307 – Counterattack
‘How’ was the question most people wanted to ask. Including Alicei.
“I didn’t know there’s these… vermin betraying the Alliance,” he hissed, words soaked in aristocratic disgust. “They dare bring him through the rift…!”
Right. The true betrayal wasn’t the intergalactic insubordination, it was the audacity of logistics.
“That’s not important now.” Mahkato’s voice snapped. “We are to jump into the rift and leave him here to freeze alone and take over that planet!”
Simple plan. Elegant, even. Detach, eject, vanish, let the bastard freeze with a view.
“Go! We’re leaving now! Abandon the stati—”
CRASH.
The entire station juddered with the kind of vibration normally reserved for bad omens and experimental reactors. Steel groaned. Consoles flickered. Dignity wobbled.
Mahkato and Alicei, two figures built for battlefield grace, suddenly resembled background extras in a zero-gravity slapstick.
“He got here already?” Mahkato spat through clenched teeth. Clearly punctuality was another of his talents.
Alicei grabbed her hand. “Let’s go.”
Mahkato’s eyes faltered—briefly, only for a millisecond—but in that flicker lived an entire war’s worth of rage, pride, and emotional whiplash.
“Why are you like this? Do you think I can’t defeat him?” she demanded, insulted not by the situation, but by the possibility of gentleness being misread as pity.
She still let herself be pulled. Some battles did require moving your feet before moving your mouth.
“I don’t care what you think I think. Let’s just give them a damn lesson!” Alicei barked, too busy stomping toward glory to indulge in nuance.
The ships departed.
No ceremony. No rallying cry. Just thrusters igniting across a dozen decks and engine cores screaming their indifference to the laws of physics.
The temporary space station, never built for this kind of overtime, groaned in protest. It forced a hard-line handshake with the rift—a volatile interface woven from spatial trauma and bad decisions. Panels blinked, alarms flared half-heartedly, and the onboard AI updated its will.
Coordinates locked.
The planet's three-dimensional signature, a mess of magnetic crust, leyline maps, and a very impolite gravitational skew, was marked and recorded in an angry red hex code. Somewhere in the bowels of the station, the dimensional calculus engine choked once, wheezed again, and then resigned itself to madness.
Rows of battleships, each one a lumbering monument to over-armed diplomacy, surged forward. Their hulls adjusted in micro-pulses, adapting to the fluctuating brane tension with the jittery precision of a caffeine-addled seamstress threading needles in ten directions at once.
They didn’t sail into the rift, they punched through it. No smooth transition. The portal didn’t welcome them. It merely tolerated their passage, screaming across its bending fabric as the station’s tethering algorithms fought to keep it stable long enough for traffic.
Mahkato’s personal ship, not to be outdone by the riffraff of the fleet, made its entrance with calibrated arrogance. Gilded hull. Psychic shielding. Quantum-stabilized energy rails humming beneath the surface like a coiled storm begging to be aimed at something stupid.
It dove straight through the throat of reality, the rift parting just wide enough to avoid catastrophe, not wide enough to avoid judgment. One by one, two by two, a flood of military doctrine wrapped in hull plating and existential fury.
The station, now cracking along its energy couplings, began folding in on itself with the kind of resignation reserved for things that knew their job was done and had no interest in dragging it out.
Drifting in its aftermath was a single main vessel, cut loose from the collapsing structure, not following along. It floated between Burn and the wreckage-rimmed rift, refusing to retreat, stubborn in its position.
On the captain’s deck stood a familiar figure. Burn had seen him before—briefly, in scattered fragments of memory—before Mahkato ever entered the scene.
Senior Fleet Admiral Thaddeus Voss.
The man who approved the assassination plan involving the White Dwarf. Also the man who first raised the flag about Apex Two, Caliburn Pendragon, being more than a footnote.
“First time we’re face to face, isn’t it?” Burn muttered. Across all the timelines, every loop and variation, he had never quite managed to reach this pocket of space where the Alliance’s decision-makers stayed conveniently out of reach. “Finally.”
And on cue, the vessel’s oversized weapon began to glow—the start of the dying star protocol.
Last time he tanked one of these, the output was capped at 8%. Burn had survived that. Technically, he’d swallowed it.
“Let’s see... theoretically, I can handle 16%. No, probably 32% now,” he said, idly calculating in his head. There was no atmosphere to worry about this time, so there wouldn’t be a cascading planetary death toll if he got greedy. “But would they even risk going above 30%?”
At that level, the blast could accidentally condense a new black hole if it tagged enough mass on the way out. There wasn’t a lot of margin for optimism. Even the ship itself might get erased before it finished the shot.
But Burn already knew.
Thaddeus Voss wasn’t planning on returning.
The man didn’t speak, but the way he stood said everything. He had already accepted the end.
After Burn captured Rudolf Blitzen and made it clear he’d separated his head from the rest, there wasn’t much left for Thaddeus to do. Rudolf was nobility—one of the Seven Heavens. An aristocrat with enough connections to erase planets on a bad day.
Going home after failing to protect him? That wasn’t going to go well.
And even dying in battle wasn’t a guarantee his family would be spared. But surrendering was worse.
So Thaddeus stood there, not flinching, knowing exactly how this would end.
Burn exhaled.
He’d waited too long to miss this chance.
BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASTTT!!!
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH!”
***
“Monster…!”
The word escaped someone’s mouth. No one bothered to claim it. No one had to.
The few ships that had slipped past Burn and into the rift were still processing the fact that they weren’t dead. Not yet. Their continued existence had less to do with tactical genius and more to do with Mahkato’s decision to run fast and not look back. In hindsight, that had been wise.
They’d seen it. All of it.
They watched the man tear into their formation without warning, without delay, and without even the courtesy of a radio threat. No grand speech. No monologue. Just direct impact.
The vessels that weren’t quick enough—those that hesitated, fumbled, or assumed they had time—were gone. Not damaged. Gone.
Exploded from the inside out under their own stress. Disassembled by their own structural pressure, with Burn moving too fast to register, too present to deny.
The unlucky ones didn’t even make it to proper wreckage. The parts of them were left behind in fragmented states, broken into measurable degrees and scattered into regions of folded dimensional space that weren’t meant to hold memories or atoms.
Those who made it into the rift were supposed to be the lucky ones. But luck didn’t mean peace.
They still saw what happened behind them. They still heard the screaming before the comms cut out.
They were still watching the coordinates shift as pieces of former vessels bled across fold-space on their scanners.
This wasn’t over.
This wasn’t even the start.
The invasion hadn’t begun.
This had only been Burn’s opening counterattack.
And now the war would start for real.
“We left him out there. There shouldn’t be a way for him to get back, right?”
“There shouldn’t be.”
“Sir Voss stayed behind to stop him. He’s dead out there.”
A small victory.
Then they reached the edge of Nethermere’s atmosphere.
And there he was.
Waiting.
No, not just waiting. Floating there with absolutely no reason to exist in this coordinate, one million light-years away.
Glowing.
“...Is he glowing?”
Yes. He was.
Then came the sound.
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
He was laughing.
With pink heart-eyes.