Chapter 241

Alexander had fought opponents faster than himself before.

Radiant was faster than anyone he’d met other than Cash.

One moment he stood at the far end of the atrium. The next, a hand closed around Alexander’s faceplate and the world became a blur of green and metal and searing white. His back hit the wall. His head slammed forward inside the helmet, face mashing against the visor.

Pain exploded across his face. His nose had broken against the inside of the visor, blood filling his mouth and painting the faceplate. The taste of metal flooded his senses. The suit’s HUD flickered.

Radiant had carried him across the entire atrium and driven him into the far wall hard enough to warp the thick steel behind him.

The OACS was intact. Animachina and Metallokinesis reinforced everything.

Radiant still had him by the face. He drew his other hand back. “Radiant Blade.”

A blade of solid light materialized in his grip, brilliant white, edges humming against the air.

Electrokinesis exploded out of Alexander.

It wasn’t controlled. It wasn’t precise. He simply opened the floodgates and let the current tear through the OACS and into everything touching it. Lightning arced from the suit’s surface, racing across Radiant’s arm, his chest, his face. The light-user jerked, muscles seizing, the blade flickering in his grip.

Radiant released him, drifting backward as he fought to stabilize his own flight as the current surged through his body.

Alexander’s second mental thread had already acted. Through Droney, twelve mace drones launched from their holding positions across the atrium. He seized them as they entered the range of his powers, still suppressed by Radiant’s Domain, and hurled the empowered drones inward.

Tungsten bludgeons converged on Radiant from every direction.

The first caught him in the ribs before he’d recovered from the lightning. The impact folded him sideways. The second hit his shoulder. The third glanced off his raised forearm as he started to move, light already gathering at his hands.

Radiant snarled. The blade swept in a wide arc, bisecting two mace drones that were closing from his left. Molten tungsten sprayed across the garden beds. He spun, caught a third drone with a pulse of light from his palm that sent it tumbling, then blurred sideways as the remaining drones adjusted course.

Alexander didn’t wait. Metallokinesis pulsed hard, launching him upward. Blood still ran freely inside the helmet. He needed altitude. Needed to maintain distance.

Below, Radiant sliced another mace drone cleanly in half, and looked up. His eyes tracked Alexander’s ascent. Light gathered at his feet.

He pursued.

Alexander rotated as he climbed, bringing his cybernetic arm to bear. The act was symbolic, but he didn’t have time to think.

“Soul Circuit.”

Electrokinesis flooded from his Core, through his body, adding to the already full capacitor banks in the arm. The charge fired in a fraction of a second, ten times the original gauntlet’s output concentrated into a single devastating strike.

Through Droney, despite being inside the suppression of Radiant’s Domain, where a piece of his soul and his Will lived.

The little drone had repositioned, drifting wide and high, almost to the third balcony. The perfect angle. The stored lightning tore from Droney in a bolt that lit the entire atrium blue-white. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

It hit Radiant in the side of the head.

The Tier 3’s ascent stopped dead. His body snapped sideways, momentum killed instantly, blade vanishing. The left side of his jaw tore open, flesh and skin burned away, exposing teeth and blackened bone beneath. His sunglasses shattered. One lens tumbled end over end toward the garden floor below.

Radiant hung in the air, light jets sputtering. Blood ran freely down his neck, soaking into his pink shirt.

Then he straightened. His eyes found Alexander, and whatever had been lazy or bored about the man was gone.

“Okay,” Radiant said. The word came out wrong, distorted by the damage to his jaw. He spat a clump of blood. “Okay, kid.”

Alexander felt it immediately. The pressure that had been holding steady since the fight began suddenly intensified, crushing down on him. His powers, already straining against the boundary, contracted as their range shrank further.

Radiant had been holding back. The Domain he’d deployed at the start wasn’t full strength. This was.

Alexander’s bubble of influence shrank to roughly ten meters in every direction. Beyond that, Radiant owned everything. He pushed against it with everything he had, trying to force Willpower and Superpower together into… something.

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Maximilian had told him that was what formed a Domain. He just needed to—

“Lightshift.”

The Tier 3 disappeared.

Hyperawareness screamed a warning. Alexander spun.

Radiant dropped from above, feet first, light jets driving him downward. Both feet connected with Alexander’s chest.

The impact broke his concentration. Metallokinesis failed. Radiant kicked off him and arrested his own descent with a burst of light, while Alexander plummeted.

He hit the garden. Plasticrete shattered beneath him, fragments spraying outward through the flower beds. The metal walkway underneath buckled, then gave way entirely. He tore through it and cratered the deck below, bouncing once before coming to a stop.

The world went white. Pain hit from everywhere at once. He coughed, and blood sprayed across the inside of his visor, joining what was already there. His vision swam.

Above, Radiant ascended to the top of the atrium and stopped, hovering just below the observation dome.

“Face it, kid.” Radiant looked down at him, blood still dripping from the ruin of his jaw. “You’re stronger than I gave you credit for. But you’re not breaking through a Domain without one of your own.” He gestured at the dome above him. “And you’re not reaching this from down there.”

Alexander just lay there. He’d underestimated just how powerful Radiant would be. The cultivator that took his arm, the confrontation with King and Queen, and finally the Lost Prophet…

He’d thought he had an idea of how powerful Tier 3s would be, even knowing Radiant was likely a pure combatant, not a schemer or a ruler or a builder or someone lacking a Domain like the cultivator did.

It hurt to be wrong. Literally. Every hit tore through the suit, empowered and reinforced by Animachina and Metallokinesis, and damaged the fleshy insides.

Him. A superhuman with what he’d thought was a very reasonable amount of Constitution.

What a mistake.

Alexander groaned and lifted himself to his feet with a pulse of Metallokinesis. His back hurt. His shoulders hurt. His hips hurt. This was probably how Augustus felt waking up each day. His insides hurt too.

“Listen, I’m not stupid,” Radiant continued. “You could still figure out a way to open the station up. I’m not particularly inclined to find out what might happen if your back’s against the wall again.” He shrugged. “So let’s call it even. Gabriel fucked with you, and you fucked him back so hard he’s fleeing to another planet. I’m just the poor asshole in the middle. What do you say?”

Alexander floated upward, rising through the hole in the garden. “I was wondering why you didn’t follow me down. Worried I’d tear through the floor and keep tearing until I found another space exit, huh?”

Radiant sighed. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

Alexander shook his head. “Not likely.”

“What about just me? I’ll take Gabriel’s ship and bounce. Then you can go get the guy you really want.”

“Seriously? Whatever happened to loyalty…”

“I’m a paid deterrent, kid. But I’m not paid enough to risk the space station being depressurized. It works in your favor too. Gabriel Santiago won’t go down easy either.”

“Thought you said he could handle me,” Alexander muttered.

“I was wrong. You’re a devious fucker, setting yourself up to survive vacuum.” He paused. “So how about it?”

Alexander considered it. Radiant was stronger than he’d expected. A serious miscalculation. There was also a chance the man went back to earth, where he’d be a powerful resource, maybe even an asset, in the cataclysm to come.

That alone added merit to the offer.

On the other hand, the man was a psychotic murderer willing to kill hundreds of people for no reason other than being told to do so.

That was pretty messed up.

And he needed this. Needed to fully experience the suffocating pressure of a Domain while fighting for his life. It was the only way he might figure out how to start forming his own in the time he had left.

Gabriel Santiago didn’t even factor into it. As long as he survived Radiant, he could just crush the entire space station into a ball of metal and throw it at Jupiter with the man trapped inside.

Alexander held his hands out. “Sorry, no—”

“Lights Out.”

Every photon in the atrium died.

The darkness was absolute. Jupiter’s glow through the dome, the emergency lighting. All of it vanished, swallowed by a Domain that owned the light and chose to end it.

The only light that remained was his HUD as the OACS switched to infrared automatically.

The world rebuilt itself in thermal gradients. Cool blues for the station’s structure. Fading warmth from where the garden beds had been crushed. And above, burning bright against the cold background, Radiant’s heat signature moved.

Alexander almost laughed. He’d spent every fight relying on Droney’s feeds for enhanced visuals. Always through the bond, always one step removed.

The suit just gave it to him directly.

He really should have read the manual.

A beam cut through the darkness. Alexander threw himself sideways with Metallokinesis, the light searing past his shoulder close enough to trigger a thermal warning on the suit’s display. A second beam followed, tracking his movement. He pulsed hard in the opposite direction, changing vector mid-air.

The two shield drones snapped into position above him. Barriers he wouldn’t be able to see except for their heat profiles shimmering into existence like twin umbrellas, angled to cover him from Radiant’s elevated position. A beam hit the first barrier and splashed across its surface, dispersing into harmless light that died the instant it left the point of contact.

More beams followed. Radiant fired in rapid bursts, each one from a slightly different angle as he repositioned between shots. The barriers held, but the first drone’s emitter was heating up fast. Alexander could feel the stress building despite Animachina empowering them.

He reached sideways with Metallokinesis. The metal handrails lining the walkway above tore free with a shriek of rending steel. He straightened them as they came, sharpening the tips, reshaping cylindrical railing into javelins.

The first shield drone’s barrier cracked. He couldn’t see them, but Technopathy sensed the fracture lines being reported to the emitter.

Alexander waved the javelins upward and fired them hard. Six sharpened lengths of steel tore into the darkness, spreading in a fan pattern aimed at Radiant’s heat signature. They left his reach, vanishing from Metallokinesis’s awareness as they shot into the Domain.

At the same time, his other mental thread reached for the failing shield drone. It vanished into the ring. The second followed an instant later, its barrier winking out. He couldn’t afford to lose either of them.

Above, Radiant zigzagged. His heat signature flickered and jumped as he evaded the javelins, light propulsion carrying him through angles that registered on infrared as brief, bright flashes. Two of them clattered against the upper balconies. A third punched into the observation dome with a sharp crack. The others were shot down.

Radiant was already diving, racing downward in a series of sharp cuts that closed the distance fast.