With a surge of dark energy, I broke free from the bonds of restraint and morality that had once held me back. The transformation was complete - what remained was an unstoppable being fueled by vengeance and a desire to end the tyranny of the U'lennea.
The universe had taught me many things, but perhaps the most damning lesson was that mercy, in the wrong hands, could be a weapon. I’d always believed in restraint, in the idea that power must be tempered by the laws and structures of society—that even the vilest beings deserved a chance to face their judgment before those deemed worthy to decide their fate. But what had that ever accomplished? How many lives had been shattered because someone “in power” allowed evil to breathe another day, thinking it wasn’t their place to be their executioner?
No more.
I’d seen too much, endured too much to keep playing the role of a savior who only delayed the inevitable. Every time someone spared the wicked, every time someone handed them over to a broken system, they’d return stronger, more determined, more destructive. Their evil was a disease, festering, spreading, infecting the innocent—leaving a trail of pain and suffering in its wake. And I was done being part of that cycle.
I wouldn’t be their Superman anymore, the one who swooped in to save the day only to step aside and watch as the monsters caught slipped through society’s fingers. No, I would be the cure, the end of their existence, the eraser of their malignancy.
The world had its rules, its laws, its appointed judges to uphold them. But I had seen the truth: the system wasn’t enough. It couldn’t be. To let evil live was to allow it another chance to corrupt, to destroy, to thrive on the suffering of others. I wouldn’t stand by and watch it happen anymore.
If the universe wanted someone to be its final arbiter, to cut away the cancer and leave space for new growth, then I would take on that mantle. No more letting evil slip away, no more hesitation in the face of darkness. I’d become the sword, cutting through the lies of justice as society saw it. I’d make a way for people to live without fear, without the constant threat of those who preyed on the weak.
I wasn’t a hero anymore. I was a reckoning. And the universe would know what it meant to face true justice.
The corridors of the U'lennea dreadnought no longer posed a challenge. What had once been a maze of defenses and traps was now laid bare before me. I ascended, the darkness wrapping around me, a tangible extension of my will. My mastery over Depletion, the core concept of Loss, was absolute. Each action was purposeful, informed by the map my swarm had constructed. I wasn’t just navigating the ship—I was dismantling it from within.
This ship of torture would be gutted.
I only had a little bit of swarm left in my command at the moment. I could feel more returning from their mission of delivering the escape pod to safety, having not been needed once the dreadnoughts gave up their bombardment and pursuit, but it didn't matter to me. The few that remained were more than sufficient to propel me forward and carve out voids of Depletion wherever necessary.
I left the experimentation lab, but not before unleashing dozens of my swarm to cleanse the room. It was an erasure—small motes of darkness consuming everything in their path. It must have seemed impossible, these tiny fragments of void sweeping along the walls, like miniature black holes, erasing whatever they touched from existence. The spiked tentacles vanished, along with segments of the walls, exposing hidden containers and tubes underneath. The entire ship was a repository of suffering, a breeding ground for viruses and weapons of torment. Depletion erased it all.
As I moved deeper into the ship, the grotesque remnants of tortured beings littered the hallways, each one a testament to the U’lennea's cruelty. The sight could only mean one of two things: either death was inevitable once someone was unplugged from the tentacles, or the U’lennea were doing this deliberately, testing me, waiting to see what I would do next. The Skii I had encountered earlier, now even more twisted and broken, dragged itself toward me, its malformed body unwilling or unable to find the escape it so desperately needed.
"Please... release us to the light," it cried out, desperation lacing its voice as it pointed unerringly toward one of my motes of darkness—the very opposite of light.
For a moment, hesitation flickered within me. Memories of the children I had fought to save surged to the forefront of my mind. Their innocent faces, their dreams—these were the reasons I couldn't falter now. I wanted to save everyone. But as I glanced around, the screams of those who still clung to life echoed through the corridors, a cacophony of suffering that forced me to confront the grim reality of what was really taking place, pushing me to make a difficult decision.
Each of the remaining living victims had glowing spikes barely protruding from various spots on their bodies. I could feel the sinister connection between the spikes and the ship, like a puppet master pulling strings. These beings were being kept alive, forced to endure endless torment, their pain amplified and broadcast as a cruel mockery of life. The spikes, which mirrored the barbed ends of the tentacles embedded in the walls, served as permanent hooks, anchoring them to their suffering for as long as the U’lennea desired.
As I considered what I could do to save the Skii, I sent my tiny drones sweeping through the walls, erasing swaths of the ship's vital infrastructure. I targeted anything that could be used against me, any weapon or mechanism that might result in these aliens' lives being lost. But as I did so, more beings emerged from their confined spaces—various alien races, each bearing the grotesque marks of the U'lennea's horrific experiments. They begged for mercy, their voices a haunting reminder of the lives devastated by this conflict.
The realization hit me like a tsunami. The U’lennea had turned their victims into tools of torment, using their suffering to manipulate me. They wanted me to hesitate, to falter in my resolve. But I couldn’t let them win. This was not a situation where mercy could be measured in hesitation or delay, but in the willingness to save and redeem. They wanted to see if I would give these aliens mercy, and in doing so, become an accomplice to their evil.
"Please, end my suffering," begged a wounded Herv, his limbs grotesquely twisted by the cruel modifications. The strange thing was, of all the pleas to end suffering, many weren’t directed at me but at their fellow inmates. They were begging each other to somehow fight against the mind-blocking devices, desperately seeking a way to end their own misery.
Another, a trembling Xeath, whispered with his small, flaming eyes fixed on my seething drone body, "We are all beyond saving. If you can understand, please finish me. We have entered the nightmare and need to be reborn to wake up."
Each plea only made me want to help them more. These beings were victims, and their suffering was a testament to the cruelty of the U'lennea. I wanted to save them; I would not allow this madness to continue unchecked.
But sadly, the choice was taken from me. In a shocking moment, the entire dreadnought simply gave up, initiating a unique self-destruct protocol. Like mist vanishing before rays of sunlight, the ship fell apart at the seams all at once, its structure dissolving into dust as its clever cr armaments and defenses detached and crumpled away. This exposed the ship’s innards to the vacuum of space, violently wrenching life sustaining gasses away from the beings around me. But it wasn’t over; everything not made of cr was left vulnerable to what came next. It seemed the U'lennea had gotten what they wanted; I had stood still long enough for them to devise a plan to destroy me.
My rampage had not gone unnoticed. The U'lennea Armada, vast and calculating, responded with a precision that betrayed their desperation. Their warships, once focused on systematic conquest, now converged on their own, desperate to contain the lethal anomaly within.
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This wasn’t just an uprising they sought to crush; it was a manifestation of death itself, a force they couldn’t control. In their desperation, they unleashed weapons that defied convention—unsanctioned devices meant to unravel the very fabric of reality. Energy distortions swept through the disintegrating corridors, gravitational anomalies tore at the ship’s delicate structures, and temporal shifts fractured the native molecules within the space that once housed a massive vessel of war.
Before I could act, eight sister dreadnoughts, in a coordinated strike, turned their weapons on their own. I felt it— the ship coming apart at the seams while I watched in puzzlement turning into horror, not realizing the extremes they would go through until it was happening. The whole ship, its cr armaments, and defenses self-destructing back into their base cr. The once formidable vessel disintegrated, its components unbinding, floating away like ash on the wind. In that moment of surrender, the barriers that had once protected the suffering aliens were gone, and the enemy's weapons found their mark.
Everything vanished in a silent, blinding, cataclysmic wave of devastation, leaving only me and the remnants of my swarm in the void filled with escaping CR dust where the ship once stood.
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Had there been sound in space, the sheer force unleashed by the eight dreadnoughts would have left all who witnessed it deafened. Instead, the blinding light of the beams, converging on a single point, erased the surrounding stars from view, causing a stunned pause in the ongoing battles. No one had imagined the U'lennea capable of wielding such overwhelming power, and the display struck terror into the hearts of all who witnessed it.
But what followed was even more horrifying. Every U'lennea vessel began to exhibit unmistakable signs of deploying a weapon feared above all others—a weapon that sent a ripple of dread through every armada present. Panic seized the fleets, and ships turned and fled, desperate to escape the impending annihilation.
The U'lennea armada had begun to charge their Skism weapons.
---
To say I was angry would be an understatement. Fury burned within me, a storm of rage at the injustice that had just been inflicted. In an instant, choice had been ripped away from me, all because I had paused—paused to secure the craft for the survivors, paused to reach out to my AI allies for aid. In that fleeting moment of hesitation, everything I had fought to protect—choice, help, goodness—was torn from my grasp. The U’lennea had taken it all, snatching away any chance of saving those still clinging to life.
As the cr dust from the obliterated ship slowly dispersed, drifting away like the ashes of a smoldering fire, my surroundings began to come into sharp focus. That’s when the full scope of their treachery became clear. Throughout my search of the ship, I had encountered only the broken and the suffering—never a single U'lennea scientist or operative. Now I understood why. They had all abandoned their posts, fleeing like the cowards they were the moment I breached their dreadnought's hull. Their tiny escape pods, barely visible against the backdrop of the stars, were now speeding away at insane velocities toward the very vessels that had just unleashed hell upon me. They knew the danger I posed, knew that I could obliterate them in an instant, and so they had left the prisoners—those they had tortured and experimented on—as nothing more than bait, a cruel trap to ensnare me in their web of misdirection.
The realization hit me like a physical blow. They had manipulated me, used the suffering of the innocent to buy themselves time, to stage their escape. And now, as their escape pods darted toward safety, I could feel the weight of their calculation, their cold, ruthless logic. They had sacrificed their own dreadnought, their own resources, just to contain me.
My gaze shifted, locking onto the weapons being primed by the U'lennea vessels. The scale of their power was staggering, far beyond the tiny display LOW had shown me on the space station. From this immense distance, I could clearly see the rippling distortion of space emanating in front of each ship. The Skism relic weapon surface was huge, an intimidating contrast to the tiny device I had seen before. Even though I was far from the epicenter, the clicking and ticking sounds of their weapons priming were audible in my mind, a sinister accompaniment to the impending catastrophe.
The weapons themselves appeared almost surreal, their design oddly comical against the backdrop of space. Each ship generated a growing bubble of tessellating fractals, patterns that seemed more suited for an abstract art piece than for a weapon of permanent timeless destruction. Yet, as strange as they looked, I knew what was coming. Don’t ask me how or why—perhaps it was a survival instinct, or some deeper, unsettling knowledge—but I understood the function of these bubbles with chilling clarity.
Once these bubbles reached their critical mass, they would unleash their true terror. The weapons, deceptively innocent in appearance—like a child running with a soap bubble wand in the wind—would extend outward from each ship. They would stretch across light-years, creating vast strips of beautifully patterned, deadly tubes. These patterns would cross my location and extend far beyond, forming a web of destruction that would obliterate any life that came into contact with it.
The visual beauty of the fractal bubbles only heightened the horror of their purpose. What looked like delicate, intricate designs in space would soon become the harbingers of death, wiping out all living beings with a single touch. The contrast between their appearance and their function was a brutal reminder of the U'lennea’s cruelty and their willingness to use such overwhelming power without remorse.
The U'lennea showed no concern for the lives of the innocent, the numerous fleeing armadas that now lay in the crossfire of their weapons. Their focus was singular and ruthless: to eradicate a perceived threat, no matter the collateral damage. The enormity of their intent was chilling.
I was their target. I was the pest they sought to eliminate. If I made even the slightest move, their weapons would sweep after me, indiscriminately scorching entire swaths of space. It was as though they intended to napalm an entire country to crush a single ant, blanketing regions of the cosmos in a relentless, destructive fire until they hit their mark.
But there was a graver concern. Nurse was with me, still tethered to my being in her invisible state, riding along with the shell of the void seedling. Her presence added a layer of complexity to the already dire situation. She was not only a vital part of my life but also at risk in the impending annihilation. The thought of her caught in the crossfire, amidst the devastation the U'lennea were about to unleash, nearly crushed me. I had to find a way to protect her, to ensure that her sacrifice was not in vain, even as I faced the overwhelming force of the U'lennea’s wrath.
I knew what I had to do.
“Kevin! No!” Her voice, raw and desperate, pierced through the chaos as I reached out with all six of my limbs. Every ounce of my being was focused on pulling her away, urging my swarm to encase her in a protective cocoon of their bodies and propel her as far from me as possible.
She fought me with everything she had. Her efforts were frantic and fierce. She battered against my control, her voice breaking with each scream, clawing at the barrier I had erected to keep her from commandeering my swarm. Her eyes were filled with terror and determination, flashing all the colors of the rainbow, and every desperate plea she made tore at my mind.
Despite her cries, despite the wrenching agony in her voice, I could not relent. I had to save her, even if it meant casting her away from the impending doom. I fought back against her attempts, shutting down every attempt to override my command, sweeping aside her frantic claws and pleading cries. I was adamant, and my swarm, bound by my will, obeyed me completely.
With a final, heart-wrenching shove, I sent her away. My focus was unyielding, every bit of my strength dedicated to ensuring her safety. As she vanished into the darkness of space, I watched helplessly as the beams of destruction converged. She was out of reach, propelled far from the carnage that was about to ensue.
In that moment, as she disappeared into the void, the weight of my decision crashed over me. It was my will that had saved her, my determination that had driven me to act. Yet, the emptiness of the void seemed to mirror the hole left in my heart as I prepared to face the oncoming storm alone.
I retreated into my private space, my last sanctuary amidst the encroaching chaos. If death was to claim me in the next fraction of an instant, I refused to face it as a mere drone, a faceless insect. I was going to confront my end as myself.
With a fierce determination, I raised my hand and clenched it into a defiant fist. This wasn’t something I could do in my drone body, the mask I had been forced to wear ever since my mind had been cast into it. I was not going to brandish tiny, insect claws at my enemy. No, this was about asserting my humanity. I was Kevin. I was a son, a brother, a friend… and to one growing Leva, a father.
In these final, fleeting moments, I was determined to remember who and what I was. I would not be the coward who sacrificed others for my own safety. I would not cower in the face of annihilation. Instead, I would stand tall and confront the impending storm head-on.
This was my final act of defiance, a testament to my true self. As the beams of fractal destruction converged upon me, moving fast even though time in my personal space practically stood still, I took solace in the knowledge that these last moments would be etched into the very fabric of the cosmos. My swarm, a reflection of my will, with their fists raised with me, would endure beyond my final breath, carrying out my last wishes and leaving a mark on the universe that would echo my character and resolve. My friends would survive and that meant the world to me.
In this act of defiance, I embraced my humanity, knowing that my legacy would be one of courage and unwavering strength. I was Kevin, and even in the face of oblivion, I would stand firm and let my final stand be a testament to who I truly was.