[Captain Indrix Jaen]

The command room was engulfed in complete silence. Every member had their eyes fixed on the live body cam feeds in the front of the room, watching soldiers get efficiently ripped apart by the heavily underestimated human. Shocked to the point of inaction, witnessing the direct repercussions of their negligence. I was not shocked at this outcome, for I had warned them as much as allowed.

However, that is not to say that I’d been aware of just how hopeless the situation was. While I did expect heavy losses to stem from this lackluster solution, I did not foresee our weapons being completely ignored by that man. I, too, had been awestricken during the capstone of this slaughter. The officer having his head slowly crushed, the process unimpeded by our full hail of bullets. Thinking back to the incident in the prison, I had only survived due to Dominique seeing the situation as entertaining rather than threatening.

Nobody even turned their heads when I got up and left, too preoccupied with watching their men get torn to shreds. While they had stared in horror, I’d been studying in scrutiny, looking for any sign of weakness that could be noted. I found one. That human, despite being a machine of war, still accrued damage like any other physical object. He'd started to slow down over the course of the fight, taking constant abuse from our attacks, even if it was minimal. There would surely be a period of downtime after the mist settled.

I stormed through the austere halls of the ship with zeal in mind. Any crew members immediately filed to the side, letting me pass unimpeded. Even if I was a disgraced captain, it seemed that there was still respect for me among the ranks.

It wasn't long before reaching my destination, the orbital strike control room. I wasted no time explaining myself, immediately barking orders for the soldier manning the weapon to leave her post. I locked the door behind her using a stolen emergency-class card.

I sat at the control terminal and started reacquainting myself with the system, recalling my time in this post back before I was promoted to captain. After a minute of fiddling with the settings and reawakening my muscle memory, I trained the sights over to the coordinates and located my target, giving me a clear overhead view of the area.

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Seeing it from this angle, I came to the realization that the word massacre was insufficient for describing the scene. It was a landscape of mountains and rivers formed from stacked bodies and flowing blood. There would be no separating individuals for funeral rites, I’ll be doing everyone a favor by torching the entire perimeter.

I spotted the monster among the wreckage, standing idly just as I had predicted, and activated the charging sequence. Anticipation began to build up along with the rising pitch of the various systems’ whirring. The weapon couldn’t be stopped at this point, it was already at a volatile stage and not firing was a non-option. All there was left for me to do was keep the sights on target and attain my revenge.

And at the final few seconds before firing, something beyond reason took its hold in reality. The human, Dominique, looked at me. With over one hundred thousand kilometers of space separating us, the angular precision to even direct eyes onto this ship was astronomical, and yet he was looking directly at me. Not even at the camera or weapon, no, he was making eye contact with me. As if we were just a couple of meters apart.

An explosion rocked the ship, knocking me out of my seat and introducing my face to the floor. The pain of falling was secondary to the gut-wrenching dread spreading through my body. I shot up to my feet and checked the weapon’s status… system offline.

I had expected so, considering I never heard the weapon fire. I hadn’t expected the wave of despair that followed this revelation, however, as it also confirmed other, more grievous truths. This wasn’t an accident, not after he acknowledged my presence the way he did. There was a very real chance that our communication systems going haywire at the perfect moment for him to escape our view was completely his doing, too. A dozen enemy warships were in orbit above him, but was his life even under threat? Did he have the power to bring us all down right now if he wanted to?

There was a hole in this line of thinking. It wasn’t possible for him to pierce the sky and compromise our security by himself, even with gross overestimations of his installed broadcasting capabilities. Did he have external help? Something evading our scanners?

But, even with these suspicions giving me a new line of action, I had run out of time. Nobody was going to let a disgraced captain lock themselves in a weapon control room, and it seems they finally brought equipment to manually force the door open. Armed men swarmed into the room, guns not directly pointed at me but still ready to answer any defiance. I wasn’t planning on doing so, anyway.