Hydraulic fluid hissed through the breach, spraying Tarkhan's chitinous back like hot grease. The patchwork Dread-Mecha—its left shoulder plate stripped down to pitted tungsten, its chest gouged from control pod to groin—stomped through the pulverized bulkhead.
"Get away from him, you filthy skin-thief!" Valkha's voice tore through the mecha’s external speakers, metallic and raw.
Tarkhan did not flinch. His neck wrenched around at an unnatural one-hundred-and-eighty-degree angle, lips peeling back to expose three concentric rings of obsidian needles. "Little heiress. Still pretending your family's toys run on pure human will?"
He threw his spear-arm backward. Ten meters of braided, oily muscle snapped out like a whip, catching the Dread-Mecha across its viewing dome. Reinforced plasteel groaned, micro-fractures spidering along the hull. Valkha answered with a concussive pulse of pure psionic violet. The blast ripped straight from the mecha's single functioning projector, howling across the room to scorch the air to ozone.
Tarkhan simply spread his ribcage.
A maw of translucent flesh parted inside his sternum, slurping the telepathic shockwave out of the air like marrow from a split bone. The alien tissue bloomed a putrid lilac, digesting her mental fire without a tremor. Behind him, thick tendrils of bio-cable plunged into the main shield terminal, fusing with the copper buses. The red countdown screen blinked in mocking sync with his swollen, gelatinous belly: *02:41 UNTIL PERIMETER DISPERSED.*
"Your minds are our food, girl," Tarkhan purred, his human vocal cords tearing apart as six hollow tubes poked through his neck. "You cannot burn what was born in the dark."
He expanded. Flesh sloughed off his shoulders in smoking ribbons, replaced by tiered slabs of black basalt carapace. Tendons thick as hawsers dragged him upward, lifting him four meters into the vaulted ceiling. A true Nethervari Herald, anchored to the academy's nervous system, rooting itself to starve the sector of its shields.
Valkha brought the mecha's pneumatic right fist down in a piston strike. Tarkhan caught the ten-ton fist with one mutated forearm, counter-torqued, and snapped the internal actuators with a sickening crunch. The machine shrieked, limbs lagging under the dead weight of blown hydraulics.
"He's feeding on my thoughts!" Valkha yelled over the external comms, her breath rattling like dry pebbles. "Every psionic circuit is drowning! The chassis is too slow—I can't hit his joints!"
Jargal dragged himself up from the debris, wiping black gore from his chin. His lungs burned where the nanites had seared his flesh, but his meridians thrummed with pure, unyielding venom. His gaze fixed on the Herald's thorax. There. Beneath the overlapping tiers of stone-hard chitin lay the central node—the cluster where biological nerve met cold terminal logic. Mind-weavers aimed for the aura. An assassin struck the marrow.
"Valkha!" Jargal roared, his temper tearing through the agony in his ribs. "Release the hatch!"
"Are you out of your mind? The hull atmosphere—"
"Drop it! Let me touch the pilot harness!"
A microsecond of hesitation ended with the armor-glass hissing open. Decompression tore loose papers into the corridor. Jargal coiled the Night-Viper Qi in his calves, the floor tiles beneath his boots splintering as he launched himself five meters through the freezing air.
He slammed onto the lip of the exposed compartment, his boots lodging in the sheared armature. Valkha sat strapped into the cradle, her flight suit soaked through with sweat, blood leaking from her nostrils as she fought the Herald's psionic backwash. She looked up, pupils dilated to black coins, terror warring with raw grit.
"Jargal, you're a Dead-Mind, you can't link to the drive—"
"Quiet," he snarled, slamming his bare, calloused palm onto her exposed collarbone.
He didn't need psychic resonance. He needed a bridge.
He forced his internal qi directly through her skin, flooding her battered meridian channels with scalding, concentrated life-force. Valkha gasped, her back arching off the harness as ancient, refined martial intent crashed into her undisciplined psychic pathways like an iron ram. Her aura ceased its wild, leaking wobble. It snapped taut, turning from erratic violet into a piercing, obsidian-black blaze.
"Don't think," Jargal ordered into the roar of the chamber, his hand digging into her flesh to steady the flow. "Follow my breath. Three counts in. One count through the heels. You are the hammer. I am the strike."
Valkha grasped the primary manual joysticks, her jaw set like flint. "Take it."
Through the direct circulation of his qi into her bio-plugs, Jargal seized command of the chassis's lumbering mass. The sluggish metal didn't need telepathic suggestion; it needed martial posture. He shifted his weight on the frame rim, forcing his qi to counter-balance the mecha’s blown gyroscopes. The fifteen-ton war-rig shifted from an uncoordinated brute into an assassin poised on the balls of its feet.
Tarkhan lashed out with four barbed appendages, aiming to pierce the exposed cabin and rip them both to shreds. "Die together, then!"
"Coiling Viper Leaves the Nest," Jargal growled.
With Valkha executing the micro-adjustments under his guiding will, the broken Dread-Mecha didn't attempt to parry. It dropped three inches, ducking beneath the sweeping barbs, and stepped inside Tarkhan's guard. The floorplates buckled beneath the concentrated torque.
"First point!" Jargal screamed.
The mecha’s left palm drove straight up, heel-first, striking the Herald’s lower abdominal joint with the explosive snap of an ancient palm-strike. The basalt carapace cracked like thin ice. Tarkhan let out a gargling screech as the kinetic vibration bypassed his energy absorption, pulverizing the softer organs behind the armor.
"Second point! Cross the seam!"
Valkha yelled in savage synchronization, hauling the right elbow around. Even with blown actuators, the momentum of the entire chassis swung behind the blow, channeled through the hip pivot Jargal forced through her legs. The metal elbow obliterated the Herald's knee hinge. Dark, gelatinous ichor erupted across the ceiling as the monster collapsed onto one side.
"Now! Heart-piercing needle!" Jargal thrust his free hand forward, his qi surging through Valkha’s temples in a blazing flood.
The mecha’s broken claw drew back, index fingers rigid, aligned along a single axis of kinetic force. With a thundering boom, the armored limb drove through the shattered breastplate, piercing the Herald’s central nerve-core and punching straight through to the wall behind him.
Tarkhan’s body convulsed. The black needles in his mouth broke against his own teeth. The alien cables connecting him to the defense console shredded, spraying blue sparks across the ruined deck.
"You... fools..." Tarkhan wheezed, his dying eyes rolling toward Jargal. His human face briefly surfaced through the melting chitin, twisted into a venomous, triumphant sneer. "You think... you won?"
A final surge flashed from Tarkhan's severed brain-stem, dumping a suicidal purge sequence directly into the facility's lower power conduits.
Sirens howled. The main display flashed an eye-searing, apocalyptic amber:
*CRITICAL FAILURE: REACTOR OVERLOAD IMMINENT.*
*TIME TO CORE DETONATION: 90 SECONDS.*
*ORBITAL DEFENSE GRID: OFFLINE. SWARM PROXIMITY: 80 SECONDS.*
On the panoramic tactical screen, the outer sensor sweep showed a wall of millions of Nethervari bio-hulks descending upon the defenseless citadel.
Valkha choked out a breath, her fingers trembling over the sparking console. "The auxiliary power switch is broken. We can route emergency power to the magnetic purge valves to vent the core and stop the station from blowing up... or we can route it to the perimeter array to raise the shields against the swarm. Jargal, there isn't enough juice for both."