Chapter 591: War Against the Demonic Society (iv)

Xavier let the ashes of the second Elder fall from his silver-furred claws. The cracked earth beneath his boots vibrated. A cluster of dark shadows breached the cloud cover overhead as a new fleet of Vanguard interceptors blotted out the remaining starlight.

The newly arrived ships did not bother landing. The vessels immediately opened fire from the sky, raining concentrated plasma torpedoes onto the obsidian plains. The ground erupted in a chain of blinding explosions.

Xavier blurred out of the blast radius using his enhanced Lykaios speed to reappear beside Rin and Kylus.

“Find a working transport and get off this battlefield,” Xavier ordered while tracking the gunships circling above. “Regroup with Reva, Lyra, and Xalvoria.”

Rin deflected a stray chunk of falling debris with his sword. “What about you?”

“Something is wrong with their deployment strategy,” Xavier explained, his icy blue eyes scanning the endless stream of reinforcements pouring from the clouds. “Their numbers feel unlimited. No matter what I do, they just keep coming. If I stay here trading blows with them forever, my power reserves will eventually run dry. You two need to assist the others and locate Bull’s mothership so we can actually escape this dead rock.”

Kylus gave a grim nod and holstered his thermal cutter. He grabbed Rin by the shoulder and pointed toward a cluster of grounded enemy drop pods near the ruined bunker. The two warriors broke into a sprint across the cratered landscape to secure a functional vehicle.

Xavier turned his attention back to the sky. He dismissed his Golden Authority and dropped the Serpent’s Fang, opting for a far more efficient approach.

The Grave Indexer materialized in his grip. He bypassed the standard ammunition feed and synced the weapon directly to his system interface, dumping thousands of credits into the chamber in a single motion.

Suddenly, four new Elders descended from the hovering dreadnoughts. They wore ornate bone plating and carried staffs crackling with dark matter. They spread out in a coordinated formation to surround him.

Xavier decided not to waste time engaging them in close-quarters combat. He holstered the Grave Indexer for a fraction of a second and extended his silver-furred hands. Channeling his telekinesis, he gripped the ruined husks of four destroyed siege cannons scattered across the plains.

He hurled the multi-ton artillery pieces directly upward at the descending Elders.

The demonic leaders paused their descent to conjure spatial barriers, preparing to deflect the incoming scrap metal. Xavier drew the Grave Indexer and fired four rapid, credit-fueled shots. The financial payloads struck the flying siege cannons just before they reached the Elders.

The resulting explosions turned the artillery into a storm of high-velocity shrapnel. The razor-edged metal tore straight through the spatial barriers, shredding the four Elders before their boots even touched the ground.

Their bodies plummeted to the earth in a shower of dark blood.

While the sky rained debris, the interceptors swooped closer to unleash a fresh volley of plasma.

Xavier utilized his digitigrade Lykaios legs to leap fifty feet into the air. He landed gracefully on the wing of a descending gunship. The pilot inside panicked and banked the vessel to shake him off.

Xavier punched his fist through the reinforced cockpit glass. He ripped the pilot out of the seat and tossed the screaming demon into the turbine of a neighboring ship. Both vessels collided in a fiery blast.

He jumped from the exploding wreckage to the next passing transport. Then, he summoned Serpent’s Fang in its chain form and lashed out, wrapping the runic metal around the ship’s exposed engine block.

He channeled a burst of demonic hellfire down the chain. The engine detonated, sending the transport spiraling into the ground.

More interceptors swarmed his position, firing tracking missiles. Xavier leaped between the falling debris, using chunks of twisted alloy as stepping stones in mid-air.

He fired the Grave Indexer with lethal precision, erasing gunships from the sky one by one. The battlefield filled with falling scrap and blazing plasma. He refused to let the endless armada pin him down, turning their own aerial advantage into a chaotic graveyard.

Rin and Kylus sprinted past the burning wreckage of a siege cannon while dodging stray plasma fire. They spotted an intact Demonic transport craft resting near a crater, prompting Kylus to plunge his thermal cutter into the boarding hatch.

The metal yielded under the heat, allowing them to climb into the cockpit. Kylus tossed the dead pilot onto the dirt and strapped into the seat.

He initiated the sub-light thrusters, and the ship lifted off the cracked obsidian ground. They banked hard to avoid a falling interceptor that Xavier had just destroyed.

Kylus pushed the throttle forward to steer the stolen transport away from the battlefield toward their original landing zone.

“I need to sync their comms,” Kylus muttered while typing rapidly on the alien console. “I am setting the frequency to the Strider’s encrypted channel.”

Static filled the cabin.

“Strider, do you copy?” Kylus asked.

The static cleared, and Requiem’s deep voice resonated through the speakers. “We hear you. Where is the captain?”

“He is keeping the armada busy,” Rin replied. “He ordered us to fall back and secure the objective. Have you located Bull’s mothership yet?”

Viola joined the channel to report her findings. “I managed to slice into the local routing network while the girls assaulted a communication spire. I found a set of hidden coordinates that match a high-value docking bay. I am sending the data to your console now.”

A green beacon blinked onto Kylus’s navigation map.

“Got it,” Kylus confirmed. “We are altering our flight path to check it out.”

“Before you do that, you need to hear this,” Reva interjected. Her voice sounded strained over the radio.

“What is wrong?” Rin leaned closer to the dashboard.

“There is something unnatural going on in this solar system,” Reva explained. “Lyra, Xalvoria, and I breached an orbital surveillance tower to access their deep-space optics. The star charts are lying. There are eleven planets in this sector, including this dead world.”

Kylus frowned. “That makes no sense. The planetary scanners only registered this single rock when we dropped out of hyperspace.”

“Because they are cloaked,” Reva continued. “The Demonic Society layered the entire system in dark technology to hide them from standard radar and galactic maps. We can only see the other ten worlds from this high-altitude spire. They all belong to the demons.”

Rin processed the information. A single hidden planet served as a staging ground, but an unseen solar system represented a terrifying galactic threat.

“We need that mothership more than ever,” Rin stated. “Send the rest of the crew to the coordinates Viola found. We will meet you there.”

Kylus gripped the flight yoke and accelerated the transport through the dark clouds.