Chapter 60 10:
Those suits used by the lithari were supposedly meant to provide them with superior armor in addition to multiplying their strength, but before any Viltrumite, those costly contraptions were nothing more than cardboard beneath the imperial race's monstrous force.
The deaths of the lithari were counted by the dozens, the spilled blood would have created a small lake under proper conditions. Korr-add was unleashing a true slaughter, yet amidst the fury of his assault, he made a mistake.
There were so many shots that sooner or later one would slip past his vision.
A plasma beam, fired from a blind angle, struck directly against the sheet hanging from his left hand.
"Nooooo!" Korr lamented, but he could do absolutely nothing about it.
The molecular fabric, resistant to vertiginous speeds yet not indestructible, tore apart with a maddening sound.
The remaining fragment projectiles spilled into the void like a drizzle, scattering in every direction due to the brutal inertia of Korr's flight.
Now he truly was lost.
He watched as his precious ammunition disappeared, bouncing against the grayish ground, rolling into unreachable corners. The sheet, now empty, hung from his lightened fingers.
That brief instant disoriented him for a moment and then pain exploded across his back.
Zaaassss!
The plasma struck him right between the shoulder blades. The heat was so intense that Korr felt his dermis contract, his nerve endings screaming in agony as though they wished to carbonize themselves.
The impact hurled him forward, destabilizing his flight, turning him into an erratic projectile that spun upon itself before crashing against a support column.
"Agh!" groaned the nato, the air escaping violently from his lungs.
His back burned, literally.
It felt as though molten magma had been poured between his vertebrae.
The uniform, now carbonized around the affected area, clung to his charred flesh with a repulsive adhesion.
But despite all of that, Korr could not stop.
Because if he did, he would die.
"Move, damn it, move, move, move, move," he shouted within his mind, those maddening thoughts echoing through him.
Driven by the adrenaline flooding every cell of his Viltrumite body, the nato launched himself into the air once again, though this time in a more erratic manner.
Now he was at a disadvantage.
He could no longer attack nor offer effective combat. He could only dodge, zigzag, survive, and avoid a horrifically painful death.
He ascended until he nearly touched the crystalline ceiling of the dorymathos, seeking cover among the structural beams that upheld that architectural mass.
From the heights, with his chest burning and his back oozing a maddening agony, Korr observed the scene with eyes half-tearful yet extremely focused.
And what he saw, certainly, froze his blood.
The group of lithari he had attempted to reach was no longer moving anywhere, in fact they had stopped.
They formed a defensive perimeter around something that rested at the center of an improvised clearing.
It was a box, large, a— No, a cube of colossal proportions, easily eight cubic meters of onyx metal.
Its surface seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it, which made it even more sinister at first glance.
On the other hand, the largest lithari, the one with the bulky armor and the bionic eye, walked toward the cube with steady steps.
In his right hand he carried a device Korr could not quite make out, but which he sensed, with certainty more than instinct, was a key.
Or a detonator, which made it even worse.
To Korr's eyes, that cube had become the most terrifying thing among everyone present.
Korr had seen enough throughout his two lives to recognize terror when it materialized before him.
The lithari seemed to be sacrificing themselves, offering their lives to their stripped-down projectiles, so many of them dead, it was more than obvious their rebellion had not the slightest intention of winning.
It seemed as though the only thing they were trying to gain was time.
And his twisted logic screamed at him that all of that time was for that cube.
If that thing were to activate, he could not even imagine what would happen here.
He did not know, nor did he care to find out. He simply could not allow it.
Korr-add inhaled deeply, feeling the reconstituted air of the dorymathos fill his somewhat atrophied lungs.
He ignored the pain in his back, and searched for determination from where he had none in order to continue.
He had no weapons and only his body remained. But despite his terrible condition, he knew that at the very least, his body would have to be enough.
It had to be.
Korr descended from the heights as though he were a fallen angel.
However, that aerial trajectory did not form a straight line.
He launched himself toward the edges and began flying in circular trajectories.
For an instant, he imagined that he was a tiny particle, like in those Discovery documentaries, where such things were propelled through a circular path.
And they spun and spun, accumulating energy, increasing their speed until brushing against the impossible, almost as though to frighten the population by insinuating that they could create interdimensional portals to unpleasant places according to the conspiracy theorists.
Well, Korr had taken the role of the particle, and the dorymathos was his collider.
And the lithari would be the targets with which he would collide.
"He's circling the perimeter!" shouted a lithari, confused. "I can't lock onto the trajectory!"
"Fire blindly, damn our ancestors! Saturate him!"
But they could not hit him.
Korr moved too fast, to the point that his silhouette had blurred into a ghostly crimson streak.
By the time they tried to calculate his trajectory, Korr had already completed three full rotations.
The plasma shots cut through the air where he had been, not where he was, and that terrified them.
The lithari squeezed their triggers driven by desperation, but their projectiles found only emptiness or, in the worst cases, the bodies of their own comrades.
Korr clenched his teeth, gathering more momentum, more speed. I only need ten seconds, nothing more.
He counted in his mind from one to ten while his body continued tracing that deadly dance.
At some point, the lithari began to fall into disarray, their defensive formations fracturing under the impossibility of predicting Korr's next movement.
And at ten, indeed, Korr changed direction in an abrupt turn.
That movement was so violent that the air itself seemed to tear apart in his wake.
He went from tracing circles to launching himself in a straight line toward the center of the enemy perimeter, toward the cube before the bionic-eyed lithari could reach his objective.
He became a biological projectile of flesh and bone, willpower and contained rage.
His fear and any other feeling had long since been left far behind.
Booooooooom!