The moment I spoke, light flared in its eye.
“You—”
I shot it through the head and dropped the remains.
Then I ran.
I was exposed now. Phantom Forge would throw everything it had at us. I could only hope my message had bought even a few seconds of hesitation—confusion, anger, anything that delayed clean decision-making.
The response came faster than I wanted.
After only two bulkheads, a dense wall of gunfire met me in a narrow corridor. I threw up my energy shield and tossed a grenade into the stream of muzzle flashes.
Then I charged.
Smoke and shrapnel filled the passage. In the blast haze, I picked targets and terminated them one after another.
When the corridor cleared, I didn’t feel relief. I felt the clock.
Phantom Forge could send ten units or ten thousand. I could handle numbers.
Dorian-2 couldn’t. He had no real combat experience. Even one enemy in the wrong place could end him.
The next stretch was a constant braid of bullets and explosions. Enemies appeared in waves, but each fallen body delivered more weapons to my feet. I fired until a gun clicked empty, threw it aside, and grabbed the next rifle from the floor without slowing down.
My style was aggressive and loud. It bought time. It also painted my armor with fresh impacts.
But Lord Julian’s composite plating held. I took damage, but not the kind that stopped a body.
Then the message I’d been dreading arrived.
“Lord Wyatt…” Dorian-2’s voice stuttered through static. “I don’t think I can— I’m hit.”
His shared view was blurred and intermittent. He was still running. Every so often he glanced back, and I caught glimpses of pursuers and the strobing pulse of gunfire.
“Run,” I snapped. “Don’t look back. I’m a hundred meters away. Just hold one minute—no. Thirty seconds.”
“I’ll… try…”
I drove forward, weapons never pausing. I blew open a bulkhead and finally saw him in a tight corridor ahead—staggering, limping, still moving toward me.
Behind him, the pursuers fired without restraint. Sparks burst across Dorian-2’s back as rounds struck plating again and again.
“Down!” I shouted.
Dorian-2 hesitated for a fraction of a second, then dropped flat.
I raised two heavy electromagnetic rifles and opened fire. The pursuers had nowhere to hide. One after another they fell, terminated in a storm of metal.
When the last body hit the deck, I rushed forward and hauled Dorian-2 upright.
He was wrecked.
His back plating was charred and peeled. The left leg was twisted out of shape. The right leg hung on by a single steel spar. A chunk of his head casing was missing, and one optic dangled from its socket by a data line.
“Dorian,” I said, keeping my hands steady. “Can you move?”
He didn’t answer. He popped open his waist compartment, pulled out the Prism-Etched Scepter head, and inspected it. Only after he confirmed it was intact did he exhale, the relief almost audible.
“It’s fine,” he said hoarsely. “The treasure isn’t damaged.”
“You look like scrap,” I said. “We’re leaving. Now. Can you walk?”
“Yes.”
I tried to half-carry him, but our speed was unacceptable. And the moment I realized that, fresh footsteps echoed down the corridor—fast and closing.
I lifted Dorian-2 onto my back and started running.
As the pursuit drew closer, I switched my grenades to magnetic adhesion and adjusted their fuses on the fly. I threw them behind us as I ran, slapping them onto ceilings, walls, and deck plates.
When we rounded the first corner, the first grenade detonated.
A chain of explosions followed. The corridor behind us collapsed with a groan of tearing metal.
By the time the sound died, we were hundreds of meters away.
After that, we didn’t meet another organized wave—only scattered units trying to block our path. The moment one appeared, it fell to my fire.
I ran across wreckage and back into the hangar, still carrying Dorian-2, and climbed into the Dragon Hunter I’d prepared.
I set him into the pilot seat. He did a quick patch on his own systems. The sparks stopped, but his posture still sagged like a machine running on sheer stubbornness.
“I can’t feel my legs,” he said, bitter. Then, quieter: “Lord Wyatt… can we really succeed?”
“We’ve already succeeded halfway,” I told him. “Now take control of this craft. I’ll handle the rest.”
“Understood.”
He powered up the control panel.
The display flickered, then snapped into a single line of text.
YOU WILL DIE.
Then every screen went dark at once.
“What happened?” I demanded.
“Phantom Forge shut the system down,” Dorian-2 said.
As if to prove his point, the hangar lights surged from dim to blinding. Fighters around us powered up in sync. Turrets rotated and locked onto our position.
And then another sound rose—heavy, slow, and growing closer.
The deck trembled under each step. Even the Dragon Hunter’s frame vibrated in response.
Something big was coming.
“Move,” I said. “Before we get turned into a sieve.”
“Working,” Dorian-2 said.
He pulled out the Prism-Etched Scepter head, cracked open his skull casing, and jammed one end into his data interface while connecting the other directly to his brain core.
Then he restarted the panel.
This time it stayed on.
Indicator lights flashed like a storm. The display filled with scrolling noise as Dorian-2 fought for control against Phantom Forge’s lockdown.
“How long?” I asked.
No response. He was gone into the machine-war.
I rose to open the hatch—planning to buy time outside—but the hatch was locked.
That was when the fighters opened fire.
Rounds hammered the Dragon Hunter’s hull in a chaotic orchestra of impacts. The craft shook hard enough to rattle my joints.
I didn’t like the numbers. The Dragon Hunter had thick plating, but sustained fire like this would chew through eventually. Once the hull was breached, it would be fast and ugly.
I needed a new option.
There was a manual hatch in the rear crew compartment—
A transparent light-screen flashed across the canopy view.
The vibration dropped. The impacts dulled.
“Shield system access acquired,” Dorian-2 said, breathless.
“Good,” I said. “Perfect timing.”
“Weapon systems are offline,” he continued. “Manual control is available.”
“Beautiful.”
I jumped into the weapons seat and dropped a half-helmet holographic targeting rig over my optics. My vision flipped to the external feed.
Every fighter with a firing angle was pouring rounds into us.
I gripped the controls and targeted the nearest one. The Dragon Hunter’s two rotary cannons spat a dense curtain of fire.
At this range, it became a brutal, stupid duel—fighters trading fire point-blank inside a hangar. Tracer tails of different colors braided through the air. Ricochets screamed across the deck. Hangar walls shredded under stray rounds.
Most of the fighters raised shields. Against many of them, my cannons weren’t enough. I managed to down two light Ghost Bees before the rest adjusted and held.
Then the battle escalated.
A missile struck our hull.
The Dragon Hunter lurched sideways, sliding across the deck until it slammed into a neighboring fighter and stopped.
My processors spiked. Missiles—inside a starship hangar. Did Phantom Forge not care if it blew a hole through its own base?
Apparently not.
It wanted us ended. Collateral was acceptable.
“How much longer?!” I shouted at Dorian-2.
“It’s done!” he yelled back. “I said it once already—we’ve full control of the Dragon Hunter!”
I ripped the targeting rig off. Only then did I notice the control panel—systems standing by, shield loss values updating in rapid increments, alarms finally breaking through the bombardment.
“Good,” I said. My voice almost sounded like hope. “Then we’re leaving.”
And that was when the hangar shifted again.
From the warehouse direction came fresh commotion. A gigantic silhouette stepped into view—so tall it nearly brushed the ten-meter ceiling. It swept fighters aside with two massive arms, clearing space for its bulk to force through.
I knew those arms.
FMG-4500X.
A heavy mining engineering unit.