"This is the Emperor of Earth, speaking from the bridge of the Frontenachii Third Fleet capital ship Slayer’s Sword." My voice distorted by the mask modulator, corrupted by failing systems, echoing through the dead deck sounded nothing like Ash the unemployed electrical engineer. It sounded like something ancient and terrible. Something... eldritch and half-alive. "Admiral Evelithria Frontenachii. Third Fleet Command. Legates. Empress Aconia herself, if you're listening. Citizens and children of Omnithornia. I want you to understand exactly what's happening right now."

  Through the viewport, the moon's surface resolved into stunning clarity. I could see the shadows in the craters, the way sunlight caught the edges of mountain ranges that had stood unchanged for billions of years.

  Beautiful. Terrifying. Inevitable.

  "The Frontenachii Dominion came to my Earth thinking you found another resource to harvest. Another planet of dumb primitives who would submit to your systematic torture… Feeding your endless appetite for suffering. You looked at eight billion humans down below and saw inventory. Saw future servants. Saw meat."

  My hands tightened on the wheel, keeping the ship on its inevitable collision course.

  "You were wrong."

  Static burst across the transmission. I powered through it.

  "Princess Aquillianne Quantivia Frontenachii came to my Earth… millennia ago via a time gate created by her Aunt Zexxia,” I lied. “She wanted to lead and inspire humanity, not terrorize, nor harvest us. To create something better than the nightmare civilization the Frontenachii Aegis built. She found friendship. She found love. She found people who saw her as a person rather than a weapon for the Frontenachii bloodline."

  The moon was close. So close.

  "When Shady refused to compromise, refused to surrender this Earth to be devoured, Admiral Evelithria ordered her execution. Her own niece. No evidence. No trial. No mercy. Just murder, resurrection, and plans of psychic torture. That was your mistake. That was the moment you proved everything Lissander Fox said about you was true. That underneath all your talk of uplifting lesser species and protecting the Omniverse, you're simply predators who systematized cruelty into an industrial process."

  My connection to the gun unit frame was failing catastrophically now. I could barely feel my fingers. Could barely see through the static consuming my sensors. I kept talking, spitting out the words.

  "I wield the Slayer's Sword now. I could turn its weapons towards the other Frontenachii ships, unmake all of the Omnids in the Third Fleet," I bluffed with a bubbling voice. "I could carve up the moon into lovely chunks and decimate your entire fleet, cast all of you into the unforgiving depths of space, use this vessel's tractor beam to send all of your immortality bracelets into the sun. But I won't... Because I am NOT like you. I am not a mass murderer, not a torturer, not a monster. Instead, I'm going to break your sword, shatter it over my knee to show you my power."

  The moon filled the viewscreen, ready to embrace me.

  "This is for every blood-bound gun unit, every warship, every pradavarian and every dragon commander enslaved to the ambitions of Frontenachii High Command. This is for my Princess," I snarled. "For every prad male who was ordered to die on your Entertainment Decks while you fed on his terror," I continued, my voice fracturing across the failing transmission. "For every human... man, woman and child you compartmentalized into wall art. For every soul you ground down into magical components. For every species you 'uplifted' into slavery while calling it salvation!"

  Mare Tranquillitatis stretched before me like a dark sea frozen in stone.

  "You built an empire on suffering and called it civilization! You systematized torture and called it necessary! You enslaved entire species and called it protection. But suffering isn't strength. Fear isn't power. Control isn't love."

  My gun unit fingers adjusted the wheel one final time.

  Perfect trajectory. Right into the Sea of Tranquility. How poetic.

  "Fear is incredibly effective at short-term control. You've built an Empire on that principle. But love?" I laughed, and it came out distorted, wrong, twisted. "You have no idea what love is. Don't worry. I'm going to bend you over my knee and… teach ALL OF YOU to love humanity!"

  The Sea of Tranquility filled the screen.

  Named by ancient astronomers who thought the dark patches on the moon were bodies of water. How wrong they'd been. How ironic the name felt now, as I brought down a comet of a Frontenachii warship upon it.

  Down there, humanity landed our little Apollo 11 in 1969. It would be a shame if it got knocked over or turned to slag, but then again Sea of Tranquility was over 500 miles wide and I was aimed at the other side of it, not the place where the Apollo 11 lander had found its final resting place.

  The reactor cores surged one final time.

  Ten kilometers of mass moving at orbital velocities would assuredly hit the moon like the fist of an angry god.

  The gun unit frame accelerated its processors to the max, time slowing to a crawl.

  The nose of Slayer's Sword smashed into the surface of Mare Tranquillitatis.

  The forward sections, already horrifically compromised by Shady’s Astral Fountains... simply ceased to exist.

  Matter converted to plasma in microseconds, temperatures spiking to millions of degrees. The shockwave propagated backward through the ship's crystalline structure faster than sound, and my accelerated perception caught every detail in total glory.

  Whatever Sage had done by amplifying the signal seemed to burn me into this final moment, skewered physical reality somehow, allowing me to witness the absolute devastation I had unleashed in slow motion.

  The forward hull crumpled like aluminum foil. Celesteel segments and reinforced panels, designed to withstand fleet combat and dimensional transit, shattered into glittering fragments that tumbled away into the lunar sky.

  Each piece caught the sun's light, refracting it into lovely rainbow patterns, the final throes of a ten-kilometer warship.

  Through the still somewhat intact magitek cameras and viewscreen holos and TVs on Sagetopia’s inn wall, I watched reality tear asunder.

  The Astral Fountains blooming throughout the ship's infrastructure met the kinetic apocalypse head-on.

  Where physics and entropy collided, space itself tore and screamed. Black tendrils erupted from ruptured corridors, writhing against the plasma and shockwave like living things trying to escape their prison. They reached for anything, nothing, everything; grasping at the fabric of reality as it was ripped away from them.

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  Deck by deck, the ship died around me.

  I saw the Entertainment Deck, the cursed torture labyrinth that had broken, ground down so many lives, collapse in on itself. The carefully maintained ward networks that had kept its horrors contained failed catastrophically, the alien monstrosities igniting and burning to ashes. The walls folded like paper, crushed between the moon's unyielding surface and the momentum of billions of tons of warship architecture.

  Every hook, every chain, every pool, every instrument of systematic suffering was obliterated in a fraction of a second.

  The spliced humans altered with Thrall crystalloid infection permanently imprisoned within the walls ignited, burning away, their souls finally free from their eternal damnation.

  Good.

  The reactor cores went next.

  Six massive dragonheart reactors, each the size of a cathedral, each containing power equivalent to a small star. When the shockwave reached them, they detonated catastrophically. Orange-yellow light brighter than the sun burst through the ship's dying hull in brilliant lances that punched through kilometers of corrupted structure.

  My gun unit frame's optical sensors overloaded, flooded with radiation across every spectrum. White light shot through with streaks of gold and crimson... the stolen hearts of dragons dying in their own flames.

  The explosion propagated outward from each reactor simultaneously. The force met in the middle sections of the ship, creating interference patterns of pure destruction. Matter simply ceased to exist where those wavefronts collided, leaving voids that collapsed in on themselves with sounds my sensors and Sage’s TV walls couldn't properly translate, frequencies existing somewhere in between, grinding, alien roars that felt like the universe screaming.

  The Captain goes down with the ship.

  I was the Slayer’s Sword captain for about five minutes total, but I certainly made it count.

  The command deck, a dragon-hoard domain reinforced by the last functioning ward networks, secured with a thousand artifacts buried in its walls, wrapped in layer upon layer of protective enchantments, held for precious seconds longer than the rest of the ship. I felt it through the dying neural interface, the way the extra-reinforced walls strained against forces that could crack planets.

  The golden veins went dark one by one, each failure registering as a spike of static feedback through my disintegrating connection.

  The viewport shattered inward. A spider web of cracks that spread across the transparent magitek material in fractal patterns. Each crack glowed with the light of the explosions outside, refracting the apocalypse into a thousand smaller versions of itself.

  It was beautiful, in the way disasters can be beautiful when you're far enough from them to appreciate the aesthetics without experiencing the terror and pain.

  Every magitek holo-screen winked away, reality catching fire as the viewcast artifacts detonated one by one.

  The blood-red and black captain's chair beneath me began to fragment. Crystalline segments cracked with sounds like ice breaking on a frozen lake. The wheel in my hands shattered from the all-shearing impact blastwave. Then my hands came apart, Kawathra-designed, reinforced hexasuit tearing, breaking, blood flying through the air as my day-old, dead body double disintegrated.

  Then the entire gun body and crystalline neural network holding onto my consciousness came apart.

  I felt every connection sever as ragged tears, synaptic pathways ripping apart under forces they were never designed to withstand. The gun unit's crystalline matrix that housed my awareness shattered into cascading fragments, each one carrying a tiny piece of my perception as it spun away into the void.

  For a single moment I existed not as a human, but something liminal, something between two places.

  A surreal line drawn in the Astral Ocean between the Earth and the Moon with the power of Sanguine’s skulk of fourteen thousand fox souls.

  Through a single camera lens piece and neural Astral broadcaster that somehow survived the destruction of my gun unit body I saw a blue sphere hanging in the starry void, visible through a gargantuan shear of the Slayer's Sword hull being ripped in half by the devastating impact.

  My Earth. The planet I was fighting for.

  Hanging there in the black, two hundred thousand miles distant, a blue-white living world wrapped in swirling clouds. I could see the Pacific Northwest... just barely, through the atmospheric haze... a green-brown smudge on the edge of the terminator line where the day met night.

  Then the wave of all consuming flames caught up with the camera lens and I saw nothing at all.

  The liminal tether snapped.

  Sage choked, heaving and panting and let go of my slightly bleeding forehead.

  I blinked.

  Every TV around us winked out.

  Above us, a flicker of light ignited on the moon at the right side of the Sea of Tranquility, like a small firecracker going off, like a new star being born in the night sky.

  “Holy shit,” Sage breathed out, staring up at the moon with me and Galateya. “Hooooly fucking sheeeeeeeet.”

  Galateya’s eyes filled with tears, claws digging into my hand. “You…” She breathed out. “You dedicated it to me too, right? The dragon… The d-dragon enslaved to the ambitions of Frontenachii High Command?”

  “Yep.” I nodded. “That was for you, Teya.”

  Galateya hugged me tightly, burying her face into my neck. Sage giggled nervously, making room for Teya.

  The two Omnid girls heard and saw everything, the message of the Emperor of Humanity booming across every television in Sagetopia. They and every human on Earth, every Frontenachii Commander, every pradavarian soldier, every gun unit and Corpse Seeker heard it.

  “You… you destroyed the Slayer’s Sword,” Galateya birthed the words after a minute of gaping at me. “Leviathan’s cunt! What the fuck. What the fucking fuck. How?! HOW?” She yelled as she shook me.

  “Creative application of Incarnator duplication,” I shrugged. “Turns out nearly-soulless Omnid corpses make great ward-disrupting bombs.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Sage hissed out, her face foxing up and then turning entirely human. “Oh my fucking God.”

  “WAT THE / FUCK” her cheeks spelled out in dark freckles.

  She stared at me very intently. “I cannot believe this. I just can’t. I saw it all, amplified the signal as much as I could… and I still can’t even. I’m going to fucking explode from the ‘can’t even’ right now!"

  “Nobody,” Galateya agreed, her entire body trembling. “Fucking nobody managed to do anything like that to the Frontenachii in the history of the Aegis Dominion. They’re going to… fuck. I’ve no idea what the fuck the Admiral is going to do.”

  “What do you think she’ll do?” I asked.

  “Yeah, T-bun,” Sage said. “What’s the… proper procedure here?”

  “Uhhh…” Galateya wiped tears from her face. “The Third Fleet is basically headless now. The Legates are going to vote on what to do next, coordinating the next step via the fleet V-cast network. The Legates aren’t going to let this insult stand. I’m… kind of very worried that they’re going to nuke a few major cities or at the very least splice every Earth leader and general as revenge.”

  The TVs framing the shack walls flickered again, a thousand fox eyes dancing between static.

  “Noppers,” Sage said.

  “What do you mean… noppers?” Galateya looked at the cheeky fox.

  “Remember, T-bun... I cast our Emperor’s lovely transmission straight to the Omnid capital, Cradlefall! Let’s see what’s going on in Omnithornia,” Sage snapped her fingers again. Several screens ignited with static, focusing and then…

  On the nearest screen and a few others a dragon girl with a red, crystalline mane appeared in a black and white suit with a cross-sword in a silver circle logo behind her. The header above read [ONN: Breaking News! Frontenachii crimes expos…]

  “This just in!” she said in a distinctive, serious and sharp tone of a news anchor. “We’ve received a broadcast from the Frontenachii Third Fleet. The speech of the Emperor of Earth who just destroyed the Frontenachii capital ship Slayer's Sword! Our Seers and Scrutimancers confirmed the dimensional transmission as one hundred percent authentic. It confirms the existence of the Frontenachii Empire invasion force and their interdimensional crimes previously exposed by Lissander Fox, a first year student at Skyfall Academy. The Omnithornian Senate is currently voting on censuring the Frontenachii Dominion Aegis…”

  However, with SSC I'm taking a different approach - no publishers, no division by book and ongoing almost-daily chapters. Only a few non-plot relevant 18+ chapters of it are on , otherwise it's staying free forever for everyone!

  leaving it a review!