyes peered in the darkness. Their flashlights on me.

Even though the monster in me tried to kill you, you let me live. No, I will not die in this wreckage of a ship that I myself brought down. The Sun Jin recovery crew discovered the corpses of your friends and all the gear they left behind. They are aware of your identity and that of your comrades, and they will come for you. They captured me.

Your friend's body... the reptilian one. I held him up, a promise to you, Forza: I am your road to ruin. Then I tore him in half. After that, the fight went out of me. I let them capture me. Now I'm in this dark cargo hold, his blood still under my hands, smearing the walls as I moan. There's nowhere left to hide.

My stained sword crashed into the mud like thunder. The cruelty of my Bloodtigers unchecked power ripped the soil apart in a maelstrom of wet, demoralizing intensity. The blade was a symbol of my rage, an extension of the pain and violence I’d engraved over my scars.