"There's a darkness in humanity when pushed to the brink, an inescapable fact. Push too far and a person just snaps. Humanity avoids staring into the abyss not because they fear it, but because they fear what happens when they let it out. Do you want to see the truth of Humanity? Look at their first contact War." -General Kaxius Versellius, Hexat Prime defense legion, 2335.

Amelia was..numb. It wasn't that she didn't care, but more like she had been overloaded with so much so soon that her mind just...shut down. Once Hal was safe and she got actual rest, she just couldn't focus on processing everything 0 had said, whether it was lies or not. What if she had been wrong, what if Adam and her other young ones were still alive, what if she abandoned them? It was a thought that she had to avoid or she would feel herself slipping into a dark place, a place she didn't know if she would escape from if she ever fell into it. It was like an empty maw, waiting to snatch her up inside, every errant thought a claw trying to pull her deeper in. Viza helped, as much as he could, sometimes just being there, sometimes distracting her with a bit of small talk. He was trying, and she was grateful for it, but still, she knew she was barely holding it together, that she might snap at any moment, and something in the back of her mind told her to never let that happen, to hold on no matter what.

They made it to the station easily enough, Amelia forgoing meeting with the Avi'Sharr ambassador due to her mental state, which surprisingly the moth-like lady understood. Viza had said that the Avi'Sharr despite being insects had low birth rates and strong maternal instincts, so they intimately understood Amelia's pain in ways she did not expect. Instead, the Avi'Sharr ambassador, Xcsizsa, gave Amelia full access to the station's birthing dockyard for ship refit, and once receiving coordinates from Amelia, set off with a delegation team to Terra. After seeing what happened to the Krultathans and that Humanity was being targeted, the moth-like species had apparently cried in outrage for them and intended to stand by Humanity, Hexats, and Krultathans against the Axon.

Amelia just focused on her work now, upgrading the ship's defensive armor with ablative designs, manufacturing the Hellfire PDFs now that they didn't need to worry about the materials thanks to the Avi'Sharr, designing a proper shell and refinement of tech for the Mack cannon, which previously had been bare for the prototype test, and most importantly, at least to her, she began work once again on the suit, this time going much better than last now that she wasn't constrained by restricted materials. Using the Cheshire implant to essentially allow tru parallel thought made the designing and error checking much faster, especially when she could dilate her time perception using it to allow herself more time than normal to think. Eventually, she managed to cobble together an idea and set to work making it a reality. It was a fully contained suit made from a graphene-based nanocomposite material layered on top by reinforced titanium-tungsten-chromium alloy painted vantablack, and below by a non-Newtonian electroactive gel composite that could harden to steel-like strength in 3.44 nanoseconds, or expand to seal off sections of the suit or to lessen an impact in 8.47 nanoseconds. In between the graphene composite and the gel was a layer of synthetic muscle, boosting the wearer's strength by a factor of 5 to 10 times, relatively, and while the micro thrusters on the back's streamlined pack wouldn't allow her to fly in earth grav by any means, it would help in low gravity or 0g situations. The helmet was tinted out, containing a built-in heads-up display and onboard adaptive VI Amelia custom designed for the suit, built to monitor her vitals, automate her implants more efficiently, aim assist, and a few other goodies. It didn't compare to the Azathoth files, but it was the best she could come up with in such a short time, so it would have to do.

After giving it a once over, test fit, a small redesign for efficiency, and adding built-in blades at the forearms, she then slotted the micro-fusion reactor into the suit and jump started it from the ship's main reactor. With the power on for the suit now, she tested the rest of the systems, including the optical camouflage, gel reinforcement, synthetic muscle, and rest.

The Atlas stealth armor was finished in a week, the ship's upgrades took half that time to design and the rest for the station's workers to implement, thankfully most spacefaring races eventually get to the point of "plug-n-play" being a thing, making the process much smoother and without any serious errors. Yet unlike before when making the railgun or turret upgrades, Amelia found no joy in finishing a design or prototype. It wasn't that she didn't enjoy the designing and building of the things she made, but rather, her emotional state just left her too drained to be able to feel anything besides the darkness that had been growing inside her, consuming her slowly this entire time. If she felt anything, it was worry that she would lose herself to that darkness, and everyone she cared for with it.

Hal was still recharging his crystalline capacitors and so was resting, Viza was brushing up on his combat training with the other Krultathan warriors, Savi was overseeing the design upgrades, and Ti'Chal was keeping security for the ship and Amelia. The entire time she had locked herself away slaving out designs, the only thing Amelia could think of was the one line 0 had said running in her head over and over.

"We didn't kill them, you know.."

If by some miracle her kids were still alive, she was going to find them, and she didn't care what happened to anyone who tried to stop her. She failed to protect her family once before, she wouldn't fail again. As soon as the upgrades to Elysium were finished, they would head out, back home, and she would finish what she started, what she should have done years ago. And if her kids weren't alive, if this had been some prank or deceit by 0, she would make sure everyone involved would burn.

for the first time in a long time, Amelia was well and truly consumed by the chilling inferno of her rage. In one week, she would be back at Terra, at Earth, and in one week, one way or another, BlackRock died.

-----

"Extermination fleet assembled, Commander. Scout ship Viserive's data collected from the attack on Ambassador Amelia has been disseminated throughout the fleet and countermeasures have been taken, each ship is running dual kinetic and thermal shields. Departure at your orders!" The Axon lieutenant barked to commander Zikal, who simply nodded an acknowledgment.

The lieutenant gave the order, and a fleet of 60 Axon ships powered up their drives and began warping to Terra. They would be there in a week Terran time, and they would not be nearly as passive as the collector squad had been. They had the information on their side, the power on their side, and they would be jumping in directly on top of Terra to give no time for defensive measures to be deployed. A fast, decisive, overwhelming strike was calculated to be their most efficient route. They would never even have to step foot on the deadly planet.

Zikal went over the data once more and shifted in annoyance. The queen was a fool to call these humans backwater primates, none of them could see with the eye of war. These humans were absolute monsters, her fleet would be destroyed in seconds if it had been ground combat, such was the difference in their physical builds. Based on what they learned from the Ambassador's kidnapping as well, they were extremely efficient at sabotage, just letting one board would be beyond dangerous, which is why she gave the order to vent any section of a ship that humans boarded immediately. She would brook no resistance to this command either. If she succeeded here, she would finally have enough merit to challenge the Queen-mother, and free her people from that disgusting abomination's oppression. No Axon was meant to be that large, that disgustingly dry and white, and certainly not live so long. If she won this battle, she would see to it that the queen-mother fell into the deepest of Axii's pits.

First, she had to win though, against these class 4 demons, devils, monsters of nightmares. Humans. She had thought the attack at Mars with the ship had been a fluke, and so sent a small group of 4 fighters and an observation ship to test the waters with the ambassador's ship just in case, having had to pay off many shady hands to get the information on where the ship was heading to in the first place. She had been fortunate to have thought ahead, as the observation ship watched the squad of 4 get destroyed by a single weapon with only 4 shots, a weapon that used both kinetic and plasma projectiles, something that could easily be considered capital class armaments and, according to the observation ship, a weak point. The Ambassador's ship had to power down almost completely to fire it, and the massive energy spikes confirmed that they could only fire that weapon by itself, meaning such a massive draw weapon was unlikely to be able to fire more than a couple of times during combat and leading to the deployment of the weaker, but better suited, dual shield setup.

The better she appeared in this war, the better her glory and the more serious her future challenge to the queen-mother would be.

------

With Earth under threat of attack by the Axon at any moment, the 5th fleet had been ordered to deploy with full war authority, allowing them to use their own capital weapons should the need arise. They had just been joined by Terra's first contingent of 20 battlecruisers of varying size, with more on the way, thanks to the upgrades to the birthing ships increasing their speed of construction, and the humans actually using drones to slingshot asteroids nearby for materials. Axcizz had to admit the way they thought was sometimes insane, and her mate seemed to think so as well, Xiixa currently coordinating with the humans and the newly arrived Krultathan First Defense fleet Kev'Nakta.

A collection of 12 ships didn't seem like much, but these were Krultathan super cruisers, designed with full aggression over the defense and had been known to give even the Axon a tough time. If they were attacked, those 12 ships could very well be the difference between survival and destruction. Still, Axcizz had to admit that the commander of the Kev'Nakta fleet, a Varia Zitoh, was rather annoying, having the air of pompousness that could only come from being born into a high station, but like it or not, they needed her fleet. Together they were forming the first TGA defense fleet, and the only thing standing between the Axons and Terra. Both Hexat and Krultatha had fleets of over 150 ships stationed in their own home systems to prevent them from being targeted, just in case, but they were all Humanity had, a collection of roughly 80 ships, with combat power of around 2:1 for their Axon counterparts. If they did show, it would be a bloody fight.

The humans themselves, however, puzzled her, saying they had, "A few tricks up their sleeves" if the Axon came and something about if the Axon attacked Earth it would become a different kind of War. Axcizz wasn't sure what they meant, war is war after all, but she had tried to ask what these "tricks" were, to no avail.

She just hoped that whatever they had planned, would be enough. She had never seen a real war but knew stories of it from the contact wars and it had given her nightmares o have seen the videos. And when Ares had been attacked, it was just as bad, if not worse. If an actual war came, Axcizz wasn't sure if she would be able to last.

---

Adam and the rest had finally escaped, but they needed safety from anyone trying to find them and to somehow send a message to their mother. Athena had gained access to the web and found out that she was indeed off-world, but scheduled to return soon based on her last transmission, less than a week's time now. They also found out that first contact, the Axon threat, and everything else was very much real, leading them to realize that BlackRock had been feeding real information into their simulations to fool their sensors, which would have detected repeating synthetic patterns as errors.

Still, they had to hide until she returned, and somehow get a message to her, so they headed north, deep into what was once Canada, able to deal with the cold just fine but using it as a camouflage to hide them from the humans hunting them, and to find a discreet location to build something to contact their mother with when she arrived. They had no means of building an FTL buoy nor communicating with the one under lockdown by the government, so they would have to rely on something a little more old-fashioned, a focused radio transponder.

Deep in the snow would give them some time to hide before anyone else could detect them, and using a cipher they knew mother would recognize instantly but others might not would buy them a little more, but it was still risky. Athena had to monitor for any signs of Amelia returning, and the twins were frightened while building the device. Adam would collect the materials needed that he could, even offering some parts from his own frame if required. Limos objected of course as these Frames had been built by their mother, but Phthisis managed to talk some sense into her. Still, Adam wished there was more he could do. He had been the first made, and the least generalized. On paper, he was made to do one thing and one thing only, but his mother was the one who told him that he was alive and that he had a choice of what to be. And had defended them as much as she could. Even their grandfather, Kevin had said something similar. He had even gone nonfunctioning, to give them the freedom of choice.

Looking at his siblings, Adam made it up in his mind made of code, that if he was to ever become what he was designed for, it would be to protect them. Like his mother did, like his Grandfather sacrificed himself to do.

It was the one thing he could do to protect his family.