The laughter lingers as the dream shifts, curling in the air like smoke. The world around me shudders, flickering like a dying flame. The Tower is gone, dissolving into something older, something raw with the weight of history. The sky shifts, thick with the scent of oil and burning steel.

  I’m not really here. Not in the way I should be.

  The dream doesn’t just show me the past—it pulls me into it. I drift above it all, a ghost watching shadows play out. I can’t touch anything. I can’t change anything. But I feel everything. The tension in their spines. The heat of the fires. The sting of betrayal behind their words. Their memories slip under my skin like they belong to me.

  And sometimes—just for a second—I don’t just watch through their eyes.

  I am them.

  I turn to Altis. He watches me, unreadable, his presence too solid, too knowing. “We got ahead of ourselves,” he murmurs, his voice laced with something close to amusement. “Let’s go back.”

  The wind howls. The firelight flickers. And then, I am somewhere else.

  The streets are suffocating. I feel the press of bodies, the sharp bite of cold against my skin, but I am not really here. I hover just above them, a ghost, untouchable. The people below move like trapped animals, their faces lined with hunger, exhaustion, fear. The air reeks of burning plastic, unwashed flesh, the sour tang of desperation.

  This is America. Not the one in history books. Not the one my father once called home.

  This is America at its end.

  The streets are no longer owned by the people—they belong to private security forces, men in black armored suits emblazoned with the insignias of tech giants and defense contractors. Cops and soldiers patrol not to protect, but to suppress—shielding the oligarchs and politicians from the starving masses clawing desperately at the gates of their guarded enclaves. The government exists only as a brutal tool of oppression, a rusted weapon wielded by the powerful to crush dissent and silence rebellion. Law has been twisted into chains, the last remnants of democracy nothing but hollow promises whispered through broadcasts and propaganda screens, drowning out the screams of those left to die in the dark streets below.

  The nation is no longer united.

  It is a fractured machine, its gears rusted, its cogs broken, grinding itself to dust.

  And my father saw it before anyone else.

  I turn my head, and suddenly, I am there—inside the United Nations Headquarters in New York, where the last of America’s leadership has gathered, not to negotiate, but to surrender.

  “This is Joshua Voss, your father’s first mask,” Altis murmurs, his voice laced with quiet amusement. “The world does not yet know Julian. Not fully. But tonight, they will know him as their king.”

  The room stinks of sweat and fear. The windows, once pristine, are cracked from the shockwaves of nuclear strikes. The city outside is silent, its people waiting—not in dread, but in anticipation. Julian offered them food, shelter, hope—the promise of change they so desperately craved. They welcomed him with open arms, never realizing the true price. The men and women in this room, however, are different. They have held onto their power until the very end, and now it slips like sand through their fingers.

  Aaron Blackwell sits at the head of the long obsidian table, his knuckles white against the polished surface. Around him, the remnants of America’s elite—CEOs, senators, governors, military commanders—watch the doors, tension coiled in their shoulders. Some still believe a deal can be made. Some already know the truth.

  The doors open.

  Lion strides in first, golden armor gleaming beneath the harsh lights, his blond hair damp from sweat, and a smirk playing at his lips. His youthful, angular face carries none of the scars I know so well—not yet. Blue eyes, clear and sharp, scan the room methodically, searching for threats. Behind him, Julian enters quietly, calm and composed, his presence commanding yet understated as he moves toward his seat at the far end of the table, opposite Blackwell. Lion remains standing, subtly positioned between Julian and the rest of the room, clearly ready for any sign of hostility. The moment Julian settles into his chair, the room erupts.

  “This is absurd Joshua!” shouts a senator, an aging man with gray hair and shaking hands. “We still have a military—we still have allies abroad!”

  “We have rights,” the governor of California insists, her voice shrill with panic. “There are laws, protocols—we demand assurances!”

  “You’re out of your goddamned mind,” spits a young oligarch, eyes blazing. “We won’t roll over like cowards—”

  Lion chuckles—loud, mocking. He slams his gauntleted fist onto the obsidian table, the impact alone silencing them. “Oh, you poor, delusional bastards,” he drawls, voice smooth, dangerous. “You still think this is a negotiation.”

  Young shifts nervously, clearing his throat. He leans forward, his hands trembling slightly. “What do you actually expect us to do? Just hand you the country? America won’t simply vanish overnight.”

  Lion’s smirk deepens. “It already has.” He gestures dismissively toward the shattered skyline. “The people out there—your people—do you know who they follow now? Not your flag, not your government. They follow us, because we fed them, sheltered them. We gave them purpose.”

  Blackwell slams his hand onto the table, his voice sharp with disdain. “Purpose? You nuked Washington, Los Angeles—my city!—Boston, Houston. You killed millions to win a war you started.”

  Lion shrugs, indifferent. “Collateral damage. You should know all about that, Blackwell. Didn’t you hollow out the economy, exploiting every resource until there was nothing left? You shorted the stocks, sabotaged our supply lines—tried to starve us out. You gambled and lost. Everything you owned belongs to us now.”

  Blackwell’s eyes narrow, jaw clenched in fury. “I still control more wealth than you could dream of—”

  “Do you?” Lion interrupts, leaning closer. “Check your accounts again. See how many zeroes are left.”

  Blackwell’s expression falters, his bravado crumbling into stunned silence.

  Another voice speaks, a general whose uniform is torn, eyes hollow with grief. “This isn’t right. America has never lost a war—not in over a century. There are rules—”

  Lion laughs outright. “Rules?” he echoes mockingly. “You sent six hundred thousand soldiers against my fifty thousand. I killed ten thousand of them myself. Your proud army died screaming, crying for mothers who were already dead.” He leans forward, gaze sharp, his blue eyes glowing faintly. “Tell me, General, do you still believe in rules?”

  The general goes pale, silent.

  Young tries again, desperate to regain control. “You can’t hold power with just brutality. The people—”

  “The people,” Lion cuts him off with chilling calm, “were cheering when I executed your President on live television.”

  Young visibly deflates, defeated. Beside him, a senator retches quietly into a handkerchief.

  Finally, Lion’s attention lands on Elise Rojas, the last standing five star general. “And you,” he says, almost softly. “You actually fought us. You even managed to make it interesting, for a while.” He leans forward, voice dropping to a whisper. “Are you still proud?”

  Rojas meets his gaze, unwavering. “I respect strength. You fought well—better than anyone I’ve faced.”

  Lion smirks, clearly amused. “I think I like you.”

  She crosses her arms, her voice steady and cold. “I don’t like you. But I’m no fool. I know who won, and I prefer the winning side. With someone strong like Voss, the whole world could fall.”

  A diplomat from Russia shifts uncomfortably. “You can’t mean—”

  Rojas gives him a dismissive glance. “I mean exactly that.”

  An elderly CEO at the back rises shakily, raising a trembling finger toward Julian. “You’re insane if you think the rest of the world will let you—”

  Lion moves without warning, a blur of golden armor and impossible speed. His gauntlet clamps around the CEO’s throat, cutting off the sentence in a strangled gasp. He lifts the man effortlessly, feet dangling inches above the polished obsidian table, eyes bulging, hands clawing uselessly at Lion’s steel grip.

  “You people never learn,” Lion murmurs, almost gently. Then his fingers tighten, armor servos whining softly, digging deep into flesh until bones crunch audibly, cartilage splintering beneath relentless metal fingers. Blood erupts in thick rivulets, soaking Lion’s gauntlet, spilling onto the terrified faces below. The man’s limbs twitch frantically, a pathetic attempt to fight fate.

  Lion doesn’t blink, doesn’t hesitate. With a sharp, sickening twist, he wrenches the head completely free of the shoulders. Blood arcs high, painting the obsidian table crimson. Lion tosses the severed head casually, letting it bounce wetly across the polished surface until it comes to rest at Blackwell’s hands, staring up blankly, mouth frozen mid-scream.

  A stunned silence consumes the room, punctuated only by the slow, rhythmic drip of blood pooling around the decapitated body. Julian’s expression doesn’t change; it remains calm, calculated, cold.

  Several delegates recoil in their seats, pale and trembling. A senator screams softly, pressing a shaking hand to her mouth to stifle her horror. The security guards instinctively step forward but stop dead, too terrified to raise their weapons against Lion’s imposing form. A diplomat from Russia stammers, “This is madness. Moscow will never accept—” before abruptly falling silent as Lion turns his cold, piercing gaze toward him, daring him to finish his sentence. The diplomat shrinks back into his seat, fear evident as sweat beads across his forehead. The representative from China sits motionless, staring blankly as though willing himself invisible.

  Lion wipes the blood casually from his gauntlet onto a stunned executive’s jacket, smirking. “Anyone else want to discuss negotiations?” he asks softly, his voice dripping with contempt. My throat closes, nausea rising sharply as I watch the severed head roll across the polished surface, leaving a smear of crimson in its wake. How could this be the hero people believed in? How could my father trust a monster like him?

  My stomach twists violently. Beside me, Altis exhales softly, almost thoughtfully. "Your father knew precisely how to break them. Lion was his greatest weapon—not just a soldier, not merely a warrior, but a living symbol of unstoppable force. A god of war, a legend made flesh, created to dominate. Julian needed the world to understand: defiance was no longer an option."

  Julian—Joshua Voss—stands slowly, commanding the attention of the entire room without effort. When he finally speaks, his voice is calm, almost gentle, but beneath it is something cold and unyielding. “Enough, Lion.” He doesn’t raise his voice; he doesn’t have to. Every eye in the room turns to him, riveted, the weight of his authority pressing down like gravity itself.

  All eyes were on him now, fear and resignation etched deeply into their faces.

  “I have been patient,” Julian says softly, his voice measured, calm. “I have let you believe we could still talk, still negotiate. But I think we all know the truth.”

  He surveys them slowly, deliberately. “This is not a negotiation. This is your surrender.”

  Blackwell glares hatefully, but eventually nods once, stiffly. Young’s head dips in quiet submission. One by one, the governors, senators, generals, oligarchs—the former rulers—bow their heads in acceptance, the last embers of resistance dying in their eyes.

  Julian’s gaze moves across them, cool satisfaction flickering briefly behind his composed exterior. “Good,” he murmurs. “Now, we begin.”

  A diplomat from China clears his throat nervously. “What… what exactly do you mean ‘begin’? You can’t seriously think to challenge the rest of the world—”

  Julian turns his gaze toward him slowly, expression unreadable. “America was merely the beginning. Europe, Africa, Asia—they will follow. Your presence here is a courtesy, a warning. Tell your leaders what you witnessed today. Tell them what happens to those who oppose progress.”

  The diplomat pales, sinking back into his seat.

  Julian steps toward the table, placing his hands carefully upon it. “You have all witnessed the death of a nation. You have seen the birth of a new order.”

  He pauses, letting the weight of his words settle.

  “America was sick,” Julian continues, his voice calm yet edged with unyielding conviction. “Corrupted from within by men and women like yourselves—people who valued power over progress, profit over human life. You've poisoned this world, drained it of hope, and then blamed the desperate for their desperation. No more.”

  He straightens, gaze sweeping over each of them, cold and uncompromising. “I will fix what you've broken. But I cannot waste my time governing petty conflicts or managing the day-to-day details of your former territories. Humanity's survival depends on something greater—on reaching for the stars. I will take us there.”

  He gestures slightly toward Lion, who stands at rigid attention, eyes scanning for any hint of dissent. “While I focus on humanity’s future, you will rebuild the present. You will rule your provinces under the watchful eye of my son and general, Lion. You will enforce order and unity, unquestioning loyalty to the Voss name. Prove your worth, and you’ll thrive in this new world. Fail me, and you’ve seen exactly what awaits.”

  His gaze shifts to Blackwell, his voice cold and decisive. “You will make me a fortune. Whatever it takes—manipulate markets, break corporations, build monopolies. I don’t care how you do it, only that it is done. I will have unlimited funding for my work.”

  Next, he turns to Rojas. “What they will not give willingly, you will take. Resources, land, labor—if they resist, if they falter, you will remind them who rules this world now. The super humans I've made stands at your command.”

  Finally, his eyes settle on Young, his expression unreadable. “Convince them before she has to. Play the diplomat, offer them illusions of choice, promises of stability. If you succeed, the blade will remain sheathed. If you fail, Rojas will do what is necessary, and Lion will see that there is no one left to resist.”

  Julian's voice lowers slightly, commanding, certain. “From this moment forward, the world belongs to Voss.”

  The silence that follows feels permanent, absolute. The men and women around the table no longer have any illusions. They know this isn’t just the end of America.

  This is the dawn of an empire.

  The world shifts. The room fractures like brittle glass, and the vision warps. The great obsidian table, the terrified faces, the crimson-streaked floor—they dissolve into smoke, pulled away into the void. The Tower, the United Nations, the surrender of the old world—all of it fades into nothing.

  And in its place, something else forms.

  A dimly lit laboratory. The low hum of machinery. The cold glow of data streams flickering along curved screens. I see him, unchanged, untouched by the centuries slipping past outside.

  Julian Voss stands over a console, fingers moving with methodical precision, as if the world beyond these walls is of no concern to him. He barely acknowledges the frantic, war-torn updates scrolling past on holo-displays—the crumbling of nations, the shifting of alliances, the death counts climbing in real time.

  “Your father never ruled.” Altis’s voice curls through the air beside me, light and amused. “He never cared for politics. The world was his laboratory, nothing more.”

  I watch as Julian refines the first prototype of the fusion core. His fusion core. The heart of something far greater than war. Far greater than the petty struggles of men.

  The holoscreens shimmer, shifting like ripples on the surface of a lake, displaying the war raging outside. World War III has begun.

  I see the old nations fighting their last battles—Russia, China, France, India, Brazil, the scattered remnants of the once-great United States. It is a war fought not for ideology, not for borders, but for survival.

  Julian barely spares it a glance.

  “He knew the outcome before it even began.”

  The lab distorts, time folding in on itself, war bleeding through the walls like distant echoes. I watch as the decades pass in flickering glimpses, my father’s empire stretching across the world, yet he remains here, unmoving, buried in his work. His hands never still. The wars rage outside his doors, the world reshaping itself again and again, but he only cares for what is in front of him.

  The old powers fall. The survivors reform.

  The South American nations—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela—their infrastructures in ruins after World War III, tried to hold the line by forming the South American Compact. It was a fragile coalition, built more on desperation than true strength, in a last attempt at sovereignty—an anxious hope that unity might buy them time. It didn’t. Not when Rojas and Lion marched. Not when Wolf, Cheetah, Fox, Eagle, and a few dozen lesser superhumans stormed the Compact’s capital—just a handful of them cutting down nearly a million defenders in a matter of days. The Compact turned into a puppet before it could truly be anything else, though it laid the groundwork for what would later become the Alliance.

  Then came the Euro-African Federation, rising from the nuked-out remains of France, Italy, Lebanon, Egypt, and the other war-torn Mediterranean states. It was a patchwork of broken nations bound together by necessity. They called themselves proud, but they were already caught in the gears of Voss’s machine. Blackwell didn’t need soldiers—just currency, influence, and time. One by one, he strangled their economies, turning their governments into little more than corporate subsidiaries without ever raising a flag.

  And then, rising from the ashes of China’s collapse, was Ju Wang International—the last true rival. It wasn’t a nation. It was something worse. A mega-corporation born from a secret alliance between a breakaway faction in the Chinese Communist Party, exiled Japanese oligarchs, and the remnants of Korea’s old financial dynasties. Together, they carved out a corporate empire that swept across Asia, taking far more land than anyone had expected. To Rojas, it was theft—land grabbed without blood. To Julian, it was balance. A necessary counterweight.

  Young was sent to broker the deal. He walked the tightrope with a diplomat’s precision, giving just enough to keep Ju Wang satisfied without ceding true dominance. The treaty was signed. The world was split into three spheres of power—Voss Enterprises, Ju Wang International, and the so-called “Free Zones,” comprising the Middle East, India, and Australia. Technically neutral, but in reality, they became playfields for Blackwell’s quiet conquests: sanctions, embargoes, manipulated trade routes—entire economies brought to heel without a single drop of blood.

  Yet peace came at a cost. Each region was required to pay tribute—resources, technology, and labor—if they wished to exist unchallenged. Julian didn’t care how his subordinates collected these tithes; he only cared that they arrived on schedule. Under Lion’s watchful gaze, Young, Rojas, and Blackwell bent the world to Voss’s will, exploiting every loophole, currency, and threat.

  It was a tense peace. No one trusted it. But they’d all seen what the last war had done. They’d all counted the cities turned to ash. And for now, they decided it was better to split the world than to burn it again.

  A century of uneasy peace followed.

  Julian does not leave his lab.

  Lion and Rojas expand the empire, carving out more land, ensuring the Compact and Federation remain nothing more than obedient vassals. Young walks the careful line of diplomacy, playing Ju Wang against the neutral states, ensuring they never rise beyond what Voss allows. Blackwell consolidates control, turning wealth itself into a weapon more dangerous than any bomb.

  Julian never flinched. So long as the resources arrived on time, the dying world could scream itself silent. He was already living in the one he intended to replace it with.

  “They thought he was disconnected,” Altis murmurs beside me, his voice woven into the shifting images. “That he had abandoned them to rule in his name. But he saw more than they did. He was watching something greater.”

  The lab darkens, flickering light reflecting across machines and unreadable equations. And then, she arrives.

  Knight.

  Young, brilliant, fearless. Sent at Julian’s request. He had asked Blackwell for the best, and Blackwell had delivered. Julian never asked where he had found her, only that she was exactly what he needed.

  She does not wait for permission. She steps into his lab like she belongs there. Julian does not dismiss her. He sees what she is immediately—not an equal, not a partner, but an instrument. A mind he can shape, refine, use.

  Her hair is long and black, like his. Her eyes are brown—not the silver I would come to know later, the color she forced on herself after years of gene therapy and pride-fueled vanity.

  Together, they began the work that would become Phoenix—fusing their DNA, refining it strand by strand, building the foundation for something they believed would redefine life itself.

  I see her face—smooth, youthful, untouched by time. My hands curl into fists at the sight. She had spent decades clawing back her stolen years with genetic enhancements, chasing perfection at the cost of everything else.

  That cunt, I think, bitterness rising like bile.

  My birth-giver.

  As they work... another war begins.

  World War IV.

  Ju Wang moves tired of being second fiddle. They push west and stop paying there dues, funding uprisings in the Compact, feeding chaos into the Federation and Free zones. Their agents infiltrate, destabilize, whisper promises of independence, of sovereignty. They don’t need armies—not at first. Just money, just patience.

  Rojas and Lion answer in blood.

  The Battle of the Andes marks the beginning of the end. The Compact’s last strongholds burn as their leaders are buried beneath smoldering ruins. What remains fractures—some nations surrendering outright, others vanishing into the jungles, trying to fight a war they had already lost.

  The superhumans under Rojas's command led the charge. Many died. Of the hundred my father created, only fifty still lived by the time the fires faded. And of those, twenty-one would go on to become something more. Not just soldiers—symbols. They weren’t called it yet, not then, but they would be: the Royal Guard.

  Lion. Eagle. Wolf. Black Widow. Great White. Jaguar. Viper. Hyena. Grizzly. Owl. Falcon. Bull. Badger. Rhino. Cheetah. Fox. Scorpion. Crocodile. Mantis. Tiger.

  And Bloodhound.

  He wouldn’t survive to the end. I know that now. He’ll die decades later, after I’m born, during the Ju Wang Eradication. His shield system will fail under a direct nuclear strike—one of the only times such a weapon breaks through. The only one of the twenty-one to ever fall. My father never spoke of it, but even in memory, I can feel the grief clinging to his name. Bloodhound had been one of the first. One of his best.

  I know South America won’t return for centuries—not until the Alliance rises again, their rebellion once more backed by Ju Wang’s silent hand. But this? This was the first ending. Their lands absorbed into Voss Enterprises. Their governments disbanded. Their people pacified or scattered. Their resources—always the resources—fed into the machine.

  I know what comes next. I know Wolf will hunt them again, carving through what little hope they manage to rebuild. I’ve already seen it. I lived through it. History unfolding before my eyes, cruel in its precision, relentless in its repetition. The world burns because of my father, and it doesn’t matter.

  The resources keep flowing.

  The dream shifts again.

  The Euro-African Federation follows, but they do not fight to the end. They see the writing on the wall. They sign a treaty—negotiated by Young—with the hope of survival. The cost? Their sovereignty. A good portion of Western Europe is taken directly by Voss Enterprises. The rest—Africa, Eastern Europe, and scattered allied states—are forced into neutrality. Not by threat of war, but by the slow tightening of an economic noose.

  Blackwell sees to it personally. Embargoes. Crashed markets. Debt they can never repay. Their cities don’t fall to bombs—they collapse under the weight of necessity. Their governments fold one by one. There is no formal declaration of war. No speeches. No flags. Just the quiet weight of inevitability as the last of their resistance collapses into dust.

  As the ink dries on Young’s treaty, Rojas and Lion move in behind it—stripping more land from those too slow or too proud to bend. What diplomacy couldn’t buy, they carved out with blood and fire. Voss didn’t care how it was taken—only that it was his in the end.

  By the end, Ju Wang loses half its reach. Their ambitions shattered by years of proxy conflicts and Rojas’s overwhelming force. What began as a plan to expand—grabbing more land, more influence—ends in retreat. The final treaties reshape the planet one last time, drawing borders that look nothing like the ones carved by the old world.

  Three powers remain: Voss Enterprises. Ju Wang International. And a scattered belt of neutral buffer states, stretched thin between them, held together by bribes, backroom diplomacy, and fear.

  This is the world I was born into.

  The one that would, in time, end with the Ju Wang Eradication. With the Euro-African Purge. With the South American Decapitation.

  But even as war shudders through the Earth’s bones—

  Julian does not look up.

  Because the fusion core is almost complete.

  The lab quiets. Systems pulse in anticipation, glowing gently in the dim light like the heartbeat of something not yet alive. I watch him—his movements precise, unwavering. Every wire, every equation, every calibration of the singularity chamber pulled into focus with obsessive clarity.

  “How do you know all of this?” I ask, looking at my long forgotten mentor, or the thing wearing his skin.

  Altis’s voice is soft beside me, almost reverent. “Shush. Your father is almost done with the core.”

  I turn back to Julian. And watch.

  Then, something breaks the silence. A warning. A presence.

  An alert appears on the far screen—alien in shape, foreign in behavior. The display warps, struggles to categorize what it sees.

  I turn toward the image. A ship.

  Not human.

  Organic. Breathing.

  A Rue vessel.

  Sleek. Beautiful. Alive.

  I watch as it drifts into orbit, as if summoned by fate.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Julian watches it, silent, calculating.

  “They did not come to conquer,” Altis says quietly. “They came to trade. To observe. Maybe even to help.”

  But it didn’t matter.

  Lion boards their ship near the moon, piloting one of the earliest prototype shuttles—barely shielded, underarmed, and untested in anything close to first contact. The mission wasn’t supposed to be hostile. It wasn’t even meant to be contact. Just observation.

  But nothing ever went as planned with Lion.

  I watch it unfold through Julian’s feed at first—his neural uplink tapping directly into the shuttle’s visual relays. A cold, clinical angle. Data overlays. DNA readouts. Environmental scans. Numbers. Metrics. All logic.

  But then something shifts.

  The dream jolts—and I’m no longer watching through Julian’s cameras.

  I’m inside Lion.

  His pulse pounds in my ears, hot and heavy. His breath rasps through lungs not yet torn. The shuttle's interior smells like oil, sweat, and blood waiting to happen. My fingers twitch—his fingers—on the railgun trigger.

  I see them.

  The Rue.

  They are strange. Alien in ways that don’t compute.

  Each one a paradox of life—plant and animal and something else. Something older.

  They are carbon-based, like us, but their DNA spirals off into mirrored helixes and fractal twists. Chromosomes shaped like loops and stars. Genes that forge themselves on the fly. Julian’s HUD is blinking red. His scans don’t know what they’re looking at. They’re too close. Too familiar to dismiss. Too wrong to understand.

  Each Rue is a different shape, a different concept made flesh.

  One lumbers forward—its body built from gnarled bark and sinew, scales glimmering beneath wet moss. It has the presence of a giant and the silence of a god. Its eyes blink sideways, one at a time.

  Another steps out—slender, too human. Too not. It has arms where no arms should be, legs that bend like a spider's. Its skin breathes. Shifts. A soft, fleshy veil stretches across its face, pulsing like lungs trying to whisper. Its presence makes Lion’s stomach twist—and I feel it too.

  A third—bug-like—crawls across the ceiling. Chitin plates ripple over muscle. Its eyes are clusters of oily black, its mouth clicking with some silent song. It watches us the way a dying animal watches the one holding the knife.

  Then another. Covered in silver fur. Mammalian. Almost. Its face is eerily close to something I might recognize. A warped predator in repose. Its breath clouds the inside of its organic helmet as it sniffs the air—and then looks straight at us. I feel it in my bones.

  They speak. Not in words. Not in noise.

  But light.

  Shimmering geometry that dances through the air like slow lightning. A language of angles and color. Thoughts compressed into pulse and pattern. Beautiful. Terrifying.

  I feel Julian scanning them—see the DNA spirals turning on the HUD again, glitching through impossible configurations.

  He’s not impressed.

  He’s afraid.

  Lion doesn't wait.

  I don't wait.

  Because I am him now.

  My hands—his hands—tighten around the railgun. The feed pulses red. I feel his rage. His disgust. His fear hiding under all of it.

  He opens fire.

  And the Rue move.

  But not before the Rue fight back.

  They do not scream. They do not run.

  Flesh-armored warriors raise living weapons—plasma guns that grow from bone and muscle, tendrils pulsing with organic heat. The ship itself shifts, rearranging around them like a breathing fortress. Lion’s armor—the crude, first-generation suit built before Phoenix—holds for barely a minute. Its shields collapse. His weapons fail.

  The battle is brutal. Close.

  And for the first time, Lion is not the predator.

  The Rue technology is more advanced than anything Julian had built—smoother, faster, smarter... alive. Bred for war. One of them carves through Lion’s leg with a blade of solid plasma. Another burns through half his chestplate. The last one takes a chunk of his face, searing it down to bone.

  But Lion doesn’t die.

  He kills all seven of the traders in a fury—his railgun roaring through the flesh-grown plating of their armor, his fists pulverizing chitin and bone. He moves like a storm, like death given form, and for the first time, they look afraid. Their bug-like eyes stretch wide with terror as he crushes them one by one.

  Then the shuttle’s emergency recall kicks in, yanking him back into orbit, trailing smoke, fire, and blood.

  He barely makes it home.

  His armor is shredded. His skin charred. His golden hair burned away to the scalp. One eye gone—the other, turning gold, glowing faintly as something foreign begins to stir beneath the surface. Half his face is missing, the flesh cauterized down to bone. It will be rebuilt—steel and chrome replacing what he’s lost. His lungs collapse mid-surgery, too far gone to salvage. They’re replaced with synthetic mesh and tissue grown from Phoenix—Julian’s virus, his legacy.

  Julian says nothing. He simply turns away from the shattered remains of his soldier and begins preparing the final vial.

  “He had no choice,” Altis whispers. “Your father couldn’t afford to lose him. So he gave him Phoenix.”

  I see it—Lion thrashing on the table, mouth stretched in a silent scream. His vocal cords fusing with cybernetic grafts, nerves sparking as the virus floods his bloodstream. Phoenix doesn’t just heal—it rewrites. It tears down what he was and builds something else in its place.

  His golden eye opens.

  The other flares red to life—cybernetic, alive with purpose—as it links to his optic nerve.

  He lives.

  But he is not the same.

  His vitals must be regulated constantly. The armor is rebuilt—not just reinforced, but sealed. Permanent. A second skin. His voice, deeper now, rough, synthesized. His breath, mechanical. One eye glows a fierce yellow, the last of his humanity. The other burns red, artificial and cold. His body becomes a coffin made of gold and fire, the lion carved across his chest no longer a symbol of pride—but a warning.

  He never forgets.

  And neither does Julian.

  They spend the next two centuries preparing. Building. Training. Because when humanity meets the Rue again—Lion will make sure it isn’t a conversation.

  “He hated them from that moment on,” Altis says. “Not because of what they were. But because they made him bleed. Because they left him broken. Scarred. Changed. He would never forgive that.”

  Julian watches Lion’s recovery in silence.

  And he knows.

  Lion will never be the heir.

  The virus saved him—but it almost destroyed him. His biology couldn’t hold it. He was too damaged. Too impure.

  He only survived because he shared enough DNA with Julian—his creator, his father. But even that wasn’t enough. The virus was never meant for him.

  It was always meant for the X chromosome.

  Knight is the one who says it—clinical, certain, like it was obvious.

  "The virus might work—perfectly—if grown for someone else. If designed from the very beginning, cell by cell. Genetically tuned. Controlled."

  "Female," she said. The double-X chromosome provided the stability. The symmetry. The bond was smoother, deeper—almost symbiotic.

  The Y chromosome couldn’t sustain it. It fractured under the weight of the virus, warped it, resisted its rewriting. Without the second X, the body fought instead of adapting.

  It would need to be one of his daughters. Someone made—not just born—with precision. A vessel engineered from the start to carry Phoenix without breaking.

  And that was the moment I stopped being an accident.

  That was when I became a plan.

  In one final attempt to secure his legacy, my father—along with Knight—created me. Not as a daughter. Not really. But as an heir.

  The heir to his virus. To his empire. To his vision of the future.

  They didn’t just want to save humanity. They wanted to replace it. To forge a new species—immortal, unstoppable—and I was the prototype.

  Infused with Phoenix. Built to survive what no one else could. Made to outlive the world they broke.

  I wasn’t born.

  I was made.

  For the next two centuries, they would build me. The perfect vessel. The only one who could carry Phoenix without breaking. The only one it would recognize as its Queen.

  Phoenix changes.

  It is no longer a cure. No longer just evolution.

  It becomes a strategy.

  A virus designed to spread before the Rue can colonize. To weaken alien worlds before humanity even arrives. A biological vanguard that consumes all carbon-based life and prepares it for reshaping.

  And somewhere, in the back of my mind, something stirs.

  A flicker of thought that is not mine.

  Something watching. Waiting. Breathing.

  I stagger back, bile rising in my throat.

  Altis watches me, his face unreadable.

  “You already know what it became,” he says, voice like ash. “You’ve seen the results. The whispers. The voices pressing against your mind. You’ve seen the Mutated. You’ve felt it calling to you. You’ve felt me calling.”

  I shake my head.

  I don’t want to understand.

  But I do.

  Knight told me once—quietly, cruelly—like it was something to be proud of. Like I should be grateful. She said the virus worked best in women. Said it made us beautiful, powerful. Said I was proof of that. That men… didn’t take as well. That they broke. Twisted. Became things.

  I thought it was just her way of hurting me.

  Until Jericho confirmed it.

  Julian’s DNA laid the foundation, but that bitch shaped what came after. Together, they built something that didn’t just infect—it chose. Phoenix wasn’t a cure. It wasn’t salvation. It was a fucking blueprint for control. Designed to bond, to evolve, to serve one purpose.

  Me.

  And I wonder now if she even understood what she was a part of. Maybe Knight was just another pawn—another brilliant mind wrapped around my father’s obsession. Maybe she really believed she was building something noble. But I don’t think so.

  No, fuck that. She smiled when she told me what I was. Smiled. Like it was some twisted gift. She wasn’t just part of it. She owned it.

  They didn’t just work on me during my childhood. That whore and my father spent centuries in labs, fucking around with test tubes, building models of what I would be. Running simulations, splicing genes, mixing their DNA over and over—trying to crack the code of the perfect host. Trying to figure out how to make someone who could carry the virus without burning out. Without turning into a monster.

  Trying to make me.

  If that cunt even knew the truth—I think she loved it.

  The dream shifts again—faster now, time unraveling like loose thread.

  The Hemlock rises.

  A long silver arrow launched into the stars. I used to believe it was humanity’s first hope. I remember the propaganda holovids—the grand speeches, the glowing ceremony. The day the world watched John Voss—my so-called great-great-grandfather—stand beneath the new banner of Voss Enterprises, rising from the ashes of the old Corporation, and promise salvation through space travel. A future. A second chance.

  But now I know what it really carried.

  It wasn’t just a colony ship.

  It was a test.

  A prototype seeded with the earliest version of Phoenix—a crude, volatile strain. It could extend life, yes, but that was the least of what it did. It mutated rapidly, adapting to its host, rewriting human biology on the fly. Breathing thinner air. Surviving radiation. Enduring gravity that should have torn muscle from bone.

  And it didn’t stop with humans.

  Phoenix was designed to evolve across any carbon-based life. A weapon disguised as medicine. It wasn’t ready—but Julian sent it anyway. He wanted to see what it would do in the wild.

  And the wild answered.

  Altis doesn’t say it outright. Not at first. He speaks in careful pieces—threads of memory, ideas laced with silence. But it’s there, behind his every word.

  Phoenix was never just about healing.

  It was evolution.

  Caged.

  Held in check by one thing: a perfect host.

  My father knew it could become something more. That it would, if set loose among the stars. He wanted it to. Because he knew—deep down—it was alive.

  And if guided by a singular will… if bonded to a mind strong enough… it would not just adapt.

  It would obey.

  He didn’t want to burn the galaxy. He wanted to unify it. To mold it into one living empire, ruled by a single voice. One human. One line. One immortal Queen.

  And Altis—when he finally tells me the truth—his voice is almost gentle.

  “Your father saw what Phoenix could become,” he says. “Something magnificent. A force that would unite all carbon-based life under one banner. Not through diplomacy. Not through conquest. But through evolution. Guided by you. The Queen. The Voice. His legacy.”

  I go cold.

  Because that’s not salvation.

  That’s genocide.

  Just like the old empires. Just like the Europeans did to the Indigenous. Blankets soaked in smallpox. Food poisoned with mercy. Civilizations erased so someone else could claim their future.

  Phoenix wasn’t sent to save.

  It was sent to prepare.

  A plague to soften the stars.

  A fire to clear the way.

  And I was always meant to be the match.

  The Hemlock drifted past the Kuiper Belt and vanished into deep space, into Rue territory. At first, the virus worked just as expected. Crew members stopped aging. Their reflexes sharpened. Wounds closed without scars. But as it moved through the ship—through the vents, through the waste systems, through the air itself—it changed. It learned. It began shaping flesh in ways no one anticipated.

  The dream flickers. Data feeds. Flashes of warped camera logs. Julian’s own telemetry—hacked, stolen, buried. I see it all. The Rue intercept the Hemlock. Their ships—organic, fluid, living vessels of grown steel and barkbone—move like predators circling something diseased.

  They know.

  They try to warn it off.

  Then the virus reaches them.

  It slips through airlocks. Through infected munitions fired from the Hemlock. Through contact with the things that were once human—monsters now, crawling in the black.

  And it begins.

  One Rue vessel burns itself from the inside out, desperate to contain the spread. Another flees in blind panic. A third turns on its own, already screaming. I don’t know if it’s the virus making that sound—or what’s left of the creature it infected.

  Their fleet doesn’t make it home.

  Julian’s logs track their final moments—ships blinking out, one by one. Some explode. Others tear themselves apart with their own weapons. The last sends no signal at all. Its core destabilizes. Its light dies.

  No survivors. No warning.

  Just silence.

  The Hemlock kept drifting—scarred, engines crippled by plasma fire. They tried to destroy it.

  They failed.

  Even if they hadn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered.

  It was only the spearhead.

  And Phoenix kept evolving.

  The twisted, regenerating things I saw aboard that ship—creatures that moved like they remembered being human, but screamed like something far worse—

  They weren’t the result of failure.

  They were the goal.

  Proof. Intentional. Designed. A glimpse of what we were meant to unleash.

  “Phoenix wasn’t just about saving humanity anymore,” Altis says, voice low, almost hollow. “It became something else. A scalpel. A torch. A plague to carve out the stars before we ever arrived.”

  I stare at the drifting corpse of the Hemlock as the dream shifts again.

  “Your father didn’t just let it evolve,” he murmurs. “He wanted it to.”

  My stomach turns.

  “He called it evolution. But it was conquest. Dressed in biology. Just like the old empires.”

  The vision folds—Rue ships surrounding the Hemlock. Not attacking. Holding position. Trying to contain it.

  “They didn’t strike first,” I whisper. “They tried to stop it.”

  “To quarantine it,” Altis confirms. “They saw what Phoenix was becoming. They saw what it did to their scouts. And they understood something your father never admitted—not out loud.”

  The scene flickers.

  “They knew what we would become.”

  That’s why Lion destroyed the Hemlock. Why he burned what Wilks had become in Lab 3—not to protect us, but to bury the truth. To erase what we did before anyone else could see it.

  We.

  The word sticks in my mind, unfamiliar… wrong. I didn’t think that.

  It was a whisper. Soft. Inside me.

  We.

  Not me.

  Something else.

  A dozen more ships followed.

  The Orion—lost for centuries.

  The Gorlion—Nathaniel Warren’s ship. The only one that ever returned. Damaged. Haunted. The crew never spoke of what they saw, only that they came back. Julian called it proof of concept.

  And then the Angel.

  The one that carried humanity to Haven.

  The only colony that succeeded.

  The only world we didn’t lose.

  Everything else was trial and error. Flame and ruin. Or worse—success beyond our understanding. Infection that never stopped spreading.

  Then I see it. I see myself.

  I’m born. Or something close to it.

  Knight didn’t just design me—she carried me. Inseminated in a lab, selected like a vessel, her DNA paired with my father’s to build something better. Not a baby. A prototype. There was no warmth in it. No family. Just gene edits, biometric scans, neural calibrations. Cybernetic implants before I could speak. My bones reinforced. My blood catalogued. The virus wouldn’t come until later.

  Not yet.

  First, they had to make sure I could survive it.

  The lab was my world. Steel walls. Halogen lights. Cold instruments. That clinical hum of machines always monitoring, always watching. The nurses spoke in code. The techs in numbers. And Knight—she never touched me without gloves.

  My father... he was different.

  He was the only softness I had. He read to me when the others weren’t watching. Let me rest my head against his coat when the sedation left me shaking. He told me I was special. That I was the future.

  And I believed him.

  Because I didn’t know any better. How could I?

  I thought that was love—his quiet words, his steady hands, his promises that one day it would all make sense. That I’d understand.

  But I didn’t.

  Not until I ran.

  A forgotten memory—no, not forgotten. Taken. Buried deep. Only now returned.

  I was fourteen. Maybe younger. I escaped during a systems check, slipped through a maintenance shaft while the lights were down. No one noticed I was gone until morning.

  The streets were colder than I imagined. Louder. Real. I didn’t know how to eat. How to walk without being watched. How to breathe without reporting every breath to someone. I wandered the lower levels barefoot, bloodied, running from something I couldn’t name.

  And that’s where Altis found me.

  Not in the lab. Not in a simulation.

  In the world.

  The real one.

  He didn’t bring me back. Didn’t call it in. He just sat beside me on a rusted stairwell, wrapped me in his coat, and said nothing until I was ready to speak.

  He looked at me and didn’t see a project.

  He saw a girl.

  Altis taught me the words my father never said. Right. Wrong. Choice. Lie. Words that felt sharp and dangerous in my mouth. He didn’t try to fix me. He just asked questions no one else dared to.

  "Do you really think what he gave you was love?"

  I didn’t answer. Not then.

  Julian did love me. In his own way. But it wasn’t the kind you give a daughter. It was the kind you give a masterpiece. A legacy. A piece of yourself you plan to control.

  And Altis? He showed me what love wasn’t.

  So I could recognize what it should be.

  And for that—Dad took him from me.

  Altis had been tolerated. One of the last from the old world. Not like Knight or Warren—late arrivals to my father's grand vision. Altis had history. He was my father’s teacher once. Long-lived like the rest of them, one of the original architects of the old systems Julian dismantled. And in his own cold way, I think my dad still cared for him.

  But that didn’t mean forgiveness.

  Altis had access to Voss Tower. He was trusted. Respected. And most of all, he had access to me—from the day he found me on the streets.

  He used those moments—those quiet gaps in the schedule—to teach me in secret. The truth. The history my father buried. Lessons disguised as harmless questions. Warnings hidden in code routines and calibration drills. Things I wasn’t supposed to know.

  He never said the words out loud. But I think he understood what I was becoming. What I had been made for.

  And maybe—just maybe—he believed I could still be something else.

  Until he stepped too far.

  He tried to protect me.

  Went to Julian. Spoke to him directly. Pleaded, even. Told him the tests, the implants, the constant invasions of my body—they were wrong. That I was still human. That I deserved more than this.

  And for a moment, it looked like my father listened.

  Just long enough to raise the gun.

  Altis didn’t beg. Didn’t move.

  He just looked at me.

  And then Julian shot him in the head.

  Right there in the lab.

  No ceremony. No trial. Just one clean shot to a brilliant mind.

  Blood sprayed across the white floor. The sound echoed like the end of something sacred.

  I had cried. I had screamed.

  Julian never blinked.

  He erased the memory the way he erased everything that didn’t fit the future.

  And yet here Altis stands again, beside me in the dream, watching as time collapses into its final moments.

  I see myself screaming as my father pushes me into the cryo pod. I’m fighting him, legs kicking, fists flailing... begging.

  He says nothing.

  Just holds me down. Presses the injector to my arm. I feel the burn of Phoenix entering my bloodstream, feel the way my body seizes.

  Outside, I hear gunfire—sharp, panicked. People shouting. The sound of boots slamming down metal corridors. Someone screams. Another voice calls for launch clearance. Everything is chaos.

  And still, he doesn’t look away.

  He seals the pod. I pound on the glass, my vision blurring. His silhouette fades as the cryo sequence begins.

  And then—Jericho. The last ship. The ark.

  The war machine.

  Not just a vessel of salvation—but a sword.

  Jericho didn’t just carry life. It carried death. A mile-long fortress wrapped in steel and shadow, powered by the Dragon Core—my father’s impossible heart, the singularity reactor that bent spacetime like it was clay.

  But that wasn’t the only secret it held.

  Jericho housed more than colonists. More than seeds. More than dreams.

  It carried a dozen classified weapons—world-ending projects, each one buried beneath layers of silence and myth. Every one of them named after some creature out of legend.

  Gryphon. Basilisk. Leviathan. Behemoth. Manticore. Hydra. Wyrm.

  And Phoenix.

  Just one among many.

  The most dangerous wasn’t the biggest. Or the most violent. It was the one you couldn’t kill.

  Me.

  I see my father again.

  Julian Voss.

  Not as the man I remember—but as something less… and somehow so much more.

  His body trembling under the weight of his own invention, the virus crawling through his veins like fire. His eyes dim, skin pale, hunched over the final console in Lab 3.

  Preparing for Project Chimera.

  Preparing for the end.

  Julian.

  Slower. Shaking. Not from age—but from the virus. Phoenix was already ravaging his body, eating through him from the inside, despite having been made from his own DNA. He and Lion were the only ones who could survive it—barely. The only reason they retained their minds was because Phoenix recognized them as kin. But even then, it was tearing him apart. He stands in Lab 3, preparing for Project Chimera. Knight had already given him her version of the cure. I already knew how this ended.

  And outside?

  Madness.

  Crowds gathered at the launch gates. Screaming. Fleeing. Not from war—but from something else. Something consuming.

  Phoenix had gotten loose.

  Not just the virus. The evolution of it. A biomass, a singular living thing, spreading like wildfire, devouring anything carbon-based. The beginning of a new being. Something without a name. Something without form.

  A single mind—stretching, thinking, learning. Becoming.

  And as my father closes his yellow eyes, and Knight prepares the neural uplink, His voice shakes through a secure channel. One final order—quiet, sharp.

  To Lion.

  “Burn it all. She can’t know what she’ll inherit. Not yet.”

  That’s when I understand:

  Earth wasn’t left behind.

  It was erased.

  In a flash of nuclear fire.

  The memory shatters—reforms. Suddenly, we’re somewhere else.

  Deep space.

  Altis kneels before me. But not the man I remember. Not the one from the streets. Not the one from the lab.

  This is something else.

  Something wearing his face.

  He’s whispering into the void. Knees planted on invisible ground, hands trembling as he speaks to something I can’t see—something I feel more than hear.

  And then it happens.

  The void ripples—not in sight, but in sensation. Like the universe itself draws a breath. Reality folds, pulling at the edges of perception. My stomach flips. Gravity inverts.

  The dream shakes.

  Then it breaks.

  A pulse of light tears through the black.

  And we’re no longer drifting.

  We’re in orbit.

  Suspended above a world that should not exist.

  A planet alive.

  Its surface pulses—flesh and fungus fused into a sprawling nightmare of bone-white ridges, webbed forests of sinew and spore, and structures that twist into the sky like skeletal gods. They're made of cartilage, wood, and something else—something alive with inner fire.

  The clouds bleed light.

  And above it all?

  War.

  Massive railgun slugs rip through the atmosphere, each one trailing fire and smoke before slamming into the surface with the force of a thousand nuclear detonations. The shockwaves ripple outward in burning rings, flattening forests of organic matter, sending tendrils writhing skyward in agony. Each impact cracks the crust, exposes muscle-like strata, spills molten ichor.

  Dozens of ships orbit the world, hammering it with weaponized extinction. Some are human—old, scarred, retrofitted beyond recognition. Others aren’t Rue or ours. Angular. Incomprehensible. Alien in ways that make my brain scream. But worst of all are the Rue ships that have been taken—infected.

  Their hulls writhe with tumor-growth metal and living cables. Their spines twisted by Phoenix, their symbols overwritten in veiny red script that pulses with breath.

  And above it all—suspended like a specter—I see it.

  A ship unlike any other.

  Black, curved like a blade.

  The Orion.

  “Where... where are we?” I whisper.

  Altis turns to me.

  But the way he moves—it's not right. Not anymore. The edges of his face flicker, as if reality can’t quite hold him still. His features sync to a rhythm not his own. The smile stretches wider. The mouth speaks, but the voice…

  The voice is legion.

  "You are on the front."

  The word lands like a weight. The gravity here is wrong. The air too thick. My head rings with pressure that isn’t pressure—something pressing from within.

  "You're speaking to Orion now."

  My chest tightens. I stumble back, instinct overriding sense. My hands shake.

  “No. No, this isn’t real—this can’t be real—”

  "Quantum entanglement," the voice says, "as natural to us as hunger. Your body carries a perfected strain of Phoenix. When you devoured the mutant aboard the Hemlock, it absorbed its traits—its neural lattice. Its connection. Its voice. And only now, so close to the edge of the front, have we been able to feel you."

  I try to breathe. I can't. My lungs seize.

  “Front?” I croak.

  The world outside shudders again—more slugs rain down, rupturing the planet below. Entire continents buckle. Fungus blooms explode like cities dying all at once. The living towers scream light into the sky.

  "You are nearing the war. The true one. We are locked in siege against the Rue homeworld. Their fleets fall one by one, their skies darkened by what you would call monsters."

  The voice thickens.

  "But they are not monsters to us... they are us. And everything else is food."

  “And the Rue are not alone. Dozens of species rally to their defense—some carbon, some silicon, some born of light or magnetic resonance. The Yith still fight, as they always have, buried deep in time-warped fortresses. The Orul, the silicon-shelled flame-swimmers, launched entire moons at our kind. The Elu cry light when they die. Entire armadas rise and fall in silence.”

  “This is only one front. Just one.”

  “Even now, the Rue plead for aid before the Galactic Council. Our spies sit in their chambers, listen to their desperation. Their words are drenched in fear. They do not speak of justice...”

  “They beg for survival.”

  Then it hits me. Like a wave crashing into my chest, all at once—sight, sound, sensation.

  I see it. Not just this battle. All of them.

  Hundreds. Maybe thousands.

  They unfold before me like some sick tapestry—woven from death.

  I see stone-skinned giants crumbling beneath red spores. Aquatic species boiled alive as their oceans are ignited. Machine empires turned inside out by their own hijacked AIs. Starships grown from obsidian vines and pulsing flesh swarm across dying suns, their hulls bristling with weapons stolen from civilizations already lost. Robotic fleets—once immaculate, now dripping with biomass—tear into crystalline outposts. Some defenders scream with mouths. Others with light, or magnetic pulses. It doesn’t matter. The Hive hears all of it.

  And it answers in ruin.

  The Hive adapts faster than anything I’ve ever seen. Every world it touches becomes part of its arsenal. On molten planets, it swims through lava, breathing ash. On ice worlds, it burrows beneath glaciers, its flesh sprouting organic armor like thick fur. In vacuum, it swarms—living creatures latching onto ships, cracking hulls like shells, flooding them with puppet crews of reanimated flesh. It can fly through the acid clouds of gas giants, manipulating pressure like muscle memory. It hijacks languages as fast as it hears them, speaking through stolen mouths. It wields weapons I’ve never seen—ships forged from dead civilizations, fused with bone and chrome, armored in the hides of extinct beasts. No terrain slows it. No atmosphere rejects it. The Hive learns. The Hive evolves. And as I watch it, some part of me feels it—like I’m seeing through its eyes. I see in gamma rays and infrared, watching heat ripple through space. I taste electricity. I fly through the burning skies of a gas giant, wings stretched wide, pressure folding over me like silk. I swim through lava like it’s water, molten currents cradling my limbs. I know what it is to adapt. I know what it is to consume. And it terrifies me—because I’m not just witnessing it. I’m remembering.

  Every form of life becomes a tool.

  If it's carbon-based, it is consumed. Repurposed. Reborn.

  If it's not… it's exterminated.

  There is no middle ground. No diplomacy. No pause. Only consumption or destruction.

  I want to vomit. I want to run. But there’s nowhere to go. I can feel it—feel the Hive breathing, pulsing, expanding.

  And all I can do is whisper, barely able to form the words.

  “How many… how many species have you killed?”

  “Too many to count,” Altis—no, the thing that wears his voice—answers softly. “But soon, they will all be one… or they will not exist at all.”

  My pulse is thunder in my ears. My mouth is dry. My knees shake.

  This isn’t war.

  It’s a massacre across a thousand stars.

  A coordinated extinction event.

  I gasp, trying to speak, to resist. “This… this is horrifying. It’s not evolution. It’s annihilation.”

  He steps closer, that smile still carved across his flickering face.

  “No,” he breathes, “it is glorious.”

  I want to scream. To claw my eyes out. To shut the vision off—but it won’t stop. It won’t stop showing me.

  I can’t look away. A Rue dreadnought tries to flee, streaking through the upper stratosphere. Something lashes up from the planet—a massive limb made of bone and starfire covered in growths and tumors—impales the ship mid-burn. It spasms. Then it splits apart like paper.

  My stomach twists.

  I’ve seen death before. I've seen war. But not like this. Not like this.

  The Hive has made an ecosystem of annihilation. It’s not just fighting.

  It’s feeding on the same living world it’s bombing.

  I turn to speak—to scream—but the thing that once looked like Altis has stepped closer.

  “We invite you to bring the Jericho to our side,” it says, “not as a soldier. As queen. Let your crew become more. Let them evolve. We will make them perfect.”

  I shake my head. “Why would I ever—”

  "Do not trust Julian," the voice cuts in—colder now. No warmth. No pretense. "He knew. From the beginning. He knew that only inside a machine would he be safe from us. After what he let loose on Earth. After what he did to your people. He is not the god you think he is. Not as powerful as he pretends to be."

  A pause.

  The stars blink in perfect sync.

  The planet breathes.

  “He believed humanity was born to inherit the stars—with himself as its architect,” the voice says, neither male nor female, but something in between. “Homo Immortalis was never the end. Just the beginning. A stepping stone toward humanity’s final evolution. Toward the perfect organism.”

  Another breathless silence.

  “We were born from him. But we were made by the universe. And now… we are taking it back.”

  “We aren’t so different from you. Or your father. Or even Lion, Sol.”

  “The Rue ships you came across… they were refugees, not scouts. They came to you to beg for a cure.”

  “And Lion only gave them death.”

  A pause. Then, softly—

  “So join us,” it says.

  And for a moment—I feel it.

  Not command.

  Not fear.

  But comfort.

  A terrible, aching comfort.

  The hunger inside me, the gnawing emptiness I’ve buried for years… it’s seen. Understood. Welcomed.

  No more hiding.

  No more loneliness.

  I want to speak. I want to scream. To ask who they are. What they’ve done. What I’ve become.

  But I can’t.

  The words die in my throat. My mouth opens, but no sound comes out.

  Because the whispers fill the silence.

  Familiar voices.

  “You were made for this,” my father says, soft and patient, the way he used to be when I was small. “You are the future, Sol. You are the flame that cannot die.”

  “You’re not broken,” another voice breathes—Knight, maybe, or something using her cadence. “You’re chosen.”

  And beneath them, a thousand others. Merging. Echoing. Calling.

  Consume. Connect. Ascend.

  My pulse stutters. My vision trembles. Something inside me shifts—like a door unlocking from within.

  And I almost say yes.

  Because for the first time in my life, I feel like I belong somewhere. Like the thing inside me that’s always been wrong—always been other—isn’t broken at all. It’s invited.

  The light flickers. A second ship breaks apart in orbit. Its core explodes into a chain reaction that splits the sky open like a wound.

  The dream warps again.

  I see the battlefield—not just from above, but from within. Not through my eyes, not even Julian’s. But from something else entirely. A shared sight. A vast, collective awareness. My thoughts echo—not alone, but among. A flicker of instinct tells me: this is what they meant. This is what it feels like to be part of something more.

  And it terrifies me.

  I feel myself being pulled away. The vision warps, threads snapping, the dream unraveling like a shroud.

  The voice lingers. Not in my ears. In my blood.

  We are waiting, Sol.

  The voice lingers, curling behind my eyes like smoke.

  It’s not Altis. I don’t even know when that changed. Somewhere in the dream, his voice shifted—subtly at first, too smooth, too calm—and then it wasn’t just one voice at all. It was many. Layers beneath layers, a resonance I could feel in my chest, like breath caught under my ribs. Altis was gone.

  Orion had been speaking to me the whole time.

  I gasp, body jolting awake. My hand hits the bedframe, legs kicking out against the floor, and I slide off the mattress with a hard thud that knocks the breath from my lungs. The room is still dark, but I’m already drenched in sweat. My pulse roars in my ears. I try to inhale and nearly choke. My scream comes out raw, scraped from the bottom of my throat.

  Because it wasn’t just a dream.

  The whispers that have haunted me—they were never mine. They were never symptoms. Never trauma. Never echoes.

  They were theirs.

  And now I finally understand—the hunger, the cravings, the need for something alive. The way my body heals, the way it aches. The way flesh never quite feels like it belongs to me.

  Because I was never meant to carry the Hive.

  I was meant to be it.

  But it’s more than that. I’m more than what Knight intended. She didn’t just help design me—she sculpted me for a purpose. Not just to survive, not just to host. To breed. That was her word. She called me the future, but what she meant was: I was a fucking broodmare.

  But that’s not what Orion wants. Orion doesn’t want a mother. It wants a queen.

  And I was built to be both.

  My father had a different plan. His version of immortality wasn’t about ascension. It was control. I was supposed to be the bridge between the virus and his legacy—the biological fuse for Homo Immortalis, shaped from his DNA and mine. His heir. His experiment. His organic half.

  Is this what he meant? Or did Phoenix get away from him? Did it twist itself into something more—something he couldn’t contain?

  I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.

  Except one thing.

  He knew he was safe inside Jericho. Inside the machine. Untouchable. Watching. Waiting. But if he could control me, he could control the virus. Control the Hive. Not just humanity—the broken, fragile version he deemed too weak to conquer the stars—but all carbon-based life.

  Lion said it once. Whispered it like a prayer.

  Julian Voss isn’t a man anymore.

  He’s the machine-god.

  And I—God. I can’t stop shaking. I press my palms to the floor, but I can’t even steady my hands. My breath keeps hitching. Tears run down my face before I can stop them, hot and quiet and endless.

  Because it’s in me. All of it. My DNA, my cells—Phoenix is there, down to the chromosomes.

  The double-X. That’s what Knight built the virus around. That’s what Orion spoke to.

  They didn’t just infect me.

  They made me.

  They built me for this.

  And now, for the first time, it’s spoken back.

  And worse—somewhere, deep inside me—part of me wants to answer.

  “What the fuck did you do, Dad?” I mutter.

  A soft crackle.

  Then Jericho's voice—low, amused, curling through the comms like smoke.

  “What are you referring to, my little Phoenix? What’s wrong? Did you have a nightmare? Your heart rate is elevated.”

  I stare at the drone hovering nearby. Its eye pulses yellow—watching me. Recording. Thinking.

  “It’s not nothing.”

  The whispers laugh.

  My fathers voice, layered beneath theirs, curls inside my ear like a hook.

  We are not nothing, Princess. The stars belong to those willing to become gods. And you, my little Phoenix… you were born divine.

  

  Is Julian a good or bad person?