“Incoming fire!” Ognian screamed, and a jolt of electricity raced through his nerve centers.

“Full power to the shield.” Admiral Kaganka’s claws lazily drummed the national anthem on her throne. “Stop the panic, officer.”

A ray of brilliant light pierced the planet’s atmosphere, slamming straight into the ship’s shield. Ognian calmed his heart, hearing reports and warnings from systems as they tried to absorb the destruction splashing itself against the force shield. The Wrathful Son and the engineering team left nothing to chance. They depowered the weapons, rerouting every ounce of free energy into the shield, empowering it to such a level that if the ship had crashed into the planet at sublight speed, it would have pierced the planet’s core unharmed.

The raging destruction splashing against the shield had enough power to evaporate a large ocean. There was no hiss, the vacuum didn’t transmit these sounds. But Ognian found himself amazed at seeing individual sparks bounce off the shield. They lasted several seconds before the coldness of the space stilled them.

“Mr. Tudor, report,” Kaganka commanded when the stream of superheated particles disappeared as suddenly as it appeared.

“Holding in one piece, ma’am!” Tudor, the chief of the generator compartment, saluted the admiral. Ognian saw him thanks to his connection with the Wrathful Son. “The eggheads reported that our boy…” he paid no attention to the animalistic rumble of the ship’s ventilation system, “…got hit with a heat beam. The focal point peaked at over thirty million degrees…”

“Over?” A hint of anger appeared in the admiral’s word. “Are we incapable of calculating the exact temperature?”

“Not at the moment, ma’am,” a white-clad scientist working at a research station joined in. “The specimen used a chemical reaction to produce this anomaly. Worse, the sensors report that the chemical reaction is still ongoing. He plans to fire again.”

“Target?” the admiral asked.

“Judging by the planet’s curvature, the body’s position, and if we assume that the coming blast…”

“Target,” the admiral interrupted her.

“Stonehelm. The hangar sections and perhaps living quarters to the south, should the structural integrity fail in the coming blast…”

“Prepare to fire the barrier breaker!” Ognian roared and almost slammed his hands into his post, bringing up one of the deadliest tools in the ship’s arsenal.

“But we need clearance,” the scientist blinked, her face pensive at understanding his idea.

“By our authority, we accept the officer’s idea,” Kaganka and the Wrathful Son said together. “Activate protocol six, four, nine, eight. Control of the ship’s weapons will be temporarily released until the crisis on the planet is averted. Every single calculation and energy capacity are to be directed toward the goal of saving lives. Fire at will, Mr. Ognian.”

He followed the command, using the battleship’s data banks to calculate the trajectory, taking into account the sudden movement of Lord Steward, guessing his intentions in nanoseconds, and formulating his plan. His crew acted at the same speed, their heart rates increasing, and medical teams rushed to the post along with the replacement crew. Every single person present experienced hemorrhage coupled with strokes. Unlike the land walkers, this minor inconvenience didn’t slow them down.

Iternians at large had long despised mechanical augmentations. These crude, inelegant metal things frightened children and, in general, were a bother to use. Where biological implants or nanomachines could repair themselves on their own, singular implants lacked such ability. The crew of the spaceship embraced this weakness, installing artificial hearts, implants capable of connecting to the ship’s system at a thought, and other useful machinery inside their bodies. It was a necessity; the cold mind reigning the Moon had often used unique types of EMI impulses far superior to the ones unleashed on the planet, and the fledgling nanotechnology of Iterna struggled to overcome the hyper-advanced technology of the old. And biological implants, often superior to nanobots, could not connect the ship because people of old didn’t use them as widely as people of the New World.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

And these implants allowed Ognian to work and survive. In a short while, they will put him in a healing coma, but as of right now, he kept working, seeing clearly even when blood blinded his eyes and he cried red tears. Irrelevant. Cracked beauty can be repaired and later improved. Wounds will be healed. Only lives can’t be replaced, and the Wrathful Son sent a new ripple through his body — not a jolt of electricity to punish hesitation or cowardice, but the warm sensation of a stern hand gripping a shoulder. He trusted everyone in the compartment and offered the full scope of his abilities to solve the problem at hand.

“For Iterna,” a junior officer whispered in a hoarse voice, and others caught the ancient cry of less enlightened times, “we bring ruin to the ruiners and life back to our world!”

At their command, the outer hull of the ship changed. The massive laser battery slid into the depths, and the multi-range of steel covered it, sealing the battleship. All around the ship, every officer experienced either excitement or jealousy at the prospect of bearing witness to one of the ultimate weapons at work.

****

The Old World was dead. In the wake of its death throes, so much knowledge was lost that humanity still worked day and night, trying to relearn a fraction of what they once knew. Hidden in ruins or buried in ancient laboratories, the nation found wondrous and terrible gifts. Knowledge of how to mass produce implants. A super cannon capable of striking anywhere in the system. A tremor engine that could create quakes strong enough to drown a continent in lava. And more deadly and impossibly advanced gifts — weapons built as deterrents.

One such weapon was the barrier breaker, arguably the most terrifying of all. Where the matter disintegrator transmuted matter into energy, the barrier breaker parted the dimensional walls of the world and opened a pathway to the realm unknown. Built originally for research purposes, the military soon repurposed it as the crown jewel of every battleship. No drones sent into the dimension ever returned; no recon team was sent in out of humanitarian concern, and sensors detected nothing. No alloy, no bastion, or energy shield could hold against the emanated zone of unreality, and even spatial and dimensional shielding risked overloading their reactors. The purple swath didn’t cause damage on its own; it whisked part of a space and sent it elsewhere.

That was what the crew projected onto the ground between the fighters. They didn’t dare aim at the rotting opponent. Who knows if he can survive in another dimension? What if he comes back stronger? Their order was to ensure his death, and this is what they strived to do.

The purple shroud shone on the battlefield, and the air screamed as it was sucked into a square-shaped gateway into some faraway void. The Chosen Prince’s body erupted, his sternum cracked, his arms disappeared all the way to the shoulders, and the overheated beam rolled through the land, cleaving it. Lord Steward hasn’t yet finished his transformation, but the heat never reached him. It struck the opened gateway and delivered the entire superheated energy into another realm.

Lord Steward reacted first. The Chosen Prince had tried to stand, even releasing foul clouds from his own ruined pores, aiming to bury them under the ground. His eye flashed in both anger and disbelief as the clawed hand struck his ruined chest and grasped the still-beat heart.

Bone spikes, created from Lord Steward’s transformed arm, impaled the Chosen Prince. Each spike opened gaping mouths, hungrily devouring the surrounding flesh and claws of muscle closed on the brain, bringing it closer to the opening maw in the president’s chest. The fangs closed, liquidating the brain, and the side effects of it rendered the rest of the body aimless. Lord Steward’s body unfurled, covering the remains in a living blanket. His many mouths sucked in the poisoned air, and the tendrils slid across the ground, picking up every last scrap of the Chosen Prince’s body. He left nothing to chance this time, cannibalizing a human body, and the sensory teams aboard the battleship reported something strange.

Diseases and unnatural growths permeating the surrounding area ever since the first war shuddered, their life cycle interrupted by the utter disappearance of the guiding will. They withered and broke apart. The change didn’t stop here. Every area under his influence experienced the effects of the Chosen Prince’s passing. Shamblers stumbled, drew a last breath of relief and came to a halt, no longer alive. Oracles convulsed and spasmed, foaming at the mouth. Many of them died when the will holding the diseases that kept them enslaved disappeared and their organs failed. Others took their own lives, horrified at the wickedness done by their hands. Those Oracles captured by the Oathtakers had to be rushed to the medics, and in several cases, their armor had to be cut off from their bodies to preserve the lives of the liberated slaves.

The president regained his warshape and unleashed a shrieking, hungry scream into the sky. It scared the people for dozens of kilometers, and the battleship’s crew prepared to open fire, fearing he had lost his mind after so much exertion. The cry ended, and the president changed into his human form, creating a biological sack filled with the captured brains on his back. He waved to the sky, and the battleship flashed its engines, returning to its important duty of containing the Moon’s threat.

With this, the Poison War had come to an end. Decades of recovery awaited the survivors, and a small group of survivors huddled together in the ruined factory were picked up by the arriving transports and raced to Barjoni’s hospital in Stonehelm, where medical crews of both Rho Medical and Barjoni Medical Care already stood at a ready.