The hallway was dim and long, its steel walls scorched with black streaks, smeared blood, and ruptured panels. Faint sparks hissed from overhead conduits, crackling like dying embers. Lights flickered in pulses—failing, fading. A low emergency siren wailed somewhere far off, muted by the distance and depth. Beneath it all—the low throb of gunfire and screams.
Lucien walked alone.
His boots pressed soundlessly against the floor, not from silence, but because the battle had numbed it all senses.
Every step brought him closer to the main floor.
Beyond the reinforced bulkhead ahead, gunfire grew sharper, louder. Chaos. Distant shouting. Flashes of stolen Chronos weaponry discharging with wild, untrained hands.
He exhaled slowly.
The final set of doors parted as he reached them. They opened without restraint.
The main floor was a battlefield.
A vast chamber of war. Collapsed barricades, overturned crates, scattered weapons trampled with grime and blood. Dozens of coalition soldiers already within—some taking cover, some shouting orders, some confused, some too panicked to think. But all still charged forward, unaware of what had just walked in.
Lucien stood in the center.
No words. No speech. No warning.
Thread-light shimmered across his limbs like rising steam. A flare of green energy erupted at his chest—threads peeling out of his spine, shoulders, palms. His armor manifested in segments, each piece folding into place with grace and force. The glow intensified. His eyes lit like twin suns behind his helm.
Then he moved. A double-bladed thread-light sword in his hands.
The first wave of soldiers didn't scream. They didn't have time.
A green arc cut through them. A wave of force turned their weapons into molten slag, their bodies into smears against the wall. Another stepped forward, a rifle raised—in the blink of an eye, he vaporized in a silent bloom of green light.
Lucien didn't stop. He moved like a phantom.
A blur of fury. A walking anomaly. The air twisted behind every step he took. Gravity bent. Time buckled. He extended his palm—a green pulse erupted, flinging a group of soldiers into the ceiling so violently they burst like a balloon.
Soldiers screamed now.
They turned and ran.
Their stolen Chronos weaponry began to flicker—then spark. Then—they exploded.
Spheres of green thread-light that erased everything in a heartbeat. Not even shadows remained after the explosions.
Lucien reached the next group. They fired. Bullets never touched him. They froze mid-air and disintegrated. Threads leapt from his back like lashes, and speared them where they stood.
He lifted his hand—clenched it. Half the room collapsed inward.
The floor cracked. The ceiling above caved slightly. The air shimmered as if reality itself bent away from him.
Lucien walked through the battlefield as if he were the only one alive.
More soldiers fled. Some tried to hide. Others begged.
None escaped.
By the end of it—the main floor was a graveyard. Smoldering corpses. Glowing threads. Ash in the air. Blood pooling into trenches.
Lucien stood in the center of it all, untouched.
Like a god.
***
Outside—Coalition encampment. Midnight.
Atop a sniper's nest mounted into a rushed iron skeleton, a soldier adjusted the dial on her scope—her breath fogged the glass. Something glimmered beyond the horizon—faint at first, like a star refusing to fade with the morning.
"What the hell is this?" she murmured—through her comms.
Other scouts looked up. A bloom of violet light—at once distant and yet consuming—began to warp the skyline. It shimmered unnaturally, like heat distorting the horizon, spreading from a single burning point into an arch of refracting color. Ground blackened. Trees warped.
Then it moved.
Figures stepped through it, dozens at first, then hundreds. Their forms slender and faceless—white and gold glints over segmented limbs. At their hands, translucent gears—clock-like—glowed with pulsing violet light floated, twisting through time—mechanical, and rhythmic.
"Aliens! They're—" The sniper's voice cut to static.
Panic ignited across the encampment.
Alarms screamed. Officers yelled over each other. Soldiers rushed to man their posts, but the fear came first, primal and devouring. They'd fought humans, but this was different.
The alien army watched.
Lined shoulder to shoulder, their stillness more terrifying than any war cry. The light behind them—still swirling like a cosmic wound—didn't dim. It grew. Pulsed. Reality around it shimmered like it could collapse at any moment.
The true enemy had arrived.
***
The world broke as the aliens charged.
In a heartbeat, the coalition's forces vanished—violet implosions that erased everything they came in contact with.
The aliens didn't fire weapons. Yet they obliterated everything they came in contact with.
Tanks split open, planes erased mid-air. Screaming soldiers turned to violet ash without ever being touched. Tents flared with violet light, eventually replaced by scorched earth.
From above, the encampment looked like the before, during, and aftermath of war—all at once.
Within seconds everything was turned to dust and ash.
Back at the main floor, Lucien stood motionless, breath visible in the cold.
Suddenly—the walls around him began to tremble.
Then—they broke in.
The ceiling split open first—a gash of violet light—followed by a shockwave that shattered glass and twisted steel. A dozen aliens dropped into the chamber in one synchronized blink—each landing without a sound.
Lucien's eyes narrowed.
The first alien moved.
Lucien blinked across the chamber—reappearing mid-air, his sword already raised. Then he swung—an arc that cut through the alien in half.
The rest rushed him.
Lucien struck first.
His sword cut through two of them in a single arc. The air behind the swing distorted, rippling with the aftershock of impact. Their bodies disintegrated on contact—unraveling like string cut loose.
Another alien blinked behind him.
Lucien turned mid-swing, slamming his sword down like a hammer. The floor shattered beneath the blow, sending shockwaves through the ground.
But they kept coming.
Ten. Then twenty. Then more.
Each alien had a gear-clock in one hand and a morphed blade-hand in the other.
They moved with unified speed.
Lucien spun his blade like a vortex, carving space around him, knocking back multiple attackers in a dazzling light-show of exploding green and violet.
But they still hit him—hard.
One slammed into his side—sending him flying through a support column. Another blinked above him, slashing downward—Lucien barely raised his blade in time to parry.
He was outnumbered—overwhelmed.
Not defeated—but pressed.
Eventually. He took a step back.
Then another.
Then he blinked across the hall—reappearing near a corridor.
Another wave descended. He fought, cut them down—his armor now torn.
He blinked again.
This time farther. Toward the corridor leading to the panic room.
The aliens followed, relentlessly.
Lucien was now just outside the fortified room—the vault that held everything he held dear. He was bleeding from the cracks in his armor. Dust fell in slow flakes from the tremors above.
He turned.
Dozens of aliens appeared at the far end of the corridor–silent, inevitable.
Lucien raised his blade. Alone. Still.
He was the only thing between them—and everything left that mattered to him.