I dodged away from the Hellhound's charge and nearly rolled into the Raptors claws. These two were working really well together.

"You need help there, Rickshaw?" Carrie asked from her own fight with a Kong.

"I've got them," I assured her as I rolled to my feet and threw a hatchet at the Hellhound.

With a screech the Raptor took advantage of my distraction to swipe at me with its tail spikes. To dodge it, I jumped over its head and kicked out at the uninjured leg on its left side; the snapping bone sent it toppling to the ground long enough for me to raise my sword and the Hellhound to leap toward me. Snapping jaws and reaching hands came for me, but I thrust forward with my sword and caught the Hellhound's chest in a shallow stab that just pissed it off even more. Before I could move in to finish it off, the Raptor hobbled around it to race toward me as fast as its broken leg could manage. Hissing and dripping venom from its jaws, the Raptor lunged for my throat in time to catch the point of my sword being driven into its own throat. I knew I'd hit an artery or something, because blood started to gush from the wound and the Raptor began to choke. The Hellhound came charging toward me again, snapping its jaws and swiping its arms in an attempt to grab me somehow. Faster than it could react, I swung my sword and took one of its arms off before moving behind it and shoving my sword into the sweet spot up into the chest cavity. With a pitiful whine it died and I moved to finish off the Raptor.

Flicking blood from my sword I took a look around the rather barren planet that we were on. Other than rocks that were scattered around, there was nothing taller than the flat ground and the small hills of dust and sand that piled up from the wind. The ground was nearly solid rock and that meant that any soil that could have formed was constantly blown around with the sand. Any life on this planet was underground in the cave systems and caverns that had formed from the water flows and the volcano eruptions. That didn't mean the Scourge weren't on the surface unfortunately, so Carrie and I were taking a break from the dark, constricting confines of the system we had been exploring to clear Scourge from the surface.

"I'm leaving you to take care of the damn Kong next time," Carrie said as she came up to me and slung her shield over her back. "That was way more difficult than it should have been."

"That Kong was bigger than they usually are," I told her. "If it had been a little bigger or had the claws then I'd have thought it was a Rampager."

"Never mind how big it was," she complained. "It was just too damn fast for its size. I think it was as fast as a Hellhound!"

"Rickshaw, you have an incoming message from the Phoenix," Cai told me before I could answer her.

"Hold on Carrie, I've got a message," I told her before responding to Cai. "Patch it through."

"Demigod, sir?" a timid voice came through. One of the newer Paladins who didn't know me. "You and Horseman Applewood are needed back on the ship, sir. Something Dr. Yurnel needs you for."

"Send a shuttle to grab us," I told him. "We're on the surface now and we mapped out the cavern system we were in. We're done here for now."

"On the way, sir," the voice said. I sighed heavily.

"I know that sound," Carrie said. "What's up now?"

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"Yurnel wants to see both of us," I told her. "The kid on the other end of the call didn't know what for."

"You'd think after twenty years of this, I'd be used to having Yurnel send for both of us for this stuff, but I'm not," Carrie sighed. "I still think that I should stay here and help coordinate the efforts."

"Yeah, you can keep thinking that," I told her. "After the fiasco with your sister and her pregnancy scare, I'm not keeping you out of this loop."

"I still can't believe she was being that stupid! She's only forty-seven now! She's got centuries ahead of her and she almost got herself pregnant!" Carrie began to really pick up steam for her now oldest complaint while I just nodded along, the way I'd learned to do a long time ago.

It's been nearly thirty years since I left Earth. In this time, I've gone back to orbit a time or two to visit my sister and her family; my parents were buried almost twenty-five years ago. Too soon if you asked me. In the time since, I've been finding and taking Scourge infested worlds. Most of them, I've been able to seed human and Deva colonies on and the oldest ones are starting to produce Nephilim to grow my army's numbers beyond the one million mark. Yurnel managed to finish the civilian race that would fill out the majority of the Deva civilization. Deva, that's what Carrie and Kyouka took to calling the collective that was the Nephilim and the newly made Aasimar. That name sounds familiar but I can never place it. Kiv-mel and others I met when I joined the fight against the Scourge are gone. Old age in most of their cases, I'm happy to say.

Those planets I didn't claim for the budding human and Deva empires I offered to the Wardens, and those races allied with my Nephilim Army were glad for the chance it gave them. The chance to build a true home, protected from the Scourge. Several races that were on the fence when my army was still new have since taken to offering us resources and treating us as protectors and in some cases, overlords. They did so after several of the planets we'd taken back and given to them had a Scourge infestation brought to them by whoever was using Warden ships to send them to places that had been cleared of them. My Nephilim had stepped up for those planets and races the same way we had for Earth back then. We still had no clues who was doing it. Iollan, Gurtmic, Muthnar, Hullmran, Tar-en-fil, Krrcktn, Cthani, and so many more races had lost entire starships from whoever was attempting to sabotage the efforts of the Nephilim. Whoever they were, they hid themselves well and never came directly for my fleets.

While Carrie continued to make her displeasure at her sister's mistake known, I watched for the shuttle and any Scourge that might have tried to sneak up on us. Nothing went wrong while I watched the shuttle land and we boarded, Carrie had long since moved from using the armor's speakers to speaking directly to me through the comm channel; her wild gesticulations alerted everyone that she was talking even if they couldn't hear her.

Back aboard the Phoenix, I led the way to Yurnel's office space and lab while Carrie finally calmed down from her shouting. She and I had removed our helmets and, not for the first time, I noticed how much she, and likely I, had changed. One of her eyes was a different color and would change depending on her mood for the day; it was a fully-robotic artificial prosthetic that she'd gotten after a Cerberous' stinger had punctured her helmet in the right place and hit her eye, destroying it. It wasn't able to be regrown with the nutrient bath treatment, so she'd opted for a prosthetic rather than an organic implant. She had grown into quite the beautiful woman in my opinion, but I'd never let her know I thought that; she'd made teasing me about any and every little thing she could into a hobby of hers; to keep me humble she insisted. I think she just liked that I wouldn't snap at her for no reason.

"Dr. Yurnel, how've you been today?" Carrie greeted the Gurtmic woman happily.

"I've been well, Carrie," Yurnel said. "It is wonderful to see you today."

"Yurnel," I greeted her simply.

"Commander," she saluted, before continuing with the business we'd been called here for. "I have finished confirming a theory I've held for the last several decades. The Scourge were created by the genetic engineering of another race. I don't know what race that is yet, but I've found out something just as troubling in my studies."

"What is it?" I asked. She'd come to me years ago with that theory and to officially ask permission to look into it and I'd given it to her.

"Humans are also a genetically engineered race," she told us. "They share a common ancestral link with the Scourge. Genetically."