>> A Lone Tyrant Rises

Monolith engines ramp in power. Hammer downward in a sudden, silent, roar of blue-white energy. Unseen. Unfelt. The Landing pad scorched dry for dozens of metrics. Boiling a massive pillar of steam into the dark above, spackled by speeding drops. The wreckers-yard around us sinks, steadily, into the murk as I pour out thunder beneath me. Tilting my huge engines to turn in mid-air.

Twelve tons of doom, carved from ultralight materials.

Above us, the Pirate Nation - alive with darting bees of light. No laws. No cops. No neat streams of traffic. Just an absolute - barbaric - free-for all. With flashes of gunfire, daring feints, and darting ambushes. Part gang dominance, part robbery, part cultural nonsense. Bearded barbarians fake-robbing their best friends - and real-robbing their enemies. Blood feuds endlessly escalating. Mercs merc-ing other mercs. Just chaos and madness on a monumental scale.

And the honking.

My God.

The honking.

When we first arrived, I tried to skulk through on stealth. But there's no dodging tanked-up Pirates in their rusty cruisers. You just can't tell where they're going - and, frankly, neither can they. Up there, when nobody can see you, the only way to dodge is to crash. Mostly into the massive, bristling, freighters - or the rotten towers. Which are also bristling. Though less with weapons than with fungus, tendrils, mouths, and eyes.

Which are, at least, softer. So there's that.

So, instead of hiding, I slide round a gaunt slab of former tower and dive through the flickering ghost of an ancient holo. We emerge from the other side in an explosion of shattering light as The Night Tyrant rips its way back into visibility. Golden halos burning above open eyes. They snap shut, and we blast onward. Just another stolen ship amid millions, dodging drunks in rocket-powered machines. Veering around cruisers, and executing moves that would turn the rear-cabin into a rock-tumbler if false gravity weren't taking the edge off.

But being visible has its own happy little issues - and, in mere seconds, I feel a shadow on my ass. A squad of jeering rabble on crudely-armoured jetBikes. Its leader drumming a bent baseball-bat on his heavy-grade helmet. More and more pouring in behind. Swinging chains and rifles. Honking, screaming, and chucking actual explosive spears like utter maniacs.

I swing upward into a quick evade, and power the main weapons systems. Missiles arming, like a whole rack of hopeful Badgers.

And, just like real version - it only takes one.

Just one.

A singular Grim XIII, incendiary, air-burst rocket slamming into their ranks. Blasting out bomblets like evil fists of hate and spite……

There’d be nothing left but red steam.

I squash down hard on the trained impulse. The screams of a thousand neoSoviet pilots injected directly into my skull. But I let their aggression burn through The Night Tyrant - shifting my posture into the attack, as I gain air above them. Turning to firing a short, wide, burst from the twin 'Dominance' turrets embedded into the cockpit like eyes. Swinging the rear gunner to help.

They scatter. Instantly.

Jeering. Circling.

Shooting their guns in the air, as the leader screams at em kill us - but not to 'hurt' his prize. Which gives me ample chance to line up the main gun, and make a little 'example' out of him. The Tyrant's internal systems roaring as power is diverted from everything, even the engines. Panels on the nose peel back from the muzzle of our Hammershot 50mm rocket-rail cannon. Industrial capacitors rumbling the air as energy builds like pressure.

The idiots scatter, and circle me. But I've already got my target.

At the last second, I disable active targeting - and fire.

Actual lightning explodes the rain. A streak of light curving toward the X marked on my tactical scope. Past the leader, who kept on moving. Slamming through the corner of a building, and out the other side. Detonating in a concussive roar, in mid air, with a force that melts mere flesh into smoke and ash.

"Next one won't be a warning." I snarl. Projecting every ounce of Terrifying Imperial Bastard into my ship’s robotic voice. Moulding it into something old, and hard, and rough as death.

But the engines are still flickering. The Tyrant sinking, noticeably, in the air.

The response is.... predictable.

“A warnin'!? PAH! Yew dumb bastards can't aim!!!” The leader laughs, banging his helmet with brain-rattling force as dozens of jetBikes flank us. Spitting fire, rage, and unfortunate bravado across our flanks. “Yeh! Ya don’t scare us, feako! We’re gonna nab ya ship, n good!”

For a single, solid, second The Night Tyrant stares bloody murder at them all.

And then golden rings explode around opening eyes of brass. Jet-riders rocketing back in panic, expecting a super-weapon.

The whole ship vanishes.

“I have more toys in my box, plaything.” The hardened voice of the ship goads them. Gloating and cold. “And you will die. One by one.” The idiots spin in every direction. Minds twisted by the hidden nightmare they sense sliding in for the kill…..

….while we sidle right the heck outta there.

Or that was the plan. Right up until their damn wrecker mothership swings its gauss-driven scrap-cannon at our former position. Blasting red-hot metal across our flanks, in a crude attempt to strip off our stealthEyes. I jink to one side, but their steam barrel goddamn follows me - like it can freaking see us! A second ball of junk heating inside it. I'm stuck. Wall on the left. Idiots on the right. Red-hot metal about to launch at my face. So I do the only damn thing I can.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

I grab the inner rings of my engines, and slam them downward.

Inverting them.

The Junker fires. Red hot, searing, metal carving a tunnel of steam through the storm. For half an instant, I know I've miscalculated. That we're gonna take damage. Maybe lose the Stealth Drive.

And then The Night Tyrant drops like a rock. Hammering blood into my meat-skull, as blue-purple flames vent - upward - in a massive double-plume of rage. I cut it, almost instantly, and the inner rings snap upwards. But we keep falling. Momentum slowing, until we finally hit buoyancy. Gravity-systems twisting our weight as ion-jets cushion us on a pillow of white-hot fury.

Another instant. A heartbeat. A second for reality to catch up.

And then I feel the wall of scrap impact the dead tower above us. Cracking windows. Bursting rubble. I tilt ring-engines again, and skid us sideways in a terrifying burst of speed. Barely avoiding the rain of metal, debris, and monster bits behind us.

"It's got stealth-breakers, yew idiot!" The Pirate goon laughs at us, as the mothership continues to track my vague position. Not very well. Not well at all, in fact. Especially at range. As if I'm more a vague direction than an outlined target on their scopes.

Either way, it's getting real obvious these guys are hunting stealth-drives. Which means they saw us decloak.... or they know us.

My eyes narrow. And something snaps inside me.

“Fine.“

Five pencil-thin rockets spit from one of my swarm-launchers to shriek across the gap between us. One hits flying scrap, and blooms into a massive spear of white-hot molten metal. Tagging a jetBike, and hurling idiots into the air. The second hammers up, into the wrecker’s pipe-filled belly. The tiny shaped-charge spitting a burning-hot hole through rough armour. Barely any damage - but the third melts their comms & sensor array. The fourth stabbing directly in into a thug. Boring a hole through cyber, flesh, and bone - plus most of the thug behind her - as the fifth rends through a group that got trapped beside the ship.

Rupturing them both in a spray of fire.

The screams are wild..... But I'm not freaking done.

We're at a bad angle for the full rail-assisted Hammershot - it's a big boy, and it only fires forward. But the quad-barrelled Boxguns slung from its sides, like stubby arms? Those are a little more mobile. They unlock from their stowed position, and I swing em upward. Peeling back the nose-covers like predatory mouths. I give the thugs a split second to regret exiting - and then a roar of heavy 55cal bullets rise in a thundering wave of lightly guided, explosive, ammunition. In half a second, they strip out entire the belly of their ship. Ripping though it. Exploding inside. Blasting the roof out in a roar of fire, and metal, and human confetti.

Their Junker lists in the air. Drunken. Done for. Drifting.

“Shit, man, it were just a joke! A joke!” The leader screams as the Wrecker ploughs, sideways, into the wall of a tower with a rending crash. Shattering most of its left engine as it buries itself there, and sticks.

“Go tell it somewhere else.” States the cold, synthetic, voice of my ship. Lacking any of my own remorse. A chill rising through my metal insides as ammunition cooks off in the doomed Junker, with little rocket-powered pops and sparking roars. The heart of the machine consumed by smoke and tiny flames......

It ain’t going anywhere no more.

Finally, something like common sense breaks its way into their brick-thick skulls - and the panic turns into full retreat. Still jeering, furiously, as they whizz off in different directions..... before I can make all their organs do something very similar.

Silence returns. As much as this chaos can ever be silent.

And I sit there. Ready. Waiting for a resurgence that never comes.

A few moments later, their wrecker lurches - horribly - and begins to fall. Leaking smoke, fuel, and probably worse. The rain battering its flames. The dark waters, beneath, eating it whole..... I stare at the distant ink, for a while, and then I slip away. Quickly. The Night Tyrant reappearing, with a weird flickering inversion of light. As if it grew from nothing.

Golden eyes snap closed, as I start to shake. Damnit. Little fools…. I shot the damn wrecker coz it could take it…… But they were all bloody over the place…..

I flex my guns.

Feeling the rain. The adrenaline. The rage. The impotence to change the past. Until, at last, I focus inward. Sensing the Roil and pulse of spinning power thrum against the insides of my engines.

Like a metal breath.

Nothing I can do. So we burn away into the dark. Shearing rain, cutting air. With trails of thin smoke leaking from my upper-right launcher.

Like a symbol of guilt.

“This is the life they chose.” Polybius clicks in the dead nothingness behind my eyes. “Witnessed, and signed for, in blood.”

“Did they?”

“Who else could have?”

I’ve got no answer to that, so I jet us forward. Pulsing fire from the rear engines to skew us into a dive. Swinging us round towers, then down into ravines. Blasting under rotted strands of cabling. Through dead factories. Dead worlds. Past windows pressed with fungal growth that glows so brightly it burns.

This is life, and death, in Karrak.

Everything. All of it.

A mad funfair, ending in carnage.

I have to accept that. I have to love it. Live with it. And let my joy be the moment. Because….

….we chose to come here too.

But there's joy in it, too. Freedom. And booster jets flare as I rise. And rise. The City unfolding into a whirling carnival of light everything opens up around us. A vast, black sky without any dawn. Glittering towers, and neon, and holos spread out beneath my high perch - beneath the great belly of the storm. Cameras rotate. Surveying. Calculating. Expanding in scope as we rise, and rise. Until we can turn, and see the massive ring of light looping the Quarantine Isolation Zone. Every district a different mass of hues and shadowy shapes, reaching for the clouds.

The City is vast. Beyond vast.

Beyond all human maps and reckoning.

And it's only here.... up here, in the dark beneath the belly of the storm... that you start to really see it..... To understand. To grasp the scope of everything man has created.... And realise.....

.....our ship is just a single speck, hanging in the dark.

A mote.

A single, tiny, dot - lost against the vast expanse.....

And beneath us?

Nation, after nation, marches out forever - into the utterly infinite dark. A billion lives between my outstretched engines. All motes of motes of dust, like me.... Yet all of them, each and every one, shine bright and radiant. Joining together to cast their rainbow-hued light outward, in all its endless glory, to burn back the tides of ink that lap at our spindly towers. As if to repaint the black of our eternal night, and bring about an artificial Day....

If daylight was ever even real....

I hang there, for a long time. Felling the rain wash across my rubberised plastic hull. The Pirate Nation a billion bees of light, darting and fighting and quarrelling far bellow..... And, in this instant, I can almost feel the perspective of some monumental god of old. Some being beyond all of us, and above all of us, watching the petty nonsense we call life.....

I turn my nose to the ground. Hanging there, atop a cliff of my own making. Suspended on rings of fire, as I close my eyes. Feeling the long dark beneath....

All is silent - even the roar of Monoliths hammering vast pillars air through their massive rings. The gale outside smoothed away to a whisper by powerful sound-destroying technology. You can’t hear us from the ground. Or the above. We’re a ghost-ship, parting the storm with our prow.

Unseen and unseeable.

And there I stand, suspended, as if at the very cusp of The Falling Dream..... But now. Here. With my mind one with The Night Tyrant.... There is no fear. There is nothing. Nothing but the dark..... and me.

And then….

….without a breath of fear.....

....I step over the edge.....

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