Chapter 767: The next Supreme General
Chapter 767: The next Supreme General
The halo finished forming and nothing happened.
It just hung there, three rings deep, pulsing in slow rhythm above the Reaver’s skull, and the silence that followed was worse than any attack Noah had braced for. The wind itself seemed to hold still, the smoke from the burning wreckage drifting upward in unnaturally straight columns, like the air had forgotten how to move on its own.
"You’re the one who knows dragons," the General said. "What’s it doing."
"I’ve never seen anything like this," Noah said. "Not from Nyx, not from Storm. Nothing in my catalogue prepared me for whatever this is."
The Reaver’s neck bent backward.
It roared, and the sound carried something underneath the fury this time, something closer to genuine agony, and Noah watched the heartbeat become visible through its chest, a massive rhythmic bulge pushing outward against the scale with every contraction, faster than any organ that size should have been capable of moving.
[BIOLOGICAL OVERRIDE DETECTED]
[ALL ORGANS OVERCLOCKING]
[WARNING: THIS IS NOT AN OFFENSIVE TECHNIQUE]
[CLASSIFICATION: DEFENSIVE BIOLOGICAL DETERRENT]
"It’s not attacking," Noah said, reading the notification fast. "It’s warning us. Like a cobra flaring its hood or like an octopus releasing ink, you get the picture. Whatever happens next is its body’s own defense mechanism, not something it’s choosing to do with intent."
"That doesn’t sound like it makes it less dangerous," the General said.
"No," Noah said. "It doesn’t."
The Reaver’s neck tore.
The scaled flesh along its throat split open as specialized sacs ruptured beneath the surface, and a fine red-violet aerosol erupted outward across the crater floor in a spreading cloud.
[AIRBORNE BIOLOGICAL AGENT DETECTED]
[EFFECT: ACCELERATED CELLULAR ENTROPY]
[EXPOSURE RISK: SEVERE]
[RECOMMENDATION: IMMEDIATE EVACUATION]
"Don’t breathe that," Noah said, already moving, blinking back toward the wreckage where Brooks and the recruits had taken cover. "Everyone fall back further. Now."
Brooks didn’t argue. She was already pulling Rael and the others back, further down the slope, while the General stood his ground at the crater’s edge, the mist rolling toward him with nowhere else for him to retreat to.
He walked into it.
Noah watched from the safer distance Brooks had pulled the recruits to, and the white light along the General’s armor brightened the moment the mist touched him, and something about that should have meant the man was simply unaffected, except Noah didn’t actually know that. He had no idea what that light was doing, or why it appeared at all, or whether it meant the General had genuinely shrugged off something that should have aged him to dust, or whether the man was just enduring it silently the way someone endured things they didn’t want to show.
’What is that light,’ Noah thought, watching it pulse. ’I’ve never seen anything like it on a person. It’s not chi, I already checked for that. It’s not void energy, I’d recognize that signature instantly. The system flagged it as Ruler Bloodline, the same flag attached to me, but I don’t glow like that. Nothing about my own bloodline has ever produced visible light.’
’Is anyone else even seeing this. Brooks hasn’t said a word about it. None of Rael’s team have reacted to it at all. Am I the only one who can actually see it?’
He didn’t have an answer. He filed the question away the same way he’d been filing every other unanswered question since landing on this planet, and watched the General stand inside a cloud that should have been killing him.
The Reaver’s chest heaved once, twice, the bulging heartbeat building toward something, and then it slammed its own heart against the inside of its ribs with a force Noah felt through the ground before he heard it.
THUD.
The pressure wave hit a half second later.
It wasn’t sound. It arrived as pure displacement, the air itself shoving outward in a sphere that expanded from the Reaver’s position in every direction at once, and the mountainside Noah was standing on simply ceased to hold its shape, stone splitting along fracture lines that hadn’t existed a moment earlier.
Noah was thrown.
He blinked mid-flight to arrest the momentum, but the second pulse arrived before he’d fully stabilized, and the wave caught him still recovering and sent him tumbling again, the ground beneath him no longer a fixed reference point at all.
A third pulse followed before he’d finished processing the second.
’It’s hitting itself to make these,’ Noah thought, watching the Reaver’s chest convulse with each contraction. ’I can see that much. But why would something do that. What kind of creature is willing to damage its own heart to produce a weapon. Is this even a choice it’s making, or is its biology simply doing this whether it wants to or not, the way the mist release looked involuntary too.’
He didn’t have time to chase the thought further. The General moved.
His armor began to reshape.
The black plating shifted along his arms and chest, panels sliding and reforming into a wider configuration, the white light beneath it climbing to an intensity Noah hadn’t seen from him yet.
"I didn’t want to use this," the General said, his voice carrying through the chaos with the same flat steadiness it always had. "Not against something I don’t fully understand. But this fight has gone longer than I anticipated, and that dragon is more powerful than anything I have ever fought. I have a planet to defend. I don’t have the luxury of holding back any further."
"AHHHHHH!"
The scream tore out of him as he released it.
A wave of pure white light erupted outward from his body, meeting the fourth pressure pulse head-on, and where the two forces collided the air itself screamed, a high keening shriek that Noah felt in his teeth even from a hundred meters away.
’How is he generating that,’ Noah thought, watching the light pour off him in continuous streams. ’It has to be coming from somewhere. Nothing manifests force like that without a source. Is it the armor. Is it him. Is the armor even separate from him at this point, or did whatever fused it to his body decades ago erase the line between the two entirely.’
’There were rumors,’ he thought, the memory surfacing slowly, something he’d heard in passing back on the Vanguard station and dismissed as the kind of myth every legendary soldier eventually accumulated. ’That the armor was carved from a void stone. I never gave it serious thought. Void stones from what kelvin did, heal. They don’t usually become armor because the energy is too great to put into one thing and even if one did, why would that explain light like this.’
’Unless it’s not healing energy at all. Unless whatever’s inside that stone doesn’t work the way the one Kelvin used on Diana worked.’
’Is he untouchable. Is that actually what I’m watching. A man who simply cannot be hurt by anything, ever, regardless of scale?’
He didn’t know. He genuinely didn’t know, and the not knowing sat uncomfortably next to everything he’d just watched the General absorb without consequence.
The General’s wave didn’t cancel the pulse outright. It diverted it, sending the worst of the force around his position rather than through it, and his stance strained visibly for the first time since the fight began, both feet planted, sweat or something like it visible along the exposed parts of his jaw.
’He’s straining,’ Noah thought, watching that. ’That means it costs him something. Whatever that light is, however it works, it’s not free. He’s spending something right now to survive this, and if I had to guess, if I’m reading what little I actually understand about energy and conservation correctly, then maybe whatever he’s pushing out right now came from somewhere he stored it first.’
’A reservoir. Built from every hit he’s ever taken across however many years of fighting. That would explain why he never flinches. Why nothing seems to actually damage him. It’s not that the attacks don’t land. It’s that landing on him just adds to whatever he’s already carrying.’
’I don’t know if that’s true. I have no way to confirm it right now. But it’s the only explanation that fits everything I’ve watched him do since he stepped off that wreckage.’
He didn’t get to think further. The fifth pulse cracked the ground beneath both of them, sending debris flying in every direction, and Noah reached into his void storage instead of continuing to chase a theory he had no way to test in the middle of a battlefield.
[Item Retrieved: Personal Effect — Unidentified Token]
The coin materialized in his palm.
’If she existed,’ he thought, looking at the Reaver convulsing with each self-inflicted heartbeat, the pendant in the carving flashing through his memory. ’If she was bonded to this thing, if it’s been alone long enough to forget what calm even feels like, then maybe this means something to it. Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t have anything else.’
He took a breath and held it.
He blinked.
The first jump put him fifty meters closer, through air still thick with the decay mist, and he felt his HP drop in a single visible chunk the moment the cloud touched his exposed skin.
[HP: 142,800/198,400]
He equipped the E.N.D armor mid-flight, the black scale plating assembling around him in fragments, the Harbinger Skin passive converting what it could of the incoming corruption into stored void energy, and blinked again, closer still.
[HP: 119,300/198,400]
A pulse caught him directly on the third jump and the armor screamed under the force, plates buckling at the joints.
[HP: 88,600/198,400]
He kept going.
The Reaver’s heart slammed again, the sixth pulse building, and Noah blinked through the gap between waves, close enough now that the heat off its convulsing body washed over him even through the armor.
[HP: 51,200/198,400]
He raised the coin.
He held it up in his open palm, the moon crossing the sun catching what light made it through the smoke and the violence, and he didn’t say anything, didn’t have breath left to spare for words, just held it there at the edge of the creature’s vision and hoped.
The Reaver’s eyes found him.
The slits, each one the size of a doorframe, fixed on the small piece of metal in his hand, and for the first time since the chase began on the mountain’s face, something in that gaze shifted.
---
On Earth, in the Eclipse facility’s lower training bay, Shade stopped mid-exercise.
He had been running drills with Diana for the better part of an hour, and then, without warning, he simply stopped, his head snapping toward nothing visible, his amber eyes going distant in a way Diana had never seen from him.
"Shade," she said. "What’s wrong."
He didn’t answer. His tail swept the floor once, agitated, and he paced a tight circle, ears flat, the controlled calm he usually carried gone entirely.
"Kelvin," Diana said into her comm. "Something’s wrong with Shade."
---
On the Ark, in a monitoring center three levels below the command deck, an analyst stared at a planetary sensor array that had just spiked past every calibrated threshold simultaneously.
"That’s not possible," she said.
"What’s not possible," her supervisor said, crossing to her station.
"Atmospheric pressure readings across the entire monitored hemisphere just shifted in the same instant," she said. "Not localized. Global. If this data is accurate, whatever’s generating it is producing pressure waves on a scale that could trigger secondary weather effects we have no historical model for. Flooding along every coastal region within the affected radius. Storm systems forming faster than any natural process should allow."
"Pull everything you have," her supervisor said. "Get it to whoever’s covering the Supreme General’s office. Whatever’s happening out there isn’t staying contained to wherever it started."
--
The General felt the sixth pulse pushing him back a full meter despite everything he braced against it with, and somewhere in the strain of holding his ground, a fragment of his armor’s plating shifted at the wrist, exposing a thin strip of skin to the open air.
He hadn’t seen his own skin in years.
The thought arrived unbidden, almost absurd given everything happening around him, but there it was, a flicker of memory beneath the immediate crisis, the last time he’d looked at his own hand without black scale covering it, decades ago now, before all of this had become simply who he was rather than something he wore.
’How monstrous is this thing,’ he thought, watching another pulse build in the Reaver’s convulsing chest. ’I have fought things across forty years that should have ended civilizations. I have never seen anything generate force on this scale, and it’s doing it by damaging itself with every single beat.’
’And the boy is standing right in front of it.’
He looked past the haze toward Noah, small against the Reaver’s bulk, holding something up toward its face with both hands shaking from blood loss and exposure.
’I expect no one to survive this except me,’ the General thought, bracing for the next wave. ’This mission was a mistake from the moment it became this large. Innocent lives have already been lost today, more than I can account for properly until this is finished.’
’But that boy does not die here. Not today.’
’If I fall tomorrow, in some other engagement, on some other front, he is the only one left who could carry what comes after me. Whether he wants the position or not, whether anyone has told him the weight of it yet, he is next. I have known that since the moment I felt what came off him in that hangar bay when he arrived at the ark barefooted. I will not let this planet be the place that takes him before he ever gets the chance to refuse it properly.’
He held his ground against the seventh pulse and didn’t retreat another step.
The Reaver lowered its head.
It happened slowly, the massive skull tilting downward until its eyes, each slit the size of a doorframe, hung level with Noah’s small frame, and it opened its jaws and roared directly at him, the sound hitting at a range close enough that Noah’s entire body flinched, his knees nearly buckling from the force of it alone.
Its snout stopped five meters from his face.
Noah stood there, breathing hard, and took in the full scale of it from a distance this close for the first time. The head alone could have swallowed the training bay back at Eclipse headquarters whole. He thought, absurdly, of Nyx, of how many Nyx it would take stacked together to even approximate this one creature’s mass, and the number his mind reached for wasn’t reasonable. Hundreds. Possibly more.
The Reaver leaned closer.
[TAMING CONDITIONS MET]
[THE REAVER WISHES TO INITIATE A BOND]
Noah stared at the notification.
"What," he said out loud. "Wait. Wait, is it asking to tame me? Or am I taming it?"
The Reaver stayed exactly where it was, head lowered, a low growl rumbling through its chest that didn’t carry any of the fury from before.
[CLARIFICATION]
[ALPHA RANK CREATURES MAY ONLY BE TAMED OR ELIMINATED]
[A RULER BLOODLINE CARRIER OF SUFFICIENT STRENGTH MAY ATTEMPT TO BOND AN ALPHA]
[ESTIMATED SUCCESS PROBABILITY AT CURRENT POWER LEVEL: EXTREMELY LOW]
[WARNING: BOND ATTEMPT AT THIS THRESHOLD WILL RESULT IN DEATH]
Noah looked at the system text for a long moment, then up at the massive eyes watching him with something that wasn’t quite the same fury from earlier, something closer to expectation.
He thought about everything the day had cost. The wreckage scattered across kilometers of mountainside. The soldiers he’d pulled from dying ships who hadn’t all made it anyway. The General standing somewhere behind him, drained from absorbing more punishment in one fight than most people took across a lifetime.
He thought about the coin in his hand, still raised, still catching what little light made it through the haze.
"No," he said quietly. "Not like this. Not today."
The Reaver held its position a moment longer, the growl in its chest softening into something almost like a sigh, and then it began to rise.
The halo above its skull dimmed, the layered violet rings dissolving into the smoke, and the convulsions wracking its chest slowed, the overclocked heartbeat finally settling back toward something that might have passed for normal on a creature this size.
It blinked.
Gone, the same impossible gap-closing that had carried it across the mountain during the chase, and the space where it had been standing held nothing but disturbed snow and the lingering haze of decay mist already beginning to disperse on the wind.
The battlefield went silent.
Rael reached them first, sprinting across the ruined ground with the rest of his team close behind, his face pale and his hands shaking slightly as he came to a stop in front of the General.
"We can track it, Supreme General, sir," he said. "We have enough data on its movement patterns from the fight. If we move now, before it gets distance, we could pin it down for you to finish."
"No," Noah said.
Rael turned toward him.
"If anyone disturbs that creature," Noah said, "they’re going to have to go through me first."
He looked at the General.
"This planet is under Eclipse jurisdiction as of right now," Noah said. "Nobody hunts it. Nobody comes back here looking for a finish. If the EDF has a problem with that arrangement, you know how to reach me."
The General said nothing.
Noah blinked away, the void energy folding him out of sight before anyone could respond, and the silence that followed his absence stretched long enough that Rael finally turned back toward the General with his jaw tight.
"How dare he," Rael said. "Walking away from a direct chain of command like that, declaring jurisdiction over a planet none of us have ever set foot on before today, talking to you like—"
He stopped.
The General was smirking.