Chapter 98 Chapter 98
AMINA
The fuel line explosion wasn’t a sound; it was a physical erasure of the world. The deck of the Goliath buckled, a tongue of white-hot fire licking the sky as the massive flagship groaned, tilting forty-five degrees toward the ruins of the city below.
Through the smoke and the roar of the dying engines, I saw Kira.
She wasn't falling. She was anchored by her madness. She had been thrown against a bulkhead, blood streaming from a gash on her forehead, but that heavy-duty wolf-killer was still leveled at me. Her eyes were vacant, the windows to a soul that had already burned to ash in the Midnight Gala.
"The prophecy ends now," she screamed, her voice barely audible over the screeching metal.
She pulled the trigger.
Time didn't slow down—it fractured. I felt the Null-Point in my womb ripple, a premonition of cold steel. I reached for the Earth Pulse to throw up a shield, but the fuel-fire was eating the oxygen, and my connection to the Ley-lines was frayed to a thread.
I wasn't fast enough.
A shadow blurred across my vision. A familiar scent of rain and scorched cedar surged past me.
Rian! The sound of the shot was a wet, heavy thwack. Rian didn't fly back; he absorbed the momentum, his body acting as a living shield. He collapsed into me, his weight crushing me against the tilted deck.
"Rian? Rian, talk to me!" I scrambled to hold him, my hands sliding over his tactical vest.
I pulled my hand back, and my breath hitched. My palm was coated in a shimmering, viscous fluid. It wasn't just blood. It was a swirling mixture of crimson and a necrotic, oily silver.
"Silver-void round," Rian wheezed, his head lolling against my shoulder. The violet light in his eyes was stuttering, like a dying star. "Stupid... fucking... girl."
Kira stared at us, the gun slipping from her fingers. She looked at Rian, then at her hands, as if she couldn't comprehend that she’d just shot the King she’d sworn her life to protect. Before she could speak, a secondary explosion ripped through the prow, and the segment of the deck she was standing on sheared off completely. She didn't scream as she vanished into the smoke and the long drop toward the city. She just fell.
"Amina..." Rian’s voice was a wet rattle.
"I've got you. I've got you, you idiot!" I lowered him to the deck, the heat of the fire singeing my hair.
I ripped open his vest. The wound was a nightmare. The silver-void round hadn't just pierced him; it was expanding. The silver was a poison to his Lycan DNA, and the void-matter was eating the resurrection energy I’d used to bring him back. The two forces were fighting a war inside his chest, and his heart was the battlefield.
I have to get it out. If that silver reaches his spine, he’s gone.
I didn't have tools. I didn't have a med-bay. I had my hands and a power that was currently trying to eat me from the inside out.
"Rian, look at me," I commanded, my voice cracking. "I’m going inside. You have to hold onto the light. Do you hear me? Don't let the Shadow take you!"
"It’s... already here," he whispered, his skin turning a sickly, translucent grey.
I hovered my hands over the entry wound. I closed my eyes, seeking the frequency of the bullet. I felt the jagged silver shards vibrating against his ribcage. I channeled a micro-kinetic pulse, a needle-thin thread of violet light, and threaded it into the wound.
The pain hit the hive-mind like a physical blow. Rian’s back arched, a guttural scream tearing from his throat.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I chanted internally.
As I worked to stabilize the internal hemorrhaging with cauterizing pulses, I felt a third presence in the room. Not Magnus. Not the baby.
The First Alpha.
In Rian’s weakened state, the Shadow was no longer lurking. It was feeding. I could feel the oily, obsidian consciousness of the Ancestor wrapping around Rian’s mind, whispering that death was a mercy, that the Void was home.
"Get away from him!" I snarled, pushing a burst of light into Rian’s system.
He is a failed vessel, the First Alpha’s voice boomed in our shared consciousness. The King is broken. Let me take the reigns, Seer. I will save the city. I will crush the fleet. Give him to me.
"Go to hell!" I shouted.
Rian’s eyes suddenly rolled back, his pupils vanishing. His hand shot up, grabbing my wrist with a strength that bruised the bone. His face contorted—not into Rian’s features, but into something colder, sharper.
"Amina..." the voice was Rian’s, but the cadence was wrong. "It’s so dark. Let me in. Let me take the crown."
"Rian, fight him!" I poured more power into the surgery, my own vision beginning to swim. The Null-Point in my womb was reacting to my distress, starting to pull on the very energy I was using to save him. I was being drained from both sides. "Don't you dare leave me!"
The Goliath gave a final, terminal lurch. We were falling. The altimeter on the HUD nearby was screaming: 3000 feet... 2500 feet...
I managed to hook the main shard of the silver bullet with a gravity well. I yanked it out, the metal hissing as it hit the deck. But the void-poison remained. Rian’s heart stopped.
The hive-mind went pitch black.
"NO!"
I didn't think. I couldn't afford to. I slammed my hands onto his chest, sending a massive, desperate surge of the Earth Pulse directly into his heart.
LIVE, YOU BASTARD!
The energy didn't just restart his heart. It acted as a bridge. Because the hive-mind was broken, the surge forced my entire consciousness into the vacuum of his mind.
The world of fire and metal vanished.
I was standing in a throne room made of bone and starlight. It was the distorted, nightmarish version of the Vale Estate. Sititng on the throne wasn't the First Alpha.
It was Rian.
But it wasn't my Rian. He was dressed in a suit of obsidian armor, a crown of black lightning hovering over his head. His eyes were cold, dead pits of white fire. Around his feet lay the corpses of everyone we had ever saved—Silas, my father, the North Pack.
This was the Tyrant King. This was the version of Rian that the prophecy had predicted—the one who would rule the ashes.
"You're late, Seer," the Tyrant said, his voice a landslide of ice. He stood up, and the floor of the mind-scape cracked beneath him. "The King you loved is buried under the weight of his own failures. I am all that’s left."
I stood my ground, my violet light flaring in the darkness of his psyche. "You're a hallucination. A fragment of the First Alpha's influence."
"I am his truth," the Tyrant countered, taking a step toward me. He raised a hand, and the shadows of the room coalesced into a blade. "To save his body, you have to kill his soul. Are you ready to fulfill the prophecy, Amina? Are you ready to break the man to save the monster?"
Behind him, I saw a small, flickering light—the real Rian, curled in a cage of silver wire, fading into nothing.
I looked at the Tyrant, then at the dying light of the man I loved. I realized that the "surgery" wasn't over. To save Rian's life in the physical world, I had to win a war in his head.
But as the Tyrant King raised his obsidian blade, the walls of the mind-scape began to bleed. Green necrotic light, Magnus's Siphon, was breaking into Rian's subconscious.
"Two for the price of one," Magnus's voice echoed through the bone-throne room.
I felt the ship hit the first of the city's skyscrapers in the real world. We were crashing, and if I didn't kill the Tyrant in the next ten seconds, we wouldn't wake up at all.