sonovelo Chapter 242 - A Fate Sealed
Chapter 242 - A Fate Sealed
Chapter 242
A Fate SealedIt wasn’t working.
The grinding pressure of Radiant’s Domain bore down on Alexander, and his reach was shrinking. Inch by inch, his bubble of influence contracted under the Will of someone who’d been doing this for years. The gap between their experience wasn’t something he could close in a single fight, no matter how badly he wanted to.
And yet.
Sparks of electricity flickered in the air around him, appearing and vanishing without his input. The metal of the station within his reach vibrated, bending subtly away from him as though an invisible sphere were pressing outward from his body. His powers were doing something on their own. Responding to the pressure by pushing back in ways he hadn’t asked for.
He didn’t understand it.
He understood ownership. Radiant’s Domain claimed the light because light was what his power controlled. It was an extension of his superpower fused with his Will, turned into something absolute. That much Maximilian had explained.
So Alexander’s Domain would encompass machines. Obviously. Electrical currents. Metal shells and the components inside them. Understanding their purpose and controlling their function. Empowering them with his soul. Four distinct abilities, all aimed at the same thing. Even Metallokinesis and Electrokinesis, versatile as they were, responded better when machines were involved. Performed more efficiently. Reached further. Hit harder.
His powers were all about mastery over machines.
But what did that actually mean? His superpowers already did all of that. His Willpower already served to challenge others. In what way was a Domain different from what he could already do?
He had no answer.
Alexander shoved the question aside and changed his approach.
Both mental threads focused inward. Into the suit. Into the OACS wrapped around his body, its worship still buried beneath the crushing weight of two clashing Wills. He stopped fighting the Domain. Stopped reaching outward. Instead, he poured everything he had into the machine he was wearing.
Then he launched himself at Radiant.
He threw a punch with everything aligned. Technopathy commanding every servo in the arm. Electrokinesis supercharging the actuators. Metallokinesis reinforcing the plating. Animachina empowering everything at once.
His fist met Radiant’s.
Their Wills collided at the point of contact. He could feel a gap between the surface of the man’s knuckles and that of his suit’s gauntlet. A space where reality itself seemed to hesitate, unsure of who commanded the right to strike the other.
A raw jet of white light erupted from Radiant’s elbow, cutting through even his own darkness. Added force slammed into the exchange, driving against Alexander’s fist. Light propulsion turned a strong punch into something devastating.
Alexander roared. Wordless. He reached deeper into his soul, pushed more power into the suit, channeled everything into the arm.
Radiant’s elbow jet cut out. The sudden absence of force threw both of them off balance, but Radiant used it. He let the recoil push him backward, rotated with it, and a kick backed by a second light jet flashed out from the spin.
It caught Alexander in the side. The suit bent. Something inside his body cracked. Pain seared itself into his mind.
Then he rocketed sideways, spinning end over end, the waves of his Metallokinesis broken under the onslaught of Radiant’s Will. The atrium blurred on infrared, hot and cold smearing together.
He caught himself three meters from the wall. Arrested the spin. Got his feet under him, landing against the steel, and kicked off hard.
Back into it.
They traded blows in the dark. Radiant was better. Every exchange made that clearer. His combinations flowed from one strike to the next with skill clearly earned from fighting superhumans for longer than Alexander had existed in this world. He read feints. Countered counters. Found angles Alexander didn’t even consider.
Alexander kept swinging. Kept pressing. Took hits that rattled him inside the suit and gave back what he could. Ignored the spiking pain from his side that screamed broken ribs.
Above, unnoticed, Droney drifted higher. It sent the remaining combat drones swarming down to join the brawl.
Radiant ignored most of them. Focused on Alexander. Let the drones crash against his back, his shoulders, his legs.
Some of them drew blood.
Alexander frowned. Shallow cuts opened on Radiant’s arms where shield-blade drones had caught him. A mace drone slammed into his kidney hard enough to make him flinch mid-strike.
That shouldn’t be possible. Alexander wasn’t empowering them. Every scrap of power he had was channeled into the OACS. The drones were running on nothing but machine power. That shouldn’t be enough to wound a Tier 3.
He didn’t have time to think about why.
Radiant caught his next punch at the wrist. Fingers locked around the gauntlet and pulled. Alexander was dragged forward, off balance, and Radiant spun with him, using his own momentum to whip him around and hurl him into the wall.
He hit hard. The steel cratered around him. He bounced out of the depression and Radiant was already there. A knee drove into his midsection, slamming him back into the crater. The impact compressed his organs against his spine. His vision tunneled.
“Radiant Blade.”
The light sword materialized, already thrusting at his faceplate.
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Alexander’s left hand shot up. He caught the blade. Squeezed.
The hard light cut into the gauntlet’s plating, splitting metal, but the blade slowed. Alexander squeezed harder. Inside the suit, his cybernetic hand clenched with enough force to deform the gauntlet around it. Servos whined. Metal groaned. The blade slowed further.
He started hammering his right fist into the wounded side of Radiant’s head, targeting the exposed jaw and burned flesh. Each punch landed with the full force of the OACS behind it.
Radiant grunted. He grabbed his own blade-wielding wrist with his free hand, adding leverage. Light exploded behind him like a roaring bonfire, pushing his weight forward. His knee kept Alexander pinned against the wall.
The blade slid closer. Bit by bit. Inexorable.
The suit’s HUD screamed warnings. Atmospheric seal failure on the left gauntlet. The blade had cut deep enough to breach the suit’s integrity.
But the blade halted, grinding directly against Alexander’s cybernetic fingers now that the blade had cut through the suit’s plating. Artificial hand with alien metal alloy on energy construct, holding through sheer mechanical force and superpowered reinforcement.
The punching wasn’t doing enough. Radiant absorbed every hit to his ruined jaw with nothing more than a flinch.
Alexander grabbed the side of Radiant’s head instead. Found the eye socket. Jammed his thumb in.
The eye burst.
Radiant still didn’t stop. His remaining eye locked on Alexander’s faceplate, and his arms drove the blade closer. Fluid ran down Alexander’s gauntlet. The light jets behind Radiant grew brighter, the darkness fading as the Lights Out technique ran its course.
The blade was four inches from the visor. Three.
Alexander started laughing.
Blood sprayed from his mouth with each breath, painting the inside of the faceplate. The sound came out wet and manic, and it filled the space between them.
He reached across the bond.
Droney hovered just beneath the observation dome, small and quiet and forgotten. A piece of Alexander’s soul lived inside the little drone, carrying his Will beyond the boundaries of Radiant’s Domain.
“Soul Circuit.”
Alexander seized the dome’s metal framework through Droney. Felt every bolt. Every support strut. Every reinforcing bar holding the glass in place.
And pulled.
Metal screamed.
Dozens of rivets popped free of their housings. Bolts sheared and snapped. Then the struts bent inward, buckling one after another. Support bars curved, glass groaning as the seal between panel and metal compromised under the force.
The entire framework sagged. Fracture lines raced across the glass panels, spreading from the existing cracks caused by the javelins.
Radiant turned and looked up. His lights dimmed. His head snapped back around to Alexander, eyes wide.
“Wait—!”
The glass blew out. Air roared upward through the shattered dome in a column of escaping atmosphere that ripped plants from their beds and tore furniture from the floor. Soil, leaves, broken plasticrete, shards of glass, drones.
Everything unsecured spiraled upward toward the void.
Radiant went with it. His body tore away from Alexander, light jets firing desperately against the pull. He tumbled, caught in the vortex of escaping air.
“Lightshift!”
He vanished. Reappeared on a walkway, hands scrabbling against the metal platform. He grabbed at the railing, fingers locking around it, knuckles white, feet dragging upward as the decompression tore at him.
The walkway ripped away from the wall as debris from beneath smashed into it over and over.
Radiant screamed, still holding onto the railing, sucked upward toward the breach. The sound thinned as the air fled, stretching into something barely audible before cutting out entirely.
His Domain cut out.
Alexander seized as many drones as he could, but many were already beyond his reach. He and Droney hadn’t moved, two threads of Metallokinesis holding themselves in place.
The roar stopped as suddenly as it began, the atmosphere in the atrium running out, while the station’s emergency protocols kicked in, sealing even the air vents.
But the suit was hissing through his clenched fist.
He hung in the vacuum of the ruined atrium and considered his options.
He could retreat. Go back the way he came, have Augustus open a portal, get patched up on Sleipnir. Or he could join Annie and Augustus directly on Santiago’s ship. It would be the wiser course. His ribs were broken. His nose was broken. Blood coated the inside of his helmet. The suit was breached. Micro-fractures spider-webbed across the chest plate.
He could collapse the entire station from outside. Crush it into scrap and let Jupiter’s gravity handle the rest. Santiago would die without Alexander ever having to look at him.
Except he remembered the hotel suite on Astra Omnia, the day they met the Queen of Hearts. Looking beyond the station and its habitat rings, to where Earth hung in the darkness, backdropped by stars. Telling Augustus, Annie, and Talia that the woman had been right about him. That ambition burned at his core. How he wanted the power to stand among giants, that he would set things right.
Starting with Santiago Systems.
And here he was. Right at the finish line. He’d failed to get what he truly needed from Radiant. The Domain remained out of reach, a concept he could describe but couldn’t grasp. But he wanted to see this through. To witness the closing act of the war they’d started.
Alexander sighed. He could no more change who he was than he could ignore the taste of blood in his mouth.
The remaining drones floated down to him. He arranged them into a rough cone, the heaviest and most damaged units at the front, Droney tucked safely behind them along with him. He oriented toward the sealed door at the far end of the atrium, where Radiant had been standing guard.
Beyond it, the rest of the station still held an atmosphere. The moment he opened the door, the air on the other side would rush so violently into the atrium that it could be lethal. Everything unsecured in the corridor beyond would come with it.
He’d have to punch through all of it. Fast, to conserve as much oxygen as he could.
Alexander locked every drone in position with Metallokinesis. Braced himself against the wall. Then launched off the wall with everything he had. Just before the drones became a battering ram, he reached into the station’s systems and overrode the emergency seal.
The door opened. The atmosphere beyond detonated into the vacuum, a wall of air and equipment erupting through the doorway, all of it accelerating as the pressure differential sucked everything into the atrium.
The drone cone hit the oncoming current head-on. The leading drones took the brunt of the collision, catching pieces of debris and crumpling, dying one after another under the barrage.
Alexander kept pushing the formation ahead of him, splitting the current and shielding him from the worst of it.
He passed through the doorway. The hallway stretched ahead, atmosphere still screaming past him toward the open door. He spun, seized the door with Metallokinesis, and wrenched it shut, reengaging the seal with a thought.
The roar cut to silence.
Alexander and the drones crashed to the floor and went sliding across the deck plating, scattering in a tangle of metal and momentum. He hit the far wall side-first, the impact jarring through his broken ribs.
He lay there for a moment. Just breathing. The corridor still had air. His suit had stopped hissing, the pressure inside now equalized with the station.
It wasn’t really a good thing when your space suit’s pressure was reliant on the station’s atmosphere, especially when you might crush it during a fight.
He sat up and examined the left gauntlet. Radiant’s weapon had done considerable damage, despite being empowered and reinforced.
Droney bumped gently against the side of his helmet.
Alexander chuckled. Coughed up a little more blood. “Yeah, buddy. I’m alright.”
He reached into the ring and pulled out the most useful tool for any engineer.
Duct tape.