Chimera Academy The Complete Collection
Page 74
The lion roared once again and in the sound, I heard an apology. “This is the way it must be,” Selene whispered in my head. “I’m sorry, but there was no other way.”
A blast of flame erupted over the hall, threatening to consume everything in its path. A corona of fire popped up in front of August as he tried to absorb it. But there was only so much he could do and this creature, no matter what connection it had with Selene, had far more power than my lover had ever displayed.
But August was not alone. He never had been. “Your Majesty, get down!” I shouted at Brendan.
Brendan complied, and when I pulled him out of the way, he went along with it. Normally, I wouldn’t have been concerned, but there was no telling to what extent Brendan had preserved Typhon’s skills, so Selene could easily harm him, even if she didn’t intend to.
She wouldn’t have come here for a simple attack on The Grand Judiciary. There was something greater at work, a power she was planning to unleash. I could already feel it vibrating in my bones, in my teeth.
I didn’t know what to do. On one hand, the last thing I wanted was to go against Selene. On the other, I was afraid that her plan might involve us losing her, which, as far as I was concerned, was unacceptable.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get a say. The chimera started to grow, its flesh pulsing bright crimson. The metal couldn’t have changed on its own, but the living tissue had no such problems. The tachyons flaring through the air slowly began to turn into additional limbs, and the heads grew larger.
In the blink of an eye, we found ourselves forced to evacuate the hall. Outside, in the corridors, we found only chaos. Star fleet members and guards ran around in desperation, wide eyed, in a panic. The lights were flickering and dying. The ground was still shaking.
“How can this be? It’s just one beast!”
“Do we have a real way of taking it down with the other chimeras gone?” Leonardo asked.
“We were warriors before the chimeras existed,” General Rhodes insisted. “We won’t let this—”
“Now’s not the time for boasting,” Brendan cut him off. “Get to the hangars and evacuate. Quickly. You’re no match for this thing. I fear this might be worse than what happened at Tartarus Base.”
No one tried to question him, but in the end, that made no difference. We were halfway to the hangars when we were cut off by a group of Centaurs.
They looked different from before, more solid, as if they had a real physical form. They were also back at full strength. The female Centaur was very distinctive and I was pretty sure she’d been destroyed in our first battle.
“Well, here we are again,” their leader, Cheiron, said. “You’ve brought us to what we wanted. Now, Your Highness, give us what we need and you may survive this.”
They wanted the tablet. Chimera probably had a similar goal. I didn’t know what would happen if they took it, but I didn’t trust them with such power.
“I think not,” Brendan said. “This technology was a gift from the gods. It’s not your place to decide who uses it.”
“Arrogant human!” the largest Centaur bellowed. “You’re holding a soul in your hand. How dare you claim ownership of it?”
“This soul was entrusted to me and to the Chimera dynasty. I won’t let you steal it.”
By our side, Paul Welton looked very pale. “Your Majesty, perhaps we should—”
“Silence, Lord Welton,” Brendan snapped at him. “I’m the one making the decisions here, not you. Besides, this is a pointless conversation. Centaurs are just as likely to lie as people. Isn’t that right?”
It wasn’t a question directed at me, but I nodded anyway. “My best guess? They’re trying to use it too, just like we did.”
“Unlike you, we have the right,” Cheiron argued.
“I disagree. So it looks like we’re at a stalemate.”
Except we weren’t, because we were caught between two sets of angry, demanding chimeras. The hallway behind us was heating up, and a blurry figure popped up in the corridor.
The chimera’s body was humanoid now, but it had no real gender I could distinguish. The three heads remained, shielding the creature’s true identity. But when she spoke, any doubt I might have had about it disappeared. “There you are. Don’t be in such a rush, humans. You’re the ones who wanted to enslave us. Isn’t it time to pay the price for that?”
The Centaurs recoiled, having obviously not expected this development. I contemplated the merits of feeding the aristocrats around me to them and making a break for it, before discarding the idea.
Selene, what do you want us to do? How are we supposed to save you? You have to live. You can’t abandon us, or our family.
I was no telepath, but my desperate thoughts seemed to reach her anyway. She twitched and her humanoid hands sprouted claws. Her body grew all over again, metal, diamond, and flesh blending together.
That was when I knew. That was when I understood. The answer had been in front of us the whole time.
Before creation, there was always destruction. Brendan had understood that, up to a point, but he’d also been leery of taking things too far.
We were beyond that now. We had to go beyond every possible limit if we wanted to salvage anything out of our torn world.
All of a sudden, I could hear Cerberus’s voice in my head again. “That’s right, pup. You need to be brave enough to take this step if you want to save your family.”
I’d always been willing to dirty my hands for the people I loved. The last time we’d been forced to do that hadn’t gone so well, but we couldn’t turn back now because it was inconvenient.
A distant memory floated through my head, that of Selene at the Mirror Trial, in the tournament. That day, she’d almost been overwhelmed by the intensity of the tachyon blasts directed at her. We’d helped her by anchoring her power and drawing the excess energy into ourselves. She’d been the one to trigger the process, and it had worked because of the telepathy Sphinx had gifted her with. But we’d progressed since then and our connection would go in reverse too.
By now, the atmosphere was saturated with power. It was a piece of cake to reach out and take it.
At the back of my mind, a monster stirred. I ignored it. Instead, I forced myself to stockpile every single ounce of energy I could process.
I sensed the moment the others understood what I was doing. There was a subtle shift in the air as August prepared himself to do the same. Brendan’s eyes flared a poisonous green. Pollux pressed his hand to the wall, bracing himself for what he was about to do. And then, there was an outburst of fire and the whole corridor was bathed in flame.
The members of The Grand Judiciary were no slouches in tachyon manipulation, but they couldn’t withstand the intensity of the assault. Screams echoed all around us as three-quarters of the people in the area were carbonized.
The Centaurs panicked. They could sense the fact that they were being sapped of strength, but couldn’t tell why.
In a frenzy, they attacked us. There was no room to dodge in the hallway, so I had no choice but to face my fate. Being trampled by a chimera would not be pleasant, but I’d live. Hopefully.
At the last moment, the ground opened up, and I fell straight through the floor. My first impulse was to try to stop it. I buried my claws into the earth and even managed to catch Brendan. But that was when I realized that there was no way to get out of the damn hole without getting torn apart by Selene or the Centaurs.
“Let go,” Brendan ordered. I did, and together, we all fell.
Logic stated that we should have ended up buried in the depths of the moon, underneath the base. But logic had very little to do with how my life had been going as of late.
There was a flash, and then, we were landing on a hard, hot surface. “Sorry about that,” a familiar voice said. “I’m still not very good at transporting people when we’re away from the sun.”
I looked up, only to find myself facing Jared. “What are you doing here?
You were supposed to be coordinating the attacks on Earth.”
We were in some kind of cavern and he was sitting on the ground, still glowing slightly and looking exhausted. “I ran into some friends. I thought it was a good idea to bring them back, especially considering what’s been going on with Selene.”
At first, I thought he was referring to another squad of apsids. I had no desire to speak to more aliens, but reinforcements were reinforcements and I didn’t have the luxury to be picky.
As it turned out, the gods didn’t completely hate us. Familiar figures emerged from the shadows. My breath caught as I identified them—my dearest friends, my family.
Cerberus didn’t have a cockpit anymore. He was no longer a metallic beast. Instead, he was a giant three-headed dog, made out of flesh and bone, like he always should have been.
In every other way, he hadn’t changed, and when he picked me up and set me on his back, he let out a low, affectionate rumble. “Hello again, pup. Did you miss me?”
“How could I not? We’re pack.”
“Indeed, hatchling,” Typhon said. “And it’s time for us to finish the job your female broodmate started.”
A black hole opened up in front of us, courtesy of Charybdis. I buried my fingers in Cerberus’s fur and held on.
This would be the hardest battle in our lives, but we had to win it. We had no other choice.
To Destroy and Create
Wesley
After everything that had happened, it was strange to return to Chimera Academy. Even so, we couldn’t abandon the place. Our absence had already been conspicuous and we had no idea what the systems in Tartarus had actually registered from the battle with King Philip and with the Centaurs.
As it turned out, with the generators offline and the drones still not working properly, much of what had happened at the med bay and in the hangars had been lost. The footage was heavily corrupted and the staff of the academy wasn’t sure how to interpret it.
There were shots of the Grand Chimera Unit fighting the Centaurs, but they weren’t clear. Footage of the king was completely missing.
That left the others to act as they pleased, and me to make sure Tartarus Base was rebuilt, ready for the unavoidable moment when Brendan would need it.
The moment the communication lines opened, we were assaulted by the results of Jared’s mission. News arrived of terrorists attacking various Terran settlements. I pretended I didn’t know anything about it and focused on returning the base to normal.
With the chimeras—including the Harpies—gone, it was easier said than done. We still couldn’t fix the generators and we were running on a low amount of power. But the staff of the base ultimately pulled through, and we managed to get things in a modicum amount of order.
Of course, that was when everything went to shit. Another transmission came through, only this time, it was from Hades Base.
“We’re under attack!” a panicked member of the Crius Guard Corps frantically reported. “Send…”
The words died in an ominous scream. And then, there was nothing.
Instantly, my mind went to Brendan and everyone who was at the Hades Moon Base. What could have happened? The defenses around the headquarters of The Grand Judiciary were almost unbreakable. Who could have pierced them?
Prince Archibald provided us with a reply. His chimera-induced affliction had been growing worse, to the point that he could no longer walk around without covering his eyes. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of his environment at all times. In fact, on occasion, it seemed like he knew far more than I ever could.
“I was wrong,” he said. “She’s back.”
He didn’t elaborate on the identity of the threat, because there were other people present. I understood his reasons. If there was something he was hiding, Selene was likely involved.
“We’ll be sending reinforcements to Hades Base at once, Your Highness. Please remain here. We will bring His Majesty back in one piece.”
“Thank you for your service, Commander Trevor, but I’m afraid I can’t just sit back and do nothing. I’m going with you.”
Despite the damage Tartarus City had received, we organized a strike team in record time. We had to resort to the students to boost the staff already present in Tartarus City, but they took it well and a large part of them had been involved in past skirmishes.
“We don’t have any real information on what we’re facing,” I warned them. “It could be an alien threat. It could be a terrorist attack. Stay together in your respective units and don’t do anything reckless.”
“Sir, yes, Sir.”
As we all headed toward our shuttles, I was gripped by a strange feeling, one I hadn’t experienced since the battle where I’d become a cyborg. It wasn’t exactly something I could define, more like an overall apprehension, a feeling of utter wrongness, a sense that something was about to go very wrong.
Ensconced in the cockpit of my vessel, I prayed to Tartarus that we wouldn’t be too late to save the others and tried to look at the situation on the bright side. At least Selene was out of harm’s way, on Terra.
Or so I believed, until I actually got to our destination. Nothing could have prepared me for what we found there. The moon was, for lack of a better word, burning. It should have been impossible, but there it was.
From orbit, we couldn’t get a good look at the buildings, not even through the sensors of our shuttles, and cyborg or not, I didn’t have the specs necessary to bypass that. But there were things that went beyond technology, and we could all feel it, down to the marrow of our bones.
There was something down there that went beyond any enemy we’d faced before.
I got my answer sooner than expected. A monstrous chimera appeared in our field of vision, so large we could’ve seen it even with the naked eye. Its three heads easily identified it as the original chimera, although only two of them—the lion and the snake—were active. It popped up roughly at the coordinates of Hades Base, but its body must have been miles wide.
“What in Tartarus’s name is that?” one of my subordinates asked over the coms.
It was a sign, a punishment, the consequence of our actions and foolishness. I didn’t say any of that. “Our target,” I told him instead.
Having something to do anchored them and if nothing else, the size of the creature made it easy for us to hit it. As we descended from space, though, I finally noticed something I shouldn’t have missed in the first place.
The neural scans coming from the creature’s brainwaves seemed strikingly similar to Selene. When I activated my implants to find a weak spot in its defenses, I was struck with the sudden knowledge that this wasn’t just a chimera.
Selene had always said that she believed her powers had been given to her for a reason. But no one could have ever expected the reason to be this.
Rendered mute, I hovered over the battle field. Looking at the gigantic beast, I tried to process what my systems were telling me, and yet, the information refused to compute.
For a few priceless seconds, I froze. I couldn’t move a muscle. I was distantly aware that I was supposed to give my men instructions, that we were in the middle of a fight here, but nothing was coming out.
And then, I saw them. The chimeras were back, only this time they no longer looked like machines. They were flesh and blood beings, and they were carrying their respective tamers on their backs.
Brendan’s voice echoed in the cockpit of my shuttle, although I couldn’t have said how he projected it through the coms. “Kill it! Take it down!”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” I replied, and tasted ash in my mouth.
I stared at the creature in front of me and a voice echoed in my head. “Believe in yourself. Just believe.”
The doubts were swamping me, threatening to swallow me whole. I had no choice but to follow along with everyone else. Selene was so important to the Grand Chimera Unit. Prince Brendan and the others must have a plan. They wouldn’t hurt her.
“She feeds on the tachyons,” I shouted. “Prince Brendan, we have to stop this.”
“No,” he replied. “Keep going. Everyone, even a chimera, has its limits. Even a Tartarus diamond can crack if exposed to enough pressure.”
There was logic in his strategy, but the problem with it was that the more firepower we focused on her, the less people we had at our disposal. It was utter chaos. The shuttles started falling like flies. Some exploded. Others simply crashed as their engines died, consumed by the chimera.
My shuttle miraculously survived, and I suspected that was no coincidence. The rest of them weren’t so lucky.
To give Brendan and his unit credit, they managed to intercept a lot of the blasts. Despite no longer being metallic, the chimeras seemed mostly immune to the creature’s fire. But if we were doing any damage to it, I couldn’t tell.
I didn’t know how long it lasted, but at one point, the surface of the creature’s skin started to crack. This was what Brendan had been waiting for.
“Retreat!” he shouted. “Withdraw now!”
We didn’t have to be told twice. Ever single ship started to pull back, flying away as quickly as they could.
The chimera didn’t chase us. It roared, flailed, sending uncontrollable fire all over the place, without actually seeking any targets. But that didn’t change the aftermath of the battle. As the ships reached a tentatively safe zone, the chimera exploded, taking a good chunk of the moon with it.
“Tartarus help us all…” Prince Archibald said over the coms.
I agreed with him, but even as he spoke, an image of Selene’s smile popped into my head. It might have crushed me, but there was something else, another figure, another woman I immediately recognized. “Believe in yourself,” she repeated.