Sirens screamed all throughout House Fulvion’s warship, warning of the impending assault in the void. We were seven and a half days into our voyage to the rebellious world of Amatius and the Subgovernor’s forces had scrambled to repel oncoming attackers before the Solar Guard and other assembled parties like our own reached the planet’s atmosphere. Nuclear warheads and antimatter charges and gamma ray barrages rocked our starship and Imperators, Militares, Venators and Servi ran past and around me like schools of frightened fish as they made their way to battle stations.

I was going to the private armory allotted to me by Persias, directed to it by Alsig’s virtual arrows pointing the way. I made my way slow and steady, going faster only risked trampling or bursting open my new comrades and despite the frantic, frenzied energy in the air, my role was yet to come. Once properly geared up, I would go to a lance pod to be launched across the void of space from the warship into the Amatians’ starship where I would push my way to the enemy command bridge and end their leader’s life and force a surrender.

Reaching the personal armory, I stripped off my clothes and pulled on the nanite laced body suit intended to be worn underneath all the rest of my Adamantplate. Black tentacles, cousin technologies to wormwires, albeit distantly, assembled my exoskeleton around me and inserted the power core into the metal skeletal structure’s chest piece. Then locker doors unlatched their locking mechanism and swiveled open to reveal the new Adamantplate I would be wearing from now on and for the foreseeable future so long as I fought with House Fulvion and for Lord Persias.

Unlike my Apollonian Guard plate armor, which had been glossy black with bronze accents, this alloyed shell was painted blue and covered with silver vines and leaf patterns. The gauntlets were ruby red to symbolize the blood that would be on my hands even after the Adamantplate was washed clean and white colored invocations to the god of war in the Romaen tongue curled around the fingers. The right shoulder pauldron bore the white lion crest of the Fulvions and the left shoulder was marked with the violet three headed eagle of the Dominium. Lastly, rather than the obsidian black faceplate and spread bronze wings of my previous helm, this one was a golden rendering of my face, sized up so it would fit over my head: the skin, hair, and blank eyes all uniformly shining gold.

The black mechanical tentacles placed the plate armor’s pieces on my body, securing them to my exoskeleton via connection ports and magnetic and gravitic binding points, the thick tentacles struggling and flexing like muscled snakes to hold up the heavy metal. Stepping into the encasing boots and letting the black wires lower my golden, aurelian helmet onto my head, I was ready to go.

For a moment, I was plunged into darkness inside my protective mask until Alsig connected with the internal sensors and cameras and projected into my vision a view of what lay beyond my faceplate.

“All set, Adrias.” She whispered.

I clenched my armored hand, enjoying the scrape of metal on metal and the whine of my exo-armor’s servos grinding against each other. As a Keenblade rose from the floor through a slot, I grabbed it and locked it to my side and walked out of the armory. My footsteps shook the corridor I walked through, and the rushing soldiers and technicians parted around me as I strode onwards to my lance pod firing station.

The lance pod was a long cylinder with a reinforced glass door popped open. It sat on rails that would pull me into a hole in the siding of the Fulvion warship’s hull. At the front of the pod was a leaf bladed arrow point and at the back was thrustors sticking out. I settled into the contraption, moving my sword as needed to fit in snugly and grabbed hold of the grips on the sides. Alsig synced with the pod and the glass cover closed and the pod rolled on the rail track into the firing tube. A lid blocked the back of the firing tunnel so that the thrustor’s flame did not explode back inside the ship and so that the maximum amount of propelling force could be concentrated behind me.

An atmospheric containment forcefield lay ahead of me that I could just barely see out a sliver of it from my laid-back position if I craned my head to look.

“Launching in five… four… three… two… one!” Alsig announced to me.

The lance pod screamed out of the firing tub and the first thing I noticed was how in the vacuum of space all noise of the battle cut out without air and material to transmit the sounds. The second thing I noticed was the brilliant flashes of light and luminous gas as nuclear rounds detonated against the stalwart hull of our ship. The third thing I saw was the chaotic dance of twirling, twisting fighter spacecraft sent from both sides getting into dogfights with one another, spraying railgun fire and energy beams against their targets, racking up kills.

I rocketed past all of the glories and tragedies of void warfare at incredible speeds, flying at velocities that would pulp a common Servus into jellied flesh and bone fragments. The seat I lay back on was protesting my bulk being pushed back against it as we accelerated and the handgrips I had a death grip on were deforming into the shape of my fingers. This was a one-way vehicle, either I would win or I would be stuck in enemy territory with no way of return besides commandeering an Amatian vessel and hoping Alsig would be able to communicate with Fulvion forces quickly enough to avoid being shot down by friendly forces and the flagship’s automated defenses.

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Projectiles hammered my craft, an energy field diminishing the worst of the barrage though it rattled me around and cracked and partially melted the reinforced glass.

“Prepare for penetration of the hull!” My Silicon Daimon alerted me.

Over the roar of the thrustors behind my head, separated only by a thin section of the back, I heard a buzzing whine as high-powered molecular distortion and matter annihilation fields powered up around the arrowhead front of the lance pod, activating to allow me to puncture through the durable shell that protected the opposing ship.

I nearly broke a tooth as I smashed through the hull and the tremendous velocity of the pod was abruptly slowed to a punishing halt. My feet were sent through the bottom of the pod, and I groaned as I wrenched them out of the torn metal. The glass lid of the lance pod ripped off of the capsule as explosive charges propelled it upwards, a measure taken in case the locking system was jammed or rendered inoperable by the rough end to my flight.

As soon as I stood up and rolled out of the capsule, the shooting from the Amatian fighters began. I would be in more trouble if the Amatians Militares facing me were armed with their customary signature Ember rifles, but those were generally forbidden by most military doctrine for combat onboard void vessels. The coal-like energy bolts from an Ember rifle flew at nearly Mach four, burned like a star, and exploded with the force of twenty tons of TNT, a fearsome weapon to be sure, but not one you would use in the cramped corridors and rooms of a starship if you intended on keeping yourself and your ship intact.

Instead, these Soldiers brought to bear against me gravity accelerated compressed rounds and focused directed energy beams. They left dents in the alloyed armor and scorch marks on the paint, but it would take concentrated and long-term fire on me in order to compromise the structural strength or lock up my powered exoskeleton to slow me. That would take copious amounts of time, time I had no intention of giving the defenders of this ship.

I brought the fire of Heracles to a slow burn, a subtle taste of its full potential, and initiated the emerald flames in my cells of psychic physio-augmentation. The combination brought a savage grin to my face, my skin tingling and my blood rushing to the drumbeat of my heart.

Whatever reticence or guilt I had felt for putting down the mutated Servi rebels was utterly absent in my heart as I faced these Militares, they might not have been lords and masters of an imperfect system like the Imperators, but they benefited from it all the same.

As I crushed a Militaris’s head with my left hand and swung my activated Keenblade through the neck of another Amatian, I reflected on how I loved the rush of battle and the crunching of bone and the spraying of the blood of my enemies, ever since I killed Gavias Cantion in vengeance for my family by crushing his skull.

I ripped limbs off and plunged my sword into their guts, shattered bones and cracked armor with the blows of my fist. Leaving behind the cooling corpses of the grey skinned, steel toothed Soldiers, I raced onwards. No longer on my own ship amongst my own people, I ran through the warriors and members of the enemy starship, moving faster than a hovercar in my tanklike armor, the bodies of those I ran through exploding as I sprinted through them like I was moving through nothing more than air rather than flesh and blood.

Alsig helpfully provided a map for me, creating shortcuts as my armor’s senses worked to identify optimal routes with minimal opposition. Wrenching the doors of an elevator shaft open that had been locked down to slow my movement towards the command bridge, I climbed onwards and upwards through it, sheathing my sword and gripping into the metal siding of the shaft to create handholds as I advanced.

Busting into the bridge, I found waiting for me countless Navitae Pilots directing the vessel’s Silicon Daimon and a single Imperator guarding the operating center. The commander, armored in Adamantplate of his own, painted the red of Amatius and crowned with bronze laurels on his helm.

I stoked the fire of my grandfather’s godly parent, the sacred heat fusing with the psychic augmentation I had been turning on and off periodically to extend its length. All thoughts dropped out of my mind, leaving only the drive and fury that raged within me when I brought my blood to near evaporation and ignited my heart to a sun’s wrathful starfire.

More by half remembered instinct than rational reasoning, I channeled the divine fire out of my fingertips and through my metal gauntlets and into my Keenblade, willing it to enhance the cutting power instead of destroying the coppery metal. The edges burned scarlet and spat golden sparks.

“What in the name of-“ The enemy Bronze Imperator commander got out through his helm’s speakers before I was on him, the burning edges and molecular disruption field combining to deadly effect, allowing me to cleave through his blade and then stab my furiously incandescent blade into his heart.

I forced more and more divine power through my sword and into him, turning it white hot and devouring his flesh from inside of armor as he desperately slashed at my golden helm with a bisected blade before he was burnt to ash. My Keenblades finally melted, the surging heat rushing through it too much to handle even with my will doing its best to preserve my weapon.

Gathering myself, I turned to the Pilots’ terrified faces and tried to remember how to speak. The urge to attack was overpowering and the shouts of wars thousands of years old and the roaring of beasts long dead echoing in my ears made it hard to think, hard to remember what my purpose here was.

It took minutes for my augmentative sorcery to run out and then for me to reclaim enough reason to kill the flames.

“Tell the ship’s forces that the commander is dead and that you’re surrendering.” I ordered the Navitae Pilots.